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“Such Hatred Has Never Flourished on Our Soil”: The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Turkey and Spain
Author(s): Karakaya, Yağmur; Baer, Alejandro
Date: 2019
Topics: Holocaust Memorials, Ethnography, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory
Abstract: In this article, we analyze local Holocaust Remembrance Day (HRD) ceremonies promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Spain and Turkey. We investigate whether these memory practices have the potential to lead to a cosmopolitan engagement with the host countries’ own pasts. Focused on the same memorial events in highly contrasting and diverse national contexts, this article examines how supranational memory discourses are adopted and reinterpreted within the nation-state framework. Our ethnographic observation of the commemorations and analysis of the speeches between 2011 and 2018 in Turkey and 2005 and 2018 in Spain show that the Spanish ceremony can be defined as porous and to a certain degree open to multivocality—given the participation of different mnemonic communities—while the Turkish one is sealed and does not allow for the possibility of disrupting its self-congratulatory national memory narrative. Paradoxically, in both cases, especially in Turkey, the national legitimation profiles are bolstered by the universal frameworks that Holocaust memory provides. Even though memory travels transnationally, the nation-state still is the most powerful translator of this past. This results in the rendition of pre-Holocaust nostalgic pasts as a multicultural heaven where different groups, including the Jewish community, lived in harmony.
Spain's Jewish Problem. From the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy" to the "Nazi-Zionist State"
Author(s): Baer, Alejandro
Date: 2009
Topics: Main Topic: Antisemitism, Antisemitism
The Blind Spots of Secularization: A qualitative approach to the study of antisemitism in Spain
Author(s): Baer, Alejandro; López, Paula
Date: 2012
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Discourse, Focus Groups, Interviews, Qualitative Research, Main Topic: Antisemitism
Abstract: According to several international surveys Spain is among the western countries with the most negative views of Jews. While quantitative data on the topic accumulates, there is a significant lack of interpretative approaches that might explain the particular Spanish case. This paper presents the background, methodology and major results of a discussion group-based study on antisemitism, which was conducted in Spain in the autumn of 2009. The study identifies and locates in different socio-economic and ideological milieus the range of stereotypical discourses on Jews, Judaism and the Arab–Israeli conflict in Spain. Analysis of the group meetings shows that, despite growing secularization in Spanish society, the central explanatory variable for persisting and resurging antisemitism in this country is still religion in a broad cultural sense.