{"id":2758,"date":"2019-07-08T19:57:49","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T19:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=2758"},"modified":"2019-07-08T19:57:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T19:57:50","slug":"religion-power-and-national-identity-jews-and-muslims-in-contemporary-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/religion-power-and-national-identity-jews-and-muslims-in-contemporary-spain\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion, Power, and National Identity: Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The roots of today\u2019s racial and religious structures can be found in late medieval Spain and its colonies. It was in the Iberian Peninsula, during the fifteenth century, that terms like raza<\/g> (race) and linaje<\/g> (lineage) went from being used to describe horse or dog breeding to being applied to Jews and \u201cMoors.\u201d This switch coincided with the appearance of anti-converso ideologies, which would turn theological categories (like Jew and Muslim), into biological ones (limpieza<\/g> de sangre<\/g>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It is precisely this concept of “race,” one that\nassociates issues of blood purity with relatively recent conversion to\nChristianity, which was later applied to the classification of peoples in the\nSpanish colonies. This ordering was crucial for the correct organization of a\ncolonial enterprise whose stated mission was to impose Christianity upon a\npopulation of pagans and heretics. The consequences of these developments went\nfar beyond the already vast Spanish Empire. Indeed, it was through the\nrepudiation of its ethnic diversity and the subsequent establishment on the\nAmerican continent of systems of production based on the exploitation of\nethnically differentiated groups that Spain established, more than five hundred\nyears ago, the fundaments of globalized modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It is against this background that Jews and Muslims in\nContemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries analyzes the place granted\nto Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national\nidentity. In the book, the focus is put on the transition from an exclusive,\nhomogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and\ntolerant one, in a European context. Given Spain’s crucial role at the genesis\nof the global hierarchization of the world population along “racial”\nlines that took place about five hundred years ago, the efforts undertaken by\nthe end of the twentieth century to adopt the country’s structures to the\nincreasing valorisation of diversity, borders permeability, and coexistence of\nminority cultures within the nation-state can be considered as paradigmatic of\nthe reassessment of religious difference in late modernity. The book is the\nresult of an original combination of quantitative and qualitative\nmethodologies, approached from a rich trans-disciplinary analytical framework.\nIn addition, the choice in favor of a comparative study of Muslims and Jews,\nuncommon in the context of studies of contemporary Spain, proves to be\nparticularly fruitful and revealing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study approaches this process from different dimensions.\nAt the national level, it analyzes the reflection of this process in\nnationalist historiography, the education system and the public debates on\nnational identity. At the international level, it tackles the problem from the\nperspective of Spanish foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Muslim states\nin a changing global context. From the social-communicational point of view,\nthe emphasis was put on the construction of the self\u2013other (Jewish and Muslim)\ndichotomy as reflected in the three leading Spanish newspapers (El Pa\u00eds, El\nMundo and ABC). In addition, attention was paid to the changes undergone by the\nJewish and Muslim local communities during the same period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work shows that since 1986, Spain experienced\nsignificant transformations at the social, cultural, and international levels.\nThese changes affected the construction of Spanish contemporary identity\ndirectly, as the different national narratives were conveniently adapted to the\ncircumstances. The images of Muslims and Jews generated in this context were\noften ambivalent, in correspondence with the intrinsically problematic attempt\nat avoiding any explicitly ethnocentric rhetoric while implicitly preserving\nit. Since then, this central contradiction permeated Spanish nationalist historiography,\neducation system, and predominant national narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an active line of continuity between the\nperceptions of Muslims prevalent at the birth of the Spanish empire, which\naccording to Anibal Quijano laid the basis for the global structures of\ncoloniality still commonplace in today’s world, and those widespread in today’s\nSpain. During the period under study, Muslim otherness had two main dimensions:\nthe complementarity between their legal marginalization as immigrants and their\nincorporation into the economic system as underpaid laborers, on the one hand,\nand their construction as internal and external enemies, on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of Jews, the central role they have historically\nplayed in the construction of Spanish national identity and their small numeric\npresence in contemporary Spain make their difference more conceptual than\npractical. Unlike Muslims, Jews \u2013 even those coming from North Africa \u2013 are not\n“colored” in modern Spain. They are not assigned attributes of\n“racial” inferiority to justify economic exploitation and\/or\npolitical paternalism. Instead, Jewish otherness is related to deeply rooted\nnotions of extraordinary power and moral purity\/impurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martina L. Weisz is a Research Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA). She studied Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, holds an M.A. in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed her Ph.D. there as well. Her publications focus on human rights, foreign policy, racism and<\/g> religious difference. Her book <\/em>Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries was published by DeGruyter Oldenbourg in 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The roots of today\u2019s racial and religious structures can be found in late medieval Spain and its colonies. It was in the Iberian Peninsula, during the fifteenth century, that terms like raza (race) and linaje (lineage) went from being used to describe horse or dog breeding to being applied to Jews and \u201cMoors.\u201d This switch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96689,48684],"tags":[347,2933,19478,297],"class_list":["post-2758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-filmbook","category-featured-scholar","tag-identity","tag-jews","tag-muslims","tag-spain"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2760,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2758\/revisions\/2760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}