The Memory Work of Jewish Spain

Daniela Flesler, Adrián Pérez Melgosa

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780253050144
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The 2015 law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary Spain, the "re-discovery" of its Jewish heritage.
 
In The Memory Work of Jewish Spain, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa examine the implications of reclaiming this memory through the analysis of a comprehensive range of emerging cultural practices, political initiatives and institutions in the context of the long history of Spain's ambivalence towards its Jewish past. 
 
Through oral interviews, analyses of museums, newly reconfigured "Jewish quarters," excavated Jewish sites, popular festivals, tourist brochures, literature and art, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain explores what happens when these initiatives are implemented at the local level in cities and towns throughout Spain, and how they affect Spain's present.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Memory Work of Jewish Spain
• 1. The Long Journey of Sephardi Myths
• 2. Tourism and the Embracing of Spain’s Jewish Legacy
• 3. Loss, Rescue, and Converso Dissonances at the Sephardi Museum of Toledo
• 4. Exhibiting Jewish Heritage at the Local and Regional Levels
• 5. Memory Entanglements: Hervás’s Jewish Inheritance and the Francoist Repression
• 6. Returns to Sepharad
• Conclusion: Memory and the Future
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Authors