Wacks explores the complex web of Iberian Jewish literature from the height of the Reconquista through the first generations after the expulsion. Looking at authors that often miss the short list of the great Hispano-Hebrew authors of the “Golden Age,” he sheds light on figures working in a wide range of generic practices, such as Jacob ben Elazar, Todros Abulafia, Shem Tob de Carrión, Vidal Benveniste, Solomon ibn Verga, Joseph Karo, and Jacob Algaba. Wacks offers sensitive readings that highlight their artistry as well as their centrality to the wider cultural and sociopolitical trends of their time. He provocatively shows how an understanding of Hebrew literature in Iberia is central for understanding contemporary Romance literatures. Sephardic authors were not merely derivative authors, or translators, but rather were active participants in the cultural dialectic of their time, crossing borders and remaking themselves at every turn. Double Diaspora is a triumph of comparative literary studies, energized by linguistic, sociocultural, and literary analyses of a diverse body of texts that allow the reader to uncover the layers and complexity of Sephardic cultural production.

The Jews of Spain famously anchor their attachment to Iberia in biblical references to the land of Sepharad; in particular, they invoke the theme of the “Exile of Jerusalem that is in Sepharad” (Ovadiah 1:19–21) to refer to their status as the descendants of those noble citizens of Jerusalem who were exiled to far-away lands by Nebuchadnezzar on the eve of his destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem. The Jews of the Iberian Peninsula ironically refer to their exilic status whenever they assert their antiquity on Iberian soil, implying that they are descendants of exiles who arrived in the sixth century BCE in order to express their rootedness in Iberia. Those Sephardim who left their homes in Al-Andalus in the wake of the Almohad invasion (1147) took their pride in their origins into their wanderings, whether it was to the Christian kingdoms of the north or into the wider Mediterranean world. Their pride in their illustrious past was paradoxically connected to their original and continued sense of exile.

The Jews of Spain, Wacks argues, lived within a double Diaspora. As all Jews after the destruction of the second temple, they live in a world that is unredeemed and where they await a messianic return to their homeland. However, because of their particular attachment to Spain, the Sephardim had a second diasporic point of reference: their hostland, Al-Andalus. They carried this compounded sense of longing and origin with them as they resettled and rose to prominence in the ascendant Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and then again as they entered into exile in the wake of their expulsion in 1492.

Wacks begins with two cases—Jacob ben Elazar's Book of Tales and the poetry of Todros Abulafia—that point to many of the anxieties of the first stage of Sephardic Diaspora, which occurred in the wake of the Almohad invasions of 1147 (chaps. 2 and 3, pp. 34–96). Many Jews who resided within the Arabic cultural milieu of Iberian Islamic centers, such as Cordoba and Granada, sought refuge and new opportunities in the small towns and burgeoning urban centers of the ascendant Christian north. In this new context, where Arabic was no longer the language of power or culture, what was the place of Arabic and Arabic-infused poetics within Jewish culture? And what of the poetic traditions swirling around them at the courts of the Christian kings they often came to serve? In both cases Wacks shows how these authors negotiated their Andalusi literary heritage with an openness and an exploration of the emerging literary trends in medieval Romance. Hebrew literature on the peninsula, Wacks argues, functioned as a “third place” for Arabic and Romance literary practices to meet and be transformed, mediated by the needs of individual Jews making sense of their place within Iberian society.

Almost seventy-five years before Provençal-inspired courtly poetry was picked up by Castilian authors, Ben Elazar used its models in his own way. The chivalric mode had little relevance to medieval Jews forbidden from the exercise of arms; instead, Ben Elazar's hero Sahar masters the pen over the sword, using his poetic mastery to win over his adversaries. His virtuosity echoes the poetic jousts of Andalusi Arabic and Hebrew verse, and yet becomes inscribed in a new poetic trope—the pen versus the sword. Here, as in every chapter, Wacks is not interested in linear anxieties of influence, or in seeing the authors as merely derivative of larger trends. Rather, he sees them as engaging multiple cultural trends in order to make sense of the double Diaspora they are living through.

His last three cases are perhaps the most intriguing and provocative: the great jurist and mystic Joseph Karo (chap. 6), the chronicler of exile Solomon ibn Verga (chap. 6), and Jacob Algaba, the Hebrew translator of the classic chivalric novel Amadis of Gaul (chap. 7), all three of whom lived in the Mediterranean lands where the first generations of Spanish exiles found refuge. Algaba's translation is not only a linguistic exercise, but also a cultural transformation of a Christian chivalric classic for a new audience. Wacks posits that Algaba's audience was probably non-Sephardic Ottoman Jews who would not be able to read this European classic in the original but were nonetheless intrigued to peer into the fantasy world of their Iberian neighbors. It was a Jewish performance of Iberianness, as well as a form of cultural transformation of the Christian Amadis into a Jewishly inflected hero.

The Sephardic Diaspora was born at the same moment that Spain's imperial identity took flight; the conquest of Granada, the colonization of the Indies, and Spain's entry into the Mediterranean as the defender of the Faith and the defensive shield against the encroaching Turks and the heretical Lutherans all unfolded as the Jews of Spain and Portugal found their way through the tumult of expulsion. The Sephardim who for so long saw themselves as tied to the kings of Spain (“servants to kings and not servants to servants!”) now lived in a new imperial order, and it is in the eastern Mediterranean where their Iberianness was reshaped within their own cultural imaginary. The centrality of Judeo-Spanish (as both a language of culture and everyday life) and Iberian identity became the markers of the Ottoman Jew (182–205). It is difficult to measure the extent to which this employment of Iberianness was a conscious cultural choice. However, Wacks offers a suggestive way of thinking about the Sephardic place within this new imperial order: “They enact Spanish culture on the Ottoman stage in a kind of Sephardic counternationalism that mimics and distorts Spanish imperial culture” (196). Algaba's translation of the Amadis into Hebrew was a cultural transformation of this Christian knight into a hero who, while not Jewish, could make sense to a Jewish audience.

Wacks has produced a nuanced and rich analysis of these texts and their authors and the wider cultural dynamics at play. He deploys his strong command of the scholarship, philological, historical, and literary-critical, to open up the texts, not obscure them in jargon and clunky conceptual paradigms. At times Wacks's prose playfully employs a more popular tone that generally works well. Because many of the Hebrew and Romance sources are hard to find it would have been a great resource to the reader to have seen the original pieces in the notes. Having more of the primary sources available in some format would have made the book an even better resource for scholars and for potential students. Double Diaspora will enrich the multiple fields it participates in—medieval and romance studies, Sephardic history, Hebrew literature, and many more.