Contemporary Spain (1808 to the present) has dealt with two main “Jewish questions”: the reevaluation or rehabilitation of the Jewish medieval past by historians and intellectuals, and the process of establishment, legalization, and legitimization of newly founded Jewish communities in a predominantly Catholic country, which until 1869 outlawed all other religious faiths. These questions were only on rare occasions investigated by academic research until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Historians of the Jewish people had not been interested in researching Spanish history of the period after the Spanish Crown burnt the last Judaizers in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, which left the country without any trace of Judaism. Historians of contemporary Spain, on the other hand, have not viewed the Jewish question as vital to understanding the transformations and vicissitudes which befell the troubled state. In other words, nineteenth-century Spanish Jewish history has been neglected.
More recently, the shift in academic research towards issues related to the representation of historical minorities in Spanish historical thought started to draw investigators to researching the place of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Spain. While considerable interest has focused on the contemporary Spanish reinterpretation of the Jewish medieval past, as much as to the history of the establishment of Jewish communities on Iberian soil, very few studies raised the question of how the changes in nineteenth-century Spain were interpreted by European Jewish communities. Apart from the pioneering articles of Joseph Lichtenstein, which were published in Hebrew in the beginnings of the 1970s,Footnote 1 I do not know of any study of the subject. Mónica Manrique therefore should be praised for her innovative decision to dedicate her research to an almost unknown subject.
The author limited her monograph to a very short time period, no longer than two years (1868–1869), and for good reason. These two years hold great significance in Spanish history, as they were the first of the so-called Six Democratic Years, a period when Spain endeavored but failed to establish a stable liberal democratic regime. The overthrow of Queen Isabel II's regime in September 1868 encouraged the Spanish liberals to implement democratic and liberal reforms even before the Spanish revolutionary parliament (the Cortes) sanctioned them. The principle of religious freedom was thus fully implemented and the Protestant religion was exercised in public in the months following the revolution. Even the new conservative regime of 1876 did not relinquish the worship rights of other religions and only limited them to the private sphere.
Noticing the changes in the Protestant camp, Manrique endeavored to find Jewish reactions to these political changes in Spain. Did Jewish communities or organizations seek to encourage Jewish immigration to Spain in light of this newly proclaimed religious liberty? Did they assist those Jews already in Spain to establish new communities, or were their reactions less enthusiastic and more cautious? In order to answer the questions, the author made extensive use of the main organs of the French and German Jewish press, mainly the periodicals Archives israélites or L'univers israélite, and to a lesser extent some archival material.
Reading this interesting analysis leaves the reader disappointed. It seems that the new period of openness between the Spanish government and the Jews did not bring changes in the life of the Jews in Spain. After the revolution, enthusiastic or positive views of the political changes in Spain were expressed by commentaries in the Jewish press. However, as time passed the tone of articles became much more cautious and skeptical. While some authors speculated about the possibility of the Jews returning to Spain, later articles warned about the negative attitudes of the Spanish people towards Jews and their religious fanaticism. The author also encountered this opinion in an original letter written by an unknown French Jewish traveler, Agustín Schwob. He warned Adolphe Cremieux, president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, of the havoc that Spanish religious fanaticism could inflict upon returning Jews. The author attributes these opinions to the so-called black legend (a distorted image of Spain created by Protestants in the sixteenth century and fomented by the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century) but even Spanish liberals themselves advised against a rapid advance in the implementation of religious liberty.
Only Haim Guedalla, a well-known member of the British Sephardic community and a relative of Sir Moses Montefiore, maintained his optimism about Spain for a longer period. He planned to build synagogues in Spain and even sent two Torah scrolls in order to enable the exercise of Jewish ritual in the newly established communities of Madrid and Cádiz. His plans did not mature, and the Torah scrolls disappeared. As the author correctly asserted, the political instability of Spain in the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, with its meager economic opportunities, did not encourage Jewish immigration to Spain. Only a handful of Jews chose Spain as a future home in the nineteenth century and the public openings of synagogues had to wait several decades.
Despite the importance of Manrique's volume, some obscure points should be corrected in further research. The almost total absence of English Jewish sources from the research, especially the Jewish Chronicle (which is cited only in republished articles in the French Jewish press), is unfortunate. According to Lichtenstein's studies, Haim Guedalla did advocate his project in a series of articles published in the Jewish Chronicle.
The work could have benefitted from editing. The text includes long and tedious sentences, as well as errors that could have been easily amended, like p. 4, line 3 (“charged with symbolism 500 years after the group's expulsion” instead of 400), or p. 74, lines 1–2 (“one of the reasons that could explain Guedalla's failure is the Spanish political situation of the 1880s,” instead of the 1870s).
Despite these drawbacks, the study brings to light valuable information about the relations between nineteenth-century Spain and the Jews and will surely stimulate further study.
