Spanish And Portuguese Jewry:

Features

Description

This massive compilation represents the culmination of Robert Singerman's almost single-handed twenty-year project to bring under bibliographic control published material on one of Europe's most important centers of Jewish life and culture. With close to 5,500 citations, it supplements a similar number of sources in Singerman's foundation bibliography on the subject, The Jews in Spain and Portugal: A Bibliography (1975).

Together, the two bibliographies provide near-exhaustive coverage of materials on the Jewish experience in Spain and Portugal from antiquity to 1992, the quincentenary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The present work comprises post-1975 publications and also retrospectively incorporates earlier sources not previously documented.

Classified into thirty broad areas and hundreds of historical and topical sub-categories and special subjects, including numerous works on individuals, it culls from the literature of Jewish studies, Spanish and Portuguese history and literature, ecclesiastical history, social history, and many other fields.

Topics of special importance include local Jewish history, Jewish-Christian polemics, and the portrayal of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in literature. Fascinating sources on more specific subjects such as Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War, Jewish physicians, and Columbus' alleged Jewish ancestry, Jewish translation activity during the Middle Ages are among those documented.

While the 1975 bibliography is especially strong in Jewish sources from pre-Holocaust Europe, the present work reflects a preponderance of recent Spanish and Portuguese studies and the important contribution of Israeli scholarship. This bibliography represents tireless analysis of serial literature and of Jewish content in books not specifically--or even apparently--bearing on Judaic matters.

Review: ?This work represents an important contribution to Sephardic Jewish scholarship and is a valuable addition to reference collections in academic and research libraries supporting Jewish studies programs. It is also an important resource for temple, synagogue, Jewish community center, and public libraries serving Sephardic Jewish communities.?-American Reference Books Annual