Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination ed. by Yael Halevi-Wise (review)

There are several noteworthy books written on the Jews of Sepharad, their history, identity and world of convivencia as it vanished with the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The cultural heritage and legacy of Sephardic Jews have been treasured and documented together with a steady interest in their historical and geographical trajectories following the expulsion. Identified, categorized and memorialized. However, as noted by Jordan Elgrably of the Levantine Center, "Until recently, we [Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews] have been taught to see ourselves as shadowy figures on the margins of Jewish society—the relics of a colorful history, excellent for classroom review but absolutely irrelevant today." Along comes Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, edited by Yeal Halevi-Wise, to shake things up and remind us just how relevant the Sephardi experience is and has been for writers since the nineteenth century. This is a much-welcome collection of eleven scholars of modern literary studies bringing a unique and fresh contribution to the burgeoning field of Sephardic Studies, inviting us to consider how the trope of Sepharad has been engaged in a dynamic literary dialogue which problematizes identity politics and perceived notions of nation building with its implication of border-crossing, boundary-breaking and (non-)belonging. As noted by the editor, the book proposes to examine how Sephardism has functioned as a politicized literary metaphor for a wide variety of authors in different ethnic, religious, and national contexts such as Germany, England, France, Spain, Israel, Latin America, and the United States, as well as in other transnational literary frameworks. These multiple and varied perspectives in place as well as time (from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) yield a vigorous and timely exposé of the preoccupations around the many challenges posed by modernity, as well as with the status and depictions of minorities, those who exist in shifting spaces of in-betweenness.

The book is divided into four parts, eleven chapters, and a postscript. Part one deals with "The Problem of National Particularisms in German, English, and French Literature on the Jews of Spain." Here we find four illuminating chapters on topics as varied as the notion of "Sephardic supremacy" in Germany, or how British authors during Victorian times used the story of the Inquisition in their depiction of the birth of a nation based on racial and religious homogeneity. Another chapter discusses how a staged oppression of the Jews in the French opera La Juive tapped into the renewed significance of the Inquisition in contemporary political discourse under the July Monarchy, and the final chapter explores German Jewish writers in the period between emancipation and the Holocaust, repeatedly using the figure of Don Isaak Abarbanel to stress the analogy between what happened in Spain to what German Jews were experiencing, as they elaborated ideological positions on various points such as assimilation and religious liberalism vs. orthodoxy. Among them is the particularly enlightening essay on the obsession among nineteenth century German Jews with Sephardic Jewry, using it as a tool to engage in a dialectic of rebellion and renewal toward what may be seen as modern German Jewry's legacy, namely, cultural openness, philosophic thinking, and an appreciation for the aesthetic.

In the second part, "Jews and Hispanics Meet Again: Latin American Revisions of Judeo-Spanish Relations," Edna Aizenberg elaborates on the complexities of literary Sephardism as she examines how Ashkenazi Latin American writers, or neo-Sephardim, create a Sephardic mythology for themselves as an acculturative (literary) tool. We may be surprised to learn that a whopping 80 to 85 percent of the approximately 550,000 Jews living south of the American border are Ashkenazim, and I found it particularly interesting to read about how they navigate feeling at home by adopting the Sephardic heritage. For the new generations of Sephardi writers, Sephardism "serves as an instrument to...