From the late fifteenth century onward, in exile from their Spanish and Portuguese homelands, the Sephardim made their mark as viziers and intimate advisers of Ottoman sultans, as vastly esteemed physicians of Renaissance dukes and popes, and as dynamic importers and exporters in the Dutch maritime traffic.

Whether as professing Jews or converted "New Christians," it was this protean minority that functioned as a self-contained international trading network, spanning the seas and oceans, pioneering the gem industry of Europe and the sugar and tobacco plantations of Brazil, and flourishing as merchant ship captains amid pirate-infested Caribbean waterways.

Farewell Espana transcends conventional historical narrative. With the lucidity and verve that have characterized his numerous earlier volumes, Howard Sachar breathes life into the leading dramatis personae of the Sephardic world.

In its breadth and richness of texture, Sachar's account sweeps to the contemporary era of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, poignantly traces the fate of Balkan Sephardic communities during the Holocaust - and their revival in the Land and State of Israel. Not least of all, the author offers a tactile dimension of immediacy in his personal encounters with the storied venues and current personalities of the Sephardic world.