Sidestepped in History, neglected in Memory: Spanish Jewish diasporas under Nazi occupation

• Applicant: Dr. Olmo Masa
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547468899

This research project focuses on the Jews with Spanish citizenship in Europe during the Holocaust, and their memories and legacy in Spain. In 1940 there were some 5,000 Jews with Spanish citizenship outside of Spain in Europe, mainly in France with around 2,500 and Greece with over 700. By 1945 two thirds of the Spanish Jews in Greece had been rescued by the Spanish authorities, while only one third of those in France were ultimately saved. The research question of this proposal is two-fold: what are the historical factors influencing the uneven treatment of Spanish Jewish diasporas in Greece and France during the Holocaust? How are Spanish authorities portrayed in the postwar testimonies and memorial initiatives of the Spanish Jews, and what is the degree of absence/presence of their memories in the Spanish State’s policies of Holocaust remembrance? In historical terms the amount of scholarly work on these groups has exponentially grown over the last decades, yet historians have sidestepped the reasons for the unequal geographic distribution of Spanish Jews rescued or abandoned by Spain. Similarly, the literature on the memory of the Holocaust in Spain has unveiled crucial public uses of the Jewish genocide in Spanish society, but it has not paid enough attention to the memories of Spanish Jews and to their degree of neglect by State remembrance policies. This historical sidestepping and memorial neglect, I argue, are a result of a scholarly approach focused on perpetrators’ and bystanders’ sources but generally inattentive to the testimonies and voices of the victims, and a Spanish-centered perspective that has not dealt with non-state actors and Jewish memories beyond the Spanish territory. To overcome these methodological problems, the proposal applies an integrated historical approach for the study of the fates of Spanish Jews in France and Greece during the Holocaust, and employs a transnational perspective to expand our understanding of these diasporic memories and their uses and (in)visibility in Spanish Holocaust memory.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position