INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 2015, more than five centuries after unconverted Iberian Jews were expelled from the place known as “Sepharad,” the Spanish parliament approved “Law 12/2015 of June 24th Granting Spanish Nationality to Sephardi Jews Native to Spain.”Footnote 1 Declared an “historic reparation” by Spanish Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, passage of what was popularly dubbed the “law of return” was widely covered by international media, and even the stodgiest of hard news outlets found it difficult to refrain from echoing the rhetoric of the state as they described a long-awaited “return” of Sephardi descendants to Spain. The law portrayed Sephardi Jews as exiled Spaniards with deep attachments to the country, transmitted through language, culture, and blood, that were presumed to manifest as love, nostalgia, and a desire to “return to Sepharad.” Jews around the world enthusiastically celebrated the news at homes and synagogues, in newspapers and magazines, and on social media. Since plans for the law were announced in 2012, it had frequently been depicted as a progressive achievement by an increasingly democratic state that was atoning for the past by finally establishing a right of return, which the descendants of those it had injured were eager to claim. Perhaps what made these redemptive narratives compelling was that it seemed so surprising that Spain would be extending such an offer to the Jews. After all, Spain has long been figured as a primordial font of anti-Jewish hatreds, tightly linked in the minds of many with that bastion of purportedly anti-modern violence, the Inquisition. Yet for some the existence of this law seemed to suggest a different sort of Spain coming into focus, one that was ready to reconcile with the past by including the descendants of those who had been excluded—a Spain that had finally become modern.
Contrary to what the Spanish state and various media outlets suggested, there was little that was novel about the spirit or the letter of the “law of return.” It was only the most recent in a series of initiatives stretching back more than a century that had offered some form of Spanish citizenship or repatriation to Jews. Although the 2015 law was touted as a new avenue for nationalization, Sephardi Jews outside of Spain had been recognized as a special class of citizenship seekers since 1982. As such, they were only required to live in Spain for two years before they could apply for citizenship via the discretionary Carta de Naturaleza naturalization mechanism. The new law eliminated this residency requirement as well as a prohibition that had prevented naturalized Sephardi Jews from holding dual citizenship. Despite misleading statements from the state and press indicating otherwise, the 2015 law did not enshrine citizenship as a “right” for the descendants of expelled Sephardi Jews in any meaningful sense of the term, nor did it fully eliminate or replace the Carta de Naturaleza process.
What the new law did do was articulate the limited conditions under which Sephardi descendants could apply for Spanish citizenship. It did so by establishing common, albeit vague, eligibility criteria for demonstrating applicants’ Sephardic ancestry, even as it largely neglected to specify how evidence supplied by applicants would be evaluated and judged sufficient. The 2015 law required that applicants not only trace their ancestry to Sephardi Jews “originating” in Spain, but that they also demonstrate an abiding connection to contemporary Spain and pass language and civics exams. It thus seemed to broaden the pool of potential Sephardi applicants by standardizing the criteria for eligibility, even as it further circumscribed who could apply by adding new qualifications. These stipulations all but ensured that only those Sephardi descendants who had continued to identify and be recognized as Jews, had a pre-existing relationship with contemporary Spain, and had the time and resources necessary to gather and submit evidence would benefit from the law. Unlike the Sephardic citizenship law passed by Portugal in 2015, or Israel's “Law of “Return,” or similar laws in other countries, the Spanish legislation initially provided a mere three-year window for applications.Footnote 2 A provision permitting a one-year extension was authorized on 9 March 2018, giving applicants until 1 October 2019 to submit petitions. The government and FCJE had initially predicted that they would receive anywhere between ninety thousand and more than half a million applications in total. When the final application window closed, the Ministry of Justice reported that 132,226 Sephardi descendants had applied, which was fewer than many people had expected and a mere fraction of the estimated 3.5 million Sephardi descendants living around the world.Footnote 3
This article is not primarily concerned with whether the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law was a “success” or a “failure,” whether its architects were “sincere” or “cynical,” or how those in the Sephardi diaspora engaged with the law's political claims. Rather, it inquires into the conditions of possibility for such a law. How did offering Spanish citizenship to Sephardi descendants come to be seen as possible, just, or even necessary? Which histories did the law summon, call upon, or refashion? And to what ends? To answer these questions, I draw on legal documents, congressional debates, interviews I conducted, news media, letters and other archival materials, philosephardic texts, and recent historical scholarship on modern Jewish Spain. I argue that the 2015 law belongs to a political genealogy stretching back centuries, in which Spanish thinkers have imagined that the “return” of Sephardi Jews would improve the racial health of the nation and usher in a Spanish modernity deferred in part by their expulsion. “Rancor” and other sentiments have figured prominently in discussions of Sephardic repatriation. At several historical junctures, Spanish thinkers and politicians have used the language of sentiments to diagnose and prescribe the attachments of Sephardi Jews to Spain. Although such affective criteria of inclusion are not now and have never been the sole or most important factors in debates about Sephardic repatriation, their consistent (and often unexamined) presence warrants closer inspection. This article therefore attends to the politics of sentiments in their own right, as well as to how they form a nexus with broader questions about Sephardi history, the racialization of religion, and citizenship.
Proposals to repatriate Sephardi Jews date back to immediately after the Expulsion, though it was in the wake of the old Spanish Empire's collapse in 1898 that Jews’ feelings (or, rather, ascriptions of them) gained salience for political thinkers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, philosephardism and Regenerationism were powerful movements that saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them uniquely suited for resurrecting empire and modernizing Spain. Ángel Pulido—a distinguished physician, anthropologist, and senator—channeled these overlapping intellectual traditions into an international campaign advocating a rapprochement with and repatriation of the people he famously referred to as “Spaniards without a homeland.” This imperial project hinged on the sentimental attachments that Sephardi Jews were presumed to feel for the patria (fatherland).Footnote 4 In his speeches and writings, Pulido linked this racial logic to an affective one, asserting that since most Sephardi Jews felt “love” for Spain, rather than harboring “rancor” for the Expulsion, they could be trusted as loyal subjects, whether they returned to Spain or remained abroad as brokers of empire.
AN AFFECTIVE LEXICON: RANCOR, NOSTALGIA, LOVE
The text of Spain's 2015 citizenship law begins with a preamble defining Sephardi Jews as “those Jews who lived on the Iberian Peninsula as well as their descendants, who, faced with the decision between forced conversion or exile, chose the latter.”Footnote 5 This denomination, the preamble explains, derives from the term “Sepharad, as Spain is known in classic and contemporary Hebrew.” The text proceeds by affirming the “solid and millennial Jewish presence” in Iberia, “palpable even today in vestiges of language and stone.” “Nevertheless,” the preamble reads, “due to history, the Jews embarked on the paths of diaspora, joining and creating communities in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire.” While we might take issue with the finer points of this characterization—for example, identifying “history” rather than people as responsible for the Expulsion—it comports with standard narratives of Sephardi history. In the preamble's second paragraph, the tone and the kinds of claims made shift into a decidedly Herderian register: “The children of Sefarad maintained a treasure-trove of nostalgia impervious to the progression of languages and generations…. They maintained the traditions, respected the names that so often invoked the origins from which they were molded, and they accepted without rancor the silence of a Spain lulled into forgetting.”Footnote 6
Unlike nostalgia,Footnote 7 rancor is not a particularly common term, even in the lofty idiom of Spanish jurisprudence. Yet, “rancor” surfaces repeatedly in the archives and in contemporary discussions about whether Sephardi Jews wanted or deserved Spanish citizenship. But it seldom appears alone. It is often found in the company of “nostalgia” or “love,” and not infrequently adjacent to words like “fidelity” and “loyalty.” Sometimes it is the presence and cultivation of these sentiments that matter; other times, it is their absence, rejection, or transcendence. For example, on the day the 2015 law was passed, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE) released the following statement: “Contrary to what might be thought, the descendants of those expelled did not harbor sentiments of hate or rancor, but instead quite to the contrary, cultivated a deep love toward the land that saw them leave and an intense fidelity to the tradition and language transmitted to them by their elders.”Footnote 8 During a ceremony at the Royal Palace in Madrid several months later, King Felipe echoed the FCJE's claim about “fidelity” and expressed “gratitude” to the Sephardi Jews for “your loyalty and for keeping the precious treasure of your language.” He concluded by thanking them “for having ensured that love prevailed over rancor and for having taught your children to love this Spanish nation.”Footnote 9 A month before the law's approval, the Mexican ex-president of the Sephardi Federation of Latin America insisted, “We don't harbor rancor about the Expulsion, it's our home.”Footnote 10 And on the day that the law went into effect, the head rabbi of Argentina's Sephardi community was quoted declaring, “The expelled Jews never harbored rancor toward Spain, totally the contrary, they lived full of longing and nostalgia for the Peninsula of their past lives.”Footnote 11
Of course, these sorts of totalizing assertions about Sephardi sentiments need not be taken at face value and should not be misconstrued as evidence of what they merely purport. Drawing on my fieldwork with Sephardi descendants, I have elsewhere written about what they had to say about sentiments (both their own and those ascribed to them), and how they forged new collectives and political practices that exceeded the narrow conceptions of identity and belonging embedded in the 2015 citizenship law.Footnote 12 What is at issue here is not the “truth” of what diasporic Sephardi Jews felt or feel about Spain, but why asserting such “truths” has been so important for advocates of their repatriation. For this reason, I am more concerned with tracking the political work that sentiments do when ascribed to others than with declaring what they are or exploring how they are subjectively experienced.
In what follows, I use “affects” and “emotions” interchangeably, along with “sentiments,” which Ann Stoler argues work as “judgments, assessments, and interpretations of the social and political world.”Footnote 13 My approach builds on the work of scholars of empire and religion, who have long recognized polities’ investment in knowing and shaping particular affective dispositions among subjects they would rule.Footnote 14 My thinking is also indebted to accounts that identify the Spanish Inquisition as foundational for modernity itself, given its creation of bureaucratic practices that aimed to “read” the interior “truths” of subjects whose “religious” difference was increasingly understood and policed according to racial categories.Footnote 15 Discovering the “truth” of what subjects felt or believed—and thus discerning whether or not they could be trusted to have the right sorts of attachments—was central to the bureaucratic logic employed by the Inquisition, both before and after the Expulsion.Footnote 16 I am not suggesting that the modern Spanish state's fixation on Sephardi sentiments is a direct continuation of this will to knowledge, but it does demonstrate a similar belief in the capacity of exterior signs to convey the “truth” about what Sephardi Jews feel.
While rancor and nostalgia have been invoked with greater frequency in recent years, such terms have long formed an affective lexicon concerned with defining and prescribing the attachments of Sephardi Jews to the Spanish nation-state.Footnote 17 Spain's preoccupation with feelings—Sephardic and otherwise—is hardly unique: “the quest for affective knowledge,” along with attempts to harness that knowledge, has been central to empire and modern statecraft.Footnote 18 For many of the Regenerationists and philosephardic thinkers who desired an imperial resurrection in the Mediterranean, “knowing” the emotional dispositions of Sephardi Jews was tightly linked with “knowing” that they were living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness, which Spain's history of “racial fusion” had helped preserve within them. Because Sephardi Jews were understood as a subsidiary of the Spanish race/nation, their emotional and political loyalties were imagined to “naturally” be properly oriented toward Spain.
What might presumptions about the presence or absence of rancor (rencor) among Sephardi Jews tell us about how their relationship to Spain has been imagined? The Royal Spanish Academy defines it briefly as a “deeply rooted and durable resentment,” while Larousse's unabridged Spanish dictionary is more expansive: “a feeling of hatred or antipathy toward the person from whom some injury has been received.” The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that rancor is a “deep-rooted and bitter ill feeling; resentment or animosity, esp. of long standing.”Footnote 19 Yet these definitions overlook the particular valence that rancor assumes when ascribed to someone else. As one colleague put it to me, rancor “politely disqualifies anger or resentment.”Footnote 20 It is an attribution of resentment or anger that has, already embedded within it, an invalidating gesture; from the perspective of the accuser, those who partake in these sentiments are mistaken—they feel unjustly. Coming from the Latin root, rancere, rancor carries within it the notion of rancidness, that the misplaced anger felt by the person accused of being rancorous actually injures them, slowly rotting away at their insides. We can think of rancor as roughly synonymous with ressentiment, a sentiment whose meaning has been vigorously debated for centuries by scholars, many of whom have contrasted it with resentment, arguing for one or the other as morally or politically superior.Footnote 21 However, little has been written about rancor as such. Despite the distinctions that have been made between ressentiment and resentment, rancor has often been used interchangeably with both terms. Whether in the history of philosophy or in philosephardic discourse, rancor is seldom dignified with definitions, but is consigned to “common sense.”Footnote 22 Rancor's obviousness—its capacity to confirm what is already “known”—depends precisely on its adjacency to historically specific ideas about Jews, and Sephardi Jews in particular. I turn to those contexts now to explore how the expulsion of the Jews from Spain began to be understood in the nineteenth century as symptomatic of problems that their return might solve.
SEPHARDI JEWS AND THE CRISIS OF SPANISH MODERNITY
From the moment the Expulsion was decreed, the potential for a future “return” of Jews has haunted Spanish thought and politics.Footnote 23 But it was not until 1797 that a proposal for Sephardi Jews’ repatriation emerged that was not contingent on their baptism. What changed in those three centuries? In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain's rulers came to see Jews and conversos (as well as Muslims and moriscos) as obstacles to the consolidation of Castilian nationalism and a “problem” to be solved by expulsion and conversion.Footnote 24 Not unrelatedly, the sixteenth-century “Black Legend” melded British anxieties about its imperial rival's colonial reach, proximity to Africa, and “taint” of Jewish and Muslim blood with accusations of a Catholic fanaticism that ostensibly produced a uniquely brutal colonial order and fostered cultural backwardness.Footnote 25 These “discourses of religious and racial difference in the European Renaissance became naturalized in the subsequent centuries and established the epistemic foundation of modern colonial racism.”Footnote 26 Much as Johannes Fabian argued that Europe denied the coevalness of its others through techniques of temporal and spatial distancing during this period,Footnote 27 Northern Europe increasingly figured Spain as an internal other, frozen in an earlier time.
Although this notion of a “backwards” Spain had its origins in Britain, it found support among Spanish thinkers as well, from liberals critical of imperial decline and compulsory Catholicism to conservatives who championed an essential Spanish difference that made Spain superior to its more secular Northern European counterparts.Footnote 28 As the editors of a synthetic history of modern Spain summarize, “for generations of Spanish intellectuals, writers, and politicians, Spain has been a problem.”Footnote 29 At the heart of many of these complaints was the idea that Spain had deviated from its appointed path, that it had ended up somewhere other than where it was supposed to be. As Enlightenment thought began reshaping how the quality, direction, and efficacy of history was understood,Footnote 30 conservatives who claimed the mantle of “tradition” and liberals who desired “progress” began to conceive of Spain as having failed at achieving the right kind of historicity. Across the political spectrum, the “problem of Spain” began to be rendered in a discourse of crisis, a concept which involves a moral judgment of the past as difference in which “there are winners and losers, errors and victories.”Footnote 31 For liberals at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Inquisition and the 1492 Expulsion were two such temporal errors, which reverberated into the present, preventing Spain from achieving modernity or arriving at its promised future.Footnote 32 Returning Jews to Spain, it was thought, would help fix these errors.
In 1812, the Cortes (Congress) of Cádiz declared national sovereignty and produced the Constitution of 1812. The Constitution was the founding document of Spanish liberalism, and reflected a shift that had begun in the previous century about sentiment. As Mónica Bolufer argues, “In the early modern period, the words used more often to speak about states of the heart or mind were afectos (affects), affeciones (affections), or pasiones (passions), understood as passing—and often undesirable—commotions or disturbances.”Footnote 33 “The new idea of an inner impulse that inspires moral judgment emerged with the change of meaning undergone by the concept ‘sentimiento’ (sentiment), previously defined as ‘opinion’ or ‘sorrow,’ which increasingly came to be used to mean both the act of perceiving objects through the senses (as theorized by sensist epistemology) and a feeling of the heart.”Footnote 34 The new liberal regime was expressly dedicated to “a new affective relationship between citizen and state,”Footnote 35 which configured patriotism as a form of love “that creates, rather than emanates from, ethnographic-cultural kinship.”Footnote 36 During the debates leading up to the promulgation of the Constitution, a battle erupted over whether to abolish the Inquisition. Liberals wanted to do so in order to check the power of the Church and remedy what they viewed as a historical error.Footnote 37 Conservatives “defended the expulsion of the Jews and the religious and political unification of Spain by the Catholic Kings as the root of Spanish greatness and blamed the nation's decadence on the survival of heretic beliefs of conversos, liberals, and Enlightenment thinkers.”Footnote 38
By the middle of the nineteenth century, historians like Adolfo de Castro y Rossi and José Amador de Los Ríos had begun to incorporate Jews into a nascent nationalist historiography.Footnote 39 Generations of Spanish thinkers would come to embrace Amador de Los Ríos's vision, which “understood the Sephardi Jews to be the bearers and transmitters of Spain's cultural legacy, charging them with a Spanish civilizing mission, as witnesses and advocates of a greater Spanish patria beyond Spain's borders.”Footnote 40 These earlier stirrings of Jewish historiography notwithstanding, the 1859–1860 Spanish-Moroccan War marked a turning point when Sephardi Jews and their history reentered the Spanish public sphere in a significant way. In 1860, a number of widely read eyewitness accounts of the war were published, which described Jews in Tetuán greeting Spanish soldiers as liberators in a Judeo-Spanish dialect and vowing their allegiance to the queen.Footnote 41 These reports offered the raw discursive material with which philosephardic theories of “re-encounter” would later be elaborated and disseminated, and equipped the Spanish public with a framework for thinking about Sephardi Jews as a kind of kin, albeit typically as ancient ancestors or subsidiary survivals.
PULIDO'S CAMPAIGN: ANTHROPOLOGY, RACE, AND SEPHARDIC REPATRIATION
The 1868 Revolution ushered in a period of democratic and religious liberty reforms, including the 1869 Constitution, which permitted non-Catholics to reside in Spain, paving the way for the first foreign Jews to be granted Spanish citizenship.Footnote 42 The 1868 Revolution also created the conditions of possibility for the emergence and professionalization of the social sciences, including anthropology, the discipline most responsible for giving shape to modern racial thought in Spain. Driven in part by their sense that Spain was deficient in the sort of history that scholars and states were busily producing elsewhere in Europe, Spanish anthropologists began to elaborate theories of racial fusion, which sought “both to distinguish Spain from other races and also to include Spain in the story of European racial dominance.”Footnote 43 By identifying mixture, rather than purity, as the source of Spain's unique national identity, anthropologists were able to argue that origins need not be pure to be valid.Footnote 44 Racial fusion, in other words, became a strategy for transforming Spain's history of racial-religious pluralism from a national liability into an asset.Footnote 45
In 1898, Spain experienced a humiliating defeat in the wake of the Spanish-American War and lost what little remained of its empire. Intellectuals on the Left and the Right took the Disaster of 1898, as Spaniards referred to it, as the latest and most dramatic sign of a crisis in need of solution. Known collectively as the Generation of ‘98, these thinkers launched an ideologically diverse movement known as Regenerationism that drew on and refigured longstanding debates between Hispanizers (who argued that Spain must return to authentically Spanish tradition) and Europeanizers (who believed that Spain had long been in decline and would continue to lag behind “Europe” until it fully embraced liberal reforms).Footnote 46 Borrowing heavily from anthropology, Regenerationists advanced competing theories about which racial mixtures had made Spain healthy or unhealthy in the past, and offered prescriptions for which racial elements to cultivate or excise in order to realign Spain with its rightful destiny.Footnote 47 Sephardi Jews emerged as prime examples of an ideal fusion that would aid in such a project.
A little more than a decade before the Disaster of 1898, Ángel Pulido was speaking Spanish on a cruise along the Danube when to his surprise several Jewish passengers introduced themselves in a strikingly similar tongue. Pulido had trained as a physician before studying anthropology and was deeply influenced by the latest theories of race.Footnote 48 Like other liberals, he was immersed in the philosephardism common among Regenerationists. When Pulido encountered Sephardi Jews who spoke LadinoFootnote 49 or Spanish, he was equipped with cutting-edge scientific and political discourses that understood Sephardi Jews as historical vestiges.Footnote 50 Theories of racial fusion were well-suited to explain the presence of these otherwise inexplicable, yet familiar, figures of alterity so far from Spain, as well as to hypothesize what might happen if they were to “return.” On another cruise two decades later, Pulido overheard a couple speaking “an incorrect Castilian,”Footnote 51 one of whom was Enrique Bejarano, a rabbi who would make Pulido aware of the Sephardi diaspora in the Mediterranean and help convince him that their use of Spanish was evidence of their continued attachment to Spain.Footnote 52
Shortly after returning from this cruise, Pulido—who by that point had become a Spanish senator—launched the first modern project for Sephardi repatriation, a lifelong campaign that included speeches in the Senate and a constant stream of articles in newspapers around the world. In 1904, he published these collected writings as the book National Interests: Spanish Israelites and the Castilian Language.Footnote 53 This was followed one year later by the widely read Spaniards without a Homeland and the Sephardi Race, which quickly became a key text for the philosephardic and Regenerationist movements.Footnote 54 Based on responses to an ethnographic survey designed by Pulido in consultation with Bejarano, Spaniards without a Homeland reflected Pulido's desire to assess what Sephardi Jews knew about Spain and how well they spoke Ladino, which he saw as signs of their cultural and biological attachment to Spain.Footnote 55 The endgame was nothing short of complete social transformation for Pulido and his fellow philosephardic thinkers, who were convinced that “returning Jews to Spain would reintroduce the catalyst needed for Spanish modernization”Footnote 56 by rescuing Spain from crisis and delivering it to where it ought to already have been.Footnote 57
Pulido was by no means the first modern Spanish thinker to use the term “rancor” in connection to Jews. While an exhaustive list of his precursors is beyond the scope of this article, an important (and typical) example can be found in José Amador de los Ríos, who effectively founded modern Jewish Studies in Spain. In his 1848 book The Jews of Spain (which Pulido certainly would have read), Jews living in Visigothic Spain are described as possessing a “profound rancor against the Christians.”Footnote 58 A decade later, one of Spain's most important literary figures would describe a Jewish character as “rancorous and vengeful like all of their race.”Footnote 59 But it is in Pulido's writing that we find sustained discussion of its absence or presence among diasporic Sephardi Jews, which serves for him as a diagnostic of their attachment to Spain, their suitability for repatriation, and their capacity to help solve the problem of Spain's insufficient modernity. Sometimes rancor is broached by Sephardi Jews themselves. In Spaniards without a Homeland and the Sephardi Race, the son of the grand rabbi in Marmara writes that because TorquemadaFootnote 60 had been equally unjust toward both his non-Jewish racial brothers and the Jews, “there should be no rancor in us, the Spanish Israelites, toward the Spanish people.”Footnote 61 Other times, Pulido introduces the term only to deny that it is felt by Sephardi Jews. In Spanish Israelites and the Castilian Language, Pulido addresses a letter to the Viennese Society of Spanish Israelites, telling them, “the young people gathered in Vienna, coming from different places and highly educated, represent a race that has always recognized its love of culture and never maintained rancor toward this wretched country of ours….”Footnote 62 But Pulido is inconsistent about whether Sephardi Jews are entitled to feel rancor, and if they in fact do. At one point in Spaniards without a Homeland he writes, “Without doubt, many Jews of good social instinct themselves advise us that there is no reason to harbor any particular rancor against Spain for the Edict of 1492, since all people without exception to more or less the same degree commit similar crimes….”Footnote 63 Later in the book, he reverts to the position that it “is natural that the Sephardi Jews harbor rancor.”Footnote 64 Just one year earlier, Pulido had approvingly quoted a letter from Bejarano, who had written, “God who reads the secrets and knows the truth will bear witness that we don't maintain or harbor rancor or ill will of any kind, but we cry for the sad consequences of lonely exile….”Footnote 65 While Pulido evinced uncertainty about whether Jews felt rancor, there was no question for him about the saliency of such sentiments to discussions of Sephardic repatriation.
“Rancor” appears in the archives of modern Spain and its Sephardic repatriation projects as a self-evident sentiment that requires no definition. Yet, we can glean from these contexts that rancor shares important features of various definitions of resentment and ressentiment. When Pulido references the absence of rancor among Sephardi Jews in the examples above—particularly when citing their letters or responses to his ethnographic survey—the “rancor” we find often recalls Nietzschean “ressentiment.”Footnote 66 If rancor's etymology includes a notion of rotting, which ends up injuring its bearer, ressentiment entails self-poisoning, since consuming the past may “cease to be a source of nourishment and become instead a source of indigestion.”Footnote 67 Nietzsche's “man of ressentiment” is thus figured as pathological, a formulation that has had a profound impact on popular and scholarly discourses about the politics of emotions. Indeed, Nietzsche was very popular with Spanish intellectuals at the turn of the century, and markedly influenced Pío Baroja, the famous novelist and infamous anti-Semite.Footnote 68 In addition to the anti-Jewish invocations of rancor by Pulido's predecessors discussed above, we can also find examples among his contemporaries. One of Pulido's fiercest critics, Africano Fernández, argued that Sephardi Jews did not feel love for Spain, but rather “rancor, hatred, and a repressed thirst for revenge.”Footnote 69 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Baroja described Jews as “rancorous”Footnote 70 and argued that they carried within them “a depth of rancor,”Footnote 71 though he considered Sephardi Jews racially superior to Ashkenazi Jews.Footnote 72 The almost reflexive disavowals of rancor we find in Pulido's texts suggest that if Sephardi Jews were to feel rancor—and were known to do so by certain others—they might be perceived in line with the negative traits associated with ressentiment, perhaps as irrational, ungrateful, spiteful, or stuck in the past.
The following passage is one of the few instances when Pulido dwells briefly on rancor's significance, offering clues for how to read the politics of sentiment that are indexed by “rancor” in his work:
One discovers at times in certain Hispanophobes a reservoir of rancor against Spain for the injuries of the past and this sentiment is one of the most human because people have a sensorial continuity and the awareness of individuals imprints inevitable dispositions on the discourse and affects that we can't think of combatting with reason…. In principle we respect the challenge of this resentment and we believe that the best way to reconquer these hearts is to do the opposite of what was done to injure them.”Footnote 73
This framing suggests that those who harbor such sentiments are exceptional, reinforcing the notion that most Sephardi Jews do not feel rancor. Nevertheless, Pulido recognizes the affects that arise in subjects as responses to historical injuries. Because such sentiments are immune to reason, he concludes that replacing rancorous attachments with loving ones requires acting on Sephardi Jews in a way that is “opposite of” earlier injuries. If negative invocations of rancor identify (as Nietzsche's ressentiment does) those who feel it as pathologically erroneous, Pulido's use of rancor here locates responsibility for the sentiment in the offending party or their descendants (ultimately, the state and its representatives).
For Pulido, rancor is a justified response to the acknowledged injury of the Expulsion. This “rancor” resembles the “resentment” that Anglo-American philosophers have associated with “a legitimate and valuable form of anger responding to perceived moral wrongs.”Footnote 74 In this line of thinking, resentment is a just sentiment that correctly appraises an injury as such; the presence of resentment works as both evidence and judgment: it is a demand that the offense and the obligation of redress both be recognized.Footnote 75 According to classic theories of resentment, the moral imperative rests with those who have injured, who are obligated to act to secure justice. But this obligation is not the “challenge” that Pulido identifies. Nothing in this passage indicates that Pulido feels an obligation to act merely because he recognizes the legitimacy of the injury of the Expulsion. Despite his acknowledgement that Sephardi Jews feel justly, he is incurious about the forms of redress that they themselves might desire. Pulido has a more pragmatic concern: undoing the injuries suffered by Sephardi Jews—through a reversal—in the hopes that this will “reconquer” their hearts. That reversal is quite literal for Pulido: the return of Sephardi Jews to Spain from the diaspora and the return of Spain to its Jewish history. While Pulido did not break entirely with earlier anti-Jewish uses of rancor, he did lay the groundwork for a reversal of the “common sense” about Jews as rancorous. His writing likely introduced (and indisputably popularized) a new semantic relationship between Sephardi Jews and rancor marked by its declared absence.
Between 1898 and the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, excitement about the Sephardi diaspora and its salvific potential for a moribund empire coincided with the growth of Spain's Jewish population. In 1904, Pulido had successfully advocated in Congress for a policy that made it possible for a limited number of Sephardi Jews to become citizens. Pulido's plan to “return” Sephardi Jews to Spain was now well-known throughout the country and the Jewish world and was being pursued by Spaniards as well as Sephardi Jews in the diaspora. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire—and with it, the capitulatory regime that had allowed European states to enroll non-Muslim Ottomans as protected subjects—Spain issued a Royal Decree in 1924 offering protégés in Turkey and elsewhere a six-year window within which to apply for Spanish citizenship.Footnote 76 Despite not explicitly naming Sephardi Jews, they were in effect the only ones who met the criteria the law had established.Footnote 77 Although philosephardism held that “Spaniards also shared a ‘blood brotherhood’ with Muslims,” it championed the familiar comparative (and colonial) logic that Jews were more assimilable into and compatible with Spanish culture than Muslims.Footnote 78 However, only a small number of Sephardi Jews were able to attain citizenship. Many were under the impression that, as protégés, they already were Spanish citizens and therefore failed to apply, while others were unable to furnish the required documentation.Footnote 79 Moreover, the Decree required applicants to confirm that they would not permanently settle in Spain. Despite the 1924 Decree's prohibition against the permanent settlement of nationalized protégés, Pulido continued advocating for Sephardic repatriation and urging a rapprochement with potential Sephardi allies and middlemen in the Mediterranean.Footnote 80
Thus, by the early 1930s, as antisemitic movements across Europe cast Jews as a degenerative hazard to racial health, national unity, scientific progress, and economic stability, an influential strain of philosephardism had developed in Spain which envisioned Sephardi Jews as a regenerative safeguard for these same measures of state vitality. This is not to deny the presence of antisemitic discourse in Spain and particularly among fascists, many of whom began their political careers as philosephardic thinkers. Philosephardism existed in tension with philosemitism—since it explicitly embraced Sephardi Jews over and against Ashkenazi Jews—and antisemitism, but is still noteworthy for its emphasis on fusion at a time when ideas of racial purity were in vogue. Philosephardism and antisemitism were two faces of the same modern dehumanizing logic, which at best saw Jews as allegorical figures or political instruments, and at worst as parasitic vermin. We can see this as well during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and after the fascist victory, as Francisco Franco's government embraced Sephardi Jews abroad as potential vehicles for economic expansion, even as it often viewed Jews on its own soil as potential threats.Footnote 81
FORGOTTEN RANCOR AND OPEN HEARTS
Pulido's campaign was embraced by many Sephardi Jews in the diaspora, who paid close attention to his efforts, wrote them up in Jewish media outlets, and invited him to visit their communities.Footnote 82 One such correspondent was the well-known Sephardi historian and philologist Henry Victor Besso, who had been born in Salonika the same year that Spaniards without a Homeland was published.Footnote 83 Consider what appears to be a final draft of a letter addressed to Pulido at his Senate office in 1926, requesting the transcript of a speech he had given in 1887.Footnote 84 In it, Besso recounts a “not very pleasant” article that had recently been published by the “Jewish (Ashkenazi) press” in New York, to which he responded, including passages from Los israelitas Españoles y el idioma castellano. Referring to himself as “a Sefardí, a young Spaniard” who had been ignorant of Pulido's books, but now read them with “much attention,” he thanked Pulido for his efforts.Footnote 85
Less than a decade later, Besso would write an obituary for Pulido that appeared in the American Hebrew on 3 February 1933.
[Pulido] has modified the spiritual attitude of the Sephardi Jews. The generation which has seen and heard him no longer feels about Spain as the former generation of Sephardic Jews. They no longer hate or curse. The crime committed against our forefathers in 1492 as well as the dreadful persecutions against them no longer provoke the reaction of former times. The recollection has lost its acerbity. The rancour has been forgotten. The Sephardic Jew of today reasons with more indulgence because he contrasts the Spain of the Inquisition with that of Pulido. The conflict has ceased. Pulido has made us forget Torquemada. Peace reappears in the Sephardic Soul. The Spanish Jew gives himself with confidence and opens without reticence his heart to Liberal Spain.Footnote 86
Like other Sephardi Jews, Besso credited Pulido with transforming the relationship between Spain and the Jews, and he did so by echoing the liberal language that opposed rancor to open hearts, and sentiment to reason, which Pulido had articulated in his books. Two decades later, Besso wrote an apparently unpublished letter to the editor in response to a 1949 New York Times article about a decree Franco had signed allowing Sephardi Jews in Greece and Egypt to apply for Spanish citizenship.Footnote 87 As the article and Besso noted, one of the primary criteria the regime said it was looking for in applicants was a “love of Spain.”Footnote 88 He questioned “whether the governments of these countries will permit the exodus of so many of their nationals, regardless of the ‘love’ which the Spanish Jews have maintained for Spain throughout the centuries, as indicated by the fact that they still preserve the language, the customs, folklore, etc, in spite of nearly five centuries of separation.”Footnote 89 He went on to note the largely unsuccessful earlier attempts at facilitating Sephardi repatriation, and the “striking differences” between the 1924 Decree and the one issued by Franco in 1949, the former of which he claims (somewhat erroneously) “granted citizenship, automatically, to any and all Spanish Jews who might ask for it, at any time, and applied to all Sephardi Jews all over the world.”Footnote 90 We now know that seven months after Franco signed this decree he published an article under a pseudonym in which he railed against Israel for rejecting a United Nations proposal to lift sanctions against Spain, and accused Jews of acting “with an unprecedented rancor.”Footnote 91
Besso saw Franco's overture as restrictive and conditional, given its narrow geographical applicability and the fact that Jews would “have to be ‘screened’ and must have shown a certain ‘love for Spain,’ etc.”Footnote 92 Much more would have to be done “by the Franco regime if it really and sincerely desires to effect a repatriation and a complete rapprochement” with the diminished numbers of Sephardi Jews remaining in postwar Europe.Footnote 93 If “sincerity” had so often been a criterion that states like Spain used to evaluate the worthiness of subjects, Besso turned this critique on its head by directing it at the state. He maintained that “modern Spain needs the combined efforts of all her sons, be what may their religious beliefs, in order to attain the grandeur which she once attained and deserves.”Footnote 94 Besso finished this affectively charged letter, which never reached its intended audience, on a hopeful note: “There is no doubt that something can be done. And whatever will be done will bring some fruitful results. Success, however, depends, perhaps more on the Spaniards than the Sephardi Jews themselves.”Footnote 95 Besso's heart no longer seemed as unconditionally open to Spain as it had been in his obituary of Pulido, which had been published just four days after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Perhaps Besso was by then more interested in how Spain felt about the Sephardi Jews than the other way around. He was, after all, writing in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which had almost entirely destroyed his birthplace, Salonika, previously home to one of the world's largest Sephardi communities. Absent from this letter was any mention of rancor, forgotten or otherwise. And yet Besso continued to affirm that Sephardi Jews loved Spain, even as he made the implicit argument that doing so should not be a condition for their inclusion as citizens.
WHO GETS TO “RETURN”? JEWS, MUSLIMS, AND THE POLITICS OF INCLUSION
Between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s Jewish religious organizations were allowed to re-open, additional waves of Sephardi Jews arrived from Morocco and Egypt, and the first synagogue constructed since the Expulsion opened in Barcelona. After Franco's 1975 death, his chosen successor, King Juan Carlos, surprised Spain and the world by presiding over a peaceful transition to democracy. During the remainder of the 1970s, thousands of mainly Ashkenazi Jews migrated to Spain from Latin America. In 1980, the Organic Law of Religious Liberty was passed, followed by the 1982 Civil Code, which recognized Sephardi Jews as a special class of citizenship seekers—much like applicants from Latin America, Portugal, Andorra, and the Philippines—and reduced the residency requirement from ten years to two. In 1986, Spain was admitted into the European Union, after having met one of the final stipulations for entry: recognizing and establishing diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. The years leading up to the 1992 quincentennial of the Expulsion saw the launch of a global campaign of “re-encounter” which culminated with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia's visit to Madrid's Bet Yaakov synagogue. That same year, the government signed accords with the Federation of Israelite Communities of Spain (now the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, or FCJE) recognizing them as the body responsible for representing Spain's Jewish population. It was the FCJE that would assume responsibility for adjudicating the Sephardic ancestry of applicants for the 2015 citizenship law. By that time, Spain's Jewish population had grown to more than fifty thousand. This increase was due primarily to the arrival in the late 1990s and early 2000s of several additional waves of Jewish immigrants from Latin America, most of whom were Ashkenazi and unable to take advantage of the special status afforded Sephardi Jews, although they could claim citizenship as nationals of former Spanish colonies.
The size and diversity of Spain's contemporary Jewish communities testify to a remarkable regeneration, but not as envisioned by Pulido. Spain never succeeded in leveraging Sephardi Jews to establish the Mediterranean empire it hoped would redeem it as a global power. After the transition to democracy, Spaniards did, however, begin to reconsider their country's Jewish past and its vibrant present. Spain's Jewish revival over the past three decades parallels reassessments of Jewishness in other European countries like Germany, Portugal, and Poland. Recent years have seen the rekindling of philosemitic and antisemitic discourses; a pervasive aestheticization of Jewish history and memory; an economic reliance on Jewish tourism; and debates about the parameters of “return” citizenship laws.Footnote 96 As elsewhere, Spain is being fashioned into “a key site for the regeneration, rearticulation, and redefinition not only of a local Jewish community, but of inventive, hybrid ideas of post-Holocaust Jewishness itself.”Footnote 97 Unlike Poland, which has been imagined by Jews as a “ritually desecrated” negative space in post-Holocaust Europe,Footnote 98 Spain remains a potent symbol of origins for many in the Sephardi diaspora. Both mythic Jewish homelands are enmeshed in narratives of “return” that “invoke remnants, shadows, silences and voids.”Footnote 99 In Spain, however, it is not the Holocaust but the Expulsion that forms “the voids of Sepharad,” a product of Spain's late insertion into broader European representational and moral economies of Holocaust memorialization.Footnote 100 The Spanish government has invested considerable resources into a vast network of “cultural heritage” initiatives—including the 2015 law—aimed at cultivating relationships with Jews in Europe, the Americas, and Israel, and persuading them to “return,” if only for a holiday. Such projects reflect a growing consensus among Spanish Jews and state officials that being a properly modern European state requires engaging with the post-Holocaust memory work and cultural production evident elsewhere on the Continent.Footnote 101
However overdetermined the 2015 law may have been by earlier philosephardic projects and recent Jewish revivals, the catalyst for draft legislation came from Spanish Jews themselves. As early as 2003, the FCJE began pressing the Spanish government to make it easier for Sephardi Jews—particularly those living through political instability in Turkey and Venezuela—to apply for citizenship under the same terms as other groups with special status.Footnote 102 In 2011, the conservative Partido Popular assumed power in a landslide election and the FCJE began negotiations shortly thereafter with the new Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who had close ties to Madrid's Jewish community dating back to his mayoralty there (2003–2011). Gallardón became one of the primary architects of the new Sephardic citizenship law, serving as the face of the initiative on an international publicity tour and shepherding the legislation through debates and modifications in the Cortes Generales. During a wide-ranging interview I conducted with Gallardón a year after the law's passage, he repeated the claim that it was an “historic reparation,” and was keen to note that it had been approved unanimously.Footnote 103 This, he maintained, was evidence that the government had “identif[ied] a feeling [sentimiento] that was present in the entire Spanish population and in all sensibilities [sensibilidades].” In contemporary usage, sentimiento can be translated literally as sentiment, but is used more colloquially to mean “feeling.” It is hard to know, given his oscillation between intensely formal and more casual language, which Gallardón meant. What stands out is his recognition of affect as important and his suggestion that the state was capable of identifying and responding to specific sentiments, in this case those of Spaniards rather than of diasporic Sephardi Jews (whom he told me had not been consulted while the law was being drafted). Sensibilidades can refer to the human senses generally, to physical bodily feelings resulting from stimuli, or to physical and aesthetic sensitivity or awareness. I translate it here as “sensibilities” since I think this captures the full range of meanings in English as well as what I understand to be Gallardón's insistence that, whatever other differences might exist among Spaniards or however they may differ about how to achieve the larger goals of the law or what its limitations and effects may be, they shared a feeling that the law was warranted and just.
While it is true that the law was unanimously approved in the end, this occurred only after intense debates in Congress.Footnote 104 Far from evincing a single feeling or sentiment that was shared by all sensibilities, as Gallardón had put it, these debates indicated substantial dissensus. And a number of them revolved around (and were themselves evidence of) the question of sentiments—which ones were present and why, what they meant and how to understand them, who they belonged to, and the kinds of political responses they demanded. That discussions of the legislation betrayed such a profound investment in emotions underscores what Audra Simpson has argued in another context: “The primary way in which the state's power is made real and personal, affective in its capacity, is through the granting of citizenship and, in this, the structural and legal preconditions for intimacy, forms of sociability, belongings, and affections.Footnote 105 Some deputies, such as the Partido Popular's Gabriel Elorriaga Pisarik, adopted the party line and insisted that “Jews of Spanish origin have carried their homeland, with sincere affection, with an immense nostalgia, and without any rancor.”Footnote 106 Others, like Emilio Olabarría Muñoz of the Basque Nationalist Party (EAJ-PNV), expressed skepticism that “the acceptance of this expulsion of the Sephardi Jews was done without rancor.” “I don't know,” he proceeded, “if there is empirical evidence that makes you think that they did it without rancor, nor if nostalgia and the identity connection with Spain therefore has been without any type of rancor with an expulsion as brutal as that one.” Olabarría reluctantly agreed to keep the language of rancor, referring to it dismissively as “a purely ontological or literary reflection.”Footnote 107 In this statement, Olabarría not only questions whether it makes sense to assume that Sephardi Jews do not (or did not) feel rancor, but on what basis the state could possibly claim to know such a thing. Elsewhere in the rhetoric of the state and Jewish leaders, nostalgia is offered as an antidote to rancor, which then produces love; in this formulation, nostalgia and rancor are mutually exclusive. Yet, Olabarría leaves open the possibility that nostalgia and rancor might well exist simultaneously. He casts doubt both on the veracity of the claims made by the law's architects and supporters and the grounds on which they are made. I read Olabarría as critiquing the ascription and denial of sentiments—with its tacit demands on would-be subjects—and arguing, much as Besso did six decades earlier, that what Sephardi Jews feel or do not feel is none of the state's business.
Olabarría continues his critique by posing a series of questions that indicate what is at stake with a law that draws so much of its symbolic force from appeals to Sephardi sentiments, yet fails to meaningfully engage with the related moral issues of injury and repair:
Is this about a compensation? Is this about a reparation? Is this, in short, about the avoidance, five hundred years later, of an injustice? It is the same to me, Mr. Minister, it is what we owe because it is owed by us, because these people, I do not know if they fled or if they were expelled without rancor, as you claim in the Statement of Intent, although it seems doubtful to me that there was not a certain amount of rancor in the moment; but they maintained the emotional connection and they maintained the identity connection [….] As such, count on our support […] But let us not forget, with this end, Ms. President, that there are other collectives with the same legitimacy, with the same historical-juridical foundation, and they require a reparation of these features. […] The Spanish state in its history has committed many outrages, Mr. Minister. Let us begin repairing this and let us continue repairing all the rest.Footnote 108
At worst, the law purports to offer justice, but enacts a kind of violence on Sephardi Jews, as well as on those other populations, which Olabarría argues are equally deserving of reparations, such as the Muslims, Berbers, and Saharawis.Footnote 109 He refuses the exceptionalist logic of the law, and its singular offer of return to Sephardi Jews, given that so many others were expelled and excluded. At the same time, he draws a link between Spain's histories of expulsion and colonization, both of which, he argues, produced suffering that the state is obligated to repair. Even for a critic like Olabarría, however, the assumption remains that some connection between Jews and Spain is always present.
The former leader of Spain's Jewish community, Isaac Querub, had also addressed the issue of other populations who deserved, and indeed had claimed, the right to Spanish citizenship. But, he assured readers, “this isn't to say that the government does not recognize or has forgotten the other very reasonable demands, like those of the moriscos or the Saharawi people, which will surely be addressed at the right time.”Footnote 110 A year later, when I asked Gallardón what he thought of the argument that Muslim descendants had a right of return that ought to be recognized, he was considerably less diplomatic than Querub had been. During our conversation, Gallardón never spoke of the Berbers or the Saharawis, nor did he refer to rancor as such. Laying his coffee cup calmly on the table and smiling politely, but dismissively, Gallardón compared the “love of Spain” that Sephardi Jews had ostensibly maintained—along with their identity and language—to the Muslims, who “did not maintain themselves as an independent people,” but had been “immediately absorbed into the existing Arab peoples in the North of Africa.” Sephardi Jews were therefore the only population that had conserved their own identity after being expelled from Spain. In response to the disagreements in Congress about who deserved a right of return, which he had earlier played down, Gallardón explained how and why Sephardi Jews were different from Muslims:
It is true that during the discussion [in Congress], it never arrived at the point that it was suggested citizenship not be given to the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain. Other, distant [colaterales] themes were suggested, it was hoped that the discussion could be taken advantage of in order to ask why citizenship was not going to be given to the descendants of the Arabs who were expelled from Spain also in 1492, and I explained in the debate in the Congress of Deputies that this was a radically distinct case, because the key to the debt that Spain had with the Sephardi Jews is not solely the issue of rectifying the expulsion, but of being grateful as well that during five centuries those who were expelled by their nation, by their homeland, which was Spain, instead of renouncing her, instead of confronting her, they kept the language, they kept the feeling of belonging to Sepharad, they symbolically kept the keys to those houses to which they knew they could never return because they had been plundered by the Christian authorities, and above all, they kept their love for Spain.Footnote 111
The outlines of this story will sound familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the politics of racial and religious difference in contemporary Europe, but particularly in Spain, recalling as it does the distinct—yet never wholly unrelated—historical trajectories of Jews and Muslims from the medieval to the modern era, whether as figments of national imaginaries or as actual populations.Footnote 112 My point is not that Gallardón's claims are historically inaccurate (though a number of scholars have shown just that).Footnote 113 Rather, I am interested in what this narrative reveals about how sentiment and racialization continue to be entwined in discussions about who “deserves” citizenship, and the affective criteria by which the descendants of expelled racial-religious groups are judged worthy of it. As Gallardón put it, “This [the love he said Jews maintained for Spain] is what the law attempts to recognize and show gratitude for, that a part of the Spanish people, who for having been unjustly expelled from Spain, had not only the right, but if I may say so, the natural tendency to curse the mother who expelled them from her house. Instead of that, what they did was continue loving her over the course of five centuries, and this is the reason why we approved the law.”Footnote 114
In this case, the narrative reaches beyond the mere insistence that Sephardi Jews harbored no rancor toward Spain for the Expulsion and goes one step further to suggest that they overcame human nature to continue loving a mother who had kicked them out of her (their?) house. This rather Christian notion of love conquering rancor espoused by Gallardón echoes the language used by King Felipe and the FCJE in the wake of the law's passage in 2015. While “rancor” in these tellings indexes a register of official histories filled with abstracted states, polities, and populations, “love” conjures intimate memories of relationships, families, and generations. And the love worthy of gratitude in this scenario is that which is unrequited, but belatedly acknowledged by the injuring party's descendants.
Subjacent to the explicit comparison Gallardón made between what Jews and Muslims did in the wake of expulsion (according to him), I believe there is an implicit comparison lurking, concerned with differentiating between what Jews and Muslims felt, or were even capable of feeling. If, according to this logic, Jews feel love rather than rancor because they were able to conserve their identifies (and therefore their connection with the mother who expelled them from her home), then what does the assertion that Muslims were “immediately absorbed” into new cultures and polities suggest about what Muslims might be imagined to have felt? What would happen if the comparison Gallardón sets up were followed to its logical conclusion? By this reasoning, Sephardi Jews are entitled to feel rancor, but do not because they have fought the instinct to hate those who injured them; they remembered their ancestors but were willing or able to forget the injuries visited upon them; they remained attached to their previous home and racial/national family, but not to the feelings aroused in them by those who treated them so inhospitably, so much like strangers. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, we could ask what a theory of sentiments that presumes Jews do not feel rancor about their expulsion might have to say about Muslims, given how often they have been figured as resentful and vengeful toward Spain.Footnote 115
By the time the Sephardic “law of return” went into effect, people had been dying in the tens of thousands trying to reach the increasingly unsettled space of “Europe” both because of and despite all its lethal abstractions. Europe's moral order was being materialized over and over again in airports, shipping containers, detention centers, barbed wire fences, and the sea itself, even as it dematerialized so many bodies that had once been in motion.Footnote 116 As is sometimes forgotten, 1492 was not only the year that Jews were faced with the “choice” of conversion or exile. It was also the year that Columbus set sail and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella “reconquered” the last vestige of Muslim al-Andalus in Granada. Between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, hundreds of thousands of Muslims and moriscos fled or were expelled from Spain.Footnote 117 Much as with the Jews before them, precise numbers of those forced into exile are hard to come by. But in both cases, forced mobility created new diasporic communities throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, whose living descendants might number in the millions. It is possible that some of those thousands of bodies who perished at sea and on land in recent years might have been able to stake genealogical claims as descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain centuries ago. Indeed, Muslims in Morocco and other parts of the Mediterranean have argued that they are also owed the opportunity to “return” to Spain. But no such offer appears to be forthcoming.Footnote 118
CONCLUSION
In Spain, as elsewhere, differential access to citizenship and mobility is one of the defining political issues of our era. Debates about whether the descendants of expelled Jews and Muslims should be offered citizenship are inextricable from the very histories of racial thought that made such exclusions possible, as well as the ongoing racialization of religious difference that renders certain populations legible as the potential beneficiaries of any “historical reparation.” Affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in these debates and the distinctions drawn between those who do or do not qualify for inclusion. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, sentiments were becoming central to liberal ideas of citizenship and governance. By its end, a powerful group of liberal thinkers influenced by cutting-edge anthropological theories of racial fusion had begun to conceive of Sephardi Jews as both ancestors and artifacts whose “return” would resolve the crisis of Spanish modernity inaugurated in part by their expulsion. Ángel Pulido's campaign for Sephardic repatriation was “a racial project of national reformation” waged on the basis of these convictions.Footnote 119 He took sentiments as a form of evidence—in tandem with kinship and language—that Sephardi Jews held redemptive promise for Spain. That most Sephardi Jews ostensibly felt love or nostalgia rather than rancor toward Spain reinforced his belief in the “natural” correspondence between race, language, and political fidelity: these complementary attachments would ensure that Sephardi Jews were aligned with Spain's modernization and its imperial resurrection.
Leaders of the FCJE, Gallardón, and the Spanish government have all described the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law as an explicit continuation of Pulido's campaign. While the law's architects have abandoned Pulido's talk of racial improvement and national regeneration, they draw heavily on the affective lexicon that he developed. So too does the law itself, as well as its supporters and critics. Since Pulido's time, Jews are more likely to be described as lacking rancor than as feeling it. Whether figured as an absence or a presence, rancor has helped coordinate the place of Sephardi Jews in narratives of Spanish origins and destinies. Rancor appears most often as a potential threat, a specter that is no sooner invoked than it is neutralized through disavowal. It is imagined as a solvent that threatens to dissolve the otherwise “natural” emotional attachments that bind Sephardi Jews to Spain. Yet, rancor is itself also a form of attachment. In the eyes of their accusers, those who feel rancor are attached to the wrong peoples, places, and things. To be free of rancor, then, is to be attached to the right peoples, places, and things. The question of rancor—who feels it, why they do, and whether they are justified—is inextricable from the question of what binds us to which times and places, which collectives, which polities. Like resentment or ressentiment, rancor is a political sentiment because it suggests an injury (real or imagined) and leaves the open question of whether that injury can, or should, be repaired. “Rancor” is an artifact of dissensus: it is invoked and disavowed when there is a discrepancy between two or more accounts of what has happened, what is owed, and what can be done.
The longstanding insistence that Sephardi descendants feel no rancor sidesteps questions about Spain's historical responsibility, its obligations, and the forms that reparations might take. If Sephardi Jews indeed do not feel injured by what was done to their ancestors, then the affective logic of “rancor” suggests that the Spanish state has no obligations to them. In the absence of such obligations, the citizenship offered by the 2015 law is a temporary and conditional “gift.”Footnote 120 In exchange for the gift of citizenship, the Spanish state gets to claim Sephardic history and people as its own,Footnote 121 much as it has done with Sephardic “heritage.”Footnote 122 We might think of the “law of return,” then, as not just conferring Spanish citizenship on Sephardi descendants, but as affirming their fundamental Spanishness. By rhetorically fashioning Sephardi Jews as Spaniards, the 2015 law—and the history of philosephardic thought that underpins it—elides the range of other identifications and attachments that Sephardi descendants (Jewish and non-Jewish) may have. Spain was not so much offering a homecoming to Sephardi Jews as it was renegotiating the terms of inclusion to claim them as Spaniards, shoring up an explicitly Castilian national identity at a time when Catalan and Basque nationalist movements were coursing with renewed energy. This most recent citizenship law, like its precursors, was not merely making claims about Sephardi Jews; it was 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.
