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Abstract
This article describes the pioneering work of José Amador de los Ríos, author of the first modern history of the Jews of Spain. Through discussion of his life and work, the article illustrates how Spain's Jewish past became an object of debate in the nineteenth century, as Spanish scholars and politicians placed historiography at the service of rival political causes. It also explores some of the ways in which the Sephardic past figured into emergent questions of national identity and the so-called Jewish Question in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The recovery of the Jewish past in Spain was marked by deep ambivalence, as the debate concerning Jewish absence and presence in Spain was marked by a nationalism that, though liberal, remained firmly Catholic.
Key words: José Amador de los Ríos, Spain, historia patria, Jewish Question, historiography, Jews of Spain
On May 19, 1918, a day of "intense joy for the patria [nation]," members of Spain's Royal Academies of History, Fine Arts, and Language gathered in Madrid to pay homage to historian and literary scholar José Amador de los Ríos on the centennial of his birth. Among the accomplishments cited as qualifying him as a "national hero of saber patrio [patriotic knowledge]" was his scholarship on the Jews of Spain, to which those honoring him in speeches made frequent reference that day.1
The celebration of Amador de los Ríos and discussion of his scholarship on the Jews in some of Spain's most prestigious scholarly institutions suggest that both Amador de los Ríos's work and Spain's Jewish past had come to hold a prominent place in conceptions of historia patria (official national history) in Spain. This article examines how Amador de los Ríos and the history of the Jews of Spain attained such standing. Through a close reading of his work on the Jews, I illustrate how Amador de los Ríos pioneered a process of recovering Spain's Jewish legacy and how Spain's Jewish past became a subject of debate in nineteenth-century Spain, as scholars and politicians placed historiography at the service of rival political causes. Moreover, I seek to explain why Amador de los Ríos sought an alternate way of writing historia patria and why he chose the Jews as a vehicle through which...