Henriette-Rika Benveniste THE IDEA OF EXILE: JEWISH ACCOUNTS AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SALONIKA REVISITED Expulsion, Migration, Exile Large-scale expulsions of the Jews in the Middle Ages and the early modern period may be seen as a continuum shaped by exile, migration and new settlement.1 In this paper I do not discuss the much-debated issues related to the “why” and the “how” of expulsion and exile. Rather, I examine the various ways contemporary actors and modern historians have perceived and conceptualized the exile that followed the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Salonika’s Sephardic community was largely formed by Jews and conversos, expelled from Spain and Portugal, who had arrived at the Ottoman city through consecutive waves of migration in the late 15th and during the 16th centuries.2 In what follows I revisit both the Jewish chronicles of expulsion and the historiography of the Jews of Salonika. I attempt to decipher the ways in which the concept of exile interweaves with the refugees’ and historians’ understanding of exile. In the first part of the paper I clarify the medieval concepts related to migration and exile and discuss the assumptions that underpin the master narratives of modern historiography. In the second part, I focus on the 16th- century Jewish accounts of the expulsion and comment on some loci of the “foundational histories” of the Jews of Salonika. Jewish exile in Medieval Thought Exile, a powerful symbol in the Bible, was fundamentally a matter of location in space. According to Isidore of Seville, “exile” (exilium) means, as it were, “outside the soil” (extra solum). For someone who is “outside his own ground is called an exile (exul)”. In the secular world, exile usually meant the banishment of a person by a higher authority. By claiming the “center” of society’s political and moral space, authority identifies its outcasts and secures the 32 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE purity of a community. The medieval act of expulsion was a legal and religious punishment.3 Jewish and Christian4 perceptions of exile have been shaped in the course of a dialogical and polemical discourse of competitive religions and identities, defined against each other in a process of interaction. The dispersal of the Jews did not begin with the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE); in many Hebrew sources exile is primarily associated with the First Temple and the Babylonian captivity (586 BCE). In collections of midrashim, dating from the 6th century, we find for the first time, in Jewish sources, the claim that Rome not only destroyed the Temple but also expelled the Jews from their land.5 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown that this new perception had been the outcome of a dialogical and polemical exchange between Jews and Christians: In Christian eyes, the exile of Jews in Roman times coincided with the destruction of the Second Temple and it was considered as proof that God had abandoned them.6 In their sayings, the dispersion of the Jews was a divine punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus. Exile justified Jews’ inferior social and political status, reduced them to the level of servants subordinated to the Church, marked the beginning of the New Testament and established a Christian claim to the ownership of the Holy Land. Were medieval and early expulsions considered as an inevitable consequence of a primordial exile? Did the loss of the Holy Land render Jewish life in Christian lands vulnerable or precarious? Theologians were ambivalent about the expulsion of the Jews as a policy.7 While, clearly, a prince should be allowed to send away Jews when they posed a material or spiritual threat, the Church should not remove the Jews from Christian society entirely, in order that they may remain as witnesses for the truth of Christianity. The second Temple played a central role in Jewish imagination, but Jews rejected the Christian view and they gave their own meaning to exile. “Galut” (exile) was for Jews the very condition of “history” and served as the axis around which their rituals and communal existence revolved. Messianic dreams lent a sense of precariousness to their presence in the Christian world, but the return to a lost homeland remained entrusted exclusively to these dreams. In the “meantime”, royal charters regulated the relations between the Jews and the state. A responsum by Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret in Barcelona (Rashba), in the 13th century, is very eloquent. Jews are allowed to live in a kingdom subject to the king’s will ; the king may expel them and the Jews should obey the royal decree, on one significant condition: The royal act should stay within the limits of the law and it THE IDEA OF EXILE 33 should not violate the established rights of the Jews.8 Jews were increasingly compelled to bargain for this “social contract, which by the end of the Middle Ages was not safeguarded by any law. Jewish perceptions developed also in response to the Christian rhetoric of exile as punishment. Since the 11th century, by envisioning exile as an order decreed in the days of Creation, the Jews of Spain rejected the notion of exile as punishment. Maimonides, who belonged to a generation which had experienced forced baptisms, considered the exile of his time as a trial whose purpose was to purify and test the pious.9 It is hard for an historian to approach popular feelings of the Jewish victims of expulsions.10 As to the popular Christian imaginary, Jewish migrations were associated with and justified by the legend of the wandering Jew, which became a common theme from the 13th century.11 A version of the story is repeated by the chronicler Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora: a Jew, who had pushed Jesus on his way to crucifixion, was punished to wander eternally until Jesus’ second coming. To the Christians, the wandering Jew, a “sacred executioner”, performs a necessary but undesirable act: the Jews have to pay for the guilt of performing the sacrifice of Jesus.12 Modern historiographies, master narratives When discussing expulsions modern historians came to deal with exile. A schematic distinction between “national histories”, or “majority histories”, and “Jewish history” allows us to grasp inherent tensions that have shaped different historiographical traditions. Guicciardini and Machiavelli saw the expulsion from Spain as a praiseworthy example, but, beyond this, only a few 16th-century Catholic or Protestant writers expressed any concern at all over the expulsion. Since the Renaissance and the Reformation and throughout the 18th century, Christian Hebraists were more interested in post-biblical Judaism than in post-biblical Jews.13 Enlightenment authors, arguing for toleration, were not interested in the past of the Jews but in their future assimilation. Since the 19th century, the 1492 expulsion has been forgotten, remembered and appropriated by different people at different times for different purposes.14 The first serious attempt to examine the Jewish presence in Spanish history in detail was made in 1848 by José Amador de los Ríos.15 He belonged to a liberal group that saw Spanish decline as a result of the obscurantist Church and the Inquisition. In the mid-19th century, the Jewish presence in Spanish history 34 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE became a controversial field where Liberals, defending a Jewish and Muslim cultural legacy, confronted Catholic apologists of the Church and the Inquisition, who considered 1492 as a beneficial moment in purging Spain of a miasma. The expulsion was related to the so-called “legend of decline”.16 According to this legend, the forces of fanaticism had driven out of the country hundreds of thousands of Spain’s wealthiest and most gifted citizens. The 19th-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz stressed not only the misfortune suffered by the Jews, but also the decline their expulsion implied for Spain. In an opposite narrative, Jews were blamed for using their money to conspire against the interests of the country, even after their expulsion. In the 20th century, the theme of the Semitic past continued to represent a battleground among Spanish historians.17 Jews and Jewish history figured in the emerging question of defining Spain and Spanishness. Claudio SánchezAlbornoz maintained that the involvement of Spanish Jews had always corrupted the construction of the so-called “Spanish character” (hispanidad), a Volkgeist transcending history. On the opposite side, Américo Castro believed that Jews and Arabs had played a vital and positive role in the formation of the cultural mixture that later became Spain. Modern historians of the Spanish expulsion have assigned different roles to different social agents.18 Most scholars agree, however, that 1492 constituted a break in the policy of the monarchs: The kings assumed the responsibility for the Inquisition and approved its results. It took time for the logic of the Inquisition to prevail. Many theologians did not support an expulsion that would deny the Jews the possibility to convert in the future. Jews had to be accused for a crime that could justify the expulsion. A crime was finally invented, in which a ritual murder accusation served as the catalyst.19 “Convivencia”, or coexistence, did not exclude anti-Semitic stereotypes, conflict or ethnic violence.20 Before the mid-20th century, traditional Jewish historiography tended either to focus on narrow geographical and chronological limits, or to eliminate the differences between communities, in order to force their varied experiences into a uniform model. Probably it was not just economic deprivation or discrimination that propelled Jews into ceaseless mobility; it was also a hope that attended migration, the hope of finding a new promised land, and migration corresponded to a “geography of hope”, according to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi.21 Jewish exile has a history as a constituting experience of Jewish THE IDEA OF EXILE 35 identity; the ideas on exile have their own history.22 Yitzhak Baer, author of a magisterial book on the Jews of Christian Spain,23 left Germany in self-exile and arrived in Palestine in 1929. In an essay24 published in 1936 during the Nazi period, he summarized his theoretical position: Exile from the Land of Israel was a kind of deviation in the history of the Jews; it contradicts the order established by God that attributes to every nation its place and the Land of Israel to the Jews. Existence in the diaspora was precarious and medieval expulsions were proof of that. Expulsions aimed basically at converting the Jews. But as the number of Jews who chose to retain their faith increased, the policy of expulsion came to accomplish a political and social task that was not originally its purpose: the purging of an unwanted element of the population. Baer described galut as a slow process that continued for centuries in the hope of return.25 Salo W. Baron, who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the US in 1926, was the first to occupy a chair of Jewish history in an American university. Baron does not hold a negative view of exile. In his multi-volume magnum opus, A Social and Religious history of the Jews26 (1937), land is of no importance and Diaspora communities are shown to achieve intellectual, social and cultural fulfillment. In medieval Europe, Jews enjoyed a better legal and cultural status than the serfs who constituted the majority of the population, notes Baron. In his view there is a relation between the national structure of a state and the treatment of the Jews, a correlation stated in terms of law: The status of the Jew is most favorable in multi-ethnic states, most unfavorable in national states. The national state has always tried to eliminate the strangeness of the Jew in its otherwise homogeneous national body through systematic assimilation, often in the form of enforced conversion, or by means of full exclusion, which generally meant expulsion.27 Yerushalmi succeeded Baron at Columbia University. In Yerushalmi’s understanding of Jewish history, exile occupies a predominant place. He saw the Jews as the archetype of exiled people; ever since the Babylonian exile, galut has been a fundamental datum of Jewish history. Yerushalmi insists on the importance of a simultaneous awareness of being in exile and yet having a profound sense of attachment to the land or place where one lives.28 On the one hand, exile is perceived by the Jews as a tragic period that has to last until the messianic redemption and this unhappy feeling is reinforced, as we saw, by Christian polemic. On the other hand, however, and especially on the level of daily 36 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE life, on the whole Jews not only adapted to the conditions of exile but they often flourished within it materially and spiritually, while preserving a vivid sense of a Jewish identity. Jews lived simultaneously on a historical and an eschatological level. This intrinsic duality permitted both a link with an ancient land and the “Judaization of exile”, by the ability to study and to observe the Torah. There were better or worse forms of exile, but exile was a condition of their existence. If for Baer everything Jews accomplished in foreign lands was treasonous to the Jewish spirit, for Baron and Yerushalmi Jews in exile managed to defend their identity creatively; exile does not inevitably represent an intolerable situation. Jonathan Israel, a historian of modern Jewish Diaspora, speaks of the expulsions in terms of a “mass exodus” that began in the later 14th century and persisted until the 1570s. As to the consequences, he claims this vast catastrophe nearly resulted in the destruction of the Jewish religion, learning and life; paradoxically, however, the immense process of uprooting culminated also in a remarkable expansion and strengthening both of Jewish culture internally and of its role in Europe’s economic and political life.29 David Biale, a specialist of Jewish cultural history, points to the fact that Jewish reflection on exile has operated in two dimensions: on the one hand, an account of the condition of galut as fundamentally abnormal and humiliating and, on the other hand, an account explaining the power Jews possessed in their internal self-government and in the larger societies they lived.30 The Jewish political thought of the Middle Ages that lies behind the assumption “dina de malhuta dina” (the law of the kingdom is the law) represents an attempt to reconcile the limitations on Jewish politics imposed by the condition of exile with the relative power Jews actually enjoyed in their Diaspora communities: in exchange for their recognition of the rights of monarchs, the Jews received internal autonomy. In the context of a heterogeneous and uncertain world, power meant protection by a powerful master. The expulsions from England, France and Spain represent the beginning of the end of the medieval system of privileges and protection, foreshowing a new world in the making: Modernity. If explaining the expulsions also means attributing a specific meaning to exile, this meaning is always dialogically constructed by Christians and Jews, “national” and Jewish historiographies. THE IDEA OF EXILE 37 The 16-century Jewish accounts Our examination of Jewish texts dealing with the exile of 1492 leaves aside the long-standing debate as to whether these historical accounts should be considered as “the swan song of medieval Jewish historiography” – an argument defended by Robert Bonfil31 or as a vivid response to the expulsion, the thesis presented by Yerushalmi.32 The question we ask is: how did Jewish histories of this period perceive the character of exile? Even though the rise of Jewish historical writing proved abortive, these works written mostly by intellectuals on the move, that is, refugees, were popular; they were not meant to be read only by rabbinic scholars. Moreover, these were times when individuals and groups, texts, printed books and ideas travelled across long distances.33 This mobility contributed in restructuring a Sephardic world in a social and cultural intermingling of Jews and former conversos in their new environment in Italy, the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere. Some of the themes which appear in post-expulsion Jewish writing have their roots in medieval thought, or even in Talmudic and Biblical literature, while some others represent new ideas. We may discern four themes: a) divine punishment for collective sins or an idea of messianic redemption, b) acts of piety and martyrdom, c) torments of exile, which sometimes include the author’s personal experiences, and d) the role of Gentile kings and Jewish intermediaries. In some accounts, exile appears as punishment: “God has found our sins; he has revealed our shame, for we were brought down from our dwellings and the Lord has cast us off from our land,” reads one anonymous account.34 In his book Or ha Hayim, Rabbi Yosepf Yavetz, one of the leading rabbis among the expelled Spanish Jews, told the exiles that their punishment was the result of their sins, for they had abandoned the ways of the Torah.35 However, in 16th-century Jewish thinking, exile is characteristically regarded not as punishment but as an end in itself, the meaning of which must be sought.36 Following this vein, Sephardic scholars viewed the exile from Spain as one in a long chain of persecutions going back to the destruction of the First and Second Temples. The Spanish expulsion, they suggested, does not reflect God’s abandonment of its people; God will manifest his providential care, as he has done in the past, always returning Jews to safety. The fear that God might have turned his eye from his people must have haunted the exiles but a messianic interpretation allowed for a defense against despair. 38 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE Elijah Capsali, who came from a prominent Cretan family, was an eyewitness to the resettlement of the Spanish Jews. In his chronicle, Seder Eliyahu Zuta, written in 1523, history appears subjected to a divine plan. Only the will of God commands the decisions taken by the kings, no matter how harsh they may have been felt by the Jews. Exile should not be considered as a condemnation; the events of the 1490s were the signal that the time for messianic redemption was near: “We had thought that exile was bad, but God saw it as good, and maybe indeed it was just for this that we were banished and that salvation began in the year 1492, for we were all gathered together to be ready for the ultimate gathering of all exiles … … I will thus tell you my friends, that the exile which appear so terrible to the eye will be the cause of growth and salvation.”37 During the 16th century, messianic speculations became a popular theme in Mediterranean Judaism.38 Don Isaac Abravanel, the man who had unsuccessfully negotiated with Ferdinand the revocation of the edict, was one of the greatest thinkers of Iberian Jewry. In the introduction to his Perush al Neviim Rishomnim (Commentary on the Prophets), he warns against despair and fear in these words: “Let us strengthen one another in our faith and the Torah of our God … If he lets us live we shall live and if he kills us we shall die but we will not desecrate our covenant and we will not retreat.”.39 The assumption underlying his thought is that the cataclysmic events of 1492 were the signal that messianic redemption was near. In his Commentary of the Pentateuch Abravanel uses briefly the myth of Troy as an example to present the dispersion in a positive light give positive value to the dispersion: “Did you know that great nation which were the Trojans as they were all gathered in one county the Greeks came to them and destroyed them and nothing was left of them anymore. And the same happened to other nations. And because Israel is dispersed they do not suffer total extirpation.”40 In Abravanel’s view, the dispersal of the Jews among the nations was intended to prevent their complete and utter extinction. Solomon Ibn Verga had migrated from Spain to Lisbon due to the expulsion decree. When the Jews of Portugal were forcibly converted in 1497, he pretended to live as a converso, only to move again to Rome after the Lisbon massacre of 1506. In his Shevet Yehuda (Scepter of Judah) he expresses an original view of the persecutions, pointing to the “great anger”, the transmitted hatred and the jealousy of Christians. But he also relates acts of piety and martyrdom.41 THE IDEA OF EXILE 39 Using biblical allusions Jewish authors who lived through the events of 1492 usually placed expulsions in the long history of tribulations suffered by the Jewish people. Some among them interwove the collective history with their personal experience and identity. Joseph Hakohen is probably the first historian known to have written a comprehensive chronological panorama and a Jewish martyrology from the destruction of the Second Temple up to the 16th century. In his famous Emek Habacha (Vale of Tears), he weaves his personal and family tragedy into his account.42 He was born in Avignon in 1496, son of refugees from Spain. He experienced exile from Provence and two expulsions from the city of Genoa, in 1515 and 1550. He recorded how some exiles were robbed and killed, captured and sold into slavery, he describes disease and ship captains exploiting and torturing the exiles. Hakohen had Samuel Usque’s Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel,43 which had been published in Ferrara in 1552, as a literary model. Judah ben Jacob Hayyat is another writer who recounts his personal troubles after leaving Lisbon in 1493, on a small boat. In his “Offering of Judah”, he writes: “there was no place where anyone would receive us. Be off with you, unclean ones, was their cry unto us. And so we sailed the sea, wandering and tossing about, for four months, with but little bread and scant water … I was beaten and wounded. They assured me however that if I would apostatize I would be set up as a prince …” After much wandering, he managed to arrive in the kingdom of Naples, but “even there I found neither peace nor quiet, nor rest, for trouble came in by the king of France. I was included in the general roundup of all the Jews of the kingdom and again I was beaten … After that I came clothed in rags to the great city of Venice.”44 In many Jewish accounts a gentile king appears to be a key for Jewish survival. This view reflects a traditional veneration of royal authority which goes hand in hand with the vigilance and selflessness of Jewish mediators who fight for the safety of the Jews. Gentile kings appear to be rewarded or punished depending on their attitude towards the Jews. According to Joseph ha-Kohen the rise of the Ottomans was part of a divine plan to punish Christianity for its ongoing oppression of the Jews. In Capsali’s account, the destiny of the Jews in Spain, Portugal, Naples, Morocco or elsewhere depended on a king’s decision. In a passage that was to become an integral part of many modern historiographical accounts, Capsali explains how God takes revenge on the Spanish king and rewards the Sultan: “And just as God saw to bringing punishment on Spain, he saw to bringing a reward upon Sultan Bayezid, for having accepted the Jews 40 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE graciously and in love and friendship. Thus God blessed Turkey because of the Jews.”45 Speaking of Ferdinand, “a mighty king”, the anonymous chronicler says: “he was Nebuchadnezzar who blackened the beauty of our light and threw down from heaven to earth the pride of our glory.”46 In a chronicle written by the son of Don Vidal Benveniste de la Cavalleria, who had negotiated the temporary settlement of the Spanish exiles in Portugal, Ferdinand appears arrogant, saying to himself: “I will be like the superior kings, the kings of France and England, and just as they expelled and banished from their lands and kingdoms, I will do the same, for I am not worse than they.”47 As we have already mentioned, the concept of the “negation of the exile” originated in Christian theology; in the dominant Christian view the exile of the Jews justified their inferior political and social status. The Jewish authors cited above all view exile as a chance for redemption, not as punishment and neither as abandonment by God. Rabbinic responsas are different sources and deal with problems of everyday life. Rabbi Samuel de Medina was born in Salonika in 1505 or 1506, to a distinguished family from Castile. He is the author of famous responsas in which he gives his legal verdict to the questions that were submitted to him. Living in the lands of Christendom, said Rabbi Samuel de Medina, meant living in a place of subversion where the Torah could not be learned, a place in which one endangered one’s faith and even one’s life. In the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, one could live “under the wings of the Divine Presence” (“Shekhinah”), in a place of Jewishness, where conversos may return to Judaism, where the rulers were benevolent and just.48 In other words, “under the wings of Divine Presence”, exile is validated; forced migration inevitably brings suffering, but it does not signify God’s abandonment because exile is not territorialized: it is an inner, intellectual condition. In the same vein, in Judeo-Spanish rabbinic literature, living in Eretz Israel does not abolish the feeling of exile.49 Christian discourse on expulsions since the 13th century reveals the themes inspired by theological tradition: usury, blasphemy, ritual murder and Judaizing conversos, those dangerous heretics who might contaminate pious Christians. From the 13th century onwards, no king could allow himself to ignore Jews as a minority to be exploited for economic, moral or political ends. Lending had made Jews useful to the royal treasury, but usury, in the Christian meaning of the term, compromised a king who is supposed to guarantee moral values. Moreover, Jews’ stubborn refusal to accept conversion stood in THE IDEA OF EXILE 41 opposition to the plans of the pious Christian king. In the Augustinian tradition God empowers the king to protect the Jews in a condition of exile that testifies to Jesus’ victory. However, a new tradition consolidated itself in the 13th and 14th centuries in which God manifests his anger when his enemies are tolerated.50 Many kings chose to preserve their power by expelling the Jews, thus abandoning the principle of protection. Spain had a “bad reputation” among the other states as an “infected society”, accused of being too lenient to minorities: In 1492, Isabel and Ferdinand received various messages congratulating them, from the University of Paris among others, for the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. This double act offered to the monarchs the title of “Catholic monarchs”, that made them equals to the très chrétien king of France, their main rival. By expelling the Jews, a king erases any ambiguity tarnishing his image as a rex christianissimus. How did perceptions evolve on the Jewish side? In one of his late essays, Yerushalmi showed how the quest for “vertical alliances” has always been, since the Roman era, a major strategy to protect Jews both from the good will of their kind neighbors and from the whim of local authorities. Hannah Arendt had attributed the “alliance” with kings and authorities who promised protection to the lack of political tradition and experience on the side of the communal Jewish leadership. On the contrary, Yerushalmi believed that Jewish communities were following realistic plans that ensured communal self-government and their prosperity. By putting their faith in a providential government, Jews were, however, unable to discern the historical forces operating in their days. The monarchs changed their attitude, but up to the eve of the expulsion from Spain, the “royal alliance” had remained a structuring myth of the Spanish Jewry, a myth which survived the expulsion.51 We may discern a deep asymmetry between the discourse of royal edicts and Christian chronicles on the one hand, and the Jewish accounts on the other. In a passage of his “Shevet Yehudah”, Solomon Ibn Verga insists on the benevolence of the kings to their Jews; he had not realized that Jews could no longer be “servants” to a “rex christianissimus”. Exile and resettlement in the “foundational historiography” of Salonika The German Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) of the 19th century drew much of its validation directly from pre-exilic Spain. Judaism needed the myth of “Sephardic supremacy” as a tool of prestige with which to enter the 42 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE modern period.52 The forerunners of the Jewish history of Salonika inherited the spirit of the Haskalah. As early as the mid-19th century, some scholars, mostly autodidacts, who possessed important libraries and were familiar with the works of the German and eastern European Haskalah, began pursuing the study of Sephardic communities. Historians such as Abraham Danon, Moise Franco, and the younger Joseph Nehama and Isaac Emmanuel, aiming to foster emancipation and to acquire equal civic rights for the Jews, viewed the 16th century as a period when the Iberian Sephardic tradition was maintained and replenished, thanks to the arrival of the refugees who brought with them the more “enlightened” cultural achievements of Europe.53 These historians painted a new picture, putting Salonika at the centre of Sephardic history, as the Jewish city par excellence. When we revisit their foundational work, we may discern stereotypes, related to the exile, which go back to the Jewish accounts of the 16th century. For all modern Sephardic historians, the expulsion was a major event. Rabbi Moïse Franco was an Alliance schoolmaster of the Jewish community of Akhisar in Turkey. In his Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites de l’Empire Ottoman, published in 1897, he does not hesitate to compare expulsion to the destruction of the Temple: “Indeed with the expulsion of 1492, the brilliance of Israel darkened, its centre of gravity moved and the powerful foundations supporting Judaism broke. This sad event produced a painful impression on the hearts of all Jews; even those who had not been victims of this unfortunate exodus, believed that our ancestors had assisted in the destruction of the Sanctuary for a third time, seeing the children of Zion resume the way to captivity.”54 In the second volume of his famous Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, published in 1935, Joseph Nehama, writing in the aftermath of the arrival of Asia Minor refugees, offers a vivid romantic description of the arrival, insisting on the suffering of the exiles. He writes in an elegant, French prose and he uses his imagination to place the refugees and their reception on the topography of the city.55 His perspective is already one of “Salonikan Sephardic patriotism”. “The immigrant feels at home,” he writes, probably projecting his own feelings about Salonika as “home”. Nehama’s triumphal vision, a widespread topos in Sephardic historiography, describes the passage from destruction to revival, a common locus in modern narratives: According to Yom Tov Assis, “refuges appear to recover quickly from trauma, distress and disappointment. The years of insecurity and instability, of wandering in the “wil- THE IDEA OF EXILE 43 derness of the nations”, are followed pretty soon by a flourishing cultural efflorescence.”56 Three themes in the early 20th-century historiography of Salonika are related to the exile: a) the Ottoman Empire as safe haven for the refugees and the protection offered by the sultan to the Jews’ b) Sephardic supremacy, and c) the idealization of migrant Jews as a unified group. In the 16th-century Jewish accounts, special emphasis was given to the “mercy” of the rulers who had permitted Jewish settlement. We have already mentioned Capsali’s description of the invitation: “In the final analysis”, he wrote, the kings of Turkey feared the Lord and both king Mehmet and king Bayezid aided the Jewish People, gathering together those who were scattered in different lands and offering them refuge.”57 As Minna Rozen notes, though Capsali’s description may not be an accurate account of the facts, it reflects a state of mind he undoubtedly imbibed from those living in the empire.58 In Salonika, at the same period, de Medina repeatedly spoke of the sultans in glowing terms, paying homage to their generous hospitality to the Jewish refugees.59 The guiding myth of royal alliance withstood the disruption of expulsion. The first modern Jewish historians of Salonika make a direct connection between Ottoman benevolence and Jewish utility. Their attitude helps turning exile into “home”. As time passed, they note, the Iberian Jews felt increasingly part of their new homeland, although, at the same time, they retained a strong sense of belonging to the “Spanish Nation”, i.e., the Jewish-Spanish Nation. The first historians of Jewish Salonika describe what was to be formulated later by Baron as a failure of nation-states to integrate minority groups, in contrast to heterodox and multi-ethnic empires. Franco organizes his book around three axes: the succession of sultans and their respective attitudes towards the Jews, the rabbis and other Jewish personalities and the towns of the empire. He introduces the triumphal reception of the Jews by the sultan, with an image which is also flattering for the Jews, and he borrows from Capsali’s account: “The Ottoman monarch received them eagerly. He is said to have pronounced a very sensible saying: You call Ferdinand a wise king, he cried before his courtiers, but he has impoverished his country and enriched ours.”60 Historians of the next generation adopted the same interpretation: In his Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, an erudite synthesis on Salonika’s Jewish history, published in 1936, Isaac Emmanuel writes that “Bayezid II had understood the importance of this active, industrious element 44 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE [the Jews] their usefulness for his state”. He adds: “Shortly after the arrival of Jews from Spain under the Turkish regime, Salonika knew one of the most brilliant phases of its history. The new blood which came to regenerate the Jewish communities, the new wealth which came to this tolerant and hospitable country, with cultivated men and remarkable artisans, prepared the belle époque of the 16th century.”61 Many years later, in 1970, Rabbi Michael Molho spoke in the same spirit in his contribution to the first conference of “Estudios Sephardis”, when he said: “A raiz de la invasion turca el imperio bizantino habia sido devastado; muchas ciudades fueron destruidos y syus habitants diezmados por las guerras con el conquistador; los griegos se agitaban contra el enemigo intruso. El sultan necesitaba un elemento apaciblo y activo para poblar las ciudades y reemplazar a los griegos en el comercio, la industria y las artes.”62 Another stereotype, transmitted to the early historiography of Salonika through 16th-century Jewish accounts, concerns “Sephardic supremacy”. Just as the Christians emphasized the uniqueness of Hispania, as distinguished from other countries of the world, a Jewish myth emphasized the uniqueness of the Spanish diaspora among the other diasporas. Some aristocratic exile families even claimed high descent from those who had been transferred to Spain following the destruction of the First Temple in 586.63 Abravanel notes: “From the rising of the sun to its setting, from north to south, there were never such a chosen people [as the Jews of Spain] in beauty and pleasantness; and afterwards there will never be another such people.” The Spanish exiles took great pride in the history and in the achievements of Jewry in Spain up to the very moment of the expulsion. Moreover, they regarded their willingness to leave Spain for the sake of God’s word as a sacrifice to their faith, which entitled them to a position of special privilege before God and Israel. Since the late 18th century, Sephardim throughout western Europe deployed their superiority to promote their own cultural, political and social agendas. The myth was widely disseminated and available for appropriation by Jews and their enemies alike.64 Franco writes that all the dispersed Jews agreed to grant their Spanish coreligionists a “sort of nobility”. Although Ashkenazi Jews had been expelled from different countries, “their misfortune was not comparable to their Spanish brethren; while Ashkenazi had been inured to hardships of suffering, insults and mistreating, Sephardic Jews were accustomed to every commodity of life, to all the sweetness of homeland; this is why the exile from their homeland was so cruel.”65 Nehama’s elegant prose contributed to the crystallization of the THE IDEA OF EXILE 45 myth of Sephardic supremacy: “Sephardic fugitives are some kind of benefaction everywhere where they have been admitted. They are proud and they are recommended by the nobility in their manners and their serious character.”66 Emmanuel follows the same vein: “Spanish exiles,” he says, “keep a distance from their brothers, either local or immigrants from countries other than the Iberia. They thought of themselves as being of noble origin. No doubt, thanks to their presence in the Castilian court and their contacts with the Spanish nobility, Sephardic Jews had nice manners. They were elegant and they expressed themselves in a distinguished language.”67 A third stereotype involves the Sephardic Jews as an “imagined community”.68 Both the edicts of expulsion and the Jewish accounts represent Jews as possessing a collective identity. However, the Iberian communities (aljamas) and the migrant congregations were not as much organic expressions of a unified society but rather external categories used by Christians and the Jewish elite. In Iberian Jewish communities we find internal fissures among factions and families, tensions and conflicts between the rabbinic elite and popular segments, as well as regional differences.69 The very fact of the expulsion had united the Jews as a collectivity. Sephardic refugees, however, had not brought with them into exile a particular Hispano-Jewish identity, as it is often assumed, but a series of cultural traits that proved far more important to the construction of their diaspora and to its social, political and religious structures. The notion of an ancestral Spanish homeland evolved in a long process, as a result of continued migration, blurring of previous regional differences and probably also under the impact of accounts which discussed exile in a general framework of Jewish history, insisting on Jews’ collective destiny. When the exiles arrived in Salonika each vernacular group founded an independent congregation. Jews residing in Ottoman lands organized themselves according to origin, language and custom, and in the congregations they formed the wealthier families stood as representatives of the rest of the community. There were more than thirty congregations (kehilot) in 16th-century Salonika. There was no mobility from one congregation to another, each congregation being responsible for its poor members and each one having a separate entry in the imperial register. It was forbidden to register with another congregation, so as to pay fewer taxes and everyone had to obey the sage of his own congregation.From a responsum by Rabbi Isaac Adarbi we learn that some people tried to remove their names from the lists a community in order to re- 46 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE gister with a new one, so as to pay fewer taxes.70 Concerning the sage in each congregation, de Medina said that “no individual of a congregation can cast off his [the sage’s] authority or rebel from his rulings and no sage may enter the boundaries of another sage even if he be among the greatest sages.”71 The members of the kehilot were also connected to informal networks of families, merchants and scholars. The attachment to the new “homeland” was inseparable from the existence of these networks, from the continuing migrations and from amazing trajectories of individuals, humble people, merchants or great scholars. One among them was Amato Lusitano (1511-1568), a personality who attracted Franco’s interest, but also the interest of modern scholarship. He was born in Spain, studied medicine in Salamanca, worked in Lisbon, moved to Anvers and, from there, to France and Germany. He moved to Venice and from there to Ferrara, where he taught astronomy; he lived in Ancona till the persecutions of 1555 and then moved to Pesaro, then Ragusa, before arriving in Salonika to be buried there.72 Neither Emmanuel nor Nehama failed to describe the existence of multiple congregations. The latter discusses what he calls “la division des Temples” and identifies the roots of the animosity in the opposition to the spiritual or temporal leaders and in fiscal causes. However, he hastily moves to deplore these divisions for diminishing the force of Salonikan Jewry in a period when it could have become “the greatest Jewish city in the Mediterranean”.73 Emmanuel emphasizes that Salonika’s congregations supported the idea of boycotting Ancona for having burned the conversos in 1553. To his opinion this manifestation of solidarity proved Salonika’s role as city-mother.74 For the majority of the second and third generation of the exiles of 1492, the pain due to the expulsion and the hardships of migration and settlement were replaced by the imagined glory of the pre-exilic past, by a sense of shared identity and by nostalgia for the lost world of medieval Iberia. When the remembrance of suffering began to fade, second- and third-generation exiles developed a collective longing for an imagined past in Iberia. Franco rhetorically wonders: “Strange thing!” They do not nourish hostile feelings for the cruel homeland which had expelled them with cowardice; and on the contrary they carried with them Spanish civilization and most of all this beautiful Castilian language which has become today a ‘barbarous jargon’.”75 Devin Naar has observed that, in the interwar period, when the situation for Salonikan Jews had become “fragile”, they opted for a discursive produc- THE IDEA OF EXILE 47 tion which emphasized the glory of the Jerusalem of the Balkans.76 Franco had already introduced to modern historiography Samuel Usque’s famous attribute for Salonika: “mother of Israel”. Salonika, says Franco, “offered to the persecuted Jews a refuge as safe as the respectable mother Jerusalem would have done”.77 The adoption and the popularization of the attribute “ir va-em le Israel”, facilitated by the belief in Sephardic supremacy, shows the existence of a diasporic conscience which could be proud as only a centre can be; this is an attitude very close to Yerushalmi’s idea of exile as home. In our survey we have seen how the Jewish accounts of the expulsion from Spain mediate between a medieval past and modern times. Their authors deterritorialize exile and open the way for a new Sephardic self-understanding. The foundational historiography of Jewish Salonika has been, in large part, nourished by themes we find in 16th-century Jewish accounts. The forerunners of the history of the Jews of Salonika have adopted 16th-century stereotypes in order to narrate a success story where the Jews turn exile into home, produce high culture and remain proudly attached to Iberia. Exilic identity largely derives from the culture of memory and nostalgia. The foundational historiography of the Jews of Salonika participated in substantiating this memory. Post scriptum The process of exile and resettlement of the Jews provides a resource for rethinking and questioning Jewish identity and diversity. In the aftermath of the Shoah, millions of people, the European Jews among them, found themselves away from home. They experienced and they reconceptualized exile and the search for a homeland. “Negation of exile” and “return to the Land of Israel” as to a national homeland was the path taken by an important part of them. For many others, exile has remained a source of reflection. The study of 16th-century accounts and of modern historiography suggests an unexpected complexity of “authentic” Jewish attitudes toward exile. In our days millions of people have become, mostly against their will, migrants, exiles and refugees. No doubt, sometimes creative but always painful debates over exile will go on. 48 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE NOTES 1 On the permanent, government-sponsored banishment of a category of subjects beyond the physical boundaries of a political entity as a characteristic of western civilisation, cf. Benjamin Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue of World History”, Journal of World History 7/2 (1996), p. 165-180. 2 See among others Joseph Hacker, “The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire”, in Haim Beinart (ed.), Sephardi Legacy II, Jerusalem 1992, p. 109-133; Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs sépharades. De Tolède à Salonique, Paris 2002; Heath W. Lowry, “When did the Sephardim arrive in Salonica? The testimony of the Ottoman Tax Registers, 1478-1613”, in A. Levy (ed.), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, Princeton 1994, p. 203-213; Minna Rozen, “Individual and Community in the Jewish Society of the Ottoman Empire: Salonica in the Sixteenth Century”, in The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, p. 215-273. 3 Cf. Laura Napran and Elisabeth van Houts (eds.), Exile in the Middle Ages: Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8-11 July 2002, Turnhout 2004; Hanna Zaremska, Les Bannis au Moyen Age , Paris 1996; Randolf Starn, Contrary Commonwealth. The theme of exile in medieval and Renaissance Italy, Berkeley 1982. 4Israel J. Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship”, Common Knowledge 12/1(2006), p. 16-33. 5 Israel J. Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship”, Common Knowledge 12/1(2006), p. 16-33. 6 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory Between Exile and History”, Jewish Quarterly Review 97/4 (2007), p. 530-543. 7Deeena Copeland Klepper, “Jewish expulsion and Jewish exile in Scholastic Thought”, in Exile in the Middle Ages (http://people.bu.edu/dklepper/RN470/expulsion_exile.html). 8See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Serviteurs des rois et non serviteurs des serviteurs. Sur quelques aspects de l’histoire politique des Juifs”, Raisons politiques 7 (2002-2003), p. 19-52. 9 Maimonides’ “Igeret teiman”, cited by Haim Hillel Ben Sasson in “Galut”, Encyclopedia Judaica 7 (1975), p. 275-294. 10 In the case of French Jews, expulsion was a trauma experienced repeatedly. In a recent study, Susan L. Einbinder observes that the few survivors expelled from the kingdom in 1306 who found refuge in Provence were not sufficient in number to support traditional, commemorative genres such as the liturgical poetry: No Place to THE IDEA OF EXILE 49 Rest. Jewish Literature, expulsion and the Memory of Medieval France, Philadelphia 2009. 11See Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds, The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, Bloomington 1986. 12Hyam Maccoby, “The Wandering Jew as Sacred Executioner”, in The Wandering Jew, p. 236-260. 13Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Medieval Jewry from within and from without”, P.E. Szarmuch (ed.), Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages, Albany1979, p. 1-26. 14 Edward Peters, “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492”, Jewish History 9/1 (1995), p. 9-34. 15See Michal Friedman, “Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria’: José Amador de los Ríos and the History of the Jews of Spain,” Journal of Jewish Social Studies 18/1 (2011), p. 88-126; Kevin Ingram, “Historiography, Historicity and the Conversos,” in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. 1: Departures and Change, Leiden 2009, p. 335-356. 16 See Henry Kamen, The Disinherited. Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture, 1492–1975, New York 2007, p. 36-37. 17 Kamen, The Disinherited, 46ff. 18To mention only a few examples: according to Henry Kamen, the feudal nobility wanted to eliminate a sector of the growing Jewish middle class that threatened to dominate and control the state. (See “The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492”, Past and Present 119 (1988), p. 3–55). For Stephen Haliczer the urban patriciate, indebted to Jewish lenders, required the expulsion or the kings (see The Castilian Urban Patriciate and the Jewish Expulsions of 1480-92, Washington 1973). According to other historians, the monarchs wanted to integrate converts into Spanish society but when their conversion project failed, Judaism had to be eradicated; their decision was motivated by the old Christians’ hatred of Jews and converts and the Catholic kings either shared this revulsion personally or used it in a demagogic manner to appease public opinion (see Joseph Perez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of Jews from Spain, Urbana 2007). See also Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of Jews from Spain, Oxford 2002. Adopting a comparative framework, Μaurice Kriegel has argued that the emergence of the modern state indeed provided the context for the expulsions. He criticized economic explanations as determinist and proposed an integrative theory that focuses on the transition to modernity, the formation of the modern state and the adoption of ancient anti-Judaist images as a means of creating a sense of solidarity (see “La prise d’une decision: l’expulsion des juifs d’Espagne en 1492,” Revue Historique 260 (1978), p. 49–90. 19 Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews of Spain, 2 vols, Philadelphia 1992 50 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE (1961), vol. 2, p. 399-423. 20 Cf. Jonathan Ray, “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing our Approach to Medieval Convivencia,” Jewish Social Studies 11/2 (2005), p. 1-18; Alex Novikoff, “Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Medieval Spain: An Historiographical Enigma”, Medieval Encounters 11:1-2 (2005), 7-36. 21See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Toward a History of Hope”, David N. Myers - Alexander Kaye (eds.), The Faith of Fallen Jews Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, Lebanon, NH 2013, p. 299-317. 22 Cf. Jean Christophe Attias, “Du judaïsme comme pensée de dispersion”, Penser le judaïsme, Paris 2010, p. 15-28. 23 Baer, A History of the Jews of Spain. On Baer see David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past. European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, Oxford 1995), p. 109-128. 24 Yitzhak Baer, Galut, New York 1947 (first published Berlin, 1936). See also the French edition with an introduction by Y. H. Yerushalmi: Galout. L’imaginaire de l’exil dans le judaisme, Paris 2000. 25 Isaac E. Barzilay, “Yi aq (Fritz) Baer and Shalom (Salo Wittmayer) Baron: Two Contemporary Interpreters of Jewish History”, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 60 (1994), p. 7-69. 26 Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols, New York 1937. On Baron see Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History , New York 1995 and David Engel, “Crisis and lachrymosity: on Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the study of modern European Jewish history,” Jewish History 20 (2006), p. 243-264. 27 Salo Wittmayer Baron, “Nationalism and Intolerance,” Menorah Journal 16 (1929), p. 405-415 and 17 (1930), p. 148-158. 28 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” Benjamin R. Gampel (ed.), Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, New York 1997, p. 3–22. 29 Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 15501750, London 1998, p. 4-28. 30 David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, New York 1986. 31 Robert Bonfil, “How Golden was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?”, History and Theory 27/4 (1988), 78-102 and idem, “Jewish Attitudes Toward History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times”, Jewish History 11:1 (1997), p.7-40. On Bonfil, see the pertinent remarks of Anthony Molho: “Robert Bonfil: A ‘Modern’ Historian’s Moral Imperative”, Jewish History 9/2 (1995), p. 113-118. THE IDEA OF EXILE 51 32 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle 1982. 33See David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (eds.), Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, Philadelphia 2004. 34 “An Anonymous Chronicle,” in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles. An Anthology of Medieval Chronicles Relating to the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, David Raphael (ed.), North Hollywood, California 1992, p. 49. See also Joseph Hacker, “New Chronicles on the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain: Its causes and consequences”, Zion 44 [Yitzhak F. Baer Memorial Volume] (1979), p. 201228 (in Hebrew). 35 Cited by Marc D. Angel in his Voices in Exile: A Study in Sephardic Intellectual History, Hoboken, NJ 1991, p. 10. 36 Shlomo Rosenberg, “Exile and Redemption in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century: Contending Conceptions,” Bernard D. Cooperman (ed.), Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass. 1983, p. 399-430. A Jewish scholar, Rabbi Joseph ben Moses Trani (1568-1639), considered the expulsion from Spain as a blessing because of the great contribution it made to Jewish culture throughout the empire. Cf. Avraham Grossman, “Legislation and Responsa Literature”, Sephardi Legacy II, p. 217. See also, Joseph Hacker, “Superbe et désespoir: l’existence sociale et spirituelle des juifs ibériques dans l’Empire Ottoman”, Revue Historique 578 (1991), p. 260-293. 37 Elijah Capsali, “Seder Eliyahu Zuta (The minor order of Elijah)”, in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p. 45. 38 According to Moshe Idel, who criticizes Gershom Sholem’s assumptions, messianism was not the movement where Judaism found the religious answer to the expulsion from Spain. Idel pays attention to the flourishing of halakhic literature; see his “Religion, Thought and Attitudes: The Impact of the Expulsion on the Jews”, Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews. The Sephardi Experience 1492 and After, London 1992, p. 123-139. 39 Don Isaac Abravanel, “Perush al Nebiim Rishonim (Introduction to the Former Prophets)”, The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p.53. 40 See Ram Ben Shalom, “The Myths of Troy and Hercules as Reflected in the Writings of Some Jewish Exiles from Spain”, in H. J. Hames (ed.), Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Prof. Elena Lourie, Leiden 2004, p. 229-254. 41Solomon Ibn Verga, “Shevet Yehuda, (The Staff of Judah)”, in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p. 91-104. See also Solomon Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehuda, Azriel Shohat (ed.), Jerusalem 1947 (in Hebrew). 42 Joseph Hacohen, “Emek Habacha (The Vale of Tears)”, in The Expulsion 52 HENRIETTE-RIKA BENVENISTE 1492 Chronicles, p. 15-111. See also Joseph Ha-Cohen, La vallée des pleurs, présentation Jean Pierre Osier, Paris 1981. 43 Samuel Usque, “Consoloçam As Tribulaçoens de Israel (Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel)”, in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p. 135-144. 44 Judah ben Jacob Hayyat, “Minhat Yehudah (The Offering of Judah)”, in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p. 112-115. 45 Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zuta, p. 43. 46 “An Anonymous Chronicle,” p. 49. 47 Don Vidal Benveniste de la Cavalleria, “Chronicle”, in The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles, p. 89. 48 Cf. Henriette-Rika Benveniste, “Under the Wings of Divine Presence. Conversos in Sixteenth-century Salonica Revisited”, in Polyptychon, Homenaje a Ioannis Hassiotis, Granada 2008, p. 83-101. 49Matthias B. Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture, Bloomington 2005, 137ff. 50 See David Nirenberg, “Massacre or miracle? Valencia 1391”, in Neighbouring Faith. Christians, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, Chicago 2014, p. 83-84. 51 See the pertinent remarks by Maurice Kriegel, “De l’Alliance royale a la religion de l’Etat. Yerushalmi entre Baron, Baer et Arendt”, in S.A Goldberg (ed.), L’histoire et la mémoire de l’histoire. Hommage a Y.H. Yerushalmi, Paris 2012, p. 29-44. 52 Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy in Nineteenth-century Germany”, in Yael Halevi-Wise (ed.), Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, Stanford 2012, p. 35-57. 53 See Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100/3 (2010), p. 349–384; Aron Rodrigue, “Salonica in Jewish Historiography”, Jewish History 28/3 (2014), p. 439-447. 54 Moise Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites de l’Empire Ottoman depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, New York 1973, p. 38 [first edition Paris 1897]. 55 Joseph Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique. Vol 5/2: Salonique 1935-1978. L’Age d’Or du Sépharadisme (1536-1593), Salonika 1935, p. 11-54. 56 Yom Tov Assis, “The Jewish World after the Expulsion: From Destruction to Revival”, Hispania Judaica Bulletin 8 (2011), p. 5-18. 57 Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zuta, 44. 58 Minna Rozen, “Strangers in a Strange Land: The Extraterritorial Status of Jews in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth centuries, in A. Rodrigue (ed.), Ottoman and Turkish Jewry. Community and Leadership, Bloomington 1992, p. 155. THE IDEA OF EXILE 53 59 Morris S. Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey in the XVIth century as reflected in the Legal Writings of Samuel de Medina, New York 1952, p. 118-120. 60 Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites, 37. 61 Isaac S. Emmanuel, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique (140 av. J.-C. à 1640).Vol 1: Contenant un supplément sur l’histoire de l’industrie des tissues des Israélites de Salonique , Paris, 1935-1936, p. 57. See also the review by I. S. Revah of Nehama’s and Emmanuel’s books in Bulletin Hispanique 40/2 (1938), p. 214–216. 62 Michael Molho, “Radicación de los exiliados de España en Turquía y emigración de los sefardís de Oriente a América”, Actas del Primer Simposio de Estudios Sefardíes, Iacob M. Hassán (ed.), Madrid 1970, p. 66. 63 Haim Hillel Ben Sasson, “The Generation of Spanish Exiles on its fate”, Zion (1961), p. 23-64 (in Hebrew). 64 See Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardi Supremacy”, in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism, Hanover 1994, p. 71-93; Todd M. Endelman, “Benjamin Disraeli and the myth of Sephardi superiority”, Jewish History 10/2 (1996), p. 31-32. 65 Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites, p.38. 66 Nehama, Histoire des Israélites, p.20. 67 Emmanuel, Histoire des Israélites, p.65. 68 Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry, New York 2013, p. 135-155; Minna Rozen, “Collective Memories and Group Boundaries: The Judeo-Spanish Diaspora between the Lands of Christendom and the World of Islam”, Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora (1997), p. 35-52. 69 See Jonathan Ray, “Creating Sepharad: Expulsion, Migration, and the Limits of Diaspora”, Journal of Levantine Studies 3 (2014), p. 9-35. 70 Sixteenth century Judeo-spanish Testimones: An Edition of Eighty four testimonies from the Sephardic Responsa in the Ottoman Empire, Annette Benaim (ed.), Leiden 2012, p. 306-308. 71 Angel, Voices in Exile, p. 36. 72 Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites, p. 75; cf. Eleazer Gutwirth, “Amatus Luzitanus and the Locations of Sixteenth Century Cultures”, in Cultural Intermediaries, p. 216-238. 73 Emmanuel, Histoire des Israélites, p. 150. 74 Ibid., p. 166. 75 Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites, p. 39. 76 Devin E. Naar, “Fashioning the ‘Mother of Israel’: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica”, Jewish History 28/3 (2014), p. 337-372. 77 Franco, Essai sur l’Histoire des Israélites, p. 41.