Volume 53, Number 9 · May 25, 2006
The Spanish Tragedy
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Sepharad
by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
Harcourt, 385 pp., $27.00
For a Spanish writer to give the name Sepharad to a novel that is largely, if not exclusively, about Spain is a subtle, complicated, and rather fraught gesture. Sepharad, after all, is the Hebrew word for Spain. The origins of the term are unclear. Although it occurs (once) as a place-name in the Hebrew Bible, it's unlikely that it refers there to the Spain we know—indeed, it is uncertain whether it refers there to an actual geography at all, or is merely a poetic or symbolic name. Some scholars have argued that the name suggests the colonization of Spain by Jews from Sardis, in Asia Minor; a likelier derivation is from the Aramaic sephar, connoting a distant limit or seacoast—an apt enough characterization of the Iberian peninsula in the eyes of the Levantine Jews who are said to have migrated there as early as the sixth century BC.
Review, 4645 words
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