American Jewish Archives Journal, Vol 44, No. 01 (1992)

8 American Jewish Archives
tary evidence regularly presents the position of victors and their suc-
cessor establishments, and other positions only rarely, and then usu-
ally only in proportion to their strength. Wherever possible, the
presentors have selected, packaged and promulgated the evidence in
the documents through the biases of their assumptive systems. As a
result, any effort at the comprehension of historical situations must
rely on the restoration of the missing links of societal activity through
a typological reconstruction consistent with the available documen-
tary evidence and the evidence of the broader societal context. To be
sure, such methodology is not without its own intrinsic biases, but
these are theoretically neutral toward the presentor and equally avail-
able to public scrutiny and correction.
The removal of these impediments and the application of contem-
porary social scientific methodology pave the way for a more com-
prehensive analysis of the Sephardic phenomenon. From such
analysis the Sephardic phenomenon emerges as the distillate of the
progressive interaction behveeen individuals and groups we can ret-
rospectively label as Sephardic with the total environments of which
they formed an integral part. In this light every culture in which the
Sephardim were active participants becomes indispensable for an
understanding of the totality of Sephardic experience. So too every
phase of this experience becomes indispensable to an understanding
of its unfolding.
The Sephardic phenomenon is divisible into seven major phases:
(I) its foundation, from its beginnings until the Muslim conquest in
711-715; (2) its formation, in Muslim Iberia until the Almoravid con-
quest around 1150; (3) its "Occidentation," in Christian Iberia until
around 1360; (4) its bifurcation, in Christian Iberia until 1497; (5) its
rationalization, in Christian Iberia and its colonies; (6) its consolida-
tion, in the Eastern Sephardic Diaspora and (7) its universalization, in
the Western Sephardic Diaspora.
In every one of these phases, in varying forms, four constants
appear: an impressive variety of Sephardic economic and political
activity in the community at large; a high degree of Sephardic inte-
gration into the broader community; the numerical growth of
Sephardic Jewry through the absorption of non-Jews; and, in addition
to devoutly religious components in the Sephardic community, the