Sephardism in World Literatures: Spanish Jewish History in Later Literary Production

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The Jewish experience in medieval Iberia has inspired a constellation of afterlives in myriad Ashkenazi and non-Jewish cultural contexts that use the Sephardic past as a lens to make sense of their present-day moments. Following Yael Halevi-Wise’s theory of Sephardism as a political metaphor, this session considers how textual imaginations and evocations of Jewish persecution in premodern Spain—such as pogroms, the Inquisition, and the 1492 Expulsion—are mobilized in a range of world literatures to discuss contemporary concerns about identity, memory, and relations with the state. Each presentation will focus on a specific textual manifestation of Sephardism, the genealogies from which it developed, and the contemporary commentary it has to offer.

Yitzhak Lewis examines the multifaceted and often contentious role that Sephardism played in the development of Hasidism, from changes in liturgy and the dissemination of the Lurianic Kabbalah to Nachman of Braslav’s tale “The King Who Decreed Conversion.” In his reading of Nachman’s text, Lewis argues that the tale’s post-Expulsion Spanish setting provided a backdrop against which to identify and articulate difficulties encountered in his early 19th-century present. Adam Cohn’s paper explores German-Hispanic writer’s Máximo José Kahn textual engagements with the physical traces of the Sephardic past as a productive analytic with which to trace evolving attitudes about Jewish identity, assimilation, and relations with the nation-state from 1930 to 1950. Finally, Stacy Beckwith presents a series of contemporary Spanish and Mallorcan historical novels that develop a multidirectional relationship between the increasingly violent events of late 15th-century Iberia and the Holocaust. Spanish Jewish history appears in these fictional works, Beckwith argues, to provide the contemporary Spanish readership with an accessible, understandable past with which to approach the horrors of the Holocaust. Yael Halevi-Wise’s opening and closing remarks will situate the three presentations as part of a larger international phenomenon.

The transtemporal dialogue that fictional works establish with Spanish Jewish history underscores the continued generative potential of Sephardism to render past and present mutually intelligible. The Iberian, Latin American, and Eastern European contexts analyzed in this panel converge to demonstrate the multifaceted investment in Sepharad across world literary production.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Yael Halevi-Wise, McGill University

Individual Presentations

• Sepharad as Social Metaphor in a Tale by Nachman of Braslav - Yitzhak Lewis, Duke Kunshan University

• Engaging with Ruins: Hispanic Jewish Identity and the State in the Work of Máximo José Kahn - Adam Cohn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Multidirectional Sephardism: Between Inquisition and Holocaust in Recent Spanish and Mallorcan Novels - Stacy Beckwith, Carleton College

Respondent

• Yael Halevi-Wise, McGill University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 05