A Livornese ?Port Jew? and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire

Bibliographic Data

ID2747479
AuthorsMatthias B Lehmann, Matthias Lehmann (0000-0002-2108-9919, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume11
Issue2
Pages51-76
Publication date2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJewish Social Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-6704 • E-ISSN: 1527-2028
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/jss.2005.11.2.51
OpenAlexW2060063834
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited10

of knowledge, and that they have no zeal for virtues, but that they are only after pomp and wealth and business.' Thus does David Attias admonish the readers of his work La Guerta de Oro (The Garden of Gold), published in 1778, arguably the first secular book be printed in Ladino, orJudeo-Spanish, the vernacular language of the SephardiJews in the eastern Mediterranean.2 Attias was born in Sarajevo, in Ottoman Bosnia, but he spent most of his life in Livorno, the Tuscan port city, where he arrived in 1769.3 He wrote his work, the content of which ranges from a seven-page introduction the Italian language a short treatise on physiognomy, to please a friend of his in the East,4 explicitly intending the book for aJewish reading audience in the land of his birth, the Ottoman Empire. Judeo-Spanish literature had only begun flourish in the 1730s; it was by definition popular religious literature until the mid-nineteenth century. Its classical age in the eighteenth century was marked by works such as the Me-am loez-an encyclopedic commentary on the Bible begun byJacob Huli of Istanbul in 1730-and numerous translations and adaptations that presented the essentials of rabbinic learning in a popularized Ladino version.5 Only in the mid-nineteenth

Ancient history · Art · Humanities · Ottoman empire · Political science · Port (circuit theory · Engineering · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · History · Law · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies

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