“For my part, I think it is all tittle-tattle and old woman’s gossip—I mean in regard to their observing the Jewish rites; but that they are of Jewish origin, cannot be denied. Furthermore, if I have time, I’ll rummage through some old papers I know of, and we’ll disinter a certain Juan Manuel Cardoso Muiño, a native of Marín, whom the Inquisition of Santiago tortured and flogged, on the ground that he was a Judaizer. He was besides an incurable leper. So you see I know all about it, you curious fellow. I’ll look up the papers.”
“No, no, it’s not necessary. I only wanted to find out—mere idle curiosity. Don’t trouble yourself about it, Don Wenceslao.”
For a month I was sorely afraid that the fellow actually would look the matter up, or perhaps even send an absurd communication to some wretched sheet in Pontevedra, as he used to do every two years, whenever he imagined that he had discovered some important and unpublished data which might serve as an historical key to the ancient kingdom of Galicia. I therefore carefully avoided recurring to the conversation about the Judaizers of Marín. This very precaution indicated that I was not quite reconciled to the drubbing which had been inflicted upon Juan Manuel Cardoso Muiño.
Later on, when I left Pontevedra for Madrid to begin my studies preparatory to the School of Engineering, I often recalled that stigma, and tried to view it in a sensible light. It seemed to me absurd to place so much importance upon a thing that, in our present social state, has none whatever in the light of good judgment and the philosophy of history. The Jews are, in fact, a people of noble origin, who have given us “the religious conception”—a conception to which, viewed either as a sublime product of the mind or as a lofty flight of the imagination, I attributed great importance.
In another point of view, also, that of social standing, it no longer seemed right to me to despise Hebrews. The stigma of the Middle Ages has been so far obliterated that wealthy Jewish capitalists intermarry with the most aristocratic families in France, and give splendid receptions and banquets at which the Spanish aristocracy deigns to appear. Aside from these outward considerations, I used to fix my thought on others, higher and deeper, and remembered that great thinker Baruch Spinosa, who was of Jewish race; as were also Meyerbeer and Heine.
In fact, as I assured myself again and again, there was not the slightest reason for feeling so sore at having descended from the Jews, except the unreason of an instinctive aversion, born of sentimental hereditary prejudice. There was no doubt about it; the blood of the old Christians which flowed in my veins, shrank with horror from intermingling with that of the Jewish race. It is very singular, I thought, that the inmost part of our being thus resists our will and reason, and that, in spite of ourselves, there exists within us a rebellious and self-governed something, over which our own convictions have no control whatever, but which is only affected by those of past generations.
And here my Uncle Felipe again appears on the scene. I do not know whether I remarked before that he was my mother’s brother, somewhat younger than she was. He was about forty-two or forty-three at the time our story commences, and was considered “quite good-looking;” perhaps because he was tall, well-formed, and somewhat stout, with thick hair and whiskers. But at the first glance my uncle showed all the unmistakable traces of a Jewish origin. He certainly did not look like the images of Christ, but resembled, rather, another Semitic type, that of the sensual Jews, such as the scribes, Pharisees and doctors of the law, as they appear in pictures and sculptures representing scenes in the Crucifixion.
The first time I ever visited the Prado Museum I was struck by the great number of faces resembling my Uncle Felipe’s. Above all was this the case in Rubens’s paintings, in those big, fat, florid Jews, with their hooked noses and gluttonous, sensual lips, hard, suspicious gaze, and with profiles like a bird of prey. Some of them, exaggerated by the Flemish master’s heavy strokes, were caricatures of my uncle, but most faithful ones. His red beard and curly hair made my uncle look precisely like the figure of one of the executioners carried in the processions of Holy Week. And to me it was very plain, it was my uncle’s deicide face which from childhood inspired me with that stolid, sullen, insuperable aversion, like that we feel for a reptile though it does us no harm. Not even my rationalistic ideas, nor my scientific positivism, nor the knowledge that I was supported and protected by that hated being, could rid me of this aversion.
“These are the tricks of art,” I reflected. “For five hundred years past the painters have endeavored to bring together in half a dozen faces the expression of avarice, of gluttony, cruelty, selfishness, and hypocrisy, and so have succeeded in making the Jewish type so repugnant. Luis is right. Tradition, that binding cement, that mold which gathers in our very souls, is stronger than culture or progress. Instead of reflecting, we feel; and not even that, because it is the dead who feel for us.”
Sometimes, in order not to acknowledge myself guilty of fear or childishness, I sought other reasons for the antipathy I felt toward my uncle. I make a great point of personal neatness, while my uncle, without being careless in his dress, was not very cleanly in his person; his nails were sometimes not immaculate, and his teeth betrayed a tinge of green. My dislike for my uncle was also stimulated by my seeing that he, without any desert whatever, as the result of no moral or intellectual qualities, had yet been able to secure a good position. I do not mean to say that he was wicked or stupid, but that he was one of those intermediate hybrid creatures, of whom we can never quite discover, whether they are bright or stupid, good or knavish, although they are strongly inclined to be the latter. A mushroom springing up in the corruption of our politics, and growing rank in the deadly shade of electoral intrigue, he was condemned by my puritanical and radical ideas, with all the rigid inflexibility of youth, to the punishment of general contempt. Although he was not as high in power as some of his fellow-bosses, his unjustifiable prosperity sufficed to stir all my youthful indignation against him.