Spanish Attitudes Toward Judaism

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.

Adolfo Kuznitzky, an attorney and the recipient of several prizes for his Jewish and Sephardic studies, lives in San Francisco, Córdoba, Argentina.
Translator Abramo Ottolenghi is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He lives in Worthington, Ohio.
Translator Joan D. Ottolenghi is a retired Spanish teacher. She lives in Worthington, Ohio.

Adolfo Kuznitzky. Translated by Abramo Ottolenghi and Joan D. Ottolenghi
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 208
Bibliographic Info: glossary, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7662-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1651-3
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Translators’ Acknowledgments    v

Translators’ Notes    1

Glossary    3

Introduction    5

1  Historical Comparisons 15

2  History and Background of the Discrimination That in Spain Went Beyond the Religious Boundaries 23

3  The Nature of the Cleanliness of Blood 46

4  The Jesuits and the Cleanliness of Blood 58

5  Netanyahu and Racism in Germany and in Inquisitorial Spain 69

6  The Polemic of Netanyahu with Historians and Hispanists 73

7  Stallaert’s Anthropological Comparativism 82

8  Influence of Inquisitorial anti–Semitism in ­Post-Inquisitorial Spain and Nazi Racism 104

9  The Spanish Civil War and the Jews 126

10  Franco and the Holocaust 139

Conclusion    155

Chapter Notes    173

Bibliography    187

Index    191