Matthias B. Lehmann. Emissaries from the Holy Land

Although growing fast, Sephardic and Ottoman studies are still underappreciated fields in Jewish studies in particular and global historical studies in general. Matthias B. Lehmann’s well-researched and well-argued Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century is a massive contribution to these growing fields. Integrating his years of meticulous work on primary Jewish sources—such as Abraham Ya’ari’s impressive corpus on emissaries from the Holy Land, Sheluhei Eretz Yisra’el (1951), the correspondence of the Pekidei Kushta (which Ya’ari hardly used at all, limiting himself to the few Hebrew letters but ignoring the bulk of their correspondence in Ladino), archival sources from the Jewish community archive in Livorno (which historians of the emissaries have not used before), and rabbinic writings from the period—as well as secondary sources on European, Jewish, and Ottoman histories, Lehmann provides us with the first definitive historical account of the early modern Jewish philanthropic network within the Eurasian context. Although the subtitle suggests that the book is about the eighteenth century, it actually covers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the eighteenth century. Structured in five chapters and an epilogue, it focuses on the diaspora side of the philanthropic network (9). The first chapter deals with the establishment of the network and the hardships associated with it. The second chapter concerns the characteristics of the emissaries who were sojourning among the diaspora communities for years. The third chapter, mainly through examining the writings of Rabbi Moshe Hagiz and Joseph David Azulai, explains the birth of the philanthropic network and modern Jewish Orthodoxy as a reaction to the religious and ideological challenges of the time. The fourth chapter explores the emergence of distinct and conflicting Sephardic and Ashkenazi identities, the repercussions of which still continue. And the last chapter deals with the rise of the rival Amsterdam-based philanthropic organization Pekidim ve-Ha-Amarkalim, led by Zvi Hirsch Lehren; the end of the early modern philanthropic endeavor, facilitated by the Istanbul-based Sephardic leadership; and the birth of new European-based philanthropic organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology) · Diaspora · Hebrew · Judaism · Land of Israel · Period (music) · Sociology · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies