Feeling Hate in Sepharad: Perception, Embodiment, and the Politics of Sentiment in Spain

• In Event: Politics of Hate? Crafting European Belonging through anti-Jewish Hatreds Old and New

Abstract

Spain—alongside Poland—is regularly and widely recognized as the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, a dubious distinction earned on the basis not only of poll data, but thanks as well to enduring narratives of each place as home to ancient, and recalcitrantly unchanged, hatreds of Jews. And yet, both Spain and Poland have nurtured dramatic Jewish revivals in recent years. In this talk, I consider the affective terrain produced by coextensive topographies of extermination and revival. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Spain over the past decade, I seek to illuminate some of the responses to and reconfigurations of sentiments understood to be anti-Semitic at a time when Jewish revivalism is increasingly central to Spanish statecraft, Jewish communal life, and public culture.

The talk is less interested in identifying the contradictions and ambivalences characteristic of post-Holocaust Europe’s reckoning with its Jewish past and the place of that past in contemporary liberal projects of inclusion (Bunzl 2004, 2007; Flesler, et al 2013; Gruber 2002; Lehrer 2013; Leite 2017) than it is in asking what an ecology that is both hostile and recuperative makes possible. In particular, I focus on what antisemitism, or the perception of it, elicits in Jewish subjects and collectives who understand themselves as its targets. How do Spanish Jews attune themselves to the possibility of antisemitism and register its presence? What forms—aesthetic, affective, embodied—do their responses to antisemitism assume? As examples, I consider video of a 2010 Inquisition commemoration at Casa Sefarad, a private museum in Córdoba’s medieval Jewish Quarter; a very public debate about the future for Jews in Spain in the wake of 2017 terrorist attacks in Barcelona; a photo of a swastika spray-painted on a statue of Maimonides; and the itinerary of a kipa. Such an approach, I argue, moves us away from a notion of subjects as merely bearers of political sentiments and toward a recognition that subjects are produced through them. This, in turn, suggests that social scientists and our interlocutors should reconsider our continued conception of the state as the ultimate ground of the political.

Author

• Charles A. McDonald, Rice University