Focusing on the period spanning the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, this talk explores the special place German-Jewish culture accorded medieval Spanish Jewry. In a broad array of genres, a portrait emerged that promoted an image of Sephardim as attractive, morally and intellectually superior, and worthy of emulation while the culture and physical appearance of Ashkenazic Jewry was most frequently depicted as regrettable and in need of radical correction. The superiority of the former was attributed to the tolerance of the Islamic environment in which they lived while conversely, the supposed inferiority of Ashkenazic culture was portrayed as being a consequence of Christian persecution. Claims about the superiority of Sephardic aesthetics became a constitutive element of modern German-Jewish self-fashioning, one goal of which was to make German Jewry appear as the most worthy successors to the Jews of Golden Age Spain.

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley, where specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. A native of Melbourne, Australia, he has a B.A. from Monash University, did graduate work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, took his M.A. at New York University and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.