In Juana Salabert's acclaimed novel Velódromo del invierno (Winter velodrome; 2001), a German Jewish girl escapes Nazi deportation from Paris and reaches Spain via the Pyrenees, with the help of an underground rescue organization called “Sepharad.” Throughout Salabert's novel, the dates 1492, 1942, and 1992 mingle and evoke one another's distinct, yet emotionally linked moments in and regarding Spain, as a home forcibly abandoned, remembered, and reexplored by Jews around or near the Mediterranean. Tabea Alexa Linhard also charts Sepharad's nuanced magnetism within Spain and regionally in Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory.
Engaging with Juana Salabert's fiction and a wealth of other literary texts, memoirs, oral histories, biographies, films, political magazines, and tourism materials from the mid-twentieth century on, Linhard's intercultural reach is broader than Salabert's. Linhard's study brings together Jewish and Spanish themes of Holocaust-era nostalgia, transit, and rescue in and via Spain, alongside discourses of historical memory recuperation vis-à-vis the Spanish Civil War, Spain's repressive fascism, and local traces of medieval Sepharad throughout the country today. The result is a prismatic compendium that significantly advances recent and increasingly combined scholarship in contemporary Iberian and Jewish studies.
In her first chapter Linhard explores different types of diasporic Jewish nostalgia for Sepharad as an elusive ancestral homeland, both in Juana Salabert's novel and the novel Sepharad by internationally lauded author Antonio Muñoz Molina, also published in 2001. Borrowing from Iberian medievalist David Wacks (33, 198 n. 4), Linhard describes Muñoz Molina's weave of fictional and renowned mid-twentieth-century biographies shaped by despotic persecution—Nazi, Francoist, and Soviet—as a “frametale.” As in medieval fiction of this genre, the many disparate voices in Sepharad form a narrative complement that they collectively imbue with overall purpose and meaning.
Linhard's study is comparable: as she indicates in her introduction and reiterates often in her five chapters, through her quest for diverse understandings of historic Jewish Spain, a weathered map emerges. It marks locales roughly around the Mediterranean to which Sepharad has conveyed a vague sense of home (chapters 1, 2, 5), a possible refuge from the Holocaust (chapters 1, 2, 3, 5), and Jewish and Moorish archetypes that have populated the Spanish imaginary as Others since medieval Spain (126, chapter 4). In her fourth chapter Linhard shows how such Semitic constructs were used to legitimate ongoing Spanish colonial hegemony in Morocco in the 1930s, and to simultaneously glorify an invented Spanish-Muslim fraternity for the Nationalists in Spain's Civil War.
Spanish author Ángel Vázquez's 1976 novel La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (Juanita Narboni's wretched life) exposes the gendered colonialist discourse that underlay such expedient and changeable Spanish borrowing from medieval Iberian convivencia, or Christian, Muslim, and Jewish coexistence. In chapter 4, Linhard intensifies Vázquez's deconstruction of Spain's Orientalist discourse in its Moroccan protectorate by discussing how feminist Moroccan filmmaker Farida Benlyazid created an even more genuinely pluralistic cinematic adaptation of Juanita Narboni in 2005. Earlier, as she begins chapter 4, however, Linhard takes time to explain how Spain's medieval mis/appropriations in Morocco contribute to our apprehension of an otherwise more thematically readable map of Sepharad's absent-presence drawn around the Mediterranean.
Even though the “contradictions in Spanish colonialism in North Africa” are not ancillary, but “intrinsically connected” to medieval Jewish and contemporary Spain (125), they lack traumatic attachment to a historic abyss that has galvanized the most cogent and compelling set of human interactions with Sepharad that Linhard traces in her study, both around a radius of Iberian consequence in the Mediterranean and in various Jewish heritage sites in Spain, as well.
I am brought back to the dialogic years of 1492, 1942, and 1992 that structure Juana Salabert's novel Velódromo del invierno, from Linhard's first chapter. The year that denotes the Holocaust in Salabert's lineup is flanked by those dates that signal the end of Sepharad and its contemporary quincentennial. Mutually evocative, all three years suggest the mental time travel that has corroborated narratives of Jewish escape and survival in 1940s Spain with Inquisition-thwarting analogies from centuries earlier. Particularly in her second chapter, Linhard examines such historic Sephardic and crypto-Jewish reconnoitering by Holocaust-era counterparts, who reached Spain either by dint or in spite of Franco's vagaries with respect to Jewish entry and asylum. In a range of memoirs, testimonies, and oral histories by Holocaust refugees in Barcelona, including Trudi Alexy's popularly known The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot (1994), Linhard finds conscious efforts to align mid-twentieth-century personal narratives with ancient Marrano trajectories. Such time straddling (from a 1990s vantage, in Alexy's case), could steady Holocaust-refugee precariousness in Spain with medieval underwriting made “coherent” (69), or supportive.
What Linhard shows increasingly in chapters 3 and 5, however, is how such ancient-contemporary intertextuality acquires its consistent message and slant through the politics of memory involved in modern authorship. In chapter 3, Linhard deconstructs several Spanish and regional oral histories, historiographies, and biographies, dating especially since the 1990s, about the main Spanish diplomats who saved around 5,000 Jews in 1940s Budapest. Foregrounded are the fifteenth-century Iberian qualities that made Mediterranean Sephardim appealing to Spanish philosemites in the 1900s–1920s, and worthy of rescue by Spain in the 1940s, to Franco's long-mythologized credit. Where medieval and twentieth-century Jewish and Spanish exilic histories particularly intersect, in the long-empty Sephardic spaces in Barcelona and Girona, and in the northern frontier town of Portbou where Walter Benjamin took his life, Linhard also disaggregates teleological connections between the 1490s, the 1940s, and beyond, so that chapter 5 reveals how contemporary Spanish tourism selectively streamlines memory, as well.
Among the many scholars of “trauma, melancholia, and nostalgia …” (7) that Linhard engages with so helpfully in Jewish Spain, Michael Rothberg's concept of “multi-directional memory” (2009), enables her unprecedented use of the Holocaust as a starting juncture of times, places, and human responses to catastrophe for her discursive mapping. Following trails charted by the Holocaust allows many of the diverse meanings of “Jewish Spain” that Linhard finds around the Mediterranean to reach us in such original and compelling form.
