My Heart is in Sepharad: Writing Medieval Spain in the Modern Sephardic Diaspora

This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of a modern global diaspora by foregrounding the historical, linguistic and nationalist contexts embedded in literary works produced over the last two centuries, written by a diverse collection of writers who imagine a preserved ethnoreligious community. Sephardim—descendants of medieval Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century—have sustained an ethnic heritage by drawing on the figures, texts, and experiences of medieval Iberia, specifically the Golden Age of al-Andalus (ca. 950- 1140) and the anti-Jewish measures in Christian Spain that led to the Inquisition and expulsion (ca. 1391-1492). I argue that by reading, translating, and rewriting the rich literature of medieval Iberian Jews, from Andalusian liturgical poetry to Kabbalistic commentaries to converso epistles, modern Sephardim creatively interpret the historical and political significance of their ancestral homeland. To conceptualize such diasporic identities, I compare temporalities, regions, and genres, consistently juxtaposing major forms of literature written by Iberian Jews throughout the Middle Ages with those written by their descendants.This study of a modern diaspora also compares the role of contemporaneous historiography, from Romantic historicism to the Wissenschaft des Judenthums to archival research of the Cairo Geniza, in accessing the history and texts of a former homeland. I furtherexplore the intertextual strategies through which modern Sephardim imagine the medieval Jewish experience, constructing palimpsests that bring influential texts into relief by writing around and about them in order to situate artistic expressions, such as those in homoerotic or Romantic poetry, as a medieval inheritance. By adopting genres from al-Andalus, where quantified meters of poetry and conventions of form reflected Jewish acculturation in a predominantly Arab society, Sephardim writing in Hebrew, in particular, produce experimental, actively archaic forms of poetry and narrative. Finally, this study addresses how Sephardim deploy medieval tropes, such as the intolerance of the Inquisition or the heroic pilgrimage of an Andalusi poet, to project an ethnicity onto modern nationalist identities.Ph.D