|OP-ED
CONTRIBUTOR
Repatriating Spain’s Jews
By ILAN STAVANS -
The New York Times,APRIL 1, 2014
Amherst, Mass. — A Jewish friend of
mine who belongs to a Sephardic Jewish family whose roots predate the
15th-century expulsion from Spain tells me that his family keeps a mythical
key. The key passes from generation to generation. “It apparently opens the
door to the abandoned house left behind when my ancestors were forced to
leave,” my friend said.
The Spanish government recently
announced its decision to grant citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic
Jews, who, like my friend’s forebears, were thrown out by the Alhambra Decree
of 1492. According to the country’s minister of justice, Alberto
Ruiz-Gallardón, this new legislation is an attempt to correct “the biggest
mistake in Spanish history.”
It is expected that there will be
some 150,000 applications and that the criterion for approval won’t be “overly
strict.” Applicants won’t be asked to relocate to Spain, nor will they need to
renounce their existing citizenship.
The new law makes Spain one of the
few nations in the world to offer automatic citizenship to Jews. On the
surface, this looks like a conciliatory move — the result of deep national
soul-searching. In reality, it is just another chapter in Spain’s ambivalent
relationship with its Jewish past.
Modern Spain has made apologies to
the Jews before. The Alhambra Decree was officially revoked in 1968. In 1992,
as part of the festivities of the quincentennial, in which Spain publicly
portrayed itself as a penitent nation paying for its sins, King Juan Carlos,
wearing a yarmulke, prayed in a Madrid synagogue alongside Israel’s president,
Chaim Herzog.
The country was ripe for
reconciliation, the king proclaimed: Sephardic Jews had a place in Spain’s
present. The idea of granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews circulated, but the
country was in the middle of a financial bonanza: It did not “need” Jews, and
the proposal came to nothing.
Until now. Spain finds itself still
mired in the worst financial crisis in memory. Inviting Jews to settle in times
of economic trouble is a strategy employed before, including in the Hispanic
world. At the end of the 19th century, Jewish immigrants were courted as
harbingers of modernity by Argentina and Mexico. And in the 20th century, the
region of Sosúa on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic was allocated
for Jewish refugees from the Holocaust — in hopes that they would push the
underdeveloped region forward.
Spain’s latter-day conversion to
philo-Semitism, however, is more apparent than real. The truth is that the Jews
left in 1492 — but the anti-Semitism stayed behind. The country is a prime
example of a nation that fosters “anti-Semitism without Jews,” a phenomenon
often marked by dualist attitudes. Take the dictatorship of General Franco,
from 1939 until 1975: Some Jewish refugees were saved by various consuls and
other diplomatic administrators, with Franco taking credit, yet his fascist
forces regularly used anti-Semitic motifs in their propaganda. Even in 1982, on
my first visit to Spain, I recall seeing swastikas, copies of Mein Kampf in
translation and Nazi paraphernalia for sale.
The original post-1492 Sephardic
communities flourished across the Mediterranean, eventually extending to the
Middle East, the Americas, Turkey, the Netherlands, the Balkans, Northern
Africa and Italy. Sephardic Jewry has a distinct liturgical tradition, a unique
cuisine, music and literature that became a staple of the Ottoman Empire.
Ladino, a hybrid tongue close to 15th-century Spanish and originally written in
Hebrew characters, mutated into regional dialects. While it never had the
unifying centrality that Yiddish did among Ashkenazi Jews, it fostered
continuity.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire
in the 20th century reconfigured these communities, as it did the societies in
which they lived. Today’s Sephardic Jews are, for the most part, educated,
entrepreneurial and deeply engaged in their own countries.
Ironically, Spain is not opening
its doors to another element of its Ottoman-era heritage — and another expelled
community: the Moors. Between 1609 and 1614, the Moriscos, as Muslims who had
converted to Christianity were known, were thrown out from the kingdoms of
Aragón and Valencia. That blow consolidated the project known as La
Reconquista, Spain’s attempt to build a unified identity based on a single
religion and ethnicity.
The continuity of Morisco culture
is less defined, but there are concerted efforts to push the Spanish government
to make a similar invitation to descendants of Spanish Moors. It is doubtful
whether this will happen because, as in other parts of Europe, anti-Muslim
sentiment in Spain is rampant. Behind the veil of Spain’s philo-Semitism thus
lies an unmistakable tinge of Islamophobia.
Equally certain is that the new
repatriation law is not about Spain’s rediscovery of its Sephardic heritage.
That cultural inheritance is treated carelessly, judging by the country’s
approach to Jewish sites.
Year after year, as I return to
Spain, I’m consistently puzzled by the official disregard of synagogues and
Jewish cemeteries. Only a small number are identified in tourist guides; many
are in disarray. Visitors to Toledo, once known as fertile ground for
cross-cultural exchange, are invariably puzzled by the vague and often
erroneous information provided in brochures. Even the Sinagoga de Tránsito,
built by the king’s treasurer, Samuel Ha-Levi Abulafia — which is by far the
most manicured Jewish building in Spain — feels uncomfortably quiet, as if
inhabited by ghosts.
The early response by the Sephardic
diaspora to the new legislation has, understandably, been enthusiastic in
trouble spots like Istanbul and Caracas, where Jewish communities feel vulnerable.
A free passport to the European Union doesn’t come every day. Other corners of
the Sephardic community are also weighing its possible benefits.
Still, it would be foolish to think
of Spain’s self-interested offer as the end of that diaspora. In fact, we are
in the midst of a Sephardic cultural revival, largely in the United States and
Israel: Academic programs, music festivals and literary events have multiplied
in recent decades.
As my Sephardic friend whose family
safeguards the ancestral key says: “As the door closed for us in Spain, we
realized the key we brought opened another door: the door to tradition. And
that we carry within ourselves.”
Ilan Stavans, the
Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst
College, is the author of the forthcoming book “A Most Imperfect Union: A
Contrarian History of the United States.”
A version of this
op-ed appears in print on April 2, 2014, in The International New York Times.
