Spanish Attitudes Toward Judaism: Strains of Anti-Semitism from the Inquisition to Franco and the Holocaust

Analyzing the history of the Jews of Spain from the time of the Visigoths to the present, this study investigates periods of discrimination against converted Jews that went beyond the merely religious, finding similarities to the racial and secular anti-Semitism of modernity. Some scholars have drawn parallels between the Spanish castizo ethnicism embodied in the "cleanliness of blood" statutes and the German volkisch (anti-Semitic) beliefs that sustained Nazism. Others have found Inquisit...