The Unseen Abstraction of Race

In our first class, we were asked if race is always seen.  Most people seemed to agree that it is notM.  Reading Martinez and Nirenberg’s respective treatments of Jewishness in late medieval and early modern Spain only served to confirm this notion.  If we accept their arguments that the limpieza de sangre phenomenon was an early employment and incarnation of race, it becomes clear that race can, and often does, have little to do with appearance, including skin color or other physical markers most often associated with it in the popular imagination.  Although American constructions of Jewishness have often referenced (visible) physicalities, it seems safe to assume that the Spanish construction of Jewishness apparently had very little to do with any kind of visible physicality and more to do with religion, culture, and behaviors which were connected to biological reproduction.  Secondly, as Nirenberg points out, even when tying Jewishness to reproduction and lineage, the ability to keep accurate track of this type of inheritance often proved difficult and problematic.  The paradox here is that limpieza de sangre represents, on the one hand, an attempt to essentialize race in the most specific and deducible form of biology conceived of at the time, yet it is ultimately something which was also not visible and therefore eluded any kind of physical observation.  Thus, race, in this instance, was on the one hand conceived as something physiological and tangible, but in reality, was something which was essentially abstract, something which could really only be traced through abstract records of lineage, which could be falsified in many cases.  

While I agree with Martinez’s assertion at the end of Chapter 2 that race is not universally constructed but “unstable” and historically situated, I could not help but notice how similar the Spanish construction of Jewish race was to the American construction of blackness, both under chattel slavery and Jim Crow.  Under both these American systems of racial oppression, race was also conceived more in terms of lineage than mere physicality. And, like the church and state in the early 15^th and 16^th centuries, American states frantically and unsuccessfully tried to define race in terms of genealogy (blood quantum), and in failing to do so, ultimately settled on a one-drop notion, as a general rule. Other striking similarities have to do with the obsession in both historical situation with female sexual purity and its policing.  While this is not an argument for any kind of universal incarnation of race, it does, perhaps, lend even more credence to the argument that a kind of racial construction was indeed occurring in Europe prior to modernity.