Review: Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture
H-Levant has published a review of Matthias B. Lehmann’s Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture
Beginning in the eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman rabbis had undertaken the task of fighting the ignorance they believed was plaguing their communities by producing works of Jewish ethics (musar) in Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino). This development was inspired in part by a particular strain within Jewish mysticism (Lurianic Kabbalah) which suggested that every Jew would necessarily play a role in the mending of the world required for redemption. The spread of ignorance among their coreligionists thus threatened to undo the proper order of things. It was with this in mind that these Ottoman rabbis–all capable of publishing in the more highly esteemed Hebrew language of their religious tradition–chose to write in their vernacular instead. While they democratized rabbinic knowledge by translating it for the masses, these “vernacular rabbis” (to use Matthias Lehmann’s term) also attempted to instill in their audiences the sense that their texts required the mediation of individuals with religious training. Thus, they explained that common people should gather together to read their books in meldados, or study sessions, always with the guidance of someone trained in the study of Jewish law. Upholding the privileged position of religious scholars in this way, such study sessions were also meant to assure that members of the popular classes spent their time in acceptable ways, rather than enjoying leisure time out in public, drinking and smoking in coffeehouses and taverns, or promenading without a clear destination.
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The rabbis’ Judeo-Spanish books–Lehmann argues–had the unforeseen effect of decentralizing their own authority, as they expanded their reading public to include women and various groups from the popular classes to whom Hebrew reading materials remained largely inaccessible. This trend was exacerbated as individuals began to read by themselves rather than resorting to the reading sessions their rabbis had prescribed. Having made space for secular topics in their writings, the Ottoman rabbis portrayed in Lehmann’s study helped lay the foundation for the secular Judeo-Spanish reading public that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Decades before western European Jews and their local Ottoman allies announced their intention to reshape the face of Ottoman Jewry according to new models, the authors of Judeo-Spanish musar literature–however inadvertently–had helped to set this process into motion. By advancing this argument, Lehmann locates the origins of the modern transformations of Ottoman Jewish communities in an earlier era than has been suggested by previous scholarship. He similarly gives evidence of the internal motors that drove this transformation from within the empire, adding a new dimension to the explanatory framework which has so long focused on the introduction of change into modern Ottoman Jewish communities from the outside, most notably from Europe.