Farewell Espana: The World Of The Sephardim Rememb

by Howard M. Sachar

They number barely a million today, less than one-tenth of the world Jewish population. But long ago, on Iberian soil, they were the magisters of their people, and the leaven of Mediterranean civilization altogether. Such were the Sephardim, and in Moslem Andalusia they were renowned prime ministers and army commanders, distinguished scientists, belletrists, and religious scholars. In Christian Spain and Provence, their translators ignited Europe's twelfth-century renaissance, their revenue agents funded the economies of Aragon and Castile, and their astronomers and navigators plotted the explorations of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama.

From the late fifteenth century onward, in exile from their Spanish and Portuguese homelands, the Sephardim made their mark as viziers and intimate advisers of Ottoman sultans, as vastly esteemed physicians of Renaissance dukes and popes, and as dynamic importers and exporters in the Dutch maritime traffic. Whether as professing Jews or converted "New Christians," it was this protean minority that functioned as a self-contained international trading network, spanning the seas and oceans, pioneering the gem industry of Europe and the sugar and tobacco plantations of Brazil, and flourishing as merchant ship captains amid pirate-infested Caribbean waterways.

Farewell Espana transcends conventional historical narrative. With the lucidity and verve that have characterized his numerous earlier volumes, Howard Sachar breathes life into the leading dramatis personae of the Sephardic the royal counselors Samuel ibn Nagrela and Joseph Nasi, the poets Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi, the philosophers Moses Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza, the statesmen Benjamin Disraeli and Pierre Mendes-France, the warriors Moshe Pijade and David Elazar, the fabulous charlatans David Reuveni and Shabbatai Zvi.

In its breadth and richness of texture, Sachar's account sweeps to the contemporary era of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, poignantly traces the fate of Balkan Sephardic communities during the Holocaust -- and their revival in the Land and State of Israel. Not least of all, the author offers a tactile dimension of immediacy in his personal encounters with the storied venues and current personalities of the Sephardic world. Farewell Espana is a window opened on a glowing civilization once all but extinguished, and now flickering again into renewed creativity.

Genres: History, Jewish, Nonfiction, Religion, Judaica

439 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Howard Morley Sachar was an American historian. He was Professor Emeritus of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and the author of 16 books, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals, on the subjects of Middle Eastern and Modern European history.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I am a convert to Judaism and cannot claim a birth tradition, I am of Spanish ancestry, having been born in Puerto Rico, which means that, most likely, there are conversos in my family tree, and that if I am able to trace back enough, I will find Jewish ancestors belonging to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish tradition. From before my conversion, I have been fascinated by the Jews of Spain--living in the U.S. one can sometimes forget that there are Jews other than Ashkenazim. Sachar outlines in painstaking detail the history of the Sephardim from their early times, through the Golden Age of the Moorish Caliphates, to the Inquisition and the horrors it visited, killing more Jews than the Holocaust, dispersing thousands around the world, and forcing hundreds of thousands into forced conversions to Christianity. The way in which Sachar lays out the various strands of history, going all throughout Europe, the Middle East and the New World, and through centuries of Sephardic life, gives one a great and solid base of knowledge on the topic, and leaves one with chills over the horrors visited and their effects, still being felt today. A most incredible book.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over thirty years ago, I enjoyed Sachar's series of narrative histories. They combined the old-fashioned sweep with details drawn from his own visits and interviews with current descendants of the Jewish communities, and this one, which may have been near his last, follows suit handsomely. It's refreshing to turn to accounts that present the writer's perspective clearly, yet avoid jargon, easy potshots at rival scholars, or theoretical displays of snobbery. Sachar's a fluent storyteller.

He'd been at it a half-century and his craft shows. Even if I wondered from the get-go how the earliest Jewish settlers in Iberia got there. They seem to just pop up around a millennium before. He therefore doesn't cover the Septimania or Four Captive Rabbis legends, or the post-Visigoth era. These topics merited attention as they supposedly embedded in folk memory the legendary marks left by Jewish arrivistes from the Babylonian aftermath of the Muslim takeover of Persia. Maybe all fanciful, but certainly a predecessor for any examination of Jewish presences in the Mediterranean?

I had to wait until ch. 13 for a treatment of some of my forebears, or at least their distant cousins, when Amsterdam (Old; New gets covered in his U.S. volume which is magisterial) finally enters. The stories of Uriel de Arias, less renowned than Spinoza who'd follow him as a dissenter, are gripping, and throughout the book, he takes you into the torture chambers of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman Inquisitions, using adroitly the victim testimonies. He shows how relentless the persecution could get, with no double jeopardy clause, so that as in one case a teenaged girl sent off to be fostered by Catholics then gets arrested at fifty, and released, re-arrested...until she dies at eighty.

The Church called killing those convicted of lapsing back into "judaizing" observance by the term "relaxation" as a euphemism for capital punishment, giving a lie to what I read only yesterday elsewhere, and assertion by a Catholic convert from messianic Jewish-Christian upbringing claiming the Church had far less to account for as to its depredations than it's alleged. I felt like sending this book his way; this denial's shameful. And as a relevant aside, although the decades since this book have had more than one attempt to vindicate Pope Pius XII for his handling of "the Jewish Question" during WWII, so Sachar's judgements may be based on less evidence than we may have nowadays, the pontiff doesn't come off very saintly in his hesitations not to anger the Reich.

Sachar does fumble a few times. He seems to anticipate the Dominicans (whom as with Franciscans, he often calls monks when they are friars) but doesn't mention them as being founded to fight heresy until later, which confuses the "monkish [sic] purists" he labels Francis of Assisi, to show one stumble. Another's garbling the spelling of Camaldolese, another Order, and a third is implying that while as his mentor Cecil Roth (who earns an affectionate tribute in the dedication preface) is right in having the Jews of Rome precede the papacy, he then indicates that they didn't arrive there until the collapse of the "Roman Commonwealth," which'd put them after the death of Ss Peter and Paul in 64. I'd have assumed Jews were there earlier than these apostles, given the capital's draw.

But overall, even though for readerly pace, he eschews footnotes or endnotes, he does assemble a well-documented range of sources for each chapter, as he takes you around the fringes of the better-known Ashkenazic realms to show in the Old and New Worlds, Africa, fringes of Asia, the Holy Land, and of course Europe the rich legacy amidst destitution that the ancestors of today's Sephardim, who after all contrary to stereotype comprise the majority of Israel's Jewish population as they have since its independence. Their poor treatment under Arab and Jewish leaders is a shame.

He also doesn't stint on criticism of the record of present-day Eretz Israel and its unsavory political alliances, which as of the early 1990s had manipulated the fears and exploited the allegiances of those who often found themselves discriminated against by their European neighbors in the State, maybe sometimes ironically as for centuries, Sachar shows how the dogged pride of the Sephardi led them to celebrate their lineage to the detriment of their "German" counterparts, regarded as second-rate, less cultured, and far less learned and adept at finesse...They looked back as does Sachar to success. And finishing this, you understand their memories, and appreciate their courage.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rich, fascinating history of Sephardic Jewish communities around the world. Highly recommend to anyone interested in Jewish history and/or the Inquisition!

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A guy who remembers it all, usually the things that happened long before he was born.

[Avraham Anouchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in 1994, "Farewell to Espana" is a captivating document. It is more than a historical documentation of the descendants of Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and 1497. As a source of reference, it includes a 50-page compendium by topics and references to other books.

Highly recommended.

[Joels Davidi]

Great book.Slightly biased.