The persecution and expulsion of Jews from Spain – or Sepharad – played a pivotal role in Jewish history and collective memory. In the modern era, the historical legacy of Sepharad inspired a wide and diverse literary corpus that included prose, poetry, and drama. Fictional accounts of the dispossession of the acculturated Sephardi elite, the terror of the Inquisition, and the secret lives of forced converts offered readers uniquely Jewish tales of romance, violence, and suspense. Blending history and fiction, past and present, Jewish authors liberally drew on images of the Sephardic past to grapple with their own cultural identities and political circumstances, as well as to captivate their audiences and promote their publications. This lecture will trace the fictional afterlives of Sepharad, a hybrid and immensely popular literary corpus that circulated across the modern Jewish world, confounding generic, cultural, ethnic, and national distinctions along its convoluted path.
Marina Mayorski is the 2024-2025 Goldin Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA and MA in comparative literature from Tel Aviv University. She recently received her PhD from the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Michigan.
Light reception to follow.
Location: Cherpack Seminar Room, 543 Williams Hall
Sponsored by the Kutchin Seminar Series in the Jewish Studies Program, with the support of Penn’s Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program, and Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies.