Thinking about ‘the Jew’ in Modern Spain: Historiography, Nationalism and Anti-semitism

Abstract

The history of the recuperation of Sephardim in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain is an important historical precedent for understanding Franco's ambivalent policy during the persecution of European Jews by Hitler. The re-encounter with this Spanish—Jewish past in the nineteenth century can shed light on the wider phenomenon of European anti-semitism as well as on the development of nationalism in modern Spanish history. This article suggests the presences, absences and continuities in the visualisation of Jews in Spanish liberal historiography and historiographic writings and the conservative reaction to this (re)thinking, the result of which was Franco's apparently paradoxical attitude towards the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany.