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

An imaginary bright line exists within the subtitle of this new volume of collected essays edited by Yael Halevi-Wise. While the first part, Spanish Jewish history, does not appear very much in the volume, the second part, an analysis of Spanish Jewish history in the imaginations of many different writers, runs throughout the entire work. This disparity is not pointed out as a matter of criticism; in fact, the comprehensive historical and geographic scope of this book provides a convincing opening to the study of the image of Sephardic Jewish experience in literary efforts over the past two hundred years, a phenomenon Halevi-Wise refers to as Sephardism. The book’s twelve excellent essays provide very convincing testimony to the importance of this history in a diverse array of modern literary contexts.

Sephardism is studied here as a “politicized literary metaphor” (18). The imagined life of Spanish Jews before, during and after the expulsion functions more as a way of configuring the present and understanding a myriad of political, cultural or social relations in different contexts long after 1492. Much like Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, this work is not about the people whose lives provided the basis for the metaphor. Rather, this work analyzes the literary device these people became and the uses to which this device was put. This is a thought-provoking book with a clear through-line connecting each of these essays. Yes, the often imagined experiences of Spanish Jews, wrenched from their homeland, forced into exile to live as displaced people, or later, as assimilated people who end up no longer as self-conscious immigrants but as people living in a permanent exile of which they were not even aware, works as a surprisingly common and accessible metaphor for writers, intellectuals and political activists. Halevi-Wise also points out in her introduction the mechanisms or historical tensions that seem to dredge up this metaphorical past. Halevi-Wise notes that in moments of “heightened historical consciousness” (5), when national identity or citizenship are being defined or questioned, Sephardism has appeared as a meaningful and useful metaphor.

Two nodal moments of historical consciousness stand out. One was 1789, the date serving less as a sign of the immediate impact of the French Revolution and more as a stand-in for the broader arrival of Enlightenment themes of racial and religious tolerance that began to filter through Europe and its burgeoning nationalist movements during the long nineteenth century. 1992 serves as the other important moment, not just as the quincentennial of Columbus’s landing in the Western Hemisphere, but also of the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The first moment was a European encounter with Sephardism that helped to define the contours of new European nationalism. The second moment, presumably one that is continuing today, sees Sephardism as a literary device helpful in working out the tensions of pluralism and democracy in the present day in ways that “challenge the political configurations of European and American nationalism of the nineteenth century” (15). The political symbolism of Sephardism changes but its multiform use as a metaphor of tolerance, intolerance, assimilation or ethnic preservation seems to transcend the particular needs of the historical moment.

The essays also range across geographical contexts, from Asia to Europe, Latin America to the United States. The sheer number of literary works and writers who explored this metaphor is surprising and justifies the editor’s and the other contributors’ desire to include Sephardism as a sub-field in literary studies of identity, nationalism and ethnic heritage. The essays that occupy the opening section deal with the “problem of national particularism” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Sephardic Jewish history was a surprisingly common leitmotif for dealing with the creation of new nation-states and the defining or muting of its ethnic components. Sephardic Jews appearing in a variety of texts, novels, opera libretti and poems, could be romantic heroes, steadfastly maintaining components...