After Expulsion by Jonathan S. Ray

Author:Jonathan S. Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Rabbinic and Popular Judaism in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean

We know neither the background nor the way of life of these men,

nor what they believe or what they do not.

—Records of the Venetian Senate1

Political and social organization were not the only areas of Jewish society in which the realities of daily life fell short of the ideals set forth by Jewish tradition. The performance of religious obligations and customs also became an arena in which the contours of the Sephardic Diaspora were asserted and contested. There can be little doubt that the central religious features of Judaism—the observance of its precepts, the performance of rituals, and the offering of prayers—served to meet a human need for spiritual expression. Yet such personal religious practices also had an important social function. Religion operated as an organizing principle in Sephardic life. The key elements of this process included the adoption of local customs in new areas of settlement, the importance of public displays of piety and allotment of honors, and the different ways in which rabbis and average Jews dealt with the religious identity of the former Conversos who reverted to Judaism during this period. The shared set of religious values and, especially, the shared legal tradition that had bound together Mediterranean Jewry for centuries continued to allow for mutual recognition, understanding, and support throughout the Jewish world. However, the divisions between rabbinic ideals and popular practice that had strained Jewish solidarity before 1492 remained a defining characteristic of Sephardic life.

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