Religious Mobility Among the Sephardic Diaspora

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Dr. Aliza Moreno-Goldschmidt

The late fourteenth century saw the initiation of waves of forced conversions to Christianity of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, sparking different manifestations of religious mobility among Jews and conversos of Jewish origin, both within the Iberian Peninsula, and in the different cities of the Western Sephardic Diaspora. This lecture first briefly describes the main historical processes that led to geographic and religious mobility within the Sephardic Diaspora during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Then, based on a selection of historical sources (whose originals are housed at the National Library of Israel and whose images will be part of the presentation), it analyzes aspects of the identity transformation processes undergone by these individuals. It also considers how the literature produced by the members of these communities reflects the mutual influence of Christian and Jewish conceptions.

Dr. Aliza Moreno-Goldschmidt, the National Library of Israel.

Aliza Moreno was born in Bogotá, Colombia and immigrated to Israel where she pursued academic studies in the fields of history and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2012 and her doctoral thesis, published in Spanish by Javeriana University in 2018, was devoted to the study of New Christians of Jewish origin in light of seventeenth-century Inquisition documents from Cartagena de Indias. She has published several articles on the Western Sephardic Diasporas in Holland, France, Italy, and Latin America, as well as on the history of the Jewish community in Colombia in the early twentieth century. Dr. Moreno has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Melton Center), Kibbutzim College of Education, Levinsky College of Education, and Herzog College. At present she is also the Judaica Reading Room reference librarian at the National Library of Israel.

Sunday, January 30, 8 pm Israel / 7 pm CET / 6 pm UK / 1 pm EST