UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

In its eleventh consecutive year, the ucLADINO symposium remains dedicated to encouraging the study of Ladino: the endangered language of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora and its multifaceted histories. Through literary artifacts, written and oral testimony, as well as musical works, this event explores how to poetically approach Sephardic indigeneity. Particularly significant is Ladino culture’s vast archive, composed of diaries, family stories, religious manuals, burial practices, dietary laws—even dreams. The ‘poetic past’ is conceived broadly. It entails cultural acts directed at transmitting an unsung Sephardic heritage to the present and future. Such acts are forged through the expressive media of word...

Taking a cue from a passage in Shakespeare’s play, the talk analyzes the tension between the contractual freedom that Western Sephardic merchants enjoyed within the confines of the marketplace and the discrimination to which they remained subjected in their daily lives, even in the most tolerant cities of Western Europe and the Americas, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that this tension has broad implications for how we think about the development of capitalism at large. Francesca Trivellato is the Andrew W. Mellon of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and...