After Expulsion

Jonathan Ray is the Samuel Eig Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University.

After Expulsionimplicitly invites the reader to succumb to the outmoded, rigid spell of historical structuralism, In this sense, Ray has offered a challenging achievement by proposing an explicit culturalist narrative that implicitly endorses structuralist interpretations of the Sephardim and the Mediterranean. (Jewish History) This valuable and readable scholarly work will attract academics (CHOICE) [T]his book isgroundbreaking in what it does accomplish, and in terms of the many ideas Ray presents that others will undoubtedly pursue, research, and publish. For anyone who had assumed that there was a cohesive Sephardic identity of the Jews who left Spain at the end of the fifteenth centurythis book is a revelation. (American Historical Review) After Expulsion charters the (literally and metaphorically) troubled waters of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean with deftness and elegance. It takes us on a journey from Seville to Fez, Salonica and Venice. It fills a notable gap in the literature by offering a synthetic and yet thought-provoking narrative of the most complex period in the early modern history of the Sephardic diaspora. - Francesca Trivellato,Frederic W. Hilles Professor of History, Yale University After Expulsionis a rich and compelling history...With its intense focus on one century, Ray's book makes a distant time and trauma painfully vivid and immediate to the reader. - Jane Mushabac (Jewish Currents Magazine) Rays exciting volume contains a wealth of original insights on the subtle and complex process that transformed the Jewish outcasts of Spain of 1492 into a new society that would become known as the Sephardic diaspora. Based upon a careful reading of a wide variety of Spanish and Hebrew primary and secondary sources, Ray provides a new and rich understanding of the crucial sixteenth century in Jewish history. His refreshing historical analysis provides fruitful and novel interpretations of Sephardic and early modern Jewish history. - Jane S. Gerber,Professor of History and Director, Institute for Sephardic Studies, City University of New York In tracing the social and political development of the Sephardic community during the sixteenth century, Ray reminds historians to exercise restraint in projecting community identities and affiliations backward in time. It is an important point, one that also fruitfully calls into question assumptions about the primacy of religious identity. Such cautions are timely, especially as more and more scholars take the & religious turn and, together with Rays inventive and careful revision of the poorly understood formative period of Sephardic identity, should win for this interesting book a broad readership. (The Journal of Modern History) After Expulsionwill prove to be an indispensable volume in the library of any reader interested in the history of Judaism in early modern Europe. Ray has written a brilliant, groundbreaking study fundamental in our understanding of the intricacies of the long and difficult configuration of the Sephardic Diaspora. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Medieval Inheritance 2. The Long Road into Exile 3. An Age of Perpetual Migration 4. Community and Control in the Sephardic Diaspora 5. Families, Networks, and the Challenge of Social Organization 6. Rabbinic and Popular Judaism in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean 7. Imagining Sepharad Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index About the Author