Tabea Alexa Linhard, Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 230 pp.

This chapter reviews the book Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (2014), by Tabea Alexa Linhard. In Jewish Spain, Linhard argues that contemporary Spain—under the influence of a particular cultural phenomenon of nostalgia—continues to look back to Sepharad of the Hebrew Golden Age, a time when Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures coexisted. For Spanish Jewry, Sepharad represents the collective memory of a lost utopian dream. In contrast, traditional and progressive Spanish attitudes toward Jews, then as now, contain elements both of philosemitism and antisemitism. Linhard also explores the issue of multidirectional networks of memory, suggesting that these might fruitfully be regarded in light of present-day realities, citing as an example the graffiti, “Palestina Libre,” that defaces a plaque in the Jewish quarter of Barcelona.