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4. Between Old and New Antisemitism: The Image of Jews in Present-day Spain
- Indiana University Press
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4Between Old and New Antisemitism: The Image of Jews in Present-day Spain Alejandro Baer Shouting “We are sick of the Jews” and “Jews out!” a group of students in spring 2009 greeted the president of the Spanish Jewish Community and other speakers about to participate in a conference on racism and antisemitism at Madrid’s Complutense University, the second-largest university in Spain. The central topic of the conference, whether antisemitism was still alive in Spain and how it was manifested, was answered right away, empirically, even before the lectures began. One of the scheduled speakers, historian Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, wrote a few days later in the university’s weekly paper that “the main characters of this story were not Spanish fascist, neofascists, nor Catholic fundamentalists, eager to bring up to date the decree of expulsion of the ‘saint’ Queen Isabel. Even as it may seem strange,” wrote Álvarez, “it was a group that considers itself antifascist.”1 In pamphlets posted on the billboards in the hallways of the hosting institute, the conference was defined as part of a campaign orchestrated by the Jewish lobby—“a financial elite specialized in victimization and manipulation”—to silence criticism of the genocide it supposedly was perpetrating against the Palestinians. The Jewish guest was described as an obscure businessman devoted to “usurious practices.” As a faculty member at Complutense University at the time, and a participating speaker at the conference, I tried along with two other colleagues to bring about a public reprobation of the incident by the university authorities (the dean and the rector). We were not successful. The incident was interpreted by large sectors of the academic community as a (more or less comprehensible) outcome of the tensions in the Middle East, particularly against Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Hence, these events not only provided insight through firsthand experience into the intellectual 96 | Alejandro Baer authorship, the ideological composition, and specific semantics of the so- called “new antisemitism” within a particular sector of Spanish society. What this event proved beyond doubt is an even more somber reality: the denial of present- day antisemitism and, at the same time, its “normalization ” in a country where the vast majority of researchers, politicians, social fig ures, and government institutions believe that in today’s Spain anti- Jewish sentiment does not in fact exist. In the following pages I address specific details and the particular nature of the problem of antisemitism in contemporary Spain, as well as what it has in common with other European countries in the context of a global resurgence of antisemitism. Through a close look at Spain, this chapter attempts to contribute to the still somewhat indeterminate field of new antisemitism theory. A Specter Haunts Spain A popu lar Spanish proverb says “de aquellos barros, estos lodos.” This literally means “those morasses bring this mud,” but metaphorically it refers to a past that rears its ugly head. In an analy sis of contemporary antisemitism, it is necessary to look back at the rich tradition of Spanish Jew- hatred, which endured from the Inquisition to Franco’s dictatorship . Equally important is a criti cal reflection on the last thirty years of democracy, as the bitter traces of those earlier hatreds did not automatically fade away. As the incident above clearly shows, deeply rooted antisemitic prejudices and stereotypes still form part of the present reality. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Castilla and Aragon. From that point forward Spain became a homogeneous Catholic society with no religious minorities. Most historians who have addressed the topic of antisemitism in Spain agree that what remained in the Iberian peninsula after the expulsion is an image of the Jew, detached from actual Jewish in di vidu als, and a “Jewish question” strongly linked to Spanish national identity (above all, to the role of the Catholic religion in the forging of a national unity).2 Antisemitic motifs of a religious nature—Jews as Christ- killers, accusations of ritual crimes, and profanation of Christian symbols—did not dis appear after the expulsion of the Jews but rather remained firmly anchored in the cultural memory, through language, literature, and popu lar traditions.3 Anti- Jewish rheto ric underwent a re- The Image of Jews in Present-day Spain | 97 birth in conservative circles at the end of the nineteenth century. “Ironically ,” writes Hazel Gold, at this time “the fig ure of ‘the Jew’ inhabits the principal discourses of Spanish society—theology, philosophy, philology, politics, art...