This issue of Quest aims not only to expand our knowledge of modern and contemporary “Sepharad” or Jewish Spain, but also to problematize and reassess the presumptions its study has entailed. It challenges obsolete conceptions of national identification, in turn engaging multilayered and transnational stories whose protagonists include: Ottoman Sephardi women (Paloma Díaz-Mas's “Sephardi Women in Ángel Pulido’s Correspondence”) and a Sephardi scholar and manuscript collect (Allyson Gonzalez' “A History of Histories—of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Exchange: Professor A.S. Yahuda and the International Trade of Antiquities, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, 1902-1944,”) or; Spanish intellectuals (Asher Salah's "Jews and Judaism in the Writings of Enrique Jardiel Poncela and his Daughter Evangelina Jardiel" and Tabea A. Linhard's “A Tale in the Language of ‘My Mother Spain’: Carmen Pérez-Avello’s Un muchacho sefardí”), filmmakers and visual artists with diverse relationships to Judaism (Hazel Gold's "Pedagogies of Citizenship: Sepharad and Jewishness in Spanish and Catalan Documentary Film and Televisi-on”); Ladino gastronomy-column writers and authors of Anglo Sephardic cookbooks (Harry Eli Kashdan’s “Archives of the Sephardi Kitchen”); a Spanish juggler stationed in Madrid’s Retiro Park and a Spanish man made homeless after being evicted from his home during the crisis of 2008 (Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa's “Spain’s Jewish Genealogies in the ‘Sephardi Portraits’ of Daniel Quintero”); as well as descendants of Jewish-Iberian converts in Turkey and Latin America reclaiming their roots (Rina Benmayor and Dalia Kandiyoti's “Ancestry, Genealogy, and Restorative Citizenship: Oral Histories of Sephardi Descendants Reclaiming Spanish and Portuguese Nationality”). All of these protagonists and their histories confront the ghosts that haunt Jewish and Iberian entangled collective imaginaries, memorial figures and cultural representations.

Taken in their totality, these essays elaborate a more expansive genealogy of “Se-pharad,” just as they illustrate its continued power and hold on political, historical, and literary imaginaries in Spain and throughout the Jewish Diaspora. By doing so, they reconsider “Sepharad” as a site of continued negotiations over Iberian and Jewish histories and identities, and the role of “genealogy” in shaping this process. Working from the margins of Iberian and Jewish studies, it is in the convergence of these fields at their periphery and as entangled histories and memories, that this work opens up new areas of study and broadens our understanding of the genealogical landscape of Sepharad and its possibilities.