By Lev Tsitrin

Memory works in strange ways, prompting sudden, vivid recollections of minor and seemingly long-forgotten happenings from decades back. The most recent such flash came in reading a New York Times article on the rise of Nick Fuentes’ influence on the MAGA movement — his stature enhanced by his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, and by the defense of Tucker against criticism for platforming Fuentes (who is an avowedly racist antisemite, according to the Times), that came from the Heritage Foundation. Yet when I read that Fuentes’ “views on Mr. Vance and his marriage to Usha Vance, a Hindu Indian American, have been incendiary, replete with references to “race mixing,” what came to mind was not current politics, but an academic lecture on medieval Iberian history I heard some fifteen years ago that focused on nearly-six-centuries-old notion of “limpieza de sangre” — the “purity of blood.”

Here is the gist, told from memory (though I now see that there is ample information on Wikipedia, too): after a frightful massacre of Iberian Jews in 1391, about half of Iberian Jewish population converted to Christianity — and being treated as Christians from that point on, freely married into many upper-echelon families, marriages that at the time were in no sense considered “mixed.” Several generations later, however, a particularly zealous cleric proclaimed that baptism alone was not enough to erase the difference that inherently and inalienably sticks to a Jew. According to him, there was something irredeemably contaminating about Jewish blood that, in any proportion, made its carrier ineligible for positions of responsibility — be they in government, military, or the church.

This discovery sent shock-waves through Iberian nobility, its members now having to prove that they did not have a baptized Jew among their ancestors, that their “limpieza de sangre” was beyond reproach.

Such not being the case for most nobles (starting with the royals themselves), what followed was the atmosphere of mutual accusations, fear and blackmail accompanied by wide-spread bribery of the officials tasked with producing the requisite certificates of purity of blood. While everyone knew that those certificates were bogus, people kept up the serious mien, and the show went on. Annoyed with the idiocy of all this, a high-ranking cleric published a book showing that statistically — just by dint of elementary arithmetic — every top-class Spaniard had some Jewish blood running through his veins, and that this should be accepted as a fact of life, and the frenzy of hunting aristocracy’s genealogical charts for may-be-Jews should end — but his book was promptly placed into its Index by the Inquisition.

Oddly, the lecturer continued, the paranoia that lasted for several centuries (dying down only by the age of enlightenment) can reverberate even today — and she illustrated the point by an amusing — or perhaps, not so amusing — anecdote of her recent casual conversation with a member of high Spanish nobility in which she mentioned, as an interesting factoid, Jewish presence in that lady’s ancestry — the mention which, instead of an expected shrug or laugh, caused visible discomfort to that noble dame.

Which brings us right back to Nick Fuentes. The name “Fuentes” sounds Spanish — and if he has some Spanish ancestry, it is highly likely that, like most other Spaniards, Nick has Jewish blood in him, too.

And may be, this is his real problem? I am by no means a psychoanalyst, but his vehement Jew-hate may be a mere psychological defense mechanism, Nick trying to convince everyone of his “limpieza de sangre” by Jew-bashing, so his highly likely part-Jewish descent is not noticed in the sound and fury of his rhetoric.

If so, Nick Fuentes is merely just another example of that most disgusting of human creatures — the mouth-frothing self-hating Jew declaring, by loud protestation, that he is “not them” (“them” being “Zionists,” or “capitalists” of whatever other bogeyman is currently requisite in “progressive” circles; nowadays, for instance, whenever someone calls into a radio talk show and starts the statement with “I am Jewish but,” what invariably follows is a denunciation of “Gaza genocide,” or a profession of support for Mamdani).

Of course, there could also be other reasons for Fuentes’ idiocy: the guy is signally ignorant. Times quotes him, for instance, as saying that “we Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith” — which, of course, is utter BS: Fuentes does not even know that Pilgrims came to America to practice the version of Christianity which the official, Anglican church violently forbade them to practice, the government trying to “baptize them” in “government’s faith,” i.e. the one pushed down by the Anglican officialdom. Nick does not know that the flight of the Pilgrims from the Old world to the New one was merely a harbinger of that was to come a couple of decades later: the brutal and bloody English civil war fought to uphold free conscience, the war that devastated the country, the war in which the chief architect of religious coercion — Archbishop Laud, and his chief patron, King Charles I, both lost their heads. It is to escape “the ancient faith” in order to practice the newer one that Pilgrims came to America, Nick. They came to America to rid themselves of the very coercion that Nick Fuentes dreams of establishing here. Nick lives in the past, hoping to become America’s Grand Inquisitor.

Needless to say, being part-Jewish is very inconvenient for this role. Hence, his anti-Jewish ravings. Fess up, Nick: when you unroll your genealogical chart going back to 1391, don’t you see it sprinkled here and there by a baptized Jew? Isn’t being part-Jewish yourself — as most Spaniards are — what drives you nuts and causes your rants?