"Américo Castro's "Problem

Américo Castro's "Problem" Ilan Stavans (bio) Keywords Jorge Luis Borges, Américo Castro, Conversos, Crypto-Jews, Hispanic antisemitism, Spain "Que no me entienden!"—they don't get me. When the distinguished linguist, literary critic, and historian Américo Castro (1885–1972), by then the Emory L. Ford Professor of Spanish at Princeton University, released his seminal book The Structure of Spanish History in 1940, he argued for a thorough reconsideration of Iberian civilization. His thesis was that Spain didn't coalesce as a nation in Roman times, nor during the Visigoth domination, but became what it is today as a result of La Convivencia. Castro was the first to publicly use the term. He portrayed La Convivencia as a period of harmonious coexistence in the Iberian Peninsula of the three major Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—that stretched from the Umayyad conquest in the eighth century to the beginning of the fifteenth. It was at that point, he believed, when el carácter español, the nation's personality, emerged as a historical fixture. La Convivencia brought into Spain an "expresividad subjetiva," a subjective expression that, in his view, was almost totally absent in Castile before the fourteenth century.1 That subjectivity came about in the interaction of the three religions. He used geographic terms such as "Oriental" (denoting Islam, Judaism) and "Occidental" (denoting European influences) to highlight the battle for the Spanish soul. Throughout his work, Castro built the foundation for the understanding of conversos as a distinct class—people who, willingly or otherwise, renounced Judaism, and to a lesser extent Islam, to openly become Catholic. He maintained that the conversos were instrumental in shaping modernity in Europe, not only as a Weltanschauung (starting with Baruch Spinoza onward to the American Founding Fathers) but predominantly as an economic network shaped around the Mediterranean Basin. Scholarly studies on the impact of the Spanish Inquisition as the engine fostering the [End Page 507] separation between the public and private realms (Henry Kamen, Benzion Netanyahu, and others), and on marranos as agents of change (Yirmiyahu Yovel) are common now.2 The aforementioned makes Castro a cornerstone in the shaping of Jewish studies in the Hispanic world—even if, in truth, Jews were only an ancillary topic in his academic pursuits. The Meaning of Spanish History is an English version of an obsession that Castro returned to in various books (among them, España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos [1948], La edad conflictiva [1961], and La realidad histórica de España [1962]), as well as in revisions he did for various translations of his work. His interests were truly interdisciplinary, and versatile on a number of fronts (he wrote on Don Quixote, Lope de Vega, Santa Teresa, La Celestina, and other literary classics). He also functioned as a vigorous public intellectual in polemics with, among others, historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz—who became Castro's nemesis—and for years wrote newspaper columns in Spain's El Sol and Buenos Aires's La Nación. Through Miguel de Cervantes, for example, Castro believed that Spain had discovered a unique awareness of inner existence ("the self from within"). This awareness, he believed, was a vital course for Spain in its ambitions and its anguishes, "for to live to the utmost—vivir viviéndose—is not separable from living in agony—vivir desviviéndose."3 In hindsight, Castro's legacy is troubling, though. Or maybe the right word is "problematic," since he not only belonged to an age in which the term was in vogue but wholeheartedly embraced it. He believed his quest to be the evaluation of Spain as an integral part of Europe in the twentieth [End Page 508] century but also "España como problema." Plus, there was the "Jewish problem," meaning the deciphering of Jews as a conundrum in Spanish history. Unfortunately, while celebrating the role of conversos, Castro infused his work with an assortment of antisemitic remarks. He posited that intolerance in Spain was rooted in the aljamas, a medieval word referring to the Jewish community. And he implied that El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición was a direct by-product of

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