In a recent work by David Nirenberg, Was there Race before Modernity? The Example of Jewish Blood in Late Medieval Spain. he attempts to sort out the nature of racism and its true modern roots by examining the concept of "Jewish Blood" laws in late medieval Spain. Following upon the philosophical construct of "modernity" as developed in the work of Michel Foucault. In analyzing "the state" and how it differed in modern times from earlier epochs, Nirenberg describes Foucault's approach this way;
According to Foucault, medieval sovereignty had been organic and cor-poratist. It was of course hierarchical and therefore often conflictual, but that conflict was always contained by a ritual regime and a historical discourse that were celebratory and inclusive. Even warring nations never forgot their common ancestry, going back, if not to Rome, then toTroy. And from this memory sprang as well a common historiography.“ What is there in [medieval] history,” Foucault asked, quoting Petrarch, “that is not in praise of Rome?" Race arose out of the collapse of this system. By the early seventeenth century society was no longer though of as an organic system but as a binary. The governing metaphor was no longer that of society as a harmonious body, but of society as a war between two irreconcilable groups or bodies. And although those groups could be characterized and classified in a number of ways (as classes, for example), the symbolic logic underlying these classifications was always racial, in that it imagined one group as polluting and the other pure, one to be isolated or exterminated, the other to be protected and reproduced. The emerging nation state was at first the venue for this struggle between groups, then eventually its arbiter, the chief guarantor of racial purity. This final nineteenth-century stage Foucault referred to as “state racism.” And just as history in the Middle Ages had been a reflection of the symbolic order that articulated power in terms of organic unity, in modernity history became a battle field, an accounting of losses and victories in the eternal war of the races.Nirenberg takes issue at times with Foucault, especially with his implicit concept of medieval society as "organic." None the less, something obviously changed in the perception of Jews from being a religious community to a "race" in the modern sense. The particular point when "Laws of Blood Purity" (Limpieza de Sangre) could be promulgated by the State seems to be a reasonable place to begin examining modern concepts of race and their political and social application. It is here that Nirnberg, and other scholars critical of much of post-modernist thinking on the history of "race," take issue with the idea that such a concept was absent from Medieval Spain. Nirenberg believes the claim that racism is purely modern is somewhat politically motivated and he never seems to understand how post-modernists could situate the beginning of the modern concept of race in high medieval Iberia. He asserts, "[Post-modernists] prefer to understand modern racial anti-Semitism as the specific and contingent product of the intersection of capitalism, imperialism, and post-Enlightenment natural science..." Which he decides makes it, "...a phenomenon radically discontinuous with other and earlier histories." This need not be the case.
The rise of Limpieza de Sangre statutes in mid-15th Century Spain arrived on the scene just before other structural features modern oppression appeared such as the colonial conquest of the America's, the rise of merchantile capitalism and the Atlantic trading empires and, last but certainly not least, two Papal Bulls, one in 1452-the Edict of Nantes-and one in 1455, by Pope Nicholas V giving the blessing of the Church to conquest and slavery. These edicts meant that Christian conquest and enslavement of non-Christians in Africa and the New World would be viewed as acceptable by the Catholic Church. Thus, the racial concepts present in mid-15th century medieval Spain could be seen as the precursor to modern racist theory and practice and not an historic aberration posing a challenge to post-modernist claims of racism's being historically bound to certain epochs. The development of modern racial concepts in late medieval Spain reflected growing social forces there that were modern in character and which set the stage for endeavors such as the rise of modern navigation and science, colonial conquest and the mass enslavement of colonized peoples in mining and agro-export plantation farming all of which were linked to the incipient rise of merchantile capitalism. It is no accident that such historic trends followed closely on the heels of the close of the 15th century and the unification of the Spanish Kingdom in 1492. Thus, racism, a concept which is historically conditioned and whose meaning is strongly bound up with political interest, does find itself at "the intersection" of all these early modern trends.