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Performance, Tourism and Jewish Memory in the Festival “Los Conversos”

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

Since 1997, the Spanish town of Hervás, in the province of Cáceres, Extremadura, has hosted an annual popular festival called “Los Conversos,” in which residents stage a play about the local Jewish past, recreate a medieval “Jewish market” and dress up “as Jews.” Over the twenty years of the festival, the memory of the Jewish medieval past has been borrowed, adapted and rearticulated in the performance of several plays. One of these plays, La Calumnia (The Slander), written by local playwright Miguel Murillo and staged in the festival between 2013 and 2015, is based on an accusation of host desecration that the Inquisition investigated in the area in 1506: a local old Christian was accused of stealing consecrated hosts from a nearby church in order to sell them to a group of conversos from Hervás. Both the old Christian man and the conversos were convicted of profanation and burned at the stake.

This paper discusses Hervás’ reengagement with the memory of Jewish Spain through the play The Slander and the “entanglements of memory” between the 1506 accusation and an episode that took place in the same town on March 29, 1936, a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. That night, some “leftist men” were accused of having started a fire at a local church and having stolen the chalice and desecrated it. In 1939 they were condemned to 20 years in prison. As Hervás, like many other Spanish and European towns, puts its Jewish heritage on display for tourist consumption, the memory of the Civil War and the popular legends about the confrontations between Christians, Jews and conversos function as a tangled complex. The relationship between them can be understood through the interrelated concepts of “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009), “travelling memory” (Erll 2011) and “entangled memory” (Feindt et al 2014).

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