The first chapter of Américo Castro's España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (1948), where he lays out his widely influential theory of ‘convivencia’ in regard to the relationship between Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities in medieval Iberia, is subtitled ‘Spain, or the history of an anxiety’. ‘Spanishness is not an inmutable essence, as Spanish nationalists assert’, he goes on to write, ‘but rather a vital shelter, built as a response to centuries of coexistence and conflict with the Semites, which left us with a fundamental sense of dissatisfaction and a permanent anxiety.’ Castro's interpretation captures the fragile nature of Spanish identity in relation to the Islamic and Jewish past, a fragility that has also allowed for multiple configurations and reconfigurations of this cultural relationship from the fifteenth century to the present.

The process of cultural exchange between communities of the three faiths that occurred during the medieval period was repressed in its immediate aftermath, not only in order to create a particular view of the nation-state within Spain that would erase all remnants of Islamic and Jewish influence, but also to ‘whitewash’ Spain's image within Europe. In the context of the various political and religious conflicts that embroiled the continent in the seventeenth century, the so-called black legend promoted an image of Spaniards and Portuguese as a race tainted by ‘Moorish and Jewish blood’. As Martin-Márquez notes, the infamous blood purity statutes of sixteenth-century Spain, which some scholars argue represents the first instance of ethnic cleansing in European history, were given as obvious proof of Spaniards’ anxiety over their own impurity.

However, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the development of modern forms of nationalism alongside colonial aspirations in North Africa awakened a growing interest in the rich multicultural medieval Iberian past. Oriental studies emerged as a discipline as scholars began to take an interest in the influences of Islamic and Jewish cultures on Peninsular arts and letters. Scholars like Serafín Estébanez Calderón, Francisco Fernández y González, Pascual de Gayangos y Arce, and José Amador de los Ríos devoted themselves to bringing the cultural accomplishments of Al-Andalus to light.