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Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory

Online ISBN:
9780804791885
Print ISBN:
9780804787390
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory

Tabea Alexa Linhard
Tabea Alexa Linhard
Washington University in St. Louis
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Published online:
22 January 2015
Published in print:
4 June 2014
Online ISBN:
9780804791885
Print ISBN:
9780804787390
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book centers on the historic relationship between Spain and the Jews in key moments of the twentieth century and shows that it is impossible to understand and articulate what Spain was, is, and will be without taking into account both “Muslim Spain” and “Jewish Spain.” The book's main argument revolves around the uses of the remote past (the era of convivencia, the establishment of the Inquisition, the 1492 expulsion) in texts that depict the memory of complicated circumstances of Jewish life in Spain and in Northern Morocco during the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist repression in the postwar years, and World War II. Jewish Spain challenges the still widespread myth that the Spanish government and dictator Francisco Franco protected European Jewry from the Nazis. The book scrutinizes the intersections among political opportunism, personal initiative and, at times, chance that made deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain possible either through exile and transit along the Iberian Peninsula or with the help of Spanish diplomats in occupied Europe. Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory is the first monograph that focuses on the varied ways in which accounts of Jewish exile and transit appear in different forms of cultural production, including literary texts, memoirs, oral histories, biographies, films, and heritage tourism packages. The book reveals how anti-Semitic and philo-Sephardic discourses shape perceptions of Jews and of Jewish culture and Spain, and it ultimately argues that these discourses have changed over time.

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