Every 12th of October, the Iberosphere grapples with its own traumatic identity. Populist politicians engage in bizarre proclamations of self-hatred, trying to obtain some sort of political capital based on historical falsehoods. However, a new current of collective celebration is also taking hold, and not without good reason: the Spanish-speaking world was responsible for some of the cultural seeds of what we call the “free world”.

Spain’s reputation had been historically castigated, for the best part of four centuries, as part of the war of propaganda between Catholic and Protestant Europe that led to the Black Legend and to a patronising, Orientalist, often racist, view of the Iberosphere that was reinforced by Romanticism. Popular perceptions of Spain’s Reconquest and global expansion were shaped by false or decontextualised narratives about the Inquisition and the values of its empire.

This is despite the positive contributions made in recent decades by, amongst others, rigorous English-speaking Hispanists such as John Elliott, Geoffrey Parker, and Stanley Payne. Reclaiming Spain’s history as a fundamental element of the development of Western ideas requires a significant step forward: accepting that the West cannot be understood without the contributions made by Al-Andalus, Sefarad, and the Spanish Christian kingdoms to the development of European civilisations.

The tradition that led to the separation of Church and State is inextricable, in its most profound roots, from the double truth expounded by Averroes. This doctrine interacted with Thomistic thought in Scholastic Christianity and paved the philosophical way for Humanistic ideas, centuries before the Renaissance. Advances in medicine were shaped by Avicenna and his Canon Medicinae, which filtered through to Europe via Southern Spain.

The configuration of our rights-based notion of the law is also indebted to Maimonides and his preference for acquitting a thousand criminals over condemning a single innocent man. The works of the Classics were translated, adapted and reinterpreted at the School of Translators of Toledo, set up by the Christian Kingdom of Castile under the sponsorship of King Alfonso X the Wise.

The New Laws of the Indies, partly informed by the empathetic recommendations of Bartolomé de las Casas, and based on the philosophy of Scholastics of Salamanca such as Francisco de Vitoria, were an early attempt at consecrating the dignity of the indigenous people in the letter of the law. This was a moral debate that only reached other European empires many centuries later.

Spain’s official policy concluded, with Vitoria’s De Indis, that the indigenous people of the New World had agency, dignity, and needed to be treated fairly as fellow human beings with a soul of their own. “No one is born a slave”, Vitoria told Emperor Carlos, and that became the law.

The Spanish crown defended such notions, in an almost utopian struggle against human nature and the dynamics of colonialism, to the best of its capacity during the viceroyalties system. Spain built an empire based on “borders of inclusion” that led to a mestizo continent, in contrast with the largely white Anglosphere with its “borders of exclusion”. There are 48 UNESCO world heritage sites, such as universities and hospitals, built by the Spanish crown outside Spain, in stark contrast with just 14 left by the British Empire across the world.

Similarly, the 2021 iteration of the series Ethnologue: Languages of the World documented the survival of 30 million speakers of indigenous languages in the territories of the former Spanish crown, spread over a hundred aboriginal languages. Of these, Guarani, with 6.5 million speakers, is the most widely spoken.

By contrast, North of the Rio Grande, barely 170,000 speakers of Navajo and a few tens of thousands of Sioux and Western Apache survive. Unlike other global languages such as English, French or Mandarin, Spanish did not expand as a predator of minority languages, but rather as a guarantor of their survival.

Francisco de Vitoria himself advocated that the conversion to Christianity of the American Indians could only be carried out through a system that ensured mutual understanding. This partly stemmed from Spain’s tradition of integration by persuasion. Spanish Franciscans were responsible for the first grammars of Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, as well as catechisms and manuals of Otomi, Purepecha and Mayan, whose formal survival is largely due to their efforts.

Likewise, the Dominicans did the same with the Mixtec and Zapotec languages, and the Jesuits promoted the formalisation, use and development of the Guarani, Mapudungun and Allentiac languages in the Southern Cone. Quechua even spread to regions where it had never been the dominant language.

The great unifying expansion of Spanish at the expense of the indigenous languages throughout the American continent took place after the declarations of independence of the different Spanish-American Republics, after the expulsion of the Jesuits in the 18th century, and with the collapse of the empire in the 19th century. These historical developments also removed the Spanish crown’s protective measures for indigenous people. Their populations in countries like Mexico were subsequently decimated.

In cultural and geopolitical terms, a more united Iberosphere would be a formidable force in today’s world. Some of its distinctive values, such as mestizaje, inclusivity and collectivity, are arguably worthy of celebration. Instead, a divided Spanish-speaking world renders its components irrelevant, subjugated to the will of others who may have fewer achievements to celebrate but certainly have a greater sense of the benefits of collective purpose. To make progress, we need to abandon the fatalistic, melancholic cycle of self-blame, and move on as a more cohesive front.

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Bylines on 14-10-2021

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon – Maimónides (c.1135-1208)

A year ago today, a coordinated Hamas-led attack on Israel left a trail of destruction, some 1,200 people killed, most of them civilians, and several other thousands injured. Many Israelis remain hostages of the terrorist group. On 19 October 2023, the European Parliament passed a resolution of condemnation against this atrocious act of terrorism. 500 MEPs voted in favour of the motion, with a small group of 21 voting against it. Of those, four were Spanish MEPs. A month later, two of them, Sira Rego and Ernest Urtasun, were named Senior Ministers of the Spanish government by Pedro Sánchez. In May of this year, Spain, together with Ireland and Norway, formally recognised the “State of Palestine”.

Shortly after, Vice-President Yolanda Díaz concluded a rally by shouting the anti-Israeli slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. A few weeks passed and, in June, Spain became the first European nation to join South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel, which accuses the Jewish state of genocide. In July, Spain’s Defence Minister Margarita Robles explicitly alleged that Israel was guilty of genocide, whilst complaining of NATO’s “double standards” vis-à-vis Ukraine.

The optics arising from the above sequence of events tell their own story. Over the past twelve months, Spain has been the flag bearer of the most uncompromising anti-Israeli stances in the Western world. This has resulted in an exchange of hostile declarations between both governments, followed by the summoning of the ambassadors in Madrid and Tel Aviv. Spanish-Israeli bilateral relations, which only began in 1986, are now at their lowest ebb. Meanwhile, Hamas has praised Spain’s “clear, bold stance” on the conflict. A second iteration of the Conference of Madrid of 1991, which led to a peace treatise, would be unthinkable today: Spain has unilaterally abandoned any credibility as a potential broker of an agreement between the belligerent parties, by unequivocally adopting a defiant anti-Israeli rhetoric that can only be explained by ideological entrenchment.

In the early 90s, Spain gained considerable political capital by presenting itself as a historical bridge between Jews and Muslims, whilst appealing to an idealised account of its own past. Having grappled with its own ghosts, Spain’s young democracy was seen as an example of orderly, rule-based reconciliation against the odds —one that could be exported to other troubled parts of the world. Al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and Sefarad (Jewish Spain) were also an inspiring role model for coexistence that could be applied to the Middle East. Some of that naïve optimism remained when, in 2009, US President Barack Obama delivered a well-meaning speech at the University of Cairo in which he made historically false claims about Spain’s past. Obama presented Al-Andalus as an example for the present by quoting decontextualised ideas from María Rosa Menocal’s landmark book of 2002 The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.

In 2015, the Spanish Parliament passed a bill granting Spanish (and therefore European) citizenship to all descendants of the Sephardic diaspora. This was a symbolic repeal of the Alhambra Decree of 1492, which forced Spain’s Jews to choose between conversion and exile. Some 125,000 people took advantage of the law, which was aimed at “correcting a historical wrong”, reconciling Spain with its Jewish past, and recognising Jewish contributions to Spanish and European history. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia spoke of the “shameful” actions of his ancestors in a ceremony with Spain’s Jewish communities.

The words of royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, in his account of the expulsion of 1492, resonated again in 2015:

And they [the Spanish Jews] left the land of their ancestors and their birth, the young and the old, some on foot, others riding their donkeys (…). They walked the roads with sadness and difficulty, some of them falling, others getting up from the floor, others dying, others being born, others falling ill. There was no good Christian who could look the other way and not suffer their pain. And everyone, wherever they went, begged them to baptise and stay. And some, in their unspeakable pain, converted and stayed, but very few of them. The Rabbis tried to lift their spirits. Young men and women sang and played the drums to encourage their people. And this is how they left Spain and reached the seaports that were assigned to them.

These acts of historical restitution were not to the detriment of Spain’s traditional ties with the Arab world. They were, on the other hand, a positive deployment of soft power. Remembrance of the Sephardim also served to integrate the Israeli Academy of Ladino / Judeo-Spanish into the network of Royal Academies of the Spanish language across the world. Historicist revival also brought with it a timely and sobering reminder of the fate of one of the biggest Sephardic communities of the 20^th century, that of Thessaloniki, most of whose members perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Through a mixture of ignorance, posturing, and, in many cases, raw antisemitism, Pedro Sánchez and his allies have undone decades of work. They have indulged in explicit denial of Israel’s right to exist; they have earned the enthusiastic praise of Islamist terrorists; their supporters’ social media have caricatured Judaism as the engine of an alleged genocide sponsored by global capitalism; they have turned a conscious blind eye on the thousands of Iran-sponsored rockets raining over Israeli civilians; they appear oblivious of the fact that Israel’s existence is directly dependent on an Iron Dome that is not an expensive extravagance but the last line of defence preventing Hamas and Hezbollah from wiping out all Jews, “from the river to the sea”.

Netanyahu’s government shall pass, as shall Sánchez’s, but Israel is unlikely to forget any time soon that, in the year that followed the worst massacre of Jews since World War II, Spain was again the hostile and bitter “uttermost West” decried by Judah ha-Levi when longing for a return to Jerusalem in his poem “My heart is in the East”. Another Sephardic thinker, the ever-empathetic and rationalistic Maimónides, defined evil as, quite simply, “the absence of good”. In both pragmatic and moral terms, this is also the best definition of Spain’s actions in the past twelve months: a compendium of nihilistic and militant “absences of good”.

Carlos Conde Solares’s forthcoming book is entitled The Last of the Almojarifes: Jewish Scapegoats of the Crown of Castile.