Jewish Spain

A Mediterranean Memory

Tabea Alexa Linhard

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804791885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Jüdische Geschichte

What is meant by "Jewish Spain"? The term itself encompasses a series of historical contradictions. No single part of Spain has ever been entirely Jewish. Yet discourses about Jews informed debates on Spanish identity formation long after their 1492 expulsion. The Mediterranean world witnessed a renewed interest in Spanish-speaking Jews in the twentieth century, and it has grappled with shifting attitudes on what it meant to be Jewish and Spanish throughout the century.

At the heart of this book are explorations of the contradictions that appear in different forms of cultural memory: literary texts, memoirs, oral histories, biographies, films, and heritage tourism packages. Tabea Alexa Linhard identifies depictions of the difficulties Jews faced in Spain and Northern Morocco in years past as integral to the survival strategies of Spanish Jews, who used them to make sense of the confusing and harrowing circumstances of the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist repression, and World War Two.

Jewish Spain takes its place among other works on Muslims, Christians, and Jews by providing a comprehensive analysis of Jewish culture and presence in twentieth-century Spain, reminding us 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."

One

Mapping Nostalgia

Velódromo de invierno and Sepharad

In the Andalusian city of Seville, as in any widely visited city today, tourists often choose to get acquainted with the most important sites on double-decker buses that provide headsets so that visitors can listen to prerecorded historical and cultural information in a variety of languages. As they pass near the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter, visitors will hear about a “wonderful time of coexistence and tolerance” and about the “melodic Spanish” that only Seville’s Jews used to speak. According to the tour script, in those times, before 1492, these same Jews already expressed their “yearning for Sepharad” in that melodious Spanish.

Needless to say, one can hardly expect a detailed description of the complexity of Jewish life in Seville before 1492 in sound bites that accompany affordable bus tours designed for tourists. And yet, beyond the idealization of convivencia in this characterization, it is worth noting its irony: the “Spanish” that only Jews spoke attained its melodic quality only after Sephardic Jews had been exiled and the language that endured in different Ladino-speaking communities became marked by its difference.¹ The notion that Andalusian Jews longed for Sepharad before the 1492 diaspora sounds absurd: how could they express nostalgia for a homeland from which they had not (yet) been expelled? Nevertheless, within the context of the tour the reference to the yearning Sephardim adds to the Barrio de Santa Cruz’s appeal.

Like a siren’s song, nostalgia is both seductive and treacherous. The idealized and inaccurate picture of the Sephardic experience that comes across on the bus tour is not an isolated incident in contemporary Spain. Indeed, a homogenizing and anachronistic vision of Sephardic Jews remains widespread (see Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, 168). This mythicized version of the past also shapes narratives of Jewish exile in Spain during World War II that appear, even if fleetingly, in the Spanish literary world.

In memoirs (as will be shown in Chapter 2) and in literary texts the representation of complex historical circumstances that allowed for deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain is interwoven with invocations of the remote past. This does not mean, however, that what happened in 1391 or 1492 directly explains what happened in 1942, as tempting as it might be to link these dates.² My exploration of Juana Salabert’s Velódromo de invierno and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad aims to show that the two novels in many ways take place in what David Nirenberg has called a “persecutory landscape” (Communities of Violence, 5). The nostalgic invocation of Sepharad that appears in both novels further reveals that the texts engage with the historical contradictions and ambiguities that made deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain possible. At the same time, and notwithstanding the complexity of the novels, they do reflect the same kind of teleological fallacy that Nirenberg addresses in his book, as noted in the Introduction.

This does not, however, mean (as Erich Hackl argues in a somewhat cursory critique of Muñoz Molina’s novel) that the Sephardim who appear in Sepharad as well as in Salabert’s Velódromo de invierno are necessarily noble characters—or noble victims.³ The novels share more than their publication date (2001), more than their representation of deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain, and far more than the portrayal of their Sephardic central characters, Sebastián Miranda and Isaac Salama. The novels also reflect on what a nostalgic invocation of Sepharad means in relation to both the current debate on “historical memory” in Spain and literary representations of Holocaust survival. Nostalgia is a blessing and a curse in both novels, which reenact a mythical (and failed) return to Sepharad, the ancestral homeland that serves as a means to bridge the past and the present. The characters, however, end up lost, found, and then lost again in their nostalgia for what may be the ultimate lieu de mémoire, Sepharad, trapped within the grasp of history and the impossibility of a return to a home that no longer exists.

Although, strictly speaking, these texts are not historical novels, they certainly engage with history: Salabert’s novel centers on the Vélodrome d’hiver round-up in Paris in July 1942, which was the first step in the deportation of more than 13,000 Jews, initially to a concentration camp in Drancy and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Salabert’s novel also includes a small number of footnotes that provide historical information, as well as a photograph of the location. In Muñoz Molina’s novel biographical sketches of historical figures intersect with the author’s own biography. In addition, in both novels the characters themselves are seduced by nostalgia for Sepharad, despite but also because of the ambiguous relationship of nostalgia with history and memory.

In Salabert’s novel, young Ilse Landermann is able to escape the Vel d’hiv, where both her mother and young brother, along with more than 13,000 other Parisian Jews, have been confined. Although Ilse’s mother and brother perish in the Holocaust, Ilse survives and eventually makes her way to Puerto Rico. An organization named Sefarad, coordinated by Sebastián Miranda, makes Ilse’s deliverance possible. My analysis of Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad will center on one of the tales, “Oh You, Who Knew So Well,” but will also consider the larger “frametale”—or “novel of novels,” as its subtitle calls it.⁴ In “Oh You, Who Knew So Well,” Isaac Salama, a young Hungarian Jew, is able to escape deportation to a concentration camp thanks to the efforts of a Spanish diplomat in Budapest.⁵ Together with his father, Salama finds exile in Tangier, Morocco, while his mother and sister, like Ilse’s family members, die in Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe. When Salama is ready to begin his studies in Madrid, he finally feels free of his burdensome inheritance of loss, which in many ways is embodied by his perpetually mourning father. But the mythical return to Sepharad becomes a failure for young Salama: he suffers a traffic accident that leaves him disabled. Isaac returns to Tangier, where he will spend the rest of his days working as a forgotten cultural ambassador in the derelict Spanish Athenaeum.

Salabert’s and Muñoz Molina’s novels situate twentieth-century Spanish history in relation to the trauma of World War II, thereby sharing the understanding of witnessing and trauma that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub develop in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. The authors base their analysis on a notion of a history that is “essentially not over, a history whose repercussions are not simply omnipresent (whether consciously or not) in all our cultural activities, but whose traumatic consequences are still actively evolving . . . in today’s political, historical, cultural and artistic scene” (xiv). Both novels engage with broader debates on literary representations of the Holocaust and, more specifically, with the historical contingencies in Spain: the Civil War, its repressive aftermath, and, more important, the debates on the “historical memory” of these events.

Both novels represent the experience of traumatic loss, although in different manners. Trauma studies tend to converge in three observations: first, the effects of trauma occur in an expanded time frame, and its symptoms are potentially somatic, “disguised or symbolic in their manifestations” (Douglass and Vogler, Witness and Memory, 10). Second, the effects and symptoms of trauma reach beyond the person who actually experienced it, passing on to family members and younger generations. Third, the connections between an actual event and trauma are often indirect and blurred: no single event has the same traumatic effect on all subjects; sometimes, as Douglass and Vogler point out, trauma appears to be completely disconnected from an actual event (11). Its effects invariably alter the processes of the mind and, as a result, the language in which devastating events are narrated. In the particular context of the Holocaust, history needs to be examined in conjunction with the ways in which the events themselves structured the possibilities (or the impossibility) of representation. Post-Holocaust history, explains Michael Rothberg, “has a traumatic structure—it is repetitive, discontinuous, and characterized by obsessive returns to the past and the troubling of simple chronology” (Traumatic Realism, 19). Rothberg’s notion of “traumatic structure” also poignantly describes the composition of both Salabert’s and Muñoz Molina’s novels. These are complex and circular texts that illuminate the ways in which trauma structures memory and language as well as the cultural and discursive relationships among very different moments in the past, echoing what Rothberg has called the multidirectionality of memory.

Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory addresses the intersections of decolonization and Holocaust memory, centering on public discourse and cultural production in France in the early 1960s, when the Eichmann trial coincided with public debate on the Algerian War. The book also is relevant to a discussion of the theoretical relation between the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the trauma of the Holocaust. Rothberg argues that “far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories—some of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s” (6).

Discourse about Holocaust remembrance has also influenced the memory of the Spanish Civil War; its most deliberate but also its most polemic manifestations are possibly the title and subtitle of Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2012). Rather than attempting to compare or equate these two events, I will focus, following Rothberg, on the ways in which the discourses on memory and trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust (depicted in both novels) pose new questions in relation to the debate on the “recovery of historical memory” that has been central to the cultural, academic, and even the legal realm in Spain since the mid-1990s.

Along with countless novels, successful films, such as Fernando Trueba’s Soldiers of Salamis (2002), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Emilio Martínez-Lázaro’s 13 Roses (2007), and historiographies and works of cultural analysis have contributed to the still expanding bibliography on the Spanish Civil War and its violent aftermath.⁶ A key player in the public debate on historical memory is the “Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica” (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), which was founded in 2000 with the explicit aim of unearthing mass graves in which the remains of Republican victims had been thrown. The ARMH has grown into an umbrella organization that has also lobbied for the Ley de Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory), which the Spanish Congress approved in 2007. The law dictates that the victims of the war and the repression should be recognized as such; it provides funds for further investigation of mass graves and enforces the removal of Francoist and Falangist symbols in public venues. Undoubtedly, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath still affect Spanish political life in a way that the Holocaust and its consequences do not. Nevertheless, Salabert’s and Muñoz Molina’s novels reveal that the memory debate may not have reached its point of exhaustion quite yet.

“Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view?” asks Rothberg in the opening pages of Multidirectional Memory. His model of multidirectional memory suggests the opposite—that is, that “pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction” (5). The “multidirectional” model (as opposed to a competitive model) allows for an understanding of the relations between the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the memory of the Holocaust without bracketing them together and eliding the radical differences between the two. In a critique of the debate that has accompanied the “memory boom”—the phenomenally large number of publications centering on memory in Spain—Jo Labanyi considers these differences. The “boom,” she argues, “has not been translated into an increased interest in the workings of memory but into an assumption that the past can be unproblematically recovered” (“Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 106). Labanyi adds that “what is tending to become lost with the current memory boom is a sense of the difficulty of articulating the traumatic impact of past violence” (106). This traumatic past has often been narrated in the form of ghost stories, such as del Toro’s film The Devil’s Backbone, which Labanyi discusses.

Trauma theory, as it has been articulated in relation to the Holocaust, would then provide a path not so much to exorcise the ghosts of the past as to learn to live with them. Paying attention to the spectral presences and their meaning in contemporary Spanish culture is crucial for Labanyi. She argues that “it is only by capturing the resistances to narrativization that representations of the past can convey something of the emotional charge which the past continues to hold today for those for whom it remains unfinished business” (107). Such “resistances to narrativization” are also part of narratives and testimonies of Holocaust survivors, although in the context of Francoist Spain these resistances have a different cause. Noting that “in the case of the Francoist repression, the resistances to narrativization have clear political causes,” Labanyi continues:

The testimonies of repression that have appeared in Spain in recent years do not suggest a biological inability to register the event at the time but habits of silence induced by decades of repression and a lack of willing interlocutors, which become hard to break. For this reason also, an aesthetics of haunting, which listens to the voices from the past that have not previously been allowed a hearing, seems more appropriate in the Spanish case than an aesthetics of rupture, which is predicated on the classic notion of trauma as the blocking of recall. (109)

These aesthetics coalesce in Salabert’s and Muñoz Molina’s novels, both of which span the early history of Francoism, including the political repression that took place in Spain in the 1940s, and the history of the Holocaust. The two novels represent singular instances of overcoming the resistance to narrativization that Labanyi locates as a side effect of Francoist repression. In a later essay, Labanyi reads the term “historical memory” in relation to “those forms of memory work that take place in transitional justice contexts,” citing Stephanie Golob, for whom the transition to democracy in Spain was a “transition without transitional justice” (“The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain,” 122). A concern for justice is undoubtedly a crucial component of the debates that center on the memory of the Holocaust. As Rothberg argues, public awareness of the Eichmann trial in the 1960s in many ways shaped discourse on Holocaust memory. I would suggest that Velódromo de invierno and Sepharad also emphasize matters that are relevant to but also go beyond a concern for justice—surviving a massive extermination, the burden of memory for future generations, exile and displacement—thereby revealing the multiple layers of post-transitional justice in Spain.

The characters in these novels survive the Holocaust partly because specific circumstances in Francoist Spain made this possible. Ilse Landermann and Isaac Salama survive both because and in spite of the consequences of the Spanish Civil War; thus, their stories fall somewhere between Spain’s “memory boom” and the articulation of the trauma of the Holocaust. Neverthless, neither the “the aesthetics of haunting” nor the “aesthetics of rupture” suffices to locate fully their significance. Indeed, an ambivalent nostalgia for Sepharad ultimately lies at the heart of both novels.

More than ghostly voices that address the unresolved past, places become ghostly in both texts; this is also why nostalgia is so crucial for these two novels. Although the nostalgically invoked home may have an actual location or even a geographic reference, the return to that home is usually more intricate than a line that can be traced on a map. Velódromo de invierno and Sepharad enact but also question the mythical return to Sepharad: a remainder, a place that in the novels becomes spectral, unreachable, and yet undeniably present. Thus, although both novels evoke the nostalgia of an impossible return, they are also about irrecoverable losses and constant attempts (always doomed to fail) to recover what is gone: Ilse abandons her mother and her little brother at the Winter Velodrome in Paris; Isaac leaves behind his mother and his sisters in occupied Budapest. In both cases the protagonists obsessively return to the brief moment in the past that would change their lives forever, tragically aware that neither recovery nor return is possible.

The irreversible losses in both novels also suggest that these texts are not just about nostalgia but about the melancholia, as Muñoz Molina writes in the last sentence of Sepharad, “of an endless exile.” Melancholia and nostalgia are by no means equivalent, and yet both afflictions share a number of traits. Both are, after all, the consequence of a loss that cannot be overcome. Although melancholia is by definition open-ended, a “reflective” nostalgia dwells instead in the realm of what could have been and what was believed to have been.

Drawing from Robert Burton’s understanding of melancholia in the seventeenth century, Boym notes that, “unlike melancholia, which was regarded as an ailment of monks and philosophers, nostalgia was a more ‘democratic’ disease that threatened to affect soldiers and sailors displaced far from home as well as many country people who began to move to the cities” (The Future of Nostalgia, 5). While melancholia, according to Boym, “confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness,” nostalgia is “about the relationships between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, bet...