Between Basque and Jewish : How the Spanish identity became racialized

Schaub Jean-Frédéric, 福崎 裕子

doi:10.14989/252452

The purpose of this article is to propose a local and general genealogy of racism in Spanish society from the 16th century to the middle of the 20th century. It takes its starting point in the particular case of Basque identity to understand how a racial conception of identity and otherness very early dominated Spanish politics. In fact, racist statements are central to the formation and dissemination of Basque nationalism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This paper unravels the genealogy leading to the invention and invocation of a supposedly pure Basque identity from the 16th century. This conception was built up over a long period of time, at the cost was an anti-Semitism - with roots stretching back to the sixteenth century - that was reinvigorated in the nineteenth century. Of course, the ethnic essentialism of Basque nationalism, including its racist dimension, was no exception in modern Spain. The Basque case is one instance of the broader question of the place of racial issues in Spanish nationalism. The argumentative mode of Basque nationalism, much like its appeals to an intellectual and institutional history stretching back to the sixteenth century, are virtually indistinguishable from pronouncements in the rest of the country. The socio-political processes that formed the Kingdom of Spain at the end of the Middle Ages gave birth to a system of religious and racial societal regulation. Catholic intransigence, attachment to ideas of blood purity, obsession with remaining faithful to the lineage, the code of honor-these were all features that fed into the assertion of Basque universal nobility, as well as Spanish casta system more generally. The idea of the Basque country as a refuge of Old Christian purity only made sense because the New Christians from Jewish of Muslim ancestry were victims of segregation throughout Spain. These two phenomena had been perfectly harmonized as from the sixteenth century. That is why in modern times Basque nationalism proved to be unable to distinguish itself from Spanish nationalism in general, in spite of desperate efforts to do so. We see the same prejudices, the same values, with both founded in the same historical conception of blood purity, and the same Catholic intransigence.

Between Basque and Jewish : How the Spanish identity became racialized

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