Abstract

DORIS Sommer’s landmark study of Latin American literature, Foundational Fictions, claims Jorge Isaacs’ novel María as a foundational fiction because of its tremendous popularity and its allegorization of the divisions plaguing nineteenth-century Colombia. Sommer’s approach to nineteenth-century Latin American literature has been widely received and generally well accepted. A recent study, “Judaísmo y desarraigo en María de Jorge Isaacs” by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, calls Sommer’s interpretation into question by proposing that Isaacs’s novel does not propose unification through mestizaje but rather is a novel of exile and Diaspora (341). Like his Jewish forefathers, Efraín, the protagonist, continues the search for a homeland at the conclusion of the novel. Given that almost twenty years have passed since the publication of Foundational Fictions, perhaps we should be inspired by Faverón Patriau’s example to reexamine Sommer’s analyses in order to determine which aspects of her methodology are still useful for us and where further work may be called for. In this article, I propose to evaluate Faverón Patriau’s critique of Sommer’s approach to the nation-building novels of the nineteenth-century and analysis of María in light of recent developments in a growing but still very much underrepresented area, Latin American Jewish Studies. Rather than discount Sommer’s enormous contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Latin American literature as over determined, we can take this opportunity to further examine the concepts of foundational fiction and mestizaje with respect to representations of Jewishness in Latin American literature. I will demonstrate that Efraín’s nostalgic look at the past offers a critique of the high cost of as-