Policing the Genuine Purity of Blood: The EU Commission’s Assault on Citizenship and Residence by Investment and the Future of Citizenship in the European Union

This article provides a brief critical assessment of the European Commission’s January 2019 “Report on Investor Citizenship and Residence Schemes in the European Union”. Since it is the firs detailed document by the Commission outlining this institution’s position on the matters of investment residence and citizenship, and given the Commission’s recently articulated intentions to take Cyprus and Malta to Court over their investment migration law and practice, the Report in question is of paramount importance. The document sets the legal-political context of the regulation of the migration of wealthy third-country nationals in Europe. It is also deeply fl awed. Rather that summarising the document, this article focuses on fi ve core defi ciencies of the Commission’s embarrassing product and demonstrates how the Commission failed to get the EU’s own law right, in addition to showing a poor understanding of international law on the matter. Ripe with nationalist assumptions not rooted in the Treaties or the secondary law of the Union and showcasing a timid, convoluted and inconsistent analysis of the issues it purports to address, the Report has unsurprisingly failed to change the landscape of regulation in the field of investment citizenship and residence in the EU or anywhere else in the world. What it did make clear, however, was that the mere political suspicion of a particular type of naturalisation is enough for the European Commission to set aside the law and misinform the public, underlying once again the problematic tension between the growing political nature of this institution and its key task as guardian of the Treaties. There is a burning need for the Commission to take a more careful, coherent and informed approach to its actions, an approach indispensable for the preservation of the rule of law in the Union.

Jesuits and Conversos in Sixteenth-Century Toledo

In the early days of the Society of Jesus, the city of Toledo was among the locations where the affinity between the order and the local population of Jewish converts was most patent. Bolstered by members of the most prominent converso lineages, such as the de la Palma and Hurtado families, the order grew exponentially in the final decades of the sixteenth century. Additionally, the Jesuits were active in the controversy surrounding the endorsement of the statutes of purity of blood. They opposed Cardinal Silíceo both directly—by means of their attempts to settle in the city—and indirectly—through their ties with his main detractors in the cathedral council. They also played a prominent role in the memorialist crisis before the eventual approval of the statutes of purity of blood in the Society of Jesus.

A Jesuit Utopian Project on Behalf of the Conversos: Fernando de Valdés and the Statutes of Purity of Blood (1632)

In 1632, the Jesuit Father Fernando de Valdés (1584–1642) completed his Memorial para quitar o limitar Estatutos de limpieza. In this treatise, Valdés sought to abolish the statutes of purity of blood and reassess the longstanding division between New and Old Christians. Additionally, the Memorial offers a novel portrait of Castilian conversos. According to Valdés, New Christians were singled out for discrimination, despite their evident virtues as sincere Catholics and faithful subjects. He did not seek to break the existing social order, but rather to offer a profound critique of the Old Christian hegemony. Ultimately, Valdés proposed an essentially utopian model of society built on personal merits and behavior, rather than blood-based and inherited privileges. This article seeks to study this Memorial in the context of the debate about the statutes of purity of blood and as an important element of that debate within the Society of Jesus.

Figuras impertinentes: Rodrigo Calderón y el Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina (1604)

RESUMEN: Este ensayo propone una lectura de La pícara Justina y sus paratextos, a partir de la relación de complementariedad entre el self-fashioning y las artes plásticas. Este análisis subraya el potencial de emblemas y jeroglíficos, escudos y empresas, de moldear la identidad individual y así contrarrestar la fijación del orden establecido con la genealogía, el abolengo, y la “limpieza de sangre”. El caso de Rodrigo Calderón, poderoso ministro de Felipe III, cuyo escudo de armas figura en la portada de la editio princeps, sirve como ejemplo para investigar la conexión entre la heráldica y el fenómeno del self-fashioning, en la España de la temprana modernidad. Por una parte, la manipulación de la identidad a partir de formas simbólicas representa un desafío al sistema; por otra, la adopción de sus paradigmas perpetúa y sustenta los idearios culturales sobre los que está construido. ABSTRACT: This essay proposes a reading of La pícara Justina and its paratexts based on the complementary relationship between self-fashioning and artistic modes of expression. This analysis emphasizes the potential of emblems and hieroglyphics, imprese and coats of arms, to shape individual identity in order to counteract the establishment’s fixation with genealogy, ancestry, and the so-called “purity of blood”. The case of Rodrigo Calderón, a powerful political figure at the court of Philip III whose coat of arms is featured on the title page of the first edition, offers an example to investigate the connection between heraldry and the process of self-fashioning in early modern Spain. On the one hand, the exercise of shaping one’s public persona through symbolic forms of representation constitutes a challenge to the social order; on the other hand, the adoption of its own paradigms, contributes to perpetuate discriminatory cultural practices and prevailing ideologies.

Colonial Community Life

Between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries Spanish colonial life was undergirded by a general theory, not always realized in practice, that social and political order would come from imposed categories of identity and community. Spanish colonizers’ ideas about community formation in Mexico were expressed in the two-republic system, ideas about purity of blood, and the caste system. These imperial ideas were put into practice in many ways: through formally created Catholic communities such as female convents and confraternities and through informal communities such as those formed by African-descent people, crypto-Jews, and previously enslaved people known as maroons. Ideas about race, gender, and class, as well as factors such as occupation, neighborhood, membership in religious groups, and family ties all shaped these formal and informal communal groupings which at times supported viceregal objectives of maintaining order and at other times weakened viceregal rule.

THE “ZHETI-ATA” KAZAKH TRADITION OF MARRIAGE TABOO

In the Kazakh traditional system of moral values, “Zheti-ata” (literally meaning “seven generations”) is an order of distribution of origin of man’s forefathers origin. A Kazakh society required from each its male member to know his own antecedents down to seventh generation. The law forbids marriages to relatives concluded within the seven generation lines, seeing it as the way to diminishing of population through genetic diseases. Our forefathers did not conclude marital ties down to seven generations, respecting the mode of kinship. Starting from the eight’s father, a new generation would be celebrated with a new title. For this, their honourable elders, judges, and seniors would call for the members of the new family clan to share the sacrifice of a white mare and blessing for the fact of completing the seven generations and giving the command for next generation marriages. The main purpose of the article is to expose similarities in the Kazak system of kinship, family, marriage arrangements, and features of keeping the Zheti-ata tradition with those of other Turkic ethnics (Uzbek, Turkmen). This is confirmed by the findings of the contemporary medical science. Therefore, violations of kinship inheritance, values of high birth and care for purity of blood are seem to be some of the today’s problems. Dedication to the zheti Zheti-ata main principle and rules of family organization have been considered basing on historical and ethnographic accounts by Russian travellers and scientists, as well as on stories, fairy tales and love sagas by Kazakh poets and writers. The article deals with cases of inobservance of the law, various punishing measures being applied to disobeying couples, treated ruthlessly as “incestors”. Several historical examples have been brought into the focus, which, as prerequisites, caused spread in reinforcement of the Zhety-ata principle into the system of kinship.