Identities and separatisms are accentuated in Spain after the expulsion of the Jews
Rivalries, exclusivism and blood cleansing permeate Spain's turbulent history. The paradox is that when Isabella of Castile and Fernando of Aragon concluded the so-called Reconquest in the face of Arab domination, exclusive and exclusionary identities began to take shape, exacerbated by the crisis of the nation-state in the 18th century. The expulsion of the Jews, also in 1492, and the subsequent struggle of the different estates to fill the immense vacuum left by a particularly influential community in the Spanish kingdoms until then, may have a lot to do with this.
In one of the lectures at the 11th Sephardic Conference in La Rioja, the professor, philologist and former director of the National Library and the Cervantes Institute, Jon Juaristi, summarises in broad terms one of the causes in the shaping of identities and the appearance and rise of separatisms in Spain.
Juaristi believes that the origin lies in noble struggles. The first document he points to is a letter that Hernando del Pulgar, secretary to Isabella I of Castile, addressed to Cardinal Pere Gómez de Mendoza, in which he asked him to explain why Guipúzcoa had enacted a Statute of Blood Cleansing, prohibiting Jews and converts from living there. It was still 1481 and there were still eleven years of conspiracies before the edict of expulsion.
The second milestone is the Nobiliario written by Diego Fernández de Mendoza, in which the list of the Spanish aristocracy is established. In this text, the inhabitants of Vizcaya are described as "Jews expelled from their original land by the emperor Titus after cutting out their tongues". From this assertion, the conviction spread of the Jewish origin of the Basques, who established their first settlement in Fuenterrabía (literally, Fountain of the Rabbi). Successive libels throughout the 16th century, especially the one written by Pedro Álvarez de Castro, Count of Lemos, would be particularly cruel, considering that "the Biscayans - Vizcainos (twice Caines) - were so called because they killed Cain and Abel and then Christ".
However, it was in 1560 that the Tizón de la Nobleza Española, a genealogical treatise of 1560, was the source of the flood of libels against the Spanish nobility, by pointing out and denouncing their Jewish origins. In any case, Basques and Castilians began to see themselves as distrustfully different precisely from the 16th century onwards, "when identity precipitations by accumulation took place", says Juaristi. "The Basques proclaimed themselves the first settlers of Spain, as descendants of a grandson of Noah, whose original Basque language would be a language of the dispersion of Babel. In turn, the Moors, for example, also claimed immemorial antiquity, presenting themselves as descendants of the Chaldeans, who would have arrived on the Iberian Peninsula speaking Arabic". In turn, the Castilians would consider the Basques "irretrievable for the truth".
Juaristi, author of 'Vestiges of Babel' (1993), concludes, then, that if identities have been developing since the historical moment of the expulsion of the Jews and their new diaspora, peripheral nationalisms accelerated from the 18th century onwards, when they began to make use of all the arguments at their disposal, whether historically true or not, in order to shape their separatist ambitions.
The architect of the creation and organisation of these Sephardic Days in San Millán de la Cogolla, the Sephardic bibliographer Uriel Macías explains to Atalayar that, "since the 1992 commemorations, a considerable effort has been made to make Spaniards aware of the before and after the expulsion of the Jews in the history of Spain".
In his opinion, it is not useful to lament what could have been and was not, alluding to the role played by the Jews in the development and prosperity of the nations that received those expelled from Spain: "The train that Spain missed was missed, that's it. What we need to do now is to get to know it, study it and, as they say nowadays, make the most of it. I believe that the only way in which the Spanish people as a whole will be aware of the importance of all this will be when its study becomes part of the curriculum in secondary education. I know that some autonomous regions are already working on this, Madrid, Aragon, Andalusia... Let's hope that it will soon become a reality".
Currently, the estimated population of Sephardic Jews in Spain is only 40,000, or barely 1/1,000 of the total population. "A great effort is therefore required, especially from the Jewish institutions themselves, both for Spanish society to get to know us better and better, and for us ourselves to be able to make this presence felt".
As recalled in the seminar's colloquia and colloquiums, in the five centuries of official absence of Jews from Spain, there are three stages: from 1492 to 1834, when the prohibition of rites and activities was total; from 1834 to 1920, small communities began to be tolerated, albeit very restricted. From that date in the 20th century, and with the parenthesis of the Civil War and the immediate post-war period, the first officially recognised communities gradually spread, starting with those of Seville, Madrid and Barcelona. A great impetus was given in 1992 by institutions such as the Centro Sefarad, one of the main disseminators of milestones, history, events and personalities of Jewish culture in Spain.
When asked when he believes that the Jewish presence in politics will be normalised in Spain, Uriel Macías replies that "there is still a long way to go. This presence is something normal in countries such as France, the United States, Argentina, and therefore in demonstrations adjacent to political activity. This is not the case in Spain, although it is worth remembering names such as Margarita Nelken, Gustavo Bauer or Enrique Múgica, who, from their seats or even in the Council of Ministers, contributed their own moral and cultural heritage to the development and prosperity of the country."