Explores the teachings, values, attitudes, and cultural patterns that characterized Judeo-Spanish life over the generations and how the Sephardim maintained a strong sense of pride and dignity, even when they lived in difficult political, economic, and social conditions. Focuses on what you can learn from the Sephardic sages and from their folk wisdom that can help you live a stronger, deeper spiritual life.

Who were the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire? What lasting lessons does their spiritual life provide for future generations? “How did the Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews of the Ottoman Empire manage to achieve spiritual triumph? To answer this question, we need to have a firm understanding of their historical experience.... We need to be aware of the dark, unpleasant elements in their environments; but we also need to see the spiritual, cultural light in their dwellings that imbued their lives with meaning and honor.” —from Chapter 1, “The Inner Life of the Sephardim” In this groundbreaking work, Rabbi Marc Angel explores the teachings, values, attitudes, and cultural patterns that characterized Judeo-Spanish life over the generations and how the Sephardim maintained a strong sense of pride and dignity, even when they lived in difficult political, economic, and social conditions. Along with presenting the historical framework and folklore of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, Rabbi Angel focuses on what you can learn from the Sephardic sages and from their folk wisdom that can help you live a stronger, deeper spiritual life.

With his engaging overview of the sacred times, places and ideas of Judaism, Rabbi Marc Angel gently reclaims the natural, balanced and insightful teachings of Sephardic Judaism that can and should imbue modern Jewish spirituality, drawing on classic sources from the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry and the great mystics of Safed.

Over the centuries, Jewish communities throughout the world adopted customs that enhanced and deepened their religious observances. These customs, or minhagim, became powerful elements in the religious consciousness of the Jewish people. It is important to recognize that minhagim are manifestations of a religious worldview, a philosophy of life. They are not merely quaint or picturesque practices, but expressions of a community's way of enhancing the religious experience. A valuable resource for Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike.

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

This book focuses on central topics, such as the structure of the Jewish community, its organization and institutions and its relations with the state; the place Jews occupied in the Ottoman economy and their interactions with the general society; Jewish scholarship and its contribution to Ottoman and Turkish culture, science, and medicine. Written by leading scholars from Israel, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, these pieces present an unusually broad historical canvas that brings together different perspectives and viewpoints. The book is a major, original contribution to Jewish history as well as to Turkish, Balkan, and Middle East studies.

Ever since his novel, The Search Committee, I have been waiting anxiously for Rabbi Marc D. Angel's next work of fiction. The short story collection The Crown of Solomon and Other Stories was worth the wait! A unique and moving collection that allows the reader insight into Sephardic Jewry's rich heritage." - Naomi Ragen, Author of The Sister's Weiss and the Ghost of Hannah Mendes These wry parables of Jewish wisdom and ignorance touch a nerve. We find ourselves thinking about these characters long after we've put the book down-this one timid and self-demeaning until she suddenly is not, that one stubborn and aggressive, another, hesitant beyond reason. The stories quietly ambush assumptions of many kinds. - Jane Mushabac, CUNY Professor of English, author of "Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti." Praise for The Crown of Solomon: While reading Rabbi Marc Angel's The Crown of Solomon and Other Stories, I could not stop wondering whether David Barukh, the unrecognized Sephardic Mozart, was a metaphor for the last two centuries of the Ottoman Sephardic culture, a metaphor for all the wasted opportunities and unrealized potentials! Rabbi Angel's stories demonstrate that Sepharadim can still teach modern American readers a thing or two, a lesson in honesty, or modesty-or, maybe, how to turn a defect into effect. Rabbi Angel does not idealize his Sephardic characters, not even the rabbinic ones. Some of his rabbis, like Hakham Shelomo, are wise in an a la turca way; others are quite average, like Hakham Ezra; some are humble, honorable and even saintly like Rabbi Bejerano-and yet others are frivolous and self-centered, like Rabbi Tedeschi. All are convincingly human and quite imaginable in real life. The lay characters of the stories are simply conquering in their charming simplicity, in their human rootedness and in their folk wisdom. While reading Rabbi Marc Angel's new book, I felt everything was in its place. It takes a person deeply rooted in both cultures, traditional Sephardic and modern American, to tell so Sephardic a story in a language such as English, and who makes everything feel totally right. - Dr. Eliezer Papo, Head of the Sephardic Studies Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev