Abstract

1492 is only the last in a series of "ends" that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries am set between periods, communities, and texts. My dissertation analyzes the modern project to represent the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the "end" of al-Andalus . Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. ;My readings attend to the following questions: Why is the Zohar , the major text of Kabbalah, not studied as part of the rise of vernacular literature in Medieval Europe? Why is it not even studied as part of medieval Arabic and Hebrew literary production? Is a cultural analysis of the central texts of medieval Jewish letters possible? Why do "mourning and melancholia" govern the reading practices that underlie the current study of medieval Spain? ;I address the theories of language that sustain and interrogate the modern representation of al-Andalus as a context that has "ended." I engage the view that dominates the study of al-Andalus , that considers language to be derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is silent and lost. I turn to close readings of philosophical, mystical, and literary texts from the Andalusi, Jewish and Arabic, cultural spheres of medieval Iberian culture: Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, the Zohar, and the rhymed prose narratives of Ibn al-Astaruwi. I argue that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. "Our place in al-Andalus" becomes the event of language unsettling its localization and producing the disappearance of its context, where midrash occurs as poetry, Kabbalah as maqama, and philosophy as literary criticism: where language goes out of context