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175 9 : assiMilaTion and raCial anTi-seMiTisM The iberian and The gerMan Models Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, New York, 1982. Named for the German rabbi and scholar, the Leo Baeck Institute, based in New York, is an organization devoted to the study of German-speaking Jewry.This article originated as the Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture that Yerushalmi delivered in 1982. In it, Yerushalmi drew a series of intriguing historical parallels between the experience of people of Jewish ancestry in medieval Spain and in modern Germany . Whereas chapter 8—“The Re-education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century”—focused on the experience of the descendants of converts as they returned to Judaism, this lecture dealt with the experience of those converts who attempted to integrate fully into Christian society and religion. Throughout the lecture, Yerushalmi acknowledged the somewhat unorthodox endeavor of comparing historical periods that are as different as “apples and pears.” He maintained, however, that just as apples and pears are both fruits, so the experiences of those who converted away from Judaism in medieval Spain and in modern Germany bear “phenomenological affinities” worth exploring. In particular, he was interested in the way in which each society, or elements within each, ascribed racial characteristics to groups of former Jews, asserting that they possessed biological qualities as Jews that lingered for generations after their abandonment of Judaism. Given that the address was the Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, and thus his audience was more familiar with modern Germany than with medieval Spain, Yerushalmi devoted the bulk of his remarks to a discussion of the latter. Around half of Iberian Jews converted to Christianity, mostly under extreme duress, during the course of the fifteenth century.When manyof the conversos took advantage of the social mobility that came with their new religious identities, “the traditional mistrust of the Jew as outsider now gave way to an even more alarming fear of the Converso as insider.” A backlash took place, which began with a series of popular riots from the middle of the fifteenth century. It spread to formal regulations that banned “New Christians” from many roles of authority and other socially significant positions. Because the people against whom these regulations were aimed were formally Christian by faith, they had to be differentiated by their ancestry. “Not religion but blood was their determining factor.” Thus, the regulations were known as estatutos de limpieza de sangre (statutes of purity of blood). Initially resisted in some quarters, they were eventually embraced by the crown and the papacy in the mid-sixteenth century and, in some places, remained in force well 176 | IberIa and beyond into the modern period. The racial underpinnings of the attitude to “New Christians ”embodied in these statutes (and in other sources that Yerushalmi discussed) came “perilously close” to the modern notion of race that anchored Nazism. Yerushalmi used this comparison to interrogate a common historiographical distinction between medieval antisemitism, motivated by theology, and modern antisemitism, motivated by new sciences such as biology. In fact, one of the proponents of this distinction, the Israeli historian Uriel Tal, had delivered a lecture on that very topic at the Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture eleven years previously, entitled “Religious and Anti-Religious Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism.” Yerushalmi’s analysis indicated, however, that “the assumption of a total absence of racism in pre-modern anti-Semitism may yet have been too glib and facile.” Racial antisemitism did not mark a complete break with premodern attitudes to Jews, and “secularism did not create modern racial anti-Semitism.” Rather, racial antisemitism , based on the perceived “essential immutability” of Jewish biological characteristics , arose out of circumstances in which Jewish assimilation was possible or mandated, including in premodern times. This recognition led Yerushalmi to identify “an imminent dialectic in the process of Jewish assimilation into societies constrained by new circumstances to accept them, but conditioned by deeply ingrained attitudes to reject them.” Yerushalmi ended the lecture with a brief introduction to a related area of inquiry . He noted that in both medieval Spain and modern Germany, people of Jewish descent who had left their faith were often overrepresented in cultural fields that exhibited a “special creativity.” He suggested that this was to be explained by the fact that assimilated Jews suffered “the anxiety of hovering between acceptance and rejection, integration and marginality” and “found release for their inner tensions and anxieties along paths that were somehow off the beaten track.” Yerushalmi did not have the opportunity to expand on these comments...

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