The aim of this article is to present a new anthropological interpretation of secular trends among the marranos of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Referring to Mary Douglas’ concept of impurity and to Victor Turner’s notion of liminality as well as to some historical records on the marranos’ way of life and their religiosity, the author shows that the marrano, torn apart between the Jewish and Christian worlds, is placed beyond the accepted and unambiguous social categories and therefore perceived as a threat to social order. In the second part of the article examples of skeptical, rational or even atheist marrano attitudes are analyzed. A special emphasis was placed on the philosophical work of Baruch Spinoza who proposes in his Tractatus theologico-politicus a secular vision of a state based on tolerance and freedom of speech. Spinoza’s efforts are shown as a marrano rationalist’s struggle to overcome the “marrano condition,” i.e. a condition of people forced to live on the margin of society due to their hybrid status. The new secular identity can be therefore understood as a response to unresolved conflicts generated by the social position of the marranos.

The paper offers a general outline of the situation of Sephardi Jews who lived in Sarajevo between World War I and World Word II with a special focus on social and cultural issues. The period between the world wars is described from the perspective of the quality of local Sephardic life: its intensive cultural, social and political activities. On the one hand, it meant closer contacts with the Gentile community and, in many cases, even assimilation; on the other hand, an interest in general Jewish matters (i.e. the Zionist movement, the cooperation and contacts with Ashkenazi Jews), as well as in Sephardi matters as such (i.e. the struggle for the maintenance of Judeo-Spanish language and Sephardic culture). The article illustrates the situation of the Sephardic group at that time by the examples of robust Jewish institutions and organisations like La Benevolencija, La Lira, Matatja, as well as some Zionist groups. Much attention is also given to the local Jewish journals Jevrejski život and Jevrejski glas and their role in the so-called Sarajevan conflict, along with Sephardic and Zionist movements. The description is supplemented with observations on the local Sephardic intelligentsia and the presentation of the profiles and activities of the writers Laura Papo Bohoreta and Isak Samokovlija, as well as the linguist and essayist Kalmi Baruh.

This paper concerns Avner Perez’s Siniza i Fumo (1986), which is one of the first collections of poems published in Judeo-Spanish since the 1970s, after the long interruption caused by the Holocaust. The book not only commemorates the Jewish community of Salonica, exterminated in 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and pays homage to its language and cultural legacy, but also ponders over the possibility of the survival of Ladino as a living language. The study analyses the internal dynamics of Siniza i Fumo, which presents “step by step” the way that the Jews from Salonica were forced to go through before being killed in gas chambers. After the images of extermination come the ones of hope, but it is only limited and conditional hope, concerning the revival of Judeo-Spanish language and literature. The paper also discusses Perez’s references to different sources of Sephardic literature such as the Bible (Lamentations) and Sephardic folk poetry.

The article offers a gender reading of Yiddish folk songs: lullabies, family songs, love songs, mikveh songs, lyrical dialogues between mothers and daughters. Placed in their cultural context, they are analyzed from the perspective of the female subjectivity they express. Numerous Yiddish folk songs emerged among women, who also recorded and transmitted many of them. Alongside tkhines (women’s prayers in Yiddish), folk songs constitute the most important sphere of female literary expression before the emergence of modern Yiddish literature. By means of simple forms they describe typical gender roles of a daughter, bride, wife and mother, as well as an agunah (deserted wife); quite often they also contain social criticism of the constraints these roles imposed upon them.

The purpose of the article is to present the images of Jews and Poles created in the novel written by Józef Rogosz and published in installments in the Przegląd Tygodniowy weekly in Warsaw in the years 1880–1882. The article traces reasons for publishing this antisemitic novel in this periodical edited by Adam Wiślicki, who did not have antisemitic views and supported acculturation and integration of Jews with the Polish nation. The article also analyses ways in which Polish v ersus Jewish characters are constructed: the former are created according to negative antisemitic stereotypes, while the latter are presented in positive light. Finally, the article attempts to trace modifications of the text made in the wake of the pogrom in Warsaw in 1881.