Adam G Beaver

Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions: Sephardic Legends’ Journey from Biblical Polemic to Humanist History

There was no love lost between the Enlightened antiquarians Francisco Mart́ınez Marina (1754–1833) and Juan Francisco de Masdeu (1744–1817). Though both were clerics—Mart́ınez Marina was a canon of S. Isidro in Madrid, and Masdeu a Jesuit—and voracious epigraphers, their lives and careers diverged in profound ways. Masdeu was an outsider in his profession: expelled from the Iberian Peninsula along with his fellow Jesuits in 1767, he spent most of the last fifty years of his life in Rome. There, substituting the descriptions and sketches forwarded by sympathetic amanuenses in Spain for the ancient remains he would never see firsthand, he continued to pursue his research in Iberian antiquities in open opposition to the state-sanctioned projects conceived and carried out by the prestigious Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. Mart́ınez, in contrast, was the consummate insider, inhabiting the very centers of power denied to Masdeu: a member of the liberal parliament of 1820–1823, he was also an early member, and eventually two-time president, of the Real Academia which Masdeu scorned. It was almost certainly as a staunch defender of the Real Academia’s massive research projects—especially its official catalogue of ancient Iberian inscriptions, which Masdeu proposed to better with his own inventory—that Mart́ınez Marina acquired his palpable distaste for Masdeu, his methods, and his ideological commitments. Mart́ınez Marina was especially skeptical of the orientalist dimension of Masdeu’s scholarship, and particularly of his handling of the “ancient” Hebrew inscriptions which the Jesuit claimed could be found throughout the