The Pioneering Historian of Sephardi Jewry

In the 19th century, a group of German Jewish university students decided to apply the new methods of academic history and critical scholarship to the past of their own people, creating what they dubbed Wissenschaft des Judentums—Jewish studies. Although these groundbreaking scholars had tremendous regard for the accomplishments of medieval Spanish Jewry, they tended to downplay the history of Sephardim in the modern era. A Bosnian Jew named Moshe David Gaon (1889–1958) dedicated much of his life to remedying that situation, as Yoel Finkelman writes: