From expulsion to charges of genocide: Spain’s animosity toward Jews endures

But antisemitism was already there in 2012. It hadn’t exploded the way it has today, but it lingered beneath and sometimes above the surface.

My secular parents enrolled me in a Catholic boarding school to “improve my Spanish”, without really considering what that would mean for an American child who barely spoke the language… and more importantly, for a Jew.

Up until then, my Jewish identity was pretty simple: spinning dreidels, eating matzo, the occasional synagogue visit. Because my dad’s diplomatic career kept us moving, I hadn’t grown up with much of a Jewish community, and I had very few Jewish friends. I had also never personally experienced antisemitism.

So when I casually mentioned to a new friend at school that I was Jewish, I was completely unprepared for her reaction. She was stunned, genuinely shocked. She had never met a Jew before, let alone had a Jewish friend.

Spain’s Jewish population is small, around 50,000, but nearly 20 per cent of Spaniards are believed to have Jewish ancestry. Yet ignorance and prejudice about Jews runs deep. When classmates learned I was Jewish, their questions drew on centuries of antisemitism – from medieval myths (“Do you have horns?” “Didn’t you kill Jesus?”) to the gutter caricatures of Der Stürmer (‘Do all Jews have big noses?’).”

High school brought a new group of boys whose antisemitism escalated. For three years, they threw Nazi salutes, yelled “Heil Hitler,” scrawled swastikas, and told me to go gas myself – all while denying the Holocaust.

When I tried to explain that members of my family had been killed in the Holocaust, they laughed and called me a liar. Nobody defended me – not friends, not teachers. Once, after I complained to the director, he brought one of the perpetrators into his office with me and told us to “talk it out”. I was stunned. How do you “talk it out” with someone who wants you dead?

Looking back at my countless hours of history classes, I realize now that both the Inquisition and the Holocaust were barely mentioned. In 2013, just as I started school in Spain, the centre-right Partido Popular proposed making Holocaust education mandatory. The proposal never passed, and schools seemed relieved – free to go on skipping over this deeply uncomfortable chapter of history.

In my final year of high school, a major Auschwitz exhibition arrived in Madrid, featuring harrowing photos, personal objects from concentration camps inmates, and even a train car that had transported Jews to their deaths. My mother, along with Madrid’s small reform Jewish community, worked tirelessly to publicize it.

Naively, I suggested to my history teacher that our class should go. We were studying the world wars at the time, yet somehow the Holocaust had been omitted almost entirely. Though she expressed interest, nothing came of it, and we never went.

I left Spain in 2018, but I return often to visit my mother, who chose to make her home there. The magic of Madrid still moves me to tears, though sometimes they aren’t tears of joy, they are tears of sadness, for an antisemitism that has only grown.

If a country that once expelled its Jews fails to teach its children that history, the murder of six million in the Holocaust, and even the basics of Judaism and Jewish civilisation, how can the adults they become be expected to understand the conflict in Israel, the Jewish people’s deep roots in the region, or the danger of leaving antisemitism unchallenged? A nation that refuses to teach Jewish history fosters ignorance – and allows an old animosity toward Jews to endure.

Eliana Silver is the JC’s Audio-Visual Producer and Reporter.