The book provides insights on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Spain and the Jewish Diaspora more generally. (As the astute student will immediately grasp, I am one of what I might lightly refer to as the goyish diaspora.) My purpose and conclusions are probably different to those of a student of Sephardic studies, who will probably already be intimately aware of the tenets of Judaism and less interested in the comparative lessons I draw between Islam and Christendom. While serious in tone, it is very readable indeed and provides what I would judge to be a good, neutral perspective. This book serves both purposes beautifully. I came to this volume as part of a project to further my education about Islam and its relationship with the rest of the world, which had led me to an interest in the Golden Age of ha Sefarad, and to inform myself further about Judaism, about which I have had too little information to understand its relationship with the world at all.

I commend the author for an excellent job.Ī great introduction to the history of a great nation I just read it for the second time because I wanted to absorb it all. The Jewish experience is recounted against a backdrop history.

She collects a lot of facts that I have learned about and weaves them all together in a very readable book. Gerber does an excellent job of piecing together the history of a far flung people. Nor have five hundred years of wandering extinguished the identity of the Sephardic Jews, or diminished the proud memory of the dazzling civilization which they created on Spanish soil.This book is intended to serve as an introduction and scholarly guide to that history. Indeed, in defiance of all logic and expectation, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain became an occasion for renewed creativity. Summarily expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their tragedy of expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another. For more than a thousand years, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community noted for its richness and virtuosity. The history of the Jews of Spain is a remarkable story that begins in the remote past and continues today.

The Jews of Spain by Jane S. Gerber