The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History

by Américo Castro

THE LITERARY WORK

A historical treatise set in Spain in the Middle Ages and early modern period; first published in Spain in 1962 (as the revised version of La realidad histórica de España); published in English in 1971.

SYNOPSIS

The singular, enigmatic quality of Spanish history can only be understood by looking at the interaction of the three cultures that formed it: Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Events in History at the Time of the Treatise

The Treatise in Focus

For More Information

Américo Castro (1885–1972) was born in Brazil to António Castro and Carmen Quesada, Spanish merchants who returned to Spain with the family when their infant boy was four. Castro grew up in Granada, earned his doctorate at the University of Madrid, and went on to forge a revolutionary new vision of Spain in respect to its history and culture. The publication of his El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925; The Thought of Cervantes) established Castro as a globally influential Cervantes scholar. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, a void was created by the disappearance of Spain’s two foremost journals—the Revista de Occidente (Journal of the Occident) founded in 1923 by José Ortega y Gasset and the Revista de Filología Española (Journal of Spanish Philology), edited by Ramón Menéndez Pidal. (Castro was a frequent contributor to this last revista). Many of the era’s intellectuals felt troubled by such developments, and by a sense of disintegration and regression in Europe because of the wars that convulsed the continent, including Spain. Exile became a common, often a necessary, option. Castro himself went into exile in 1936, teaching at various institutions in the United States, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas, and Princeton University. In exile, he wrote his most revolutionary works, España en su historia: moros, judíos, cristianos (1948; Spain in its History: Moors, Jews, Christians) and its numerous sequels, most prominent among them The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, a book with a complex pedigree.

Leading up to its publication was La realidad histórica de España, or The Structure of Spanish History, released in 1954. This work was revised and republished in Spanish in 1962 under the same title but with a new prologue (“Prólogo para españoles”). As one scholar points out, “What most clearly characterizes the 1962 text is its intention of formulating an overall historical vision of Spain and not simply its literature, language or art” (Araya Goubet, p. 49). In 1965 a new introduction was added to create the version that would be revised into The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History. So much more historical is this second English edition than its literature-oriented predecessor, The Structure of Spanish History, that it can be thought of as a new work, one that extended Castro’s revolutionary approach to Spanish history and that has prompted people to rethink established ideas.

Events in History at the Time of the Treatise

From prehistory to the Reconquest

The historical events treated in this entry begin with the peopling of the Iberian Peninsula and move forward to those events as seen from the points-of-view of historians around the middle of the twentieth century, when Américo Castro advanced his view. Before Castro, the general consensus was “that Spanish culture has fixed characteristics which have remained constant from the time of the [ancient] Iberians to the present”; this perspective, argues Castro, erroneously attributes particularly Spanish traits to all groups that have occupied the peninsula (Glick, p. 290). He maintains that the Spanish are not those who occupied the peninsula from time immemorial, but rather that their culture developed in the centuries following the Muslim invasions of 711.

The Iberian Peninsula has indeed been inhabited by an assortment of peoples since its prehistoric days. Prior to the Muslim invasion in 711, these more or less indigenous peoples (Celtiberians, Galaeci, Turdetanians, Tartessians) played unwilling host to Phoenicians and Carthaginians, among others. Not until the Romans in the 100s b.c.e., however, would any group establish a single political control over the peninsula that the Romans referred to as Hispania or Hispaniae (plural). Later, in the fifth century c.e., the peninsula came to be dominated by Germanic tribes, the most successful being the Visigoths, who were Arians, or non-Catholic Christians. One of their kings, Recared, converted to Catholicism in 587, paving the way for his own people to follow suit, which, in turn, allowed the larger Catholic Hispano-Roman population of the area, “to rally around the Visigoth monarchy” (Collins in Carr, p. 53). At this point, Catholicism became a common factor that prompted separate groups on the peninsula to identify with each other. Religion had begun to serve as a unifying force among the disparate groups.

The next momentous event in the process was the invasion of Spain by the Muslims, who crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711. So overwhelming was their assault that in the space of a few short years the North African invaders achieved effective control over all but the most mountainous regions, extending their rule to the west south of the Duero River and to the east almost as far north as what are today Pamplona and Barcelona. The conquerors imposed Arabic culture, making Islam the dominant religion in all the territories they subjugated.

Some small isolated pockets of Christian resistance survived in the north of the peninsula because of the foreboding mountainous terrain, finding an all-encompassing reason for being in the preservation of their faith. Defining themselves collectively as “Christians” (cristianos), these holdouts struggled to sustain their faith and to retake the lands that had been seized from them and their kind. Slowly this kernel of Christian resistance, born in the isolated mountainous areas, gathered strength, giving rise over time to new kingdoms that became linked to one another by their opposition to Muslim hegemony. “There is war between Christians and Moors,” observed Prince Juan Manuel in the early fourteenth century, “and there will be, until the Christians have regained the lands that the Moors took from them by force” (Juan Manuel in Castro, The Spaniards, p. 50).

In a movement known as the “Reconquest” (Reconquista), which spanned several centuries, the Christian kingdoms repossessed areas until they controlled most of the peninsula under the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Medieval legend dates the Reconquest from a skirmish in 722, while recent historians say it began in the late eleventh century under Alfonso VI (1065–1109), when the ideology of Crusade was first invoked. From either date, as they reconquered territory, the Christians incorporated into their realm two minority cultures with distinct religious practices and overall outlook: the Muslims and the Jews. Of course, such a population mixture was nothing new in the land. Christians had long been a minority in various reaches of Muslim Spain, becoming known there as Mozarabs (Christians dwelling in Muslim territory). These Mozarabs adapted to the new Muslims rulers and Arabic customs, meanwhile maintaining their own Christian faith and practices. Similarly, Muslims and Jews in the reconquered lands would retain their separate identities, assuming specific minority roles in Christian society—either by law or by established practice.

There was no “secular” government without religious affiliation at the time. In such a world, the distinctions between Christian, Muslim, and Arab cannot properly be viewed in terms of modern ideas such as “discrimination” or “racial segregation.” Rather these distinctions enabled society to establish a system of relationships between its majority and minority communities that allowed them to preserve their separate cultural and religious identities. In his works, Castro speaks of three eras in relation to medieval Spain:

1) an age of the three groups living more or less in harmony (early eighth to the late fourteenth century); 2) disintegration of that harmony (late fourteenth to seventeenth century); 3) total absorption into Christian society (1609 to the present). Historians have since narrowed the first age, speaking of a more or less peaceful coexistence among the three groups in Christian Spain from the late eleventh century (the Jewish migrations to Christian Spain) into the thirteenth century.

In this relatively “cooperative” age, the groups maintained their separate identities by subscribing to a system Castro defines as convivencia, or living togetherness. The system—sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and not uniform throughout the Christian kingdoms—nevertheless endured without extinguishing the separate cultural identities of the three groups. Religion was but the first of a host of their distinct traits: “By proclaiming oneself a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, one espoused specific religious doctrines and also accepted a whole system of cultural values that affected one’s daily life, one’s habits, traditions, laws, and even language” (O’Callaghan, p. 22).

The three communities in the Christian kingdoms

Medieval society in Christian Spain showed considerable complexity. No one culture was strictly tied to a single set of roles in the larger fabric of society but there were basic tendencies, as Castro indicates in The Spaniards. More exactly, the Christians, Jews, and Muslims tended to assume separate occupational roles. In Castro’s words, “a society was gradually being constructed in which … certain types of occupations were linked … to religious faith” (Castro, Spaniards, pp. 81–82). Although there were Christians who in fact engaged in trade, this group held in highest esteem two other pursuits: 1) attaining honor by waging war, and 2) taking holy orders. These were the two main avenues of upward mobility in medieval Christian society. In secular life, agriculture was the next most honorable occupation after the practice of arms, the belief being that farming “strengthens the body and the spirit and prepares [one] for travail and for war” (Sepúlveda in Spaniards, p. 81). The statement points to an overriding preoccupation with war in Christian society. Again in Castro’s words, “For the Hispano-Christian, peace had never been productive” (Spaniards, p. 83). Castile (Castilla in Spanish), the kingdom that would provide the central warfaring impetus for the Reconquest, as well as for Spanish imperial expansion beyond the seas, is a case in point. Its very name, notes Castro, harks back to the Latin plural for “castles” or “fortresses” (castella), suggesting that the Christians who inhabited the area viewed themselves in relation to a warlike enterprise. Other vital functions (trade, science, and learning), though seen as necessary for the good of society, were considered secondary.

All three societies had proscriptions against intermarriage, a self-preservation tactic in such a mixed society. In Muslim-dominated territories, Islamic men sometimes took Christian wives; in Christian territories, intermarriage did not take place unless one party converted to Christianity.

JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN CASTILIAN LAW

Completed early in the fourteenth century, Las Siete Partidas became the law code in Castile. The code prescribed how Jews and Moors were to pass their lives among the Christians.

• Jews … practicing their own religious rites … [should be] very careful to avoid preaching to, or converting any Christian… Whoever violates this law shall be put to death and lose all his property.
• All Jews male and female living in our dominions shall bear some distinguishing mark upon their heads …and…shall pay for each time [they are] found without it ten maravedis of gold; and if [they have] not the means to do this [they] shall publicly receive ten lashes.
• For the reason that a synagogue is a place where the name of God is praised, we forbid any Christian to deface it, or remove anything from it, or take anything out of it by force.
• Moors shall… observe their own [religious] law [but]… not have mosques in Christian towns …So long as they live among Christians… their property shall not be stolen from them … and we order that whoever violates this law shall pay a sum equal to double the value of what he took.
• If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian virgin, we order that he shall be stoned. … If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian married woman, he shall be stoned to death.
• Men…who…renounce the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and become Moors … shall lose all their possessions.… If any person who has committed such an offense shall be found in any part of our dominions he shall be put to death.

(Constable, pp. 268–75)

The Christian areas formulated laws that forbade Jews from owning Christian slaves, from making love to a Christian, or from cohabiting with or marrying a Christian. Christian parliaments likewise imposed restrictive laws on the Mudéjares, the Muslims who chose to live in the Christian areas. According to the law, they had to wear their hair short, without a forelock, and their beards long. Mudéjares could not wear bright apparel, employ a Christian, or live in a Christian house. Although they generally enjoyed freedom of worship, certain practices were circumscribed—for example, the muezzin calling of the faithful to prayer.

Moors and Jews in Christian Spain

The Muslims of Spain, predicts the epic Christian hero El Cid, shall one day be servants to the Christians (see Poem of the Cid , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). His prediction would come to fruition. There were many Muslim slaves in Christian Spain, with little say about where they would reside. The Mudéjares, though, those who elected to remain in Christian-controlled areas of their own free will, commonly chose to live in rural areas. When they settled in the cities, the group often resided in separate Muslim quarters (Morerías) with their own courts of law.

Mudéjares won high repute for skill in craftsmanship and in a type of art and architecture that still bears their name (arte Mudéjar). Distinguished by intricate carvings and a remarkable sense of proportion, Mudéjar art continues to be regarded as genuinely Spanish. Mudéjares also participated, along with Jews and foreigners, in the School of Translators of Toledo and distinguished themselves for work in astronomy and astrology. Castro associates the Mudéjares with particular service occupations as well. Tailor (alfay ate), barber (alfajeme), muleteer (arriero), mason (albañil), and inspector of weights and measures (albéitar) are all medieval words of Arabic origin that point to Muslim occupations (Spaniards, p. 80). While the Mudéjares achieved a veritable monopoly on certain professions in various areas, there was often a high degree of economic cooperation between them and Christians, including joint Christian-Muslim trade unions, such as that of the blacksmiths of Segovia. Rarely, however, were Muslims employed by Christian rulers, perhaps because the Muslims were seen as potential political enemies.

Hispano-Jews became associated with certain occupations too. While Jews had been present on the peninsula at least since their dispersal after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70c.e., many great personalities appeared in Spain under Muslim rule, including the poet Yehuda Halevi (c. 1080–1140), and the philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204).

First under the Muslims, then in Christian-dominated Spain, Jews often carried out the roles of physicians, scientists, tax-collectors, public officials, diplomats, and administrators of the wealth of the state or nobility, achieving considerable prestige through these privileged positions. The privileged status, along with age-old prejudices, incited animosity against the Jews. Intermittent persecution, a pogrom in Granada in 1066—caused many to flee from Muslim to Christian-controlled zones, bringing with them not only Jewish culture but also the Muslim customs they had assimilated, including the Arabic language, and in the case of the most learned Jews, the languages of Latin and Greek.

The Arabic language used by the Hispano-Jews belonged to a culture that had absorbed through conquest many of the treasures of the Hellenic world. Through the agency of these Hispano-Jews, this culture left its mark on Cordova, which, under the Muslims, became one of the world’s most famous centers of learning. In Christian-controlled Castile, a land dedicated to the waging of war, learning was meager, so the educated, multilingual Jews found their way into influential positions working for Christian lords. Extending the work of the translators in Toledo, the Jews of Castile translated Arabic treatises on philosophy, mathematics, and physical science, which were then disseminated to the larger European world. Castilian Jews engaged in a wide variety of other occupations too, from farmer, to doctor, tailor, tax collector, shoemaker, and soldier. The notion of Jews working only in finance, “enjoying high positions in the royal court, or leading uniform lives throughout the peninsula, is misleading and incorrect” (Freund and Ruiz, p. 172).

The Jews mostly lived in urban-centered communities in Christian Spain, often in their own quarters (juderías), governed by their own law courts, though legal autonomy varied greatly across kingdoms and eras. In disputes between Jews and members of other communities, Jews often fell under the direct jurisdiction of the king or his representative.

While laws of the land promoted peaceful coexistence, it certainly did not always ensue. Jews were massacred in Christian Spain from time to time, as they had been in Muslim Spain. An especially fierce rash of pogroms raged through the peninsula in 1391, bringing the long cherished tradition of convivencia, or living togetherness, to a definitive close. While the tradition had managed to endure through the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, it began afterwards to deteriorate until it reached a new low in 1391.

Historians generally concur that the pogroms of this year mark an irrevocable turning point. As long as convivencia lasted, the situation of minority religious communities in Christian realms was highly structured but also highly interactive. “Despite repeated ecclesiastical condemnation, Christians, Muslims, and Jews drank together, went to war together, lived in the same neighborhoods (sometimes in the same house), established business partnerships, engaged in all forms of commercial exchange, even watched

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.”

each other’s religious ceremonies” (Nirenberg, p. 157). Relations would only worsen after 1391 until they disintegrated altogether in 1492. In the interim, Jews who converted to Christianity became highly suspect. “In the eyes of lower-class Christians, and of their zealous counterparts in the upper echelons, the conversos remained Jews despite their conversion” (Freund and Ruiz, p. 179). This perception helps explain the tension that would continue to exist between Castile’s Old and New Christians (the Old Christians being those who claimed no Semitic or converso ancestry).

Post-1492 society

In 1492 the Christians conquered the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, cementing Iberia’s political unification. That same year, all Spanish Jews who were not willing to accept baptism into the Christian faith were ordered to leave Spain. Having conquered the last Muslim holdout, Spain became a united nation with two religions: Christianity and Islam. Ten years later, in 1502, the king and queen issued an edict calling for all Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom. Most felt compelled to convert so that they could stay in their ancestral homeland, but they did not take the new faith to heart and remained suspect in the eyes of their Christian neighbors thereafter. Still a highly rural population, the Moriscos (Christianized Moors) continued to speak Arabic and refused to assimilate into the larger Christian population in other ways as well. The two groups lived together uneasily for another hundred years, until 1609, when, after a series of uprisings and wars, the Christians expelled the Moriscos. This final expulsion converted Spanish society on the peninsula—in contrast to its overseas possessions—into a monocultural entity. But the vestiges of multicultural Spain could not be so easily stamped out. Although in politics and religion, Christians had triumphed, the ensuing society showed an unmistakable fusion of the values of the three “castes” (a term that in Spanish connotes purity of lineage and that Castro uses to differentiate among the three groups).

A reflection of this fusion of values was the widespread concern over “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre). Whether by force or of their own accord, many Jews had converted to Christianity over the centuries. The converts (commonly referred to as “New Christians”) were regarded with skepticism and suspected of insincere conversion, of secretly practicing Judaism, and of trying to lure Christians into renouncing their faith. Moriscos too were regarded suspiciously. The ill will engendered by all this suspicion lingered after the Jewish and Muslim expulsions. In particular, the Old Christians showed a fierce respect for pure lineage (lo castizo) of people, that is, for their Old Christian ancestry. In fact, the rift between Old and New Christians increased after 1492, going on to haunt peninsular life, intensifying internal division and conflict in a society that only on the surface appeared to be united.

The Treatise in Focus

Contents summary

The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History is divided into 14 chapters, plus an addendum and an appendix. Though it is a historical investigation, the treatise is arranged not according to a chronological criterion but rather by thematic headings. As noted in the preface, his title The Spaniards indicates Castro’s “wish to accentuate and emphasize the personal, rather than the structural, nature of [Spanish] history” (Spaniards, p. v).

In Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, Castro sets out the terms of the problem: what is the method to be used in studying history and toward what aim should it be employed? The aim is to study a human phenomenon without reducing it to either a justification of current political goals or a series of easily quantifiable data, since neither can adequately take into account acts of human will or volition. The object of examination is a particular nation, Spain, with all its peculiarities and uniqueness. Castro begins with the following premise—the understanding of who Spaniards are has been clouded by historians and philosophers who for centuries have projected the concept of “Spanishness” far back into history on individuals and peoples who had no awareness of being such: the Celtiberians, the Visigoths, and so forth.

In Chapter 3, “The Intermingling of the Three Castes,” Castro advances what will become the crux of his new view of Spanish history, perhaps best summarized in the words of Thomas Glick: “The culture we know as Spanish did not exist before, and came into being as a result of, the interaction of Muslims, Christians, and Jews (the ‘three castes’ as he calls them) in the eighth through the thirteenth centuries” (Glick, p. 7). The chapter makes the case for Castro’s central argument regarding the understanding of the individuality of Spain: “Those Peninsular peoples successively conquered by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Byzantines, and Muslims did not possess the collective or social structure and physiognomy of those who slowly reconquered Peninsular territory [from the Muslims] over a period of eight centuries” (Spaniards, p. 38). In other words, the Reconquest of Spain was achieved by the Spaniards—a people forged from interaction among the three castes.

The next chapter (“Theoretical Assumptions”) sets out to delve into the inner life of the people known as the Spaniards. Such an inner life, for Castro, is expressed by the deeds and events that make up their reality. In his eyes, it is the peculiar way that such deeds and events have taken place that constitutes the “vital disposition and way of life” or “dwelling place” that is unique to a given group (Spaniards, p. 99). Castro considers “dwelling place” more descriptive than “psychology” or “character,” in that it refers to a person’s awareness of belonging to a collective life, one that can change and evolve, that is not fixed forever.

Chapter 5, “A History of Inner Confidence and Insecurity,” attempts to show how the spirit of struggle and militancy that characterized the people that came to be called “Spanish” provided the basis for an enormous sense of historical “mission,” yet also contributed to a sense of historical insecurity. This insecurity, says Castro, can be traced back to a “lack of proportion and congruity between the intensity of [the Spaniard’s] impulses and the stability or worth of the results to be achieved” (Spaniards, p. 146). It is an insecurity that helps explain the Spanish passion for grand exploits and fame (the Reconquest, the conquest of the Americas, the desire to be seen as someone) and the sense of disenchantment that pervades the works of such great writers as Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, and St. Teresa of Avila (see Don Quixote , the Trickster of Seville, The Swindler , and Interior Castle , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times).

In Chapter 6, “The Non-Spanish Structure of Roman and Visigothic Hispania,” Castro attacks the notion that Spanish life already existed in those peoples who conquered the peninsula before the Moorish invasion of 711. In particular, he takes a close look at the figure of Seneca, the Roman philosopher born in Hispania, whose stoicism has been highlighted as one of his “Spanish” traits. For Castro, the stoicism of Seneca had nothing to do with later forms of Spanish life, nor did it ever really interest Spaniards. In his words, “If the Spaniards had been followers of Seneca, their history would have been different from what it has been and is, because their interest would have been concentrated on the rational analysis of earthly life” (Spaniards, p. 178). He then dwells on the Visigothic kingdom, which, though it held political hegemony over Hispania until 711, had no genealogical or cultural connection with the peoples who undertook the Reconquest, says Castro; nor, to his mind, did the Visigoths provide any lasting traits that could be perceived as Spanish.

Chapters 7 and 8 turn their attention to Islam and its presence in Spain. Castro asserts in Chapter 7 (“Al-Andalus”), “The Christian peoples who finally came to be called Spaniards were the result of the combination of an attitude of submission and wonder in the face of a culturally superior enemy, and the effort to overcome this very position of inferiority” (Spaniards, p. 215). The treatise proceeds to examine what Castro holds to be distinctly Islamic elements that have shaped Spanish society, in particular the type of mysticism exemplified in the poetry of St. John of the Cross. The following chapter (“Islamic Tradition and Spanish Life”) is an examination of ways of living and speaking in present-day Spanish life that are a result of the centuries-long presence of the Moors in the peninsula.

In Chapter 9 (“In Search of a Better Social Order”), Castro links the nineteenth-century movements called “anarchism” in Spain and their ties to earlier anarchical tendencies in Spanish society. According to Castro, the conflictive state of being that emerged out of the mingling of the three castes and the subsequent amputation of two of them caused Spaniards to turn inward for sources of renewal and hope, rather than outward (to revolutionary movements or alternative forms of government, as in other European countries). Spain’s late-nineteenth-century anarchist movements stemmed from a messianic longing that tried to destroy the social order without offering a constructive alternative. There was a similar failure centuries earlier, when the Christian Spaniards expelled the Jews and Muslims. “The Spanish Christian caste fell into the regrettable error of scorning and rejecting the customary occupations of the Moors and Jews instead of taking them over” (Spaniards, p. 326).

Chapter 10, “Beginnings of Christian and European Reaction,” details the rise of the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, where traditional belief holds that the body of the Apostle St. James (St. James the Great) is buried. Mentioning the strength this belief gave to those who struggled against Islam, the chapter says that the shrine helped rally a type of warlike national self-consciousness. This militant self-consciousness, argues Castro, differed greatly from any other medieval European manifestation of Christianity, since the Spanish were the only European Christian people of the era to feel themselves spiritually isolated and forced to battle for their own existence. In Chapter 11, “Santiago, an International Attraction,” Castro details Santiago’s function as a contact point with other Christian European nations, one that promoted especially the introduction of French monasticism. Also detailed is Santiago’s link to the independence of Portugal.

“The Islamic Perspective of Three Christian Institutions,” Chapter 12, is an examination of what Castro deems to be Spanish traditions that arose as a result of the Christian caste’s contact with Islam: namely, military orders, Holy War, and religious tolerance. For Castro, the military orders, those knight-monks dedicated to combating the infidel, were not wholly in keeping with the Christian tradition, but rather had more in common with the institution of the hermitages in Islamic lands, in which “holy men who alternated between asceticism and the defense of the borders, lived in retirement” (Spaniards, p. 473). Castro also brings his scholarship to bear on a demonstration that the “war against Muslims in Spain and in Palestine, however different its purposes and results may have been, was inspired by the [jihad], or the Muslim doctrine of holy war” (Spaniards, p. 488). So too, says Castro, did the relative religious tolerance that held sway in Christian Spain until the end of the fourteenth century spring from contact with ideas in the Muslim’s holy text, the Koran, which regarded both Christians and Jews as fellow “peoples of the Book.”

Chapter 13, “The Historical Ages Conditioned by the Peculiar Problem of the Spanish Population,” examines several issues at once: the reasons why erudition was not cultivated among the Christians of Castile during the Middle Ages; how the Mudéjares related to the other two castes and the role of the Jews in the caste system. Castro finishes the chapter with a section that polemicizes with the American scholar, Otis H. Green and his Spain in the Western Tradition. In this last section, Castro takes Green to task for inserting Spain into the Western European cultural tradition and for not taking into account the Semitic (Jewish and Muslim) contributions that shaped the uniqueness of Spain’s culture.

In the final chapter (Problems and Periods in Spanish History), Castro addresses the disappearance of the caste system and its effect on Spain’s technical and philosophical progress. He finishes by proposing a chronological division for studying Spanish history as follows:

a) Disappearance of the Roman-Visigothic duality and beginning of the reconquest of the eighth and ninth centuries

b) The living togetherness (convivencia) in the Christian kingdoms from the tenth to the end of the fifteenth century of people of three castes: Christian, Jewish, and Moorish

c) Religious exclusivism [absence of Islam and Judaism]: imperial, artistic, and literary grandeur from 1500 to 1700 (a conflict between the individual person and collective opinion—Cervantes, Gracián, cultural paralysis)

d) Crisis in the eighteenth century with the rise of a (French) foreign dynasty in Spain, intellectual hermeticism, and attempts at Europeanization; tension between the imported culture and traditional modes of living: Feijoo, Jovellanos, Godoy, Goya

e) From 1800 to the fall of the monarchy in 1931

The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History ends with an addendum and an appendix. The addendum includes excerpts from two documents: one is a letter from the field marshal of Spanish forces during the War of Mexican Independence. Exhorting the local citizens to remain loyal to the Spanish crown, the marshal explains that “the Apostle Santiago [is] always on the side of the Spaniards,” thus demonstrating, as Castro explains, that “In the early nineteenth century it was still felt that war in defense of the sovereignty of the king of Spain was holy and of divine origin” (Spaniards, p. 586). The second document is from the case of Luis de Carvajal, burned by the Mexican Inquisition in 1596, allegedly for trying to convert a friend to Judaism.

In the appendix, entitled “Observations on Bullfights and Autos da Fe,” Castro briefly examines two Spanish spectacles, the latter extinct, the former very much alive today. The point of examining these two institutions, for Castro, is that both “in seventeenth-century Spain came to be spectacles endowed with sacred significance, although in different forms (Spaniards, p. 598). The autos da fe, or public executions for deviance from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, served to rid Spanish society—symbolically and sometimes literally—of those elements that were deemed foreign to the body of believers.

Castro finishes this volume by reiterating the guiding force behind his conception of history: “Ultimately, to perceive and grasp the dramatic sense of history is as necessary and at least as important as the study of the rising and falling graphs of economy or public and private property” (Spaniards, p. 600).

Caste consciousness

In order to bring into focus the inner life of today’s Spaniards, Castro makes use of ancient documents that illustrate how the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula differentiated themselves from one another. Such documents reveal that at the start of the Reconquest, those who opposed the Moors called themselves “Christians,” using religion as the distinguishing factor: “The faith in Christ ‘conferred nationality’ as much as did the faith in Mohammed,” whose followers at the time controlled most of the peninsula (Spaniards, p. 50). This historical reality helps explain the importance of “caste” to Castro, which, as noted, is the term he uses to differentiate among the three groups. All three groups would live elbow to elbow on the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, each defining itself in opposition to the other two, and despite interaction with the other two, priding itself on the “purity” of its lineage to the extent that it was free from being “tainted” by too much contact with the others. This system of castes, according to Castro, was unique to the Iberian Peninsula, given that other European countries did not undergo the same type of history as Spain—Christian reconquest of lands that had been seized by the Muslims.

For Castro, the concept of caste was not simply an outgrowth of the Christian wars against the Muslims, however; it had deeper, more complex roots and, moreover, “did not proceed from motives peculiar to [the Christian Spaniards]” (Spaniards, p. 52). Such a concern for separation, notes Castro, appears often in the literature of the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews. In al-Andalus, as the Muslim-controlled swath of Iberia was called, Jews and Christians were thought inferior for not having accepted Islam and both were excluded from political power (Glick, p. 168). Castro identifies this caste consciousness as the determining factor in Spanish identity, “From the struggle and rivalries among these three groups, from their interconnections and their hatreds, arose the authentic life of the Spaniards” (Spaniards, p. 63).

The history of the Spaniards must begin by determining the identity and procedures of those who initiated new forms of collective life after the Visigothic failure, a life that was tightly bound to the Semitic peoples—Moors and Jews—who for centuries maintained the civilization of the inhabitants of al-Andalus at a high level. Those Semitic peoples deeply affected the vital structure of forms of conduct of the Christians. (Spaniards, p. 64)

Without a firm focus on the “Semitic forms of life” (customs received from Jewish and Islamic peoples) that influenced Spanish Christians, says Castro, one cannot understand their later evolution or their literary achievements. The melding of castes, argues Castro, led to literary greatness. Out of sincere belief or compulsion, many Jews converted to Christianity and much of the finest Spanish literature of the fourteenth to sixteenth century is indebted to the contributions of Jews or Christians of Jewish ancestry.

In Castro’s estimation, while the three castes lived side-by-side, each held to a belief in its own worth and a feeling of security in its role in society. The memory of their common life would surface in post-1492 literature. Castro mentions the example of Pármeno’s mother in the Spanish drama La Celestina (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times), who “never failed to attend the burial of Christians, or Moors, or Jews,” as well as the literary allusions of the Sephardic Jews, who referred to the social system of the three castes in ballads sung in exile (Spaniards, pp. 91–92). The system remained alive in memory. Meanwhile, asserts Castro, the absence of the two castes had a severe consequence. The development of Spanish society was interrupted by the expulsions, cut short by the loss of the Muslims and the Jews, who had contributed so much to the forging of Spanish culture.

Sources and literary context

As far back as the eighteenth century, Spanish authors had begun to question the nature of Spanish history and the Spanish nation. With the influence of French Enlightenment ideas that accompanied the traumatic coming of the French Bourbon family to the Spanish throne, writers such as Benito Jerónimo Feijóo and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos began examining the question of what was particularly Spanish (see Essay on Woman , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Such an examination proceeded into the nineteenth century, with the group known as the “Generation of 1898” carrying on the tradition of self-questioning. Writers such as Miguel de Unamuno looked into Spanish history to find features that could explain its rise to imperial grandeur in early modern times and its subsequent fall into “decadence,” which reached unprecedented depths in their own times.

Spanish historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of two guiding figures: Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856–1912) and Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968). Menéndez Pelayo set out to provide a synthesis of the available data that had been maintained regarding the history of Spain. He absorbed many of the prevailing European notions about historical method and searched for a principle to apply to Spain, settling on “Catholic unity” as the central characteristic of the Spanish people throughout history, a conclusion he reached partially in response to the nationalist movements sweeping Europe at that time, movements that tended to focus on ethnicity and particularities instead of factors that transcended race and nationality. While later historians would often view his conclusions as less than scientific, his place in the pantheon of Spanish historians and his contribution to study of Spanish history has never been questioned.

The other towering figure of Spanish historiography is Ramón Menéndez Pidal. His monumental work Orígenes del español (The Origins of Spanish) remains to this day the most complete work on the history of the Spanish language. His historico-linguistic approach to the study of the roots of Spanish culture, his innumerable works of scholarship and his dedication to creating the Revista de filología española (The Journal of Spanish Philology) formed the school of historians that gave rise to Américo Castro as one of its most illustrious pupils. Menéndez Pidal’s scientific rigor was marked by distaste for examining religious questions (in contrast to the approach of Menéndez Pelayo and Américo Castro); in later years he would sometimes disagree with the conclusions reached by his disciple Américo. For Menéndez Pidal, the study of the roots of the Spanish language, along with the earliest forms of its literary tradition (including folk ballads and epic poems) would form the nucleus for understanding the true nature of the Spanish people.

Falling in line with the investigations of these scholars, Castro upset traditional historiography by suddenly dating the origin of the Spaniard from the Muslim invasion. His position was startling in contrast to the long-accepted view that Spanish history started much earlier, with the beginning of peninsular life: “In one way or another, almost all the historians who studied Spain … from … Father Mariana’s Historia de Espanna (1601) … asserted the existence of a geological “Spaniard” born together with Peninsular geography” (Araya Goubet, pp. 64–65). Castro changed all that, introducing an innovative perspective, one that stirred vigorous controversy.

Reception

Hotly debated before the publication of Castro’s theories, the question of Spain’s defining characteristics took on new energy with the publication of Castro’s theories. España en su historia: moros, judíos, cristianos, as well as his later works, proved extremely popular in Spain and abroad, garnering an enormous amount of attention, both positive and negative. In 1957 the Mexican publishing house Porrúa released the book Juicios y Comentarios (Judgements and Commentaries), containing reviews of Castro’s foundational 1948 book by some of the foremost scholars of the day, culled from journals such as The Muslim World, The Yale Review, and the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.

Back in Spain, in 1953 Ramón Menéndez Pidal published the first volume of the series directed by him, Historia de España (History of Spain). In 1956 Claudio Sánchez Albornoz published España, un enigma histórico (Spain, a Historical Enigma). The following year, in 1957, the series Historia social y económica de España y América (Social and Economic History of Spain and America), directed by J. Vicens Vives, arrived at the bookstores. Each of these studies, either intentionally or unintentionally, entered into polemics with Castro’s vision of Spanish history.

In 1966, the medievalist and Cervantes scholar Eugenio Asensio entered into what was perhaps the most biting dispute with Castro’s ides. Other authors published ideas that conflicted with Castro’s, but Asensio adopted a stance that was anti-Castro (the title of his book La España imaginada de Américo Castro [1976; Américo Castro’s Imagined Spain] is sufficiently explanatory). For Asensio, “Castro belongs to a line of philosophizing historians that miss that mark by joining historical data with philosophical concepts” (Asensio, p. 10; trans. D. Bacich). Asensio disagreed with Castro’s situating Spanish identity in the cultural mix that occurred after 711, and others have too, but none of the criticism has negated the riveting effect his ideas have had on historians and literary scholars: “The impact of his work is … equivalent to an intellectual revolution within the scope of Spanish history.… One must either yield to his doctrine or have very good reasons for not doing so. But it is impossible to remain impartial; one always has to take a stand in this regard” (Araya Goubet, pp. 64–65).

—Damian Bacich and Enrique Rodríguez-Cepeda

For More Information

Araya Goubet, Guillermo. “The Evolution of Castro’s Theories.” In Américo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization. Ed. José Rubia Barcia and Selma Margaretten. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Asensio, Eugenio. La España imaginada de Américo Castro. Barcelona: Ediciones El Albir, 1976.

Carr, Raymond, ed. Spain: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Castro, Américo. The Structure of Spanish History. Trans. Edmund L. King. Princeton: Princeton University, 1954.

_____ The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History. Trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Constable, Olivia Remie, ed. Medieval Iberia: Readings From Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Freund, Scarlett, and Teofilo F. Ruiz. “Jews, Conversos, and the Inquisition in Spain, 1391–1492.” In Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries. Eds. Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

Glick, Thomas F. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University, 1979.

Halevi, Jehudah. Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi. Ed. Heinrich Brody. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1952.

Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469–1714: A Society in Conflict. London. Longman, 1991.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University, 1996.

O’Callaghan, Joseph. A History of Medieval Spain. Ithaca: Cornell, 1975.

Surtz, Ronald E. et al., eds. Américo Castro: The Impact of His Thought. Essays to Mark the Centenary of His Birth. Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1988.