From Inquisition to Popular Fiction: Limits to Public Memory Change in Spanish Historical Novels on Jews

• In Event: New Crossroads in Iberian and Jewish Studies PANEL 2: Reinterpretations, Reincorporations, and Representations of Spain’s Jewish Past

Abstract

Basque-Spanish author, Toti Martínez de Lezea, is a doyenne of popular Spanish historical fiction today. In addition to restaging local dramas of Inquisition surveillance and mob-led Jewish pursuit in medieval northern Spain, in 2009 de Lezea also contributed to an anthology of quick narrative sketches of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Iberian women around the Peninsula between 790 and 1484. As readers move up through these years, de Lezea’s Jewish and conversa protagonists gain in contextual and personal relatability. In an interview, the author shared with me that this is because she and most writers who facilitate time-travel back to local scenes of Catholic-Sephardic tension depend on increasingly concrete images of Jews and conversos that started to abound in diocesan and Inquisitorial records throughout Spain by the 12th and 13th centuries.

Indeed, such sources are also clear in prominent author, Carme Riera’s nationally-lauded IN THE LAST BLUE, from 1994. This internationally known and translated novel chronicles a community of ill-fated Mallorcan Crypto-Jews, or ‘chuetas’ in Balearic island parlance, along their path to Inquisitorial burnings in 1691. Of Mallorcan Jewish lineage herself, Riera has written about how she aimed to educate and infuse more historical accuracy and empathy into contemporary collective memory surrounding this stand-out band of nearly escaped, then re-trapped converso unfortunates. Almost every plot twist and individual Jewish foible in LAST BLUE, however, clearly stems from Inquisition documentation that German historian, Angela Selke, already assembled in non-fictional narrative form in 1972.

With comparative recourse to THE DEAD COMMAND, a 1908 novel on Christian-chueta relations and mutual suspicion by realist author Vicente Blasco-Ibañez, this paper explores limits to Spanish public memory adjustment through popular historical fiction that largely re/animates institutional anti-Semitic stereotypes and related local lore. Spanning the twentieth century, in both Blasco-Ibañez and Riera’s novels more independently and liberally drawn converso characters struggle as exotic or vague counterweights to players with sharper descriptive precedence derived from Inquisiton records.

Author

• Stacy N. Beckwith, Carleton College