Abstract: In 2015, Spain passed a law that concedes Spanish citizenship extraterritorially to persons recognized as Sephardic Jews and descended from the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spanish kingdoms in the fifteenth century. This chapter explores the implications of this institutional effort to repair a historical injustice. Given Spain’s membership in the European Union, this granting of national citizenship implies by extension European citizenship as well. In addition to proving Sephardic ancestry, applicants need to demonstrate cultural ties to Spain. This cultural connection is inflected by the official notion of Hispanicness and its legal implications. However, the 2015 law omitted the expulsions of Muslims and Moriscos (converts to Christianity from Islam), which took place during a similar historical period. By doing so, the 2015 law established a three-pronged way of redefining certain collective identities as deserving, or undeserving, of Spanish/EU citizenship: by requiring proof of Sephardic origins; by requiring a recognized cultural connection to Spain; and by denying Muslim ancestry. This chapter argues that this law fits into a rewriting of Spanish and European identity, coding Europe in racialized terms. Multiple scales of inclusion/exclusion are at work in this law, ultimately through a process of de- and re-racialization of citizenship.
Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.
Abstract: In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.
Abstract: In a gesture of reconciliation, Spain and Portugal in 2015 passed bills inviting the descendants of Sephardic Jews – expelled 500 years earlier – to acquire citizenship. Applicants are to ascertain their Sephardic heritage through family trees, evidence of belonging to a religious community, language skills and/or retained links with the homeland. This article explores applicants’ motivations to request citizenship and the ways in which legal provisions, religious associations, and the migration industry become gatekeepers of and (re)shape what it means to be Sephardic. Based on interviews with applicants and other actors involved, the article discusses how states, religious associations, applicants themselves and businesses facilitate and define the process towards citizenship. It also points to how the repatriation laws have spurred identification with – but also alienation from – Spain and Portugal, by making it possible to gain an attractive EU passport, while encouraging the revisiting of a painful past.
Abstract: The 2015 Spanish and Portuguese nationality laws for descendants of Sephardi Jews are unusual in their motivation to redress wrongs committed more than half a millennium ago. Both have enabled descendants of those Sephardi Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, or forced to convert to Christianity, to claim citizenship status through naturalization. The laws have elicited ancestral and contemporary stories that speak to the personal and social meanings applicants give to these citizenships. Through extensive oral histories with fifty-five applicants across four continents, we examine our narrators’ views on the laws’ deep roots in a genealogical concept of belonging, based on familial and biological heritage and the persistent criterion of the bloodline. We argue that the responses of Sephardi applicants complicate traditional notions of genealogical inclusion, unveiling instead a multiplicity of meanings attached to identity, belonging, and contemporary citizenship. While Spain and Portugal’s offer of what we call “restorative citizenship” requires the demonstration of biological and genealogical certainties, we argue that those seeking Spanish or Portuguese nationality complicate, expand, and sometimes subvert state constructions of citizenship as well as transform their own identities and belonging. More than recuperating a lost Spanish or Portuguese identity, many Sephardi descendants are discovering or deepening their ties to ancestral history and culture. Sephardi genealogy is also being mobilized in a contemporary global and European context in which citizenship and belonging are no longer defined exclusively by nation state territoriality, but rather through claims to new hybrid, multiple, and flexible identities.
Abstract: La Ley 12/2015 en materia de concesión de la nacionalidad Española a los sefardies originarios de España enacted on June 11, 2015, received Royal Assent on June 24 and came into force and effect on October 1, 2015 (the “law “, “ legislation” “legislative scheme”).
The objects of this paper are twofold; first, to set out the key provisions of the legislation read in tandem with the Instructions issued on September 29, 2015(“Instructions”) by the General Directorate of the Registries and Notaries (“DGRN”) and, second, to identify and analyze the significant issues raised by a fair number of these provisions and by the legislation as a whole.
Clearly, the legislation does not stand on its own provisions as these are not exhaustive of all the matters affecting the acquisition of nationality. In some instances, in order to obtain a better understanding of the legislative scheme, some of its provisions need to be read and interpreted in conjunction with those of other legislation. Due to the constraints of space, this paper focuses primarily on the provisions of the legislation that stand on their own, save where the rationale for one particular provision are meant to be read together with some of the Spanish Constitution
Abstract: En transformant les Juifs en citoyens, la Révolution française bouleverse leur statut. La logique révolutionnaire, hostile par principe aux corps intermédiaires, incite les Juifs à renoncer à leur structure communautaire propre. L'intégration à la Nation est désormais leur but : c'est seulement dans la sphère privée qu'ils peuvent préserver leurs traditions et leur fidélité.
Pierre Birnbaum ne se contente pas de retracer l'histoire des épousailles entre la France et ses Juifs, avec ses temps forts, ses moments de crise et ses grandes figures. Il développe une thèse originale : après avoir été longtemps l'agent de l'uniformisation républicaine et laïque, c'est aujourd'hui l'Etat qui incite les Juifs à se constituer en une communauté, largement « imaginaire ». Philosémitisme républicain et antisémitisme nationaliste se renforcent curieusement et « communautarisent par le haut » les Juifs français, tentés eux-mêmes de reconstituer, « par le bas », une communauté.
Le chemin de la Révolution française à Carpentras symboliserait-il le passage imprévu de la citoyenneté à la communauté ?
Abstract: The Jews of France have been liberated for over two centuries; they have been considered free citizens and equal to their compatriots. What purpose, then, does it serve to study their citizenship today? Until World War II, French Jews called themselves "Israelites;" they were deeply patriotic and had found a place for themselves in France’s "community of citizens." However outbursts of anti-Semitism during that period reminded them that their new status prevented neither hate nor rejection; they had to persevere in the struggle for citizenship equity.
France has not been spared from recent movements demanding recognition of particular identities in the public space. Ethnicity in French political life has become increasingly obvious, in spite of the constant assertion of "republican values." Questions about immigration, nationality, and integration are constantly in the forefront of public life. Though, in France, the existence of ethnic and religious communities is not legally recognized, certain groups are designated as separate, often creating conflicts among them
Abstract: In the last few years, multicultural citizenship, once hailed as a solution to national cohesion, has faced increasing political and academic accusations of inciting
segregation and group divisions. This has prompted a re-evaluation of different institutional and discursive arrangements of national citizenship and their impact on
the integration of minority ethnic groups. This research into the history of Jewish integration into British society analyses the relationship between changing forms of
British citizenship and the evolution of British Jewish identities. In so doing, it enhances our understanding of how citizenship policies affect minority selfrepresentation
and alter trajectories of integration into mainstream society.
The research draws on an historical and sociological analysis of the Jewish community in Leeds to reveal how the assimilationist and ethnically defined citizenship of Imperial Britain conditioned the successful Jewish integration into a particular formula of Jewish identity, `private Jewishness and public Englishness', which, in the second part of the 20th century, was challenged by multicultural citizenship. The policies of multiculturalism, aimed at the political recognition and
even encouragement of ethnic, racial and religious diversity, prompted debates about private-public expressions of ethnic/religious and other minority identities, legitimating alternative visions of Jewish identity and supporting calls for the democratisation of community institutions. The thesis argues that the national policies of multiculturalism were crucial in validating multiple `readings' of national and minority identity that characterise the present day Leeds Jewish community.
Employing a multi-method approach, the study demonstrates how the social and geographical contexts of social actors, in particular their positions within the minority
group and the mainstream population, enable multiple `readings' of sameness and differences. In particular, the research explores how a wealth of interpretations of
personal and collective Jewish identities manifests itself through a selective and contextualised usage of different narratives of citizenship.
Abstract: Contemporary liberal democracies confront governance problems elicited by the discord between the principles of equality and difference, and between the concepts of majority and minority. Citizenship came to be recognized as a vital governance tool in response to this challenge evidenced by growing academic and political interest in the concept. The basic precept that citizenship refers to is a constitutionality-based relationship between the individual and the state, implying a unique, reciprocal, and unmediated bond between the individual and the political community.
It is argued that citizenship has three main aspects. First is the legal status aspect, which enfolds citizenship in terms of civil, political, and social rights, plus duties such as obeying laws, paying taxes, and performing military service. The second aspect is the identity dimension of citizenship, which regards individuals' membership in different social and political groups in multiple categories of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, profession, and sexuality. The third aspect is related to citizens' capacities, responsibilities, and willingness to cooperate, in short the civic virtue that the citizens possess and perform. The sense of identity that citizens have; their maneuvers to deal with competing identities; their willingness to participate in collective decisions and access to political processes; their sense of belonging to the social, political, and economic order; and their initiative potency all refer to different features of civic virtue. All in all, modern citizenship is perceived as the combination of legal status, social roles, and moral attributes that necessitate "good citizenry."
It has been suggested that these three aspects of citizenship—legal status, identity, and civic virtue—are interrelated; as the sensitivity to identities increases, demands for legal rights increase correspondingly. It is also claimed that identity affects the way people perform their duty of civic participation and their conception of responsibility. From another point of view, it is also argued that the three components of citizenship conflict with one another under certain circumstances. For instance, claims for cultural recognition of minorities may conflict with equal citizenship status. An empirical investigation of citizenship is complementary to understanding the interaction between these three aspects. This study undertakes the crucial task of providing evidence from the field to illuminate the complex correlations and divergences within citizenship and the relational bond between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects.
In this article, the results of qualitative research on a particular group of citizens—Turkish citizens with Jewish background—are discussed in the light of the parameters set above. The study provides empirical evidence to illuminate the dynamics at stake in the relationship between the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects in the specificity of Turkey's Jews and the conduct of Turkish citizenship. With the use of in-depth interviews conducted with the sample group of Jews, the study attempts to understand how being a non-Muslim minority group living in a Muslim-predominant society influences the perceptions and experiences regarding citizenship.
The discussion developed in the article is presented in three parts. In the first part, an overview of Turkish citizenship and the status of non-Muslim minorities per se is put forth. This part also sets forth the essentials of Turkish citizenship with its legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects. In addition, the paradoxical consequences of the dominant paradigms inherent in citizenship in Turkey regarding non-Muslim minorities are demonstrated. The second part focuses on the field research conducted with the Jewish community in Turkey. After a brief summary of methodology and a portrayal of the general characteristics of the sample group, it discusses how members of Turkey's Jewish community experience and perceive Turkish citizenship through its aspects of legal status, identity, and civic virtue. The respondents' perceptions and experiences regarding being Turkish citizens and a non-Muslim minority are also covered. The third part offers a discussion on Turkish citizenship in the light of the research results and gives a citizen-centric account through the lenses of respondents.
Abstract: Over the course of several round table seminars across Europe, JPR's "Res Publica" Project brought together a diverse groups of thinkers, activists and social commentators from across the continent to explore how to build a greater sense of the common good.
Each round table discussion - in the UK, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany, Holland, plus a final pan-European one - was written up in full by the projector director, Dr Diana Pinto. At the end of the process, JPR's Executive Director, Dr Jonathan Boyd, summarised the major themes and ideas that were raised during the round table discussions, as well as in a series of twenty-six article written by participants on some of the key issues discussed. This paper is the result. It explores five major themes: (1) National identity; (2) Law; (3) Status of minorities; (4) Religion; and (5) State and civil society.
Abstract: After each of the round table discussions that took place as part of JPR's "Res Publica" project - in UK, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany and Holland, followed by a pan-European one - participants were invited to write short articles in which they could use their expertise and experience to reflect on an issue of their choice.
During the project, the articles were used to help promote further discussion and debate, but in this report, we have pulled them all together into a single document to showcase the range of ideas discussed, and to encourage further dialogue and debate. Together, the twenty-seven articles, written by a wide range of insightful thinkers from different national, ethnic and religious backgrounds, provide a thought-provoking analysis of contemporary European life, and encourage us to look more thoughtfully at how we might work towards a greater sense of commonality across the differences that exist.
Abstract: The Res Publica (Latin for “public good”) project, funded by the Ford Foundation, was designed to bring together a diverse groups of thinkers, activists and commentators in Europe to consider some of Europe’s most pressing issues: notably, the loss of a sense of the common good in our pluralist democracies, a consequent erosion of feelings of shared belonging and the emergence of new types of tribalism.
The project involved independent voices from different religious, cultural, ethnic and secular backgrounds - each speaking in his or her personal capacity - in a series of small, closed and off the record national round tables – and each lasting for two and a half days in a rural residential setting. The national round tables were intended to open the way for a more pan-European shared reflection on the res publica.
Each round table explored the conflicts, underlying fears and defensive reflexes that exist in each country and within each minority or majority group; in other words, those factors which have led to a weakened common public space. The project intentionally sought to broach difficult questions in a context of mutual trust - questions linked to national identity, the role of the law, citizenship, the role and rights of (often silent) majorities and (often vocal) minorities, secular responses to collective religious demands, and the link between civil society and the state. The round tables were also intended to address the tensions between national cohesion and a ‘Europe without borders’, especially their impact in two areas: integration and the struggle against racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. To facilitate the discussions, round table participants received a carefully planned set of questions and issues that they were free to address, challenge, or revise in the round table discussions.
The project comprised six national round tables in total (in the UK, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands), followed by a seventh pan-European one. In keeping with the ‘off the record’ policy of the round tables, the reports of the meetings do not identify those who spoke, and specific attributes (such as a ‘Muslim voice’, a ‘Catholic view’ or a ‘Jewish position’, a ‘judge’, or a ‘civil society activist’) were only mentioned when the person specifically chose to speak in that capacity. Prior to the pan-European one, we commissioned a set of five papers from each country which addressed the five key themes which emerged from the round tables: national identity, the status of minorities, the law, religion, and the state and civil society.
Abstract: In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The public lighting ceremony in Paris on the first night of Hanukah, December 23, 1997, resembled battle. Chabad raised a giant menorah on the Champs de Mars and ranged around its flanks various siege engines: portable generators, a stage, a screen, batteries of speakers. The speakers boomed Hasidic marching music that rattled windows on the buildings facing the field. Then shrill young boys on stage shouted Hebrew verses into a microphone. Napoleon's grapeshot could not have done a more effective job of subduing a mob. The previously talkative crowd fell silent and gazed at the stage for what was to come next: first, a five-minute video biography of Rabbi Schneerson projected onto a large screen, then a satellite link-up with similar ceremonies in Crown Heights and Jerusalem. On cue, bearded cameramen turned to the crowd. People waved and cheered when their image on screen joined that of crowds in America and Israel. This was mixed with video of boys' choirs and stock footage of the Rebbe waving to crowds, as if to suggest that he was alive and actually participating. Then came the climax, the victorious raising of the flag: the Grand Rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, accompanied by a Chabad rabbi, rose aloft in a cherry picker. He pronounced a series of blessings into a microphone and lit the menorah. Paris was his.
The spectacle that night on the Champs de Mars has, arguably, less to do with Chabad's penchant for messianism and noise than it has to do with decolonization. Since emancipation in 1791, French Judaism has defined itself according to its embrace of the Revolution's universalist principles and its disavowal of political, cultural, and doctrinal separateness. Now, however, a small but vocal minority of the North African Jewish immigrants who have settled in France during the past 30 years is challenging the 200-year-old consensus. All of the people involved in the Hanukah ceremony, including the Grand Rabbi, were Sephardic Jews of North African descent. Like the millions of other formerly colonized peoples, most of them Muslim, who have come to France and are altering its culture, their aim is to assert a more uncompromised cultural identity within an ethnic community less sympathetic to its historical concern for discretion. What is happening among Jews is thus only a subset of a larger, national process. The North African Jews have succeeded to the extent that Judaism, at least in the Paris region, is more vital than it has been since before World War II. And never in France's history have there been as many Jewish schools, yeshivas, synagogues, kosher restaurants, and ritual baths.
The revival of Jewish life in France because of the North Africans is also strengthening French Judaism in some less obvious ways. The North African Jews' activism has taken place amidst a national debate concerning cultural pluralism and the integration of African immigrant communities. The conjunction of communal and national issues has provoked responses from community leaders and Jewish intellectuals anxious to defend the Republican values of traditional French Judaism. While some go no farther than defend the historical status-quo, others endeavor to rethink French Judaism and bring it up to date. Two Jewish thinkers in particular, Shmuel Trigano and Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, are beginning to elaborate a French Judaism that reconciles the demand for a stronger Jewish identity with the values of the Republic. After first exploring recent developments in France's Jewish community and their relation to national debates, this article will examine the ideas of Trigano and Bernheim at length.
France has historically been ill at ease with its own diversity. France's monarchy, for instance, worried that religious diversity impeded political centralization and undermined the power of the crown. The Enlightenment interpreted cultural differences in terms of the persistence of atavisms such as tribalism and superstition, both of which it contrasted with the universality of civilisation. Finally, the Revolution added Jean-Jacques Rousseau's obsession with private or minority interests that might threaten the unity of a Republic one and indivisible. It follows that the emancipation offered to Jews came with precise conditions. Jews had...
Topics: Antisemitism, Citizenship, National Identity, Jewish - Muslim Relations, Antisemitism: Muslim, Anti-Zionism, Immigration, Emigration, Aliyah, Jewish Continuity, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: Du phénomène antisémite qui a marqué le début des années 2000, on ne retient généralement que des explications idéologiques ou psychologiques, sans voir qu'il trouve son origine dans l'évolution même de la société française bien plus que dans le conflit du Moyen-Orient. Le modèle d'identité juive hérité de l'après-guerre, conjuguant
appartenance et citoyenneté, est devenu impossible. Telle est la thèse défendue par ce livre. Le déclin de la nation, le choc démographique découlant de l'immigration, la dérive des institutions juives représentatives, pour une partie d'entre elles instrumentalisées par la politique depuis l'ère mitterrandienne, tout concourt à le rendre caduc. Pour les Juifs de France, comme pour une forme de notre démocratie - celle de la laïcité ouverte -, une
époque se referme qui laisse place au trouble et au désarroi. Y a-t-il encore un avenir pour les Juifs en France ? A travers l'analyse des scénarios possibles, dans une confrontation
inquiète et lucide avec la réalité, Shmuel Trigano interroge le devenir des Juifs, et celui de notre société tout entière, à laquelle il tend un miroir inattendu.
Abstract: Au lendemain de la deuxième Intifada, une situation inédite s'est créée en France. Les agressions antisémites ont connu une explosion sans précédent alors qu'un discours de dénigrement s'est répandu dans les médias et le débat public qui a touché Israël, mais aussi la communauté juive française. Faut-il y voir un dérapage ponctuel ou le symptôme d'un phénomène plus profond? Est-il lié uniquement aux événements du Proche-Orient ou à des logiques purement françaises ? Et si tel est le cas, sont-elles uniquement relatives aux " tensions inter-communautaires " qui opposeraient, selon la rumeur publique, Juifs et Arabes dans une société qui assisterait en spectatrice désolée ou scandalisée à de tels débordements ? Tous ces événements sont certes liés, mais ils se passent avant tout en France et concernent pour la plus grande part des citoyens français. Le mérite de ce livre est d'en sonder la cohérence sociologique, idéologique et politique, spécifiquement française. L'enjeu, gravissime, n'est pas simplement la laïcité mais l'identité nationale, devenue le tabou d'un système idéologique dominant qui vise à la défaire, celui-là même qui produit une nouvelle question juive mais bloque aussi l'intégration de la population immigrée. Or, c'est parce qu'elle était adossée à une identité nationale que la République avait réuni tous les citoyens.
