Incantation

Content Warning: The source material deals with death, torture, and antisemitism, as well as hate crimes and cruelty to animals. Descriptions of violence and grief feature prominently.

The three religious cultures featured in the novel—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—all have a long history within Spain. Jews and Christians lived on the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Roman Empire, while Muslims first arrived in significant numbers amid the Umayyad Caliphate’s 8th-century CE conquest of the region, which ousted its Visigoth rulers. Over the next several centuries, the borders between Muslim and Christian lands were constantly changing due to ongoing territorial disputes in the Reconquista (711-1492) between the Christian North and the Islamic South. Spain consequently experienced a lot of tension between the different groups, but because it was located between these different worlds, it was also a place where Jews, Muslims, and Christians mixed socially and learned from each other. Being a place where different faiths lived with relative tolerance for each other meant that people moved to Spain in the hopes of joining in this prosperity. Even when Jewish people were institutionally discriminated against under Muslim or Christian rule, there was still a great deal of cultural sharing. This resulted in a unique Jewish identity within Spain: the Sephardic Jews.