Spain has an awkward relationship with its past. The lamentable restoration of Cadiz’s Castello de Matrea is no exception. A stupefied journalist from the Guardian explains the reconstruction process of the tower ‘in which new…
When Spain shows an interest in its Jewish history, as well as its present Jewish community, it is often attached to a money-making scheme. A cursory glance at the articles and figures criticising the law…
Sitting in Bet Shalom, a reform synagogue on a sloping street off Barcelona’s Gracia, I speak to Jaim Cassim, the synagogue’s president. Additionally, he is the president of the committee set up to make the…
‘I think its a political thing – you need it to have some kind of excuse to be friend of Israel. With this law, you repair the hard feelings of people.’ Laura Kolesnicov, the director…
The Law unifies the two main ways the Government has addressed Jewish history. Not only does it present a version of Sephardic past, and present identity which is in line with their revisionist account, but…
Within Spain’s selection of the more flattering periods of Jewish history, they have scrambled linearity and avoided the legally repressed 20th Century. Un-scrutinised and accounted for history, is simply sidestepped. As with the Red, which…
La Red de Juderias is the most widely known, and publicly criticised, of Spain’s Jewish endeavours. The Red was the main apparatus through which this revision could take place. In 1995, the Spanish government matched…
Spain’s False Restoration of Jewish History Selective Memory The Spanish Government has allegedly, after five centuries, situated their Jewish legacy within their national history. In fact, the history which they present as complete, has been…
Locating Sepharad in Spain’s Law of Return “Berlin’s Jewish population goes back to about 1670. Some of these Jews had Sephardic roots, but they’re hard to trace. I charge US$80/hr, 10 hours minimum.” Roger, a…