It happens that the reading of a book produces a singular effect: not that of an accumulated knowledge, but that of a slow, almost moral disquiet that takes hold. De la cour d’Espagne au ghetto italien (From the Spanish Court to the Italian Ghetto) acts in this manner. A work of demanding erudition, issuing from a long historian’s labour on archives, texts, and intellectual trajectories, it inscribes itself fully within Sephardic history, marked by the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the forced conversions, and the successive migrations across Europe and the Mediterranean basin.
Yerushalmi places at the heart of his inquiry the marrano condition: those Jews converted in appearance, Christians in public, Jews in secret, whose very existence puts into crisis every simple definition of identity. From Inquisitorial Spain to the Italy of the ghettos, then toward the Ottoman Empire or other lands of refuge, the book retraces a chain of forced displacements in which identity no longer transmits itself through continuity, but through dissimulation, translation, and recomposition. Yerushalmi seeks neither to reconstitute a continuous genealogy nor to propose an identitarian synthesis. His motivation is elsewhere: to understand how a tradition survives when its social, political, and religious frameworks are shattered, and how the Sephardic diaspora invents, in exile and constraint, unprecedented forms of fidelity.
The work never proposes a stabilised or definable-once-and-for-all Jewish identity; on the contrary, it exposes a succession of concrete situations in which identity comes undone, displaces itself, and recomposes itself under constraint, in the course of persecutions, forced conversions, and successive exiles. In this sense, the book belongs as much to intellectual history as to a reflection on memory: it interrogates what is transmitted when transmission is impeded, what becomes of identity when it can no longer lean upon a territory, an institution, or even a continuous collective practice.
Yerushalmi does not recount a peaceful continuity: he follows uneasy existences, caught between forced conversion, ritual dissimulation, and successive displacements. At the heart of the work stands a central figure, that of Fernando Cardoso—who will become Isaac Cardoso after his public return to Judaism—whose intellectual, spiritual, and geographical itinerary Yerushalmi patiently reconstructs. A New Christian out of necessity, a reader of Jewish texts out of secret fidelity, then a declared Jewish thinker in exile, Cardoso does not seek to “recover” a pure origin: he attempts to understand what subsists when a tradition can no longer transmit itself openly. In him, memory passes through oblique readings, encrypted citations, an uneasy erudition that replaces the collective practice rendered impossible. Identity is no longer direct inheritance, but intellectual and moral work under surveillance.
Yerushalmi also insists on the shattered geography of this memory, which he restores with an almost topographical precision. Madrid and the great cities of Castile are no longer habitable places: they become spaces of dissimulation, surveillance, and fear, from which one flees less to find a refuge than to defer persecution. Venice then appears as an ambiguous stage: a place of relative welcome, of the circulation of books and ideas, but also a space strictly bounded by the ghetto, where protection is paid for by juridical and symbolic enclosure. In this Italian geography of exile, Verona occupies a more discreet but significant place: a place of passage, less institutionalised than Venice, where certain marranos and Sephardic families find a provisional shelter, at the price of an increased invisibility and a fragile integration, before resuming the road. From there, for many Sephardic and marrano families, the displacement continues toward the Ottoman Empire—Salonika, Istanbul, Smyrna—where other forms of coexistence are invented, less founded on forced assimilation than on a tolerated imperial plurality.
But this dispersion is not only spatial; it is also conceptual. Each geographical displacement entails a displacement of the relation to the Law, to language, to community. In the philosophical writings of Fernando Cardoso, this migratory trajectory translates into a thought of identity as an assumed discontinuity. Jewish identity never appears there as a substance transmissible in a straight line, but as a trial of the intellect and of conscience, fashioned by repeated exile, cultural translation, and the constant necessity of discernment between what can be said, kept silent, or hidden.
Cardoso does not seek to define what “being Jewish” is in itself. He interrogates the conditions of possibility of a fidelity without visible practice, of a belonging deprived of public rites. In his writings, such as Yerushalmi restores them, the meditation on the Law occupies a central place, but it is profoundly displaced: the Law does not appear there as a code of prescriptions to apply, but as a principle of thought, a call to continuous interpretation. Cardoso returns several times to the idea that the Law does not disappear when observance becomes impossible; it changes regime. Deprived of its collective and ritual forms, it withdraws into study, reading, inner discussion. The Law then survives as an intellectual and moral demand, as a discipline of judgement, obliging the subject ceaselessly to interrogate the meaning of the text and the conditions of its actualisation. To be faithful to the Law no longer means obeying visible commandments, but keeping alive a critical relation to meaning, to justice, and to truth.
In this perspective, Cardoso insists on the fact that interpretation is not a betrayal of the Law, but its mode of survival. Reading becomes an ethical act: to read is to discern, to weigh, to compare, to resist imposed evidences. Being Jewish is then defined less by external signs than by a manner of reading and reasoning, by an intellectual vigilance in the face of dogmas, whether religious or political. Identity does not give itself to be seen; it is practised in the gap, in the silent exercise of a fidelity without guarantee.
Likewise, when he reflects on forced conversion, Cardoso does not treat it as an ontological rupture, but as a tragic situation in which identity is doubled. The public Christian and the inner Jew coexist without ever resolving themselves. This tension, far from ending in a hidden essence, produces an identity that is unstable, uneasy, always in excess over its visible forms. Jewish identity thus constitutes itself in the gap, in the very impossibility of coinciding fully with itself.
In this perspective, Jewish identity is formed in the in-between: between languages, between fidelities, between contradictory loyalties. It circulates in books, correspondences, reasonings, more than in territories or signs. It is never given as an essence, but as an intellectual and moral question constantly relaunched: how to think the Law without community? how to transmit without visibility? how to remain faithful without collective guarantee?
It is in this sense that, in Yerushalmi, the question of identity is never posed alone. It is indissociable from impeded transmission, from exile as a durable condition, and from the permanent suspicion that every closed definition of self—every too-assured identity—carries within it a deadly temptation. This suspicion appears as one of the most tensed and most topical threads of the book.
In Fernando Cardoso, as Yerushalmi reconstructs him, the quest for origins is first of all a vital necessity. It arises in a world where Jewish identity is hunted, dissimulated, sometimes turned against itself. In the Spain and Portugal of the Inquisition, then in the Sephardic diaspora that extends from Italy to the Ottoman lands, the question is not “who am I?” but “how to continue being, without disappearing?” Identity is there mobile, cunning, plural; it transmits itself by fragments, by gestures, by half-veiled narratives. It is forced openness, constrained circulation, existential bricolage. It is precisely this dimension that appears as constitutive of a profound Jewish tradition: not essence, but displacement; not closure, but relation. Identity takes the form there of a question addressed to the world, and not of a definitive answer. In this perspective, the quest for origins is never a pure return, much less a territorial reconquest; it is an uneasy work of memory, a fidelity without fixed ground.
Yet it is here that the trouble begins.
For this quest, transposed into the contemporary context of the Jewish nation-state, changes radically in nature. It ceases to be a movement of opening to become, increasingly, an instrument of closure. Where the Zionism of the origins—nourished by the Enlightenment, by socialism, and by a universalist horizon—sought to respond to the radical insecurity of the Jews through political emancipation, we are witnessing today a profound, slow, and cumulative transformation, whose causes are both remote and recent.
Remote first of all, for the very creation of a Jewish State introduced an unprecedented tension into Jewish history: the passage from an identity fashioned by diaspora, interpretation, and minority status, to a territorial sovereignty founded on force, law, and frontier. This mutation has displaced the centre of gravity of Judaism, from the Law and the text toward the State apparatus, from discussion toward decision, from internal plurality toward national unification. What, at the start, belonged to a political protection in the face of European antisemitism, has progressively taken on the form of a national normalisation, exposing Jewish identity to the same drifts as other nationalisms.
More recent then are the causes linked to the succession of conflicts, to the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories, and to the erosion of universalist forces within Israeli society itself. The failure of the peace process, the rise of religious-nationalist currents, and the banalisation of a permanent state of exception have transformed identity into a political resource. It is no longer only a heritage or a memory, but a tool of mobilisation, of legitimation, and of disqualification of the other.
To this is added a broader geopolitical context: the retreat of universalist ideals on a worldwide scale, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and the rehabilitation of closed identities presented as bulwarks against insecurity. In this landscape, the Israeli State does not escape the logics of its time. Jewishness, formerly a minority and reflexive experience, tends to be redefined as a majority, defensive, and exclusive identity. It is then mobilised as a justification—no longer only for the protection of one’s own, but for the exercise of a durable domination.
It is a matter neither of denying the history of persecution, nor of minimising the constitutive trauma of the Shoah, nor of ignoring the absolute horror of the massacres perpetrated by Hamas. That a State has the duty to protect its population is scarcely a matter for debate. What poses a problem is of another order: the mechanism by which the horror undergone is progressively transformed into a moral justification for domination and conquest.
The traumatic event, when it is absolutised, ceases to be only a historical fact or a painful memory; it becomes a political principle. Past suffering no longer illuminates present action—it sacralises it. All criticism is then disqualified as an attack on the memory of the victims, every limit perceived as a betrayal. Horror, instead of founding a universal ethical demand—“never again, for anyone”—is turned into a permit to act: since this was done to us, everything becomes legitimate to prevent it from happening again. It is in this tipping that the rhetoric of essence installs itself. Jewish identity is invoked no longer as a plural and uneasy history, but as a homogeneous, indisputable substance, invested with a superior right to violence. The colonisation of the West Bank and the massive destruction of Gaza are no longer presented only as contestable strategic choices, but as existential, almost metaphysical necessities, inscribed in a threatened collective identity.
Now this process produces a paradoxical and destructive effect: it nourishes precisely the antisemitism that it claims to ward off. By confusing Judaism, State, and violence—by making of any criticism of Israeli action an attack against the Jews as such—the authoritarian power fabricates the conditions of its own victimary narrative. Latent antisemitism—quite real, ancient, never disappeared—finds there a terrain of reactivation, while the State sets itself up as an indispensable bulwark against a hostility that it partly contributes to nourishing. In this closed circle, the accusation of antisemitism becomes a political weapon. It allows the disqualification of any internal opposition, any critical Jewish or non-Jewish voice, any ethical protest, by assimilating them to a hatred of the Jews. This mechanism is characteristic of contemporary authoritarian regimes: the State presents itself as the exclusive embodiment of the wounded identity, and any contestation is denounced as an existential threat.
The logic is that of a power that nourishes itself on the insecurity it maintains, and that transforms the memory of the crime into a resource of government.
It is this drift—perceived with dread—that marks the passage from a tragic memory to a politics of force, from an uneasy identity to an armed identity. Not only does it betray the ethical heritage drawn from Jewish history, but it locks the future into a spiral where violence calls for violence, and where the accusation of antisemitism, by dint of being instrumentalised, risks losing its moral import while allowing the very hatreds it claims to combat to prosper.
This slippage is neither accidental nor unprecedented. It has long been identified by Jewish thinkers and writers themselves, uneasy at seeing Jewish nationalism adopt the darkest forms of European nationalisms. As early as the middle of the twentieth century, figures such as Hannah Arendt warned against the risk that a State founded on a closed identity would substitute for the diasporic condition—fragile, but inventive—a sovereignty obsessed with force, frontier, and the friend/enemy logic. In another register, Jean Améry recalled that the memory of persecution, if it ceased to be interrogated, could turn back into dogma and lose its ethical import.
Closer to us, this disquiet runs through the work of contemporary Israeli writers. In David Grossman, notably, violence is never thought as a historical fatality, but as a progressive moral degradation that alters both the one who undergoes it and the one who exercises it. His novels and essays describe a society worked by fear, in which the permanent threat ends up justifying hardening, blindness, and the loss of all empathy for the other. Grossman does not oppose an innocence to a guilt, but an ethical responsibility to the temptation of closure.
In this lineage, historians have also played a decisive role. The works of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi himself have shown how Jewish memory has been constructed less as a narrative of power than as a permanent interrogation on transmission, exile, and discontinuity. Others, such as Zeev Sternhell, have analysed the ideological slippages by which Zionism, initially plural and socialist, was able to reconfigure itself as an exclusive nationalism.
These approaches, sometimes very controversial, nevertheless converge on an essential point: they recall that Jewishness has historically constituted itself as a critical experience of power, attentive to its abuses and its drifts, and not as a sacralisation of the State or of force. They thus underline the risk there is in transforming a history of vulnerability and dispersion into an identity of power closed in on itself.
What appears today, with a growing unease, is an instrumentalisation of victimisation. Past suffering, quite real, is summoned to suspend all present criticism. The argument becomes circular: because one was a victim, one cannot be called into question; because one acts in the name of the Jews, the acts would necessarily be defensive; because the enemy is declared barbaric, every response would become legitimate. Now this logic is precisely what Jewish history had learned to dread.
There is here a tragic inversion: identity, instead of being a memory open to the universal, freezes into a fortress. It ceases to be narrative to become frontier. It is no longer transmitted as question, but as injunction: injunction to unreserved adhesion, to uncritical loyalty, to the recognition of a permanent threat that would render every objection suspect. Identity is no longer proposed as a heritage to interpret, but imposed as a norm to defend; it no longer solicits individual responsibility, it demands alignment. In this sense, the identitarian injunction functions as a device of moral closure, which transforms belonging into political obligation and memory into an instrument of discipline.
It is not here a matter of a judgement, even less of a lesson to be given. It is a matter of a position of an uneasy heir. Uneasy at seeing a quest for origins—historically linked to wandering, to translation, to coexistence and to incompletion—transform itself into the justification of a brutal power, indifferent to the suffering of the other. Uneasy also at the long-term consequences of this drift on the Jewish State itself, henceforth marked by a durable trace in the eyes of the democratic nations, where the reference to universalism and to law finds itself gravely undermined.
This disquiet also extends to the Jews of the diaspora, for whom Israel has long constituted less a real State than an imaginary horizon, a possible utopia, a future home thought of without the obligation of inhabiting it. As State identity hardens and violence becomes normalised, this imaginary tie becomes fissured. Israel becomes more difficultly thinkable as promise, as symbolic refuge, or as deferred fulfilment. It is then a whole pan of the modern Jewish imaginary—made of political hope, of historical reparation, and of moral projection—that finds itself fragilised, even broken.
Perhaps this, ultimately, is the most acute ethical stake: to know whether one can remain faithful to a tradition of exile once installed in sovereignty. To know whether memory can still be a place of responsibility, and not an arsenal. To know whether Jewish identity can remain a question addressed to humanity, rather than an armed response against it.
The book closes without offering a definitive conclusion. Such is doubtless one of its major contributions. A scholarly work, rigorous in its erudition, De la cour d’Espagne au ghetto italien does not content itself with illuminating a bygone past; it furnishes intellectual instruments for thinking the present. By showing that Jewish identity has historically constituted itself in discontinuity, interpretation, and disquiet, Yerushalmi invites us to measure what is lost when identity closes itself, substantifies itself, and transforms itself into a State doctrine. More than in ruins or frontiers, it is perhaps in this fidelity—or this infidelity—to a critical tradition of openness that the moral future of Judaism is being played out today.
January 2026