Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century
with Dr. Sarah Abrevaya Stein
After their expulsion from Spain, thousands of Sephardic families made their way to the bustling port of Salonica, then part of the Ottoman Empire, becoming the majority of the city’s residents by the early 16th century. Among them was the sprawling Levy clan and, over the centuries, as leading publishers and editors, the family chronicled modern Sephardic life across the empire.
The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew borders and transformed the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Relatives soon emigrated, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the family, as it did close to 90 percent of the Jewish population of Salonica.
This session, based on Stein’s award-winning Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century, will trace an emblematic Sephardi journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Family Papers was named a Best Book of 2019 by The Economist and an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review. Professor of History and Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA, she is author of nine other books and has won both a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Jewish Book Awards. Her full biography is available here.
ABOUT THE SPANISH JEWISH EXPERIENCE SERIES
For two millennia, Spanish Jewry swung on a pendulum from the heights of tolerance during the “Golden Age” — when Jews flourished as philosophers and poets, physicians, mathematicians and traders — to the depths and degradations of forced conversion, the Inquisition and expulsion.
The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center is proud to present a five-part lecture series illuminating the complexities of Sepharad, as Iberia is called in Hebrew, and to discover the rich legacy of Jewish Spain through the lenses of art, architecture, music and the modern diasporic experience.
We will meet ordinary Spanish Jews who struggled with the ever-changing realties, as well as some of Judaism’s most revered thinkers and writers: the physician/rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or Rambam; the virtuosic poet Yehuda Halevi; and the biblical scholar and philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra.
Delivered by leading professors of Sephardic studies from across the US and the Atlantic, each lecture stands on its own. You are welcome and encouraged to attend any or all.