Sephardic Studies in the Service  of National Catholicism: The Institutionalization of Sephardic Studies  by Francisco Franco at Spain’s National Research Institute in Madrid, 1940-1950.”  

• In Event: New Crossroads in Iberian and Jewish Studies I: Re-encounters, Returns, and Recoveries in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic World

Abstract

In 1940, almost nineteen months after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War, Spanish head of State, General Francisco Franco, established the Benito Arias Montano Institute of Hebraic Studies within the recently established Spanish National Research Council. The institute became the first academic institution in modern Spain dedicated specifically to Hebraic and Sephardic Studies and in 1941, it published the first volume of its journal SEFARAD. SEFARAD, the first Spanish academic journal dedicated exclusively to Judaic studies would become the Institute’s principal organ of scholarly dissemination. The founding of the institute was nonetheless presented by its founders not as much as an unprecedented event, but rather as an organic development in the “restoration” of the briefly interrupted teleology of Spanish history: A history of an eternal united Catholic Spain.

This paper examines the founding and early years of the Arias Montanto Institute and its journal. It explores how the institute served to reclaim Sepharad and consolidate earlier attempts of recovery of the Jewish past in Spain, for Franco’s project of National Catholicism in the aftermath of the war.  Such efforts emphasized Spanish Jewry’s purer and superior character due to its intimate—and prolonged—exposure to Christianity in the particular Iberian setting. It was elsewhere in Europe that “Judaism had acquired the materialistic character manifested by a certain segment of its sectors.” This historical recovery was thus affected by racial theory and perspectives on Jewish race and its degradation, even as it deployed a variety of cultural Hispanism to rescue or exempt Sephardic Jews and ultimately Spain from that taint. These efforts also married fascist inspired race theory to earlier and more developed Spanish cultural paradigms for understanding and claiming Sepharad, including Liberal and Republican philosephardism. This formal institutionalization of the recovery of the Jewish past, moreover, coexisted with the Franco regime’s habitual declarations of a “Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy” plaguing Spain. The conjuncture of the establishment of Sephardic Studies as a formal discipline of scholarly inquiry in Spain with the rise of National Catholicism and the antisemitism of the Franco regime accentuates the ambivalent relationship of modern Spain to its Jewish past.

Author

• Michal Rose Friedman, Michal Friedman