Danielle Rozenberg, L'Espagne contemporaine et la question juive (Contemporary Spain and the Jewish Question)

It is a precious work, honored with the Alberto Benveniste Prize, that Danielle Rozenberg, a researcher at the CNRS, has just produced on the Jewish question in Spain. What “Jewish question” can one address in a country that, with the mass expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, scarcely knew the upheavals of a Europe stricken by antisemitism, notably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? It would be a stretch to insinuate that a Jewish presence haunts, or once haunted, this country — and yet Spain saw an impressive quantity of reprintings of the Protocoles des Sages de Sion (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) between 1932 and 1937: no fewer than seven! The hypothesis that antisemitic delirium has no need whatsoever of concrete Jews — already analyzed in the cases of communist Poland and present-day Japan — holds true in Francoist Spain as well. In fact, the author tells us, it is the traditional presence of Catholic anti-Judaism and the conflation of Bolshevism with Judaism that feed an antisemitic discourse meant to disqualify the defenders of the Spanish Republic. They all become reds, and “this representation makes it possible to justify the war morally, so that it becomes an enterprise in defense of the values of Catholic Spain against an attempt to sovietize the country, on the verge of succeeding in the summer of 1936.”

This book is not addressed, of course, solely to the Francoist period and to an antisemitism whose epicenter would be a “conceptual Jew.” It retraces the tenacious traces, the upheavals, of the Jewish presence on Spanish soil, notably the long wandering of the conversos, those Jews compelled, from 1492 onward, to embrace Catholicism, and who, generation after generation, try to preserve elements of their Judaism. It is even quite astonishing that some of them, the Chuetas of Majorca for example, were able to preserve the mark of a converso origin while observing the Catholic faith. A problematic origin, since, until the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the schools of Majorca refused to admit Chueta children. “The expression fer sa xuetada (to commit a ‘Jewry’),” writes Danielle Rozenberg, “is still in use to describe a piece of sharp practice involving money.”¹ In 1942, moreover, the German consulate, backed by the Falangists, had suggested that the Chuetas be deported to a concentration camp. Who would have thought that 1492 was so far from 1942?

This strange presence of the past also manifested itself in the spiritual heritage that the exiles of 1492 carried away with them. A heritage whose backbone is Judeo-Spanish and Ladino, languages preserved down to our own day. Imagine the astonishment of the Madrid diplomats posted in Eastern Europe when, at the end of the nineteenth century, they discovered inhabitants of the Balkans speaking a clipped and antiquated Spanish! To the point of wishing to envisage commercial relations with the Sephardic Jews of the Balkan region in order to extend their country’s influence. In the same way, the idea of using the Spanish Jews to extend their influence in Morocco had also taken root.

From there on, it is an ambiguous policy that characterizes the attitude of the Madrid authorities toward the Jewish fact and the Judeo-Spaniards. For instance, a decree by the government of Miguel Primo de Rivera grants Spanish nationality, on 20 December 1924, to the “former Spanish protégés or their descendants.” Later, his son José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, would ten years afterward publicly proclaim his antisemitism.

The same ambiguity under Francoism. Thus in 1940, Jewish rites (circumcisions, marriages, funerals) are forbidden and Jewish institutions dissolved by decree. In 1941, a register of Jews is even set up at the Ministry of the Interior, a register that would still be active in the 1950s. But at the same time, Franco’s regime puts in place a policy meant to protect the Sephardim and takes in thousands of Jewish refugees, making General Franco appear as a savior of Jews — an image he would cultivate after the war to clear himself of his rapprochement with Nazi Germany.

The work closes with a reflection on democratic Spain. Today, some forty thousand Jews live in the Iberian Peninsula, drawn from various waves of migration (Jews from Morocco, from Egypt, from Latin America, and even from Israel). On 10 November 1992, the State officially recognized Spanish Judaism. On 31 March of the same year, King Juan Carlos had, in a famous speech delivered at the Beth Yaacov synagogue in Madrid, sealed the reintegration of the Hispano-Jews within the Spanish nation. Normalization? The Spanish State, and the Jews of Spain, now face the classic ills of modern democracies: revisionism, Holocaust denial, antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism…

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