"Modern Spain as Jewish Archive" COUNTERHISTORIES: MODERN JEWISH SCHOLARSHIP IN CONTEXT— RESPONDING TO CHALLENGES FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT, AJS 47th Annual Conference December 13-15, 2015, Boston (Herbert D Katz Center Sponsored Panel) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Michal Rose Friedman This dissertation is a study of initiatives to recover the Jewish past and of the emergence of Sephardic Studies in Spain from 1845 to 1935. It explores the ways the Jewish past became central to efforts to construct and claim a Spanish patria, through its appropriation and integration into the nation's official national historical narrative, or historia patria. The construction of this history was highly contentious, as historians and politicians brought Spain's Jewish past to bear in debates over political reform, in discussions of religious and national identity, and in elaborating diverse political and cultural movements. Moreover, it demonstrates how the recovery of the Jewish past connected-via a Spanish variant of the so-called "Jewish question"-to nationalist political and cultural movements such as Neo-Catholicism, Orientalism, Regenerationism, Hispanism, and Fascism. In all of these contexts, attempts to reclaim Spain's Jewish past-however impassioned, and however committed-remained fractured and ambivalent, making such efforts to "recover" Spain's Jews as partial as they were compromised.
This article describes the pioneering work of José Amador de los Ríos, author of the first modern history of the Jews of Spain. Through discussion of his life and work, the article illustrates how Spain's Jewish past became an object of debate in the nineteenth century, as Spanish scholars and politicians placed historiography at the service of rival political causes. It also explores some of the ways in which the Sephardic past figured into emergent questions of national identity and the so-called Jewish Question in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The recovery of the Jewish past in Spain was marked by deep ambivalence, as the debate concerning Jewish absence and presence in Spain was marked by a nationalism that, though liberal, remained firmly Catholic.
Thinking about 'the Jew' in Modern Spain: Historiography, Nationalism and Anti-semitism
The history of the recuperation of Sephardim in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain is an important historical precedent for understanding Franco's ambivalent policy during the persecution of European Jews by Hider. The re-encounter with this SpanishJewish past in the nineteenth century can shed light on the wider phenomenon of European anti-semitism as well as on the development of nationalism in modern Spanish history. This article suggests the presences, absences and continuities in the visualisation of Jews in Spanish liberal historiography and historiographic writings and the conservative reaction to this (re)thinking, the result of which was Franco's apparendy paradoxical artitude towards the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany.
Norman Roth, “Some Pioneers of Jewish Studies in Spain,” Iberia Judaica, vol. 15 (2023): 355-394
2023
Interest in Hebrew, both scholarly analysis and actual reading and writing familiarity, among Christians dates to the medieval period, in Spain as well as Europe generally 1. Little has been written on the Christian Hebraists in Spain in the seventeenth century, but for Europe generally see the work of my former student Stephen Burnett 2. In a sense "Jewish studies" in Spain, or at least scholarly investigation of Hebrew, and not just the Bible, began in the eighteenth century, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the "Wissenschaft des Judetums" movement in Germany, through the exhaustive efforts of Leopold Zunz and others 3. Pérez Bayer, 1711-1794 4 , was one of the first, and certainly most important, of these scholars in that time in Spain. He was born and educated in Valencia, including the university there, and pursued advanced studies at the University of Salamanca. He later went to Italy where he became acquainted with the (today little-known) Italian Hebraist Blaisio Ugolino, 1702-1776, certainly a converted Jew 5. Possibly it was this which inspired him to an interest not only in biblical Hebrew but also to an extent, at least, postbiblical. However, there may have been other motives, such as the inclination to incorporate all the layers of Spanish settlement, ancient, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Muslims and Jews, into the new concept of an ancient but somehow coherent Spanish culture which was significant for the political aims of the monarchy 6. histórico-crítico sobre la primera venida de los judíos a España", Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia 3 (1799): 317-468. The topic in itself deserves a thorough study.