You could call it “hypocrisy.”
At the same time as promoting a mass boycott of Israel over the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, Spain’s Socialist government joined four other E.U. member states last week in opposing proposals emanating from Brussels to restrict visas for Russian nationals, due to the Moscow regime’s ongoing war against Ukraine. Spain is content to demonize Israel for fighting a war triggered by a grotesque pogrom while indulging wealthy Russians spending their ill-gotten gains on a beach vacation, even as their armed forces pound civilian targets, abduct Ukrainian children and threaten the security of Poland.
“Hypocrisy” is an accurate descriptor, but it doesn’t quite encapsulate the unctuous nature of the Spanish stance. The country’s double standard isn’t simply the consequence of a strategic calculus. When Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently expressed regret at not possessing nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers to counter the Israel Defense Forces, when he called for the expulsion of the Jewish state from the worlds of culture and sport, when he praised demonstrators harassing Israeli athletes participating in a famous cycling race through Spain, and when he urged the European Union to enact sanctions against Jerusalem, he was channeling a tradition of enmity towards Jews and Judaism that goes back centuries.
In the succession of wars that Israel has fought over the last two decades against Iranian proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, Spain has instinctively and aggressively sided with the Jewish state’s foes. During the war in Lebanon in 2006, another Socialist Prime Minister, José Zapatero, donned a keffiyeh as he denounced Israel for defending itself against Hezbollah missile and rocket barrages. Most of the Spanish media, in thrall to what the long-serving Spanish senator José Laborda once termed the “infantile anti-Americanism” that prevails in contemporary Spain, have for years eagerly participated in depicting Israel as a rogue state without peer.
Ironically, Spain’s embrace of the radical antizionism associated with the far left is built upon a foundation of backward, premodern antisemitism.
Compared to Germany, France and Russia, Spain comparatively receives little attention among scholars of antisemitism. In part, that’s because the German word “Antisemitismus” wasn’t coined until the late 19th century, 400 years after Spain’s rulers—King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—issued the Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from a land where they had once flourished. Nonetheless, Spain has made a major contribution, if you can call it that, to the murky world of Jew-hatred.
One innovation in particular goes a long way in explaining the deadly venom facing Jews in a country that, in our own time, still contained a town named Castrillo Matajudíos (“Fort Kill the Jews”) until it was renamed in 2015. As the Christian Reconquista of Muslim-ruled Spain progressed through the 14th and 15th centuries, resulting in the launch of the Inquisition, Jews were faced with the choice of conversion to Christianity or death. Many chose the former option, often practicing Judaism in secret.
Although Christianity had previously not distinguished between those born into the faith and those who accepted it through conversion, that was no longer the case in Spain. Pre-empting the Nazi race laws by 500 years, the Church in Spain placed a thick wedge between “Old” and “New” Christians—former Jews coerced into the Church on pain of execution. Underpinning this was the concept known as limpieza de sangre, or “blood purity.” Those born as Christians were considered pure, but those who converted were regarded as suspiciously impure.
Statutes based on the “blood purity” concept were enacted across the nation, resulting in one of the earliest examples of racial discrimination. New Christians, or conversos, were prohibited from holding office, testifying in a court of law and marrying Old Christians to maintain the “purity” of their bloodlines. Some theologians also saw Jews as less than human. In his 15th-century polemic Fortalitium Fidei, Alonso de Espina presented Jews as “half-human, half-beast,” remarking that those Jews who chose to be burned at the stake rather than convert were “damned devil’s martyrs.”
As antisemitism’s center of gravity shifted eastwards down the centuries—to France, Poland, Russia, Germany and other countries—Spain became less significant. But the legacy of its anti-Jewish polemics and persecutions, as the eminent historian Benzion Netanyahu (the late father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) wrote, “full of the race hatred and race bias that characterized the thinking, feeling and attitudes” of the Old Christians, certainly impacted the nature of antisemitism elsewhere.
The current surge of hatred in Spain, centered upon Israel, reproduces those ancient themes. At its root is the notion that there is an inherent rottenness within every Jew passed down through the generations. It explains why even those Jews who claim to accept Christ as their Redeemer cannot be trusted.
In a modern Inquisition based on rooting out Zionism, that distinctly Spanish conception can play a major role inside and outside Spain. In many ways, we are already seeing it manifesting in the pro-Hamas movement in several countries, where Jews who declare themselves as anti-Zionists still find themselves accused of “tribalism,” “invoking privilege,” “seeking victimhood” and similar thought crimes as defined by the antisemitic left.
As far as the Spanish government is concerned, it is this same legacy that explains why Spain will cynically follow a policy determined by national interests in the case of Russian slaughter in Ukraine, yet suddenly rediscover its moral compass in the case of Israelis defending themselves from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. For these attitudes to be cast aside, nothing less than a fundamental reformation of Spanish attitudes to Jews is needed.
Absent such a profound transformation, Israelis and Jews need to understand that Madrid is an enemy. That does not mean that every Spanish citizen is a supporter of the government or in agreement with these antisemitic and antizionist positions, and many of them actively and bravely oppose it. It does mean that our interests are served by frustrating and isolating Spain economically and diplomatically, especially in the United States, where the Trump administration increasingly understands the nefarious role that antisemitism plays in setting attitudes, and eventually policies, towards the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel.
