Jeremy Cohen. A Historian in Exile

Many of the great Jewish historians—from Heinrich Graetz and Yitzhak Baer to Amos Funkenstein and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi—have written about Shevet Yehudah, that classic of Hebrew letters from the sixteenth century. Jeremy Cohen’s A Historian in Exile now offers a new and impressively detailed analysis of a book that Yerushalmi once described as “a precociously sociological analysis of Jewish historical suffering” (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [1982], 57). Most of Shevet Yehudah was written by Solomon ibn Verga, a Castilian Jew who experienced the expulsion from Spain in 1492, relocated, as did so many of his coreligionists, to Portugal, and there was subjected to the mass baptism of all Jews five years later. Ibn Verga likely left Portugal in the wake of the violent attacks against “New Christians” in Lisbon in 1506. It was his son, Joseph ibn Verga, who edited his father’s work, added some materials of his own, and saw to the publication of Shevet Yehudah in Adrianople in 1554. The book was subsequently translated into Yiddish and Ladino, into Latin, and into various European languages, including German, Spanish, and French (to date, there is no English translation) (2–3). Cohen’s excellent analysis would have been even richer had he included a discussion about the fascinating history of the reception of Ibn Verga’s text across the Jewish diaspora in subsequent centuries.

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