A Comment About

Spain’s ‘Jewish Problem’

December 30, 2008 - 12:00 am - by Soeren Kern
JFM
2008-12-30 06:55:06

There is a small problem with this article it is based on biased data.

People from formerly occupied countries have a strong reluctance to openly assert negative feelings against the Jews because antisemitism is associated with the Nazi occupation, Quislings, people turning Jews to Nazis in order to get their belongings and histories of cowardice and indifference in their own families. The same is true in Germany. But Spain was neutral and remained unoccupied. While its government didn’t wide open its borders to Jews ait didn’t turn them to the Nazis. That means that Spaniards have no special guilt feeling about the Shoah and thus the reluctance about looking antisemitic is much lower. Thus a Spaniard is a lot less likely to lie at the interviewer than a German or a citizen of the occupied countries and you have through other questions and recoups to estimate the lying factor (that is what statistcians specialized in opinion polls do for a living) in order to draw valid conclusions when you compare anti-Jewish numbers between Spain and other countries.