Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain

Redefining National Boundaries

Martina L. Weisz

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110638318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The book analyzes the place of religious difference in late modernity through a study of the role played by Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity. The focus is on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective Self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one in an European context. This process is approached from different dimensions. At the national level, it follows the changes in nationalist historiography, the education system and the public debates on national identity. At the international level, it tackles the problem from the perspective of Spanish foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Muslim states in a changing global context. From the social-communicational point of view, the emphasis is on the construction of the Self–Other dichotomy (with Jewish and Muslim others) as reflected in the three leading Spanish newspapers.

1 Introduction

Events taking place in Spain and its colonies in the late medieval period and early modernity were crucial to establishing the global structures of religious and racial difference that persist in today’s world. It was indeed in the Iberian Peninsula, during the 1430s, that words like raza ‘race’ and linaje ‘lineage’, which had hitherto been associated to horses and dogs, begun to be applied to Jews and “Moors”. This phenomenon coincided chronologically with the appearance of anti-converso ideologies, which would turn theological categories (like Jew and Muslim), into biological ones (limpieza de sangre).1

It is precisely this concept of “race”, one that associates issues of blood purity with relatively recent conversion to Christianity, which was later applied to the classification of peoples in the Spanish colonies. This ordering was crucial for the correct organization of a colonial enterprise whose stated mission was to impose Christianity upon a population of pagans and heretics.2 Yet the consequences of these developments went far beyond the already vast Spanish Empire. Indeed, it was through the repudiation of its ethnic diversity and the subsequent establishment on the American continent of systems of production based on the exploitation of ethnically differentiated groups that Spain established, more than five hundred years ago, the fundaments of globalized modernity.3

In Spain, the conceptualization of religious difference as a biological “problem”, and the subsequent hierarchization of the human population along “racial” lines was indeed an intrinsic part of Empire building. This intimate relationship can be encapsulated in three decisive events that took place during the historic year of 1492. That was the year of the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, but also of the definitive victory of the Catholic Kings over the Muslim-Arab rulers of Al-Andalus, a cultural-political entity that had ruled major parts of the Iberian Peninsula for almost eight hundred years. Lastly, that same year the entire Jewish community was expelled from the Catholic Kingdom by Royal Edict, establishing a precedent that would subsequently be applied to Muslims as well.4 After the expulsion of Muslims and Jews, Spanish “racial-spiritual” purity was preserved in Spain and its colonies through the ‘blood purity statutes’ (estatutos de limpieza de sangre).5 Considered as a proof of the Spanish people’s chosennes, this “purity” became a central pillar of the imperial task of global evangelization.

These seminal moments in Spanish history have affected the construction of Spanish national identity until this very day. Up to the eighteenth century, no relevant political group contested the assumption that the Spanish collective body had to be protected from the “contaminating” influence of both Muslim and Jewish blood through institutions like the blood purity statutes and the Tribunal of Inquisition. The advent of the Enlightenment broke this consensus, although it did not call into question the self-identification of the vast majority of the Spaniards with Catholicism. Even the Spanish liberals and reformists of the nineteenth century, despite their strong anti-clericalism and their vehement repudiation of anything related to Catholic integrism, perceived Spain as a Christian State. In fact, they claimed that both the Inquisition and the blood purity statutes went against the essence of the Spanish people precisely because tolerance is one of the core values of Christianity.6 This trend persisted until at least the first half of the twentieth century. According to Christiane Stallaert, the ethnic identification of the Spaniards with Catholicism was not only a fundamental trait of the Francoist side during the Civil War of 1936–1939, but was also widespread among the Spanish “reds” (socialists, communists and anarchists). Furthermore, some of these revolutionary Spaniards, such as Juan Machimbarrena and Segismundo Pey Ordeix, interpreted their Christian identity as the negation of Muslim/Jewish identity, in spite of the pluralistic and philosemitic politics of the government of the Second Republic during its first years (1931–1933).7

With the advent of democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, Spain created the institutional and political basis for the establishment of a multi-ethnic and non-denominational state. Since that time, the Spanish government has expressed its desire for historical reparation through a series of official acts, like the declarations of both Judaism and Islam as religions with ‘clear and deep roots’ (de notorio arraigo) in Spain, declarations which took place in 1984 and 1989 respectively.8 In 2015, the Cortes (Spanish parliament) passed a law granting citizenship to the descendants of expelled Jews, which constituted an important landmark in the long process of re-encounter/reconciliation between Spain and Sephardic Jews all over the world. Without any doubt, the will of the successive Spanish governments of the democratic era to reconnect Spanish culture and identity to its Jewish and Muslim-Arab roots has been reinforced with its incorporation into the European Community, due to the Europe institutions’ emphasis on pluralism, multiculturalism, and respect for human rights.

This book analyzes the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity, with a special focus on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context. The Spanish case is particularly suitable for this study, given Spain’s crucial role at the genesis of the global hierarchization of the world population along “racial” lines that took place about five hundred years ago. Interestingly enough, by the end of the twentieth century globalized modernity had produced an inversion of the ethnic and religious patterns that led to its establishment. The obsession with borders and collective homogeneity that pervaded early modernity was challenged by the increasing valoration of diversity, borders permeability, and coexistence of minority cultures within the nation state. In that sense, the efforts undertaken in the Spanish cultural, social and political realms to adapt the country’s structures to these dramatic developments can be considered as paradigmatic of the reassessment of religious difference and national identity in late modernity.

The main focus of this study is on the period 1986–2006, which witnessed critical developments in Spanish contemporary history, but the analysis extends beyond these dates. In 1986, Spain became a member state of the European Community, and established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Moreover, in 2006 the Spaniards commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of their last Civil War.

The study of national identity is especially problematic in the Spanish case, given the secessionist tendencies of some of its Autonomous Regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country. The complex dynamics generated by these tensions have been taken into consideration in this work, but the focus remains on the construction of Spain as an identity framework.

While the contemporary struggles over the construction of a Spanish collective identity have been given considerable scholarly attention, the specific subject of the remodeling of Spanish national identity vis-à-vis its Others has inspired a number of academic publications only during the last few years.9 Jo Labanyi’s edited volume Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain, published in 2000, was a pioneer in analyzing the country’s recent engagement with its “ghosts” and dealing with the often-blurred boundaries between self and Others in a Spanish context.10 This book, whose efforts are mostly directed at cultural theorizations, offers important insights concerning the challenges and particularities of the Spanish cultural scene. The study of difference is mostly centered on gender and migration issues, as well as on Gypsy otherness.

Regarding the Muslim as Other, one of the most important works in this field is Christiane Stallaert’s Etnogénesis y etnicidad (1998), in which she analyses Spanish ethnicity from the perspective of its confrontation with the “Moro” (‘Moor’), through the lens of an historical-anthropological analysis. Equally important is Kitty Calavita’s Immigrants at the Margins, which examines the dynamics of immigration, law, race and exclusion in contemporary Italy and Spain.11 In addition, Parvati Nair, Daniela Flesler, Ana Rueda and Raquel Vega-Durán have focused on the social and identity issues raised by Maghribi immigration to Spain from cultural perspectives.12 Furthermore, Barbara Fuchs and Susan Martin-Márquez have analysed Spain’s ambiguous role in the orientalized-orientalizing dichotomy from cultural and historical perspectives.13 More recently, Avi Astor and Ana I. Planet Contreras have focused on different aspects of Islam’s presence in contemporary Spain.14

More general works on Spanish alterity include Gabriela Yones-Aharoni’s MA Thesis (in Hebrew) on the “Other” as reflected in the Spanish cinema between 1983 and 2000; Danielle Rozenberg’s Minorías religiosas y construcción democrática en España, which analyzes the place of religious minorities in the construction of Spain’s democracy; and Joshua Goode’s Impurity of Blood, dealing with the meanings of racial identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain.15 Moreover, in La política de inmigración en España: reflexiones sobre la emergencia del discurso de la diferencia cultural, Belén Agrela scrutinizes the cultural and societal aspects of Spain’s immigration policies from the standpoint of anthropology.16

Finally, important contributions on the phenomenon of antisemitism in contemporary Spain have been published in recent years. These include Álvarez Chillida’s El antisemitismo en España (2002); Joan i Tous and Nottebaum’s El olivo y la espada (2003); Álvarez Chillida and Izquierdo Benito’s edited volume on Spanish antisemitism (2007); Jacobo Israel Garzón et al.’s El estigma imborrable (2005); Rodríguez Jiménez’s Antisemitism and the Extreme Right in Spain (1999); Baer and Zukierman’s Nuevo antisemitismo, viejos estigmas (2004); and Baer’s Spain’ Jewish Problem (2009).

As stated above, this book analyzes the role played by both Jewish and Muslim difference in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity. The fact that this kind of analysis has rarely been done before is rather surprising, given the many parallels and points of contact between these two ethnic minorities throughout Spanish history. On the other hand, this trend fits the pattern followed by the whole field of Jewish studies, in which research projects including both Muslims and Jews within a single analytical frame have been until recently quite uncommon.17

The second main originality of this work resides in the three different perspectives from which this process is analyzed. At the national level, this study follows its reflection in historiography, the education system and the public debates on national identity. At the international level, it focuses on Spanish foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Muslim States in a changing global context. From the social-communicational point of view, the emphasis is put on the construction of the self – Other (that is, Jewish and Muslim Other) dichotomy as reflected in the three leading Spanish newspapers. In addition, attention is paid to the processes undergone by the Jewish and Muslim communities since the democratic transition. Clearly, these distinctions are made for the purpose of analysis; these dimensions are in fact interconnected and mutually influence one another.

Finally, the research on which this work is based adopts a trans-disciplinary approach, bringing together elements from the disciplines of international relations, political science, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies and history. It combines a qualitative approach to the sources with the quantitative methodology called “content analysis,” to conduct the assessment of the images of “Jew” and “Muslim” as reflected in the three main Spanish newspapers: El País, El Mundo and ABC.18 It makes significant contributions to the study of racism and antisemitism, Iberian studies, european studies, and history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Consolidation of Spanish Democracy and the National Identity Debate
• 3 Spanish Foreign Policy towards Israel and the Arab States
• 4 Spain and the Jews
• 5 Spain and the Muslims
• 6 Final Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index