Amador de Los Ríos and the Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies in Spain

Nation and narrative were inseparable in the nineteenth century, and perhaps remain so. The ideological project of nation-building was largely a question of learning to tell the story of a people—our people—as a coherent and uninterrupted history. Our people may have been in constant and reciprocally formative contact with contemporaneous neighbors, but the nation was to be differentiated from other nations and defined by the relationship to our forebears.