Engaging with Ruins: Hispanic Jewish Identity and the State in the Work of Máximo José Kahn

• In Event: Sephardism in World Literatures: Spanish Jewish History in Later Literary Production

Abstract

When the German-born Jewish journalist Máximo José Kahn (1897-1953) adopted the penname Medina Azara in the Spanish press in 1930, he crafted an identity using the architectural ruins of medieval Islamic Iberia. Kahn’s admiration of the Umayyad caliph Abd ar-Rahman III’s palatial complex—whose ruins were excavated in the early 20th century—was of an aesthetic, religious, and political nature. As Kahn would later write, the visually striking archeological site was once a locus of symbiotic relations between the Muslim majority and a successful, influential Jewish minority. My presentation argues that Kahn’s decades-long textual engagements with the physical ruins of Jewish life in medieval Iberia reveal evolving attitudes towards the relationship between Jews and the (modern) state. Throughout, I pull on insights from cultural archaeology (González-Ruibal 2014), memory studies (Silverman 2015) and Yael Halevi-Wise’s (2012) theorization of Sephardism as a political metaphor.

Beginning with his early Spanish-language journalism in La Gaceta Literaria (1930), Kahn elaborates an identitarian application for ruins. By textually excavating the architectural traces of medieval Sephardic life for his early 20th-century Spanish readership, Kahn expresses hopes for Jewish normalization and assimilation in a country where antisemitism and Jewish absence prevailed. In Apocalipsis hispánica (1942), a collection of essays published during Kahn’s exile in Mexico, he mines the fluid temporalities of Sephardic ruins to reflect on medieval Convivencia and Christian fundamentalism, thereby articulating an exilic identity for himself in the present. The legible and generative ruinscapes presented in La Gaceta Literaria and Apocalipsis hispánica undergo a transformation in Kahn’s final novel Efraín de Atenas (1950), published in Argentina. Efraín’s search for a Jewish identity leads him to Spain, where his enthusiasm to interact with the ruins of Sepharad lead to frustration. Unable to locate the imaginative powers of ruins that Kahn had previously explored, Ephraim realizes that the decayed Jewish presence in the Peninsula does not resonate in the present. In a palimpsestic gesture, the novel uses objects such as Jewish tombstones to connect distinct moments of Jewish persecution and indict the assimilationist logic of the nation-state in the years immediately after the Shoah.

Author

• Adam Cohn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill