No Longer Nostalgia: Jewish Spain and the Future of the Inheritable Past in Europe

In 1992, King Juan Carlos commemorated the 1492 expulsion of the Jews with a speech welcoming the “return” of their descendants to Spain, proclaiming, “Sefarad is no longer nostalgia.” Since then, however, nostalgia for the Jewish past has only intensified as Jewish Quarters long bereft of Jewish inhabitants have been renovated into World Heritage Sites, public celebrations of Sephardic culture have become commonplace, and the historical romance of the convivenciaof Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain has been revived as a template for modern multiculturalism. In 2012, exactly two decades after the king’s groundbreaking speech, the government announced that descendants of expelled Jews in the diaspora would be eligible for immediate Spanish citizenship.

What does it mean that Jewishness—which for so long was disavowed as the other within—has become an object of recuperative labor in such a wide range of projects? Why has the lived Jewish present remained largely invisible, despite its growth and transformation by converts, immigrants, and liberal Judaism? In this paper, I attempt to shed light on the various “returns” to Judaism that have taken hold in Spain during the past three decades and to locate them in relation to similar “revivals” of Judaism and Jewish culture in other European countries, like Poland and Germany. I suggest that Spain both exemplifies and offers a unique vantage on the peculiar politics of Jewish history in Europe today, as well as on the shifting rubrics through which cultural “problems” of the past are unevenly incorporated into the present.