Citizenship and Responsibility for the Past: The Spanish Sephardim and Moriscos

• In Event: Beyond, Within and Across States: Considerations on Immigration and Migration

Abstract

In 2015, the Spanish Parliament to pass, by a unanimous voice-vote, a law granting citizenship to the descendants of all Sephardic Jews expelled in 1492. Such a generous citizenship policy was never extended to the descendants of the Moriscos, Muslim converts to Catholicism who were expelled from Spain in 1607 and ended up primarily in North Africa. This differential treatment bears a significant contemporary effect, since unlike the Sephardic diaspora, Morocco and other North African countries constitute a large source of contemporary Spanish immigrants, both legal and illegal.
In this essay, I use Spain’s decision to expedite citizenship for descendants of the Sephardim but not the Moriscos in order to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of three normative models for linking immigration and citizenship with responsibility for the past. Whereas the model of reparations for historic injustice cannot address the full range of victims of the fundamental injustice visited upon Jews and Muslims in early modern Spain, the model of coercively constituted identities more perversely, if inadvertently, justifies Spain’s preference for the descendants of the Sephardim over the Moriscos. Only the model of remedial responsibility provides a coherent approach to how contemporary Spain must confront the legacy of the fundamental injustice historically suffered by the Sephardim and the Moriscos.
My analysis begins by examining contemporary justifications and criticisms of the 2015 citizenship law in relation to how contemporary Spaniards ought to view the fundamental injustice visited upon the Sephardim and Moriscos in early modern Spain. I then examine how each of the three theoretical models for linking immigration and citizenship with responsibility for the past would assess to the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law in light of the fundamental injustice visited on the Sephardim and Moriscos in early modern Spain. I conclude that the remediate model properly prioritizes the citizenship claims of contemporary descendants of fundamental injustice who face the greatest economic or political threats, and thus places greater weight on the descendants of the Moriscos.

Author

• Michael R. James, Bucknell University