Julia Cohen (Vanderbilt): "Modern Sephardi Jews and the Spanish Past."
Department: Jewish Studies
Date and Time: April 7, 2014 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
Event Details
Modern Sephardi Jews and the Spanish Past
Monday, April 7, 2014 at 5pm
Humanities Gateway 1010
In 1904, Spanish Senator Ángel Pulido launched a campaign calling for Spain's reconciliation with Jews of Spanish descent. Many Sephardim, eager to earn recognition from the homeland of their ancestors, responded enthusiastically to Pulido's call. Others opposed the idea with equal emotion, explaining that Spain had cruelly expelled their forebears, and that they now owed their allegiance to their new countries of residence. Yet, if we turn the clocks back just half a century, sources left behind by Sephardi communities within the Ottoman Empire—the largest center of Judeo-Spanish life in the modern era—offer little evidence of such debates. In fact, throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, discussions of Spain rarely appeared in the writings of Sephardi Jews from the empire. When they did appear, such references tended to treat Spain as a remote and even spectral foreign land rather than the site of acute and bittersweet memories that it had clearly become by the early twentieth century. In this talk, Julia Phillips Cohen seeks to answer the question of what had happened in the intervening decades to turn the topic of Spain into such a pressing issue for Ottoman Sephardim.
Julia Phillips Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-editor, together with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, of Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950, forthcoming with Stanford University Press in August. She is currently working on two new projects—one on Ottoman Jews' involvement in the global Oriental goods trade and the other on modern Sephardi Jews’ relationship with their Spanish past.