Early modern Jewish communities formed and operated in complex ways. Over centuries of frequent and extensive migration, Jews lived in close proximity with other Jews, established rules of conduct, shared resources, and retained common heritages, memories, and commitments. Yet, spread through disparate cultural contexts, Jewish rituals, traditions, societies, experience, and thought varied greatly. In recent years, scholars have toiled to uncover communal self-fashioning, the function of subcommunities, and the nature of pan-Jewish identity.
Alex Kerner's book on the Western Sephardic community of London is a welcome contribution to this broad objective of understanding Jewish communal life in the early modern period. Kerner's innovation is to bring theories of language and cultural translation, typified by Peter Burke's work on early modern Europe, to the Sephardic Jews of London (Shaʿar Hashamayim Congregation). Using archival documents and published pamphlets, Kerner shows how lay leadership (or, the Mahamad) oversaw “written communications (books, pamphlets, administration) and the languages used by the community institutions and members” in a bid to shape and control communal cohesion (13). To Kerner, the wardens of the community, fearing Christian perception and vilification of Jews, sought to anticipate and eliminate potential threats emanating from within. Tying this to earlier trends of confessionalization, Kerner argues that language policies were as strong a force on the community as religion or ethnicity.
Kerner divides the book into three parts, each of which includes an introduction. Part 1 details the initial 1664 censorship article, which accompanied the birth of the community, and presents its evolution deep into the nineteenth century. Part 2 discusses various ways in which language played a factor in communal identity and control, particularly in ritual, administration, and publication. Part 3, taking up more than half the book, manifests these theoretical concerns in a chronological narrative of Sephardic publishing and publication attempts in London through the early nineteenth century.
In parts 1 and 2, Kerner offers a deep analysis of the censorship bylaw, showing parallels with English Quakers and presenting it as a response to a slew of conversionary tracts published by apostate Ashkenazic Jews in the seventeenth century. He also articulates the two-century evolution of Shaʿar Hashamayim's publication policy: members of the community were banned from engaging in print activity (printing, editing, translating, publishing) without express permission of the Mahamad; initial threats of ḥerem (excommunication) were dropped by 1677 as communal involvement proved increasingly voluntary; frightening sacral punishments gave way to monetary fines by 1733; the 1781 protocols, the first to appear in print, incorporated a rationale for publishing prohibitions; and a copy of the 1784 version included a handwritten English translation alongside the printed Spanish, indicating linguistic shifts. In addition to demonstrating the correlation between a shrinking community and a weakening Mahamad, Kerner shows how the bylaw controlling local Jewish publication amalgamated Dutch communal policies, Iberian inquisitional cultural heritage, and English censorship policies.
In part 3, Kerner analyzes publishing permissions and rejections found in the archives of Shaʿar Hashamayim and offers a bibliographic history of publications issued by English Jews in the eighteenth century. He shows how Hebrew and Spanish, representing the community's dual heritage, were rarely deemed problematic, while English publication almost never received approval. For example, the Mahamad refused the request of Moseh Nieto, son and brother of successive chief rabbis, to publish his English translation of the Hebrew prayer book in 1734, but granted a license for his Spanish translation (Livro de rezas). According to Kerner, the Mahamad displayed a leniency toward Spanish, because of the unlikelihood that it “could be used against the interests of the community” (64). Though that assertion raises questions about the Sephardic Diaspora more broadly (Did fear of retribution prevent Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam or Hamburg from publishing in the local vernacular more than heritage, audience, or fluency?) Kerner successfully shows that the “linguistic absolutization of power” reflected the Mahamad's attempts to enforce uniformity and discipline (242–47). Kerner's work is most fruitful when he relates a published volume to a ruling or discussion in the archives, as he does in his lengthy chapter on the literary career of David Nieto, chief rabbi of Shaʿar Hashamayim until his death in 1728. Scholars have long looked to Nieto to understand Jewish intellectual life in early eighteenth-century England, and Kerner's research provides a solid background for Nieto's publishing efforts.
However, Kerner's treatment of David Nieto also exposes some of the book's weaknesses. In discussing two anonymously authored sermons generally attributed to Nieto, Kerner misses an opportunity to address whether Jews regularly published anonymously, a common practice in eighteenth-century England, and what that says about social discourse in voluntary communities. Elsewhere, he posits (without amplification) that Nieto could have elevated London's rabbinic profile, which to me seems an unlikely prospect when even Amsterdam's Portuguese rabbis did not leave a lasting intellectual legacy outside their own community.
Kerner stays so close to the Mahamad's linguistic “power politics” that the reader is left to ponder how the author understands the many social, intellectual, and cultural elements upon which this book touches. Comments like “by the end of the eighteenth century, the Sephardic community of London was in advanced stages of decline” (239) are ineffective without a definition of decline, let alone a depiction of the heights from which this community degenerated. Likewise, Kerner does not clarify whether the communal censorship policy actually preserved Portuguese identity on the street; it seems just as likely that the Mahamad's actions increased displeasure in the community as a whole, leading to the hemorrhaging of membership. In addition, Kerner skirts a slew of directly relevant historical topics, from local print shop activity to the community's involvement in the book trade. Greater engagement with the historiography of books may have proven fruitful and broadened the appeal of Kerner's observations. For example, recently, scholars have explored definitions of authorship in the early modern period, keenly aware that copyists, editors, correctors, typesetters, printers, and censors played significant roles in publication. Kerner's research on censorship and the power of lay leadership suggests communal bodies likewise affected the process between authorship and actual publication.
Criticism aside, Kerner's mastery of both primary and secondary material is palpable. He so thoroughly mines the material that Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration will ably serve future studies on the intellectual and cultural life of English Jewry and Western Sephardim more broadly. More importantly, this book clearly establishes the importance of language and censorship in forming and preserving Jewish communal identity and boundaries in the early modern period.
