Return to Sepharad: Excerpts from a Voyage to the Ancestral Past

• In Event: Embodied Jewish gender histories: Feminist, reflexive, creative encounters in the archives and in the field

Abstract

My presentation takes the form of a travelogue, a monologue of excerpts from my first-person account of traveling the historic Jewish byways of Spain as a Sephardic tourist and as a relic of that history. It is a paradox of Jewish heritage tourism in Spain that a robust tourism industry has developed around meager material remains of Sephardic history. This industry is conducted largely through the non-profit enterprise Caminos de Sefarad—Red de Juderías de España [Sephardic Pathways—Network of Jewish Quarters of Spain]. Cities and towns throughout Spain make up a tourist route of rediscovered (and some say, invented) medieval Jewish quarters.

While critics of the phenomenon of Spain’s Sephardic tourism see a commercialized fantasy of imagined places built on exploiting Jewish nostalgia, the Sephardic route is much more than that. As sociologists studying tourism have pointed out, tourists who visit places bound up with their own heritage perceive places differently. Naomi Leite, writing about the experiences of such tourists in Portugal (2005), describes “moments of heartfelt connection: not a sense of connection to a depersonalized collective history, but instead a profoundly personal encounter with the past, in spaces redolent with ancestral memory and, in some cases, even felt ancestral presence.”

In 2022, I began traveling around Spain on an autoethnographic journey designed to explore this fraught world of Sephardic history-as-tourism through a performative practice of embodied, affective, imaginative, and spiritual engagement. I allow that my exploration is fueled by that kind of nostalgia that seeks “a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” But it is grounded in what Svetlana Boym also called “reflective nostalgia” — a reflexivity that does not presume a false opposition between longing and critical thinking.

Author

• Mechele Leon, The University Of Kansas