Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T12:10:50.049Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

Charles A. McDonald
Charles A. McDonald*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

Keywords

Sephardi JewsreturnaffectsentimentrancorressentimentraceempirecitizenshipSpain
Type
Sentimental States
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 722 - 751
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgments: My thanks to colleagues who commented on earlier incarnations of this article: Tom Abercrombie, Kimberly Arkin, Jonathan Boyarin, Julia Phillips Cohen, Sultan Doughan, Daniela Flesler, Michal Friedman, Emily Marker, Valentina Ramia, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, Jon Snyder, Ann Stoler, Miriam Ticktin, and Jeremy Varon. I presented versions of this paper at the Association for Jewish Studies Meeting, the American Anthropological Association Meeting, Rice University, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas-Austin. I especially thank the editors and reviewers at CSSH for their insightful comments. In Spain, I am grateful to the FCJE, Paloma Díaz-Mas, and Liliana Suárez-Navaz. Librarians and staff at the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, Real Academia Nacional de Medicina, the Center for Jewish History, and the American Sephardi Federation provided invaluable assistance. Research and writing for this article were supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Posen Foundation, American Academy for Jewish Research, the Center for Jewish History, the New School for Social Research, the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rice University, and the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish to English are my own.

References

1 “Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesión de la nacionalidad española a los sefardíes originarios de España,” Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE), 51, 25.06.2015, 52557–52664, https://www.boe.es/eli/es/l/2015/06/24/12/dof/spa/pdf.

2 On Israel's “law of return,” see Kravel-Tovi, Michal, When the State Winks: Jewish Conversion, Performance, and Bureaucracy in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seeman, Don, One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On birthright and dual citizenship, see Tanasoca, Ana, The Ethics of Multiple Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawrance, Benjamin N. and Johnson, Ryan, Citizenship in Question (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Harpaz, Yossi and Mateos, Pablo, “Strategic Citizenship: Negotiating Citizenship in the Age of Dual Nationality,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45, 6 (2018): 843–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1440482.

3 Miguel González, “‘Los sefardíes ya no son españoles sin patria,’” proclama el presidente de la comunidad judía,” El País, 2 Oct. 2019.

4 This is not to suggest that philosephardism should be understood exclusively as imperialistic or as an expression of bad faith. Historians have written persuasively about the ambivalent ways in which Spaniards conceived of Sephardi Jews and their relationship to Spain. See Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013); Maite Ojeda-Mata, Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018). However varied philosephardic thought may have been, the political projects it helped nurture were never far from anxieties about Spain's loss of empire, racial origins, place in Europe, and contested modernity.

5 Ley 12/2015. On the genre of the preamble, see Alfons Aragoneses, “Convivencia and Filosefardismo in Spanish Nation-Building,” Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series no. 2016-05 (1 May 2016), 1–34, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2798054.

6 Emphasis added.

7 On the politics of nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Olivia Angé and David Berliner, eds., Anthropology and Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn, 2014).

8 “Nacionalidad española para sefardíes,” Federación de Comunidades Judías de España, http://www.fcje.org/nacionalidad-espanola-para-sefardies/.

9 “Palabras de su majestad el rey en el acto solemne con motivo de la Ley 12/2015 en materia de concesión de nacionalidad española a los sefardíes originarios de España,” 30 Nov. 2015, http://www.casareal.es/ES/Actividades/Paginas/actividades_discursos_detalle.aspx?data=5550.

10 José María Jiménez Gálvez, “El caro billete de regreso a Sefarad,” El País, 3 May 2015.

11 “Descendientes de judíos sefardíes ya pueden reclamar la nacionalidad española,” Minuto Uno, 1 Oct. 2015.

12 Charles A. McDonald, “Return to Sepharad: Citizenship, Conversion, and the Politics of Jewish Inclusion in Spain,” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 2019.

13 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40. See also Lori A. Allen, “Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 2 (2017), 385–414.

14 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Along the Archival Grain.

15 Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

16 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.

17 Although overtures toward Sephardi Jews tend to shore up a specifically Castilian nationalism, for an exception see Edgar Illas, “On Universalist Particularism: The Catalans and the Jews,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013).

18 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 18.

19 Real Academia Española: Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2014), s.v. “Rencor”; Larousse gran diccionario: inglés-español, español-inglés, Patrick White, Teresa Alvarez García, and Pilar Bernal Macías, eds., 2d ed. (Mexico City: Ediciones Larousse, 2004), s.v. “Rencor”; OED Online, Oxford University Press, s.v., “Rancor,” https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/157964?rskey=HD1wyN&result=1 (accessed 15 Mar. 2021).

20 James D. Fernández, correspondence with author, 8 Mar. 2017.

21 See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1759); Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann and P. J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1969); Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Thomas Brudholm, Resentment's Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Didier Fassin, “On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions,” Current Anthropology 54, 3 (2013): 249–67; Grayson Hunt, “Redeeming Resentment: Nietzsche's Affirmative Ripostes,” American Dialectic 3, 2/3 (2013): 118–47.

22 See Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” Antioch Review 33, 1 (1975): 5–26; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

23 See Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 50–51.

24 See Kevin Ingram, ed., The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. 1 (Boston: Brill, 2009).

25 See María DeGuzmán, Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend; Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.

26 Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quillian, “Introduction,” in M. R. Greer, W. D. Mignolo, and M. Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.

27 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

28 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “‘This Rotting Corpse’: Spain between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001), 149–60; Mónica Burguera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Backwardness and Its Discontents,” Social History 29, 3 (2004): 279–83.

29 Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.

30 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988); and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

31 Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke, 2013), 22.

32 See José Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2003), 417–31.

33 Mónica Bolufer, “Reasonable Sentiments: Sensibility and Balance in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds., Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 22–23.

34 Ibid., 23.

35 Wadda C. Ríos-Font, “‘How Do I Love Thee’: The Rhetoric of Patriotic Love in Early Puerto Rican Political Discourse,” in Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds., Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 39.

36 Ibid., 41.

37 The Inquisition was abolished in 1813, only to be restored and abolished several more times until finally dissolved in 1834.

38 Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Lindhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, “Introduction,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3.

39 See Adolfo de Castro y Rossi, Historía De Los Judíos En España (Cádiz: 1847); José Amador de los Ríos, Los Judíos de España: Estudios Históricos, Políticos y Literarios, Nitai Shinan, ed. (Pamplona: Urgoiti, 2013). See also Andrew Bush, “Amador De Los Ríos and the Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies in Spain,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 18; Michal Friedman, “Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria’: Jose Amador De Los Ríos and the History of the Jews of Spain,” Jewish Social Studies 18, 1 (2011): 88–126.

40 Michal Friedman, “Recovering Jewish Spain: Politics, Historiography and Institutionalization of the Jewish Past in Spain (1845–1935),” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012, 50.

41 See Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África (Sevilla: Fundación José Manuel Lara, 1860); Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Recuerdos de la campaña de África (Madrid: José M. Rosés, 1860); Rafael del Castillo, España y Marruecos: Historia de la guerra de África, escrita desde el campamento (Cádiz: La Publicidad, 1859).

42 On how Sephardi Jews pressured the new government to allow Jews to “return” to Spain, see Mónica Manrique Escudero, Los judíos ante los cambios políticos en España en 1868 (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2016).

43 Joshua Goode, Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 78.

44 Ibid.

45 On racial mixture in Latin America, see Peter Wade, Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

46 See Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Friedman, “Jewish History as ‘Historia Patria’”; “Recovering Jewish Spain”; and “‘Reconquering “Sepharad’: Hispanism and Proto-Fascism in Giménez Caballero's Sephardist Crusade,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013).

47 Goode, Impurity of Blood, chs. 4 and 5.

48 For more on Pulido's anthropological training and prominent place in the discipline in Spain, see ibid., chs. 3, 4, and 8.

49 Ladino is the Judeo-Spanish language spoken and written by Sephardi Jews.

50 Goode, Impurity of Blood, 193.

51 Ángel Pulido y Fernández, Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí (Madrid: 1905), 2.

52 Goode, Impurity of Blood, 192.

53 Ángel Pulido y Fernández, Los israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1904).

54 Pulido y Fernández, Españoles.

55 Goode, Impurity of Blood, 193; Isabelle Rohr, “‘Spaniards of the Jewish Type’: Philosephardism in the Service of Imperialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spanish Morocco,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 78.

56 Goode, Impurity of Blood, 196.

57 Pulido did not envision welcoming all Jews: he favored Sephardi Jews over Ashkenazi Jews and militated against allowing poor Jews to settle in Spain.

58 de los Ríos, Los judíos de España, 31.

59 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas y leyendas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1941), quoted in Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España: la imagen del judío (1812–2002) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002), 163. Chillida's book includes this and other references to rancor by Spaniards, though he does not analyze the term's use or meaning.

60 Tomás de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.

61 Pulido y Fernández, Españoles, 72.

62 Pulido y Fernández, Los israelitas, 112–13.

63 Pulido y Fernández, Españoles, 203.

64 Ibid., 313.

65 Pulido y Fernández, Los israelitas, 36.

66 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals.

67 Paul Muldoon, “The Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics,” Political Psychology 38, 4 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12433, 671.

68 Carlos R. Saz Parkinson, Positively Negative: Pío Baroja, the Essayist (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011). See also Nelson R. Orringer, “El Nietzsche de Baroja: filósofo-poeta modernista,” Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía 25 (2008): 137–50.

69 Africano Fernandez, España en Africa y el peligro judío: apuntes de un testigo (Santiago, 1918), 195, 258, quoted in Isabelle Rohr, “Philosephardism and Antisemitism in Turn-of-the-Century Spain,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 31, 3 (2005): 373–92, 390.

70 Pío Baroja, La leyenda de Jaun de Alzate (Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1922), 193.

71 Pío Baroja, Comunistas, judíos y demás ralea (Valladolid: Ediciones Reconquista, 1938), 37, and see also 68, 227, 278.

72 Rozenberg, La España contemporánea y la cuestión judía (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010), 115.

73 Pulido y Fernández, Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí, 133–34.

74 Thomas Brudholm, “Revisiting Resentments: Jean Améry and the Dark Side of Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” Journal of Human Rights 5, 1 (2006): 7–26, 12.

75 Ibid., 12–19.

76 “Real Decreto de nacionalización de antiguos protegidos de origen español de 20 de diciembre de 1924,” Gazeta de Madrid, 21 Dec. 1924. See also Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

77 Maite Ojeda Mata, “La ciudadanía española y los sefardíes: identidades legitimadoras, ideologías étnicas y derechos políticos,” Quaderns-E De L'Institut Català D'Antropologia 20, 2 (2015): 36–52, 43.

78 Rohr, “‘Spaniards of the Jewish Type,’” 82, 76–90.

79 Ibid., 85.

80 Friedman, “‘Reconquering ‘Sepharad,’” 50–75; and “Recovering Jewish Spain”; Isabelle Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898–1945: Antisemitism and Opportunism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008); Ojeda Mata, Modern Spain and the Sephardim.

81 Rohr, Spanish Right and the Jews.

82 See Paloma Díaz-Mas, “Repercusión de la campaña de Ángel Pulido en la opinión pública de su época: la respuesta sefardí,” in Juan González-Barba, ed., España y la cultura hispánica en el sureste europeo (Atenas: Embajada de España, 2000), 326–39.

83 For more on Besso, see Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, 3 (2010): 349–84.

84 “Correspondence from Henry Victor Besso to Ángel Pulido Y Fernández,” ASF AR-9, box 33, fol. 5, Henry Victor Besso Collection, American Sephardi Federation, New York, N.Y., 8 Oct. 1926.

85 Ibid.

86 Henry Victor Besso, “A Great Apostle of Sephardi Jews Passes Away,” American Hebrew, 3 Feb. 1933. I found a clipping of this article in the American Sephardi Foundation archives: “News clipping,” ASF AR-9, box 6, fol. 34A, Henry Victor Besso Collection, American Sephardi Federation, New York, N.Y.

87 Henry Victor Besso, “The Return of the Exodus,” ASF AR-9, box 7, fol. 6, Henry Victor Besso Collection, American Sephardi Federation, New York, N.Y.; “Spain to Admit Jews from Greece, Egypt,” New York Times, 10 Jan. 1949.

88 Besso, “Return of the Exodus,” 1.

89 Ibid., 1.

90 Ibid., 3.

91 Arriba, 15 and 18 May 1949, quoted in José Antonio Lisbona, Retorno a Sefarad: la política de España hacia sus judíos en el siglo XX (Barcelona: Rio Piedras, 1993), 144–45.

92 Besso, “Return of the Exodus,” 3.

93 Ibid., 4.

94 Ibid., 4.

95 Ibid., 4.

96 Flesler, Linhard, and Melgosa, Revisiting Jewish Spain; Erica T. Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Ruth Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Geneviève Zubrzycki, “Religion, Religious Tradition, and Nationalism: Jewish Revival in Poland and ‘Religious Heritage’ in Québec,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, 3 (2012): 442–55; and “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism,’ and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, 1 (2016): 66–98.

97 Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited, 5.

98 Ibid., 3. See also Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng, eds., Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Geneviève Zubrzycki, “The Politics of Jewish Absence in Contemporary Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, 2 (2017), 250–77.

99 Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited, 51–52.

100 Alejandro Baer, “The Voids of Sepharad,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 124–49.

101 McDonald, “Return to Sepharad.” On Spain and Holocaust memory, see Alejandro Baer, “The Voids of Sepharad,” in Daniela Flesler, Tabea Alexa Linhard, and Adrián Pérez Melgosa, eds., Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 124–49; and Alejandro Baer and Nathan Sznaider, Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era: The Ethics of Never Again (New York: Routledge, 2017).

102 Author's interview with Carolina Aisen (President, FCJE), Madrid, May 2016.

103 Author's interview with Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, Madrid, July 2016. I am grateful to the journalist Daniel Hoffman for arranging and then collaborating with me during this interview.

104 Congreso de los Diputados, Diario de sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados pleno y diputación permanente, no. 242, 227th session, 2014, 1–80.

105 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 18.

106 Congreso de los Diputados, Diario de sesiones, 72–73.

107 Ibid., 66, emphasis added.

108 Congreso de los Diputados, Diario de sesiones, 67.

109 On the Saharawis, see Randi Irwin, “Derivative States: Property Rights and Claims-making in a Non-Self-Governing Territory,” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 2019.

110 Clara Felis, “Isaac Querub: ‘Los hijos de Sefarad han aceptado sin rencor el silencio,’” El Mundo, 1 June 2015.

111 Emphasis added.

112 See Américo Castro, España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948); Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008); Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); and Silvina Schammah Gesser y Raanan Rein, eds., El otro en la España contemporánea: prácticas, discursos y representaciones (Sevilla: Fundación Tres Culturas, 2011).

113 Recent work refutes the argument that expelled moriscos were immediately “absorbed” by their host communities in the diaspora or were indifferent about the home from which they had been exiled. Scholars note that there is a long and shifting tradition of morisco descendants who express forms of attachment to Spain, including professions of “love.” See Rogozen-Soltar, Spain Unmoored; Shannon, Jonathan, Performing Al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Calderwood, Eric, Colonial Al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hirschkind, Charles, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)Google Scholar.

114 Emphasis added.

115 See notes 112 and 113.

116 For recent responses to Europe's “refugee crisis,” see Mayanthi Fernando and Cristiana Giordano, eds., “Refugees and the Crisis of Europe,” Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology, 28 June 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/refugees-and-the-crisis-of-europe; Genova, Nicholas De, ed., The Borders of Europe: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

117 Although agreements protected the religious liberty of Muslims who remained in Spain, pressure from the Church meant that the vast majority of Spanish Muslims were compelled to convert between 1499 and 1526. Those converted Muslims, known as moriscos, were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614.

118 See Gil Shefler, “Spanish Muslims, or Moriscos, Seek Parity with Jews Expelled from Spain,” Washington Post, 5 June 2014. The possibility of granting Spanish citizenship to the descendants of expelled Muslims was discussed during a 2006 Andalusian parliamentary debate, though such a measure would have to be passed by the national parliament.

119 Goode, Impurity of Blood, 183.

120 On the “gift” of citizenship and forms of refusal, see Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; McGranahan, Carole, “Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship,” Cultural Anthropology 31, 3 (2016): 334–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 335–36; and “Refusal as Political Practice: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and Tibetan Refugee Status,” American Ethnologist 45, 3 (2018): 367–79.

121 For a closely related, and almost inverse, example of such an “exchange,” see Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks.

122 Charles McDonald, “Return to Sepharad”; and “Return,” “Editors’ Forum: Theorizing the Contemporary,” Cultural Anthropology, 20 Dec. 2019, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/return.