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ILLUSTRATED HISTORIES: THE NATIONAL SUBJECT AND “THE JEW” IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH ART

2009; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636200902771129

1469-9818

Hazel Gold,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Other activities included the convening of academic conferences and publication of scholarly monographs; the issuing on CDs of compilations of Sephardic ballads and anthologies of the music of Christian and Jewish Spain in the Middle Ages; the awarding of the Premio Príncipe de Asturias to the international Sephardic community; and the visit by King Juan Carlos to a Madrid synagogue. Additionally, beginning in the 1990s Spanish writers, including Carme Riera, Lucía Graves, and César Vidal, published historical novels that explored Jewish–Christian relations in the shadow of the Inquisition. 2. Recent scholarship has focused principally on the representation of the Muslim/African/ Oriental other in the forging of the Spanish cultural imaginary during the nineteenth century. Examinations of the portrayal of "the Jew" are less frequent and, until recently, have been of greater interest to historians than to literary and cultural critics. 3. See, for instance, the studies by CitationRehrmann, CitationMacías, Álvarez Barrientos, and Fernández; also, Álvarez Junco 227–49. 4. The declaration of war in response to ostensible offenses committed against Spanish garrisons in northern Morocco was used by the government of the Unión Liberal party, headed by General Leopoldo O'Donnell (1858–1863), as a means of deflecting attention from domestic unrest and promoting patriotic fervor. When Spanish troops took possession of Tetuán in 1860 they discovered Ladino-speaking inhabitants descended from Jewish and converso refugees to the Maghreb following the Spanish expulsion of 1492 and the forced mass conversions in Portugal in 1497. Living in isolation in the mellah amid conditions of extreme poverty and discrimination, the Sephardic Jews of Tetuán evoked diverse, often negative reactions among chroniclers of the occupation. 5. In the twenty-first century Spain is still not the country of choice for Jews seeking resettlement. In the annual surveys conducted by the Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales assessing Spaniards' attitudes toward immigration, Jews are perceived as the third most detested group after gypsies and Arabs/Muslims. The results of these surveys are included in CitationDíez Nicolás, Las dos caras de la inmigración ("Valoración media de los españoles hacia los habitantes de varias zonas del mundo, 1991–2003" 110). Since the majority of Spaniards have no contact with members of the Jewish population, CitationDíez Nicolás attributes this considerable level of negative sentiment to an "antijudaísmo imaginario" (115). That such prejudices are not rooted in firsthand experience is reflected in the reaction of the novelist Juan CitationGoytisolo to the survey results: "Y yo me pregunto, ¿hay inmigrantes judíos en España? ¿Quién ha visto un inmigrante judío?" ("CitationJuan Goytisolo: 'La mirada'"). In another interview Goytisolo asks: "¿hay inmigrantes judíos en España? Y, en caso de que los haya, ¿son identificables? ¿No se trata más bien de judíos mentales, fruto de la sobada 'conspiración judeo-masónica' de tiempos del franquismo?" ("España y sus Ejidos" 39). 6. Scholars have evolved a vast terminology to speak about the European Jew as a mental or rhetorical construct as opposed to a flesh and blood historical entity. CitationKruger offers a useful discussion of such terms: "abstract Jew" (Bauman), "paper Jew" (Biddick), "hermeneutical Jew" (Cohen; Lampert), "juif théologique" (Dahan), "protean Jew" (Despres), "virtual Jew" (Tomasch), and Kruger's own contribution, "spectral Jew". The concept of spectral Jew, derived from a Derridean reading of Marx, is intended to evoke a third space that suspends dichotomous conceptualizations and instead moves between embodiment and immateriality, experiential reality and fantasy construction. In this artice I have opted for the use of "imaginary Jew" for various reasons: because it stresses that in the absence of Jews in nineteenth-century Spain, Spaniards inevitably drew upon fictional constructs to supplement (or replace) their lack of direct knowledge; because it resonates with the notion of imagined communities and the search for national identity; and because it is etymologically linked with my focus on Spanish artists' representations of "the Jew" through visual images. It should be obvious that my use of this nomenclature is distinct from Alain CitationFinkielkraut's critique of the "imaginary Jew" of the post-Holocaust generation. Finkielkraut refers to a representation that is not produced by a hegemonic, Christian culture but rather is an invention of Jews themselves: "after the Catastrophe, Judaism cannot offer them any content but suffering, and they themselves do not suffer. In order to deny this contradiction, they have chosen to pass their time in a novelistic space full of sound and fury that offers them the best role … these young people live in borrowed identities. They have taken up residence in fiction. The Judaism they invoke enraptures and transports them magically to a setting in which they are exalted and sanctified" (Finkielkraut 15). 7. CitationÁlvarez Junco is especially clear on this point: "Al igual que el catolicismo del siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX es una cultura enfrentada al mundo moderno, este nacionalismo español se concibe a sí mismo como una ideología defensiva, fundamentalmente ante el cambio de las estructuras sociales y la amenaza de desintegración del Estado" (462). 8. Bécquer's story, which takes place on Good Friday, trades in the longstanding accusation that Jews engaged in the ritual murder of Christian children in order to use their blood in making unleavened bread for Passover. 9. See George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991). 10. For an analysis of Hispano-Jewish historiography by Castro and Amador de los Ríos, see Roberto López Vela, "La plebe y los judíos: La construcción de un mito histórico en la España del siglo XIX", Sefarad 64.1 (2004): 95–140. 11. This point is made more baldly by Casabó y Pagés: "La antítesis de este compuesto de buenos, delicados y nobles sentimientos la constituyen las costumbres, opiniones, dogmas y manera de ser de la raza semítica, cuyo carácter es un amasijo de negaciones de lo expontáneo [sic] y franco, de lo generoso y esforzado, de lo grande y sublime, circunstancias todas que ensalzan el espíritu caballeresco de las demás razas, especialmente de las que han venido extendiéndose en las regiones geográficamente Indo-Europeas de que nosotros formamos parte" (33). In Casabó's tract, Catholic identity differentiates Spain but does not negate her Europeanness. On the European repudiation of the internal Oriental other, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007). 12. The ideology of nacional-catolicismo is predicated on the close relationship between the Catholic Church and the Spanish state. The term was coined during Francoism to describe the identification between civil and religious institutions which resulted in the Church's control, supported by the state, of numerous aspects of social and political life. It is used by Álvarez Junco and other historians of nineteenth-century Spain to refer to a nationalist ideology (a form of Spanish essentialism based on Catholicism) and a political doctrine (the recuperation of the Church's standing as a political force following the signing in 1851 of the concordat between Spain and the papacy and, later, the integration of neo-Catholics into the conservative party of Cánovas del Castillo). 13. The "paradox of Spain's 'precocious liberalism'" is addressed in Jesús Millán and María Cruz Romeo, "Was the Liberal Revolution Important to Modern Spain? Political Cultures and Citizenship in Spanish History", Social History 29.3 (2004): 284–300. See also Isabel Burdiel, "Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism", Journal of Modern History 70.4 (1998): 892–912. 14. In reply to Sander Gilman's question in The Jew's Body "Are Jews white?", Jacobson responds that the problem is more accurately understood as "how have they been both white and Other?" (176). One could argue that "the Jew" in images by Goya, Cutanda, and Sala, paraphrasing Jacobson, is both Spanish and other. 15. Album C consists of 133 sheets sequentially numbered and captioned by Goya. Unlike his seven other albums, this one somehow survived nearly intact rather than being broken up for successive sales; the majority of the sheets (120) belong to the Prado, although Por linage de ebreos was purchased in 1862 by the British Museum. Scholars are in disagreement regarding the chronology of the drawings and whether they were produced during the years of absolutist repression under Fernando VII (1814–1820) or instead during the period encompassing the War of Independence and Cortes de Cádiz (1808–1814), although current opinion inclines toward the latter view. Compare CitationWilson-Bareau (79–80), Gassier (226), and Goya y el espíritu de la Ilustración (125). 16. Each Inquisition tribunal consisted of two or three inquisitors, an assessor (calificador), a prosecutor (fiscal), and a constable (alguacil). 17. Afrancesados ("Frenchified") is a derogatory term that came into use during the reign of Carlos III to describe Spaniards who were proponents of French Enlightenment ideas. During the War of Independence it was subsequently applied to supporters of the Napoleonic invasion and the Estatuto de Bayona, redacted in 1808. Afrancesados could also be found among the groups whose interests were represented by the moderados, or Moderate party, that emerged in the 1830s. The theme of the supposed conspiracy of Jews, liberals, and freemasons is well explored in studies by Fernández, Álvarez Barrientos, and Álvarez Junco. 18. Emilia Pardo Bazán observed the thematic confusion that ensued when Sala's painting was exhibited in Paris: "Merece notarse el lienzo de Sala, Torquemada ante los Reyes Católicos, que, según el Figaro (tengo interés en poner de relieve con cuánta competencia tratan los franceses lo que nos atañe), representa a un 'Torquemada tempestuoso, defendiendo con gran empeño el dogma de la Inmaculada Concepción'" (qtd. in Reyero 264–5).In his otherwise informative study of historical painting and the national identitarian project in Spain, CitationPérez Viejo erroneously claims that the many paintings that feature scenes from the reign of the Catholic kings omit reference to the expulsion: "la coetánea expulsión de los judíos es ocultada cuidadosamente. No hay representaciones que permitan situarla en un imaginario" (1134). Based on this judgment, he argues (unconvincingly) that, compared to the Muslims in Spain, the Jews were not conceived of as mythic others ("los judíos nunca tuvieron ese carácter mítico del otro frente al que se había construido la nación española, al contrario que los musulmanes"). 19. This is also the position adopted by the historians Adolfo de Castro and Fernando Garrido, who vindicate Spain's non-Catholic minorities. For fuller discussion of the competing historical explanations of the nation's past that circulated during the Isabeline monarchy and the Bourbon Restoration, see Álvarez Junco 417–31.