ABSTRACT When we talk about the Sephardic diaspora, we often talk about Iberian conversos who leave the Peninsula, supposedly to live openly as Jews in places like Algiers, Venice, Amsterdam or the Ottoman Empire. But what about those conversos who continued to identify in some way as Jews but who remained in Spain and Portugal? To what extent can we talk about them as part of the Sephardic diaspora as we understand it today? In this essay, I examine the inquisitorial and rabbinic discourses of Iberian conversos through the lens of Khachig Tölölyan's definition of diasporic culture. I argue that Jewish‐identifying Iberian conversos meet his criteria, allowing for a more nuanced understanding the Iberian converso experience that goes beyond the voices of the Rabbinate on one side, and the Inquisition on the other. In so doing, I challenge the record of scholarship that does not consider Jewish‐identifying Iberian conversos as part of the Sephardic diaspora. This approach enables us to take a new look at the relationship between conversos and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout the Sephardic diaspora.
ABSTRACT This essay reconsiders the anonymous sonnet ‘Y Dios, que a los suyos padeciendo mira’ preserved in the Prologue of MS 11/9394 S‐2 (Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia), a Morisco codex produced near Tunis between 1630 and 1650. As a key yet subtle rhetorical hinge in the text's Prologue, the sonnet establishes MS 11/9394 S‐2 within an authoritative textual lineage of Morisco manuscripts produced in the diaspora, legitimizing the use of Spanish for Islamic instruction while displaying an ambivalent engagement with Spanish literary models. The sonnet identifies the expelled Moriscos as the new Israelites—God's chosen people whose persecution in both Spain and Tunisia confirms their favoured status—offering a Morisco counternarrative to the supersessionist discourse that portrayed Old Christians as God's elect in expulsion apologies published at the beginning of the seventeenth century. By reframing the Moriscos' ongoing persecution as evidence of spiritual legitimacy and providential deliverance, the author constructs the Morisco diaspora itself as confirmation of divine favour in a sacred history that is still unfolding.
ABSTRACT Orpheus's power to tame wild beasts with his lyre made him an embodiment of key humanist ideals in the Renaissance. Yet, to become such an exemplary model, his myth underwent a metaphorical sparagmos , a dismemberment wherein controversial elements, such as his failure to retrieve Eurydice and his introduction of pederasty to Thrace, were sanitized or excised. While the majority of Elizabethan masques, lyrical poems, and rhetorical treatises celebrated Orpheus's glorious attributes, R. B.'s epyllion Orpheus, His Journey to Hell (1595) departed from convention by explicitly confronting these suppressed themes, offering a satirical lens through which to reinterpret the hero. This article argues that the anonymous Legend of Orpheus and Euridice (1597) emerged as a direct response to R. B.'s text, attempting to rectify its controversial depictions—particularly regarding Orpheus's sexuality—and restore him as the quintessential Renaissance hero.
ABSTRACT On 28 April 1577, the printer Joseph Ya’abetz in Constantinople printed a rare Hebrew pamphlet titled Ben Porat Yosef (Joseph, the Offspring of a Fertile Tree). Its author, Isaac ben Samuel Onkeneira, claims to report a philosophical debate between Don Joseph Nasi (1524–1579), the powerful Portuguese‐born agent at the Ottoman court, and a ‘great scholar among the Christians’. Written in rhymed prose, this fictionalised dialogue portrays the unnamed scholar as a staunch defender of natural science, especially astral determinism, whereas Nasi defends the Jewish faith. The article shows that the intellectual profile of the opponent is not that of a Christian but of a Jewish ‘heretic’ ( apikoros ) of Portuguese New Christian origin. It interprets the debate as a re‐enactment of the Maimonidean Controversy in an Ottoman Jewish context, in which it was enriched with arguments from medieval Arabic philosophy, the Jewish anti‐rationalist tradition and the sceptical thought of the European Renaissance. The study of the text thus allows a reconstruction of the intellectual milieu of the Iberian travellers whom Nasi welcomed to his residence at Ortaköy on the shores of the Bosporus.
ABSTRACT This article examines how the seventeenth‐century scholar Ahmad ibn Muhammad al‐Maqqari (d. 1041/1632) reimagined the geography and legacy of al‐Andalus in the aftermath of the Morisco expulsion. Composed in Ottoman Damascus at the request of a local patron, his Nafh al‐Tib transforms al‐Andalus from a lost territory into a transhistorical space of cultural possibility: not nostalgic adab, I argue, but a sophisticated diasporic project that answered post‐expulsion trauma by asserting the continuity and transferability of Andalusī civilization. Drawing strategically on medieval geographical authorities, above all Ibn Saʿid al‐Maghribi and Ibn Ghalib al‐Gharnati, al‐Maqqari attributes the peninsula's exceptional fertility and refinement not to geographical advantage but to the inherited virtues of its people: their Greek civilizational legacy and their Arab lineage. In dialogue with diaspora studies, the article introduces two concepts, Andalusī environmental agency and transplantable geography, to show how al‐Maqqarī mobilized land, lineage and labour to claim that Andalusī achievement could be re‐rooted across North Africa and the Ottoman Mediterranean. His fusion of genealogy and environmental mastery at once secured his authority within Damascene scholarly circles and offered the dispersed Moriscos a framework for flourishing in new homelands—an ecocritical reading of how the memory of al‐Andalus was made portable.
