Medieval Sepharad: Jewish Communities Real and Imagined

What do we mean when we say “Sephardi”? Ostensibly, the Hebrew term “Sepharad” refers to the Iberian Peninsula, and more specifically to the Jewish civilization that developed there between late antiquity and the 15th century. In current historiography, however, it has come to designate an internal category of Jewish history that stands outside the associated debates on the nature and limits of community in medieval Iberia. Medievalists have long since rejected the concept of a Spanish “nation” that persisted throughout centuries of “reconquest” until the realization of political and religious unification of the peninsula in the 15th century. There nonetheless persists a striking willingness to construct the peninsula's Jews along similarly broad and uniform lines. For medieval Jewish intellectuals, the term “Sephardi” denoted more than just a geographic association. It was meant to assert their membership in an elite cultural community distinguished from the rest of the Jewish world. Contrary to this notion of an identifiable and cohesive Sephardi society presented by medieval rabbininc literature, recent studies based on information drawn from royal and municipal archives have yielded a competing image of the organization and boundaries of the Hispano-Jewish community. These archival sources reveal the Jews of Christian Iberia to have formed a highly ramified society in which individuals were as much motivated by their pursuit of power, social stature, and economic opportunities as by religious affiliation. This paper will attempt to bridge the gap between these disparate portraits of Hispano-Jewish society, and discuss the way in which Iberian Jews created a variety of communal rubrics, both real and imagined.