ABSTRACT
Early in 2014, the Spanish government announced its decision to grant citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were forced to flee the country in 1492. Spain’s minister of justice at that time, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, justified this decision as an attempt to correct “the biggest mistake in Spanish history” (qtd in Stavans). This apparently conciliatory move was mostly well received, but met with the skepticism of several critics. Ilan Stavans, for example, has argued that inviting Jews to settle in times of serious financial crisis was not so much an act of reconciliation as a well-known strategy to bring the Jews back to Spain in order to push the economy forward. Stavans has a point. In the late-nineteenth century, senator Ángel Pulido Fernández had started a similar campaign to repatriate the Sephardic Jews that was lauded by many Spanish intellectuals as a remedy to strengthen Spain’s international position. It is against this background that I propose reading Pardo Bazán’s three-act prose drama El becerro de metal (The Golden Calf) (1906).1 Although Pardo Bazán stood sympathetic towards reconciliation between Spain and the Sephardic Jews (González 186), she did not consider the return of the Jews as a panacea for the many problems Spain faced.
