Rabbi Joseph Skloot’s Biderman Lecture Examines Three Generations of a Jewish Family After the Exile from Portugal

For Joseph Skloot, Ph.D., Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History, delivering this year's Biderman Lecture in Judaic Studies at Princeton University was a homecoming.

Skloot said it was "an immense and emotional honor" to "contribute now as a professional academician to the culture of scholarship" on the very campus where he spent his undergraduate years - the place where he first "encountered the academic study of Judaism and the Jewish people" and "got the bug" that would drive him on to his career at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Skloot, whose current work often focuses on the history of rabbinic culture and its transmission through printing, delivered the October 28 lecture, "Building a Home out of Books: One Family's Story of Migration, Providence, and the Printed Word." Through the writings of three men from three generations of the Ibn Yahya or Ibn Yihya family, Skloot explored "a range of ways Iberian Jewish refugees resident in Italy in the mid-to late-sixteenth century described and explained the magnitude and implications of their exile and migration" following the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal.

This Biderman lecture, Skloot told his audience, is part of a larger project the professor has embarked on: "a collective biography of three generations of refugee rabbis" who, before they became fugitives in 1493, were "among the most prominent Jewish families in Portugal," renowned as "financiers and traders, embedded in the politics of the Portuguese court and counsellors and physicians to the monarch."

Examining the writings of David, Yosef, and Gedaliah Ibn Yahya, Skloot observed that "while each generation crafted their own retelling of the story of their family's displacement, they also relied on the rich theological and poetic vocabulary of biblical and rabbinic tradition."

Skloot came to the topic while completing his first book, First Impressions: Sefer Hasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing, published by Brandeis University Press in 2023, which was awarded the Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. First Impressions traces how Hebrew printers of the sixteenth century adapted and transformed medieval manuscripts into books, and the social and cultural worlds that shaped those volumes. One of the print shops he studied in that monograph was the press of the partners of Bologna, Jewish silk weavers of Iberian and Italian origin who printed nine titles in the 1530s. Two of those titles, a philosophical treatise and a biblical commentary, were authored by Yosef Ibn Yahya.

From the philosophical treatise, Skloot learned the captivating story of Yosef's father David's flight from Portugal prior to the forced conversion of Portugese Jewry in 1497. Some years after his arrival in Italy, David would become the leading rabbi in Naples until the expulsion of that city's Jews in 1540. Yosef's son, Gedaliah, achieved enduring notoriety for his book Shalshelet ha-kabbalah (Chain of Tradition), one of the first modern historical works written by a Jew in Hebrew.

Skloot first read about Gedaliah's Shalshelet ha-kabbalah as an undergraduate at Princeton, an encounter that led him to pursue a doctorate in Jewish history following his ordination at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and now he has come full circle: researching Gedaliah and his family as a faculty member at HUC-JIR and presenting his research at this prestigious Princeton lectureship.

Jewish life in Portugal may have been all but wiped out as a result of persecution in the fifteenth century, but the written works of those who escaped like the Ibn Yahya family, Skloot explains, represent "a kind of enduring memorial that has persisted even longer than the golden years of Portuguese Jewry" ever did.

The Biderman Lecture is sponsored by Princeton's Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies and its Center for Jewish Life, and endowed by HUC-JIR Governor Emeriti Mark Biderman and Wendy Biderman.

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