Sephardic history and nostalgia for Spain in The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate tree

The historical expulsion and displacement of Spanish Jews has captivated the imagination of many writers over the centuries, including Sir Walter Scott, whose historical romance, Ivanhoe, featuring a Sephardic maiden, Rebecca, was considered by Georg Lukács to be among the first historical novels. This article explores the ways in which Sephardic history and nostalgia for Spain, which expelled all Jews in 1492, drives the narrative in my novel, The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree. Corresponding with Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Marianne Hirsch’s Rites of Return, this article explores Spain’s role as a lieu de mémoire, which continues to inspire fictional quest narratives tracing a return to one’s ancestral roots on the basis of mystical, rather than genealogical, claims, due to a lack of archival documentation. This reflects a process of ‘reenchantment’, which serves to correct the historical account, while helping to heal the ongoing trauma of persecution, expulsion and exile.