Introduction: Jewish cultural heritage, space and mobility in Spain, Portugal and North Africa

I

A traditional definition of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, includes all assets that have a symbolic cultural value: from historic towns, buildings, cultural landscapes and cultural objects to intangible manifestations that usually fall into the category of folklore and ‘popular culture’. They are a unique set of cultural manifestations created under particular social, cultural, and economic circumstances, which are impossible to recreate truly. The speed with which the world is changing places heritage at a risk of being lost through physical destruction or loss of knowledge. National and international organisations have sought to establish a formal system of identifying a sample of that heritage and conserving it for the future. As it cannot include everything, determining the best or most representative samples or things to preserve is not always a politically or ideologically neutral decision (Messenger and Smith, 2010,Waterton 2012). The UNESCO and the Council of Europe have been very active in the area of cultural heritage. Among the issues of interest for these organisations in the broad field of culture are cultural identity and the recognition of minorities (Richards 1996).

Since the 1990s, studies on ‘place’ and ‘space’ have contributed to rethinking the concept of heritage (Brauch, Lipphardt, Nocke 2008). If the concept of ‘heritage’ refers to the past, the concept of ‘space’ refers to the dynamic relationships that occur – alongside many other areas – around heritage, its use, interpretation, (re)creation of identities, and construction of social relationships (Breglia 2006). That is, not as something stable and fixed but as something symbolic and fluid (Gromova and Voigt, 2015). As Diana Pinto pointed out, in the mid-1990s, when she coined the concept of ‘Jewish space’, cultural heritage and other Jewish cultural spaces in Europe would inevitably come from the hand not only of Jews but often of non-Jews (Pinto 1996). The transformation in tourist products of old Jewish neighbourhoods in Europe is one such example for a form of co-construction of memories and, even, identities (Eszter 2014). As Joan and Jean Comaroff have argued, ethnicity and cultural heritage have become a commodity, a market product (of those in the margins, the exoticised ‘others’) to be consumed (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). This raises crucial questions about who’s heritage and identity are distinguished for preservation, by whom, why, and how.

The ethnographic gaze can help us see beyond the superficial representations, often stereotyped, sometimes offensive, of the ethnicities that supposedly represent Jewish cultural heritage and Jewish cultural spaces in the flourishing ethnocultural tourism in Europe and beyond. A more in-depth look will reveal a much more complex picture, with the social interactions and projects that arise from this (re)creation of ‘Jewish’ spaces, shared by Jews and non-Jews (Lehrer 2013). This phenomenon, widely studied in Central and Eastern Europe (Gromova, Heinert, Voigt 2015), has received little attention in other contexts, such as the Iberian context and North Africa, this monographic dossier’s object.

When Diana Pinto developed the concept of ‘Jewish space’, she had in mind places of post-Holocaust Europe, that Europe that had wiped out the Jews, their cultural heritage and their spaces in the mid-20th century. In the southwest of the continent, Spain and Portugal had long begun the recovery and reconceptualisation of their Jewish heritage. This early recovery of the Jewish (and Muslim) cultural legacy had much to do with the revision of its ‘national history’ since the mid-19th century, at a time when interest in Oriental Studies spread throughout various European universities (Lacave 2000). The recovery of this cultural heritage was also carried out, fundamentally, by non-Jews, for the same reasons as in post-Holocaust Europe, their scarce presence in the Spanish case, their invisibility in the case of the descendants of Portuguese crypto-Jewish converts, after five centuries of exile or hiding. Paradoxically, the Franco dictatorship did not change or hide this interest, and in 1941 the Arias Montano Institute of Arab and Hebrew Studies was founded in Madrid. Research on Hispanic-Jewish heritage and culture occupied a prominent place on the Institute and several Spanish universities’ agendas, especially concerning the rich and abundant medieval heritage and the language spoken by the diaspora’s Hispano-Jews (Menny 2015). Interest in the Spanish-Jewish diaspora was significant in colonial Morocco, where the Sephardic Jews of Tetouan and other northern Moroccan towns were an essential prop for the Spanish protectorate (1912–1956). The Balkans and Turkey also attracted the attention of Spanish scholars. The Hispano-Jewish diaspora there, like in Morocco, had preserved, with different local adaptations, the old Spanish spoken language written with Hebrew characters by their ancestors, in addition to other cultural particularities of the Ibero-Jews (Pulido 1904, Palacín 1958, Más 1986, Hassán, Benito, Romero 2008).

As in Europe, the rise of cultural tourism in Spain and Portugal since the end of the 20th century has promoted both the revaluation of classical Jewish cultural heritage as a tourist product and new alternative forms of cultural tourism based on the concept of ‘Jewish space’ (Por ejemplo, ‘Caminos de Seradad-Red de Juderías de España’, así como sus proyectos ‘Sabores de Sefarad’ y ‘Viñedos de Sefarad’ Forga and Valiente, 2016). However, this revalued and exhibited heritage rarely tells us about the darker aspects of that relationship. Forced conversions and the expulsion of religious minorities characterise early modern Spanish and Portuguese history. The Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, the Autos da Fé or the creation of new social hierarchies and inequalities based on genealogy, in the birth in a ‘blemished’ lineage of Muslims, Jews and other heretics, that is, the ‘old Christians’ and the ‘new Christians’, reached with more or less strength the 19^th- century. The memory of the Holocaust as a Jewish heritage space integrated into official or alternative circuits of memory and cultural tourism is practically non-existent in Spain, except for Walter Benjamin’s monument by the sculptor Dani Karavan in Portbou, on the eastern Spanish-French border.

The Maghreb countries are also becoming aware of their religious minorities’ cultural legacies and their touristic potentials. This is undoubtedly the case in Morocco, whose monarch maintains a paternal relationship with the Judeo-Moroccan diaspora, but not in countries like Egypt, where the bulk of Jews were deprived of citizenship after the creation of the State of Israel. However, in North Africa, the preservation of the Jewish heritage, although facilitated, its rehabilitation and preservation in many cases depends on the resources that the Jews themselves are able to mobilise. Synagogues, mellahs, cemeteries and objects in museums are the main heritage elements recovered. As the visit to these spaces involves generating an economic movement from tourism that benefits the local economy, the Moroccan State helps tourists access these spaces, placing special emphasis on their safety. Thus, whether it is to visit the Church of Our Lady of Victories or the Bengualid Synagogue in Tetouan, parishioners and visitors have the protection of Moroccan security forces. In other countries, such as Egypt, however, the Jewish heritage is in an even more precarious situation and abandoned by the State. Perhaps the improvement of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab countries will help ameliorate centuries-old if not millenary Jewish heritage from ancient communities. However, Jewish spaces in North Africa evoke a past not as distant as in Spain and Portugal. The mellah, the Jewish neighbourhood in Morocco, a former liminal zone between Jews and Muslims, is now home to Muslims who migrated from rural areas to the cities after the Jews left from the middle of the 20^th-century (Gottreich 2007).

II

At the same time, those Jews who left Morocco for France or Israel in the 1950s and 1960s still remember their former homes, recreate them symbolically in cultural practices and memory work, and in recent years pilgrimage tours back to North Africa, to visit sites and particularly tombs and cemeteries, have become popular. It is in this context that our conceptual approach moves one step forward – from space and place to movement and mobility. Mobile culture studies encompass more than the established research on Jewish migration, they can include studies on nomadism and vagabondage, on urban flânerie and the exploration of landscape, on the relationship between human communities and their physical surrounding, from the mountains to the sea. In Jewish history and culture, experiences of movement, forced or voluntary, have created a particular relationship between the idea of home and the practice of mobility (Schlör 2016). Many of the places that we regard today as elements of a Jewish cultural heritage have been created in this field of tension between a sense of belonging and the longing for a home – by expulsions and new settlement, by the creation of family or community networks across national borders, by tokens of memory carried from one place to another. Jewish ethnography has rarely been able to study one homogenic community at one given place but has instead been challenged to trace connections across spatial as well as temporal distances, from the linguistic or culinary traditions that moved from ‘Sepharad’ to Constantinople or Salonica, via the memory of the Eastern European ‘shtetl’ in American-Jewish memoirs or musicals, to the particular German-Jewish habits of proper dress and punctuality in the Palestine of the 1930s.

With these particularities in mind, we still enter a scholarly field of established inter-disciplinary research. For the editors of the open access online journal Mobile Culture Studies, the main areas of research are: mobilities of people, things, ideas, and information; cultural and social phenomena of mobilities and their counterparts, historical evidence of people’s mobile practices and changing concepts of mobility; and representations of mobility in oral and visual culture. The focus is “not primarily […] the comparative study of cultures of mobility, but culture as an inherent movement […], culture as a dynamic principle, as generator of spatial and mental movement (Mobile Culture Studies 2021). The first issue of the journal, published in 2015, has been dedicated to ‘the sea voyage as a transitory experience in migration processes’ and focused on the passage between sea ports of departure and arrival as an experience of transition between time and space – as David Jünger has shown, this experience has produced an impressive amount and variety of reflective literature, often in the form of letters and diaries, but also travel reports and memoirs whose authors used the time of in-between-ness, or liminality, to think about the meaning of the passage and to express their thoughts in writing (Jünger 2015).

The notion of liminality refers to the important works of Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909), and Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between. The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage (1964) (van Gennep 1960, Turner 1964). Although not written with Jewish history in mind, both approaches have often been used to illustrate Jewish histories of departure, passage, and arrival. From its inception in 1998, our journal Jewish Culture and History has published contributions and special issues inspired by research in this field, from ‘Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950’ (2001) to ‘Jewish Maritime Studies’ (2012) and ‘Jewish Migration and the Archive’ (2014). Similarly, the contributions to this special issue inscribe themselves, as spatial and temporal variations, into a larger narrative. Taking a longue durée perspective, we can follow that narrative from the biblical story of Abraham’s covenant, the hope for and the failure of arrival, a story that is re-staged in Exodus when, after a wandering of 40 years, Moses is not allowed to set foot in the promised land and again, now in historical time, when David as the unifier of the tribes is not permitted to build the temple in Jerusalem, the very symbol of the identity between land and people. It is indeed after the destruction of that temple, finally built under Solomon and captured by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, that a different idea, maybe even a different ideology emerges: When the prophet Ezekiel consoles those in Babylonian exile and encourages them to build houses, he becomes, as Carl S. Ehrlich has argued, a prophet not just in – but of exile (Ehrlich 1999, Rom-Shiloni 2006). This tension between longing and belonging has shaped both Jewish history and Jewish/non-Jewish relations over centuries: Where is home? What happens to home when I am forced to leave it? What remains of home when I am somewhere else?

With the emergence of the Jewish diaspora, already before but particularly after the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, we find Jewish communities moving alongside the Romans to North Central Europe and creating a Jewish space later termed Ashkenas, moving along the North African coast and entering the Iberian peninsula, creating a Jewish spaced called Sepharad – and we find other communities who stay in the Middle East, in Mizrah, where they will be met by those expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1496 and, centuries later, also by those who leave Eastern and Central Europe for a new adventure of home-building. All these topographical signals and icons have emerged and developed in a continuous process of ‘co-construction’ (Steven Aschheim) with non-Jewish neighbours, in contact and conflict over time and space – another long and varied narrative of encounters and negotiation which have produced not a simplistic ‘Jewish culture’, but many variations of Cultures of the Jews, to quote – and honour – David Biale’s ground-breaking edited volume whose contributors follow the timeline from Antiquity to Modernity and capture important moments, time-space models, in a widely cast geographical network (Biale 2002, Aschheim 1998).

III

Focussing all these historiographical and epistemological approaches into one particular area, that of Spain, Portugal, and Northern Africa, this special issue of JCH intends to bring together, and in dialogue, new and innovative research projects that take into consideration questions and challenges in the areas of heritage conservation, spatial identity, and mobility.

The first text that opens this especial issue on Jewish Cultural Heritage, Space, and Mobility in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa is the keynote speech delivered by Javier Castaño at the Annual Conference of the Association of European Jewish Museums in 2017. Castaño’s speech, “Representing Hispano-Jewish and Sephardic Material Culture in Spain”, serves as an excellent frame for the articles that follow, particularly those by Marina Pignatelli and Vanessa Paloma Elbaz. Castaño emphasizes the invisibility of early modern and modern Jewish culture in contemporary Spain, which parallels the development of a narrative that links Iberian medieval Jews to the Sephardic diaspora, emphasizing an alleged Spanish background and bond with the (Spanish) homeland of their ancestors. This imaginary has guided the cultural representation of Jews in the Sephardic Museum of Toledo since it was founded in the mid-20th century, an illusion that connects the medieval Jewish past with the idea of the ‘return’ and ‘restoration’ of the Jews in Spain in the 20th century. Likewise, the Museum of Jewish History in Girona (Catalonia) also focuses on medieval history and the contribution made by the Jews to Catalan history and culture, while omitting historical periods that would undoubtedly challenge the positive narrative. In the second part of his piece, Castaño makes a series of suggestions to overcome the limited and biased representation of Jews in Spain and Portugal (where the situation is quite similar). Starting with the concept of ‘Sepharad’, he suggests that it be viewed in cultural and religious – rather than geographical and political – terms. He argues that Jewish museums in 21st-century Spain and Portugal should represent the variety of Jewish cultural experiences in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, as well as anti-Judaism and antisemitism, persecution, and trauma, as they form an essential part of the historical experiences of Jews in the two countries.

In her article, ‘A Synagogue, a Well, a Mikveh, and an Ethnoscape: Ethnographic Notes on Braganza’s Jewish Heritage’ Marina Pignatelli reveals the incongruences between the heritagization model used with the Jewish ruins in Braganza, a northern Portuguese city in the region of Trás-os-Montes, where most of northern Portugal’s crypto-Jews were concentrated, and the experiences and perceptions of the 21st-century descendants of the Jews who remained in the region after the forced conversion and expulsion in 1496. While the process of heritagization is part of a European and global phenomenon that links cultural heritage, economic development, and tourism, in this case, the cultural heritage of an ethnic minority – the descendants of the Jews and crypto-Jews who remain – has been excluded from the process. Pignatelli calls for a participative methodology of ‘engaging heritage’ for community-based conceptions of cultural legacy. In such approach, cultural heritage is understood not as an unchanging essence, but as a living meaning actualized by the communities. The second part of the article examines four sites of memory of great value to the Braganza and Trás-os-Montes Jews that have gone unnoticed by the municipality and organizations related to the heritagization of Jewish culture: the ruins of a former 20th-century synagogue, an ancient well, a mikveh, and a 2005 stone stele placed at a crossroads to commemorate the Jews that escaped the Spanish Inquisition and forced conversion by fleeing to Portugal beginning in the late 15th century. The elders who placed the stone stele at the crossroads and took care of it believed they were descendants of those Spanish Jews. Pignatelli concludes with a discussion of the need for a more participative and inclusive heritagization process that does not exclude any voices, particularly when they are related to the views and meanings of those whose culture is supposedly being represented and preserved.

Like Pignatelli, in ‘Imagining a Sonic Al-Andalus through Sound, Bones, and Blood: The Case of Jewish Music in Morocco and Spain’, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz takes the heritagization process of the Jewish Moroccan and Spanish past as starting point. Despite the significant differences between the history of the Jews in Morocco and Spain, Elbaz identifies some commonalities in the meanings and mechanisms of the heritagization of the Jewish past in the two countries. Both acknowledge the ‘indigeneity’ of current Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish Jewish music in the arena of sonic culture. This music evocates an idealized common past and shared culture grounded in language. The recognition of Jewish music as a cultural heritage in Morocco and Spain passes through language in the reproduction and re-enactment of ‘traditional’ musical repertoires. In this way, the music of those Jewish artists who do not fit the ideal model is not conceptually incorporated as Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Spanish cultural heritage. Other cultural arenas include sacred spaces, such as cemeteries, which are also incorporated as Jewish cultural space heritage to encourage tourism, particularly in the case of Morocco’s hillulot celebrations. However, in Spain, Jewish cemeteries and tombs are empty spaces after centuries of (forced) abandonment. Nevertheless, this emptiness has been replaced by recovering other cultural manifestations to make the (medieval) heritage visible, contrasting with the invisibility of current Jewish communities in the country. Unlike in Morocco, however, this revived heritage is most often represented by non-Jewish voices. The paper concludes that the heritagization of Jewish culture, based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ visibilized through the cultural (re-)creation of medieval al-Andalus, including Jewish music, serve economic and political purposes in both Spain and Morocco.

In ‘Jewish Tetouan: Place, Community, and Ethnic Boundaries from the Minutes Book of the Community Board, 1929–46’, Maite Ojeda-Mata, like Pignatelli, also emphasizes the multiple dimensions of ‘cultural heritage’, its essentialization and reification, and the importance of recognizing the actor’s point of view, the ‘emic’ understanding of ‘Jewish Tetouan’. She uncovers a set of social relationships, inside and outside the community, that give sense to the community members’ meaning of ‘Jewish Tetouan’. This conception included not only those living in Tetouan’s old Jewish quarter, but also those who had moved for social or economic reasons out of the mellah, whether to the new neighbourhoods constructed by the Spanish or to the nearby Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which became more accessible after the creation of the Spanish Protectorate in 1912. Moreover, the conception also included the Jews from Tetouan who moved beyond the shores of North Africa to southern Spain, Gibraltar, and South America. They formed a regional and transnational network with close links to their Moroccan hometown. Beyond ‘Jewish Tetouan’, ethnic bonds extended, symbolically, to Eretz Israel, and ethnic solidarity included practically any Jewish community suffering from political or economic hardship, regardless of location. Outside the conceptually perceived and practically performed ethnic bond were the ‘others’, the ‘non-Jews’. However, they were not seen as a homogeneous whole, and the intensity and nature of the interactions reveal a strong identification with the Spaniards first, followed at a distance by other Europeans, and a disidentification, with some exceptions, with their long-time Muslim neighbours and the Moroccan Muslim national project. The author argues that cultural identity and cultural heritage are historical and relational, and, therefore, that any attempt to reduce culture to a particular physical or symbolic remnant essentializes and reifies it – as if culture could exist outside the people who practice it – and, thus, transforms it.

Aviad Moreno’s article, ‘Remapping “Tradition”: Community Formation and Spatiocultural Imagination Among Jews in Colonial Northern Morocco’, emphasizes the contextual and dynamic aspect of mobility in colonial North Morocco, particularly in the cities of Tangier (International Zone) and Tetouan (Spanish Protectorate Zone). Focusing primarily on the modernizing, emerging middle classes of Tangier and Tetouan, the author explores the relationship between modernization, mobility, and the perception and uses of ‘space’. Moreno is interested in ‘the subjective spatiocultural experience’ of northern Moroccan urban Jews of being ‘between spaces’. At a time when most Moroccan Jews lived in cities, ‘Jewish spaces’ were, nevertheless, not delineated in physical terms, particularly in Tangier, where a segregated Jewish neighbourhood never existed as in other Moroccan cities. Like Ojeda-Mata, Moreno argues that a rigid, static conception of a ‘Jewish community’, linked to a physical ‘Jewish space’ cannot account for the dynamic, contextual, and dialectical character of Jewish experiences in colonial northern Morocco. In this respect, Jews in Tangier hardly constituted a ‘Jewish community’, even before the colonial period. Likewise, in Tetouan, after the modern Spanish quarter was built, middle-class Jews started to move outside the old Jewish neighbourhood. Inter-ethnic relations, particularly with Europeans, imbued the Jewish middle (and also lower) classes with a new ‘modern’ sense of themselves. However, the intensity of the exposure to non-Jewish culture also reinforced the sense of ethnic identity and Jewishness amongst the Jews of Tangier and Tetouan.

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Notes on contributors

Maite Ojeda-Mata

Maite Ojeda-Mata is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at The Parkes Institute, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Before that, she worked as a researcher and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra and Autonoma de Barcelona universities. She specializes in historical-anthropological research on the historical-political conditions in which socio-political identities are defined and redefined, naturalization and citizenship, migrations and diasporas, and popular religion. She is the author of Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities (Lexington Books, 2018), and the co-editor of Judíos entre Europa y el norte de África, siglos XV-XXI (Bellaterra, 2013).