Imagining the Sephardic Community of Vienna - A Discourse-Analytical Approach (Martin Stechauner...

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Imagining the Sephardic Community of Vienna: A Discourse-Analytical Approach

Martin Stechauner

1. Introduction

Over the last few decades the study of Sephardic communities has become more popular, especially in the fields of Jewish and Romance Studies. The growing interest in the history and language of Sephardic Jews has not solely been limited to the traditional and well-known cultural centres of Sephardic Jewry, for example the former Ottoman Empire (for example Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000) or Northern Europe (for example Bodian 1997; Kaplan 2000). In the recent past, smaller, although no less significant and thriving Sephardic communities such as the (historic) Sephardic com-munity of Vienna, have taken centre stage in several studies (for example Eugen 2001; Kaul 1989), exhibitions1 and symposia.2

This paper presents a study on the constitution and consolidation of Sephardic identity in relation to a diasporic experience. Its aim is to high-light another aspect of Sephardic Jewry that goes beyond the study of Sephardic history and language, namely the notions of Sephardic diaspora and identity in Vienna in the context of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Animated by these objectives, the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of Sephardic identity shall be brought to light. Furthermore, this paper will also highlight how an experience of diaspora, as well as other

Notes on Romanisation: Hebrew expressions will be romanised according to the tran-

scription system published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 2012. Arabic will be romanised according to the system developed by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress (ALA-LC Romanization).

1 See the exhibition Die Türken in Wien organised by the Jewish Museum of Vienna (2010) and the Jewish Museum Hohenems (2011) about the Turkish-Israelite Community of Vienna, website: http://www.jmw.at/de/exhibitions/die-tuerken-wien-geschichte-einer-juedischen-gemeinde (accessed January 2, 2014).

2 See the conference Sefarad an der Donau organised by Michael Studemund Halévy at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (June 26, 2011 – June 29, 2011), website: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vk/detail.do?id=92 (accessed January 2, 2014); see also Stude-mund-Halévy, Leibl and Vučina 2013.

50 MARTIN STECHAUNER

historical circumstances, played a significant role in the identity-finding process of the Sephardic Jews of Vienna.

By applying the theoretical approaches of thinkers like Benedict Ander-son (b. 1936) in combination with a discourse-analytical approach, espe-cially the one devised by Stuart Hall (1932–2014), it shall be demonstrated that cultural identities are rather complex and multi-layered constructs. Hence, multiple approaches are required in order to be able to reconstruct the mechanisms which are responsible for the formation of cultural identity. Of course, it must be kept in mind that most of these approaches had origi-nally been developed in order to analyse more ‘secular’—political, social etc.—phenomena, specifically nationalism. This is why certain considera-tions and conceptions might initially appear somewhat unconventional when applied to the analysis of religious and ethnic communities. However, since the Study of Religions should be perceived as a predominantly inter-disciplinary subject, it is not only desirable but, in fact, absolutely necessary to employ and test the common state-of-the-art approaches of other neigh-bouring disciplines, not least because religious phenomena can hardly be understood separately or independently from social, political, psychological or philosophical points of views. In this respect the theoretical approaches of Anderson and Hall, as well as those of other prominent theorists included in this paper, provide a very solid foundation for the analysis and evaluation of cultural—including religious—identities.

Before proceeding with the discussion of the theoretical and methodo-logical approaches applied in this paper, a few things must be said about the religious group that is going to be presented in detail. The historic Sephardic community of Vienna predominantly consisted of Jewish immi-grants from the former Ottoman Empire (for example Bosnia-Herzegovina, which became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878).3 The origin of Ottoman Jewry, in large part, is the Iberian Peninsula where the Alhambra Decree, issued by the Catholic Kings in 1492, practically forced all Jews of Spain to choose either between conversion to Christianity, exile or death. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II. (r. 1481–1512) gladly received a large number of those refugees who had remained faithful to their Jewish religion (Bossong 2008: 92-93). In the Ottoman Empire the Jewish refugees were able to establish new communities, usually in cities or in areas that were closely controlled by the Sublime Porte. Soon there was a Spanish Jewish

3 The contemporary Sephardic community of Vienna has a distinct history which

goes back to the immigration of Jews from Central Asia and the Caucasus region, as will be discussed later at the end of section 3.

IMAGINING THE SEPHARDIC COMMUNITY OF VIENNA 51

congregation in almost every major city of the Ottoman Empire,4 for exam-ple in Constantinople, Izmir (Smyrna), Sarajevo, Belgrade, Bitola (Ma-nastır), Sofia, Plovdiv (Filipopolis/Filibe), Edirne (Adrianopolis/Ordin), Rhodes, Jerusalem, and Safed, to name but a few, but also in other territo-ries that where strongly affected by the Ottoman Empire and its expansion politics (Díaz-Mas 1992: 39). For instance, after the Treaty of Belgrade had been signed between the House of Habsburg and the Sublime Porte in 1739, Ottoman citizens—including the Ottoman Jews—suddenly had the oppor-tunity to trade and to move freely within Austria and its crown lands (Se-roussi 1922: 148). This is the reason why Sephardic Jews could also estab-lish congregations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire—most prominently in Vienna—which were smaller in size but no less influential and important than the affiliated communities in the Ottoman Empire.

Together with their Jewish faith, the Iberian expellees also took their Spanish language, culture and customs with them. It is difficult to tell what kind of language the medieval Jewry spoke before the great expulsion; however, outside the Iberian Peninsula the development of ‘Djudezmo’,5 which is also known as Judeo-Spanish (‘Djudeo-Espanyol’ 6), ‘Djidio’,7 ‘Ladino’ 8 or simply (E)spanyol, 9 can be reconstructed quite accurately.

4 The Iberian immigrants soon outnumbered the autochthonous Greek-speaking

Jews, also known as Romaniotes, as well as other, smaller (Ashkenazi, Italian, Karaite, Arabophone) Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire that had lived there long before (Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000: 5, 11-26).

5 Sometimes also spelled ‘Judezmo’, originally meaning ‘Judaism’. David Bunis pre-fers to call the language of (Eastern) Sephardic Jews ‘Djudezmo’ since this is a term that ‘originated among native speakers’ and was not ‘imposed by outside sources’ (Bunis 1978: 98).

6 Judeo-Espanyol is often referred to as a ‘relatively neutral, self-explanatory, aca-demic term’, usually ‘preferred by Romance scholars’ (Harris 1994: 24). However, Bunis adjudges the term Judeo-Espanyol rather to be ‘pseudo-scientific’ since it was invented by philologists and linguists of the eighteenth or nineteenth century; yet later the term was adopted by many Sephardic Jews too (Bunis 2008: 427).

7 Other spellings: ‘Jidio’ and ‘Djudio’; literally meaning ‘Jewish’ (cf. the term ‘Yid-dish’ for Judeo-German).

8 Today, especially in Israel, Judeo-Spanish is best known by the name ‘Ladino’. Al-though this term is very popular among Jews and non-Jews alike, Ladino has not always been used for the everyday speech of Sephardic Jews. The term Ladino derives from the Spanish word ‘latino’ (‘Latin’) which in medieval times was used for referring to any Moorish (Muslim) or Jewish Spaniard who was also fluent in Romance, the Christian tongue of that time. Within the Jewish context Ladino became a term for what Paloma Díaz-Mas calls a ‘calque hagiolanguage’, that is, a language which was only used to translate religious texts (for example, the Bible or popular prayers in Hebrew) word-by-word into a vernacular language (Díaz-Mas 1992: 75-76).


Although its base mostly consists of medieval Castilian Judeo-Spanish, from the 16th century onwards the language of Sephardic Jews developed independently from peninsular Spanish in many respects, especially con-cerning its lexicon (for example many Turkish, later also French, Italian, Greek but also Southern Slavic and German loanwords had been adopted).10 However, in the Western Mediterranean—more precisely in North Africa (Northern Morocco and parts of Algeria)—which also became the home of Spanish-speaking Jews who had fled Spain and Portugal, their language developed quite differently.11 Furthermore, these Western Mediterranean Sephardim also called their vernacular by a different name, ‘Haketia’.12

The use of different names for what is often considered to be virtually the same language is the rule rather than the exception in the case of Jewish languages, and so it is for Djudezmo (Bunis 2008). According to Joshua Fishman (1985: 9-10), the use of different names for the same language indicates the absence of a higher status function of the language in question. In fact many Western-educated Sephardic intellectuals, who considered their language to be a corrupt form of (Castilian) Spanish, used to refer to their mother tongue as ‘Jargon’ or ‘Zhargon’ (Harris 1994: 23).

Together with their own cursive script for manuscript writing, which later became known as ‘solitreo’ or ‘soletreo’ (Bunis 2011: 25), Sephardic Jews developed an elaborated book hand. Its typeface which had been de-signed for printing would become known as ‘Rashi script’ (letras de Rashi), named after the famous rabbi of Troyes because it was used for printing his commentary on the Bible and the Talmud,13 in the first printed book ever published in Hebrew in 1475 (Harris 2005: 101). For some Sephardic prints Hebrew square characters (ktav meruba בע מר כתב ) were also used, espe-

9 Literally meaning ‘Spanish’, also known as ‘Muestro Espanyol’ (‘our Spanish’, in

opposition to Castillian Spanish). 10 For a detailed account of the historical and linguistic development of Judeo-

Spanish, see Bunis 1992 and 2011. 11 Due to the geographical proximity, the Sephardic Jews of North Africa main-

tained closer contact with peninsular Spanish but also were strongly influenced by Arabic and to some extent by British English (Gibraltar) (Zucker 2001: 10).

12 The name most probably derives from the Arabic root ḥ-k-ā حكى which means ‘to tell’ or ‘to chat’ (Bunis 2011: 24); thus Haketia can be translated as ‘clever’ or ‘witty saying’ (Bunis 1978: 9, Díaz-Mas 1992: 75). Apart from this, Díaz-Mas and Bunis offer an additional etymology, suggesting that Haketia could also derive from the name Haquito, the diminutive of Hebrew/Biblical name Yitsẖak יצחק, actually meaning ‘little Isaac’. Nowadays Haketia is also sometimes referred to as Ladino Oksidental (Western Ladino) (cf. Bentolila 2005: 12), analogous to Eastern Ladino which was and, in some cases, still is spoken in the Eastern Mediterranean.

13 Rashi י“רש( = RSh“I) is the abbreviation of the name Rabi Shelomo Yitsẖak רבי .(1105–1040) יצחקשלמה


cially for newspaper headlines and book titles and for religious texts with masoretic vowels (Díaz-Mas 1992: 99). In major Sephardic centres the Rashi script was used to print books and newspapers until the 1920s (Tur-key) or even until World War II (Salonika) (Harris 2005: 101). Also the Judeo-Spanish text, which will be discussed later on in this paper and which shall shed light on the constitution of Sephardic identity in Vienna, was mainly printed in Rashi characters. However, in the course of the moderni-sation of the societies in which Sephardic Jews were living and through acquaintance with other languages like French, Italian, Turkish and Spanish at the turn of the 20th century, other writing and printing systems had been adopted. In most cases it was the Latin script (for example in Turkey14), but in others the Cyrillic alphabet (in Bulgaria and Serbia) or the Greek writing system was adopted (Bunis 1992: 400-401). Today, many speakers of Djudezmo no longer know how to read the Rashi script and the few texts produced in this language are usually published in Latin characters (Díaz-Mas 1992: 95, 99-100). One of the most popular transliteration systems for displaying Judeo-Spanish in Latin script nowadays is the graphic system developed by Aki Yerushalayim (Revista Kulturala Djudeo-Espanyola),15 one of the few remaining Judeo-Spanish periodicals published in Israel. This graphic system is also used in the present paper in order to transliterate Judeo-Spanish when originally printed in Rashi script.16 For the sake of convenience and comprehensibility, Hebrew square characters ( ...ג, ב, א ), instead of Rashi letters ( ...ג ,ב ,א ), will be used for displaying original phrases in Judeo-Spanish. Further, quotations in Djudezmo will be trans-lated into English, whereas the German quotations will remain untranslated.

2. Deciphering Religious and Cultural Identity: A Dis-course-Analytical Approach

As has been outlined above, a discourse-analytic approach turns out to be the proper choice in order to gain deeper insights into the diasporic and cultural identity of Sephardic Jews. Since the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in

14 In modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) abolished the Persian-Arabic alphabet in 1928 and introduced the Latin alphabet instead which was also adopted for the Jewish media.

15 Website: http://www.aki-yerushalayim.co.il (accessed: November 9, 2013). 16 Some authors cited in this paper use different graphic systems for displaying

Djudezmo in Latin script, for example using a phonetic (Bunis 2008) or hispanicised (Pulido Fernández 1993) transcription system. These citations will not be transcribed into the graphic system of Aki Yerushalayim but will be quoted in their original spelling.


the 1960s and the following ‘discursive turn’ in the early 1980s, discourse analysis has become a popular methodological choice within most disci-plines of the humanities and social sciences in order to study ‘how our lan-guage use and [other] modes of representation fundamentally affect and shape our understandings of reality and our constructions of meaningful worlds’ (Moberg 2013: 4). Also in the fields of the Study of Religions dis-course-analytical approaches have more and more frequently been applied over recent years (see Wijsen 2013: 1-3), simply because such approaches not only provide new perspectives on religious phenomena as such but also because they offer new ways of (re-)evaluating and (re-)interpreting the research material, namely the primary and secondary sources at our dis-posal. In this regard discourse analysis also turns out to be a very useful tool for examining certain aspects of religion and religious communities, such as topics dealing with religious and cultural identity.

The term ‘discourse’ was coined by Michel Foucault (1969) who used it in order to refer to representations (for example, representations constructed through language) which are responsible for our understanding of reality. Foucault’s aim was to reveal the continuing effects that discourses have on modern society and culture (Moberg 2013: 7). However, by now other defi-nitions of ‘discourse’ have been developed, as for example that of Stuart Hall who is especially ‘interested in empirically exploring the function of discourse in relation to certain social phenomena (such as religion, for ex-ample)’ (ibid.: 9). According to Hall, discourses have to be seen as

ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice: a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which pro-vide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society (Hall 1997: 4).

However, it has to be acknowledged that there is not just one single defini-tion of discourse but a large variety of definitions. As Marcus Moberg points out, it is not only impossible to find an ‘“all-purpose” definition’ of discourse ‘but even undesirable’ since the particular concept of discourse has to be ‘understood in the context of [its] particular piece of research’ (Moberg 2013: 9).

Such an open—one might even say volatile—definition of discourse makes this concept especially attractive for the Study of Religions which to some extent has always had trouble in defining its own topic of research. Thus, since there is no such thing as a neutral or innocent (unschuldige) theory defining religion, Hans G. Kippenberg and Kocku von Stuckrad suggest that we should think of religion rather as a discourse or a field of


discourse (Diskursfeld) in which particular identities and definitions—including scientific ones—are constructed, boundaries are drawn and spaces of power (Machträume) are occupied. Consequently, Kippenberg and von Stuckrad describe the Study of Religions as a sort of meta-discipline which aims to describe the definitions within the field of discourse in which the Study of Religions itself is operating (Kippenberg and von Stuckrad 2003: 14). Discourse analysis, then, turns out to be a useful tool which ‘provides researchers with a particular way of approaching how people use language and other modes of representation in order to construct particular versions of certain phenomena and states of affairs and to make them meaningful in particular ways’ (Moberg 2013: 11). In this context it is important to note that from a social-constructionist point of view meaning is always under-stood as something that is being produced or made, thus it is not a priori inherent, permanent or static (ibid.: 10). The same is true about religion in this context, which is why Moberg holds that religion within a discourse-analytical approach must be regarded ‘as an “empty signifier” that has no intrinsic meaning in itself’ (ibid.: 13).

For the purpose of analysing Sephardic diasporic identity, two principles or meta-approaches which have been drafted in order to theorise group identity turn out to be especially useful. The first one comprises Benedict Anderson’s theories concerning national identity. The second approach applied in this analysis is the models of cultural and diasporic identity which have been devised by Stuart Hall. While Hall’s theoretical ap-proaches explicitly build on concepts such as discourse and narrative ac-cording to the usual practise within constructionism and postmodernism, Anderson’s theories are predominantly grounded in historical materialism which, in turn, is heavily based on the methodological approaches coined by Karl Marx (1818–1883). However, Anderson was very much aware of the methodological affinity of his own approaches with discourse analysis. Thus he himself states that his theories were actually designed in order ‘to combine a kind of historical materialism with what later on came to be called discourse analysis’ (Anderson 2006: 227). Indeed, Anderson’s theo-ries have given a new and fresh impetus to discourse analytical approaches (see Sarasin 2003: 150-176), especially fruitful—as will be shown—for the study of religious communities.

3. Imagining Sepharad

As mentioned above, this analysis of Sephardic group identity is largely based on the theoretical approaches of Benedict Anderson. His reflections


about nations and nationalism, especially in relation to the emergence of print technology, were most famously discussed in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006 [1983]). Although heavily influenced by Ernest Gellner’s (1925–1995) notion of nations, namely that nations are mere inventions by nationalism in places ‘where they do not exist’ (Gellner 1964: 169), Anderson developed his own concept of ‘the nation’. Instead of defining the nation as an inven-tion, he rather describes it as an ‘imagined community – […] imagined as both inherently and sovereign’ (Anderson 2006: 6). Re-describing this thought, he claims that, in fact,

[every nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. […] Fi-nally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual ine-quality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always con-ceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship (ibid.: 6-7).

Although Anderson had primarily developed this definition in order to ana-lyse the mechanisms behind nation-building and the emergence of modern nation states, he did not want to have this concept solely understood as an exclusive model for the definition of the nation. As a matter of fact, quite the contrary is the case as he adds that indeed ‘[...] all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’ (ibid.). Furthermore, he puts much emphasis on the need not to distinguish communities ‘by their falsity/genuineness’, but rather ‘by the style in which they are imagined’ (ibid.).

According to Anderson, religious groups follow similar rules and mechanisms in order to imagine themselves as communities (ibid.: 12-19). Thus, adapting Anderson’s considerations, we may easily conclude that Sephardic communities also have to be understood as ‘imagined communi-ties’, and therefore as constructed entities, imagined by people who per-ceive themselves as a group. However, the style in which Sephardic com-munities are imagined may differ according to certain contexts. This comes most clearly into focus when having a closer look at terms such as ‘Sephardic’, as well as Sepharad. In fact these terms turn out to be rather eclectic and their meaning has changed over the course of time. To give an example, the Biblical Sepharad ספרד is believed to be identical to the city of Sardes, capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor (see Obadiah 1:20). In the Latin Bible, however, Sepharad was translated into ‘Bosporus’. It was only in late Antiquity that this term became identified with Spain or the Iberian Peninsula and although the modern Hebrew term


today designates the modern country of Spain, for many Sephardic Jews it has remained a rather volatile term, which was even expanded to the dias-pora communities outside the peninsula as soon as the Iberian Jews were forced to leave their homeland. So, although today the term Sepharad usu-ally stands for Spain or the Iberian Peninsula, the term ‘Sephardic Jewry’ usually refers to Jewish diaspora communities in North-Western Europe (for example Amsterdam, London, Hamburg), in Southern Eastern Europe (the Balkans), in North Africa (for example Morocco), in the Middle East (for example part of the old-established Jewish community of Jerusalem) and even in the Americas (for example in the Caribbean and the Guianas).17 Despite the epochal changes, caused by the uprooting of the Iberian Jewry in the late fifteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula should remain an impor-tant point of reference for the identity and the heritage of Sephardic Jews. However, some semantic changes to the term have occurred since the time Jews who continued to practice their faith left the peninsula. By presenting an example from 1775 Salonika, David Bunis expounds that after the expul-sion from Spain and Portugal the term Sepharad could also refer to loci other than the Iberian Peninsula:

Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire occasionally referred to their language as lašón de Sefaraδ [sic] “language of Sefarad” without necessarily identifying Sefaraδ [sic] with “Spain”, since the term had come to denote any region in-habited by Sephardim, such as the Ottoman Empire (Bunis 2008: 421).

These examples shall only make us aware of how the meaning and the use of the term Sepharad began to change according to the new circumstances in the diaspora. Consequently, this term also became used for the new lands inhabited by Sephardic Jews after the gerush sepharad ספרד ושגר , which is the Hebrew term for the expulsion from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497). Being aware of the great consequences that the gerush entailed for the his-tory of Sephardic Jews, Max Weinreich (1894–1969) proposed to think about Sephardic history in two stages: the history of Jews in Sepharad I, which refers to a period from the earliest Jewish settlements on the Penin-sula up to the end of the fifteenth century, and in Sepharad II, referring to the history of the diaspora communities which were established outside the Peninsula after the expulsion (in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa etc.).18

17 The first Jewish settlements in the New World were, in fact, established by Dutch

Jews of Portuguese descent (see Arbell 2002 and Gonsalves de Mello 1996). 18 Here, Weinreich employs a terminology he has already used for describing the

history of Ashkenazi Jews, by dividing it in Ashekenaz I for the time when most Yiddish-speaking Jews resided in German-speaking lands (for example the Rhineland), and Ash-kenaz II for describing the period of Ashkenazi Jews after many of them had moved to


Based on Weinreich’s model, another term has since been created in order to refer to the Sephardic communities now living outside Sepharad I and Sepahrad II, a result of the dispersions, re-settlements and migrations of Sephardic Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth century, for example to the United States or Israel. Thus, this secondary dispersion can be referred to as Sepharad III (Šmid 2002: 114n1).

Such a conceptualisation of space very much resembles Edward Said’s notion of ‘imaginative geography’ which depends, above all, on knowledge (for example of one’s own ‘imagined’ history) and power (for example a hostile or exclusive outside force). According to Said (1979: 54-55) geo-graphic boundaries are always accompanied by social, ethnic and cultural ones which, in the end, are all imaginative.

Finally, it also has to be mentioned that especially today the term ‘Sephardic Jewry’ does not necessarily have to designate Jews whose an-cestors actually lived on the Iberian Peninsula or who still speak Djudezmo. Since the term ‘Sephardic’ is also frequently used for referring to Oriental Jewish communities who conform to the Sephardic minhag מנהג, that is, a religious custom or tradition, it can also designate Jews of, for example, Iraqi, Moroccan, and Central Asian descent or even any non-Ashkenazic Jew. As such, we can conclude that in order to perceive themselves as a community, Sephardic Jews necessarily had and still have to ‘imagine’ themselves as a group of people, by fixing the meaning of the term Sephardic either to a common origin, common religious customs and laws or a common vernacular language, just to name a few current examples. Consequently—whatever definition is chosen—there will always be indi-viduals who will drop out of a particular definitional framework.

As a matter of fact, this observation is definitely verifiable when looking at Vienna’s Sephardic communities now and then. While only a hundred years ago being ‘Sephardic’ in Vienna meant, first and foremost, being a speaker of Djudezmo and having roots in South-Eastern Europe or the for-mer Ottoman Empire, today’s Bucharan Jews who emigrated to Vienna in the 1980s and 1990s naturally define themselves as Sephardic Jews too because they confirm to the Sephardic minhag which was introduced in that community about two hundred years ago (Labudovic 2009). Such a defini-tion, however, might be rejected by other Sephardic Jews who exclusively use the term Sephardic for referring to Jews of Spanish or Portuguese heri-tage and who actually speak or spoke Judeo-Spanish (Lévy 2005). The rejection of Jews who merely confirm to the Sephardic minhag but who

parts in North Eastern Europe, predominantly inhabited by Slavic peoples (Weinreich 1973: 100).


lack a direct Iberian heritage by actual Djudezmo speakers or by Jews who claim to have real Portuguese or Spanish ancestry is hardly surprising since language is a very strong reference point when it comes to one’s own iden-tity. For this reason it is definitely worth having a closer look at language as an identification factor, especially when dealing with an ethnic-religious group that strongly perceives its own identity as very much linked to a ver-nacular language, as in the case of the historic Sephardic community of Vienna. Again, Benedict Anderson provides an appealing model in order to describe the mechanisms of this imaginary process.

4. Identity and Language

Apart from ‘imagined communities’ Anderson has coined another term, namely ‘print-capitalism’, which is based on the theory that the emergence of national consciousness was only possible through the concurrent emer-gence of capitalism.19 To be more accurate, it was the creation of the print industry and the adoption of vernacular languages (for example modern German, French, Spanish etc.) instead of exclusive ‘sacred’ print languages (for example Latin, pre-modern Hebrew) that hitherto had been in use for the distribution of intellectual ideas (Anderson 2006: 37-38). According to Anderson, it was the invention of printing technology and the distribution of printed media in vernacular languages that ‘laid the bases for national con-sciousness’ (ibid.: 44). Vernacular languages had the power, similar to the traditional print languages, to create an exclusive and ‘particular language-field’ of people to which ‘only those’ could belong who were speaking or could understand the same kind of language or at least a similar dialect. The media, such as books and newspapers printed in the common vernacular suddenly made people aware of their fellow readers. Furthermore, printed media had the power to give language a fixed form ‘which in the long run helped to build’ an ‘image of antiquity’ (ibid.). Not only could a printed book be reproduced countless times but through print it also got a perma-nent form. This should make it possible for future generations to read in the past or, in other words, to read the ‘imagined’ past itself.

Another important fact about print-capitalism is that it simultaneously created ‘languages-of-power’. Apparently, some ‘dialects were “closer”’ to the printed language and hence ‘dominated’ its final form. This, inevitably, leads on to distinctions between languages of higher status and prestige and

19 At this point we become aware of the fact that Anderson’s theories are actually

based on the methodological approaches of historical materialism and Marxism.


languages or dialects that have been ‘unsuccessful (or only relatively suc-cessful) in insisting on their own print-form’ (ibid.: 45).

Of course, ‘print’, as theorised by Anderson, should be understood as a shibboleth. A similar cultural impact was precipitated, as Anderson main-tains, by the invention of the radio in 1895 which ‘made it possible to by-pass print’ and create an ‘aural representation’ of imagined communities, thus also reaching people who were neither able to read nor write (ibid.: 54n28). As for the present, we can even conclude that new technologies, such as the internet and social media, not only create virtual spaces but, in fact, virtual—‘imagined’—web communities. In this regard, Michal Held (2010), who researched two popular Internet platforms frequently used by Sephardic Jews all over the world, calls such virtual spaces ‘Digital Home-Lands’ which make it possible for a dispersed community to find common, however imagined, ground. Here, we also become aware of the fact that whenever we are talking about Sephardic communities, we are actually dealing with diasporic communities which all happen to share some charac-teristic features.

5. Imagining Sephardic Diaspora

Studying Sephardic communities or texts produced by these communities, one encounters many features which turn out to be typical for diasporic communities in general. In fact, Sephardic communities very much fulfil all the criteria for a typical diaspora which, according to Rogers Brubaker, are (1) dispersion, (2) homeland orientation, as well as (3) boundary-maintenance (Brubaker 2005: 5-7). Principally the expulsion from the Ibe-rian Peninsula and the reference to this ‘homeland’ plays a significant role in many Sephardic narratives. However, ‘homeland orientation’ generally plays an important role in Judaism since the Bible is full of narratives that constitute a strong homeland orientation in connection with the biblical topoi of exile and exodus. Although these events, whether the gerush sepharad, the Exodus or the Biblical exile, were remembered rather as rup-tures and collective tragedies, Sephardic diasporic communities created coherent and meaningful narratives about their own past and origins in order to experience the sense of being a coherent community, in spite of being dispersed. This also led to the maintenance of boundaries in order to distinguish themselves from other groups (for example the majority or host society) in the diaspora.

According to Stuart Hall, who was researching the notions of the Afri-can diaspora and identity in the Caribbean (Hall 1990), the act of imagining


a community is always an interpretation through discourses and narratives, ‘told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media, and popular culture’ (Hall 1992: 293). Only by sharing these narratives do people con-sequently become part of an ‘imagined community’ in Anderson’s sense. A very important narrative for the formation of group identity ‘is that of a foundational myth’ which is a story that ‘locates the origin of the nation, the people and their national character’ (ibid.: 294). Furthermore, Hall points out that national identity or, in other words, the identity of imagined com-munities is ‘grounded on the idea of a pure, original people or “folk”’ (ibid.: 295). However, as Hall adds, ‘in the realities of national develop-ment, it is rarely this primordial folk who persist or exercise power’ (ibid.). That is to say, in other words, the original folk was not yet a powerful na-tion but rather had to struggle for its survival and maintenance. The main point of reference for Sephardic Jews in this regard, is certainly their own anchorage in Judaism, together with its Biblical narratives. However, taking a closer look at biblical terms such as am עם which is usually translated as ‘people’ or ‘nation’, we also become aware of the volatility of such identity-establishing terms, a phenomenon already mentioned in relation to the terms Sepharad and ‘Sephardic’. The meaning of the term am—that is, designat-ing Israel as a people—was only fixed within the context of the Exodus and in reference to a repressive power regime (Egypt) which can be associated with a discourse about the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. These terms have been frequently used by thinkers such as Foucault, Said or Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), but are grounded on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) meta-theory which became known as the ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’. According to Hegel the dynamics emerging in this model are responsible for the formation of self-consciousness, or in other words, identity (Hegel 1986: 145-154). This dichotomy between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ shall only remind us of the fact that an identity-finding process is never self-contained but dependent on other, external agents as well. In this respect the Book of Exodus can clearly be identified with a foundational myth, with Moses being the mythological hero at centre stage. The aim of such myths is obliviously clear, namely to create a coherent narrative—most likely about a single agent—for establishing a group identity.

Therefore group identity should not primarily be valued as a collective effort or struggle. In fact, group identities—respectively, the corresponding official or authoritative narratives constituting such identities—are usually drafted by a small group of people belonging to a literate social elite. This is why we can conclude that communal identity, first of all, is the product of single visionaries who, in turn, draw upon their own social realities when producing their identity-constituting narratives.


Regarding the nature of diasporic communities, Stuart Hall in his Cul-

tural Identity and Diaspora (1990) arrives at another important conclusion, namely that although most narratives circulating within diasporic communi-ties suggest a pure identity pegged onto a single origin (Sepharad, the Holy Land etc.), actual diasporic communities are not hallmarked by purity but by ‘hybridity’ (ibid.: 235). This means that the maintained boundaries are rather permeable, creating new complex, multi-layered, syncretic, creole societies. These communities, thus, are by far not as homogeneous and ‘pure’ as the popular narratives might at first suggest. In fact, by having a closer look at popular narratives, its authorship, as well as the historical circumstances, the hybrid character of these communities in question comes into focus. The foundational myth of the Sephardic community of Vienna serves as a good example in order to highlight the identity establishing dynamics within diasporic societies that have been outlined so far.

6. Baron Diego d’Aguilar – A Legendary Figure between Myth and Reality

The legend of Baron Diego d’Aguilar or Diego de Aguilar (c. 1699–1759)—also known by his Jewish name Moses Lopes Pereira or Mosche Lopez Pereyra—perfectly illustrates the consolidation of historical facts and fiction which usually occurs in a foundational myth. Although there is hardly any doubt that a man by the name of Diego d’Aguilar truly lived in Vienna during the first half of the eighteenth century and that this man even bore the aristocratic title of a Baron (Freiherr), many of his biographical data apparently underwent some significant changes that finally trans-formed him into the rather mysterious and heroic figure that the historic Sephardic community of Vienna claimed as its founder.

There are at least ten popular versions of the legend of Diego d’Aguilar (Studemund-Halévy, Collin 2013). Perhaps the most famous one was pub-lished in a brochure (Festschrift) by Adolf von Zemlinsky (1845–1900) and Michael Papo (1843–1918) in 1888, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Sephardic community of Vienna, officially known as Türkisch-israelitische Gemeinde zu Wien in German. It is a bilingual edition which was written in both German (printed in a black-letter typeface) and Judeo-Spanish (printed manly in Rashi script). Both covers of the chronicle men-tion Adolf von Zemlinsky as the community’s Sekretär (sekretariyo), while Michael Papo is mentioned as Functionär (funsyonariyo) of the Turkish-Israelite community of Vienna. Furthermore, Adolf von Zemlinsky is men-tioned as the author of the chronicle (‘Verfasst von Adolf v. Zemlinsky […]’,


‘Kompuesta en Alemano por Adolfo de Semlinski H[ashem] Y[ishmoro]’), while Michael Papo only seemed to have translated Zemlinsky’s text from German into Judeo-Spanish (‘Ueversetzt ins Jüdisch-spanische von Michael Papo […]’, ‘Traslada por Michael Menachem Papo H[ashem] Y[ishmoro]’; see Appendix, Figure 3 and 4). The two versions differ from each other in style and length as well as in some other details, as will be shown shortly, which is the reason why Papo’s text should be considered as a very loose translation, or even as an independent text (Studemund-Halévy 2009). Nevertheless, the plots of both versions in the pamphlet closely re-semble each other. It was published under the title Istorya de la komunidad israelit espanyola en Vyena. Del tyempo de su fundasyon asta oy segun datos istorikos20 in Djudezmo and Geschichte der türkisch-israelitischen Gemeinde zu Wien. Von ihrer Geschichte bis heute nach historischen Daten in German and is to be considered the first official chronicle of the Sephardic community of Vienna, or at least the earliest still preserved. Al-though both authors profess to have used historical sources (‘historische Daten’, ‘datos istorikos’; see Appendix, Figure 3 and 4) for their work, neither Alexander von Zemlinsky nor Michael Papo mention their sources or informants. The legend portrayed in their chronicle goes as follows:

It is the year 1725 and Diego d’Aguilar is an inquisitor in Madrid. One day he sentences a young lady to death for being a clandestine Judaiser. Shortly before the defendant is supposed to be burned at the stake, an older woman seeks to receive an audience with the inquisitor. The woman, whose name is Sarah, declares that she is the mother of the young convicted girl and that she has come to beseech the inquisitor to stop the prosecution against the young lady. When the inquisitor is not willing to give in to her demands, the old lady finally reveals to him that she herself is in fact the mother of both the young girl and the inquisitor. At first the inquisitor does not believe her but when the old woman calls him by his original given name ‘Moshe’, all of a sudden he realises that she is telling nothing but the truth. Thus, he recalls that he was actually born as a Jew but separated from his family at a very young age. Having come to his senses, he immediately rushes off in order to save his sister from death but when he returns he has to inform his mother that only a few hours ago her daughter, his sister, has already died in agony under torture. Both are devastated. As a direct conse-quence of the event, d’Aguilar decides to flee Spain together with his mother. Before leaving, d’Aguilar remembers that he still possesses a pre-sent from the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) who found

20 ונדאסייון אסטה 'דיל טיימפו די סו פ. יינה'איסטורייא די לה קומונידאד ישראלית איפאנייולה אין ב

.see Appendix, Figure 4 ,אויי סיגון דאטוס איסטוריקוס


accommodation in his palace while visiting Spain together with her father Charles VI (1685–1740) several years ago. Summarily, d’Aguilar and his mother decide to seek refuge in Vienna; however, according to the German version of the legend his mother Sarah dies during the journey, never reach-ing the Austrian capital. On reaching his destination d’Aguilar goes to see Maria Theresa, begging her to let him and several other refugees from Spain stay in her realm. Of course the Empress immediately recalls their former Spanish host, and kindly invites him to stay as her guest in Vienna. Gladly accepting her offer, d’Aguilar becomes an influential court Jew and the leaseholder of the imperial tobacco monopoly. Using his great influence at the court, Baron d’Aguilar becomes a patron of the Jews in Vienna as well as of those in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire. For example in lieu of a synagogue, he offers a room in his own house to the first Sephardic immi-grants from the Ottoman Empire in Vienna in order to provide a place of worship for them. Furthermore, he donates two sets of rimonim ניםרמו , that is, torah crowns, with an engraving of his name to the Sephardic congrega-tions of Vienna and Temeswar (Timișoara in modern Romania), the latter also being blessed by his patronage. One day, when d’Aguilar learns about a secret plan that all Jews shall be expelled from the Austrian territories, he and one of his friends seek to confound this scheme by sending a letter to the Sultan in Istanbul. Promptly the Sultan sends back a letter personally addressed to Maria Theresa in which he tries to convince the Empress to renounce her plans of expelling the Jews from her realms. Concerning this affair, Zemlinsky’s original version and Papo’s alleged translation differ from each other. While in the German version Maria Theresa gladly ac-cedes to the Sultan’s petition, refraining from her plans to expel the Jews from Austria, the Judeo-Spanish text renders a rather more unkind picture of the Empress. Although in the Djudezmo version Maria Theresa also ultimately decides to spare the Jews, d’Aguilar decides to flee Vienna be-cause he suspects that the anti-Jewish Empress knows about his eager inter-vention. In the German version, however, other reasons are said to have led to the hero’s prompt departure, namely that the Spanish Inquisition has finally gained knowledge of d’Aguilar’s residency in Austria and, more-over, of his return to Judaism, wherefore his immediate extradition is de-manded in order to put him on trial for apostasy. Be that as it may, in both versions it is pointed out that d’Aguilar essentially leaves without a trace. According to Zemlinsky and Papo, nobody knows for sure about his final destination; some say he might have gone to Amsterdam, while others be-lieve he may have found refuge in Bucharest (the latter is only mentioned in the German version). In remembrance of and in reverence for his generosity and advocacy the Sephardim of Vienna and Temeswar consider him the


founder of their communities, wherefore every rosh hashana ראש השנה (the Jewish New Year) a kaddish קדיש (mourner’s prayer) is prayed in his re-membrance (Papo and Zemlinsky 1888: 2-6; see also Kaul 1989: 58-59 and Studemund-Halévy and Collin 2013: 287-294).

It is interesting to note here that Diego d’Aguilar’s legend consists of two slightly different endings in German and Judeo-Spanish. However, this official version of the legend is most obviously based on an earlier source, namely a two-part article (Geschichte Diego de Aguilar’s) by Ludwig Au-gust Frankl (1810–1894) (1856a; 1856b) which was published in the Allge-meine Zeitung des Judenthums (see also Studemund-Halévy and Collin 2013: 242, 248-262). At the beginning of his article, Frankl informs his readership that he himself learned about the legend from Hakham Ruben Barukh (d. 1875), the venerable leader of the Sephardic community of Vi-enna at that time (Kohlbauer-Fritz 2010: 152). About thirty years later, in 1886, Aaron ben Shem Tov Semo, the son of Shem Tov Semo (1810–1881) who was one of Vienna’s most famous publishers and editors of Judeo-Spanish newspapers, published his own version of d’Aguilar’s legend which, according to its author, is based on an earlier Hebrew version.21 However, he does not mention an exact source and it remains open to ques-tion whether a Hebrew original of d’Aguilar’s legend has ever really existed (Studenmund-Halévy 2010b). In 1888 Adolf von Zemlinsky (Shem Tov Semo’s son-in-law) and Michael Papo’s version was finally published in the above mentioned bilingual edition in which d’Aguilar is explicitly men-tioned as the founder of the Sephardic community of Vienna:

Wollen wir mündlichen Traditionen Glauben schenken, so würden sich gar mancherlei Bindemittel finden, worunter namentlich eine traditionelle Fabel über das Entstehen dieser Gemeinde spricht, welche wir hier in Kürze wie-derzugeben uns verpflichtet halten, da eben die Hauptperson dieser Fabel identisch ist mit der des Gründers unserer Gemeinde (Papo, Zemlinsky 1888: 2).

Here we see that the authors initially declare that their version of Diego d’Aguilar’s legend is actually based on a popular fable. In so doing, they seem to admit that their account might not resemble the true historical facts, which does not seem to disqualify the legend from being adopted as the official story of the foundation of the Sephardic community of Vienna.

21 The legend was published in the magazine Luzero de la Pasiensia in Severin

(Romania) under the title El estabilimento de la onorada Comuna Spagnola en Viena, trezladada del ebraico conteniendo la beografia del Baron Diaga [sic] de Aguilar. Inter-estingly, it was not printed in Rashi but is in Latin script (Studemund-Halévy and Collin 2013: 244, 263-278).


Even at this early stage we see that Ludwig August Frankl, the author of the first known printed version, was not quite sure about the veracity of the story, even though his informant was none other than the rabbi of the Se-phardic community of Vienna:

Es ist offenbar, daß uns hier Dichtung und Wahrheit innig ineinanderver-schlungen entgegentreten, daß aber selbst der Dichtung wirkliche Thatsa-chen, nur poetisch ausgeschmückt, zu Grunde liegen mögen (Frankl 1856b: 658).

Indeed, the legend of Diego d’Aguilar should not be taken as merely the invention of its authors or their informants; actually it is based on several historical facts. However, while Zemlinsky and Papo did not make any attempt to prove its historical authenticity, Frankl, on the other hand, pro-vided a range of historical data that draw a more authentic picture of d’Aguilar’s life. For example, Frankl found out that d’Aguilar’s decision to leave Vienna was based on economical rather than other considerations because his contract for holding the Austrian tobacco monopoly ended in 1748. By then, his business had already been greatly weakened by foreign ambassadors who had repeatedly tried to bypass his monopoly (Frankl 1856b: 659). Zemlinsky’s and Papo’s assumptions that d’Aguilar withdrew from Vienna because he was afraid of Maria Theresa’s vengeance (in the Judeo-Spanish version) or because the Spanish government had ordered his extradition in order to hand him over to the inquisition (in the German ver-sion) seem to be no more than fictional literary elements. Particularly, the fact that the authors offer two slightly different endings gives evidence that they treated the source material at their disposal rather creatively in order to serve different aims and maybe also a different readership. Obviously the authors were eager to let Maria Theresa appear in a much more humane and neutral light in the German version (Kaul 1989: 59), not least because this version would address a much larger readership, including non-Jewish Aus-trian officials. These officials eventually could have interpreted the Judeo-Spanish accounts of affairs as a lèse-majesté since the reputation of already defunct rulers of the House of Habsburg was protected by a law in the Aus-trian Imperial penal code (cf. Strafgesetz of 1852: § 64; Czech 2010: 62, 69).

When it comes to d’Aguilar’s mysterious flight, Frankl already ascer-tained that Diego d’Aguilar had not merely disappeared as the legend sug-gests but, in fact, he left Vienna in order to return to his house in London which also indicates that d’Aguilar must have lived in England before he settled down in Vienna (ibid.). Even Ruben Barukh, the rabbi from whom Frankl had learned about the story in the first place, mentioned that


d’Aguilar had reached Vienna via England (Frankl 1856a: 632) and not directly from Spain Papo22 and Zemlinsky’s version suggests.

Frankl’s original assumption that d’Aguilar had gone to England after having left Vienna was ultimately confirmed by a letter from his friend Josef von Wertheimer (1800–1887), an Austrian Jewish philanthropist, whom Frankl had asked to investigate the traces d’Aguilar must have left in London. In his letter von Wertheimer quotes a short extract from a book about the biography of d’Aguilar’s son, Ephraim Lópes Pereira d’Aguilar (1739–1802), also including some information about his father:

Baron Diego de Aguilar war in Lissabon geboren, das er ungefähr 1722 sei-ner Religion wegen verließ. Er kam nach England und ging im Jahre 1736 nach Wien, wo er Pächter des Tabakmonopols wurde. Er war ein Liebling der Kaiserin Maria Theresia. Im Jahre 1756 kehrte er nach England zurück mit seiner Familie, die aus zwölf Kindern, Söhnen und Töchtern, bestand. Er starb im Jahre 1759 unermeßlich reich (Frankl 1856b: 661).

In another letter that Ludwig August Frankl received from his friend, Josef von Wertheimer almost revokes the information that he had communicated before by stating:

Es existiert kein Abkömmling von Baron Diego de Aguilar. Seine Grab-schrift ist verlöscht, und es würde nicht unerhebliche Kosten verursachen, sie zu entziffern. Andere Nachforschungen waren vergeblich (ibid.).

It is entirely conceivable that this was a letter previously written by von Wertheimer which was delayed and arrived after the first. At any rate, Frankl does not further clarify this contradiction. However, it is an interest-ing fact that Diego d’Aguilar obviously was not of Spanish but rather of Portuguese origin.

While Frankl cannot provide any solid evidence of d’Aguilar’s death in London, a genealogical record, today preserved in the library of the Society of Genealogists in London, actually proves that the ‘Bemaventurado [blessed] MOSEH LOPES PEREIRA BARON DE AGUILAR […] S.A.G.D.E.G.’ was interred on the burial ground of the Spanish and Portu-guese Jews (Row 17. No. 41) in Mile End which is located in the Borough of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End.23 Furthermore, a pedigree of the

22 Only in the Papo’s version is it mentioned in passing that d’Aguilar and his

mother left for Vienna on a ship departing for England (Inglityera) (Studemund-Halévy and Collin 2013: 290-291).

23 Genealogical Record in: Colyer-Fergusson Collection, archived in the Society of Genealogists Library, London, UK; see Appendix, Figure 1.


d’Aguilar family in the same record gives evidence that ‘Moses Lopes Pereira Baron Diego de Aguilar came to London from Vienna’ in the year 1756. It also informs us that his last will dates 5 August 1759, that he was born in 1700 and that he finally passed away in the month of August in 1759 and was laid to rest on 17 Av 5519 (10 August 1759) at Mile End.24 Moreover, the above mentioned initials ‘S.A.G.D.E.G.’ on his tomb give evidence of his Portuguese origin, since this is an acronym written on many grave stones of Portuguese Jews, standing for Sua Alma Goza da Eterna Gloria (‘his/her soul attains eternal glory’) (Arbell 2001: 304). At this point it is also worth mentioning that the authors of Diego d’Aguilar's legendary account also misrepresent the facts about the fate of his parents. While the legend recounts that d’Aguilar arrived in Vienna without his family, Felici-tas Heimann-Jelinek (1991: 28) informs us that both his mother (Sarah Peryrea) and his father25 (Abraham Lopez di Pereyra) were buried in Vi-enna at the Jewish cemetery in Roßau (Seegasse), together with two of his children and his brother in law.26

Putting all the evidence together, Ludwig August Frankl was right in as-suming that Diego d’Aguilar did not just mysteriously disappear after hav-ing left Vienna but, in fact, moved back to London where he had come from before settling down in Vienna. Through Josef von Wertheimer’s letter and the genealogical data from London we also learn that d’Aguilar’s roots did not lie in Spain, as the legendary accounts suggest, but in Portugal. Owing to his committed investigations, Frankl could even provide more evidence, proving d’Aguilar’s Portuguese provenance. By consulting the K. and K. Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as several other archives in Vienna, Frankl (1856b: 657) not only found out that d’Aguilar was entrusted with the creation of the tobacco monopoly by the order of Emperor Charles VI in 1725 (thus, not by Maria Theresa) but that d’Aguilar’s father had been a successful businessman who was responsible for the establishment of the tobacco trade business in Portugal. The precise motive for Diego d’Aguilar’s departure from Portugal and his immigration to England re-mains unclear. The fact that he already bore a Portuguese title of nobility when leaving Lisbon and that he was conferred with the title of Baron (Don

24 Genealogical Record in: Colyer-Fergusson Collection in the Society of Genealo-

gists Library, London, UK; see Appendix, Figure 2. 25 The death of d’Aguilar's father—who allegedly died in Spain—is only mentioned

in Michael Papo’s version of the legend but not in Adolf von Zemlinsky’s which, once again, indicates that Papo’s Judeo-Spanish version is not a word-by-word translation of Zemlinsky.

26 See also Wachstein (1917: 216-217, 278-280, 311-317); Studemund-Halévy (2010c).


Diego Freiherr von Aguilar) in Vienna on March 26, 1726, is historically confirmed. A draft of his patent of nobility is still preserved in the Austrian State Archives (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv) (Milchram 2010: 80-81). However, this also means that when d’Aguilar was awarded his barony in Vienna Maria Theresa was only eight years old, which makes a previous encounter in Portugal (or Spain as the legend suggests) not impossible but very much unlikely.

At the end of his article Frankl mentions a number of testimonies by rabbis who were contemporaries of Diego d’Aguilar. Salomon Salem (1717–1781), the chief rabbi of the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam, for example, described Diego d’Aguilar as a crown of Jewry (Krone des Judenthums) for having an open house for every foreign rabbi visiting Vienna. Moses ben Saul Katzenellenbogen (1670–1733/43), who was also among those received by d’Aguilar, describes his generous host as ger גר, thus, as a convert or proselyte of Jewish origin who was only able to converse in Spanish or Dutch—which suggests another (Dutch) connec-tion.27 Furthermore, Katzenellenbogen informs us that d’Aguilar did not exclusively favour Sephardic Jews but also Ashkenazi Jews in need of sup-port. 28 All these benevolent characteristics (see also Kaul 1989: 49-57) seem to have nurtured the legendary accounts of Diego d’Aguilar, ulti-mately, turning him into a heroic figure.

7. A Legendary Hero of a Historical Legend

A remarkable fact about the legend of Diego d’Aguilar is that quite a few alterations have been made to his biography although, as Michael Stude-mund-Halévy emphatically outlines, many facts about his life (for example his Portuguese origin; London as his final destination) were already known in the nineteenth century (‘die Fakten [waren] auch im 19. Jahrhundert bekann’; Studemund-Halévy 2010b). Herein lies the paradox: although Ludwig August Frankl’s version obviously seems to have influenced most other subsequent accounts about Diego d’Aguilar, the efforts made by Frankl in order to draw a more realistic picture of the legendary figure were widely ignored in Zemlinsky and Papo’s famous version. Thus, it is impres-sive that a story comprising so many unhistorical details could gain such an

27 According to Heimann-Jelinek (1991: 27), Diego d’Aguilar did not arrive in Vi-enna via London but Amsterdam.

28 ‘Diego de Aguilar [machte] keinen Unterschied, ob die spanischer, deutscher oder polnischer Abkunft waren; sie fanden bei ihm eine gleich gute Aufnahme’ (Frankl 1856b: 660; see also Studenmund-Halévy 2010a).


official character by turning Diego d’Aguilar into the founder of the Sephardic community of Vienna. However, this appears to be much less surprising when we perceive his legend as a typical ‘foundational myth’ in Stuart Hall’s sense or, in Tamar Alexander-Frizer’s terms (2008), as a ‘his-torical legend’. Alexander-Frizer defines five basic literary genres or narra-tives which are typical for the Sephardic folk tale.29 Thus, the story of Die-go d’Aguilar is not only to be classified as a legend but as a historical legend which constitutes a crucial sub-genre of Sephardic folk tales in gen-eral. One important feature of the narrative genre of the historical legend is that

[i]t may portray encounters between personalities who could never have met inactuality or connect events and places without any basis or reality. Among members of the group, the legend is more powerful than history, and histori-cal facts cannot change the belief in the legend (Alexander-Frizer 2008: 223).

Alexander-Frizer’s statement very much resembles another one made by David Biale, who stresses that the very existence of historical narratives already makes them ‘as true as the historical “facts” that seem to contradict them’ (Biale 2002: xxiv). This is the reason why even the disproval of Diego d’Aguilar’s dubious encounter with Maria Theresa in Spain would not eradicate the authority of this historical legend. The unbroken authority that this historical legend inheres is maybe best expressed by Mordechai Arbell, an Israeli diplomat and researcher of Sephardic communities with Viennese roots, who is very familiar with the story of Diego d’Aguilar: ‘It’s a legend. But this legend is very true’ (Personal Interview: April 12, 2011).

George Lukács (1885–1971), a Marxist philosopher and literary histo-rian who developed his own theories about ‘The Historical Novel’, high-lights another feature which is especially important for the analysis of the role of historic or epic heroes for group identity:

The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community (Lukács 1983: 66).

Lukács is very much aware of the fact that myths are an essential ingredient for the consciousness of an entire community. Florian Krobb who analysed

29 (1) the legend, (2) the ethnic tale, (3) the fairy tale, (4) the novella and (5) the hu-

morous tale (Alexander-Frizer 2008).


another, German version of Diego d’Aguilar’s legend30 very much builds upon Lukács’ theoretical model. Krobb suggests that d’Aguilar’s legendary accounts should rather be classified as a collective autobiography (Kollekti-vautobiographie), since the story—even though it is fictional for the most part—becomes relevant for the construction and imagination of the history (Geschichtsbild) of an entire group.31 Further, Krobb holds that collective autobiographies are at the same time, as he calls them, wishful autobiogra-phies (Wunschautobiographien), by which he means the projection of con-temporary sentiments (gegenwärtige Befindlichkeiten) into the past (Krobb 2002: 15-16). Lukács has already pointed out that another fundamental task of the ‘epic hero’ is to link the crises of the past to the actual crises of the present. On the one hand the hero ‘appears in order to fulfil his historic mission in the [historical] crisis’ and, on the other hand, ‘to solve just [the current social] problems’ (Lukács 1983: 38). As we have seen, the legend of Diego d’Aguilar is not only linked to the historical crisis of Sephardic Jewry—the gerush sepharad—and its aftermaths—the persecution of al-leged Crypto-Jews in the Spanish realms—but also to the Anti-Semitic atmosphere under Maria Theresa’s rule. Furthermore, as will be shown later on, the authors of the official version of the foundation of the Sephardic community of Vienna found themselves in a significant crisis concerning their Sephardic identity which, apparently, led to peculiar national aspira-tions in order to strengthen their Sephardic roots. In fact, Krobb is con-vinced that the emergence of collective autobiographies, such as that of Diego d’Aguilar, went hand in hand with the formation of a Jewish national consciousness in the 19th century (Krobb 2002: 34-43). Having said this, Krobb’s model of wishful autobiographies even more convincingly resem-bles Stuart Hall’s concept of national identity:

National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about “the na-tion” with which we can identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and im-ages are constructed about it (Hall 1992: 293).

30 Die Familie y Aguillar (1873) by Markus Lehmann (Krobb 2002: 73-86). 31 Krobb, for his part, is more interested in the impact of marrano literature on the

consolidation of Jewish-Ashkenazi identity in nineteenth century Germany. His thoughts and concepts, however, may easily be applied to the analysis of Sephardic identity dis-courses, especially in the context of Vienna where Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were interacting on many levels (Schleicher 1932).


Again, we have to keep in mind that in this context attributions, such as true or false, are absolutely irrelevant for the formation of an identity,32 so we may not conclude that historical legends are per se mere inventions, which, for example, is definitely not true for the legend of Diego d’Aguilar as has been noted on various occasions. Hence, even though many aspects of a historical hero are imagined rather than actual proven facts, Lord Reglan, an independent scholar who developed an influential model of the evaluation of mythological heroes, reminds us

[...] that imagination is not the faculty of making something out of nothing, but that of using, in a more or less different form, material already present in the mind. We must conclude, then, that those who composed the traditional stories […] applied, in a more or less modified form, [other] stories which they had heard in a different but not dissimilar connection. We fail to ex-plain the origin of these stories unless we trace the materials from which they were composed (Reglan 2003 [1956]: 208).

In fact, there is no doubt that the creators of Diego d’Aguilar’s legend were heavily influenced by popular marrano33 novels which had been published throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Díaz-Mas (1992: 174-175) names several Sephardic novels and theatre plays that almost exclusively deal with themes such as the persecution of marranos or the unscrupulous methods of the Inquisition. Popular novels representing that ‘typical view’ of Sephardic Jews towards inquisitorial Spain hold titles such as La judia salvada del convento (The Jewish Woman Saved From the Convent), Don Miguel San Salvador (About a Convert), La Hermosa Rahel (A Story about Marranos of Portuguese Origin); among theatre plays there were Don Yosef de Castilla, Don Abravanel i Formosa o Desteramiento de los djudios de Espanya (Don Abravenel and Formosa or Exile of the Jews from Spain) and Los marranos: Senas de la vida djudia myentres la inkizisiyon espaniola (The marranos: Scenes from Jewish Life during the Spanish Inquisition). The latter short play was published by T. Yaliz, also known as Alberto Barzilay, in Salonika in 1934 and is about a convert by the name of Don Miguel who became an inquisitor, persecuting Elena, a Jewish woman who turns out to be his own mother. Studemund-Halévy and Collin (2013: 245) suggest that the author of this play might have been inspired by the popular legend of Diego d’Aguilar since the two plots very

32 ‘[...] Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by

the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 2006: 6). 33 The conversos, or new Christians, in medieval Spain were also called marranos

(swines) or tornadizos (turncoats) which were expressions of resentment and contempt on behalf of the old Christians (Kaplan 2012: 138).


much resemble each other. At any rate, similar plots frequently reappear in many Judeo-Spanish novels throughout the nineteenth century (Díaz-Mas 1992: 175). These stories typically feature basic themes like denunciation, persecution, separation from one’s family, education in a Christian convent, torture and Auto-da-fé tribunals34 and sometimes even a miraculous rescue and an escape to safe havens in cities such as London or Amsterdam. Usu-ally these stories were adaptations from French, Hebrew or German novels translated into Judeo-Spanish (Studenmund-Halévy 2010b). However, we must not forget that these novels are based upon true historical events on the Iberian Peninsula. Even before the expulsion it was not uncommon that confessional fractures ran through the same family: while some family members converted to Christianity, others remained true to their old faith (Bossong 2008: 48). We may conclude that such incidents somehow be-came part of the collective cultural memory of Jews after the expulsion. The same holds true for the conversos who—by virtue of being persecuted at the hands of the Inquisition—gradually turned into mysterious and heroic fig-ures that later became the protagonists of thrilling novels and even historical legends, such as the one about Diego d’Aguilar (Krobb 2002: 25). So, al-though most historical legends are, in fact, based on historical events, Alex-ander-Frizer (2008: 223) outlines that historical legends themselves—or rather their authors—choose the facts and the manner of their presentation in accordance with a certain goal. This goal, following Hall (1992: 294-295), is the formation of a ‘foundational myth’ which helps ‘disfranchised’ or uprooted peoples to ‘conceive and express their resentment and its con-tents in intelligible terms’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 1) by providing an ‘alternative history or counter-narrative’ (ibid.).

Returning to Krobb’s concept of collective and wishful autobiographies, another factor concerning this model seems worth discussing in detail, namely the projection of contemporary sentiments into the past. By taking a closer look at the biographies of Adolf von Zemlinsky and Michael Papo and also at their social and historical environment, we learn a lot about their version of Diego d’Aguilar’s legend; for instance, why the two authors decided to publish their version of the legend in this particular way and not another.

34 An Auto-da-fé (act of faith) was a public inquisitorial show trial against heretics

(including Judaisers). The most severe punishment to be imposed was death by burning (Pérez 2006: 154-169).


8. Authorship and Social Environment

Adolf von Zemlinsky was born in Vienna on 23 April 1845 as Adolf Seminsky to Catholic immigrants from the Hungarian (today Slovakian) town of Zsolna (also known as Žilina or Sillein in der Zips). He decided to change the orthography of his family name into the more ‘ambiguous’ Zem-linsky, most probably because he found it more suitable for perusing a liter-ary career. Together with the new family name he also adopted the aristo-cratic but rather ‘spurious’ ‘von’ ‘in order to make his mark in the world of letters’ (Beaumont 2000: 9). Adolf ‘von’ Zemlinsky was the son-in-law of Shem Tov Semo (born in Vienna, raised in his parents’ city Sarajevo) who, for his part, was one of the most active promoters of the Judeo-Spanish press in Vienna (Bunis 2013: 44). Together with his sons Haim, Shabatay and Aron and, of course, his son-in-law Adolf von Zemlinsky, Shem Tov Semo made Vienna one of the most important places for the publication of printed media in Djudezmo (Studemund-Halévy 2010a: 61-62). The Semo-Zemlinsky family even had its own small publishing company and many members of the family were committed authors and translators. Shem Tov Semo, for instance, translated various novels originally written in German by Zemlinsky into Judeo-Spanish (ibid.: 68-69). El Correo de Vyena—Vienna’s most important Judeo-Spanish periodical, which included several supplements such as El Dragoman, Guerta de Istorya and Ilustra Guerta de Istorya—was also published by Shem Tov Semo and his sons (Studemund-Halévy 2009). These newspapers and magazines were not only eagerly read in Vienna but they were also extremely popular among Sephardic Jews in the Balkans.35 With Vienna being the capital of the so called ‘Sephardic Haskalah’ or Sephardic Enlightenment (Bunis 2013: 42-44), Semo’s mis-sion was to create a synthesis of Sephardic traditions and modern pedagogy in which he was heavily inspired by the rabbis Yehuda Bibas from Corfu (1780–1852) and Yehuda Alkalay from Sarajevo (1798–1878), both crucial figures in the advent of modern Jewish nationalism (Studemund-Halévy 2009).

Catholic by birth, Adolf von Zemlinsky decided to convert to Judaism in order to be able to marry Shem Tov Semo’s daughter Clara (1848–1912). His father-in-law did not seem to be bothered by the fact that Adolf von Zemlinsky was actually a convert; he rather seemed pleased by the ambition of his son-in-law to learn Djudezmo, which is why Zemlinsky soon became

35 For example, many of Semo’s texts were also published in Salonika (for example

Guerta de Estorya; Bunis 2013: 52-53) which was definitely the most important publish-ing place for Judeo-Spanish newspapers.


one of Semo’s closest associates in the family business. Within the Sephardic community of Vienna Adolf von Zemlinsky also gained much respect and was even appointed as its secretary in 1872 (Heimann-Jelinek 2010: 146). Clara and Adolf von Zemlinsky’s daughter Mathilde Zem-slinsky (1877–1923) who would later marry the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). Clara and Adolf’s son, Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942), would also become a famous Austrian composer (Kohlbauer-Fritz 2010: 162).

Similar to the formerly mentioned Shem Tov Semo, Adolf von Zem-linsky’s father-in-law, Michael Papo’s roots also lie in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo) which had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878. From 1888 to 1918 Papo severed as the rabbi of the Sephardic community of Vienna. The Papo family would later on be heavily affected by the terror of the Nazi regime. Michael Papo’s wife (née Grünbaum) was deported to Theresienstadt where she died in 1942 (Heimann-Jelinek 2010: 164). In the same year their daughter was killed in the Maly Trostinec death camp in Belarus. The only family member that survived the Holocaust was Manfred Papo (1898–1966) who had also served as a rabbi in Salzburg and St. Pölten (ibid.: 166; Papo 1967: 327). For his lifelong commitment to the Sephardic community of Vienna, which had not ceased to keep contact with the Otto-man Empire, Michael Papo was decorated with a medal on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan in 1905 (Heimann-Jelinek 2010: 164). Shortly before his death in 1918 he was even rewarded with the title haham bashi which is the Turkish term for ‘chief rabbi’ (Papo 1967: 342).

During his lifetime, Papo was an active supporter of the cultural and academic association Esperanza which would play a significant role on the World Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913 (Kohlbauer-Fritz 2010: 174). Esperanza (‘Hope’ in Judeo-Spanish) was exerting a huge influence on the Sephardic communities in the Balkans (first and foremost in Croatia, Bos-nia-Herzegovina, Romania and Bulgaria), promoting an ideology that Ben-bassa and Rodrigue (2000: 143-150) call ‘Sephardism’. Sephardism was originally meant as a culturalist trend, thus, putting strong emphasis on the language and culture of Sephardic Jews (Ayala and von Schmädel 2010: 85), but soon it changed into an ideological movement, similar to the eman-cipatory ambitions of Central and Eastern European Jewry. Sephardism can be valued as a counter movement to (Ashkenazi dominated) Zionism,36 which is why Benbassa and Rodrigue (2000: 147) refer to it as a ‘Diaspora-type’ kind of Zionism or nationalism. Its supporters hoped that Sephardic

36 In the course of the nineteenth century the Sephardim of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia were soon outnumbered by Ashkenazi immigrants who had moved there when these parts of the Balkans were incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire.


culture would continue to ‘flourish in both the Diaspora and Palestine’ even after the establishment of a new Jewish homeland.

Taking these circumstances into account, it is hardly surprising that Mi-chael Papo and Adolf von Zemlinsky began their chronicle with a broader discourse about the Jewish past as they perceived it:

[...] der Bestand eines Volksstammes [ist] in den Blättern der Weltgeschich-te verzeichnet, der Bestand eines mächtigen großen Volksstammes, dessen Geschichte gar eng verflochten sind [sic], mit dem anderer Volksstämme und alle diese Folianten widmen immer und immer wieder ein Blatt der Ge-schichte dieses Volkes, das in Folge maßloser an ihm verübter Grausamkei-ten und Unterdrückungen jeglicher Art, eine Zeit lang der Befürchtung Raum gab, auch diese Nation würde vergehen, verderben. Diese Be-fürchtung erfüllt sich jedoch nicht (Papo and Zemlinsky 1888: 1).

Here, Zemlinsky and Papo strongly emphasise the resolute national nature of their own Volksstamm37 by simultaneously juxtaposing it in opposition to other, more powerful tribes or nations that repeatedly used to oppress and maltreat the Jewish people. This experience—of being an oppressed and discriminated against ‘Other’ and, respectively, the discourse about such an experience—definitely seems to be one of the main reasons that two authors imagine themselves and their co-religionists not only as a community but, at long last, as a national entity in opposition to their oppressors (see Hegel’s above-mentioned Master-Slave Dialectic). Defining one’s own group merely by a process of elimination, letting another party set up imaginary boundaries which shall decide who belongs to one group and who to an-other, is only one step, although a decisive one, in imagining a national/ ethnic/religious entity.

Nevertheless, when Papo served as rabbi in Vienna it was already clear that the Sephardic identity, including one of its main carriers, Djudezmo, had entered into a state of decomposition. For instance, by the end of the nineteenth century it was German that had become the dominant vernacular within the Sephardic community of Vienna. This circumstance might ex-plain Papo’s strong engagement within the Esperanza association which sought to strengthen Sephardic culture as well as the use of Judeo-Spanish as a spoken language. However, the efforts made by Esperanza could not suspend this ongoing process of decay. Papo did his best in order to coun-teract these developments. In 1884 he published a German-Djudezmo dic-tionary (Traductor de lenguas) under the title Trajoman. Although it was

37 It is important to note that Zemlinsky apparently does not use Volksstamm or Na-tion—translated as tribu טריבו and nasyon נאסייון in Papo’s version—for referring to Sephardic Jews alone but Jews in general.


primarily intended for Sephardic merchants from the Ottoman Empire who wanted to sell their goods in German-speaking lands (Studemund-Halévy 2010b: 78; Hernández Socas, Sinner and Tabares 2010), it can be valued as an effort to strengthen the relations between the Sephardic Jews of Vienna and their co-religionists in South Eastern Europe.

What is interesting to note in this context is that Benedict Anderson ap-praises the production of word lists and simple lexicons as an important precursor for the emergence of modern nationalism. Of course, Michael Papo’s Trajoman was not the only Sephardic dictionary or textbook ever published; however, it is interesting to note that out of 21 Sephardic gram-mar books and dictionaries—also including books for teaching Hebrew to children—that had been published between 1821 and 1930, seven—or one out of three—were published in Vienna—including the first one ever pub-lished, Hinuh leNaar: Maestro de kriatura en sortes de alef bet kon algunas kuantas brahot menesterozas. Viyena 1821 (Studenmund-Halévy 2009: 13-15). Anderson’s assumption that dictionaries and lexicons play a sort of vanguard role when it comes to the advent of nationalism has another ori-gin, which is also very compelling within the Viennese context. According to Anderson, the invention of the dictionary stood at the beginning of a broader development, namely the scientific comparative study of languages and philology which, of course, was first of all an elitist endeavour (Ander-son 2006: 70-71). So it is hardly surprising that at the turn of the twentieth century Vienna had evolved into one of the first centres of academic re-search into Judeo-Spanish.

The variety of different dialects promoted several Romance philologists and even rabbis, who were interested in the language of Sephardic Jews, to engage in research into Judeo-Spanish. Most of these intellectuals came from Germany—Kurt Levy (1907–1935), Max Leopold Wagner (1880–1962)—and Austria—Julius Subak (1872–1936), Kalmi Baruch (1896–1945)—but also from North America—Leo Wiener (1862–1939), Max Aaron Luria (1891–1966) (Quintana Rodríguez 2006: 3). In Austria the Kaiserliche Akademie enlisted Julius Subak to collect recordings in the Balkans in Judeo-Spanish for the newly inaugurated Phonogramarchiv in Vienna (Studemund-Halévy 2010a: 70). Subak’s recordings from 1908, together with the material collected by Max A. Luria in 1926, were recently published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) (Leibl 2009). These records and transcripts count among the oldest recorded testimonies of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans. Furthermore, several dissertations and essays about linguistic aspects of Judeo-Spanish (phonology, grammar) and the history of Sephardic Jews were published, most of them in Vienna or by scholars who had studied or


lived in Vienna.38 Although Vienna was definitely an important point of departure for many scholars studying Judeo-Spanish and Sephardic culture in the Balkans, it is an interesting fact that almost nothing was published about the variety of Judeo-Spanish spoken in Vienna. The only researcher who explicitly named some examples of the ‘Viennese dialect’ of Judeo-Spanish is the Russian born American linguist Leo Wiener in his article Songs of the Spanish Jews in the Balkan Peninsula (Wiener 1903: 206).39

Although—following Benedict Anderson—the activities of ‘profes-sional intellectuals were central to the shaping of nineteenth-century Euro-pean nationalisms’ (Anderson 2006: 71), which also becomes evident from the fact that Vienna became a centre for the promotion of Sephardism, we have to remain realistic about the actual condition of Judeo-Spanish and its role as a living vernacular language. Rafael Mazliach, a Sephardic banker and commerce agent from Vienna, explicitly underlines the precarious status of Judeo-Spanish not only in Vienna but all over the Balkans at the turn of the twentieth century. In a letter to Ángel Publido Fernández (1852–1932), a Spanish physician and politician who started a campaign in order to re-establish contact between Spain and the Sephardic diaspora, 40 he wrote:

Sir, I can respond to you with deep sorrow that the Youth in Vienna as well as in the Balkan states is alienating itself from the mother tongue; the languages of their countries of residence, here German, there Serbian, are ousting the Spanish language! while the Elderly still hold on to their mother tongue.41

38 Grünwald, Moritz: Zur romanischen Dialektologie. Über den jüdisch-spanischen

Dialekt als Beitrag zur Aufhellung der Aussprache im Altspanischen (Belovar ca. 1893); Grünwald, Moritz: Sitten und Bräuche der Juden im Orient (Vienna 1894); Levy, Moritz: Die Sephardim in Bosnien (Sarajevo 1911); Baruch, Kalmi: Der Lautstand des Juden-spanischen in Bosnien (Vienna 1923); Altarac, Isaac: Die Spracheigentümlichkeiten der Judenspanischen Bibelübersetzung (Vienna 1932); Schleicher, Mordche Schlome: Ge-schichte der spaniolischen Juden (Sephardim) in Wien (Vienna 1932); see Studemund-Halévy (2010a: 70n28).

39 According to Quintana Rodríguez there is no evidence for the existence of a dis-tinct Viennese dialect of Djudezmo. However, we can assume that the spoken vernacular of the Sephardic Jews of Vienna very much resembled the speech of Sephardic Jews in Bosnia and Serbia, since these were the regions where most of the Sephardic families living in Vienna originally came from (Quintana Rodríguez 2006: 40-41n30).

40 For a detailed biography of Ángel Publido Fernández and his engagement among the Sephardim in South Eastern Europe cf. Meyuhas-Ginio (2007: 193-208).

41 ‘Señor, yo puedo con mucha tristesa contastar, que la Juventud de Vienna y de los estados balcaniquos se esta alejando de la lengua maternal; las lenguas de los estados de sus domicillcos, aquí el aleman, ayí el serbo, estan mayorgando el español! mientres que


With regard to this regretful account it is possible that there is an additional reason why as early as the 1880s Adolf von Zemlinsky and Michael Papo decided to publish their chronicle—including the legend of Diego d’Aguilar—in a bilingual edition. It is highly probable that the young gen-eration of Sephardic Jews in Vienna had difficulty understanding and read-ing the languages of their parents and grandparents. In 1887, the same year as the inauguration of the new Sephardic synagogue in Vienna and one year before the publication of von Zemlinsky’s and Papo’s chronicle, a letter to the editor of the periodical Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums was pub-lished that very well describes the loss of Judeo-Spanish and the ongoing process of acculturation the Sephardic community of Vienna had gone through:

[…] Bis vor 30 oder 40 Jahren trugen die Mitglieder der türkischen Gemein-de, Männer und Frauen, die malerische orientalische Tracht und sprachen zumeist Spaniolisch, jetzt kleiden sie sich ausschließlich deutsch, respective französisch, d. h. modern und sprechen deutsch. Sie haben eine Schule mit deutscher Unterrichtssprache, und zahlreiche Kinder besuchen die allgemei-nen Volks-, Bürger- und Mittelschulen. So viel jedoch bekannt ist, widmen sich nur selten Knaben oder Jünglinge der Wissenschaft im Allgemeinen der jüdischen insbesondere. Ihr Ritus in der Synagoge ist der spanische. Sie ha-ben in letzter Zeit jedoch einen deutschen Kantor, Namens Bauer, und einen Chor (Philippson 1887: 633; see also Seroussi 1992: 149-150).

This commentary vividly describes the drastic social changes within the Sephardic community of Vienna which occurred only within a few decades; apparently, a new—in Hall’s terms—hybrid style of culture had emerged, less Turkish and more Viennese. Consequently, this process was associated with the loss of the Judeo-Spanish language and an alienation from the traditional Sephardic culture. This was also the time when the children of some long-established Sephardic families in Vienna decided to withdraw their subscription from the Turkish-Israelite Community of Vienna.42

This was precisely the environmental setting in which the legend of Diego d’Aguilar had emerged. The cultural changes that had taken place only within a few decades must have been perceived as a real crisis by Sephardic intellectuals, such as Papo and von Zemlinsky. Obviously these two authors adopted and modified this legend of Diego d’Aguilar in order to create a coherent history and to remind the Viennese Sephardim of their

los Viejos detienen con amor la lengua maternel.’ (Letter by Rafael Mazliach in Pulido Fernández 1993: 308). Translation is by the author.

42 As for example members of the wealthy Russo family (Kohlbauer-Fritz 2010: 108).


own, first and foremost Spanish, roots. In this respect remembrance of the Balkan and the Ottoman heritage, from which contact had not yet broken off, was not enough. For Papo and von Zemlinsky it was much more impor-tant to draw a direct link to the ancient homeland (Sephard I) in order to be able to preserve the Sephardic character of the community; apart from these Spanish/Sephardic elements they were also keen to emphasise the Vien-nese/Austrian, as well as Turkish/Ottoman aspects which altogether become manifest in the main character of the founding legend. Several facts of Diego d’Aguilar’s biography—for example, his Iberian origin and his influ-ence at the court of Habsburg—appeared perfectly suited to conversion into suggestive narratives, with the aim of creating a direct link between the ancient Sepharad and Vienna, which also became known as the new ‘Sepharad of the Danube’.43 However, the fact that the hero in question was of Portuguese origin obviously did not make him ‘Spanish’, or in other words, ‘Sephardic’ enough. As a consequence, his biography had to be altered and dramatised in order to turn it into an ‘authentic’ Sephardic folk story, including a setting in the Spanish capital Madrid, as well as the hero’s involvement in the Spanish Inquisition. All these elements have obviously been borrowed from popular Sephardic novels of the nineteenth century. Apart from a direct link to Spain, a link to the new host society, in which most Sephardic Jews living in Vienna had integrated so well, also had been created: not only should the Sephardim of Vienna feel themselves to be proud Jews of Spanish heritage but also Viennese Sephardim. The aim was, in Hall’s sense (1990: 230-237), to connect, or one could say harmonise, several cultural spaces or ‘presences’ which were so significantly important for the authors of Diego d’Aguilar’s legend.

9. Conclusion: The Sepherad of the Danube – A Hybrid Diaspora Society

According to what has been exposed so far, it is most evident that Michael Papo and Adolf von Zemlinsky tried to position the historic figure of Diego d’Aguilar within the narratives of the past, which seemed to have been of greater significance for them. The result was a heroic and legendary figure that should remind the addressees of this story, first and foremost their Sephardic co-religionists in Vienna, of their cultural, as well as their histori-

43 ‘Sepharad of the Danube’ (Sefarad an der Donau, La Sefarad del Danubio) is a

term frequently used by Michael Studemund-Halévy for referring to the Sephardic com-munity of Vienna (Studemund-Halévy 2009; 2010a; 2013).


cal and geographical roots. However, in order to make d’Aguilar a much more Austrian figure or, in other words, to create a link to the present envi-ronment, the legendary account of d’Aguilar featured prominent and au-thoritative Austrian figures such as Maria Theresa and Charles VI.44 Last but not least, another link to the Sephardic colonies on the Balkans and in Anatolia, where most of the Viennese Sephardim had come from, had to be accommodated by featuring a no less imperious figure than the Ottoman Sultan.45 Although the personal contact between d’Aguilar and these his-torical figures may well be questioned, we have seen that many of those allegedly historical links are not all per se fictional. In fact, several elements of d’Aguilar’s biography are not only feasible but even seem to reflect real historical events, as for example his converso background, his confirmed presence in Vienna, his relations with the Habsburgian court, and his pa-tronage of local Jewish communities. The legendary heroic figure of d’Aguilar, however, is first and foremost an imagined character; thus, merely an image of the historical figure. Of course the imaginative elements within his legendary biography do not make his figure less authentic or even corrupt, but rather bring into focus all the different elements or, again in Hall’s terms, ‘presences’, which constitute the diasporic/cultural identity of the Sephardic Jews in Vienna. By drawing upon the (imagined) diasporic experience of one Spanish (former converso) Jew and by highlighting his vivid interactions with the Austrian and Ottoman authorities, the main re-cipients of that legend—the Sephardic Jews of Vienna—should be re-minded, first of all, of their Spanish but also of their Austrian and Ottoman heritage, especially at a time when the traditional Sephardic lifestyle and culture, together with its language, was about to disappear. Furthermore, we may also conclude that the non-Jewish readers of the German version of the legend were intended to receive the impression that this community was—for historical reasons—after all an autochthonous Austrian community. Moreover, the legend’s whole plot featured a certain aristocratic aura which is quite a typical narrative element employed by many Sephardic authors as well as in Sephardic folk tales since, according to Miriam Bodia (1997: 85), the typical medieval Sephardic Jew most popularly imagined by Sephardim in the diaspora is usually a nobleman or, in her owns words, ‘a figure with-out parallels in other Jewries’. The aristocratic standing of Baron Diego

44 In Ludwig August Frankl’s and Michael Papo’s version of the legend even Prince

Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) makes a short cameo appearance. 45 Neither Papo nor Zemlinsky mention the name of the ruling Ottoman Sultan who

supposedly intervened when Maria Theresa made plans for expelling the Jews from Austria. Frankl, in turn, mentioned ‘Sultan Selim’; however, a Sultan by that name was not in power in the lifetime of Diego d’Aguilar (Akşin Somel 2010: lxxv-lxxvi)


d’Aguilar most perfectly served the author’s efforts in the course of creating a figure that most closely resembles an outstanding and legendary hero. This hero was able to incorporate—at least—three significant ‘presences’ constituting the Sephardic diaspora in Vienna: a Spanish/Sephardic pres-ence (representing the strong retrospective dependence on the imagined homeland, that is, Sepharad I), an Austrian/Viennese presence (for having gradually integrated/assimilated into the Viennese society) and an Otto-man/Turkish presence (representing the historical and political ties with the Ottoman Empire); furthermore, we could also add the existence of a Balkan presence, since many community members continued to maintain close contacts with their regions of origin (for example represented in the legend by d’Aguilar’s close relation with the Sephardic community of Temeswar46). By applying Hall’s conceptual model of diaspora and cultural identity, we immediately become aware of the hybrid nature of the Sephar-dic community of Vienna. The manifolds ‘presences’ featured in the legend do not constitute pure origins but should rather be understood as discourses about historical and geographical origins. Only the knowledge of a coherent history allows individuals to imagine themselves as groups of people be-longing together and, hereinafter, as a community or even as a nation. Fol-lowing Benedict Anderson, we may not forget that an original and meaning-ful identity of a whole group—and maybe even of individuals—can only be imagined because history and even personal biographies turn out to be highly complex and full of elusive ruptures. Precisely for that reason, Sephardic communities in particular always must be studied within their particular cultural, social and historical contexts. This is why, for example, the different notions and nuances of Viennese Sephardic identity cannot be understood without keeping the different—Biblical, Spanish, Portuguese, Balkan, Ottoman, Habsburgian, and nowadays even Central Asian, Cauca-sian, Russian and Soviet— ‘presences’ in mind, which all have a share in this imagined collective identity of Sephardic Jews in Vienna to a greater or lesser extent. In order to give such an identity its shape and meaning, the creation and the distribution of an identity-establishing foundational myth, representing not only the origins in the past but also the present circum-stances, seems to be inevitably necessary. Especially in a diasporic context, such a narrative, for example about a legendary hero, is able to define the boundaries of one’s own aspired identity. In order to maintain a national character, single intellectuals and even entire intellectual associations

46 One could argue whether Temeswar really is a Balkan city since Romania is not

always counted as a Balkan country. However, as Maria Todorova (2009: 46-49) has exposed, Romania also may be counted as a Balkan country since ‘the Balkans’ is, too, an imaginary place without clearly defined borders.


sought after efficient ways of distributing these identity-constituting narra-tives at the turn of the twentieth century, most likely through the production of printed texts in a language that every potential addressee was able to understand. Thus it is not surprising at all that Michael Papo, the co-author of one of the most popular printed versions of the foundational myth of the Sephardic community of Vienna, was also one of the most prominent sup-porting members of Esperanza. However, in 1923—only a few years after Papo had passed away—an article in El Mundo Sefaradi (Esperanza’s own club magazine) was published which already drew a much less enthusiastic picture of the future of the Sephardic community of Vienna. Both the decay of Sephardic print culture, as well as of Judeo-Spanish as a spoken lan-guage, were clearly considered to be the main reasons for the erosion of the national identity of the Sephardic Jews in Vienna:

Vienna once [was] an important Sephardic centre. Here, many Judeo-Spanish newspapers were published, as well as many other different works in that language, especially many religious books for the Sephardic rite were published and edited in Vienna. […] But over the time the good old Jewish tradition was lost […] The contact between Judaism and the Sephardic way of life in the East is crumbling day by day. […]. The young Sephardic gen-eration is uprooted. At best they know a little how to read Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish they do not speak at all, as “Spaniards” they do not participate in the Jewish national life, thus they are urged to give an answer to the question: what nation are you part of?47

47 ‘Vyenah [era] un importante sentro sefardi. Aki aparesian gazetas judeoespanyo-

les, se publikavan diferentes ovrasen este idioma, i espesyalmente redaktavan en Vyenah i imprimian los livros relijyozos para el rito sefardi. […] Ma, la buena tradisyon judia se fue kon el tyempo perdyendo […]. El kontakto de este judaizmo kon la vida sefardi en el oryente se rompia de dia en dia [...] La jenerasyon jovena sefardi es una dezraizada. En ebreo save, en el major falo, apenas meldar, el judeo-espanyol no avla del todo, komo ‘espanyoles’ no partesipan en la vida nasyonal-judia, i se topa en apreto de dar repuesta a la demanda: de ke nasyon sos’ (El Mundo Sefardi 1 (1) 1923: 39-41). Translation by the author.


Appendix

Figure 1: Transcript of Diego d’Aguilar’s tombstone inscription (selected from the Genealogical Record in the Colyer- Fergusson Collection, archived in the Society of Genealogists Library, London, UK)

Figure 2: Pedigree of the d’Aguilar Family (selected from the Genealogical Record in the Colyer- Fergusson Collection, archived in the Society of Genealogists Li-brary, London, UK


Figure 3: Cover sheet of Papo, Zemlinsky 1888 (German version)


Figure 4: Cover sheet of Papo, Zemlinsky 1888 (Judeo-Spanish version)


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