“Seeking Refuge under the Wings of the Shekhinah”: Political and Theological Lexicons of Exile in 16th-Century Sephardi Responsa Texts

The sixteenth century was a prolific period for the writing and publishing of responsa texts throughout the Mediterranean region. Leading Sephardi rabbis were inundated with questions related to the forced conversion, expulsion, and relocation of Spanish Jewry in the aftermath of the Iberian Inquisition. The halakhic discourse on exile and forced migration from Iberia in 1492 reveals a constructed geography that encouraged Jews to live with an Islamic, rather than Christian, context. Rabbinic perceptions of Roman and Ottoman empires were couched in theological and political rhetoric that portrayed a benevolent Sultan and a tolerant society in the Ottoman east, while Latin Christendom held a “bitter, evil Pope” and the cruel sword of the Inquisition. Drawing on a vocabulary that ranges from biblical Hebrew to Talmudic Aramaic to Ottoman Greek and Turkish, early modern Sephardic responsa are a valuable source for understanding the post-Expulsion experience. The mélange of cultural and linguistic references in the texts reveals the variety of influences upon the rabbis, including biblical notions of Europe as eretz Edom, the biblical enemy of the Jews as well as kabbalistic concepts of the Shekhinah, the imminent, feminine aspect of God dwelling in Turkey. This paper will consider the multilingual, multicultural lexicon shared among the network of early modern rabbinic leadership in the Mediterranean and how they used this rhetoric to appeal to the emerging Sephardic diaspora