Last week the Mediterranean Institute invited Tito Mesod Benady and Aline P'nina Tayar to give their own particular views on the subject of what historian Jonathan Israel has called "the single most flexible and widest-ranging, historically, of the classical diasporas" namely, the Sephardic Jewish diaspora.

Tito Benady is a distinguished historian who has written extensively about subjects such as Sephardic Jews in general; the Jewish communities in Gibraltar, Malta and Minorca and the Royal Navy. Aline Tayar, on the other hand, is a poet and novelist who is probably best known in Malta for her personal odyssey in search of her roots in How Shall We Sing? A Mediterranean Journey through a Jewish Family.