A Nation In Exile
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“We need to shut with bolts, keys and locks all the doorways through which the spirit of Spain escapes and spills over into the four points of the horizon,” pleaded the 19th-century Spanish novelist Angel Ganivet. He knew whereof he spoke: Ganivet spent the last six years of his brief life in Antwerp, Helsinki, and Riga, where he committed suicide at the age of 33. He was not exactly in exile — he lived in those cities as a diplomat representing the Spanish government — yet Ganivet’s compulsion to leave his native country made him typical of Spanish writers, intellectuals, and scientists throughout the centuries. “In other nations, the people arrive,” Henry Kamen writes in “The Disinherited” (Harper, 508 pages, $34.95), his encyclopedic new study; “in Spain they depart.”
What makes Ganivet’s plight still more emblematic is that, even after he left Spain, he found that Spain had by no means left him. “The central motif of my ideas,” he insisted, “is restoration of the spiritual life of Spain.” Like so many exiles of all nations, voluntary and involuntary, he found that his native country preyed on him like a riddle. “Wherever we care to pass over the roads of Spain,” Ganivet wrote, “we will encounter the eternal sphinx with the eternal question: is it better to live as we have done till now, or should we break definitively with bad traditions and transform ourselves into a modern nation?”
It is the kind of tormented question we usually expect to hear from post-colonial societies in the Third World. The dangerous combination of envy of the modern West and pride-salving contempt for Western values might be found in contemporary South Africa, Singapore, or Saudi Arabia. Yet the biggest revelation of “The Disinherited” for a reader unfamiliar with Spanish history is that Spain has spent most of the last five centuries mired in the same inferiority complex. The country that conquered America and bestrode Europe in the 16th century had become, by the 18th, an economic and cultural backwater, plagued by constant political violence. As early as 1568, a citizen of Oviedo observed that much of Spain was as “savage” as the New World could possibly be; as he memorably put it, “There are Indies in Castile.”
In every generation, Mr. Kamen shows, Spain’s best minds asked what had gone wrong with their country, and what could be done about it. “The Disinherited” tries to answer that “eternal question” by viewing Spain from the vantage point of the successive waves of exiles who were forced — by law, violence, ambition, or need — to leave her behind. Each of Mr. Kamen’s chapters starts off by considering a major episode of expulsion or emigration in Spanish history, and goes on to offer biographical sketches of some of the significant figures who took part in the exile.
He begins with one of the most notorious episodes in Spanish history, the expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Mr. Kamen adopts a revisionist position on this historical catastrophe. Impatient with the attempts of later Spanish writers to blame everything that went wrong with Spain on the expulsion of the Jews, he tends to downplay both its scale and its significance. The number of Jewish exiles, he writes, was only about 50,000, “barely a third or a quarter of what scholars used to suggest before modern research changed the picture,” and “the expulsions of 1492 had no negative economic consequences.” Mr. Kamen particularly resists the tendency to “look on the scattering of 1492 as a prefiguring of the Holocaust.” In general, Mr. Kamen’s chapter on “The Survival of the Jew” seems cursory — perhaps because once the Jews left Spain, they belonged to Jewish history rather than Spanish, and so disappeared from the purview of “The Disinherited.”
The same cannot be said of the Moors, the Muslim inhabitants of the country they called “al-Andalus.” The Jewish population of Spain was small enough to expel in 1492, but the Moors were too numerous to deal with so peremptorily; instead, they were forced by law to convert to Christianity. It was not until 1609 that the government dared to cast out the entire population of 300,000 “Moriscos” — Christians of Muslim origin — many of whom continued to practice their religion in secret. This was the largest act of ethnic cleansing in pre-20th-century Europe, and meant uprooting a people that had been a central part of Spanish culture for almost 1,000 years. Even an official of the Inquisition opposed the expulsion, saying that the Moriscos were “Spaniards like ourselves.” But the Spanish mania for racial and religious purity prevailed, and hundreds of thousands of Moriscos became refugees in North Africa. Like the Sephardic Jewish exiles, the Muslims managed to preserve vestiges of their Spanish culture for many generations: To this day, Spanish folk music survives in parts of Tunisia.
Mr. Kamen is not especially skilled at bringing out the human drama of his story, and “The Disinherited” is rather less absorbing to read than its subject seems to promise. At times, “The Disinherited” feels less like a narrative than a biographical dictionary — especially when Mr. Kamen is writing about figures who are little known outside the Hispanic world. Yet even when it comes to the most famous names in Spanish culture — the few who managed to escape the hermetic borders of Spain and become familiar throughout the West — Mr. Kamen shows that exile was a standard fate.
The music of Victoria in the 16th century and Albeniz in the 19th, the paintings of Picasso, Miró, and Juan Gris, the films of Buñuel — all were produced mainly on foreign soil. Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, was driven out of the most Catholic country in Europe by the Inquisition, which suspected that he was a converso (he wasn’t, though other early Jesuits were). Goya’s most famous paintings deal with the bloody uprising of the Spanish against French occupation in 1808 — his “the Third of May” is probably the best known document of Spanish history since Columbus. Yet even Goya chose to end his life in exile — in France, of all places. Mr. Kamen sees one of his late etchings, depicting “a little wizened old man, cackling to himself in merriment, riding high on a swing,” as an image of the painter himself, celebrating his late-won happiness in a foreign land. Goya was buried in Bordeaux, and his remains weren’t brought back to Spain until 70 years later.
The same story can be told of the chief monuments of Spanish scholarship. These hold a special fascination for Mr. Kamen, who is himself one of the greatest living historians of Spain, though he was educated in England and writes in English. The first Spanish translation of the Bible, for instance, had to be published in Switzerland, since the Spanish Inquisition, in a fine stroke of irony, had placed the Bible itself on its “Index of Prohibited Books.” The translator, Casiodora de Reina, ended his days as a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt.
The Inquisition was also responsible for the expatriation of the Renaissance polymath Juan Luis Vives, who left Spain for good after his father, a Jewish convert, was burned at the stake. Vives wrote copiously on all kinds of subjects, and several of his books — “Instruction of a Christian Woman,” “On the Relief of the Poor,” the handbook “Latin Exercises” — were read across the continent. He was, as Mr. Kamen writes, “the only best-selling Spanish author of his time in Europe.” Yet he went unread in Spain, where his complete works were not edited until the late 18th century. “Spaniards are indifferent to study,” Vives said resignedly. “I shall be read there by few, and understood by even fewer.” That contented backwardness, Mr. Kamen argues, survived down to the Franco era. One of his fullest and most heartfelt chapters deals with the exiles who fled the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 — many of whom became his own teachers and interlocutors. What Spaniards call “cainismo” — the fratricidal impulse of Cain, which some Spanish writers “have suggested … is Spain’s particular and original sin” — cannot be relegated to the past even today. “The word is used almost daily in the Spanish press,” Mr. Kamen writes, “as though it were a self-evident aspect of Hispanic political and literary life.”
Yet in spite of this grim legacy, Mr. Kamen ends “The Disinherited” on a note of paradoxical hopefulness. For if Spain’s exiles were the products of her isolation, they have also been the antidote to it. “It was the exiles,” he writes, “who became the new bearers of Hispanic civilization.” While the mother country languished in isolation, the Spanish exiles — in France, Italy, the United States, and of course Latin America — kept the lines of communication open. In retrospect, they can be seen as the truest benefactors of the country that persecuted them. “The disinherited,” Mr. Kamen concludes, “went through deprivation, alienation, and loss of identity, but some achieved for Hispanic culture what they would certainly not have been able to accomplish had they eked out their days at home in tranquility.”
akirsch@nysun.com