Reclaiming al-Andalus Orientalist Scholarship and Spanish Nationalism, 1875-1919

Reclaiming al-Andalus focuses on the construction of the scholarly discipline of Orientalist studies in Spain. Special attention is paid to the impact that the elaboration of a series of historical interpretations of the legacy left by Muslim and Jewish culture in Spain had over the writing of national history in the period of the Bourbon Restoration. A historiographical account of Spain’s Orientalism tackles the problematized issues that both Arabist and Hebraist scholars sought to address. Orientalist scholarship thereby became inextricably linked to different interpretations of the historical shaping of Spanish national identity. Political circumstances of the day impacted on the approach these scholars took as they engaged with the Iberian Semitic past. And this at a critical moment in the crystallization of modern Spanish nationalism. A common thread running through the work of these Orientalist scholars was the tendency to nationalize or “Hispanicize” cultural activity of the Semitic populations that lived on the Iberian Peninsula in medieval times. This Hispanizication was instrumentalized in diverse ways in order to serve nation-building efforts. Hence Orientalist sc

Pablo Bornstein received his PhD at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he also studied his MA in Middle Eastern History. His research interests focus on Spanish historians before the Spanish Civil War. He is particularly attentive to the relationship between historiography and nationalism. Dr Bornstein is currently working on a comparative study of the conceptualization of the Muslim and Jewish past in Spain during the first half of the 20th century.