Saturday, March 15, 2014
Committee (Omni Shoreham)
This paper focuses on what is increasingly referred to as the “return to Judaism” by immigrants, converts, and the state in contemporary Spain. In the four decades since the fall of the Franco dictatorship, Spain’s Jewish “roots”—long disavowed for their supposed cultural and biological corruption of the national body— have come to be celebrated by the state as the nation’s culture heritage. As once-crumbling medieval Jewish neighborhoods long bereft of Jewish inhabitants are renovated into modern centers of World Heritage Sites, growing numbers of Spaniards and immigrants are reclaiming the Judaism of their forcibly converted ancestors. Despite the disparate publics and objectives that animate them, this constellation of projects converge on the question of whether the conversion of a building or a self counts as a return to or of Judaism. By considering the deliberations of multiple publics on who can rightfully makes claims to Jewish histories and futures in the present, I seek a better grasp on the shifting politics of history, materiality, and value.
The resurgence of Judaism onto Spain’s landscape is embedded in dense entanglements of philosemitism and anti-Semitism; changing notions of relatedness and belonging; turns to history, memory, and origins; and the development of new moral and political economies. In this protean ecosystem, competing epistemological and ontological claims mingle with unpredictable consequences. I propose that “conversion” and “return”—as concepts with genealogies that reach into both Spanish and Jewish political theologies—might have analytic purchase for understanding this emergent time and place of Jewish Spain.
