One can start with a popular work which is very wide ranging, and might be helpful for beginners and those who
look for more popular sources; nonetheless, it includes numerous scholarly works and can direct users in various ways:
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| Hessel, Carolyn Starman, The Whole Sephardic Catalog: A
Guide to Resources and References for Educators and Lay Readers. New York: The Coalition
for the Advancement of Jewish Education, 1992 |
The work has five parts: Sephardic experience: where it happened, when it happened; Annotated
bibliography; Media selections; Resources: people, places, experiences; and an Authors' index.
The first part is subdivided according to place or subject. It opens with the Sephardic experience in
the Americas, and goes on to the Balkans and other countries cited separately. It has sections on
Christopher Columbus, the Conversos, Sephardic literature, Muslim-Jewish relations,
Sephardic-Ashkenazi relations, etc. Each topic is divided into subsections citing articles, non-fiction
books, literature, series, and classroom materials (not all topics appear in all categories). Entries
include only the author's name and the title of the work.
The second part–annotated bibliography–is subdivided into articles, books,
classroom materials, literature,
and series. Items are arranged alphabetically by author and include bibliographic reference as well as a
short annotation (between one and five lines). This form of presentation causes an obvious repetition,
and the two parts could be combined.
The next part lists media selections (videos, 16 mm. films, filmstrips, and slides). They are
listed alphabetically by title, including length, date, type, audience, where one could get it, and a
short annotation.
The part dealing with resources lists organizations (and their addresses) where one could locate speakers
and entertainers, print materials, and exhibitions. This list of organizations and an earlier list of
periodical and serial publications help to locate further information.
The lack of a subject index makes it difficult to locate subjects which do not have their own
subdivision. Although somewhat repetitive and inclined to the popular, this work includes a wide range
of materials and it guides the user where to locate further information.
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| Hessel, Carolyn Starman, The Whole Sephardic Catalog: A
Guide to Resources and References for Educators and Lay Readers. New York: The Coalition
for the Advancement of Jewish Education, 1992 |
The work has five parts: Sephardic experience: where it happened, when it happened; Annotated
bibliography; Media selections; Resources: people, places, experiences; and an Authors' index.
The first part is subdivided according to place or subject. It opens with the Sephardic experience in
the Americas, and goes on to the Balkans and other countries cited separately. It has sections on
Christopher Columbus, the Conversos, Sephardic literature, Muslim-Jewish relations,
Sephardic-Ashkenazi relations, etc. Each topic is divided into subsections citing articles, non-fiction
books, literature, series, and classroom materials (not all topics appear in all categories). Entries
include only the author's name and the title of the work.
The second part–annotated bibliography–is subdivided into articles, books, classroom materials, literature,
and series. Items are arranged alphabetically by author and include bibliographic reference as well as a
short annotation (between one and five lines). This form of presentation causes an obvious repetition,
and the two parts could be combined.
The next part lists media selections (videos, 16 mm. films, filmstrips, and slides). They are
listed alphabetically by title, including length, date, type, audience, where one could get it, and a
short annotation.
The part dealing with resources lists organizations (and their addresses) where one could locate speakers
and entertainers, print materials, and exhibitions. This list of organizations and an earlier list of
periodical and serial publications help to locate further information.
The lack of a subject index makes it difficult to locate subjects which do not have their own
subdivision. Although somewhat repetitive and inclined to the popular, this work includes a wide range
of materials and it guides the user where to locate further information.
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More scholarly sources dealing with the core–the Iberian peninsula – are in the works of
Robert Singerman, the
Head Librarian at the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida, Gainesville and previously the
Judaica Librarian at the Hebrew Union College Library, Cincinnati. He has published two bibliographies related
to Sephardic studies:
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| Singerman, Robert, The Jews in Spain and Portugal:
A Bibliography.. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1975 |
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| Singerman, Robert, Spanish and Portuguese Jewry:
A Classified Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993 |
Singerman's purpose, as stated in the first work, was "... to bring under bibliographical control a wide range of published materials pertaining to the Jewish presence in Spain and Portugal from antiquity to the present day. It should be emphasized from the outset that our coverage does not extend to the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490's and their descendants in the Old and New Worlds" (p. vii).
This was indeed a pioneering work, due to the lack at the time of any bibliography covering the same topic. Both volumes are rich and updated: the first contains 5051 entries and the second 5446 (with corrections and additions, such as reprints and more reviews). The second work covers not only materials published since 1975 but also earlier publications which escaped the compiler's attention.
Both volumes share an emphasis on the history and culture of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, Christian-Jewish polemics, works relating to the delineation of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in literature, and works relating to Jewish communities in the Iberian Peninsula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Excluded from the works are the general areas of Biblical exegesis, Hebrew grammar, literature and poetry, Jewish philosophy, and rabbinical literature, though some secondary works in these fields have been included. Also excluded are general works dealing with the Inquisition, which is dealt with in the work by Emile van der Vekené Bibliographie der Inquisition: ein Versuch (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1963) and his later work Bibliotheca bibliographica historiae sanctae inquisitionis (Vaduz : Topos Verlag, 1982-83).
Singerman was aware of the fact that the wide ranging nature of the material presented special problems of classification, since no record was entered more than once, while it might deal with several subjects. He also preferred to maximize the regional aspect of a work over its general subject (for example: expulsion from a certain area would be in the part dealing with this region and not in the more general part dealing with the expulsion).
Included are unpublished master's theses and doctoral dissertations. No effort was made to locate publishers of monographs, series information or holding information. Book-reviews are recorded randomly. Hebrew and Yiddish books are cited in transliteration followed by an English translation of the title in brackets, while periodical articles in Hebrew, Yiddish or Ladino are cited in English followed by the original language in parentheses.
The structure of both works is similar, containing two unequal parts, dealing separately with Spain and Portugal. They start with bibliographies and manuscripts, followed by general history, local history, and history by period. The following sections deal with Jewish participation in the Voyages of Discovery, Conversos, Jewish-Christian controversy, biography, special subjects (including arts, cabala, education, liturgy, law, printing, slavery, etc.), Spanish or Portuguese Jews in literature, description and travel, and communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both volumes have a detailed index which includes authors' names and subjects (persons, places and topics).
The division of the work into a large number of sub-topics is very helpful in getting to subjects one is interested in, and the index helps to locate items dealing with a certain topic but located elsewhere. Attempts to locate primary sources are a little more difficult: although there are sections dealing with manuscripts, citations of them are also scattered throughout the works with no mention in the index. The same goes for additional bibliographies. The Romanization in the second volume is better than in the first with regards to vocalization (the first also includes some diacritics, but their use is not consistent, even within one word or title).
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Several publications focusing on Sephardic culture–language, literature, and folklore–were published in the 1980s. Some of this material is included in the more general bibliographies and those with a geographic emphasis, but specialized bibliographies are obviously of great help to the user. A major one is by David Bunis of the Department of Romance Languages in the Hebrew University, previously with Columbia University:
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| Bunis, David, Sephardic Studies: A Research
Bibliography, New York: Garland Publications, 1981 |
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The bibliography includes 1891 entries in five parts: general works on Sephardic Jewry; Judezmo language (including influence on other languages and its place within the framework of Jewish languages); Judezmo literature (including texts, bibliographies, studies, authors, genres, and Judezmo literature in English translation); folklore and folklife (including poetry, music, tales, humor, riddles, drama, games, medicine, magic, cookery, dress, arts, life cycle, calendaric cycle, and folklore of specific areas); and historical background. Also included are a list of institutions and organizations concerned with Sephardic studies in various countries, with their addresses as well as indexes of authors and selected subjects. The entries are mainly in English, Judezmo, French, and Hebrew; titles in Hebrew characters are Romanized using International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbols, but for the Hebrew at least Romanization is not consistent.
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A complementary bibliography to Bunis' is the one by Paul Wexler from the Department of Linguistics at Tel-Aviv University:
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| Wexler, Paul, Judeo-Romance Linguistics:
A Bibliography. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1989 |
This bibliography focuses on all the Judeo-Romance languages attested before the expulsions of the Jews from France and the Iberian peninsula (with the exception of Judezmo) and thus does not include Judeo-Romance languages created after the sixteenth century. It deals with Judeo Latin, Italo-, Gallo-, Ibero- and Rhaeto-Romance but not with Castilian, which is dealt with by Bunis. For the sake of brevity, whenever synthetic works were available for a given topic, Wexler rarely gave earlier entries.
The bibliography includes 1653 entries in six parts: comparative Judeo-Romance; Judeo-Latin; Judeo-Italo-Romance; Judeo-Gallo-Romance; Judeo-Ibero-Romance; and Judeo-Rhaeto-Romance, as well as index of authors and anonymous articles. All parts (except the last) include bibliographies, general discussions, texts, terminology, dialects, etc. Entries in Hebrew–a minority–are cited in Hebrew script and are intermixed with those in Roman script. The comparative element is quite strong, including non-Romance Jewish languages, such as Yiddish. Included are also converso dialects. There is no subject index, so one has to rely on the bibliography's arrangement for access to topics.
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Until the publication of the bibliographies of Bunis and Wexler one had to relay mainly on the one compiled by Michael Studemund which is much shorter and less sophisticated:
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| Studemund, Michael, Bibliographie zum
Judenspanischen, Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1975 |
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It contains 1368 entries in alphabetical order with no index, and is based on materials
found in European libraries.
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