This col­lec­tion of eleven essays explores the iden­ti­ty of a small minor­i­ty with­in a minor­i­ty, the Sephardi/​Mizrahi Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in the Amer­i­c­as. Tak­ing a com­pre­hen­sive approach to the term ​“Sephar­di,” the essays’ authors include not only the descen­dants of Iber­ian Jews, but all whose rit­u­als, litur­gy, and Hebrew pro­nun­ci­a­tion ​“bear the imprint of a com­mon, non-Ashke­nazi tra­di­tion.” Exam­in­ing the past hun­dred years, they trace the emi­gra­tion of Jews from areas for­mer­ly under Ottoman rule in addi­tion to more recent emi­gra­tion from the mod­ern Islam­ic world. In the Amer­i­c­as, the geo­graph­i­cal scope of the col­lec­tion takes the read­er from Que­bec to Argenti­na. Reli­gious iden­ti­ty, accul­tur­a­tion, rela­tion­ships to oth­er Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties, and atti­tudes to Zion­ism are among the themes explored. Oth­er essays con­sid­er lan­guage, lit­er­a­ture, and music of select­ed com­mu­ni­ties.

Bejara­no, one of the edi­tors, exam­ines the cor­re­la­tion between the dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the old world of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Sephardic com­mu­ni­ty in the New World. She con­cedes that reli­gious obser­vance among the descen­dants of the Ottoman émi­grés tend­ed to be less rig­or­ous than that of the lat­er Mid­dle East­ern immi­grants and that this phe­nom­e­non pro­duced sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in the lev­el of accul­tur­a­tion. Ger­ber takes these dif­fer­ences a step fur­ther and demon­strates that where­as the Sephardic com­mu­ni­ties trans­plant­ed from the Ottoman Empire suf­fered from seri­ous assim­i­la­tion, the Syr­i­an com­mu­ni­ties were vig­or­ous in their resis­tance to accul­tur­a­tion and assim­i­la­tion. Indeed, some of these com­mu­ni­ties (includ­ing the Alep­pans of Brook­lyn) were to go so far as to place a ban on con­ver­sion to Judaism. This ban has become quite wide­spread among the Sephardic rab­bis in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Wiith excel­lent ref­er­ences and bib­li­og­ra­phy, Con­tem­po­rary Sephardic Iden­ti­ty in the Amer­i­c­as fills a void in the study of the Sephar­di phe­nom­e­non as it has devel­oped in the Amer­i­c­as over the past hun­dred years.