This is a polemical, but nonetheless intelligent and readable, essay on the motives behind Spain’s treatment of the Indians, Moors, and Jews during the Golden Age. It is thus another contribution to that glorious debate—la leyenda negra—that has been going on from the time of Las Casas. In this respect the author is a partisan contributor, as he writes forcefully about the “fanaticism” and “irrationalism” of the racial stereotypes that circulated throughout Spanish society, judgments buttressed with reference to numerous contemporary texts.
The work is interesting insofar as it is a comparative approach to the question of racial minorities in Spanish society. The author argues that the origins of racialism in Spain had an objective, rational basis in the creation and consolidation of the Empire, but that once racial ideas were produced and nurtured, they took on an irrational existence of their own. The work succeeds at least in demonstrating this hypothesis by quoting many lesser-known writers and polemicists of the Golden Age period, although it is not clear exactly what influence many of them had on the perception or outcome of events.
The author is somewhat less successful in his explanation for the irrationalism of Spanish thought as exemplified by the rejection of Machiavellian political ideals. The concept of political decline is injected in a vague and unsubstantiated manner, and the conception of the use and appeal of ideology is never made clear. These problems are partially caused by the fact that the book is a brief distillation of a thèse d’état, which no doubt contains a more substantial argument and a wider development of the theme. Yet this extract provides new insights into a great body of strange literature that still poses difficult moral and historical problems for anyone who makes the effort to comprehend it.
