Sephardic Jews

Why Does the Spanish Right Want to “Recover the Historical Memory” of Sephardic Jews?

By Daniela Flesler and Michal Rose Friedman

Spanish conservatives who have rejected any accounting for Francoist crimes are nevertheless willing to make amends with the descendants of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled five centuries ago. The contradiction is only apparent.

“You have no historical memory, you don’t know anything about the past, and you cannot contribute anything to the future,” the conservative Spanish minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, told Cayo Lara, leader of the leftist Izquierda Unida, in September 2013, after a heated exchange in the Spanish parliament over the 1977 amnesty law. Lara had argued for the revocation of the law; Gallardón against. To score his point, Gallardón quoted the legendary Communist politician and union leader Marcelino Camacho, who in 1977 had expressed his support for amnesty, which, he said, would “open the road to peace and liberty.”

The idea that building a democratic future requires the past to remain closed has been mobilized ever since to justify the silencing of Francoist repression. In fact, it is the main argument invoked by the Partido Popular (PP) to oppose the Law of Historical Memory, passed in 2007 under the then Socialist government. This law recognized the victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, gave rights to the victims of the dictatorship and their descendants, provided a path to Spanish citizenship for political exiles and their descendants, and formally condemned the Franco regime.

While critics to the left of the PSOE and the United Nations special rapporteur criticized the law for not going far enough, the PP voted against it, claiming that it served to weaken the political consensus of the transition to democracy and weaponized the Civil War for political propaganda. The PP and the