Editor's Note
Dear readers of Sephardic Horizons,
With this issue of Sephardic Horizons we close another year of bringing informative, interesting, and thought-provoking articles and reviews in English and Judeo-Spanish to a worldwide public.
Volume 11, Number 4 includes three wide-ranging articles reflecting on the history and geographic expanse of the Sephardic world. Marvin Heller once again contributes to the history of publishing with a focus on the work of Moses ben Baruch Almosnino in sixteenth century Salonika. A moving memoir of a Holocaust survivor, Moshe Ha Elion, from Salonika is presented by Judith Lin. Finally, Sephardic Horizons’ editor Judith Roumani offers an overview of electronic Sephardic periodicals, updating an earlier summary she gave in Livorno in 2005 at a conference in Ladino. The occasion of her current report was a twenty-first century, international zoom presentation commemorating the thirty-year anniversary of the on-line publication Sefarad ve Ha Mizrah, edited by another Sephardic Horizons contributor, Yitzhak Kerem.
Volume 11, Number 4 is top heavy with reviews, a formidable indication of the robust growth of outstanding research on varied aspects of the Sephardic world. Rachel Bortnick contributes a review of the recent publication, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir by Dina Danon, in Ladino/Judeo-Spanish. Several other current studies are covered in the review section, including Jane Gerber’s review of The Promise and the Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us About the Making of European Commercial Society by Francesca Trivellato; Steven Bowman’s review of The Holocaust in Thessaloniki, Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942–1943 by Leon Saltiel; and a review by Zdravka Mihaylova of a new book in Bulgarian, Kaleidoscope of Identities: Personal Stories of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria about Ladino Language by Leah Davcheva. Other reviews include two books about Sephardim in the Americas; three retrospectives of significant scholars in the field, A. B. Yehoshua, Harvey Goldberg, and Albert Memmi; and two studies focusing on topics of Jewish material culture. A final review takes on the popular novel, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. I think many people are anticipating the television adaptation of this book, already available in Israel.
Thanks are extended to the expanding number of researchers and writers who contribute to Sephardic Horizons, whether with the results of their research or their evaluations of recent publications.
As much of our lives are cautiously reopening we look forward to your feedback to our publication, produced by the volunteer efforts of our editors and webmaster. In addition, if you enjoy Sephardic Horizons, please remember that there are expenses involved in publishing it online several times a year. If you would like to make an end-of-year donation to help our efforts, please click on the Donations tab on our homepage, which takes you to a secure Paypal link. Sephardic Horizons is a program of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano, which is a 501(3) (c) organization, allowing all donations to be tax-deductible for US taxpayers.
Warmest regards,
Annette B. Fromm, Associate Editor/Review Editor