THE BLIND SPOTS OF SECULARIZATION

ABSTRACT

According to several international surveys Spain is among the western countries with the most negative views of Jews. While quantitative data on the topic accumulates, there is a significant lack of interpretative approaches that might explain the particular Spanish case. This paper presents the background, methodology and major results of a discussion group-based study on antisemitism, which was conducted in Spain in the autumn of 2009. The study identifies and locates in different socio-economic and ideological milieus the range of stereotypical discourses on Jews, Judaism and the Arab–Israeli conflict in Spain. Analysis of the group meetings shows that, despite growing secularization in Spanish society, the central explanatory variable for persisting and resurging antisemitism in this country is still religion in a broad cultural sense.

Keywords:

• antisemitism
• Spain
• Jews
• secularization
• Muslims
• qualitative methodology

Notes

¹We thank Hubert Knoblauch and Bernt Schnettler for the critical feedback and helpful comments given at the sociological research Kolloqiums of the Technical University Berlin and the University of Bayreuth. We also wish to thank the blind reviewers for insightful feedback as well as the editors of this volume, Robert Fine and Christine Achinger, for their comments, amendments and patience. We are grateful to Eric Heuberger for his careful proofreading of the English manuscript. Special thanks go to Patricio Pedraza. Without his professional commitment and his expertise conducting group discussions this study would never have been accomplished.

²For example, in the last survey undertaken in 2009, 74 percent of those interviewed answered ‘fairly certain’ to the statement: ‘Jews enjoy too much power in international financial markets’ See: Anti-Defamation League, Attitudes Toward Jews in Seven European Countries, February 2009.http://www.adl.org/Public%20ADL%20Antisemitism%20Presentation%20February%202009%20_3_.pdf

³Only questionnaires carried out in a standardized way will produce comparable data across different countries. But the question arises whether one should suppose that the categories used in survey studies are adequate for the comparative study of antisemitic opinions and attitudes. In addition to being elusive, they are marked by their own homegrown character.

⁴ Casticismo is a literary, cultural and ideological style linked to reactionary thinking. It is an assertion of traditionalism, expressed in terms of culture, religion, life style, attitudes, speech or political and social organization. It is perceived by traditionalists as behavior proper to their breeding (casta), seen not as a question of race or ethnicity but as a reflection of national Spanish character (see Stallaert 1998).

⁵According to Isabel Rohr, this political myth was developed in the nineteenth century ‘as Spanish intellectuals, traumatized by the loss of Spain's American colonies, pondered their national identity and history’. The idea was that ‘there existed an eternal Catholic-Spanish essence, Hispanidad, born in the Visigoth time and resurrected during the centuries-long fight to capture Spain back from the Moors, the Reconquista’ (Rohr 2007: 4).

⁶The path to secularization in Spain is reflected dramatically in individual religious practices, although not as much in religious identification. According to the survey barometer of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), December 2006, 77.1 percent of Spaniards still define themselves as Catholics.

⁷According to the Transatlantic Trends study of 2004, in Spain hostile sentiments towards the United States are the most pronounced in Europe.

⁸The discussion group is a qualitative research technique anchored in two theoretical approaches with substantial epistemological differences. The North American version, best known today as the focus group, was developed through the use of group interview techniques as an instrument of social and psychotherapy-based analysis. It was undertaken in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s by Robert K. Merton, M. Fiske and Patricia L. Kendall. The other version is European, in particular Spanish, the work of Jesús Ibáñez (1979). Known as the ‘discussion group’, its theoretical framework combines linguistics, semiotics, and structuralism. As a research method it has been developed by Enrique Martin Criado (1997), who added an interactionist dimension to the analysis. It is nowadays widely employed for the empirical analysis of daily social life (see Valles and Baer 2005, Alonso 1998). Research on antisemitism with this type of methodology can be traced back to the ‘Group experiments’ conducted by Friedrich Pollock at the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung in 1950/51 (Pollock and Adorno 2011).

⁹To the extent that modern antisemitism is expressed in fundamentally anti-liberal and anti-modern terms, social class is obviously only one variable among others, closely correlated to political and religious aspects, and would require more detailed explanation (see Goldberg 2008).

¹⁰Two groups which were part of our initial conception were not included due to budgetary limits. RG7 included the unemployed and sub-employed living in the urban periphery. RG8 was conceived in order to explore the possible survival of a coexistence heritage – the myth of ‘Sefarad’ and of the three cultures – in a location (notably Andalusia) where this conception is widespread.

¹¹‘What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning’ (Northrop 1962: 17).

¹²As indicated by Jose Manuel Pedrosa, ‘the Spanish tradition of anti-Judaism is closely related to similar traditions which have been wielded against other people’ (2007: 32).

¹³The crisis of the ancien régime began and ended much later in Spain than in France. The reasons for this delay lie in Spain′s belated capitalist development and the peripheral character of its industrial and financial development. There was also no nationally powerful bourgeoisie (see Perez Agote 2010: 227).

¹⁴In some isolated cases, where the participant had actual experience of Jews, there is an immediate questioning of the use of these negative stereotypes. This occurred in RG2 (corporate) and in RG5 (students from Barcelona). In both cases an important element of reflectivity was introduced into the group dynamic.

¹⁵Glock defines this dimension in terms of the consequences of belief, religious praxis and religious experience on the everyday life of individuals (Starck and Glock 1970: 16). Here we explore the traces of Catholicism in the habitus of individuals, a system of dispositions ‘whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production’ (Bourdieu 1990: 55).

¹⁶See, for example, the condensed discourse of our group of Madrid progressives: ‘and obviously, most of us are Catholics. As I've said, ‘we are’ because that's our tradition. In fact, I'm also an atheist’ (RG6).

¹⁷We would agree with scholars who interpret antisemitism in terms of cultural theory as a function of Christianity. William Brustein (2003) also distinguishes between religious, economic and political dimensions of antisemitic discourse (adding a fourth racial dimension). His answer to the persistence of antisemitism is the primacy of Judaism as the core belief system through which and against which the central cultural/religious motors of European identity are defined.

¹⁸There is a growing emphasis on feelings over reason, and to the detriment of the latter, emanating from Palestine Solidarity campaigns in Spain. See, for instance, a recent video in support of a second flotilla to break the Gaza blockade with the title ‘Y tú qué sientes’ (What do you feel?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH04W38WBDQ.