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The authority as the fundamental legal expert over the Ashkenazi or the German Jews was passed on to R. Asher b. Yehiel after R. Meir b. Barukh's death. Simultaneously, as R. Asher gained authority over the German Jews, a businessman tuned jurist and legal scholar named R. Solomon b. Adret took the same position, only he was to be in charge of the Iberian Jews. This chapter discusses how, during the period between the reign of these significant figures and the publication of Joseph Karo's work entitled Shulhan Arukh, both the Iberian Jewry and the German Jewry experienced dramatic changes and disturbances that brought about various developments and posed several challenges in Jewish Law. This chapter explores the developments in Jewish Law from 1300 to 1565.

This chapter recounts the first years following the expulsion of 1492. The passage of Iberian Jewry from West to East was neither immediate nor direct. Whereas some of the refugees were able to find safe haven in the eastern Mediterranean, the vast majority spent the rest of their lives amid a succession of tribulations in Portugal, North Africa, and Italy. Those who were able to gain a foothold in their new lands laid the first tentative foundations for the various communities that would eventually develop into the Sephardic Diaspora. Other refugees found the hardships of those first years too much to bear and accepted conversion in exchange for sustenance. Indeed, those who decided to return to Spain did so because they saw life in exile as socially, politically, and economically untenable, not because they had a theological change of heart.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Together with the fall of Muslim Granada early that same year, the expulsion of the Jews represented ultimate failure of inter-faith coexistence for which medieval Iberia is often praised. However, the impulse to memorialize the tragedy of the expulsion should not obscure the larger story of how the Jews of medieval Iberia reconstituted their communities and refashioned their cultural identities as they transitioned to new lands and a new age. This book thus chronicles the voyage of Iberian Jewry from medieval Iberia to the wider Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, and from a collection of relatively disconnected municipal communities to a recognizable diaspora society.This provides a reassessment of the nature and development of Sephardic society and many of its central features.

This chapter concludes that the story of the formation of Sephardic Diaspora and the long and difficult resettlement of Iberian Jewry in the lands of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean offers valuable insights into the essential nature of Jewish communal organization and the self-fashioning of communal identities. Key to a better understanding of these issues is the recognition that they transcend the question of the Jews' political and religious relationships to their host societies. Indeed, although outside forces determined the general contours of Jewish society, the primary challenges to executing the rabbinic ideal of autonomous government came from within. In many ways, this communal instability was a central feature of Hispano-Jewish life that carried over into its diaspora.

This chapter discusses the hymnographic developments in Spain. Although the Andalusians adopted much of the prevailing culture, their Arabism was tempered by the reality of being exiled from their national home. The degree to which Arabism was pervasive is seen in the Andalusians’ attempt to adapt Arabic-style quantitative metrics for use in their writings for the synagogue. They also composed their piyyuṭim in the prevailing styles of Arabic prosody, the qaṣīdah, a monorhyme hymn in metrically balanced hemistichs, and muwashshaḥ, a hymn where the rhyme is variable in the strophes and constant in the refrain. Distinctive in the Hispanic piyyuṭ is the poet’s signature in the acrostic. Although the Hispanic synagogue poets composed in most of the older genres, they added some unique features. However, a change in the fortunes of Iberian Jewry in the latter half of the twelfth century resulted from the invasions of the Muslim Almoravids and Almohades. With the Christian reconquest, the earlier courtly life and culture came to an end. The celebrated Andalusian poets became vagabonds and their grandee patrons were replaced by an emerging middle class. The new cantor-poets, sensitive to the more modest needs of their constituents, fashioned a conservative tone in liturgical writing.