In recent decades a number of scholars have examined the modern fascination - spanning linguistic, national, and religious traditions - with medieval Iberian Jewish history and culture. Hispanist Edna Aizenberg has noted how Peninsular Sephardic history casts an allure with "its mutating richness, its exemplariness, [and] its ability to encapsulate the peaks and valleys of Jewish history" ("The Allure of Sepharad," McFarland & Company, 2005, p. 162). Indeed, in creating a range of modern literary legacies beyond Iberia, Jewish Spain has increasingly invited ‘Sephardist’ studies of Spanish Jewish and Catholic convert (converso) experiences in metaphorical relation to international authors' contemporary socio-political realities. This panel builds on Yael Halevi-Wise's theorization of Sephardism in 2012 by examining how three understudied writers dialogue with Jewish Iberia from 20th-21st century Spain, Mallorca, and Israel, in ways that activate Wittgenstein's inclusive notion of family resemblances. In their fiction, autobiography, and/or poetry, Rafael Cansinos Assens (1882-1964), Miquel Segura Aguiló (b. 1945), and Mois Benarroch (b. 1959), each affirm and negotiate how they fit by birth or imagination into a particular Spanish Jewish genealogy rooted in Spain's Sephardic past. This panel explores literary connectivity to historic Sepharad through a sense of belonging that intuited family resemblance confers in the modern era.

Rafael Cansinos Assens was born in a Spanish Catholic family in Seville, Spain, but came to identify himself as a descendant of conversos and was regarded by his contemporaries as Jewish. His extensive Jewish-themed oeuvre explores the historical context that made his converso identity claim possible and reflects on belonging and family genealogy in relation to Spain’s Jewish history. Daniela Flesler analyzes the (re)construction of family resemblances in Cansinos Assens’ novel The Lights of Hanukkah (1924), which narrates his own identification with Judaism through the figure of an alter ego, the poet Rafael Benasar, and in short stories from his collection Jews in Sepharad (1950), which further examine key themes and characters of The Lights. Cansinos is an early representative of an important phenomenon today, that of Catholic-raised Spaniards who see themselves as having Jewish ancestry, a narrative seen later in the work of Miquel Segura.

Miquel Segura Aguiló is an actual descendant of fifteen crypto-Jewish families who were persecuted by the Inquisition in Mallorca, Spain, during the late seventeenth century. Both as a journalist and an author, Segura has long endeavored to expose endemic discrimination against Mallorca's converso community without aggravating the liminality in which Catholic families of medieval Sephardic heritage have persisted in island society since the 1690s. Stacy Beckwith draws on Segura's autobiographical writing from the 1990s and the 2010s in which he comments on his Xueta (Mallorcan converso) advocacy. Segura's novel, The Rabbi's Ashes (2016) also shows how the author has struggled to find personal resemblances to a wider Jewish family. Beckwith argues that in "returning" to being Jewish, however, Segura still portrays his stigmatized Mallorcan converso-descended community with insights that affirm its members' autonomous understanding and handling of family identity and memory.

Mois Benarroch is a Sephardi-Israeli poet born in Tetouan, Morocco soon after the end of the Spanish Protectorate. Reut Ben-Yaakov considers how his work uniquely intertwines the two complementary tropes of the Hebrew literary imagination of Sepharad: convivencia (the much-debated notion of cultural compenetration and interreligious tolerance) and the anusim (“forced ones,” or the Jews compelled to renounce their faith). Throughout his work, Spain emerges as an origin and a space of familial memory of belonging and exile. Ben-Yaakov will detail how Benarroch inscribes Spain into his literary world across genres. His Hebrew-language poem Mother (1994) maps Spain through its cities, as the speaker turns to his mother, asking where he can go or return, an invocation that subtly gestures towards a deep-seated memory of Jewish-Muslim convivencia. His Tetouan Trilogy (1999-2006), a set of three Hebrew-language novels, unfolds through intergenerational storytelling, where fathers recount histories and personal revelations to their family members, framing a Sephardi identity as a site of loss and continuity.

Moving outward from mainland Iberia to Mallorca, Morocco, and Israel, this panel takes an expansive approach to Jewish writing in dialogue with Spain. Together, these papers reveal the generative power of family resemblances to establish living relationships with modern Spain via medieval Iberia.

Each presentation will last fifteen minutes. Allowing a transition time of two minutes between speakers and a brief welcome at the beginning of the panel will leave twenty minutes for discussion at the end of the session.