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Dreaming Al-Andalus Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte Dreaming al-Andalus Nineteenth-century representations of Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past Proefschrift voorgedragen tot het behalen van de graad van Doctor in de letterkunde 2017 iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my doctoral supervisor Prof. Elizabeth Amann for her patience and generosity. Her insightful guidance and reassurances have been invaluable throughout this adventure. I am indebted also to the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for their financial support for this project. I am grateful also to Fernando Durán López of the University of Cádiz for his encouragement. The University of Ghent has provided with me a place to work, and much more besides. My fellow PhD students have provided support and companionship. I am enormously fortunate to have benefited from the company and friendship of María José Gonzálzez Dávila. Her humour and cheer, over numerous coffees and lunches at the department, have made the experience a less solitary one. I could not have asked for a better compagnon de misère. My family, as ever, has been an unending source of energy and reinforcement. I am grateful to Orr for his infectious optimism and to Geffen for her deep reserve of empathy. You have both been essential. Joel, who taught me to ask questions, provided perspective and serenity. Esti’s incredible patience in the toughest times is not just inspirational; her unfailing support gave me the resolve to continue. I am very thankful, too, for the support and encouragement of my friends and to Toam, Yovel and Kinneret, who will know one day how important they have been. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to Guadalupe. Through the process of creating this thesis, she has been the brightest of lights, even in the darkest of moments. She has been a ray of sunshine, on the cloudiest of days. Without her selfless dedication and unwavering belief in my abilities, this thesis would not have been written. iv v vii ix Contents Introduction 2 1. Spanish Orientalisms 9 1.1 Orientalism in Spain: a unique case 10 1.2 “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” 13 1.3 Treasures of the Muslim past: the return of the Moor in the text 15 1.4 Moorish horror: fantastical responses to the past 23 1.5 The Spanish-Moroccan War: 28 Encounters with Contemporary Islam 2. Weep like a woman: gender confusion in al-Andalus 34 2.1 Contrasting veils: Christian and Muslim women in 37 Ramiro, conde de Lucena 2.2 Muslim effeminacy: flawed masculinity in Boabdíl el Chico 42 2.3 Gender subversion in Los amantes de Teruel 45 3. Exiles in history: liberal readings of al-Andalus 52 3.1 Power and liberal politics in Los espatriados 54 3.2 A manifesto of moderate liberalism: Aben Humeya 61 3.3 Historical revisionism: La expulsión de los moriscos 68 1 4. Counternarratives: The Jew and the Converso 73 4.1 Jewish villains and Basque heroes: Amaya 73 4.2 The Jewish voice as counternarrative: 89 Aventuras de un converso 5. Raquel: the Jewess of Toledo 101 5.1 From Lope de Vega to García de la Huerta’s Raquel 104 5.2 Jacquez Cazotte’s Rachel ou la belle juive 109 5.3 Raquel: a historical novel 112 5.4 Franz Grillparzer’s Die Jüdin von Toledo 117 5.5 English adaptations of the Jewess of Toledo 126 6. Conclusions 132 2 Introduction La sombra de Pelayo by Gaspar de Zavala y Zamora had its theatrical debut in Madrid on the 14th October 1808, six months after Napoleon crossed the border into Spain and installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The date of the performance was no coincidence: it was the birthday of Spain’s newly-crowned King, Ferdinand VII, who had just been deposed by Napoleon. La sombra de Pelayo, which Zavala refers to in his prologue as a “drama alegórico”, creates a parallel between the Muslim invasion of 711 and that of Napoleon in 1808. In the opening scene, an anthropomorphised Spain appears on stage in chains and declares: Llanto, dolor, afrenta: de mi gloria, de mi grandeza, y esplendor antiguo, los restos son dolor, afrenta y llanto conmigo irán al postrimero siglo. Mis ínclitas hazañas, mi renombre, mi poder formidable, en hondo olvido cayeron por jamás. (3) As Spain lies defeated, under French occupation, it mourns the loss of its past glories. The shadow of Pelayo, founder of the Christian Kingdom of Asturias in the wake of the Muslim invasion in 711, chides Spain for its resigned attitude. Pelayo’s shadow reminds Spain of its glorious past of “adalides cristianos, que arrojaron del suelo Hispano, al Árabe atrevido” (5). He tells Spain: “Si, otro tiempo una Caba y un Rodrigo vendieron mi esplendor al Agareno, hoy al pérfido Franco, me han vendido otro Rodrigo, y otra injusta Caba” (6). Pelayo refers to the most famous legend about the Muslim invasion to suggest that, in the same way, Spain has now been betrayed and handed to the French. As David T. Gies argues, the play “draws upon a deeply rooted dichotomy of Spanish history, that of the ‘infidel’ Moors against the embattled Christians” (44). Zavala casts the French invaders as the latest incarnation of Spain’s ‘eternal’ enemy: the Muslims. Pelayo’s shadow reminds Spain that it defeated the Muslims once before and that it must similarly fight against the French. La sombra de Pelayo illustrates how, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, the story of Spain’s Muslim past is used as a metaphor for the country’s contemporary ills—in this case, the Napoleonic invasion. Moreover, the history of the Reconquista—and its hero, Pelayo—becomes a patriotic rallying cry for national resistance against the invader. Muslim rule, which lasted, in various configurations, from 711 until 1492, has had an enduring impact on Spanish culture. Strictly speaking, the term al-Andalus refers to 3 the medieval territories that were under Muslim rule. But al-Andalus is also useful shorthand for the entire history of coexistence between Christians, Muslims and Jews that Muslim rule—and its aftermath—entailed in Iberia1. Since the collapse of Nasrid Granada—the last Muslim territory in Spain—in 1492, al-Andalus has been central to the Spanish collective imagination and has held a powerful fascination for Spanish writers. Indeed, as La sombra de Pelayo shows, Zavala turns to the Muslim invasion as a historical metaphor for Napoleon, despite the time span of more than a thousand years that separates the two events. In the wake of the Napoleonic invasion, Spain underwent an extremely turbulent period of major political change. The repeated (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to establish a liberal, constitutional form of government, the return of absolutism, the development of Spanish and peripheral nationalisms and the loss of empire in America all contributed to a re-evaluation of Spanish history and the country's relationship with its European neighbours. In the cultural sphere, the emergence of Romanticism as a powerful—and very contradictory—aesthetic movement further challenged traditional narratives of the past. Throughout the century, moreover, al-Andalus emerged as a major cultural and literary theme. Under the impetus of Romanticism and Orientalism, Muslim and Jewish characters fill the pages of the period’s novels and short stories and populate the stages of its theatres, like never before. To give a few examples, Spain’s first historical novel, Ramiro, conde de Lucena (1823) by Rafael Húmara y Salamanca, is set during the Christian siege of Muslim Seville. In Aliatar (1816), a play set in Muslim-ruled Aljama, the Duque de Rivas rehearsed some of the themes that would appear in his Don Álvaro, o la fuerza del sino (1835), arguably the first romantic drama in Spain. In La sombra de Pelayo, we have seen that the rhetorical force of al-Andalus relies on the implicit recognition that Muslims are the essential and eternal enemy of the Spanish people. Hence, Zavala can call on Pelayo and the memory of the Reconquista to remind his audience of the need to fight the French. As the century progresses, however, writers begin to depart from this simplistic model. Spanish literary production not only confirms the tendency to portray contemporary events through the prism of al- Andalus. Writers also begin to question the cultural assumptions that Zavala takes for granted. In 1840, for instance, in the preface to his translation of The History of the Mommahedan Dynasties in Spain, Pascual de Gayangos laments that “instead of being commended to the gratitude of modern ages, as they assuredly deserved to be”, the Muslims of al-Andalus were denigrated in Spain because of a "spirit of religious bigotry" 1 It is in this broader sense that I will use the term ‘al-Andalus’ in my discussions throughout. I refer not only to the historical period of Muslim rule, but also to the coexistence of Christians and Muslims after 1492. 4 (vii). Gayangos reminds the reader of the Arabs’ contribution to learning through schools in Toledo and Córdoba, which transmitted the learning of the Ancient Greeks. He credits them also with the introduction of paper manufacturing to Spain. But between Zavala's unquestioning use of the Muslims as national enemy and Gayangos' attempt to celebrate their achievements, there lies a whole spectrum of literary responses to al-Andalus. How are Muslim and Jewish characters portrayed in these texts? Why are they represented in these ways? What values and preoccupations did nineteenth-century writers project onto al-Andalus? And, how did they engage with Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past? What role did movements such as Romanticism and Orientalism play in portrayals of al-Andalus? Finally, what role did the memory of al-Andalus play in the formation of Spanish national identity? In this thesis, I set out to examine the representations of al-Andalus in nineteenth- century Spanish literature.
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