Exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled to Italy translated Hebrew bible into their common language
In 1553, a community of exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had found refuge and patronage in the northern Italian city of Ferrara did something that would have been unthinkable, and very possibly fatal, in their former homelands.
They printed their own Hebrew bible in Spanish.
The Ferrara bible, as the volume came to be known, was needed for reasons both practical and symbolic. A large number of the Sephardic Jews living in Ferrara had ostensibly converted to Roman Catholicism in an attempt to avoid expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. But many of the converts, or conversos, had tried to keep their ancestral faith alive by practising it in secret. Despite their best efforts, however, time, displacement and the prohibition on Judaism soon eroded their knowledge.
“The Ferrara community was formed not so much by those expelled in 1492, but primarily by Portuguese and Spanish converts who had remained crypto-Jews, that is, they had secretly maintained Jewish religious practice and preservation within their families in Spain or Portugal, passing it down from parents to children,” said Paloma Díaz-Mas, a Spanish writer and scholar who has written an introduction to a new edition of the Ferrara bible.
