Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (review)

One sometimes hears rumblings in certain academic circles that race is an “American” concern, wholly foreign to modern Spain. Joshua Goode’s meticulous study of the multiple attitudes towards racial discourse during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their expression in historiography, imperial (and post-imperial) strategy, and policies regarding the descendents of Iberia’s Sephardic exiles will quiet those voices: Spain is decidedly not devoid of autochthonous racial thought.

Impurities of Blood is a lengthy, comprehensive study of race, racism, and racializing thought in Spain. After a discussion of the medieval and early modern periods, the primary focus is on the decades that coincided with Romanticism and nationalism, the twinned concepts that defined membership among its citizenry by means of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. With careful attention to the subtleties of shifting political winds over the course of the nineteenth century, the author persuasively argues that race was permanently central to Spain’s conception of itself, even as its meaning constantly shifted along ideological and political lines. Not only the centralizing nation-state and imperial army, but also Basque nationalism, Sephardic repatriation, and Catholicism were all inflected by the reigning racial theories. In fact, as Goode reveals, race offers a privileged view of the seemingly chaotic social and political history of Spain between 1870 and 1920. “Instead of a clear opposition between conservative and liberal visions of Spanish identity, race demonstrated that a far more unified discourse existed within Spanish political and intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century. There were many more than two Spains” (82). The final sections of the book offer an incisive analysis of racial policies in the decades following the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Modern Spanish race developed at the turn of the century as a means of explaining Spanish imperial decline in terms of inherited biological factors and morphological degeneration. Unlike the case for other imperial powers, in Spain race was not a tool to distinguish “inferior” colonized people from their colonizers, but rather to understand the failure of empire. Anthropology and race theories developed, in part, in an attempt to pinpoint a racial and physical deficiency among Spanish soldiers that could explain their perpetual colonial defeats.

The common distinction between race theories in Northern and Southern Europe posits that in the former, race was celebrated as purity and exclusion, while in the latter it was forged through assimilation, fusion, and inclusion. As a result, Spanish race has been seen as somehow positive or “welcoming,” whereas, for example, German racial thought was negative (leaving aside Nazi policies, for the moment). However, Goode departs from standard historiographical comparisons of European racisms and instead explores how racialized thought was debated and implemented in specific policies in Spain. This methodological approach allows him to illuminate the means by which various racial traditions produce distinct (or similar) racial policies. Goode’s analysis of the ideas and practices that preceded Spanish fascism is complex and nuanced, and truly uncovers how and why particular ideas took hold. Ultimately, the author succeeds in setting aside the idea that race and genocide in Europe must always be defined in relation to the policies of Nazi Germany. He brilliantly dismisses the all too common exculpatory view that because race, eugenics, and population control in Spain under Franco did not reach the murderous heights of the Third Reich, or because race was constructed around a discourse of fusion rather than purity, Spain was and is somehow free from racism.

Grounding his arguments on specific political, social, and academic debates, and following the birth and growth of the field of anthropology, Goode details the uses of the conceptualization of Spain as a nation of assimilation and fusion (“the racial alloy”) by both the left and the right, and its interpretation by writers as diverse as Pío Baroja, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Miguel de Unamuno. He reveals the astounding interest in race and anthropology among a range of...