A Hateful Glass of Wine
The Spanish city of León is home to about 120,000 people. Located in the north of the nation (here’s a map), it’s the capital of the province of León, a region which is majority Roman Catholic but trending secular. Nevertheless, the culture of the area — including in the city proper — is anchored around Roman Catholic holidays and traditions. As the city’s Wikipedia entry notes, Holy Week — Palm Sunday through the day before Easter — draws thousands of people out in observance and celebration. And while you’re there, you may find that someone offers you a glass of Holy Week lemonade, seen above. It’s a drink local to the region made of lemons, sugar, sometimes some other fruits, and importantly, wine, and it’s commonly served during a Holy Week event called “matar judíos.”
And if you speak Spanish, you’re probably not going to drink it after reading that. As for those who don’t speak Spanish, “matar judíos” literally translates to “kill Jews.”
And yes, originally, that’s what historians believe the toast was designed to celebrate.
For most of the Middle Ages and beyond, anti-Jewish violence was common in Spain. León was no exception. In 1196, the city’s Jewish quarter — created just decades earlier when Jews fled there after attacks by Roman Catholic majorities — was destroyed by the very same groups that caused them to settle there in the first place. The Jewish population rebounded over the next couple of centuries, but by the 1300s, the hate returned as well.
Spanish publication El Español spoke to historian Margarita Torres, a professor of history at the University of León and the city’s former historian. Per Torres, via the publication (with some help from Google Translate and some cleanup by me), the Jewish community in León became “the scapegoat of a society in profound socioeconomic crisis from the mid-14th century onward. War, plague, famine — any excuse was seen as good enough to blame the Jews for all the ills, incited by the inquisitors and some local clergymen and nobles who sought, in these bloody acts, to rehabilitate their memory, advance their careers at Court or in the Church, or simply eliminate those to whom they owed debts.”
In 1449, per Torres, that scapegoating came to a head. Many Christian noblemen in León were deep in debt, including a knight named Suero de Quiñones — and he owed money to a Jewish merchant. As Torres explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “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.” To celebrate their triumph, Quiñones and his merry band of murderers popped open some wine and toasted to the reasons for their joy: “killing Jews.”
Nearly six centuries later, the tradition of toasting to murdering others (but, thankfully, not actually murdering them) continues. Per the JTA and others, many residents defend the practice as “an expression that is not racist at all,” but suffice it to say that few if any of the remaining Jews in Spain agree.
Bonus fact: You’ll note that, above, I never use the word “antisemitism” to describe the wine or its origins. That’s because the term post-dates the period that the tradition began in, and was intended to differentiate a “newer” brand of Jew hatred from the type described above. The Spanish who drank to killing Jews killed Jews because of religious discrimination, believing that Jews a millennium earlier plotted to murder Jesus. But during the Enlightenment, religious discrimination became increasingly unacceptable. So many Jew haters pivoted their theory as to why Jews were bad. One in particular, a German named Wilhelm Marr, posited that Jews were a race that, if left to its own devices, would subsume German culture. He advocated for the removal of this foreign race, a term he called “antisemitism” (but in German), and in 1879, founded “Antisemiten-Liga” (“The League of Antisemites”) in furtherance of those efforts. Today, the term is used to describe anti-Jewish discrimination broadly, but it originally was used by anti-Jewish racists to help justify their discrimination.
From the Archives: The Somewhat-Fake Sausage That Saved Lives: Fake pork hanging in the window keeps the inquisitor away.