David Graizbord

Dr. Graizbord is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies. A historian of early modern Jews, Dr. Graizbord's research focuses on the Western Sephardi Diaspora of the seventeenth century. In particular, Dr. Graizbord's writing approaches questions of religious, social, and political identity as these questions shaped the lives of so-called "New Christians" or "conversos" from the Iberian Peninsula who became Jews in exile.  He has also written about Judeophobia and the culture of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; marginality and dissidence in Jewish and Ibero-Catholic societies of the seventeenth century; ethnicity and religion among Sephardim from medieval times to the 1700s; and converso trading networks in the Atlantic. More recently he has begun to research Jewish ethnic identity and Zionism among American Jews.

Research Interests:  Conversos, Judeo-Portuguese Bayonne