Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice
Résumé
The book inaugurates a new field of research in Literary and Jewish Studies at the intersection of Jewish history and the internationalist cultural phenomenon emerging from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Republican exile, and the Shoah. The study presents an open corpus and proposes the definition of Jewish textualities based on the entanglement of multiple Jewish poetic modes. It explores the Jewish imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War in the context of cultural phenomena such as antisemitism, orientalism, and philo-Sephardism. It also offers perspectives on memorial and post-memorial Jewish literatures triggered by transhistorical imagination. Through the examination of a variety of narrative fiction and non-fiction, memoir, poetry, epistles, journalism, and music in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and English, it unveils non-canonic authors across the West. The study questions Western cosmopolitanism and focuses on the condition of Jewish writers as producers of epistemic disobedience, a characteristic of Mosaic enthusiasm in seeking reparation and emancipation. It also underlines the Jewish cultural phenomenon in the West that worked as a counter-culture when adopting chameleonic survival tactics in order to disguise under Western cosmopolitanism. The book argues that Western cosmopolitanism, in its imitation of the Jewish diasporic condition through cultural appropriation, perpetuates the subalternity of the Jewish cultures. In response, the book revindicates the polyglossia of the Jewish cultures and literatures in the context of genocide and epistemicide when recognizing them as providers of poetic justice in the Jewish query for emancipation.