Spain, the Old and the New

"The Inquisition Tribunal" by Francisco Goya. (Google Arts & Culture)

In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain decreed that the Jewish religion could no longer be practiced in their realm. The Jews who lived there were instructed either to convert or to leave. If they did neither the penalty was death. This absolute ban on Judaism followed a century of persecution, exile, and forced conversions of Jewish residents of Spain.

The short-term consequence was vast suffering for those Jews who decided to leave, abandoning everything they had. The already-working Spanish Inquisition then invented new ways to persecute those who stayed and converted. The Inquisitors habitually targeted sincerely converted Christians as well as those who were not sincere but only attempting to continue their lives in Spain. Inquisitors and their willing lay collaborators were often motivated by the law that the property of the accused Jews became the property of their accusers.

Spain exiled or persecuted a very productive sector of their population, and lost the contributions of tens of thousands of skilled artisans, entrepreneurs, and knowledge workers. In the long term, this gap in skills and education contributed to the eventual decline of Spain from being a major world power to its current status -- although the immediately subsequent conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of native populations and resources postponed the consequences.

In exile, many communities of Spanish refugees maintained the memory of their origin in Spain, as well as speaking Castilian Spanish. The traditional name of Spain used by the Jews was Séfarad, and thus they have always been known as Sephardic Jews.

Retour à Séfarad, published 2018.

Pierre Assouline, in his memoir Retour à Séfarad, includes a very detailed account of this history, along with his personal story. His ancestors left Spain in the earlier persecution in 1391. They spent 600 years as members of the Sephardic community of Morocco. In the 1950s, the Arab countries of North Africa drove out their Jewish communities. As a result, Assouline and his family settled in France and he obtained a French education. He became a well-known journalist and author of a large number of biographies, novels, and other works.

In about 2016, Assouline decided to respond to a decree by the current King of Spain stating that descendants of the Jews from the expulsions 500 years ago could now be granted citizenship in modern Spain. Retour à Séfarad documents the obstacles Assouline encountered as he tried to become a Spanish citizen. He was assigned mountains of paperwork to prove his roots, he had to navigate a variety of bureaucrats in person and online, he was required to become fluent in the language and history of Spain, and he had to take courses and pass examinations to prove his competence. He also experienced many other challenges.

The memoir also includes descriptions of the author's travels in Spain, checking into the 500-year-old history of Jews in a number of locales. Assouline describes the attitudes towards this history among the residents in the modern communities where Jews once lived. He gives character sketches of a number of contemporary Sephardic Jews, as well as  their family histories. As he discusses his situation, he explores the meaning of personal identity and how people form their own identities. Of course he inevitably includes comparisons between the expulsion of 1492 and the Holocaust of the 1940s. Although the book covers an amazing variety of topics, I found it interesting and coherent. In particular, before I read Retour à Séfarad, I was already familiar with most of the Spanish-Jewish history covered there; however, I totally appreciated the way Assouline wrote it and the many details that he included.

Assouline is a very wide-ranging consumer of books, films, music, art, and more. Thus Retour à Séfarad is absolutely full of references to high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture, both French and international. He describes visits to various museums, connecting his thoughts on history to various painters such as to Francisco Goya -- for example, the work depicted at the start of this post. He mentions Cervantes and his creation Don Quixote often. But there's also Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Philip Roth, André Schwartz-Bart, André Breton, James Joyce, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elias Canetti, Amos Oz, Al Capone, Charles Dickens, Lawrence of Arabia, Henri Cartier-Bresson and many more ... so many allusions!

I enjoyed reading this book. One reason I liked it is that I have been to the places he described, often trying, as he did, to find places with remnants of the long-lost Jewish residents. I have read many of the authors he mentions, so I could connect to what he was saying. I am proud to say that I read the book in French as there is no available translation. I've read one other book by Assouline: An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler 1884-1979 (blogged here).


As I read the history of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in Retour à Séfarad, I was thinking a lot about the price that Spain paid for expelling a whole community so brutally and pointlessly. I have been thinking of the similarity of the historic injustice with the current actions of our own government, the United States of America. What we are doing to our own immigrant communities now, in 2020, is equally unjust and potentially as destructive to the future of both the current citizens and of the immigrant communities that we threaten with expulsion. We don't even offer them an option to "convert"!

Review © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot.com.