{"id":66162,"date":"2026-08-05T13:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T13:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/66162\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T13:04:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T13:04:26","slug":"the-blogs-the-spain-that-might-have-been-daphne-lazar-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/66162\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blogs: The Spain that might have been | Daphne Lazar Price"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are acts of vandalism that damage property, and then there are acts that reveal history has never really ended. The recent defacement of the statue of Maimonides<\/a> in C\u00f3rdoba, Spain, with a swastika is one of those moments. It is tempting to see it as just another antisemitic incident. It is not.\n<\/p>\n

A swastika on the statue of Maimonides is an attack on eight centuries of Jewish history. It collapses the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust into a single image. It reminds us that the forces that once sought to expel Jews from Spain and later sought to exterminate them in Europe were animated by the same enduring idea: Jews do not belong. Which raises a question. Why Maimonides?\n<\/p>\n

Maimonides was born in C\u00f3rdoba in 1138. He is remembered as one of Judaism\u2019s greatest legal authorities and philosophers, the author of the Mishneh Torah and Guide of\u00a0 the Perplexed, and a physician whose influence extended far beyond the Jewish world. His writings shaped Jewish law, influenced Christian theologians, and were studied by Muslim scholars. Few figures better embody the idea that knowledge can transcend religious boundaries.\n<\/p>\n

His statue is not merely a monument to a Jewish thinker; it is a monument to one of Spain\u2019s greatest sons. And it is a monument to a civilization.\n<\/p>\n

For centuries, Jews helped shape Spanish life through scholarship, medicine, philosophy, commerce, diplomacy, poetry, law, and science. C\u00f3rdoba was one of the great intellectual capitals of medieval Europe. Jewish thinkers translated classical texts, advised kings and caliphs, pioneered medicine, composed enduring poetry, and helped make the Iberian Peninsula one of the intellectual centers of its age.\n<\/p>\n

Then, in 1492, that world was shattered. The Alhambra Decree ordered Spain\u2019s Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Tens of thousands fled. Those who remained often lived under suspicion, pursued by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly practicing Judaism in secret. Spain did not simply lose a religious minority, it expelled one of its greatest intellectual communities.\n<\/p>\n

The loss cannot be measured only by the number of Jews who left. It must also be measured in the books never written in Spain, the universities never founded, the discoveries never made, the businesses never built, the patients never healed, and the conversations between civilizations that never took place. The expulsion impoverished the Jews who were forced into exile and it also impoverished the nation that sent them away.\n<\/p>\n

It is impossible to read that history without asking another question: What if the Inquisition had never happened?\n<\/p>\n

Today, Spain\u2019s Jewish community numbers only about 45,000 to 50,000 people in a nation of nearly 50 million. Many are descendants of Jews who returned only in the 20th century or immigrants from Morocco, Latin America, Israel, and elsewhere in Europe. The continuous Jewish civilization that flourished in Spain for more than a thousand years was broken over five centuries ago.\n<\/p>\n

But imagine another history. Imagine if the communities that produced Maimonides, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and generations of physicians, philosophers, merchants, poets, jurists, and scientists had remained. Imagine Jewish neighborhoods that never became museums because they never stopped being Jewish neighborhoods. Imagine synagogues that were never converted into churches. Imagine universities, publishing houses, hospitals, charitable institutions, and centers of Torah learning that evolved continuously through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, industrialization, democracy, and into the 21st century.\n<\/p>\n

Spain would almost certainly be home to one of the world\u2019s oldest, largest, and most influential Jewish communities, not one painstakingly rebuilding itself after centuries of absence. Instead, visitors wander through beautifully restored juder\u00edas that often feel like archaeological sites. They are reminders not only of Jewish life, but of Jewish absence.\n<\/p>\n

To Spain\u2019s credit, the country has spent the last several decades trying to reclaim that lost history. Historic synagogues have been restored. Jewish heritage has become part of Spain\u2019s national story. Spain even created a pathway to citizenship for descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled in 1492, an extraordinary acknowledgment that the expulsion was not merely a tragedy for the Jews, it was a tragedy for Spain too.\n<\/p>\n

Which makes the timing of this attack all the more unsettling. Spanish authorities have not identified those responsible, but history never unfolds in a vacuum. Since October 7, antisemitism has surged across Europe, and Spain has been far from immune. Public debate over Israel\u2019s war against Hamas has become deeply polarized. Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez has emerged as one of Europe\u2019s most outspoken critics of Israel. Those political debates are legitimate in any democracy. But history teaches that when Jews become symbols in larger political battles, the line between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews can become dangerously blurred.\n<\/p>\n

A swastika is not a criticism of Israeli policy, nor is it a protest against a government. It is a declaration of hatred toward Jews.\n<\/p>\n

Spain, like much of Europe, is also grappling with questions of immigration, identity, and social cohesion. Periods of uncertainty have often given rise to conspiracy theories and the search for scapegoats. Across European history, Jews have repeatedly filled that role. The grievances change, but the targets of hate do not.\n<\/p>\n

That is why the swastika on Maimonides\u2019 statue feels so jarring. It is not simply hatred directed at today\u2019s Jews; it is hatred directed at the very possibility of Jews belonging in Spain. The symbolism is unmistakable. The Inquisition sought to erase Jewish life from Spain and the Holocaust sought to erase Jewish life from the world.\n<\/p>\n

The vandals who painted a swastika on Maimonides compressed those centuries of hatred into a single image. Their message was not simply that they hate Jews today, it was that Jews never belonged here in the first place. There is a profound irony in that.\n<\/p>\n

Maimonides himself embodied the richness of the civilization that Spain now seeks to remember. Born in Muslim-ruled C\u00f3rdoba, forced into exile by religious persecution, and later serving as physician to the Sultan of Egypt, his life crossed religious and political boundaries. He demonstrated that faith and reason, tradition and inquiry, could coexist.\n<\/p>\n

To mark his statue with the emblem of Nazism is to reject not only the Jewish contribution to Spain, but the very idea that civilizations can learn from one another. The vandals intended to desecrate a Jewish monument and in doing so, they reminded us why that monument exists. It stands not only for one extraordinary Jewish thinker, and a civilization. It stands for the Spain that once was, and the Spain that might have been, and for the enduring responsibility, shared by Jews and non-Jews alike, to ensure that neither is forgotten.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are acts of vandalism that damage property, and then there are acts that reveal history has never…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[668,17,26436,20228,26437],"class_list":["post-66162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-antisemitism","tag-spain","tag-spanish-inquisition","tag-spanish-jews","tag-the-holocaust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}