Carla Ramos García

PhD Project: “The Modern Reception of The book of the Duties of the Heart by Ibn Paquda in the Sephardic Communities of the Diaspora.”

The mass forced conversion of the Jewish communities in the Iberian territory involved social and religious consequences not just in the Peninsula but also in exile where the permanent arrival of Converso population caused that the mechanisms of assimilation into the already existing Jewish communities were put into question. One of the problems authorities had to deal with was the lack of Jewish religious knowledge of these groups who had learned and practiced their religion in a hostile context. Religious instruction became then an element of permanent concern, and in which the print had a fundamental role. Very different texts were produced with this aim in mind but, among them, I would focus on The book of the Duties of the Heart by Ibn Paquda (Zaragoza, XII century), translated and printed successively in Salonika (Judaeo-Spanish, 1568), Amsterdam (Spanish, 1610; Portuguese, 1670) and Venice (Judaeo-Spanish, 1713).

The principal line of research of my project consists in the study of Ibn Paquda’s book taking in consideration the educational goal why it was repeatedly translated. The analysis pretends to address the different instructive ways to face the conversion/re-conversion, being the revitalization of medieval authors, as Ibn Paquda one of them. In this analysis, two different aspects are considered: the instruction of the new communities; and the process of a creation of a Sephardic, which seems to differentiate itself from the rest of the Jewish world. Regarding this aspect the language is also an important feature in order to build the self-proclaimed superiority of the “Nation”.

To conclude, the purpose of the analysis of the Duties of the Heart’s reception is the comprehension of the different contexts in which it appeared, as well as the problems that the different translations originated and that would result into various and diverse readings.

She is also a member of the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the University of Salamanca.