In Sure Dwellings: A Journey From Expulsion to Assimilation, by Margot F. Salom

In 1492, the last professing Jews in Spain were driven out of their beloved Sepharad where they had formerly been accepted as an important part of a thriving, pluralistic society for seven centuries of Islamic rule. The Christian Reconquista in the last of those centuries, spelt the beginning of the end for the Jews of Spain as well as for the convivencia (cooperation) that had long existed between Jew, Muslim and Christian in what has been called the "Golden Age". Many of the expelled Spanish Jews spread out around the surrounding Muslim lands where they found some refuge. Others found a brief hiatus of safety in Portugal. Decades later many of the expelled Jews travelled to the mercantile centres of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and the New World where they participated in the burgeoning trading empires of Holland, England the Italy. It is this fascinating history that the author has attempt to trace, using her ancestors as a paradigm. Realizing that this narrative of the western Sephardim is all but forgotten with the secularisation of a resolute assimilation process, she has written a story that both describes the history of the countries of her ancestors' settlement as well as her personal search through many of the lands of their diaspora, in an attempt to establish the journey of her ancestors as they travelled from fifteenth century Spain to nineteenth century Australia. It was in Australia that this lineage finally became established in a land of "sure dwellings" and where the inevitable outcome of assimilation was the loss of an ancient faith - a loss that has created the primary impetus for the telling of this story

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Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy, by Dan Rottenberg

In this work Dan Rottenberg shows how to do a successful search for probing the memories of living relatives, by examining marriage licenses, gravestones, ship passenger lists, naturalization records, birth and death certificates, and other public documents, and by looking for clues in family traditions and customs. Supplementing the "how to" instructions is a guide to some 8,000 Jewish family names, giving the origins of the names, sources of information about each family, and the names of related families whose histories have been recorded. Other features included a country-by-country guide to tracing Jewish ancestors abroad, a list of Jewish family history books, and a guide to researching genealogy.

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From the publication, "Los Sefardíes" (The Sephardim),by Jose M. Estrugo. Published by Editorial Lex La Habana, 1958.(Surnames common among the Sephardim)

When the Romans conquered the Jewish nation in 70 CE, much of the Jewish population was sent into exile throughout the Roman Empire. Many were sent to the Iberian peninsula. The area became known by the Hebrew word "Sepharad". The JEWS in SPAIN and PORTUGAL became known as "Sephardim" or and those things associated with the SEPHARDIM including names, customs, genealogy and religious rituals, became known as SEPHARDIC.

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The Jews of the Balkans, The Judeo-Spanish Community , 15th to 20th Centuries, by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue

This volume is a history of the Sephardi diaspora in the Balkans. The two principal axes of the study are the formation and features of the Judeo-Spanish culture area in South-Eastern Europe and around the Aegean littoral, and the disintegration of this community in the modern period. The great majority of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 eventually went to the Ottoman Empire. With their command of Western trades and skills, they represented a new economic force in the Levant. In the Ottoman Balkans, the Jews came to reconstitute the bases of their existence in the semi-autonomous spheres allowed to them by their new rulers. This segment of the Jewish diaspora came to form a certain unity, based on a commonality of the Judeo-Spanish language, culture and communal life. The changing geopolitics of the Balkans and the growth of European influence in the 19th century inaugurated a period of westernization. European influence manifested itself in the realm of education, especially in the French education, dispensed in the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle with its headquarters in Paris. Other European cultures and languages came to the scene through similar means. Cultural movements such as the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah) also came to exert a distinct influence, hence building bridges between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds

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The Sephardim of England, by Albert M. Hyamson

A history of the Spanish & Portugese Jewish Community, 1492-1951.

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A History of the Jews in Christian Spain,Volume 2, by Yitzhak Baer.

Traces the economic, social, legal and political life of the Spanish Jewish community from the 11th century re-conquest of Iberia from Muslim rule to the expulsion of 1492. Based on many years of study in the Spanish archives by a Professor from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

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Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World: 1391-1648,edited by Gampel.

This book explores antecedents,causes, mechanics and aftermath of the 1492 expulsion from Spain and lists Sephardic movers and shakers during the period.

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Sangre Judia (Jewish Blood) by Pere Bonnin. Flor de Viento, Barcelona, 2006. A list of 3,500 names used by Jews, or assigned to Jews by the Holy Office (la Santo Oficio) of Spain. The list is a result of a census of Jewish communities of Spain by the Catholic Church and as found in Inquisition records.

Pere Bonnin, a philosopher, journalist and writer from Sa Pobla (Mallorca), a descendant of converted Jews, settles with this work a debt "owed to his ancestors", in his own words. The book, written in a personal and accessible style and based on numerous sources, includes a review of basic Jewish concepts, Jewish history in Spain, and Christian Anti-Semitism. There is also a section that focuses on the reconciliation between the Church and Monarchy and the Jews, which took place in the 20th Century. In this study, Bonnin deals in depth with the issue of surnames of Jewish origin. In the prologue, the author explains the rules he followed in the phonetic transcription of surnames of Hebrew origin that are mentioned in the book. The researcher cites the Jewish origin, sometimes recognized and other times controversial, of historically prominent figures (like Cristobal Colon, Hernan Cortes, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and many others) and links between surnames of Jewish origin with some concepts in Judaism.. The book also includes an appendix with more than three thousands surnames "suspected" of being Jewish, because they appear in censuses of the Jewish communities and on the Inquisitorial lists of suspected practitioners of Judaism, as well as in other sources. In the chapter "Una historia de desencuentro", the author elaborates on surnames of Jewish origin of the royalty, nobility, artistocracy, clergy, and also of writers, educators and university teachers during the Inquisition. Special attention is given to the "Chuetas" of Mallorca, the birthplace of the author.

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Sephardic names from the magazine "ETSI". Most of the names are from (but not limited to) France and North Africa. Published by Laurence Abensur-Hazan and Philip Abensur.

ETSI (a Paris-based, bilingual French-English periodical) is devoted exclusively to Sephardic genealogy and is published by the Sephardi Genealogical and Historical Society (SGHS). It was founded by Dr. Philip Abensur, and his professional genealogist wife, Laurence Abensur-Hazan. ETSI's worldwide base of authors publish articles identifying a broad spectrum of archival material of importance to the Sephardic genealogist. A useful feature of ETSI is the listing, on the back cover, of all Sephardic family names, and places of origin, cited in the articles contained in each issue

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From the civil records of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Amsterdam Municipal Archives possess a complete set of registers of intended marriages from 1578 to 1811, the year when the present Civil Registry was started. Between 1598 and 1811, 15238 Jewish couples were entered in these books. Both the number of records and the volume of data that may be extracted from them are unprecedented.

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