Primo de Rivera's 1924 Decree on Sephardic Jewish Nationality

Primo de Rivera's 1924 Decree on Sephardic Jewish Nationality is a law of refuge in the novel, enabling a family of Sephardic Jewish descent to escape anti-Jewish persecution and settle in Spain. Its meaning is sharpened by the book's other uses of nationality: Spanish identity can also be manufactured or granted to conceal people wanted for crimes, turning legal recognition into an instrument of protection for perpetrators as well as a means of survival for the persecuted.

The decree and the Saporta family

In 1941, the banker Jaime Saporta hurriedly secured Spanish nationality for his family through the Spanish consulate in Paris. His sons, Marcelo and Raimundo, had been born in Istanbul, but their father established their claim to Spanish passports by documenting the family’s Sephardic Jewish origins in Salonica. The decree provided the legal basis: it nationalized people of Spanish origin, including Sephardic Jews, allowing the Saportas to leave France under Vichy rule and escape the persecution of the Nazi occupiers by moving to Madrid.

The law’s practical force lies in this passage from ancestry to papers, and from papers to physical safety. The Saportas’ Spanish nationality was not merely a family connection or a symbolic inheritance; it gave them a document that could be obtained through a consulate and used to cross a dangerous political divide. The family reached the country of its ancestors while anti-Jewish laws and Nazi persecution threatened them in France.

Different paths after arrival

The two brothers’ lives in Spain diverged. Marcelo, eighteen when the family arrived, was required to perform military service. In the barracks, contact with young men who represented the country’s reality led him toward opposition to the dictatorship. Back in Madrid, he joined former students of the French lycée in a student movement that had reconstituted the republican Federation of University Students to contest the Falangist university union’s dominance.

Raimundo, three years younger, adapted without difficulty to Francoist Spain. He later became a prominent Real Madrid executive and Santiago Bernabéu’s right-hand man. Their contrasting trajectories show that the decree secured the family’s arrival, but did not prescribe what Spanish belonging would mean to each brother. For Marcelo, the country of ancestral origin became the setting for resistance; for Raimundo, it became a place in which to establish himself within the existing order.

Nationality as protection—and as cover

The novel places the decree beside a darker political use of Spanish nationality. In the postwar years, the Francoist state used retroactive grants of nationality, supported by authentic documents made out for false identities, to protect Nazis seeking refuge in Spain or passage to another country. The Allied List of 104 included Clarita Stauffer, identified as a principal organizer of a secret aid association that supplied false papers and helped German fugitives find work. The list gave her Madrid address and described her wartime activities; the state’s response was to treat her as Spanish and refuse to hand her over.

The contrast is not that the decree itself serves both purposes, but that the novel sets a legal means of escape from persecution against a later regime’s manipulation of nationality and documentation. For the Saportas, the father’s proof of Sephardic descent made citizenship a way out of danger. For Nazi fugitives, fabricated identities and protective citizenship made the same administrative category a way to evade accountability. The law’s appearance in this larger pattern makes papers consequential: they can render a person legible to a state, but political power can also alter what that legibility protects.