1492, as we all know, was the year when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But it was also the year when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand & Isabella conquered Granada, the last Islamic stronghold on the western European mainland, and issued the Alhambra Decree under which Spanish Jews were forced to choose between conversion and exile. The 100,000 or so who chose to go into exile (estimates of the number vary and are hotly disputed), mostly to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire, maintained strong emotional and linguistic links with their former homeland in Iberia, which they traditionally referred to as Sepharad (in the Hebrew scriptures, Sepharad was the most distant country Jews lived in during the Babylonian exile - probably not Iberia, but Sardis).

In the process of post-Franco reconciliation, Spain has taken its time to normalise its relations with Jews - recognising Israel in 1986, apologising for (but not rescinding) the Alhambra Decree on its 500th anniversary in 1992, and offering Jews with ties to Spain a simplified route to Spanish citizenship in 2015. "How we've missed you," King Felipe VI said in his speech at a reception for Sephardi Jews to mark the passing into law of this new measure.

The French writer Pierre Assouline, a lifelong hispanophile who was born in Casablanca into a Sephardi family that fled from Seville after the pogroms of the late 14th century, decided to take the King's invitation literally and immediately made an appointment with the Spanish consulate in Paris to apply for a passport. His novel Retour à Séfarad engagingly chronicles his experience of navigating the bureaucratic hurdles involved in this process in parallel with a detailed analysis of Spain's relationship with Jews, his friends' views about what he's doing, and the way the process has affected his own notions about his identity and his complicated relationship with a "homeland" from which he has been excluded for five centuries.

For Assouline, Spain is above all the country of Cervantes, Goya, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca and Andrés Segovia. The whole book is one long succession of affectionate Quijote references, down to the chapter-headings. But of course it's also the country of the Inquisition, the Civil War and Franco. And a food-culture that revolves almost entirely around ham-worship. And a conversational style that has much in common with bullfighting. And a village that has only very recently changed its name from Castrillo Matajudíos (Castrillo kill-the-Jews). And a new cult of philosephardism that seems to have nothing to do with actual Jews and everything to do with PR and tourism.

This sometimes comes over as a slightly precious book, but Assouline also clearly enjoys sending up his own image as a hardcore French intellectual. In between meetings with famous names, he has strangers ask him if he's a librarian or bookseller, because of the way he keeps quoting from books. Others embarrassingly mistake him for the ultra-glossy publisher of art books, Prosper Assouline ("no relation, but from the same tribe"). He frequently tells us about unrealised plans - places he didn't go to and people he didn't interview because he was afraid of the way he would react to them. Well-meaning friends try to introduce him to influential people who could give his passport application a nudge forward, but he turns shy and runs away at the last minute. I was amused when he meets Javier Cercas to discuss his ideas for the book, and Cercas suggests to him that he should treat it as a cocido (a traditional Iberian hotpot that can contain an astonishing variety of different ingredients) - Cercas went on to use the very same image himself to describe the process of writing one of his recent books.

One of the most memorable anecdotes (in a book that sometimes seems to be nothing but anecdotes) has nothing to do with Spain at all - Assouline recalls an article he wrote in the late 1970s about antisemitism in France. His technique was to interview prominent people associated with antisemitic views and ask them the single question "What did the Jews ever do to you?". Most of the responses he gets are fairly predictable and formulaic, and then it occurs to him that he ought to interview at least one Muslim. The most prominent he could find was an Iranian exile called Ruhollah Khomeini - he asks him the question and gets the one-word answer: "Nothing". End of interview.

I found this a very interesting and enjoyable book to read, but I'm not really sure if it took me anywhere in particular, apart from clarifying and deepening some of the impressions I've already formed about Spanish culture. It's not really a book about Sephardi culture, although that does come into it, of course. But I did, slightly unexpectedly, find myself engaging with Assouline's reflections on the notions of nationality and identity and to what extent they are things we can determine for ourselves. Very relevant in these times. One of Assouline's friends tells him, quite seriously, that a second passport is never a luxury for a Jew. I think you could easily extend that and say that in these times, it's not a luxury for any of us... ( )

De beaux mots d'un écrivain pour expliquer ses origines juives en Espagne. ( )

Histoire intéressante. Mais l'Ego surdimensionné et le snobisme de l'auteur transparaissent à chaque page ce qui enlève une bonne partie du plaisir de la découverte d'une histoire méconnue. ( )