Leon's "Kill Jews" cocktail tradition hate or innocuous?

Post Reply New Topic

It’s the week before Easter in León, an ancient city in northwest Spain, and locals have poured into the streets to knock back glasses of wine-lemonade, an annual festivity that’s sometimes punctuated with a cheerful cry: “Matar judíos,” or “Kill Jews.”

“Semana Santa,” or Holy Week, is the most important religious period in Spain. León’s celebrations are particularly spectacular, marked by 10 days of music, sermons and about 30 processions, featuring some 16,000 penitents. It’s also a high season for visitors — in 2002, the city’s Holy Week was declared a “Festival of International Interest for Tourists.”

One fixture of these frenzied days is a Leonese cocktail made from red wine, lemons, cinnamon and sugar, sometimes with oranges and figs. Here it is called “limonada,” and virtually every bar in Barrio Húmedo, the city’s nightlife-packed medieval quarter, is plastered with signs advertising their version. It’s a local tradition to drink 33 limonadas during Holy Week, representing the age of Jesus when he was crucified.

t’s also a centuries-old tradition for revelers seeking limonadas to say they are going out to “kill Jews.”

“It’s an expression here,” Margarita Torres Sevilla, a professor of medieval history at the University of León, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “For example, you tell me, ‘Have a drink with me? Okay, let’s go kill Jews.’ Another typical sentence of Holy Week is, ‘How many Jews have you killed? Three, four, five [limonadas]? Oh, you have killed a lot.’”

In León, a city of about 124,000 that has no visible Jewish community, locals told JTA the phrase is not seen as vulgar or antisemitic. Some bars celebrate it as a point of pride in the city’s heritage, using the phrase as a hashtag when advertising their seasonal specials on social media.

“With the arrival of Holy Week also comes the season of Leonese limonada, a tradition that is popularly known as ‘killing Jews,’” said a Spanish-language Facebook post from Bar Genarín on March 10. “We offer you two varieties, the classic and a white.”

“It’s strange to foreigners, but they take it with a laugh,” said Sonia Da Costa, a server rushing plates and glasses to the swell of customers at Cafetería Chamberí, a local tapas bar. “Here it’s normal.”

The historic Jewish quarter of León, which has not seen a Jewish population in hundreds of years, comprises two streets embedded in the very Barrio Húmedo overflowing with limonadas today.

Few traces indicate where the community lived; its three medieval synagogues were lost, the final one commemorated by a small plaque recently installed on Misericordia Street: “The third Jewish synagogue of León was built here (1370-1481).” On a side street branching off León’s central square, one stone doorway bears two vertical markings, which Torres Sevilla believes were left by a mezuzah.

Jews settled in the area starting in the 10th century. León produced Moses de León, a famed Jewish mystic thought to have composed the Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah.

The town became a center of Jewish religious thought, where Jews lived in relative equality to León’s Christians, interrupted by sporadic spurts of violence, until 1293, when King Sancho IV banned them from owning farmland. Two decades later Jews were forced to wear a yellow badge, and starting in 1365 they had to pay a special tax, similar to one borne by Muslims.

The expression of “killing Jews” on Holy Week goes back to an episode in the 15th century, according to Torres Sevilla. León was economically devastated by war and the Black Death, leaving many Christian noblemen in debt.

One such knight, Suero de Quiñones, owed payments to a Jewish merchant. To avoid paying his debt, Quiñones whipped up a religious fervor against León’s Jews on Holy Week in 1449. He organized a group of knights to attack the Jewish quarter, murdering the lender and several others on Good Friday.

“Quiñones said on Holy Week, our Lord was accused by the Jews and the Jews killed him,” said Torres Sevilla. “So what do we do with the Jews? Kill them. But the real reason was not a Christian motive — the real reason was that he had an important debt to an important merchant of the Jewish community.”

To celebrate their supposed vengeance for the death of Jesus, Quiñones and his allies went to drink wine in Barrio Húmedo. Thus commenced the ritual of downing limonadas to the refrain of “killing Jews,” said Torres Sevilla.

Other stories say the phrase emerged from the taming powers of limonada, authorized by medieval leaders in the midst of Holy Week’s abstinence and fasting to stop Christians from committing pogroms against Jews — by keeping them occupied in the taverns.

The Leonese tradition of “Matar judíos” does not appear to be connected to the Spanish town about 150 kilometers east that was called Castrillo Matajudíos — or Fort Kill the Jews — from 1627, during a period of antisemitic persecution, until a few years ago.

The region’s Jewish community did not last long after Quiñones’s attack. Jews were expelled from León in 1481, and 11 years later, under the Alhambra Decree of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, from all of Spain. Some historians have also linked limonada’s association with “killing Jews” to a quote attributed to Ferdinand, upon signing the expulsion decree in 1492: “Limonada que trasiego, judío que pulverizo” (“Limonada that I decant, Jew that I pulverize”).

Today, residents say the phrase is a social custom devoid of any connection to murder, religion or real-life Jews.

“People are used to it here, it’s an expression that is not racist at all,” said José Manuel, who works at Vychio Cafe Bar. “It’s an expression from a time period of racism but now, no, it’s an expression out of custom.”

Torres Sevilla said that a Jewish past lies dormant in León, even among locals who may not know their own history. While tens of thousands of Jews fled Spain as a result of the Alhambra Decree, thousands of others stayed and converted. Torres Sevilla believes she is among the Spaniards descended from “conversos,” who preserved some distinct traditions despite becoming Christian. “Sevilla” is a historically Jewish surname. Her family goes to church on Saturday — not Sunday — and begins prayers on Friday, the Jewish Shabbat. She grew up with a ritual, also found in other “converso” families, of cleaning the home and having clean clothes ready before Saturday.

Many Leonese Jews stayed and converted after 1492, she said, but their descendants may have no idea — and may even be among those calling to “kill Jews” with their limonadas on Holy Week.

“Everybody knows about ‘kill Jews,’ but nobody knows about the Jewish history of León,” said Torres Sevilla

Charming "custom".

Here in the US they somehow got the children of America to change "eeny meeny minie moe" from "catch a n****r by the toe" to..."catch a tiger by the toe". And did so almost overnight sometimes in the Fifties. In time from my early Sixties grade school child self to only knew or say the "tiger" version.


So...maybe adults in that province of Spain can do something like that. "Kill" something else in that expression.

A spring 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project finds 46% of the Spanish rating Jews unfavorably. More than a third of Russians (34%) and Poles (36%) echo this view. Somewhat fewer, but still significant numbers of the Germans (25%) and French (20%) interviewed also express negative opinions of Jews. These percentages are all higher than obtained in comparable Pew surveys taken in recent years. In a number of countries, the increase has been especially notable between 2006 and 2008.

Surveys from the 1980s and 1990s showed that the Spanish image of the Jews was ambivalent: pejorative stereotypes such as avariciousness, treachery and deicide contrasted with positive evaluations such as their work ethic and their sense of responsibility. In 1998, a survey conducted of 6,000 students in 145 Spanish schools showed a slight increase in racist attitudes compared with 1993 - 14.9 percent would expel the Jews compared with 12.5 percent in 1993. In spring 2002, many EU member states, including Spain, experienced a wave of antisemitic incidents which started with the 'Al-Aqsa-Intifada' in October 2000 and was fueled by the conflict in the Middle East. During the first half of 2002, the rise of antisemitism reached a climax in the period between the end of March and mid-May, running parallel to the escalation of the Middle East Conflict

According to the "Report on Anti-Semitism in Spain in 2010" which was jointly produced by the Observatory on Anti-Semitism in Spain and a nongovernmental organization called the Movement against Intolerance in 2010, while Spain was mired in the worst economic recession in its modern history, it emerged as one of the most antisemitic countries in the EU. According to a poll commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 58.4% of Spaniards believe that "the Jews were powerful because they controlled the economy and the mass media. This number reached 62.2% among university students and 70.5% among those who are "interested in politics." More than 60% of Spanish university students said they did not want Jewish classmates. In other polling data, more than one-third (34.6%) of Spanish people had an unfavorable or completely unfavorable opinion of Jewish people. Another interesting finding is that antisemitism was more prevalent in the political left than it is on the political right - 34% of those on the far right said they are hostile to Jews, while 37.7% of those on the center-left were hostile to Jews. Sympathy for Jews among the extreme right (4.9 on a scale of 1–10) is above the average for the population as a whole (4.6). Among those who recognized themselves as having "antipathy for the Jewish people," only 17% says this was due to the "conflict in the Middle East." Nearly 30% of those surveyed said their dislike of Jews had to do with "their religion," "their customs," and "their way of life," while early 20% of Spaniards said they dislike Jews although they do not know why.

Basques? Catalans?

.

Huh?

The folks in question are in the transition zone between Galician speakers and Castilian (regular Spanish) speakers.

The place in question is the city of Leon, in northwest Spain. So they are not Basques, who straddle the northern border with France, nor Catalan speakers who live on the northeast coast around Barcelona.

The city is the capital of the province of Leon, and in the middle ages was the capital of the Kingdom of Leon. The kingdom took up the whole northwest corner of Spain (the part that sits on top of Portugal) and including the whole Galician speaking area (a language intermediate between Spanish and Portugese).

I know where Leon is. I was suggesting Basques and Catalans as substitute bogeymen as Castilians (and Leonese) have had friction with both.

EDIT You might also want to check out Medinaceli, where at an annual festival, the townspeople set a bull on fire and cheer wildly while it burns to death.

There are few demographic differences in attitudes toward Jews. However, in many of these countries, those with more education tend to have more positive attitudes than do those with less education, though majorities at both levels have favorable views. The biggest such difference is in the Czech Republic, where 81% of those with more education have a favorable view of Jews, compared with 60% among those with less education.

That is the sort of antisemitism that concerns me the most, more so than a priest telling his congregation in rural Spain, who had never seen a Jew IRL, that the Jews killed Christ.