The Jews Of Spain by Jane S. Gerber

Author:Jane S. Gerber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1992-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Even more ambitious than printing and distributing Caro’s Beit Yosef was the Salonika presses’ publication of the Talmud, a project so enormous few generations have succeeded in carrying it out. The type was brought from Portugal by the printer Don Yehuda Gedalia, and the first tractates appeared between 1519 and 1523. Proudly regarding the expensive undertaking as a communal responsibility, the city’s Jews drew up a detailed appeal for financing, including the floating of a loan that would be repaid from the proceeds of selling the work. The surplus was earmarked for the poor of the Holy Land. After the Talmud was publicly burned in Italy in 1552, a second edition was printed on the Salonika presses.

Gedalia’s influence extended to secular literature as well. In his house he founded a literary society that would continue to hold meetings for fifty years. The salon’s talented members included Saadiah Longo, a famed poet who wrote in the Andalusian tradition, and poets all over the Empire sent their works to be recited there. Gedalia also acted as a patron to scores of needy refugee intellectuals, including the Portuguese physician Amatus Lusitanus (né Juan Rodrigo de Castel-Branco), who had led an extraordinary life as a marrano before arriving in Salonika and reverting. After medical training at the University of Salamanca, he had fled Portugal and enjoyed an illustrious medical career in Antwerp, France, and Ancona and Pesaro in Italy. At one point, he gave a series of anatomy lectures to scholars in Ferrara that was considered shocking, in part because at one session he dissected twelve cadavers in front of his audience in order to demonstrate the function of valves in the circulatory system. He was appointed as a physician to the pope, but his position did not spare him the anguish of the auto-da-fé in Ancona. He fled to Salonika, wrote about medicine under Gedalia’s aegis, and was honored as the glory of the medical world of the day until he fell ill while tending victims of the plague in the city and died in 1568.

In his career and others, we see again and again that the Sephardic exiles were intent upon transporting their multifaceted culture and renewing it on Ottoman shores. Indeed, if one mark of a great civilization is the ability to export itself and establish a thriving culture in distant places, then surely the evidence from Turkey proves the greatness of the Sephardic tradition. Consciously working to this end, in 1547 Sephardic printers produced the Constantinople Pentateuch, a trilingual literal translation of the Bible with the Hebrew, Castilian, and Judeo-Greek texts printed in three parallel columns. Similarly, they had produced a Ladino translation of the Book of Psalms in 1540. In addition to preserving texts, however, the Ottoman presses also sustained links to the living Hispanic culture. It is especially noteworthy that the contemporary bestseller in Spain, the converso author de Rojas’s La Celestina, was published in Salonika in Hebrew translation. The exiles would in fact keep abreast of Iberian

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