ABSTRACT

This article tackles the issue of Jewish Andalusi identity and the notion of Sephardi exceptionalism, promoted by several Jewish Andalusi scholars from the tenth century onwards. It does so by examining the way Jewish Iberian immigrants identified themselves, or were identified by their contemporaries, in their new locales. The basic corpus for this study is the documentary Cairo Geniza, which enables an examination of every-day experiences of these Iberian immigrants, as opposed to literary compositions which have been the main source for the study of the notion of Sephardi exceptionalism. The period examined is the late tenth through the thirteenth centuries, considered the “classical Geniza period” and equivalent to a period of major shifts in Iberian Jewry. Using digital tools and secondary literature, a database of 161 manuscripts which include identifications of Iberian immigrants was assembled. An analysis of these identifications reveals, on the one hand, a growing use of the new Hebrew identifier “Sepharadi” as a geographical and probably cultural marker. On the other hand, it frames it in a historical reality in which identification as a Sephardi was not an obvious choice with a clear cultural meaning, but rather just one out of a spectrum of possible identifiers.

摘要

这篇文章探讨了安达卢西犹太人的身份问题和塞法迪例外论的概念，该概念由 10 世纪以来的几位安达卢西犹太学者提倡。它通过检查犹太伊比利亚移民在他们的新地方识别自己或被他们的同时代人识别的方式来做到这一点。这项研究的基本语料库是纪录片 Cairo Geniza，它可以检验这些伊比利亚移民的日常经历，而不是文学作品，后者一直是研究塞法迪例外主义概念的主要来源。审查的时期是十世纪末到十三世纪，被认为是“古典 Geniza 时期”，相当于伊比利亚犹太人的重大转变时期。使用数字工具和二手文献，收集了 161 份手稿的数据库，其中包括伊比利亚移民的身份证明。对这些标识的分析表明，一方面，越来越多地使用新的希伯来标识符“Sepharadi”作为地理和可能的文化标记。另一方面，它把它框定在一个历史现实中，在这个现实中，被认为是塞法迪人并不是一个具有明确文化意义的明显选择，而只是一系列可能的标识符中的一个。