Whenever Madrid and Jerusalem quarrel — which under Pedro Sánchez is most weeks — a familiar chorus starts up. Spain, it explains, has been the enemy of the Jews since the Inquisition, and whatever its current government does is simply the old poison decanted into new bottles. The theory has the advantage of requiring no knowledge of Spanish history, which explains its popularity.

The record is worth consulting, if only because it keeps refusing to cooperate. Jews have lived in Iberia longer than almost anywhere else in Europe. Obadiah 1:20 speaks of exiles from Jerusalem dwelling in Sepharad, a place the classical commentators identified with Spain; modern scholars doubt the identification, and the first unambiguous traces of Jewish life in the peninsula date to the Roman period.

In the thirteenth century, Alfonso X of Castile — el Sabio, the Wise — compiled the Siete Partidas, the seven-part legal code that shaped Spanish and Latin American jurisprudence for centuries and whose traces can still be found in Louisiana law. An entire title within it is devoted to Jews. It affirmed their subordination and fenced their lives with restrictions. Yet the same title placed synagogues under royal protection — Christians were forbidden to destroy or deface them — and banned forced baptism in categorical terms. It even provided that a Jew could not ordinarily be summoned to court on his Sabbath.

This was the same king who kept Jewish astronomers on his payroll; the Alfonsine Tables they produced for him steered European astronomy for the next three hundred years, all the way to Copernicus. Set the legislation against its own time — kings elsewhere were squeezing their Jews for revenue before showing them the door — and the Partidas stand as one of medieval Christendom’s rare experiments in legislated coexistence: unequal by design, and still more than nearly anyone else attempted. When Alfonso buried his father, Fernando III, in Seville, he had the epitaph carved four times over: in Castilian, Latin, Arabic — and Hebrew.

Persecution deepened over the following two centuries, and in 1492 came the Alhambra Decree and the expulsion. Spain arrived late to the practice: England had thrown out its Jews in 1290; France did the same in 1306 and, for good measure, again in 1394. Among the major kingdoms of Western Europe, the Spanish were nearly the last. Yet somehow only they are still made to answer for it five centuries on — the........

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