Responsa in a Historical Context

A Winner of the 2024 Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication AwardThis book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. This collection will acquaint the reader with Jews who, following their expulsion, settled in the Ottoman Empire, in Palestine under the Mamluks, in Amsterdam and in Brazil. The period of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was a tragic time in Jewish history, but the revitalization of the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish communities in new locales is testimony to the human spirit and determination. The volume includes eight chapters, each built around one responsum from one of the great halakhic authorities of the time. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, agunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more. Read a sample: bit.ly/koren-sampler