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8. Remaking a Good Fusion, Excising a Bad The Jewish Repatriation Movement in Spain, 1890–1923 The previous chapters have demonstrated that racial identity, as defined in anthropology and criminology, was a rather flexible concept. Most often the racial characteristics that were thought to define the nation or region reflected as much the particular interests and prejudices of the racial theorist as any objective interpretation of the scientific evidence. Race sometimes referred only to the physical characteristics of individuals in a national group. At other times, race was a compendium of cultural and social attributes of the individual or a region, defined partly by a vague sense of inheritance and partly by environmental conditioning. Underlying all of these positions was the assumption that fusion best characterized Spain’s racial past. Though the idea of racial fusion was widely shared, certainly what caused this fusion and what qualities were ascribed to Spaniards fluctuated depending on the racial theorist and to what political or social purpose the idea of racial fusion was put. These scientific positions did not necessarily conform to any one political ideology. In fact, liberals were drawn to racial identities conditioned by social environments because they implied that individuals could somehow alter their own destinies with a simple change of scenery or economic status. Catholic traditionalists, like Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, saw the anthropological view of racial fusion as verification of the value of conversion . Anarchists, like the criminologist Pedro Dorado Montero early in his career, thought racial identity proved that societies were shaped by social and economic forces. This final chapter explores the multiplicity of meanings and historical trajectory that racial fusion had in Spain through the experiences of one figure whose conclusions about race transcended a variety of the political positions. Remaking a Good Fusion, Excising a Bad | 183 His ideas led him to direct a movement to restore Spain’s racial health by reintroducing a racial group that had been needlessly excised from the racial mix in the fifteenth century, Sephardim, or Jews of Spanish origin. This effort merits attention for several reasons. One, it was defined as a project to regenerate the Spanish race; in other words, it was a racial project of national reformation. Two, the Jewish repatriation movement in Spain overlapped in time the development of anthropological and criminological discussions of race. Three, the movement’s leader used his racial ideas to defend a variety of political projects and to serve different political agendas throughout his career. Yet his basic sense of the value of racial fusion and its effects on Spaniards remained the same. As a result, Ángel Pulido y Fernández and the Jewish repatriation movement provide an good case study of how racial fusion supported a number of different political positions—especially because the individual who consistently supported this notion of race saw his own interests and ideas change quite a bit during the turbulent decades between 1890 and 1920. The vast changes in the professional pursuits of the movement’s leader, Ángel Pulido, provided an important backdrop for the evolution of his racial ideas. Pulido began as one of Spain’s first modern anthropologists. He subsequently turned to criminology and then served in a variety of administrative and bureaucratic offices within the Spanish government. Among these were his most famous roles as a senator and a director of the Spanish postal system and Department of Public Health. He was an early advocate of public immunization (in response to the flu pandemic of 1918–19), the abolition of capital punishment, and the promotion of women’s health. Political changes matched career changes. Pulido began as a republican and an initial critic of the Restoration system. He remained throughout his life a close confidant of one of the Restoration’s greatest enemies, Emilio Castelar. Later, he became supportive of the Liberal Party of the Restoration, as well as a great advocate of scientific interventions in social problems, specifically the expansion of scientific education and public hygiene. He ended his career still identified with the Liberal Party, but working closely with ideas more commonly associated with the Conservative Party and Catholic traditionalism. As a result, Pulido’s exploration of the racial sciences and his efforts to use race to fix social and political problems mimicked the pattern traced in the previous chapters. The scientific ideas about race that he advocated were used to support a variety of political positions. The effort to repatriate Spanish Jews, a pursuit Pulido initiated in 1880...

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