Spanish Attitudes Toward Judaism

This book analyses the history of the Jews of Spain starting from the time of the Visigoths until present times to show that there were times when the discrimination went against converted Jews and thus beyond the religious, offering some similarities to the racial and secular anti-Semitism of modernity despite their being separated by some centuries. This caused some historians and social scientists to delineate parallelisms between the Spanish casticist ethnicism of Inquisitorial times and the German volkisch that sustained Nazism. Other individuals went further and found the parallelisms in post-inquisitorial Spain which includes the Spanish Civil War and Francoism due to the survival of certain ethno-religious feelings in a country where there were no Jews. The singularities of Spanish anti-Semitism are revealed in the statutes of ""cleanliness of blood,"" and Jesuit participation in them, also, Spanish susceptibility at being viewed as a nation of Jews (the Black Legend) and what Stanley Payne calls "A Spanish paradox, traditional prejudice accompanied by philo-Sephardism," the moderate philo-Sephardism of the nationalists and groups of the right associated with hatred against Masonry and Ashkenazi Jews. All this gave rise to a historiographical controversy that went beyond the scholarly to assume a polemic in newspapers which is described.