The Memory Work of Jewish Spain by Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Memory Work of Jewish Spain by Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa Dalia Kandiyoti Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa. The Memory Work of Jewish Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 390 pp. The Memory Work of Jewish Spain is a timely and exhaustive study of Spain's newest rapprochement with Sephardic communities. Both sweeping and closely detailed, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa's book ably analyzes the efflorescence of cultural activities, museums, and heritage networks undertaken by Spain in the past two decades, following the 1992 quincentenary commemoration of the expulsion of Jews. They train a critical eye on the official presentation of what the Spanish Jewish past means today, fruitfully combining extensive fieldwork in newly constructed Jewish heritage sites with cultural and textual analysis. The authors' explanations and interpretations take their cues from Spanish historiography, memory studies, Jewish heritage scholarship, and tourism studies. They emphasize the "multidirectionality" and "entanglements" of Spanish Jewish memory with the memory cultures of the Spanish Civil War, Francoism, Catalanism, the Holocaust, and much more. Because the "work" of memory that the title points to is largely undertaken by the state, with a secondary and minor role for the country's current Jewish communities, the demythification and historicization of how modern Spain presents the Sephardic Jewish legacy are key to Flesler and Pérez Melgosa's approach. They show that the building blocks of today's official philosephardism, whose origins date to the nineteenth century, include the idea of convivencia, or peaceful medieval coexistence of "the three cultures" serving as "an index of tolerance … inherent" to Spain (76). Other prevalent myths are the Ashkenazic concept of medieval Spanish Jewry as an ideal community and the notion that the Sephardic Jewish diaspora is an economic superpower. According to the authors, state-sponsored promotion of heritage tourism, museums, festivals, performances, and celebrations deploy these myths and downplay persecutions, thereby instrumentalizing a romanticized Sephardic memory for national(ist), economic, and branding purposes. [End Page 441] The termination of human and material Jewish life in Spain, from architecture to cemeteries to books, was totalizing. To compensate, many ordinary streets, buildings, and churches have recently become resignified as Jewish sites, including in towns that have had no Jewish communities since the expulsion. As with other mobilizations of the past that overlap with tourism and commerce, the dead do substantial work. Their individual names or glorious lives as scholars or doctors are displayed on plaques and invoked in official speeches and brochures. As a collective, too, the Jewish dead are busy animating the tourism sector, their culture valorized and sometimes spectacularized in performance and "Jewish" dress-up (see chapter 5). But all this effort to erase the erasures cannot hide "the dismal lack of objects" (207) in the exhibits. This dearth, the authors observe astutely, is in sharp dissonance with the institutional narratives of medieval Jewish splendor. In several chapters, Flesler and Pérez Melgosa walk us through many Jewish museums and exhibits. The repurposed buildings, the collections gathered from various parts of the world to compensate for the paucity of Spanish remnants, and exhibit designs are subjected to historicized scrutiny, informed by heritage and museum studies. Chapter 3 is largely devoted to the making of the Sephardi Museum of Toledo, housed in the Transit Synagogue, one of only three in Spain that survived the destructions of the medieval era as converted churches. The museum no longer presents Jewishness simply as an artifact of past convivencia. But the absent story of the forced converts whose descendants prayed as Christians in the synagogue-turned-church haunts the institution, a "museum of converso Spain," as the authors put it. Converso history's role in the present, usually neglected, appears in many chapters, including in chapter 5's probing of the Los Conversos festivals in Hervás and their relation to the memory of Francoism. The "Exhibiting Jewish Heritage" chapter concerns the politics of collecting and displaying in a situation of "imperfect fit," as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett characterizes the frequent relationship between Jewish museums and Jewish communities. In Girona's museum, the authors observe an overlap of Catalan politics with the recovery of...