AMADOR DE LOS RÍOS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES IN SPAIN

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Notes

1. Michal Friedman offers a comprehensive overview of Amador de los Ríos’ life and intellectual trajectory in the framing of a close reading of important portions of his Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España (1848), a text that will be central to my discussion here. See Friedman, “Jewish History” as well as the essay in the present collection, “Reconquering ‘Sepharad.’” I am deeply grateful to Prof. Friedman for furnishing me with these texts in manuscript.

2. Amador de los Ríos introduces the term in his Toledo pintoresca of 1845 (with new editions up to 2006), and offers a definitive statement on the mudéjar style in his El estilo mudéjar en arquitectura upon his induction into the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in 1859. That speech itself has appeared in several editions (e.g., the Valencian edition of 1996), but its impact is better measured by the ubiquity of the term in discussions of Iberian art history in English no less than Spanish. Antonio Zoido Naranjo, for instance, will still quote from Amador de los Ríos’ induction speech in defining “La arquitectura mudéjar” (“Mudejar Architecture”) in Ni Oriente ni Occidente (198): and though Mariam Rosser-Owen does not refer back to Amador de los Ríos explicitly, she continues to use his term under the heading of “Mudéjar Taste” in her very recent Islamic Arts from Spain (76–107). Nevertheless, current scholarship has begun to contest the implicit understanding of fixed boundaries between “us” and “Other” in Amador de los Ríos’ usage and the art historical tradition that he inaugurated with respect to mudejarismo Juan Carlos. Ruiz Souza confronts Amador de los Ríos explicitly in “Architectural Languages”; see also Robinson and Feliciano. My thanks to Olga Bush for bringing these references to my attention.

3. With the exception of citations from CORDE (see n. 11), the original orthography has been preserved for quotations from nineteenth-century sources. The translations of all texts are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

4. Amador de los Ríos would be among the many Spanish intellectuals who supported the Spanish neo-colonial war in Morocco in 1859–1960 (see his Victorias de Africa). See Martín Márquez on Africa in the political imaginary of Spain, including the construction of the Muslim Middle Ages.

5. For a lesser-known case, see the Spanish translation of Sismondi in which Amador de los Ríos had a hand, especially the remark that “La literatura española difiere esencialmente de las demas de la Europa, puede decirse que estas son europeas, mientras que aquella es oriental” [Spanish literature differs essentially from that of the rest of Europe, it can be said that the latter are European, while the former are oriental] (1–2) and the critical reply of the translators in the notes (Sismondi 29).

6. See also Amador de los Ríos, El arte, for a related polemic with a French scholar in explicitly nationalist terms.

7. Notable in Marzo's articles is a strategy typical of colonialist discourses whereby the past glories of the Other are contrasted to their squalor in the present, that is, a negation that colonizer and colonized can be coeval (see Fabian). Wacks finds much the same strategy in Jewish Studies in Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (325). On the other hand, in the second of two articles that ran in the Revista Literaria de El Español concurrently with Fernández de Navarrete's work, Francisco Enríquez Ferrer includes Arabic architecture in its general purview without denigration. On this and other points, a comparative evaluation of Spanish colonialist discourse with respect to Jews and Muslims and the construction of indigenous America in the same period, late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, would be illuminating, but cannot be conducted here. I note, however, that Amador de los Ríos would be at the intersection (see his edition of Fernández de Oviedo; the introduction appeared separately as Vida).

8. For a distinct account centered on developments among the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, see Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity. See also, Bush, Jewish Studies.

9. Among the many discussions of the Wissenschaft movement, David N. Myers, Resisting History, is especially germane to the topic of historical sensibility.

10. Wissenschaft scholarship does not appear to have had a direct impact on the initial formation of modern Jewish Studies in Spain. References to German-Jewish scholars of that movement are absent from Amador de los Ríos’ Estudios, for instance. Only decades later does he refer with a certain diffidence to the work of historian Heinrich Graetz (Historia social 1.166, n. 1, see also 1.141, n. 1 and 145, n. 2).

11. The following excerpts have been gleaned from the website of the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) under the heading “Imparcialidad,” which forms part of the website of the Real Academia de la Lengua (http://corpus.rae.es).

12. The preceding excerpts have been quoted from the CORDE under “Imparcialidad.”

13. Among the first to follow the path opened by Amador de los Ríos is Adolfo de Castro, whose Historia de los judíos en España [Historia of the Jews in Spain] appeared in 1847, one year prior to the publication of the Estudios as a book. Amador de los Ríos takes considerable pains to establish his own priority over Castro as the pioneer in this field in the prefatory notice to the Estudios. For another early contribution to modern Jewish Studies in Spain in the area of medical history, clearly acknowledging the precedent of Amador de los Río’ Estudios, see Moreno de Villalba.

14. Examining German philosemitism of the succeeding generation contemporaneous with Amador de los Ríos’ Estudios, Dagmar Herzog emphasizes that even a certain theological rapprochement between Christian dissenters and Reform Judaism did not suffice to eliminate ambivalence toward Jews (Herzog 111–39). “What was meant to be a democratic dialogue,” Herzog concludes, “too soon turned into a highly problematic monologue” (139).

15. Amador de los Ríos is speaking there in appreciation of the Catalán Renaissance of the nineteenth century, which he applauds, much as in the case of his reassessment of the achievements of Iberian Jews, in so far and only in so far as that modern literary movement is construed not as a form of separatism, but, on the contrary, as a contribution to a unified national culture (e.g., “Contestación” 68).

16. In his attenuated treatment of Iberian Jews under medieval Muslim rule, Amador de los Ríos depends instead upon French secondary sources.

17. The procedure is not substantially revised by Américo de Castro, though he is generally recognized in Hispanic Studies as the foundational figure (to the detriment of Amador de los Ríos and his immediate predecessors) of scholarly commitment to understanding the Jewish contribution to Spanish national history. The severe limitation on Jewish voices in this procedure has led, on the other hand, to the very small impact of Amador de los Ríos’ research on Jewish Studies outside of Spain (see the landmark work of Baer) and also a stern rebuke to Américo Castro by Benzion Netanyahu (see also Smith 27–58).

18. That argument leaves out of account public debates conducted before Christian authorities (e.g., see Maccoby).

19. Among recent studies of crypto-Jews, see Gitlitz, Alpert, Jacobs, and Yovel.

20. New paradigms are developing from attention to the space of the frontier as a geocultural framework for understanding Iberian Jewish life (e.g., Ray), the deconstruction of binaries (e.g., Kruger), and the theorization of intimacy (e.g., Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale). See also the critical reaction to Amador de los Ríos’ concept of “mudéjar style” cited above in note 2. In earlier scholarship, see Stephen Gilman's discussion of the converso environment of Fernando de Rojas and the groundbreaking work of Samuel M. Stern on the mixed-language poetic form of the muwashsha.

21. Another important distinction between the Estudios of 1848 and the Historia social of 1875–1876 was Amador de los Ríos’ extended consideration at the close of the latter dedicated to the contemporary situation in nineteenth-century Spain. He devotes special attention to two matters that came into renewed focus since the publication of the Estudios: the petition to rescind the Edict of Expulsion of 1492 presented by Rabbi Ludwig Phillipson of Magdeburg to the Spanish Cortes Constituyentes in 1854 and the attempt to establish freedom of religion through the Constitution of 1869. He historicizes these matters, looking back as far as the political position of the Conde-Duque de Olivares in the seventeenth century, and following the debate to his own present day (Historia social 3.546–68). And in the very act of concluding his Historia social, política y religiosa, he recommends the text as a point of reference to “la atencion de nuestros hombres de Estado” (3.567) [the attention of our men of State]. A separate study would be needed to trace the impact of his text, and the modern Jewish Studies that Amador de los Ríos was promoting, on the history of those debates.