College Syllabus: “Sephardic Jews in the Diaspora and Israel”

“Sephardic Jews in the Diaspora and Israel”

Yaron Ayalon, Undergraduate Lecture Course, Emory University, Spring 2013

Aiming to survey the history of Sephardic Jews, this course begins with a brief discussion of the formative Middle Ages, which in many ways defined and shaped Jewish practices and customs for centuries to come. We move on to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, then the Ottoman period and the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean Jewish world into a Sephardi-dominated one, in language and practices. Then we discuss the changes Sephardi-Mizrahi communities experienced with the emergence of Zionism and immigration to the State of Israel, where the Sephardim were a majority until the 1990s. We devote the last third of the semester to the experiences of Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews in Israel.