Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa
THE MEMORY WORK OF JEWISH SPAIN
Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780253050106
Reviewed by James Benjamin Nadel1
In 2012, the Spanish government announced that it would begin the process of granting Sephardic Jews the “right of return”; an opportunity to obtain citizenship in the country from which their ancestors had been expelled five hundred and twenty years earlier. Since the introduction of this bill, historians and cultural critics have attempted to articulate the place that Sephardim, and their centuries of presence on the Iberian Peninsula, occupy in the Spanish public imaginary. Two scholars of Spanish culture and literature that have considered this topic in the past, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, have released a wide-ranging book that analyzes the ways in which this public imaginary has taken form in heritage sites throughout Spain. Flesler and Perez Melgosa specifically chronicle the development of “Jewish memory” in Spain, starting with a discussion of late nineteenth century Spanish philo-Semitism, but focusing primarily on the period since the 1990s. They consider the emergence of Sephardic history museums, cultural events, signage for former “Jewish Quarters” (Juderías), and a whole host of literary and artistic approaches that Spaniards have taken to incorporate “Jewish Spain” into their metahistorical understanding of the country’s path to the present. In so doing, they demonstrate the particular meanings that Sephardic history holds for Spaniards, both those establishing these sites and those visiting them.
Several compelling patterns emerge from the consideration of these commemorations and memorial sites. The most basic of these is that Spanish museums of Sephardic history generally have little to go on. By and large, they do not contain original artifacts or Jewish material culture from the medieval period. At best, they are housed in buildings that are thought to have been synagogues in the past or stand in what was once the city’s “Jewish Quarter.” Many museums around the world are forced to deal with this issue, but, as Flesler and Pérez Melgosa point out, in Spain these markings of medieval Jewish “presence” underline the “absence” of these communities in the present (p. 115). An ambivalence is therefore inherent to these projects, as their celebration of pre-1492 Sephardic life is “haunted” by the violence of the Expulsion and the Inquisition. The ambiguity of these well-meaning efforts is all the more highlighted by the persistence of anti-Semitic prejudice in contemporary Spanish society.
Within this general uncertainty, Spanish communities and museum officials have interpreted the meaning of Sephardic history for themselves and in multifarious ways. In many cases, the “discovery” of a Jewish past within Spanish cities coincided with more general re-evaluations of local heritage after the fall of the Franco dictatorship. As such, the inclusion of Jewish history into the public consciousness of a specific locality, what the authors call “the production of Jewish space,” (p. 120) offered Spaniards the chance to put their hometowns on the map of Europe. They thereby entered a continental community that was, at this same moment, itself being branded as “tolerant” in large part through the development of official Holocaust commemorations. More than just tourist operations then, these new museums marked the acceptance of a “new” model for the “Spanish citizen” and allowed officials to swell with pride at the “value” their cities could add to this discourse (p. 133). What’s more, each museum that Flesler and Perez Melgosa examine in Chapter 3 has iterated on this theme in order to comment on local concerns; an establishment in the northeastern corner of the country emphasizes the distinct experience of “Catalan Jews,” while another city brands itself as part of a wide Sephardic diaspora stretching to the Caribbean.
This book does not stick to physical sites alone, however. Instead, in Chapter 6, the authors diversify and also interrogate several artistic and literary representations of Sephardic history and the Spanish present converging. Investigating the “interplay of past and present temporalities,” Flesler and Pérez Melgosa discuss both a portrait artist’s renderings of Spanish political figures as notable Sephardim and a group of Spaniards that themselves claim to be Jewish, the descendants of conversos that maintained their religion in secret centuries ago. Following Erica Lehrer’s conclusions about similar phenomena regarding Jewish history in Poland, the authors seek to understand these attempts to embody the Sephardic past in the present. Thankfully, this analysis of personal “heritage” both evades endless conversations about authenticity and escapes the monumental form that often ties these commemorations to the politics of a specific place. In this discussion, attempts to write and rewrite the memory of Jewish Spain become an analytical focus, an object that can reveal the inherent instability of cultural identification writ large. Connection to the Sephardic history of the Iberian Peninsula can thus be interpreted as simply a dedicated pursuit; a process of self-formation that, for better or worse, reconsiders the boundaries and meaning of both Sephardic and Spanish history. In this regard, this book makes an interesting pairing with Dana Horn’s recent People Love Dead Jews, a brash, breathless denunciation of “Jewish Heritage Sites” that seek to divine simple lessons from historical acts of violence against Jews. Flesler and Pérez Melgosa similarly deconstruct such lessons when they are on display in Spain’s production of Sephardic heritage, but they are also more willing to see the creativity in these acts of memory formation, especially in their final chapter.
Flesler and Pérez Melgosa consistently note that Jewish memory is often enacted in conversation with a broader complex of historical imagination in Spain surrounding the convivencia period, the supposedly harmonious medieval Golden Age when Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side in Spain and Portugal. They are certainly correct in asserting that some of the appeal that Jewish history has for both Spaniards and tourists alike is its existence within this vague and edenic past. However, this context deserves more treatment, as it speaks to the general position of Sephardim as interstitial figures in Spanish history, existing somewhere between Christians and Muslims. For instance, although the authors consider the Casa de Sefarad in Cordoba, they missed the opportunity to examine the “Living Museum of Al-Andalus,” a peculiar exhibition space located in the city’s Calahorra Tower that displays, among other things, a series of plastic mannequins representing medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian philosophers in deep discussion about the meaning of religious difference in their faiths. Moreover, it would have been interesting, especially considering Flesler’s expertise in contemporary Spanish reactions to Moroccan immigration, to dedicate a more significant part of the book to directly comparing these Jewish memorial sites to those aimed at preserving Spain’s Islamic past. Do the same ambiguities emerge when Spaniards consider the Muslims that were also expelled from the country? In what ways do notions of race, ethnicity, and religion structure these two different cases of memory creation? Approaching such questions would allow for an even deeper understanding of the various memory practices that shape public consciousness in contemporary Spain, as well as the ways in which that consciousness aligns with or differs from customs in other settings where residents grapple with the notable absence of Jews.
1 James Benjamin Nadel is a PhD student at Columbia University, where he studies Jewish and Russian History. He is currently an ASEEES Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Scholar.