EUME
2026/ 2027

Reut Ben Yaakov

‘Your Map Is Imprinted Upon My Insides’: Spanish Landscapes and Retrieved Sepharad in Hebrew Literature

Portrait of Reut Ben Yaakov
Photo: private.

Reut Ben Yaakov is a scholar of modern and contemporary Hebrew literature. She holds a PhD in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research explores Hebrew literature, with a special interest in critical approaches to prevailing historiographies and in how social marginalization based on gender, race, and ethnicity is constructed within and by literary techniques, both within the Hebrew context and in cross-cultural perspective. Her first book, “It Took Me Twenty Years to Love”: Israeli Poetry in the 1990s (forthcoming from Magness Press), was awarded the 2025 Idelman Prize for Debut Book in Literary Studies. Ben Yaakov is also a translator of fiction and poetry and the editor of Tangier Publishing House’s translated poetry series, Zarra. In the academic years 2026-28, Reut is a EUME Fellow of the Minerva Foundation, co-hosted at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

‘Your Map Is Imprinted Upon My Insides’: Spanish Landscapes and Retrieved Sepharad in Hebrew Literature

This project explores how literary imaginations in contemporary writing engage questions of national and religious identity through representations of Spain as a symbol and Jewish history as a site of interreligious memory. Predominantly focusing on Mizrahi and Sephardi writers, it examines how literary works engage with Jewish-Muslim-Christian relations and Jewish identity-making in Europe’s past in the contemporary Middle East. The Hebrew literary imagination of Sepharad is structured around two complementary narratives: Convivencia (or the “co-existence” of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities in Europe), a key concept in the scholarship of Spanish history but notably absent in Hebrew literary discourse, and Anusim, the notion of Jews who were compelled to renounce their faith—a prevalent figure in Hebrew literature. The Convivencia and Anusim narratives raise crucial questions about the meaning of coexistence, identity-making, and strategies designed to address otherness, especially as they relate to Israeli societies’ religious, cultural, and national perceptions. This project thus aims to explore how Spain is shaped as a literary topos through which Hebrew writers and poets articulate their visions – aspirations as well as disappointments – of identity and cohabitation in a region that hosts divergent national, ethnic, and religious groups. Building on queer and postcolonial theories, my literary analysis will provide new frameworks for understanding interreligious relations in contemporary Jewish thought.

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