TY - JOUR
T1 - Rancor
T2 - Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment
AU - McDonald, Charles A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments: My thanks to colleagues who commented on earlier incarnations of this article: Tom Abercrombie, Kimberly Arkin, Jonathan Boyarin, Julia Phillips Cohen, Sultan Doughan, Daniela Flesler, Michal Friedman, Emily Marker, Valentina Ramia, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar, Jon Snyder, Ann Stoler, Miriam Ticktin, and Jeremy Varon. I presented versions of this paper at the Association for Jewish Studies Meeting, the American Anthropological Association Meeting, Rice University, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas-Austin. I especially thank the editors and reviewers at CSSH for their insightful comments. In Spain, I am grateful to the FCJE, Paloma Díaz-Mas, and Liliana Suárez-Navaz. Librarians and staff at the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, Real Academia Nacional de Medicina, the Center for Jewish History, and the American Sephardi Federation provided invaluable assistance. Research and writing for this article were supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Posen Foundation, American Academy for Jewish Research, the Center for Jewish History, the New School for Social Research, the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rice University, and the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish to English are my own. 1 “Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesión de la nacionalidad española a los sefardíes originarios de España,” Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE), 51, 25.06.2015, 52557– 52664, https://www.boe.es/eli/es/l/2015/06/24/12/dof/spa/pdf.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the return of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of racial fusion, philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not harbor rancor for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but 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.
AB - In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the return of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of racial fusion, philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not harbor rancor for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but 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.
KW - affect
KW - citizenship
KW - empire
KW - race
KW - rancor
KW - ressentiment
KW - return
KW - sentiment
KW - Sephardi Jews
KW - Spain
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U2 - 10.1017/S0010417521000190
DO - 10.1017/S0010417521000190
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85109163067
VL - 63
SP - 722
EP - 751
JO - Comparative Studies in Society and History
JF - Comparative Studies in Society and History
SN - 0010-4175
IS - 3
ER -