The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.
The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.
Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production Before and After 1492
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Overview
The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253015761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2015 |
| Series: | Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 316 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
David A. Wacks is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. He is author of Framing Iberia: Maqamat and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain and editor (with Michelle Hamilton and Sarah Portnoy) of Wine, Women, and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Literature in Medieval Iberia.
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Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature
Jewish Cultural Production Before and After 1492
By David A. Wacks
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 David A. WacksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01576-1
CHAPTER 1
Diaspora Studies for Sephardic Culture
[We] were pretending ... that we had brought a kind of India with us, which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land. V. S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions
The Torah is the portable homeland of the Jews. Heinrich Heine, Hebraeische Melodien
DIASPORA STUDIES FOR SEPHARDIC CULTURE
Diaspora is a Greek word that describes the broad scattering of a people as if they were seeds scattered across several furrows in a field. In its original usage it described the colonization of people dispersing from metropolis to colonies in order to reproduce imperial authority in conquered lands. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) it came to mean the dispersion of the Jews from Zion throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Since then it has come to be applied to a range of historical scatterings: African, Indian, Chinese, Armenian, and others. Ultimately diasporic culture is a discussion about Here (the hostland) and There (the homeland). What did we take with us from There? What are we doing with it Here? When (and under what circumstances) are we going back There? And what happens when history conspires to make Here a new There?
The seed metaphor is productive for thinking about diasporic culture, because it implies an originary culture (the seed or the DNA contained within it) and the varied expression of that culture when it responds to the resources of the local host culture. Although we tend to emphasize the scattering, and especially the collective longing for the hand that scattered us, or perhaps the plant from which we were originally harvested, I think it is time we emphasized the germinating and taking root in the new soil, watching the unique chemical signature of the new soil give expression to the originary DNA of the seed in a plant that is neither all Here nor all There.
Jewish thinking about diaspora (Hebrew galut, exile) is eschatological and providential. The dispersion from There to Here is not merely a story of human action; it is divine plan. It accepts as a given two prophetic ideas: the first, that the Jewish dispersion from Zion is divinely ordained, and the second, that the Jews' eventual return will announce the coming of the Messiah. This approach, cultivated by rabbis and Jewish intellectuals for millennia, persists even in the modern discipline of Judaic studies. Theorists of other, non-Jewish diasporas have borrowed the metaphor but not the prophecy. Their analyses of, for example, Indian diaspora are grounded in the political, social, and psychological circumstances of diasporic cultures. This is not to say, as we will see, that they always move entirely beyond the paradigm of galut and ge'ulah (redemption), but that their starting point is historical and empirical rather than prophetic.
In the middle of the twentieth century, historians of mass migrations of populations of Armenian, African, and other (non-Jewish) populations began adapting the term diaspora, referring to the Hebrew abstract noun galut (or the concrete noun golah, Jewish communities in exile) to describe the experience of these peoples in dispersion. Since these first studies, the semantic field associated with the word diaspora has expanded to include a wide variety of groups—ethnic, religious, national, and racial. Indeed, diaspora studies has grown into its own interdisciplinary field—according to one critic, an "academic growth industry"—bridging literature, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, and political science. William Safran and Richard Baumann both complain that the term diaspora has been diluted by overuse, while Sudesh Mishra takes Safran to task for proposing overly monolithic, essentialist conceptions of diasporic experience, and James Clifford simply acknowledges the expansion of the term's reach in academic discourse. Scholars have studied the Jewish diaspora for over a century and have recently turned their attention to the diasporas of Africa and India, to broadly conceived comparative studies, and, more generally, to theorizing the effects of diaspora on culture. Ironically, many of these scholars do not acknowledge the genesis of the term in Jewish history. A third wave of studies has focused on mapping and critiquing the various strains and schools of critical thinking on the subject of diaspora. The discussion of diasporic culture has had an important impact in the field of literary and cultural studies, witnessed by the recent publication of scholarly "Diaspora Studies" readers and handbooks.
It is probably no surprise that scholars of diaspora cannot agree on a definition of diaspora. Some insist that it applies only to certain groups and not others. They draw distinctions based on the nature of the dispersion from the homeland (en masse or ongoing, catastrophic or opportunistic), on the mode of group identification in diaspora (religious, social, ethnic, national, etc.), or on the discourse of return to the homeland (liturgical ideal, political program, personal goal), among other factors. Much of this argument hinges on the question of essentialism, or whether one can speak of a "diasporic culture" as a discrete unit with fixed characteristics. Critical responses to this question vary widely. Walker Connor confidently widens the semantic field of diaspora to mean "that segment of a people residing outside of the homeland." Khachig Tölölyan finds this trend "problematic," and warns of a "certain danger of biologism," while Stéphane Dufoix's protests that this dilution of the term renders it "theoretically ... useless."
Brent Edwards points out that when British cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall began to use the term, it was in response to nationalist and racist theories of cultural production. Like Chicano studies or African American studies in the U. S. academy, it was a way to recognize and valorize habits of cultural expression of a given ethnic minority that were seen as at variance with the prevailing national norms formulated by the dominant majority. However, as Sudesh Mishra writes, some diaspora theorists "guardedly repeat [the] ideological ploy" to which Hall and his colleagues were reacting. That is, they ascribe an essentialism to diasporic cultures that smacks of nineteenth-century nationalist discourse. They fall into the trap of reproducing categories of experience and cultural expression that they have inherited from earlier scholarship of national culture, without sufficiently interrogating those categories.
As a corrective, Edwards proposes that we think of diaspora as a "key site of struggle over competing articulations," rather than as a single articulation or a single mode of discourse. Sudesh Mishra likewise emphasizes the emergent, iterative, polyphonic, and polysemic nature of diaspora. He inveighs against earlier critics whose "dual territorial" approach to diaspora essentially duplicates a paradigm ofJewish galut and ge'ulah that deprivileges the "itineraries consisting of serial detours and digressions" that for him characterize diaspora but that are disruptive to the "dual territorial" model of exile and return.
For purposes of articulating a theory of double diaspora that spans pre- and post-1492 Sephardic culture, the approach of Khachig Tölölyan, who has written extensively on the Armenian diaspora, is most productive. He proposes a paradigm of diasporic culture based on the following elements:
1) a collective mourning for a trauma that shapes cultural production in diaspora
2) a preservation of elements of the culture of the homeland
3) a rhetoric of "turning and re-turning" toward the homeland (as opposed to an actual return or repatriation)
4) a network of diasporic communities that are characterized by differences among each other and over time
Tölölyan's formulation combines the best of the dual territorial school with sensitivity to the dynamism and emergent nature of social systems. Whereas traditional Jewish scholarship writes of a return to the homeland, whether real or imagined, Tölölyan writes that diasporic people "turn and re-turn" toward the homeland while recognizing that they maintain dynamic attachments to both homeland and hostland. His approach is also compatible with this project because he seeks to draw connections between earlier and later diasporas and, in a broader sense, to think about the social and cultural processes that obtain in diasporas as analogous to emergent forms of culture growing from other transnational, globalizing experiences where identification with a nation state competes with other forms of identification:
At its best the diaspora is an example, for both the homeland's and the hostland's nation-states, of the possibility of living, even thriving in the regimes of multiplicity which are increasingly the global condition, and a proper version of which diasporas may help to construct, given half a chance. The stateless power of diasporas lies in their heightened awareness of both the perils and the rewards of multiple belonging, and in their sometimes exemplary grappling with the paradoxes of such belonging, which is increasingly the condition that non-diasporan nationals also face in the transnational era.
In the same spirit of nuancing the dual-territorial understanding of diaspora, a number of critics have proposed the idea of "double diaspora." This occurs when a significant diasporic community experiences another diaspora from a hostland where they have significant history and to which they have developed a strong cultural affiliation. Some examples of double diaspora would be the diaspora of Indian Parsis or African Jamaicans throughout the Anglophone world, or Armenians or Israelis throughout Europe and North America. In some ways, the Sephardic diaspora has more in common with these modern double diasporas than it does with the original Jewish diaspora from Zion.
To return to Tölölyan's paradigm, there is a traumatic dispersion (the 1492 expulsion) that serves as focus for collective mourning and an inspiration for various forms of social organization and cultural production (Sephardic culture). Engagement with theories such as Tölölyan's can be productive for the study of the Jewish diaspora(s), and in particular to the Sephardic diaspora. Theories of non-Jewish diasporas begin with the premise that diasporic cultures are a product of human actions and mundane material and social conditions, which in turn generate symbolic, religious, or spiritual narratives. A diaspora studies approach to Sephardic history allows us to honor the prophetic discourse of traditional Jewish sources while keeping our understanding of cultural production grounded in historical record.
GALUT: HISTORY AS DIVINE PLAN
Galut and its companion ge'ulah are arguably the single most important concepts in Jewish history. The experience of exile in its material, spiritual, and artistic inflections has made Jewish culture what it is. Major historians of Jewish culture have made this point more authoritatively than I. Yitzhak Baer, writing for a popular audience in his book Galut (1947), put it very succinctly: "The problem of being a Jew is inseparably bound up with the Galut." Ten years later, Salo Baron concurred that Jewish history is a history of galut and that the Jewish religion itself would be "unthinkable" without the drama of "chosenness" that is essential for redemption from exile.
The concept of galut that is essential in shaping Jewish culture over the centuries has also been the single most influential principle behind modern Jewish historiography. This is no accident: it was also, not surprisingly, the single most influential principle behind premodern Jewish historiography. Although modern historians of the Jewish experience imagined themselves as dispassionate scientific observers and interpreters of Jewish history, they had (and continue to have) something in common with their predecessors, a residual understanding of Jewish history as prophetic that has continued to influence modern academic thinking about Jewish diasporas.
Jewish historical consciousness has always been bound up with notions of prophecy and divine will. The Hebrew Bible is filled with scenes in which God plainly states that Israel (the biblical nation, not the modern nation-state) has been selected to carry out a divine mission and that the existence of that nation is prophecy. This galut consciousness that becomes so crucial to Jewish culture in diaspora is anticipated in the early books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). The themes of wandering and expulsion dominate the book of Genesis through its series of narratives of expulsion, wandering, and return. Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, but are able to redeem themselves through work and childbirth. Cain is banished from his home and condemned to wander the earth, but is protected by God in his exile. Noah and his family are consigned to float aimlessly during the flood, but land at Ararat with a rainbow backdrop that portends a good relationship between God and humankind. Abraham sets forth from Ur to find Canaan, a land that God claims to have reserved for him, pending the covenant of circumcision. Joseph's sojourns in Egypt end well for him but eventually his descendants are enslaved by the Pharaohs.
Deuteronomy is a more unified narrative that sets the stage for an eventual homecoming to the Promised Land, a metaphysical reversal of Adam and Eve's movement from Paradise to exile. This narrative is continually updated in subsequent books that keep pace with historical realities of diaspora and colonial domination. For example, Esther deals with the problem of living as a minority community in diaspora in Persia. The rabbis pick up where the Old Testament leaves off, though their mode is more pragmatic (Leviticus) and less dramatic (Exodus). Living under colonial domination of the Holy Land requires a slightly different skill set, one to which the Mishnaic tractate Avodah Zara (Idol Worship) speaks. In it, the rabbis explain the how-to's of living among gentiles, even in the Holy Land itself.
The rub has always been that it seems the Jews were chosen for a perfectly good reason, but that prophetic distinction does not necessarily carry over into social or material privilege. It hardly bears repeating that Jewish history, even in the most dispassionate retelling, is a history full of sorrows. This conflictive existence, born of divine blessing but lived as constant persecution, has been, according to Amos Funkenstein, a "source of perpetual amazement" to the Jews themselves, who generate new and improved explanations and interpretations for the marvel of their own survival.
This historiographical tendency has deep roots in scripture and liturgy. The history of the Jews begins with the Hebrew Bible itself, which contains a whole series of books written in various genres that tell the history of Israel. They are, on the whole, narratives, some of them highly novelized, with only moments of somber chronicling such as the famously stultifying genealogical interludes popularly known as the "begats." The book of Chronicles contains a few accounts of major battles in addition to royal genealogies, but there is nothing in the Tanakh on the order of a Herodotus or a Livy. Even the books that are broadly historical are highly novelized, the best example of which would be the book of Esther. We might take these as early examples of what Amos Funkenstein calls "counterhistories." He writes:
Counterhistories form a specific genre of history written since antiquity. ... Their function is polemical. Their method consists of the systematic exploitation of the adversary's most trusted sources against their grain. ... Their aim is the distortion of the adversary's self-image, of his identity, through the deconstruction of his memory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature by David A. Wacks. Copyright © 2015 David A. Wacks. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Diaspora Studies for Sephardic Culture
2. Allegory and Romance in Diaspora: Jacob ben Elazar's Book of Tales
3. Poetry in Diaspora: From al-Andalus to Provence and back to Castile
4. The Anxiety of Vernacularization: Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Ardutiel de Carrión's Proverbios morales and Debate between the Pen and the Scissors
5. Diaspora as Tragicomedy: Vidal Benvenist's Efer and Dina
6. Empire and Diaspora: Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah and Joseph Karo's Magid Meisharim
7. Reading Amadís in Constantinople: Spanish Fiction in the Key of Diaspora
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
David Wacks's study is groundbreaking for its pioneering scope and poignant analysis. Through the critical lens of a 'double diaspora' Wacks sheds new light on the themes of expulsion and redemption in works by some of the most important medieval Spanish Jewish authors in the post-Zion Iberian exile such as Moses Maimonides and Judah Halevi. Wacks also leads the field of Sephardic Studies in a new direction by casting his critical eye on texts by lesser known Jewish writers, including the kabbalist Joseph Karo, living in a second exile from post-1492 Spain.
David Wacks's elegant monograph bridges the divide between Hebraists and Hispanists, medievalists and early modernists, with conceptual sophistication and substantive insights. It makes, indeed, a compelling case for the analytic viability of "double diaspora" in the literary history of Sephardic Jews and the inscription of Hispano-Jewish literature in the Weltliteratur canon. An important contribution and a superb read.
David Wacks's elegant monograph bridges the divide between Hebraists and Hispanists, medievalists and early modernists, with conceptual sophistication and substantive insights. It makes, indeed, a compelling case for the analytic viability of "double diaspora" in the literary history of Sephardic Jews and the inscription of Hispano-Jewish literature in the Weltliteratur canon. An important contribution and a superb read.