Wilfred Mendenson

far-right party Vox have since proposed an alternative “Law of Concord” to “close the wounds” of the past—and all further debate on the topic.

Strangely, the PP’s unwillingness to debate the victims of fascism has stood in sharp contrast to its position on revisiting Spain’s Jewish history. In fact it was Gallardón himself, as minister of Justice, who helped craft legislation (Law 12/2015) that granted an expedited path to Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. The law’s preamble stressed “the shared determination to jointly build a new space of peaceful coexistence and unity in contrast to past intolerance.” The law, in other words, positioned democratic Spain as a nation looking critically at its intolerant past from a pluralistic vision of national identity.

When the law was approved in June 2015, Spanish officials and the leaders of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain emphasized its restorative function, celebrating “a new period of reencounter, dialogue and coexistence.” The Spanish law, much like a similar law passed in Portugal, expands “our understanding of reparation” as it offers “nonresidential dual citizenship with the goal of reconnecting a people wronged long ago to its roots,” Dalia Kadiyoti and Rina Benmayor argue in the introduction to their forthcoming book Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants.

In 2021, we had the chance to interview Gallardón. The law, he said, was meant to “ask the descendants of those affected for forgiveness” and to send “a message to the new generations that there are things that should never be repeated.” He also stressed how important it was that all political parties supported the law—an ironic position in light of his party’s steadfast opposition to the law of Historical Memory. In fact, he framed his law as “recovery of historical memory,” invoking the phrase championed by the Spanish memory movement in its demands for full accountability for Francoist crimes. In other words, while the idea of reparations for Francoist repression, including amending the amnesty law of 1977, remains taboo among the Spanish Right, apparently it is acceptable to publicly address the memory of Jewish persecution and expulsion, albeit cursorily. In fact, it was the PP that took the initiative. How do we explain this paradox? What is it about the memory of the expelled Sephardi descendants that makes it acceptable to the Spanish Right?

Here it is important to remember that in earlier periods, particularly during the Franco era, Jewish leaders in Spain were pressured to lend legitimacy to particular government actions. Franco government officials believed in the existence of a “US Jewish lobby” influencing international public opinion. Accordingly, they viewed any “gesture of goodwill” toward Spain’s Jews as potentially helping Spain’s relations with the United States, which in turn proved crucial to overcome the regime’s international isolation after 1953. Some of these older assumptions— and relations between the Spanish Right and Jewish representatives—are still at play today. They were also implicit in the creation of Law 12/2015. “The Jews represent a convenient memory,” Holocaust scholar Alejandro Baer told us in 2021. “They don’t seek any revenge … They don’t challenge you and allow you to bolster the idea that there are others who should be forgotten.”

Thus, we witness a situation in which the historical memory of the Sephardic Jews—painted as a community that has maintained its love and loyalty for Spain despite persecution and expulsion, and that should be repaired for past wrongs—serves to delegitimize and undermine the historical memory of the victims of Francoist repression, along with the claims for historical reparation made by other minoritized groups over the course of

Spanish history.

The truth is that the law for Sephardi descendants pays little more than lip service to a democratic, tolerant, or multicultural vision of Spain. In practice, Spanish citizenship remains a privilege difficult to attain, as applicants are asked to meet a series of specific expectations and bureaucratic requirements. In the end, the

Spanish Right’s wholesale rejection of the Law of Historical Memory regarding the Spanish Civil War and its reparative gestures towards the memory of Sephardi descendants spring from the same source: a vision of nationhood built on a limited notion of “concordia” that does not truly examine the past but uses it to further cement conservative notions of unity and Spanishness.

Daniela Flesler is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. Michal Friedman is the The Jack Buncher Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. This essay is based on research for their chapter “Negotiating Historical Redress: The Spanish Law of Nationality for Sephardi Descendants and Spain’s Jewish Communities,” in Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal, ed. Rina Benmayor & Dalia Kandiyoti, forthcoming with Berghahn in 2023.

CIT Y COLLEGE REISSUES TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN VOLUNTEER WHO DIED IN SPAIN

By Isabel Estrada

ilfred Mendelson (1915-1938), better known as “Mendy,” was one of thirteen CCNY

Wstudents, faculty and staff volunteers, out of a total of 60, who died fighting in support of Spain’s democracy during the Spanish civil war. A moving 1942 tribute to Mendy from his friends, Let My People Know, is now available online in a new critical edition prepared by CCNY faculty and students. The 96-page pamphlet was originally edited by Joseph Leeds.

A son of Ukrainian immigrants who settled in the lower east side of NYC, Mendy was a charismatic leader who had joined the labor movement that emerged from the discrimination of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe. Before joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, he wrote about the threat of fascism in college publications and lectured in New York City in favor of freedom of speech in the USA.

Our annotated edition of the pamphlet—one of whose few existing copies belongs to the Cohen Library of the City College of New York (CCNY)—features the political activism of Jewish students but also highlights the strong bonds of solidarity between Jewish and African American communities in the 1930s. The writing of CCNY students in the 1930s demonstrates the shared social agendas of the Jewish and the African American communities at the local level (specifically in Harlem, where the CCNY campus is located) as well as nationally and internationally.

Through a variety of testimonies, we learn that over 1,000 students rallied to protest the dismissal of Oakley Johnson, a Black English professor who supported student activists and was publicly known for his communist sympathies. Noteworthy, too, are references to the book The Negro Question in the United States (1936) by James S. Allen, which articulates the communist position on the problem of race relations. Allen argues that in the South of the United States, modes of functioning derived from slave society are still present, which capitalist development has failed to erase. He suggests the need to transform the South into a popular democracy as a key step towards Black liberation.

The pamphlet closes with one of Mendy’s own essays, “World Politics and Ethiopia,” which positions him as a mature political thinker fully aware of the danger of fascism for African independence. Mendy decries the expansion of fascist imperialism in the African continent, framing Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia as the continuation of the “white-man’s burden” and echoing Langston Hughes’s observations from civil-war Spain. “Fascism,” Hughes wrote, “preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.”

Let My People Know, a unique document about the CCNY volunteers who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War, is an invaluable teaching tool to reflect on the role of college students in the shaping of democracy.

Isabel Estrada is an Associate Professor at CCNY. The critical edition of Let My People Know: The Story of Wilfred Mendelson (“Mendy”), Student Leader, Organizer, Journalist, Anti-Fascist Soldier Who Fell in Spain July 28, 1938, was annotated by Prof. Estrada, Stefano Morello, and the students in the Spring 2022 course “Activism and the College Experience” at The City College of New York (CCNY). It can be accessed online at https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/ projects/let-my-people-know.