Antisemitism in Spain
Despite occasional violent outbursts such as the 1066 Granada massacre, Jews were granted protection to profess their religion in exchange for abiding to certain conditions that limited their rights concerning Muslims.
[5] In 1492, via the Alhambra Decree, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain ordered the expulsion of a disputed number of Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, ranging from 45,000 to 200,000,[6][7] and thus put an end to the largest communities in Europe.
[14] In a country with few Jews, this discourse was functional from an ideological standpoint to the rallying of the conservative forces against republicanism and the workers' movement rather than the minuscule Jewish community.
[16] Surveys from the 1980s and 1990s showed that the Spanish image of the Jews was ambivalent: pejorative stereotypes such as avariciousness, treachery and deicide contrasted with positive evaluations such as their work ethic and their sense of responsibility.
[19] In spring 2002, many EU member states, including Spain, experienced a wave of antisemitic incidents which started with the 'Al-Aqsa-Intifada' in October 2000 and was fueled by the conflict in the Middle East.
During the first half of 2002, the rise of antisemitism reached a climax in the period between the end of March and mid-May, running parallel to the escalation of the Middle East Conflict.
[20] According to a September 2008 study published by the Pew Research Center of Washington DC, nearly half of all Spaniards have negative views of Jews, a statistic that marks Spain as one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe.
The results obtained from segmentation of the study population confirmed the existence of fairly homogeneous attitudes – both favorable and unfavorable – towards all religious groups in general, rather than any differentiated opinion with respect to the Jews.
[20] However, that assumption clashes with the fact that 21st-century Spain is one of the most secularised countries in Europe,[35][36] with only 3% of Spaniards considering religion as one of their three most important values[37] and thus not linking it to their national or personal identity.
Furthermore, in modern Spain there is not an "internal enemy" scare but in far-right circles, which are more often focused against Muslim immigration as well as Catalan and Basque separatism, way more visible phenomena.
During the years of the Second Intifada and throughout the 2006 Lebanon War, Spanish newspapers and magazines published cartoons in which Israelis, Israel as a whole, or Jewish symbols were linked to the killing of children, themes of vengeance and cruelty, echoing ancient anti-Jewish imagery.
[23][41] For example, on 23 April 2002, at the height of Operation Defensive Shield, the highly satirical magazine El Jueves (Thursday) displayed on its front page a caricature of Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, with a pig's face, a skull cap, a swastika and the caption "This wild animal.
Angry Spanish supporters created an expletive antisemitic hashtag in their messages after the match, which briefly became one of the most popular keywords on Twitter in Spain.
Twelve Jewish associations filed a judicial complaint after seeing references in some messages to death camps and the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust.
The organizations singled out five people who were identified by their real names on Twitter, accusing them of “incitement to hatred and discrimination” — a crime punishable by up to three years’ jail in Spain.
