Iberianism and Its Discontents

Abstract

Muñoz Molina’s claim that the history of Europe’s painful diasporas throughout the first half of the twentieth century is not part of Spanish cultural and political discourse may be true if we are referring only to contemporary cultural production. The Spanish intellectuals and public opinion at the end of the nineteenth century and beginnings of the twentieth century, however, did pay good attention to what was known throughout Europe as the Jewish problem and, as it could be expected, whenever they articulated their position against or in favor of the European pogroms, they did so by referring to Sepharad and the forced exile of the Sephardim out of Spain.