Multidirectional Sephardism: Between Inquisition and Holocaust in Recent Spanish and Mallorcan Novels

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

Abstract

In his nationally acclaimed historical novel, Sepharad (2001), Antonio Muñoz Molina, a renowned Spanish author on prejudice and anti-Semitism, highlights how meager Holocaust awareness and education have been in Spain, even into recent decades. Muñoz Molina illustrates how still today, Spaniards' predominant lack of familiarity with Iberian, let alone wider Jewish history, stems from Inquisitorial Spain's systematic eradication of medieval Sephardic life by the late 15th century. However, especially since 1992, the 500th anniversary of 1492, growing ancestral curiosity in towns around Spain has inspired over thirty novels involving urban buildings, streets, and public squares where episodes of Jewish flourishing and/or persecution once played out. My paper will examine how three contemporary authors, two Spanish and one Mallorcan of crypto-Jewish descent, exemplify a Sephardist trend of transporting Spanish readers into international Holocaust environments in an organically accessible way. Each uses Spanish Jewish history to move Spaniards intuitively between the historical persecution that produced Sephardic voids throughout Spain, and similar Nazi processes that sequentially eradicated Jewish life in Holocaust Europe.

I will start with journalist Enrique de Diego's 2002 novel, The Last Rabbi, on late 15th century Catholic absolutism in the central Spanish city of Segovia. In a postscript the author imagines talking today with Spain's notorious Inquisitor General, Torquemada. For Segovian readers especially, the interview underscores why de Diego has just portrayed their historic Castilian landscape as a template for 20th century genocide. Exceeding suggestive analogy in Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina shuttles readers between Sephardic traces in Úbeda, his Andalusian hometown, and multiple sites of Jewish erasure in 1940s Europe. Lastly, in now-Jewish journalist Miguel Segura Aguiló's 2016, The Rabbi's Ashes, Spanish readers also find innately familiar portals from Inquisition-era Palma de Mallorca into thematically corresponding Holocaust scenarios. Borrowing from Michael Rothberg's insights into memory, though, these Inquisition/Holocaust conduits in Aguiló's work become even more multidirectional when a contemporary Mallorcan character of crypto-Jewish heritage seems to speak for her community in resisting a proprietary gaze from Israeli and wider Jewish religious authorities - at odds with how the 2021 internationally-made documentary, Xueta (crypto-Jewish) Island, celebrates Jewish observance returning to Palma.

Author

• Stacy Beckwith, Carleton College