Spanish Attitudes Toward Judaism: Strains of Anti-Semitism from the Inquisition to Franco and the Holocaust

Analyzing the history of the Jews of Spain from the time of the Visigoths to the present, this study investigates periods of discrimination against converted Jews that went beyond the merely religious, finding similarities to the racial and secular anti–Semitism of modernity. Some scholars have drawn parallels between the Spanish castizo ethnicism embodied in the “cleanliness of blood” statutes and the German völkisch (anti–Semitic) beliefs that sustained Nazism. Others have found Inquisition-like parallels in post-inquisitorial Spain—including during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist era—a result of the survival of ethno-religious prejudices in a country where there were no Jews. The singularities of Spanish anti–Semitism are revealed in the “Spanish Paradox” of anti–Semitism coexisting with philo–Sephardism and also in the Spanish sensitivity to being viewed as a nation of Jews (the Black Legend). The author examines a historiographical controversy that went beyond scholarship, spilling onto the columns of newspaper polemic.