Gustavo D. PerednikA brief note for Catholics reading this article, please check the document on the Shoah, We Remember by John Paul II.
Jews currently make up less than 0.05 percent of Spain's population, where they were ambivalently rediscovered after four centuries of absence and demonization. Although deep and intense, Judeophobia in Spain is less scrutinized than in other Western countries. Spanish traditions, media, and vocabulary, even among intellectuals, point to a rooted hatred about which Spaniards are utterly naive. This can be traced to a national obsession about unity and homogeneity, which may be related to the frequency with which blood libels were fabricated in Spain and included in law.
In spite of the vicious anti-Zionism of its press on both sides of the political spectrum, and the recurrence of "the Jewish lobby" scapegoat, most Spaniards remain unaware of Judeophobia in their country. This naivety could be used to advantage, making it a phenomenon that could be counteracted.
In this article the word Judeophobia replaces the misnomer anti-Semitism, a term used by many Judeophobes to launder their hatred.[1] This more appropriate word is being increasingly accepted in Spain.[2]
In spite of its depth and intensity, Judeophobia in Spain is scrutinized less than in other Western countries. Half a century ago books on this topic, such as Koppel Pinson's, [3] focused on Russia, Poland, France, and Germany. In the 1980s, Jacob Katz [4] wrote on Jew-hatred up to the Holocaust, dealing with Germany, France, and Austro-Hungary. More recently, Meyer Weinberg's book on Judeophobia [5] devotes chapters to the aforementioned countries, as well as to Argentina, Bulgaria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Italy, Rumania, and the United States. Robert Wistrich6 adds the ex-Soviet Union and Islamic countries. Albert S. Lindemann [7] analyses nine of these countries. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson [8] consider the Netherlands and Turkey. Remarkably, Spain is overlooked in most Judeophobia anthologies.
In a study on Judeophobic attitudes in several European countries that was released towards the end of 2002 by the Anti-Defamation League, Spain came out the worst,[9] both among the five countries under study and among another five countries considered two months earlier. In the Spanish survey, 21 percent of those interviewed were Judeophobic. A Gallup survey found that only 4 percent of Spaniards empathized with Israel regarding the conflict in the Middle East. [10]
Culturally Spain is one of the most homogeneous Western countries - almost all Spaniards are Catholic. Until at least one generation ago, most of them were raised in a Judeophobic atmosphere. Although few had seen a Jew with their own eyes, "killing Jews" was widely considered an innocuous children's game. In many Spanish towns and villages, grassroots Judeophobia is rampant. In some traditional fiestas and rituals passed down from generation to generation, the effigy of a Jew is derided and beaten or even symbolically murdered.
In 1999 a newspaper published a nonchalant article dealing with an Easter tradition in the province of Leon, where cafeterias offer special lemonade in bottles that "will be used to kill Jews." Utterly indifferent to the dark shades in his report, the journalist calls it "a harmless expression" and adds the recipe for this singular lemonade.[11]
Spaniards' vocabulary includes many striking examples of Judeophobic expressions, which in other languages have been eroded by modern political correctness. The accepted dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (twentieth edition, 2001) includes under "synagogue" - a meeting for illicit purposes, and under "judiada" - evil action. When the Spanish Royal Academy is requested to exclude from its new editions the derogatory definitions of a Jew, it responds that they merely reflect the way language is used, and that there is no deliberation on their part. Jew has always included a figurative definition of "miser, usurer." However, the Academy does not reflect in its dictionaries derogatory meanings of words related to other national groups, such as Spaniards in Latin America or even of very widespread negative meanings attributed to words like nazi.
Espasa Calpe, publishers of the world's largest encyclopedia, expressed regret last October for the use of Judeophobic terms in its fourth edition of the Dictionary of Synonyms. But the definitions in its encyclopedia have barely changed. The CD version 2000 defines "Jew" and "Zionist" as follows:Jew:
Related to Judaism....Jews await their Messiah....The Jewish capital is Tel Aviv....Derogatory: miser, usurer: a Jewish loan.
Zionist: Adjective. Related to Zionism: Zionist association; Zionist terrorism. Noun: belonging to this ideology: the Zionists have expressed opposition to Palestine independence.
The Uniqueness of Spanish JudeophobiaIn at least six ways Judeophobia in Spain stands out from among its parallels in the West.
Firstly, it is distinctive because of its antiquity. In his classic book on Judeophobia,[12] Edward Flannery cites that Judeophobia in Spain began in the year 589 with the Third Council of Toledo, after the conversion of King Recaredo to Christianity. Even before this conversion, Spain could boast of the first reported case of compulsory baptism, which took place on the island of Minorca in 418, as a result of Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. Since then, Judeophobia has had an ongoing influence on Spanish society.
The second reason for its singularity is its virulence. In 1391, during the riots stirred up by Ferrant Martinez, hundreds of Jews were murdered and entire communities were forcibly Christianized. Since in medieval Christianity the return to the old faith was considered heretical and punishable by death, these waves of forced baptisms were irreversible.
This irreversibility brings us to the third - and main - distinguishing aspect of Spanish Judeophobia, namely the phenomenon of the Marranos, which developed in Spain as a tragic sequel to the forced baptisms. Spanish conversos continued practicing Judaism partially and secretly until after the eighteenth century.
Fourthly, Spanish Judeophobia has always been almost all-inclusive, even among the country's foremost intellectuals. With the outstanding exception of the bard Cervantes (on whose Jewish ancestry leading historians agree), the main authors of the Golden Age of Spanish literature (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries) gave uninhibited vent to their Judeophobic inclinations. Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, and Alonso Castillo Solorzano attacked alleged Judaizers, who seldom defended themselves in the hope that their accusers would relent. One of these accused "Judaizers," Felipe Godinez, pronounced a eulogy in honor of Lope de Vega in spite of having had his supposedly Jewish ancestry satirized by the latter.
Francisco de Quevedo is one of the most revered Spanish authors of all ages. His vituperation of his literary competitor, Luis de Gongora, went: "I shall smear you my verses with bacon for you not to bite them, tiny Gongora/ why would you belie the Greek language/ being just a rabbi of the Jewish tongue/ something not even your nose can deny."[13] Again this ironic venom is shocking: Quevedo complained about Jews plagiarizing him although there was not a Jew left to plagiarize (Jews had been expelled from his country more than a century earlier).
While this stubborn persistence of Judeophobia in a Judenrein country is comparable to that of the "miracle plays" of medieval France, Christopher Marlowe in England,[14] or the beginning of Latin American Judeophobia with the novel The Stock Exchange,[15] the Spanish case includes not only fiction but also essays and political platforms.
A century after Martin Luther's Judeophobic writings, Quevedo wrote in a similar vein the Execration against the Jews' Stubborn Blasphemy[16] in which he addressed King Philip IV with the explicit request that "all of them should perish, with their possessions. Their gold is slag, their silver is stench, their wealth is a pest. By birth our Lord Jesus Christ taught us to escape from the Jews' gold....The Jews do with us what Satan did with Christ." Quevedo ends with the wish for "the total expulsion and desolation of the Jews, always evil and every day worse, ungrateful to their God, and traitors to their king," without bothering to notice that there were no Jews left in Spain to expel.
Fifthly, Judeophobia was more "official" in Spain than in other countries. Blood libels and sermons to the Jews were not an exclusively Spanish practice, but they were lawfully supported by the Spanish state, as they were in Russia six hundred years later.
The first Spanish blood libel took place in 1182 in Saragossa. A century later the Code of the Seven Parties (1263) states: "We have heard that in certain places during Holy Friday the Jews kidnap children and they mockingly put them on the cross." As with the expulsion from England, Spanish Jews were banished after public opinion had been poisoned by blood libels.
As for the well-known sermons to the Jews, a law of James I of Aragon (1242) refers to the presence at the homilies as compulsory, and the king himself gave Christian exhortations at a synagogue.
One of the most famous public disputations took place in Barcelona in 1263. It ended with the same James I ordering the Jews to delete from the Talmud allegedly anti-Christian references. The worst Judeophobic polemist of that period, Raymond Martini, then wrote Pugio Dei ("The Dagger of Faith"), which has served since then as a basic text to attack Judaism. Also notable was the disputation of Tortosa (1413), which caused the restriction of Jews' rights to study in Aragon.
Last but not least, Spain can boast of the most thorough and well-known expulsion of Jews ever. In 1492 hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled, the greatest Jewish community of the time - one that had produced philosophers, astronomers, poets, and physicians, and had made valuable contributions to Spanish culture and welfare - was annihilated and remained so for almost half a millennium.
Following the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion of 1492, Spain remained officially without Jews until 1869, when a new constitution, implicitly revoking the Edict, allowed private religious practice. Attempts to have this revocation made explicit failed.
The strength of Spanish Judeophobia may be the result of the long-lived obsession of this country to be "united", almost "pure."
Spaniards sometimes view in hindsight that the Spanish Inquisition was void of Judeophobia and was a political instrument for racial purity. Lozano writes: "[The Inquisition's] anti-Jewry has nothing to do with either anti-Semitism or racism...until Spain became Europized nobody thought a Jew was not Spanish or that he should be expelled if he didn't convert....This happened when the Inquisition was transformed from an intellectual or theological anti-Jewry into the big instrument of mere racial purity, to which Christendom was reduced and equivalent....The triumphal European theology of intellectual and religious homologation became Spanish theology. And there would be no other."[17]
During the war to drive Napoleonic French troops out of the country, Spanish resistance leaders attempted to establish a liberal government in Spain. From 1810 to 1813 they convened the Spanish Cortes (national assembly) in the town of Cadiz. "Purity of Blood" certificates were abolished by law on 17 August 1811, when freedom of press was also established, albeit only for political ideas.
In 1812 the assembly proclaimed a constitution that came to be the "sacred codex" of liberalism, and served during the nineteenth century as a model for the liberal constitutions of Latin American nations. The Cadiz constitution gave Spain a limited monarchy and a single-chamber parliament, curbed the power of the nobility and the Catholic Church, suppressed the Spanish Inquisition, and expanded protection of individual rights. However, with regard to freedom of public religion, the constitution is very explicit in its twelfth article: "The religion of the Spanish nation is and shall be perpetually Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman, the only true one. The nation protects it and it forbids the practice of any other one." Although there were no Jews in Spain, the Jewish question was raised during the fierce debate between liberals and monarchist-Catholics.
The Cadiz constitution, a victory of liberalism, was promptly repealed by Ferdinand VII when he returned to Spain as king, following Napoleon's defeat. Much of Spain's history thereafter was a struggle to put the Cadiz ideals into effect.
The Obsession with PurityOn 2 January 1492, the Catholic Kings entered Grenada with great pomp and ceremony. The fall of this last bastion of Muslim power in the peninsula strengthened the drive for complete religious homogeneity. But a big obstacle had to be surmounted: the presence of thousands of converts who secretly remained loyal to Judaism. Their presence was considered scandalous: it proved that the segregation of Jews and restrictions of their rights was not enough. From then on, purity of faith became a Spanish obsession: New Christians had to be cleansed of any Jewish influence.
It was also in Grenada that the expulsion edict was signed. The monumental exodus took place and Jews were replaced by New Christians who remained in Spain. They became the new victims of the purity obsession. The derogatorily called Marranos and their descendants were forbidden to occupy public office, to belong to corporations, colleges, orders, and even to reside in certain towns.
Public positions were restricted exclusively to Christians "of impeccable descent," namely those who were not suspected of Jewish ancestry. This change of the focus of the obsession meant a relocation of hatred. Since no more Jews existed, Judeophobia sought a different victim to satisfy its virulent blood-thirst. The New Christians fit the bill. As time went by, more stringent efforts were made to exhume every trace of impure ancestors that had previously been overlooked.
Until 1860 "purity of blood" was a prerequisite to being accepted into the Military Academy. The most prestigious of Spanish colleges, San Bartolome of Salamanca, boasted that they rejected any candidate against whom the slightest rumor existed of Jewish ancestry. Since no one could be sure of his "blood purity since time immemorial," the blemish was negotiable through bribed witnesses, shuffled genealogies, and falsified documents. Until this very day a special aura is often attributed to this supposed "unity of faith" of classic Spain.
It is noteworthy that the obsession with purity of blood may have a deep relationship with the frequency with which blood libels were fabricated in Spain, where the canard, as aforementioned, was included in law. As opposed to other Western countries, there are still Spanish priests who openly revere in their churches the false memory of a martyr boy ritually murdered by blood-drinking Jews. In the St. Nicholas Church in Sevilla there is an altar devoted to Dominguito del Val, "murdered by Jews in 1250." Bishop Carlos Amigo Vallejo, who spreads this libel, is one of the patrons of a public foundation that supposedly promotes "friendship between the three Mediterranean cultures" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.)
The fearful, mistrusting, and hate-filled atmosphere created by the libels generated collective hysteria. Not surprisingly, the 1492 expulsion took place the year after the blood libel of La Guardia, which immediately gave birth to the cult venerating the memory of the "holy martyr boy."
Generation after generation, details were added to the story, which assumed epic proportions. Each century produced a literary masterpiece that reiterated the topic. In 1583 Fray Rodrigo de Yepes wrote the Story of the Death and Glorious Martyrdom of the Innocent Saint called de La Guardia (after almost a century of Jew-free Spain) and the plot of this work was the basis for Lope de Vega's The Innocent Child of La Guardia. During the eighteenth century, Jose de Canizares adapted it in The Very Image of Christ, as did Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (1830-1870) in his story The Rose of Passion. In 1943 Manuel Romero de Castilla again published the libel under the title A Unique Event during the Kingdom of the Catholic Monarchs.
Of the two blood libels which are still celebrated worldwide, one is in Spain,[18] commemorating the time in 1415 when the synagogue of Segovia was confiscated and its leaders executed after an earthquake was interpreted as a divine punishment for Jewish blood rituals.
Infant John of Aragon took part in some of the accusations. In 1367 in Barcelona, several Jewish sages (Hasdai Crescas, Nissim Gerondi, and Isaac Ben Sheshet) were among those arrested when the whole community (including children) was locked up in the synagogue for three days without food. Since they steadfastly refused to confess to a blood crime, the king ordered that they should be freed and three Jews were executed. Ten years later there were similar cases in Teruel and Huesca.
Thus the end of the glorious Jewish community of Spain was not only tragic in the suffering involved and exceptional in its enormous dimensions, it also left behind a collective memory of the demonic image of the Jews, and a fear of blood impurity. Says Rafael Cansinos Assens, one of the most important modern Spanish authors: "With the edict of expulsion of 1490, the Jews disappeared from Spain and from its literature...the Jew is erased from the consciousness of the Spaniard."[19]
The Ambivalent Rediscovery of JewsToday Spain's population is forty million; the Jews are at most 0.05 percent of it (about 20,000 Jews) and this figure is the result of dramatic growth during the last decade.
Most Spaniards are still unaware of the presence of Jews in their country, and for them the word Jew often evokes stereotypes of the past. A Spanish teacher has compiled almost thirty popular sayings in the Spanish language in which the word Jew is used nowadays in a derogatory way.[20] The Jews were rediscovered in Spain after an absence of four centuries during which their image was the object of demonization.
One of the aforementioned debates of the Cadiz Cortes took place in January 1813 between Deputies Hermida and Ruiz Padron.[21] The former declared:
Not only civil laws are needed; also the indispensable courts that protect purity of the faith...from the time of the Romans, the Hebrews were exiled from Spain; they schemed dangerous revolutions and they were punished by the Gothic kings and it is apparent that they were the cause of the perdition of Spain....Their wealth pleased the kings and doors were opened to them....However, the people always looked at them with horror....[In 1396] they were differentiated to avoid their link with Christian families; the law wanted them to convert in order to allow their employment and treat them as Spaniards, but their conversion was never trusted...despite Vicente Ferrer's preaching, the heresy of the Jews was so rooted that in times of the Catholic Monarchs, lawyers almost preached the law of Moses....The continuous complaints that the Catholic Monarchs heard despite the Code of Seven Parties, they were forced to find a remedy in the establishment of the Inquisition...the hate of Christ's enemies was terrible...it was necessary to purge the Spanish domains of this race of enemies, throwing them out of Spain. Their crimes are shocking....It is not possible to completely eradicate the remnants of an old people as the Jews that still conserves the Spanish language and easily mixes with the Spaniards...
The latter retorted:
I cannot understand, Sir, the reason for which the Hebrews inspire us from childhood with a mortal aversion. The children of Israel...are the authentic and eternal testimony of the Holy Scriptures. They justly boast of tracing their origin to the blood of Abraham, and according to the Gospels even Jesus Christ introduces himself as son of Abraham in flesh. It would be more worthwhile to instruct our youth in these eternal truths, than in the stinking canticle: If you give a Jew, I'll return him burnt. If a hidden Hebrew was discovered among us and committed a crime, he should be punished according to the laws of the state, rather than hung from pulleys, held on stocks, or be thrown into the stake only because he is a Hebrew.
In 1837, though no Jews had resided in Spain for centuries, Minister Juan Alvarez de Mendizabal was accused of being of Jewish ancestry when he expropriated the Church's patrimony. Some twenty years later, when it was rumored that Jews were returning to Spain, an influential professor from Sevilla published an article in a well-known Catholic magazine, which is remarkable in its bluntness:
Some days ago several periodicals announced that the Jews from Prussia were going to request the Constituent Assembly that the national laws about their expulsion should be derogated. We are not surprised that in this era when Spain seems to be a putrid corpse, those stinking worms come out to the public light, that no matter how much it toils it won't be able to erase from its forehead the loathsome curse that reduced it to live wandering, without temple, without ministers, without motherland neither home, always persecuted and always hated wherever it puts its filthy foot. The Jews are deceiving themselves very much if they believe that the Spaniards have forgotten their old betrayals and treacheries, their insurrections and their deceits, their swindles and their racketeering, their iniquities and their wild ferocity...if they believe they can be compatible with the Spanish Catholic people, their race that stole children, and after terribly tormenting them, it mutilated them and it crucified, if they didn't put an end to their existence with tortures that horrify, in the history of those innocent martyrs that we worship in our altars. The Jewish race that despises and reviles Jesus Christ, that insults his most Saintly Mother with sacrilegious words, the Mother of the Spaniards. They can't ever have legal existence in this eminent people, exclusively Catholic. The coming of the Jews to Spain, would be the beginning of new evils...they always promoted tumult and insurrection...they are Our Lord Jesus Christ's crucifiers, scornful to his most Sacred Mother...usurious, swindlers, and pirates of peoples.[22]
The notable protagonist of the positive rediscovery of Spanish Jews was Senator Angel Pulido whose work (Spaniards without Motherland, 1905, among others) deals empathetically with the Sephardim, who had been much denied by Spaniards. Modern Spanish nationalism reacted with ambivalence to this new awareness of the existence of Jews.
Spanish nationalism strove on the one hand to preserve Catholic Spanishness from foreign habits; on the other hand it claimed that (Sephardic) Jews were part of their nation. The Sephardim were seen as "those who keep the language of the motherland" (Ladino is essentially the Spanish of the sixteenth century preserved by the descendents of the expulsion of 1492).
Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, who supported an eventual return of Sephardim to Spain, was one of the main ideologists of Spanish fascism. He edited and published a series of articles in 1939 by Pio Baroja (a leading Spanish novelist of the twentieth century) under the title Communists, Jews, and other Ilk, where communism is presented as "the Jewish crusade against Europe," and where although Sephardim are seen as gifted in arts and open-spirited, "Ashkenazim are the avant-gardes of communism."
This ambiguity, either sincere or affected, continued during almost four decades of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975). Catholicism had become the official religion, and Spain was again culturally monolithic. On the one hand, it was difficult to preserve in modern times the same myths about the Jews that characterized the medieval mentality; on the other hand, Judeophobia was still there and had to be justified. Although "in its attitude toward the Jews and the Jewish question, the Franco regime displayed a kind of 'split personality,' there can be no doubt about the anti-Jewish philosophy of Franco, the Falange, and the Church."[23] All in all, the pretension of some type of understanding of Jews was always shallow. To Franco, Jewry was one of the "villains" of our time, and since Franco, "the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" has been an oft-quoted scapegoat. In his conversation with Nazi Ambassador Dieckhof, Franco declared on 3 December 1943, "Thanks to God and the clear appreciation of the danger by our Catholic kings, we have for centuries been relieved of that nauseating burden."[24]
Nevertheless, the abstracts of the First Conference of Sephardic Studies in Spain were published during the 1960s with the prologue of the most visible leader of the extreme right, Blas Pinar.
During World War II the Spanish government issued passports to more than ten thousand Sephardic Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. A further forty thousand were permitted to pass through Spain to other destinations. For this reason alone, many well- meaning Spaniards, clearly not Judeophobic, reject the notion that Spain has any kind of moral debt towards the Jews, and contend that Jews are too often ungrateful to the Spanish, "who saved so many Jewish lives." The renowned case is that of Spain's diplomatic representative in Budapest during World War II, Angel Sanz Briz, who during 1944 saved almost one thousand Jews who claimed Spanish origin. He based his humanitarian action on a 1924 Spanish law which promised Jews of Spanish descent a restoration of citizenship. Sanz Briz issued protective passports to save them from deportation.
Nazi collaborators were provided shelter in Spain after the war, in which Spain had been for some time a passive ally of Germany. It is notable that the international voluntary brigades that fought with the Republican forces against Franco's nationalists during the civil war included high percentages of Jews. (In some battalions the Jews constituted up to 40 percent, and there was a Palestinian Battalion consisting entirely of Jews.)
To a certain extent Spanish ambivalence towards the Jews continues today. Spain rebuilds and develops its ancient ghettos throughout the country, claiming back the glory of the medieval Jewish community. Yet most of its population persists in perceiving Jews in a negative light.
From Ambivalence to NaivetySeveral unique characteristics of Spanish Judeophobia have been mentioned, but the most remarkable trait should be considered further: most Spaniards remain completely unaware of the Judeophobic nature of their country and are shocked at the suggestion that Spain is particularly hateful towards the Jews. On 26 June 2003 the remarks by diplomat Javier Solana, head of foreign affairs of the European community, were typically Spanish. He angered the International Relations Committee of the U.S. Congress by declaring that "there is no anti-Semitism in Europe." This phenomenon of unawareness can be explained in several ways.
Firstly, Spaniards tend to relate Judeophobia almost exclusively to Nazism; therefore they are reluctant to perceive Judeophobic expressions unless they are extreme and violent.
Secondly, it is not infrequent that a Spanish public figure makes a Judeophobic slip. Generally it is unacceptable in European countries for someone to publicly define himself as Judeophobic without apprehension about repercussions. A letter was circulated in the Spanish-speaking Internet a few months ago which exemplified the boldness with which a Spaniard can express himself, something that is far more seldom seen within educated circles in other countries.
The director of Artmalaga art gallery in Andalusia (southern Spain) sent the following signed answer in response to the question of a Jewish artist (1 February 2003): "We totally reject working with any person related to Israel, because we completely disagree with its segregationist policy. We have a certainly anti-Semitic stand against any person linked to that country, which murders daily people regardless of their age, for the sole reason of being Palestinians."[25]
Thirdly, Spaniards usually fail to distinguish between Israel and "the Jews," and therefore they tend to claim (sometimes openly in the media) that Judeophobia is caused by Israeli policy. The problem was recently presented in this light in an article by a Jewish journalist in the most widely read newspaper of the country.[26] It is telling that Spain was the last Western European country to establish relations with Israel, in 1986.
In spite of usually seeing Israel and "the Jews" as one unity, many Spaniards would be eager to make a clear distinction between the two groups when it comes to Judeophobia. In this area, they would argue that even the most vicious anti-Zionism does not necessarily imply attacking the Jews. For example, a very thorough book on Spanish Judeophobia by Alvarez Chillida,[27] fails to grasp the extent of anti-Jewish prejudices in Spanish Israel-bashing. In Chapter 14, under the subtitle "Left-wing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism," Chillida explains: "After the Six Day War a new anti-Zionism of the left emerged...the revolutionary Palestinian fight against Israel was part of the fight for the liberation of peoples oppressed by American imperialism....In my opinion, this left-wing anti-Zionism ought not to be confused with anti-Semitism. Because it is not the same to consider unjust the existence of the State of Israel and to consider that Jews are generally perfidious."[28]
Apart from public statements, the easiest way to reveal Spanish Judeophobia is by reading the press. The most important Spanish newspapers and TV channels unanimously bash Israel, demonizing the Jewish State in the same way the Spaniards demonized the Jewish people over centuries.
On 20 April 2003, a top journalist of one of the leading newspapers published an article with the title "The Name of the Problem is Israel,"[29] where the Jewish state is blamed for the Iraqi war and the author suggests that the whole intifada is the result of a conspiracy between George Bush, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, who deliberately incited the Palestinian war by collaborating to send Sharon to visit the Temple Mount.
The Spanish media has few exceptions to its anti-Israel line. Among the politically left wing, Israel-bashing comes under the rationalization that they are pro-Palestinian (namely pro-Arafat) and feel solidarity with the underdog. The fact that they do not support the Chechnians against Russia does not call for a redefinition of their standpoint. Nor does the fact that their solidarity does not leave room for other stateless peoples (Kachmirians, Kurds, Tamils, and so on), Nor does the fact that there is no solidarity with the Palestinians when Israel cannot be blamed for their misfortune, such as when they were murdered by Jordan in 1970 or evicted by Kuwait in 1991.
Among the right wing, Judeophobia has Catholic underpinnings as its source. For example, the widely read Catholic newspaper ABC adds the word "revenge" to its description of any defensive action that Israel takes. This strengthens the prejudice of many of its readers about the vindictiveness of the Jews, who according to them follow a religion of revenge.
Neither group has clearly articulated a theory about the Jews, but rather they have adopted the European line, on the left and on the right, which identifies Israel as the source of evil. Israel is ubiquitously presented as a racist theocracy financed by the U.S. In this sense, Spain is no different than the rest of Europe, although it sometimes stands out, such as when Spanish President Felipe Gonzalez visited Yad Vashem and refused to wear a kippa on the premises, instead opting to wear a baseball cap.
The most widely read newspaper, the left-wing
El Pais, is probably the most extreme in its constant demonization of Zionism and Israel. Its international affairs editor, Jose Maria Bastenier, frequently publishes vituperations against the Jewish state, and the newspaper's language leaves no room for doubt about its views. Before the elections in Israel, a professor of one of the most prestigious Spanish universities, Gema Martin Munoz, wrote there that Sharon was planning the "final solution of the Palestinian question."[30]
Gesher, a group of young Jewish intellectuals, released a study on cartoons in the main newspapers this year.[31] It concludes that current Spanish Judeophobia has "its clearest expression in the anti-Zionistic rhetoric"[32] and that "the precedents of current Judeophobic vignettes can be found in the way the Jew was presented in the religious paintings or popular drawings of the Inquisition period, and even with the drawings of children's books during Franco's era. In this way the cartoonist connects negative visual imaginary of the Jew with the Israeli, who represents the Jews nowadays." The study is careful to reproduce cartoons "Only when traditional preconceptions, stereotypes, and stigma about the Jews are used to build up a critical argument against either Israel or its government." Only in those cases, claim the authors, "we will be witness to unequivocal expressions of contemporary Judeophobia." Five major newspapers were investigated[33] over a period of three years (2000-2002) and more than thirty cartoons are included. The cartoonists Reboredo, Cain, and Ferreres, and journalists Maruja Torres and Antonio Gala are particularly venomous.
One of the most vociferous current Spanish Judeophobes is lawyer-turned-journalist Javier Nart, who frequently speaks on radio and TV, and finds Israel to be the main problem of the modern world. In a world arena of ayatollahs, Osamas, and Saddams, the only head of government whom Nart publicly calls "an animal, a criminal," is the head of the Jewish government.[34]
Pilar Rahola, a left-wing journalist who courageously denounces left-wing Judeophobia, explains
El Pais, Nart, and company, by stating that the Spanish left is deeply Judeophobic. Says Rahola:
Israel is not just a country that is trying, for better or worse, to survive for fifty years, but it is reduced to one sole image: a country that occupies the territories and whose vocation is to make life miserable for the poor Palestinians. The history of the Holy Land is being reinvented. Everything takes place as if there were instructions: Never recall the faults and errors of the Palestinians, never recall their alliances with dangerous countries such as Iraq, in order to heap more shame on the United States and Israel. The profound reasons for this war are never made clear, never discussed.[35]
The obsession of the Spanish press with Israel also stands out. For instance, while the German or British press spoke from the outset about "the massacre of Jenin" as a possibility, the Spanish press took it as a certainty from the outset. The criminality of Israel requires no proof. Newspapers spoke about the "ethnical cleansing" at Jenin, and even about the "Jenin Holocaust." One of the worst exponents of the lie was Telecinco (TV channel five) where the exhibition of a rotten corpse served as an alleged proof of the "massacre."
A similarly histrionic TV program was screened on 4 July 2003 (TVE 1). It was a program about the suffering of the Gaza population, in which actor Jorge Sanz empathetically cried in front of the cameras, presenting all anti-Israeli terrorists as noble, heroic freedom fighters, and demanding that Israel stops its criminal actions. The token Jewish side of the picture was a scene of Jews at the Western Wall, for which the only explanation given was that there "guys and gals are separated."
Needless to say, when the so-called massacre of Jenin proved to be a propaganda hoax, no newspaper recanted or apologized. Israel is guilty, even when found innocent. Also the story of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah continues to be "true" only in Spain.[36] The Spanish reader is constantly "informed" about a "spiral of violence" in the Middle East that was originally initiated by the Jews.
Spain also surpasses its left-wing counterparts in other European countries. The leader of Izquierda Unida, Gaspar Llamazares, an obsessive Israel-basher, declared his party was fed up with the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, and announced that his party would not take part in any homage paid to their memory. An editorial in Libertad Digital, a periodical exceptional in its support for Israel, responded with these words: "A [European] politician who dared express that he is fed up by too much talk about that trifle that is six million Jews murdered by Nazis would be a national shame and an unrecoverable political corpse. Unfortunately, in this country, Judeophobia continues to be free; it can even be profitable electorate-wise. Llamazares' attitude borders on criminality....He might think that he insults the Jewish people when he spits on the Holocaust. He is wrong. He spits on the human race."[37]
The Reports on TerrorismThe typical press attitude is exemplified by their reports on terrorist attacks in Israel. The news mentions "activists" or "militants" (the word "terrorists" is almost exclusively reserved for the Basque movement ETA, or occasionally for the actions of the Israeli army), and editorial pages condemn Israel even when it has been attacked. As Pilar Rahola stated: "The Jewish victims in Israel also end up...as their own killers. There are no Jewish victims, just as there are no Palestinian executioners. The main distortion of the truth is that Arab terrorism becomes comprehensible and even acceptable."[38]
One particularly eloquent example is the contrast between press reports about the two terrorist attacks in October and November 2002 respectively. The former, in Bali, Indonesia, aroused unanimous outrage; the latter, in Mombasa, Kenya, where the victims happened to be Jewish, was nominally condemned.
A more recent example was the terrorist attack in which fifteen were killed and dozens of civilians were wounded in Haifa on 5 March 2003. The newspaper editorials condemned Israel and not the attack. The news in El Pais on 6 March announced that "Eleven Palestinians die due to an Israeli operation" and only a small subtitle referred to the bus attack. The newspaper's editorial piece is entitled "An Eye for an Eye" and claims that the suicide attack reproduced a previous Israeli attack in which nine Palestinians had been killed. The editorial in Catholic ABC, while attacking neither the victims nor their government, boasts moral equidistance by stressing that killing "from both sides" has not abated.
Moreover, a typical procedure in the Spanish press is to quote token Jews, Jews who either criticize Israel or who unreservedly hate Israel. In March 2003, a review of a book by the extremely anti-Zionist Israel Shahak[39] explains that to understand the alleged criminal nature of Zionism we should relate it to its source, the evil of the Jewish religion.
One of the interviews with Yasser Arafat in the Spanish press appeared in the widely read daily La Vanguardia on 13 October 2002. The Israeli interviewer fails to question any of Arafat's statements. He empathetically opens the interview with "How do you feel, Mr. President?" and uncritically allows Arafat to claim "the murderers of Yitzhak Rabin are currently in power in Israel."
This principle of token Jews against Israel was applied in 2002 when granting the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize of Concord (parallel to the Nobel Peace Prize). A Palestinian and a Jew were chosen. The first, Edward Said, opposed even the Camp David Agreement. The Jew, pianist Daniel Barenboim, is a frequent Israel-basher and Wagner cultist. The message to the Spanish public was once again of postured impartiality, and the average Spaniard thus remained unaware of any hostility towards the Jews.
Barenboim asked that the Palestinian flag be exhibited (no one either noticed the asymmetry or imagined the possibility of Said requesting the Israeli flag). Moreover, he declared that it would please him to perform in a concert in Syria and to invite President Bashir Assad, but that when performing in Israel he would never invite the Israeli prime minister.
Another aspect that is singular to Spanish Judeophobia is the acceptance of the usage of the expression "the Jewish lobby" as legitimate and truthful. The modern Judeophobic myth of Jewish world domination should be meaningless in a country devoid of Jews for almost half a millennium. The fact that it is not proves again that Judeophobic myths, in contrast to racist or xenophobic myths, are not distortions of reality, but wild fantasy.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has appeared in Spain in three versions. The first one was published in 1927 by a little known Judeophobe, Pablo Montesinos y Espartero.
The second edition was published in 1933 with the support of the German Embassy, in the newspaper of the founder of a group that subsequently became the Falange, Ramiro Ledesma.
A new edition of the Protocols appeared in 1977. Spain was in the process of becoming a democracy, and the extreme right party (Fuerza Nueva) claimed that democratization was part of a Jewish conspiracy. Even the murder of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (Franco's appointed successor) in an ETA attack on 12 December 1973, was attributed to Jewish machinations.
After September 11th, the myth that "the Jews are always behind it" became popular in the Internet and the media. In Spain, "the Jewish lobby" is freely cited in intellectual circles. Actress Marisa Paredes, president of the Spanish Academy for Arts and Cinematography, declared on April 2002 to the Europa Press agency that Roman Polanski got an Oscar for his film The Pianist because "of the Jewish lobby's intrigues." In December 2002, journalists Alex Navajas and Alex Rosal claimed in the newspaper La Razon that the "attack on the church" (due to pedophile cases involving several priests) was the result of a conspiracy by "the Israeli lobby."
On 3 November 2002, a major newspaper, El Mundo, published a review of the book The Jewish Lobby by Alfonso Torres. The article delineates the "revelations of the book" and at the end mentions known Jews under the heading "Basics of Jewish Spain" (the parallel with Edouard Drumont's La France Juive is apparent). According to the article, "They are in banking, justice, hotel industry, construction, and textile industry. They move in the most powerful circles and keep contact with the economic and political elite. They can even get out of jail thanks to the support of the Hebrew lobby."
An interesting point here is the outraged answer given by the editor[40] of the supplement in which the article appeared to a reader who complained about the Judeophobic bias of the piece. The editor's answer is a typical example of the aforementioned naivety:
[The complaint is] demagogic... [because] the author never says that Jews should be exterminated....To criticize a Jew does not mean to want to kill him....I don't know what is it to be an anti-Semite and even less I know what is included under this ever growing and mendacious definition of anti-Semitism....If tomorrow someone proved that half of Spanish businessmen are from the town of Cadiz, I would request an article about it and no person from Cadiz would accuse me of wanting to destroy them.
This same newspaper, with over one million readers, published on 15 June 2003, a sympathetic interview with the unrepentant terrorist Ahmed Jubara in Ramallah, under the title "The Mandela of the Palestinians."[41]
On 29 June 2003, a three-page interview with him presented him as a legendary hero. He had placed a fridge-bomb in a crowded area in order to kill as many Jews as possible. The twenty Jews murdered are not considered victims in the interview, because, as Jubara asserts (unchallenged) "what we do is not terrorism."
One more example of how Judeophobia causes no embarrassment to public figures is Raul Gonzalez Blanco, widely considered the best Spanish football player, who posed for photographs while he held the banner of the Ultra Sur neo-Nazi group (which sponsors the Real Madrid team in which Blanco plays.) In none of these cases (El Mundo, Paredes, and Blanco) were apologies or explanations offered, precisely because Judeophobic prejudices in Spain usually go unnoticed or are condoned.
Author Rafael Cansinos Assens (1882-1964) is known to have discovered the supposed Jewish origins of his family, apparently motivated by the aforementioned work of Senator Angel Pulido.[42] Cansinos wrote several novels and essays in which he deals with historical and literary aspects of the Jewish experience. Even for him, well predisposed towards the Jewish people as he was, it was hard to unequivocally condemn Judeophobia.
In his book The Jews in Spanish Literature, which was published for the first time in Argentina in 1937 and has a new Spanish 2001 edition, Cansinos studies Jewish characters in the works of nine Spanish authors[43] of the last two and a half centuries, and overlooks Judeophobia in most of them. The naivety of this oversight is apparent in the following statements by Cansinos: "Jewish haughtiness was chastised in this play...the Jew aspires to dominate and impose himself...he has an imperialist sense of life....There is no line with hate in the play...the absence of Judeophobia is obvious."[44] In a play that revives the myth of Jews using human blood for their rituals and the crime of deicide, where everything Jewish is repellent, where as even Cansinos admits the protagonist "was rancorous and vindictive as is everyone of his [Jewish] race," he nevertheless concludes that the author "is not an anti-Semite."[45]Except for one case, Cassens's ingenuousness whitewashes every Judeophobe mentioned.
On the Other HandThere are exceptions to the Spanish rule. On the conservative side of the political spectrum, Camilo Jose Cela, who was often critical of Spanish Judeophobia, was one of the promoters of the establishment of relations between Spain and Israel, and presided for years over the institute for friendship between the two countries. (These facts too often go unmentioned in his biographies, including the press reports of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989.)
Two very well-known Spanish intellectuals wrote very sympathetic books about Israel when they visited the country in 1957 (Josep Pla) and 1968 (Julian Marias) respectively. Pla is considered the top Catalonian novelist, and the second edition of his book was published in 2002. Marias is one of the top Spanish contemporary philosophers.
The virtual publication Libertad Digital is open in its defence of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
On the political left, the previously quoted Pilar Rahola is a journalist and former congresswoman of Izquierda Republicana who has become very popular in Jewish circles throughout the world, thanks to her brave and staunch denunciation of the vitriolic Judeophobia within Spanish left-wing circles.
In 2002 the renowned writer Horacio Vazquez-Rial worked on the publication of a book with essays by twenty Spanish intellectuals, In Defense of Israel (the title of the anthology). However, he could find no publishing house willing to accept the challenge, in spite of the inclusion of such prestigious authorships among the essays as Gabriel Albiac, Joan B. Culla, Jesus del Campo, Jose Jimenez Lozano, Reyes Mate, Marta Pessarrodona, Valenti Puig, Fernando Rodriguez Lafuente, Juana Salabert, Carlos Semprun Maura, and Vicenç Villatoro. All are famous Spanish personalities who are true friends of the Jewish people.
Many Spaniards are becoming increasingly interested in their Jewish history. Small towns in which there had been a Jewish presence during medieval times are becoming proud of their past and trying to recreate it in order to attract tourists (Spain is a world leader regarding tourism). An increasing number of Spaniards - though still a very small group - even consider themselves Jewish or partly Jewish by virtue of their supposed Jewish ancestry.[46]
There has been progress in recent years in legal matters. The new Spanish penal code (in which racism, Judeophobia, and the denial or justification of genocide are criminal offenses for the first time) became effective on 25 May 1996. This came about after a federal court refused in February 1996 to extradite the ex-Nazi army officer Otto-Ernst Remer, the resident of a Spanish summer resort since 1994 (Remer died in 1997).
In June 2003, the Spanish police (Guardia Civil) arrested four neo-Nazis. There are several active neo-Nazi groups in Spain, a country which is home to about 100 far-right groups and parties spanning the spectrum from "traditional" Falangists to neo-Nazi skinheads. Every November 20th they commemorate the deaths of dictator Franco (1975) and of the "Falange" founder Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera (1936, by firing squad).
The Spanish far right is currently fragmented and isolated, and has not recovered from the electoral disaster it suffered in 1982 after its failed attempt at a coup d'etat on 23 February 1981. It has been without parliamentary representation ever since.
One of the oldest and most active neo-Nazi groups in Europe is faltering. The neo-Nazi Pedro Varela-led CEDADE was founded in 1965 and based in Barcelona until January 1993. It received a blow when Varela was arrested and convicted, and his bookshop Europa was raided by the Catalonian police. Until then Varela had control of CEDADE's extensive international publishing network, the most important distributor of neo-Nazi propaganda in Europe. He was ultimately released.
An AssessmentThe depth of the roots of Judeophobia in Spain makes it particularly dangerous, especially considering that unemployment in Spain is approximately double the European average. However, its naivety could be used to advantage, making it a phenomenon that could be counteracted and to some extent neutralized.
In March 2002 the author of this article was invited to lecture at the Rovira i Virgili Catalonian university at Tarragona, where an advanced student candidly asked: "It was explained to me a hundred times but I am still unable to understand it: why does Israel have a right to exist?"
Many Spaniards pose this question implicitly or explicitly. Had the audience at Tarragona not been hostile, I could have provided my questioner with her 101st explanation, albeit doubting whether a hundred more would have made her understand - Judeophobia restricts understanding.
I chose not to justify my existence but rather to bounce her question: "Since there are a hundred and ninety-two countries in the world, I wish to congratulate the one hundred and ninety-one that have passed your demanding right-to-exist exam. Don't you find it strange that there is one lone country, much smaller than Catalonia and attacked by the most atrocious regimes, which you have failed to grant a right to exist?"
In my experience, this method is shocking to Spaniards because of their obliviousness of their anti-Jewish prejudices, even against the Jew of the countries (Israel). Questioning the questioner can bring to consciousness a flaw that could not be easily overcome had it been conscious from the outset. When Judeophobia is exposed to the well-meaning, the expose frequently breaks the prejudice.
From this perspective, the Jewish community's stance is vital. The organized Jewish community in Spain has tried to keep a very low profile and not openly counterattack Judeophobia. Its youth often felt it was too difficult to confront the extremely hostile atmosphere on university campuses, due to a lack of backing from the Jewish community at large. During the worst period of the intifada, when Israel was demonized everywhere, the Jewish Community of Madrid changed its official name from Comunidad Israelita to Comunidad Judia in order to minimize the "Israel connection" of being Jewish.
Things are changing today. A younger generation of Jews are expressing their Jewishness, partially due to the influence of the immigration of very active Jews from some Latin American countries (notably Venezuela), where being Jewish is a matter of pride.
The educational endeavors of the organized Jewish community may yet bear fruit: when a Spaniard is made aware of his attempt to discredit a single people or a single country, he may arrive at one of two conclusions: either Israel is indeed the most satanic work in human history, or the venom to which the Jewish state is subjected is directly related to the spitefulness that has persecuted the Jewish people over many centuries. In both cases the presence of Judeophobia will be made apparent.
Notes[1] The first chapter of the author's book Judeophobia (Barcelona: Flor del Viento, 2001) deals with the impropriety of the word anti-Semitism. Among the historians quoted in the book who use the term Judeophobia are Walter Laqueur, Edward Flannery, J. Halevy, Jacob R. Marcus, Leon Pinsker, Peter Schafer, Henry Weinberg, Robert Wistrich, and Zvi Yavetz.
[2] In an interview in the newspaper La Nueva Espana (Asturias, 13 July 2003) journalist Javier Neira claims that "the word Judeophobia is the one most used nowadays to define the persecution against the Jewish people."
[3] Koppel Pinson, ed., Essays on Antisemitism (New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, 1946).
[4] Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, Anti-Semitism 1700-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
[5] Meyer Weinberg, Because They Were Jews, A History of Antisemitism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
[6] Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism, The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Mandarin, 1991).
[7] Albert S. Lindemann, Esau's Tears, Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[8] Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
[9] European Attitudes towards the Jews: A Study in Five Countries (Anti- Defamation League, September 2002). Five hundred people from each of the following countries were interviewed: Austria, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.
[10] The survey was made during June 2001 by Intergallup S. A. It interviewed more than two thousand adults. Nineteen percent were in favor of the Palestinians, 19 percent said they had no sympathy for either party, and only 4 percent favored Israel. The margin of error was 2.2 percent.
[11] Jose Luis Gonzalez Arpide in A Fuego Lento, Leon, 1 April 1999.
[12] Edward Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-three Centuries of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Spanish version: Paidos, ed., Veintitres siglos de antisemitismo (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1974), p. 150.
[13]. Francisco de Quevedo, Obras Inmortales (Madrid: E.D.A.F., 1969), pp. 1346, 1348, 1353, 1363.
[14] We don't mention William Shakespeare since it is highly controversial whether his drama The Merchant of Venice is Judeophobic.
[15] Julian Martel, La Bolsa, serialized in La Nacion, Buenos Aires, 1891. An essay by Perednik on this novel was published in Coloquio, (Buenos Aires: Latin American Jewish Congress, 1989).
[16] The complete title of this essay of 1633 is Execration for the Catholic Faith against the Stubborn Blasphemy of the Portuguese-speaking Jews who in Madrid hang up Sacrilegious and Heretical Posters, Recommending the Remedy to Stop What Happened, that Cannot Begin to be Punished with all the Torments of this World.
[17] Jose Jimenez Lozano, Anti-Jewry in Spain, in Reyes Mate, ed., Philosophy after the Holocaust (Barcelona: Riopiedras, 2001), pp. 223, 229.
[18] The other is Deggendorf, Bavaria of 1337. See Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 8:1043.
[19] Rafael Cansinos Assens, ed., Los judios en la literatura espanola (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2002), p. 31.
[20] Jose Manuel Laureiro, El refranero, ¿sabiduria popular? (unpublished, 2002). Laureiro based this article on Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España. La imagen del judio (1812-2002) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002).
[21] Actas de las Cortes de Cadiz, anthology, Enrique Tierno Galvan, Madrid, 1964, vol. 2, pp. 1026-1229.
[22] Leon Carbonero y Sol, Claims of the Jews for their Establishment in Spain, La Cruz, vol. 2, Sevilla, (1854):623-627. La Cruz, the Catholic magazine of Spain, was published until 1915.
[23]. Nehemiah Robinson, The Spain of Franco and its Policies Toward The Jews (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1953), pp. 8-9.
[24] Ibid.
[25] The answer was signed by Juan Carlos Rica, Artmalaga.
[26] Hermann Tersch, El Retorno de la judeofobia, El Pais, Madrid, 4 May 2003.
[27] Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España. La imagen del judio (1812-2002) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002).
[28] Ibid., pp. 465-466.
[29] Enrique Curiel, The Name of the Problem is Israel, La Razon, Madrid (20 April
2003).
[30] Gema Martin Munoz, El Pais (27 January 2003).
[31] Alejandro Baer and Federico Zukierman, Anti-Semitism in Graphic Humor - Caricatures and Vignettes of the Spanish Press about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Madrid: Guesher, 2003), pp. 2-3.
[32] Ibid., p. 4.
[33] El Pais, La Vanguardia, ABC, El Periodico, and La Razon.
[34] As stated by Nart in his recent appearance on 9 July 2003 in the town of Gijon, during a conference organized by Gustavo Bueno Foundation.
[35] Marc Tobiass, Judeophobia Explains the Pro-Palestinian Hysteria of the European Left, Proche-Orient (2 October 2002) - an interview with Pilar Rahola.
[36] Takeapen has a website about the Spanish press and its treatment of the Middle Eastern conflict.
[37] Libertad Digital (30 April 2003).
[38] Pilar Rahola's lecture at the American Jewish Committee's 97th Annual Meeting, 7 May 2003.
[39] Jose Maria Ridao, La Esparta Judia (1 March 2003).
[40] Agustin Pery Riera, chief editor of Cronica supplement (13 November 2002).
[41] On the other hand, this same newspaper published on 8 July 2003 the most important report that the Argentine Intelligence Service (SIDE) prepared under Miguel Angel Toma, on how the attack on the Argentine community was planned and perpetrated in 1994.
[42] The introduction to the last edition of Cassens' work, by Jacobo Israel Garzon (Valencia: Pre-Textos editions, 2001), p. 8.
[43] Garcia de la Huerta, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Benito Perez Galdos, Isaac Munoz, Adolfo Reyes, Vicente Blasco Ibanez, Antonio Cases, Juan Pujol, and Concha Espina.
[44] Rafael Cansinos Assens, The Jews in Spanish Literature (Valencia: Pre-Textos editions, 2001), pp. 45, 47-48.
[45] Ibid., p. 51.
[46] The book Jewish Blood appeared in Barcelona in 2000, and quickly sold its first edition. The author Pere Bonnin, of Chueta origin, tells about the misfortunes of the "New Christians" in modern Spain.
David Warren
