Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015 pp.298 $42.75 cloth ISBN 978-0-253-01572-3
Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production
Before and After 1492
by David Wacks
Reviewed by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz*
This book addresses the question “What constitutes Sephardic literature?” While answering this question, Wacks delineates the continuum of how a Sephardic literary voice developed in pre- and post-expulsion communities. Addressing the thematic axes of theology, language and nation-building, David Wacks centers his study on the Sephardic longing for varying homelands (Zion - Iberia) as a hinge marker for the development of this literature. Wacks analyzes six Sephardic writers within their historical arc and delineates how between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the surrounding intra- and extra-communal environment propelled Sephardic authors consciously and unconsciously to choose certain linguistic, theological and stylistic directions. In his words, “diaspora is a lens through which to study Sephardic culture's engagement with the sovereign power and vernacular culture of Christian Iberia, the "hostland," and the interaction between this engagement and the symbolic attachment to and practice of the cultural structures oriented toward the Zionic homeland.” (3)
The first chapter places his study within Diaspora studies, after
explaining that he arrived at this conclusion late in the process. In
his discussion of the relevance of the discipline of diaspora studies
for Sephardic studies he uses the concept of ‘double diaspora’: when a
significant diasporic community is once again sent out from their host
land (as the Sephardim were from Spain in the late fifteenth century)
creating a de-territorialization of a diasporic identity. Chapter two
presents Jacob Ben Elazar’s Book of Tales (Sefer ha-meshalim)
which uses Christian and Arabic literary forms, planting the themes
squarely within a Sephardic lens. The next chapter tracks the poetry of
Todros Abulafia and its geographical journey from Al-Andalus to Provence
and its return to Castile, with a trail of literary influences from all
three places. Chapter four focuses on Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Ardutiel de
Carrión’s Proverbios morales in Castilian, which was produced
at the behest of the king of Spain. Being the first Sephardic author who
was commissioned to write by the king, he of course wrote in Castilian.
The chapter discusses language choice at length, and how Ardutiel
achieved writing about Jewish morality in the vernacular without any
attribution to Jewish sources, thus keeping a sort of neutral position
regarding the vernacularization of Jewish topics and literatures. The
fifth chapter on Vidal Benvenist’s Efer and Dina discusses the
intellectual environment in Spain after the pogroms and mass conversions
of 1391 and the Disputation of Tortosa. In this environment Jewish
authors use the Romance literary language and address Jewish concerns on
sexual morality, sexual intermingling with the majority and
assimilation, albeit in the vernacular, and in a veiled manner. Chapter
six presents two writers, one of historiography and one of mysticism and
religious law: Solomon ibn Verga, author of Shevet Yehudah and
Joseph Karo and his mystical text Magid Mesharim. Both of these
writers show the literary consequences of the conversion and exile of
Sephardim. Impacted by their own expulsion, their writing expresses
voices excluded from the ‘Spanish’ discussion which brought them to
produce a Sephardic humanism, thus establishing their own agency. The
last chapter travels to Constantinople and the adoption of Amadís de
Gaula as a heroic text. Even though both Sephardim and the Ottoman
Empire were sworn enemies of the Spanish crown, the exile of the
Sephardim and their allegiance with the Ottomans would not undermine the
cultural continuity of their relationship to Spain and its culture.
The grand arc of Wacks’ book is the linear tale of the development of a
literature demonstrating the shifting identity of the Sephardim as
perceived through pre- and post- expulsion writings. Wacks posits that
the shifting identities can be seen through both the writers’ choice of
language and their chosen topics. The historical realities of the 13th
through the 15th centuries marked dramatic shifts for Sephardim, and
Wacks links them as parts of a grand multi-century literary chain.
Unfortunately, the reader is left at various points in the narrative
searching for dates to bolster the historical aspect of this literary
development.
Throughout this volume Wacks traces how Sephardic literature begins as a
Hebrew literature which evolves to a Jewish literature in the vernacular
and sixty years after the expulsion turns into Hebrew-language
Spanish vernacular literature1 for the
consumption of exiled Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. However, even
though language choice is one of the most central aspects of the
expression of cultural allegiance and complexity, Wacks does not give it
the full space and discussion that it merits within the questions raised
throughout the book. It is only in the second chapter that Wacks enters
this important discussion on language choice and its ideological charge:
it would have been useful earlier, in the introductory chapter. His
approach to diaspora focuses mostly on the relationship to land and
sovereignty. However, language is one of the fundamental mechanical
aspects of identity and a tool for emphasizing cultural belonging. Wacks
says that his focus is “on how diasporic experience finds expression in
the artistic repertory” (31), but even though the linguistic aspect
appears throughout the book, it is not presented as a theoretical basis
of his diasporic analysis.
Another question which remains to be answered is what is the boundary
of diaspora? Did the Sephardic diasporic hostland ever turn into a
homeland? If so, do we see it in the literary output of Sephardim as
such, or no?
Wacks masterfully demonstrates throughout his study of these authors and
their oeuvres how Sephardi authors oscillated simultaneously between
cultures, languages, genres and themes that were common to medieval,
ancient and early modern literary voices. He also raises some important
points on how previous scholarship overlooked the multi-directional
influences occurring in Andalusian literary culture. For example, an
early key historical moment before the arrival of Sefer HaMeshalim
was the Reconquista of Toledo in the 11th century. Consequentially,
there was the partial (but not total) hispanization of Toledo. This
double cultural ‘appartenance’ of the Jews of Toledo supported the
existence of a text such as Sefer HaMeshalim, a book of
proverbs in Hebrew whose root sources are debated to come from either
European Christian or Eastern Muslim sources. Elazar's use of these
foreign literatures at a transitional time for the Sephardi community
show how they were negotiating the transition from one cultural moment
to another. Wacks sees this as a tool for Elazar’s voice as a
diasporic writer instead of as a writer of a multicultural
community. He names this “an author doing diaspora” (35). Elazar’s
choice to write in Hebrew, a crucial language choice, establishes a
healthy Sephardi contribution to vernacular culture while establishing
that Hebrew language was the “superior” choice for Jewish writers.
However, as Wacks shows by the end of the chapter, Elazar’s Romance
draws heavily from chivalric style while using conventions, ideologies
and habits of expression from Arabic and Hebrew, straddling three
worlds, languages and literary traditions. Throughout the third chapter
Wacks discusses the debt that Troubadour poetry owes to Andalusian
Arabic poetry and how Abulafia’s poetry blended European and Arabic
voices, creating a third voice which he then introduced to the court of
Alfonso X, his patron. Once again language, (Abulafia chose Hebrew to
write) is mentioned. Considered an assimilationist by his peers (76),
Abulafia wrote in the poetics of the majority but not in their language.
In this manner, he maintained a clear boundary around his readers who
would need to know Hebrew, but not around the topics which were the
mainstay of the Iberia of his time. In other words, he inched toward the
topics of the vernacular while keeping a language boundary.
The discomfort of homeland/hostland in a literary voice is represented
in the chapter on Ardutiel’s work. Wacks states “Ardutiel is clear of
his position, of the difficulty of the living member of a marginalized
religious minority proposing to speak (or write) authoritatively on
moral matters.” (108) His style of writing the Proverbios is
referred to as a textual performative performance, because it was
written in the vernacular, and not in a ‘written’ language par
excellence like Hebrew. The Debate engages in a parody of the medieval
Arabic and Hebrew literary debate between the pen and the sword. Wacks
puts forth an interesting approach of interplay between the
Proverbios and the Debate: it is as if this interplay represents
the debate between Hebrew and Romance which embodied Ardutiel’s anxiety
due to the “increasingly unstable environment” which eventually led to
the expulsion of the Jews from Castile-León, Navarre and Portugal (126).
By the last chapter Wacks chooses to focus on the importance of Spanish
imperial power for Sephardic literary output. His fresh view of
Sephardic humanism as “an obscure counter history of an emergent Spanish
national state” (183), links Sephardim continuously with Spanish
cultural and political development. Especially because of the vacuum
left in Spain by the Jewish departure and the vacuum of Spain within the
exiled Sephardim themselves, both communities continued to interact with
each other, directly or indirectly, in the century following 1492. He
concludes with an important statement regarding Ibn Verga, Karo and
Algaba’s literary voices as “the forge of a new phase of Sephardic
cultural identity: the fusing of Hispanic and Jewish cultural identity”
(208).
The innovative value of this work is that instead of presenting a break
between pre- and post- expulsion literature, Wacks presents a continuous
literary development influenced by and influencing identity and
Sephardic consciousness. It covers the Sephardic literary voice in its
layered complexity which is usually compartmentalized within academia
into either Hebraist or Hispanist or medievalist or early modernist. In
presenting this continuum, with examples of important contributions to
its literature during these centuries, the intellectual voice is recast
in a more unified manner, probably closer to the way that Sephardim from
the 15th and 16th centuries would have experienced it. Wacks has written
an important volume on transnational identity shifts through literature
with complex linguistic, thematic, religious and nationalistic concerns
in constant interplay.
* Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Centre des recherches moyen-orient méditerranée, Institute national des langues et civilisations orientales, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France, and Director of KHOYA: les archives sonores du Maroc juif, Casablanca, Morocco.
1. This means a Spanish (not Jewish or Christian/ not religious) secular literature BUT now in Hebrew, in other words, translated into Hebrew for these Sephardim who wanted Spanish culture - but now they were reading it in Hebrew.