Dani VG

You have heard the line: “Spain invented modern racism with the limpieza de sangre statutes.” It is everywhere: op-eds, classrooms, TikToks, “Decolonial” discourse, and pop history books. But almost nobody knows where this idea actually came from. The claim does not come from medieval archives. The single most influential source is a 1995 book titled The Origins of the Inquisition by Benzion Netanyahu. Netanyahu argued that Spain persecuted Jews racially, not religiously, turning medieval Spain into a proto-Nazi state centuries before race science even existed. Historians overwhelmingly rejected it. “Limpieza de sangre” was not biological. Conversos held office and intermarried. Statutes varied widely. Medieval “race” is not the same as modern race. Why did Anglo academia accept it? Because it was useful. Netanyahu’s thesis gave the Black Legend, the Anglo-Protestant propaganda tradition portraying Spain as uniquely cruel, an academic-looking justification it never had. U.S. universities embraced it. Culture-war politics weaponized it. “Decolonial” influencers repeated it uncritically. Netanyahu reread medieval Spain through modern Zionist ideology. Jews were framed as a biological nation. Spain was framed as a proto-Holocaust. Persecution was framed as racial, not religious. This interpretation projected nineteenth-century racial ideas onto the fifteenth century, an anachronism that Iberian Catholicism never accepted. In Spain, Jewishness was understood as a religion. Baptism erased distinctions. Identity was spiritual, not biological. Anglo academics found this narrative appealing because it shifted the origins of modern racism away from the Protestant North, where race science, eugenics, and segregationism actually emerged. Netanyahu’s 1990s ideological thesis later spread into social media orthodoxy. “Spain invented racism.” “Limpieza de sangre equals racial purity.” “The Inquisition equals early Nazism.” This is not history. It is a combination of ideological interpretation, academic convenience, and online simplification turned into a meme. The next time someone repeats it, remember that they are not citing medieval Spain. They are citing Benzion Netanyahu’s interpretation.

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