CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGchoice of the a first-person plural voice links her identity as an Anglo-
Jewish Sephardic poet to the collective Jewish voices of the historical poets
about whom she writes, suggesting that the very ability to create an Anglo-
Jewish poem signals a "Golden Age" for Anglo-Jewry in her contemporary
moment.
This self-reflexive aspect suggests that "Song of the Spanish Jews" not
only is an historical recreation but also has specific meaning for Victorian
England. Indeed, right from the start the poem challenges one of the major
arguments used against the campaign for Jewish political enfranchisement
in the first half of the nineteenth century. As David Feldman makes clear,
this argument contended that "Jews could be members of a Christian
society but not make laws for it; they were in the country but not of the
nation." 23 In other words, there was a widespread belief that Jews could
never have a complete national identification with England because of their
commitments to Judaism and the theological imperative to return to Israel
as the true locus of national identity. The opening stanza of Aguilar's poem
reads:
Oh, dark is the spirit who loves not the land
Whose breezes his brow have in infancy fann'd,
That feels not his bosom responsively thrill
To the voice of her forest, the gush of her rill. 24
In this and the next two quatrains, the collective "we" represents the idea
that the Diaspora Jews do indeed have the capacity to "love" the "land"
upon which they live. But the Spanish Jews go further by suggesting that
without this intimate relationship of self to land, their spirit becomes
"dark." Thus love of one's geographical home has distinct religious and
spiritual implications as well as national ones. In fact, the third stanza
concludes by referring to the "dark spirit" of one "Who treads not with
awe where his ancestors lie / As their spirits around him are hovering nigh."
These lines imply that the Spanish Jews of this "Golden Age" maintained a
relationship to the "homeland" generally denied to Jews of the Diaspora, a
relationship that was eventually denied to Spanish Jews in particular. Of
course these lines carry with them a certain ironic distance in the nineteenth
century, given that readers most likely knew about the Spanish Inquisition
that in 1492 deemed that no Jews could remain in the land where their
families were buried. For Jewish readers in particular, this deep sense of
relationship to birth-land may have carried a special meaning, since so
many of the Anglo-Jewish Sephardic families who eventually settled in
England traced their lineage back to this Spanish soil, though they could
not move directly to England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
since Jews were legally forbidden to enter England until 1656.
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