Spanish anti-Semitism today
According to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) global anti-Semitism index, 26.9% of Spanish adults display anti-Semitic attitudes. This is the highest percentage among all Western European countries. It is appalling, for example, to discover that 33% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that people hate Jews because of how they behave. In other words, that it is the Jews' fault that anti-Semitism exists.
We cannot close our eyes to this: in Spain, anti-Semitism forms part of the accepted values of very broad layers of the population. So broad that the common consensus is that the following positions cannot be considered anti-Semitic:
- Advocating or propagandising for the expulsion of Jews from the territory of Israel (From the river to the sea).
- Establishing victim hierarchies in the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorist groups and characterising crimes against humanity committed against Israelis as understandable and even deserved.
- Promote and adopt agreements in public bodies (generally in city councils), which exclude Spanish citizens from access to public services or offers if they maintain relations with Israeli organizations or institutions present in one way or another in territories annexed by Israel after 1948 (many of which today are ordinary Israeli cities).
- Boycotting the presence and public participation of individuals for taking a stand against the alleged need to wipe Israel off the map (and implicitly its Jewish population) in order to establish a Palestinian state.
- Adhering to and encouraging conspiracy theories about Jewish media control. A conspiracy that is especially ridiculous in Spain, where press and television insert an abundance of recurrent anti-Semitic topics in their chronicling of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
It is evident not only that these positions and actions are anti-Semitic and that it is anti-Semitic to justify them, but also that, unlike in the USA and other countries where the anti-semitism of these positions and actions has been called out since the 7th of October, in Spain they have been around for a long time and there are no signs of reflexion on the need to detect and reject them.
Where does the antisemitism of today come from?
From Franco's regime to the fall of the Berlin Wall
Leaving aside the ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) and the more pro-American wings of the PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) and CDC (Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya), the generation that lived through the Transition and from which would emerge the militants, leaders and ideologues of the different parties, cultural currents and tendencies of opinion of Spanish democracy had no more than four ideological matrices. After all, these were the ideological matrices that were available in late-Francoist Spain. The Spanish social, political and cultural leaders of the first stage of democracy were formed by them or by a combination of them.
- Catholic fundamentalism, anti-Semitic in origin, which evolved from Carlism to ordoliberalism and finally to liberal-conservatism, as is well explained by José Luís Viñacañas in "La Revolución Pasiva de Franco".
- Social Christianity, going from Ruíz Giménez, to the Maoist ORT (Organización Revolucionaria de los Trabajadores), the HOAC (Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica) all the way to the JOC (Juventud Obrera Católica), whose cadres would feed both PP and PSOE and which never really got rid of the anti-Semitism of its origins in Acción Católica.
- Falangism, a populist matrix that permeates the Spanish left and right to this day to a greater or lesser degree and which was violently anti-Semitic already in its foundational bases.
- The PCE (Partido Comunista de España), which communicated with Falangism more than is usually recognized and which, during the 40s and 50s, blindly followed the dictates of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), which went from supporting the birth of Israel in the framework of the so-called "two-state solution" to calling for the throwing of Jews into the sea and profusely using anti-Semitic clichés in its propaganda in support of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation).
But even if we depart from this sad and poor cartography, the significance of the period in reality resides in the general ideological aggiornamiento of both the left and the right. Although the cultural remnants of the generations formed under Franco undoubtedly remain, there does not exist any current that has not evaluated its own foundations and has undertaken a process of criticism of the social values inherited by the generations formed under the dictatorship. Clericalism, male chauvinism, homophobia and to a lesser extent antigypsyism were all called into question, initiating a profound and dynamic transformation of acceptable social values that would transform Spanish identity from then on.
Why was there no similar critique of anti-Semitism? Simply because Jews did not exist socially in the Spain of the 1970s and 1980s.
The normalisation begun by Franco in 1954 with the opening of the Barcelona synagogue and the revocation in 1968 of the expulsion decree did not even make visible the existence of the very small Jewish community existing at that time in the peninsula. It is not just a metaphor: the Madrid synagogue, inaugurated in 1968, was intentionally located behind a church in a hidden place not visible from any main street.
With late Francoism, Jewish community gained a space to exist legally, but not socially.
Upon Franco's death, in November 1975, an overwhelming majority of peninsular Spaniards did not know, not even through the media, a single Spanish Jew. The first public Spanish Jews would be the Múgica-Herzog brothers: Enrique, who in 1988 became Minister of Justice, and Fernando, one of the founding members of the Basque Council -a precursor body of Basque autonomy-, later senator for the PSOE and creator of the Spain-Israel Friendship Association. Both would be regular victims of anti-Semitic clichés in the caricaturism of the newspapers and political propaganda of every type without anyone seeming to notice in the least.
And it is that the general consensus at the time and during the following decades was that anti-Semitism simply did not exist because in Spain there are no Jews. And it is true that it did not exist as a social problem, that is to say, socially recognized. That does not mean, however, that it does not exist and that wide social strata do not share widespread and violent anti-Semitic prejudices.
The root of this does not reside in a class-based or inter-religious conflict. Nor can it be blamed on the myths of medieval Christianity, the origins of nationality, the expulsion of 1492 or the persecution of the "Marranos". The root of the problem today is the slow, late and incomplete overcoming of the clichés of both Carlism and the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s.
The post-Cold War era and the transformation of anti-Semitism into a weapon of partisan struggle
This will become even more evident in the 1990s and 2000s, when after the collapse of the USSR, Stalinism disappears as the main ideological referent of the social currents of the left. There emerged with the anti-globalization movements what was later characterized as a gentrification of the themes of the old Stalinism, including support for any antagonist of Israel, which had served as a vector of anti-Semitism among the left.
The right, for its part, would split - and the consequence is clearly visible today - between a right wing friendly with fake news and conspiracies which after 9/11 spread profusely, in particular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the attack on the Twin Towers (Jews did not go to work that day, etc.); and the majority of the right which, aligned with US positions, would accuse the anti-Israeli discourse of the left of anti-Semitism.
The accusations of anti-Semitism then become a weapon of the partisan struggle between right and left in a political landscape that, after the attacks of March 11, 2004, would remain in permanent tension.
Although in the short term this reduced the rate of anti-Semitism -which began to be measured in 2010-, as certain anti-Semitic positions gradually became more uncomfortable for the conservative public, the overall result in the medium term could not be any more negative: the exoneration of anyone from developing an in-depth cultural values critique, consolidating certain anti-Semitic clichés and positions in the progressive culture, a somewhat undefined amalgam that replaced the post-war doctrinal frameworks among the new left-wing tendencies that materialized in parliaments since the 2008 crisis.
The vicious cycle between the rejection of Israel and anti-Semitism
Up to this point we have spoken of the dominant ideological and social currents and how they maintained inherited anti-Semitic cultural molds which, in the course of global political evolution, were given new meanings and substance in relation to to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while remaining normalised.
The principal consequence of this development is an impoverishment, almost an unidimensionalisation of all that is Jewish and Jews on the part of a wide sector of Spanish public opinion. Jewish people and all that is Jewish -still invisible in the daily life for most of the peninsulars- are seen from the perspective of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
A vicious cycle is thus formed in which the rejection of Israeli government policies towards the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank spontaneously translates into justification of anti-Semitism, so that anti-Semitism grows with each blow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to the DYM survey of October 2023, 23.2% of Spaniards view Israel with antipathy, which if coupled with the fact that 56% of Spaniards believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, configures a promising future for anti-Semitism.
How to break the vicious cycle
The second half of the last century gives us a clue. The Arab-Palestinian-Israeli conflict did not always mediate the understanding of all that is Jewish in Spain. In the 1960s and early 1970s "dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young people" opposed to Francoism, traveled to kibbutzim in search of social and organisational models that would satisfy their need for community and social transformation.
Their impact in Spain, especially in Catalonia, was also long-lasting. From that environment emerged many of the voices that knew how to confront Spanish anti-Semitism while remaining radically critical of the policies of post-Oslo Israeli governments in the conflict.
When we listen to their testimonies today, we cannot help but think of the need to make up for lost time in the most socially conscious environments.
A vicious cycle is broken by acting simultaneously on all parts of the chain. Which in this context means breaking the one-dimensionality of the predominating perspective on the Jewish experience today by making visible both the current and daily contribution of European Jews to the problems of the century, as well as the Israeli historical experience, wherever they can serve as a contribution to today's problems.
The problems that most of the Spanish (and Portuguese) territory confront today are related to depopulation, agricultural sustainability and adaptation to droughts. Meanwhile, in the urban population, the ghost of the lack of large educational and social action movements for children and young people appears again and again.
All these issues are well rooted in the Jewish experience, both Jewish-European and Israeli, of the last century and a half.
- Much can be learned from the great Jewish transnational educational movements such as Dror or Mishol when it comes to the creation of solutions for educational leisure and social impact on a peninsular and European scale. Also and especially, of their use of digitisation to broaden the impact of social work.
- Much can be learned from current experiences of ecological agricultural development such as Lotan or Samar, but also from innovative models of cooperative housing and social development.
- Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Portuguese history must be recovered by bringing to the forefront the actuality and impact of associations such as Alma de Andalucía, Mozaika or Toldot in the recovery and productive and social use of patrimony.
- And we certainly have a lot to learn from the morality of tikkun olam, repairing the world, encouraged by associations like Gesher and their approach to community contribution.
Conclusions
Spain is the country with the most widespread anti-Semitism in Western Europe. In the years of the Transition it was only the last ideological remnant of Franco's regime but, due to the lack of visibility of the Jewish community, it has become over time a pending task. The consequence is the implantation in very broad social strata of a one-dimensional perspective on all that is Jewish and Jews, preparing fertile ground for anti-Semitism. The problem then becomes eternalized and enters a vicious cycle in which, thanks to this one-dimensionality that reduces Jewish people to a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, antisemitism is made invisible and becomes socially justified through the rejection of the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Confronting anti-Semitism consists, today, in broadening the perspective on the Jewish experience by making visible the daily contribution of Spanish Jews and the potential of the Israeli experience on the major issues of the century: from the ecological transition to educational movements, from the strengthening of patrimony to digitisation with social impact.
And it cannot be a mere communication, a mere story or promotion. It is about multiplying and making visible the contribution so that it is felt as part of the social and collective experience of our time. So that, once and for all, Jewish people and all that is Jewish are no longer considered as outsiders representing a reality of war and exclusion.