In a recent work by David Nirenberg, Was there Race before Modernity? The Example of Jewish Blood in Late Medieval Spain. he attempts to sort out the nature of racism and its true modern roots by examining the concept of "Jewish Blood" laws in late medieval Spain. Following upon the philosophical construct of "modernity" as developed in the work of Michel Foucault. In analyzing "the state" and how it differed in modern times from earlier epochs, Nirenberg describes Foucault's approach this way;
According to Foucault, medieval sovereignty had been organic and cor-poratist. It was of course hierarchical and therefore often conflictual, but that conflict was always contained by a ritual regime and a historical discourse that were celebratory and inclusive. Even warring nations never forgot their common ancestry, going back, if not to Rome, then toTroy. And from this memory sprang as well a common historiography.“ What is there in [medieval] history,” Foucault asked, quoting Petrarch, “that is not in praise of Rome?" Race arose out of the collapse of this system. By the early seventeenth century society was no longer though of as an organic system but as a binary. The governing metaphor was no longer that of society as a harmonious body, but of society as a war between two irreconcilable groups or bodies. And although those groups could be characterized and classified in a number of ways (as classes, for example), the symbolic logic underlying these classifications was always racial, in that it imagined one group as polluting and the other pure, one to be isolated or exterminated, the other to be protected and reproduced. The emerging nation state was at first the venue for this struggle between groups, then eventually its arbiter, the chief guarantor of racial purity. This final nineteenth-century stage Foucault referred to as “state racism.” And just as history in the Middle Ages had been a reflection of the symbolic order that articulated power in terms of organic unity, in modernity history became a battle field, an accounting of losses and victories in the eternal war of the races.
Nirenberg takes issue at times with Foucault, especially with his implicit concept of medieval society as "organic." None the less, something obviously changed in the perception of Jews from being a religious community to a
"race" in the modern sense. The particular point when "Laws of Blood Purity" (Limpieza de Sangre) could be promulgated by the State seems to be a reasonable place to begin examining modern concepts of race and their political and social application. It is here that Nirnberg, and other scholars critical of much of post-modernist thinking on the history of "race," take issue with the idea that such a concept was absent from Medieval Spain. Nirenberg believes the claim that racism is purely modern is somewhat politically motivated and he never seems to understand how post-modernists could situate the beginning of the modern concept of race in high medieval Iberia. He asserts,
"[Post-modernists] prefer to understand modern racial anti-Semitism as the specific and contingent product of the intersection of capitalism, imperialism, and post-Enlightenment natural science..." Which he decides makes it,
"...a phenomenon radically discontinuous with other and earlier histories." This need not be the case.
The rise of Limpieza de Sangre statutes in mid-15th Century Spain arrived on the scene just before other structural features modern oppression appeared such as the colonial conquest of the America's, the rise of merchantile capitalism and the Atlantic trading empires and, last but certainly not least, two Papal Bulls, one in 1452-the Edict of Nantes-and one in 1455, by Pope Nicholas V giving the blessing of the Church to conquest and slavery. These edicts meant that Christian conquest and enslavement of non-Christians in Africa and the New World would be viewed as acceptable by the Catholic Church. Thus, the racial concepts present in mid-15th century medieval Spain could be seen as the precursor to modern racist theory and practice and not an historic aberration posing a challenge to post-modernist claims of racism's being historically bound to certain epochs. The development of modern racial concepts in late medieval Spain reflected growing social forces there that were modern in character and which set the stage for endeavors such as the rise of modern navigation and science, colonial conquest and the mass enslavement of colonized peoples in mining and agro-export plantation farming all of which were linked to the incipient rise of merchantile capitalism. It is no accident that such historic trends followed closely on the heels of the close of the 15th century and the unification of the Spanish Kingdom in 1492. Thus, racism, a concept which is historically conditioned and whose meaning is strongly bound up with political interest, does find itself at "the intersection" of all these early modern trends.
In examining the persecution of Jews, and particularly the conversos, or forced converts to Christianity, in high medieval Spain and Portugal we should find important clues to understanding the nature of race as a modern social construct and its modern political function in civil society. In reviewing briefly the political landscape of medieval Spain we find that as the Reconquista progressed the Catholic Church in Rome became increasingly emboldened. The eleventh century seemed to be a turning point in the Christian reconquest of Spain with such military leaders as El Cid of the middle nobility winning several important victories against the Moors. Spain was highly disunited at this time and the eleventh century victories over the Moors, climaxing with the conquest of Toledo in 1085 by the armies of Alfonso VI, shifted the power center from the Muslim rulers to the Church and the landed nobility who provided the means to reconquer Spain for Christianity. It was at this point that the Muslim civilization in which enjoyed protection and flourished began to decline as the Reconquista progressed.
At this point, the Royal Courts of Castile, Aragon, and Leon tended to side with the remaining Jewish communities due to their long established contributions and importance to the growth and prosperity of Spanish society. They continued to defend the rights of the Conversos almost until the very end. On the other side of the divide was the Church and the landed nobility which saw itself in competition with Conversos for public offices (such as tax farming) and political influence. The political obsession with racial purity on the part of the Church and the nobility drove the persecution of the Conversos who had long integrated into Spanish society upon conversion.
In 1391, a massive pogrom all over Spain, the first of its kind, led to the death and expulsion of thousands of Jews and the mass conversion of thousands more. But over the following decades, mistrust and resentment of Conversos by the Church and nobility led to a flurry of edicts banning Conversos from all manner of public life. Agitation against the Conversos had intensified after 1391 culminating in the 1449 revolt in Toledo against the Conversos and the Royal Courts that defended them. The riots spread throughout Castile over the following years and took many lives. It was under the mounting pressure leading to the uprising in 1449 that the first edicts of Limpieza de Sangre (Laws for the Purity of Blood) were enacted in Toledo (and later elsewhere) restricting conversos from various areas of public life. Here clearly begins the practice of modern institutional racism against a group to restrict their ability to compete in the political and economic life of the country. One historian describes the racial nature of Iberian anti-Semitism in the late Middle Ages;
Nearly five hundred years before the Holocaust Limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) legislation was both portent and precedent for the Jewish future. Literally translated it means “purity of blood” and as applied during the Inquisition it was paired with mala de sangre, or “black/Jewish blood.” There are stark coincidences between the 15th Century legislation and the 20th Century Nuremberg legislation and this issue will be returned to following the Limpieza in 15th Century Spain.
The author goes on to point out that Conversos could no longer claim the privileges of Christians as they were not of "pure blood." As he states Jewish identity came to be seen as an ascribed racial characteristic and not a religious one per se. Even Baptism could not expunge the Jewish "racial character" so as to remove the "threat" the Converso posed to Spanish society. When the Church extended the Inquisition to Spain in 1481, the persecution of Conversos as racial aliens intensified. Tomas de Torquemada, head of the Spanish Inquisition, became obsessed with "purifying" the Spanish race as epitomized by the Spanish nobility whose European origins were considered beyond question. Thus, Torquemada took as his mission not just the rooting out of religious heresies in purging the Conversos from Spain, but of creating in Spain a "racially pure Spanish society." The author quotes Grosser and Halperin on this historic development;
“[Conversion and assimilation] were no longer a guarantee against prejudice and persecution. The Jewish taint survived and contaminated. In this sense the Inquisition [was] the intellectual and historical precursor of the racial anti-Semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries epitomized by Nazism.” The authors final assessment of the Limpieza de Sangre draws a straight line to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany;
Limpieza de Sangre as determining Jewish blood as basis for exclusion from society continued in use in Spain until removed in 1870. These laws covering social life and eligibility appear nearly identical, inspired if not adopted whole as law excluding Jews from society in Nazi Germany incorporated in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Prohibitions against Jews regarding marriage and sexual relations, attending school and university, practicing various professions, and employment; all were included in law by Germany and served to isolate Jew from Aryan.
Indeed, the very term "anti-Semitism" coined in the 1870s by a German publicist named Wilhelm Marr, intended to signal a decisive shift from religious persecution to the treatment of the Jew as racially alien. Marr's coup de grace in coining the term merely acknowledged the long historic transformation of anti-Semitism from religious persecution to institutionalized racism. Such racism generally results in uncontrolled violence and genocide. Norman Roth, a historian of the period, says of the anti-Converso riots of the late 15th century;
"...from the events detailed here of the anti-Converso riots of the fifteenth century, and of the nature of those who instigated them, we gain many new insights into the probable origins of the Inquisition and the nature and source of the anti-Semitism which sought to eradicate, not a religion, but an entire people."
It should come as no surprise that the development of racism as a mode of discourse and as a structural feature of politics began at a time when civil society conflicts over economic opportunity and access to public office began to intensify. Max Weber referred to racist oppression as "closure"; the use of group identity to bar others from the same socio-economic advantages sought by the dominant social group. Historian Norman Roth, in an excellent article on the anti-Converso riots of the fifteenth century, pointed out that the extreme violence of the riots resulted essentially from "
the socio-economic and political threat which some "old Christians" saw in the Conversos" The political dynamic described by Weber, as a regularized, institutionalized and violently enforced phenomenon, is thoroughly modern. In pre-modern societies, despite the rigidity of caste and status, privileges, rights, honors and duties were often in flux and almost never tied inextricably to one's ascribed traits or ethnic identity. Even slaves had to be manumitted after a time and those of low rank could rise in status through service to the ruler whose rule was personal and not detached or bureaucratic. The systematic racism faced by the Conversos of the late fifteenth century Spain was politically quite modern in character.
Also, this is a time of the growth of the nation-state and the solidification of Spanish identity as a quintessentially national identity which would seem to deny those not deemed "racially pure" or of proper historic lineage or kinship ties the right to be a "proper Spanish subject." It is no accident that 1492 was such a critical conjuncture of the unification of the Spanish nation with the merging of the two Kingdoms, the beginning of exploration in the New World and the expulsion of the Jews form all of Iberia. Modern racism was operative at the intersection of all these events and conditioned them while also being conditioned by them. A straight line from the first laws of Limpieza de Sangra in Toledo (1449) to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany (1935) runs through five centuries of the ongoing development of racism as an ideology that all this time justified the exploitation, persecution, expropriation, expulsion, segregation, marginalization, and, of course, murder. of people whose physical and related characteristics were deemed different from the dominant majority group. It is within the context of this tortured history that anti-Semitism should properly be regarded as racism and nothing less.