Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History

Jane S. Gerber is Professor Emerita of History and director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies. She is author of Jewish Society in Fez: 1450–1700 (1980), The Jews of Spain (1992), winner of a National Jewish Book Award, and Sephardic Studies in the University (1995), and editor of The Jews in the Caribbean (also published by the Littman Library). She has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Hebrew University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere. She headed the Advisory Board of the American Sephardi Federation and served on the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History and the Academic Board of the Rothberg School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

• Introduction1. Poetry and Politics in the Caliphate of Cordoba, 950–11502. Crossing the Borders of Art andSociety: Toledo as a Meeting Place of Cultures, 1150–13503. The Search for Redemption inSafed, 1500–16004. The Jews of Venice betweenToleration and Expulsion, 1516–16485. Reconstructing Sepharad inIstanbul and Salonica, 1492–16006. Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam and the Formation of the Western Sephardi Diaspora,1579–1700ConclusionsBibliographyIndex

Reviews'Highly readable and enlightening... Gerber paints an illuminating picture of a vivid Jewish sub-culture always in contact with the non-Jewish, Christian and Muslim, surroundings... Cities of Splendour will be of great value for many scholars and students of Sephardic and Jewish history.'Carsten Schapkow, Sephardic Horizons