Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  guztiz maitatuba. By them revered and loved.

  Eman ta zabalzazu Ancient and holy symbol

  munduban frutuba, Let fall thy fruit worldwide

  adoratzen zaitugu While we in adoration gaze

  arbola santuba. on thee our blessed tree.

  Spanish authorities responded to the growing popularity of the song by arresting Iparraguirre in Tolosa and expelling him from Spanish Basqueland.

  IN 1872, DURING the Second Carlist War, modern Basque nationalism may have accidentally begun when Santiago Arana, a passionate Carlist from Vizcaya, hid a wounded Carlist general, Francisco de Ullíbarri, in his shipyard. Arana was a wealthy industrialist who had purchased arms for the Carlists. When the Liberals learned of the general and the arms, Arana was forced into hiding, abandoning his wife and eight children. Then, fearing capture and interrogation, the family also went into hiding, eventually fleeing to French Basqueland. Sabino, the youngest child, was only seven years old.

  Though the family was reunited at the end of the war, life was never the same for the Aranas. Sabino grew up with the weight of the Carlist defeat, a disintegration of family life that had only begun with separation and exile. Santiago’s bitterness over the defeat and the abolition of the Fueros made him seem physically and spiritually diminished. Even the family business, shipbuilding, was declining. Basque shipbuilding had reached new heights after the First Carlist War. With the new steel mills along the Nervión, the industry adapted to steel. Huge new shipyards such as La Naval were established along the riverfront. But the Arana family was still building wooden ships.

  The two youngest children, Sabino and Luis, were sent off for a Jesuit education. Sabino would later write, “When I was ten years old I felt intense patriotic feelings, only I didn’t know what my country was.” He questioned why his father had so spent himself on Carlos, a would-be king of Spain. In 1882, according to Sabino, the two brothers were passing the morning talking in the garden, and they slid into a debate. Sabino championed the Carlist point of view, but Luis, echoing the forgotten argument of the slain Carlist Jose Antonio Muñagorri, thought the cause of Don Carlos had nothing to offer Basques. “Vizcaya is not Spain,” Luis argued to his brother. This was a deep revelation to Sabino.

  The following year, their father as well as an older brother died, and Sabino drifted into a deep depression from which he emerged with an intense interest in the study of Euskera. He wanted to write a book on Euskera grammar, Elemental Grammar for Vizcayan Euskera, which could be used to teach the language. He also became convinced that Basques needed to study “the glory of their past in order to understand their current degradation.”

  But, to please his mother, he studied law in Barcelona. As soon as she died, in 1888, he left law school and returned to the family estate in Vizcaya. That year a professorship of Euskera was created at the Instituto Vizcaíno, and Sabino applied. The winning candidate was Resurrección María Azkue. In second place, was Miguel de Unamuno. Sabino Arana had not attracted a single vote.

  FOR TWO MEN who are almost perfect opposites, Sabino Arana y Goiri and Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo had a great deal in common. Both were deeply religious, and both saw the loss of the Fueros, the cataclysm that darkened their childhood, as the great tragedy of their times. Like Arana, Unamuno was devoted to issues of the Basque language and identity. His first book, his university thesis, was Critique on the Issue of the Origin and Prehistory of the Basque Race. His early dream, never realized, was to write a twenty-volume history of the Basque people. Both men were born in Vizcaya, Unamuno in Bilbao in 1864 and Arana the following year in a nearby town. The town and the city, Carlism and Liberalism. But in the beginning they did not seem so different. Perhaps their clash was heightened by the fact that neither man was much given to humility.

  When older, Unamuno said that in his youth he had been a “staunch nationalist.” He used the Euskera word, bizkaitarra, that Arana had given to his journal, the first Basque nationalist publication. But it was clear even in his university thesis at age twenty that Unamuno was not a bizkaitarra. He was too honest an intellectual to be a true crusader. He was a contrapelo, someone who liked to comb his hair against the natural flow. In his Critique, he attempted to expose the romantic half-truths, the preposterous myths about Basque origin. Later he would write an essay titled Ideocracia about the tyranny of ideas. He declared himself an “ideophobe” who never wanted to see his thoughts turned into a movement.

  Sabino Arana did not suffer from this fear of ideas. The tyranny of ideas was to be his kingdom. He did not want to expose myths; he wanted to create them. While Miguel de Unamuno is remembered as one of the greatest intellectuals Spain has ever produced, Sabino Arana was a fanatic, perhaps a lunatic, certainly a racist, and a man who spent his life in a hotheaded fury, dying young and absurdly. During a half century Unamuno produced a large body of work, including novels, poetry, and essays; Arana’s few writings are seldom read, and he is rarely spoken of with fondness even by his supporters. Yet it is Arana, not Unamuno, who has had the great impact on history. That is partly because Arana, unlike Unamuno, did want to start a movement.

  Sabino Arana. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

  The more Unamuno reflected, the more he turned against Basque nationalism, which he called, in his first novel, Paz en La Guerra, “exclusivist regionalism, blind to all broader visions.” Typical of middle-class Bilbao, he became a Liberal, and remained one even after that movement had become, by his own admission, irrelevant. He was always proud of his Basqueness, but he concluded that Basques were simply an interesting and valuable element in the greater quilt that was Spain. He regarded Euskera as an inferior language to Spanish, an oral language of peasants, unsuitable for literature, and claimed that agglutinating languages were not capable of articulating sophisticated ideas.

  Contemporary writers have proven Unamuno wrong about Euskera. He failed to see how the Basque Renaissance could change the language. Until then, Euskera had not been used as a literary language. But in 1898, a priest named Domingo de Aguirre wrote the first novel in Euskera, Aunamendiko Lorea (The Flower of the Pyrenees), a romantic historical story set in the seventh century.

  Arana was that dogmatic nationalist, “blind to all broader visions,” that Unamuno had described. He had a single idea: that the Basques were a nation and should have a country. In fact, so narrow was his focus that originally he spoke only of his native Vizcaya. But Arana instinctively understood nation building. He reflected on why his nation was not a country and resolved to give it the missing elements. He gave it a name, inventing the word Euzkadi from Euskal, meaning “Euskera speaking,” and the suffix di, meaning “together.” Before this, Euskera had only the phrase Euskal Herria “the land of Euskera speakers.” Euskal Herria was the name of a place, but Euzkadi was intended to be the name of a country. Arana invented other important words in Euskera: aberri, meaning “fatherland,” from aba, meaning “father,” and erri, meaning “country”; abertzale, meaning “patriot”; and azkatasuna, meaning “liberty.” He not only invented new words but changed the spelling of existing ones, to make them look more Basque. The Castilian c was replaced with the Basque k and the s with z. He gave Euzkadi a mythology of national origin in works such as Bizkaya por su Independencia (For Vizcayan Independence), which mythologizes the medieval struggle for independence of the Basques.

  Bizkaya por su Independencia, originally published in 1890 as Cuatro Glorias Patrias (Four Glorious Acts of Patriotism), is considered the founding act of modern Basque nationalism. Critics argue that it was founded on a lie; supporters would call it simply an embellishment.

  Compared with other Basque writing of the nineteenth century, such as Chaho’s invention of Aïtor, these four stories of great battles in Vizcaya between the Basques and León and Castile were not outrageous. Arana was not as interested in historical facts as he was in turning these events—the battles of Arrigorriaga in 888, Gordexola in 1355, Otxandiano in 1355, and Munguia i
n 1470— into epic struggles for the founding of the Basque nation. Complications such as those other Basques, including the Loyolas, who were ready to fight to the death for Castilian privileges, were not to be part of the founding myth. Arana was a propagandist, not a historian, and he understood the importance of simplicity. This was a Basque declaration of independence.

  The book ends by asserting that “Yesterday,” each of the four places:

  fought against Spain, which tried to conquer it, and remained free. Today—Vizcaya is a province of Spain Tomorrow— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ?

  Heed these words, Vizcayans of the nineteenth century, the future depends on what you do.

  ON JUNE 3, 1893, Arana organized the first public demonstration openly declaring Basque nationalism. His early supporters were mostly young men under twenty-five years old, but his following grew at a rate that sometimes alarmed his adversaries. On July 31, 1895, Ignatius Loyola’s Saint’s Day, Arana officially founded the Basque Nationalist Party, his underground independence movement.

  Arana wrote the Basque national anthem, “Gora ta Gora,” though it was set to music only after his death. He worked with his brother Luis on designing the flag, the ikurriña, originally for Vizcaya and later as the flag of Euzkadi. The flag established the Basque national colors: red, green, and white. Typical of Arana, the reasoning behind the flag’s design was arcane and alienating, but the reality of it is appealing. According to Arana, the red background symbolized the people, the green x stood for the ancient laws, and the white cross, superimposed over it, symbolized the purity of Christ But what makes the ikurriña work is that it echoes the colors of Basqueland, recalling a red-trimmed, whitewashed Basque house set against a lush green mountain.

  ACCORDING TO ARANA, ninth-century Basqueland was “a confederation of republics . . . free and independent, harmoniously and fraternally united.” But, like many sons and daughters of old Carlist families, Arana exaggerated the democratic quality of the Fueros.

  In some ways, the Fueros were remarkably progressive for medieval law. The revision written in 1526 under Guernica’s oak tree was one of the first legal codes to outlaw the use of torture. It was also one of the first European codes to ban debtors’ prison. It protected citizens from arbitrary arrest and unwarranted house searches. But contrary to what is often asserted, traditional Basque government was not a representative democracy. It favored rural people and did not give proportional representation to urban dwellers. The code did not give full rights to women but gave women more consideration than most medieval law. For example, inheritance law emphasized keeping an estate intact and favored surviving widows. An older sister had priority over a younger brother. The Fueros were sympathetic to family-owned business and small holdings. When Socialist-led democracy came to power in Spain in 1982, wanting to rewrite property laws to break up large holdings, it looked to the Basque Fueros for a model of property law.

  In any event, Arana, who touted the Fueros as the perfection of democracy, did not have a notably high standard of democracy. His ideal was closer to a Catholic theocracy, a notion which traces back at least to 1881, when he was fifteen and had fallen so ill that he was given last rites. Miraculously, he recovered, and ever after he credited the Virgin Mary with this unexpected reversal. His slogan for the Basque Nationalist Party, a motto which is still used, was Jaungoikua eta Lagizarra, God and the Old Laws, today frequently abbreviated on official Basque Nationalist Party messages as JeL.

  Arana wrote that if the Basques were ever to abandon the Church, he would abandon the Basques. He called for Euzkadi to be “an essentially Catholic state” and added, “It will not admit in its midst any individuals affiliated with a false religion, sect, schism, masonic or liberal.” In 1888, when he was twenty-three, he learned that a London-based Bible society had obtained permission to sell Protestant books in Bilbao. He applied for permission to distribute Catholic literature next to them, giving his away without charge, until he drove the Protestants out of Bilbao. As for Jews, on the occasion of the death of French writer Emile Zola, Arana wrote a profile describing the hero of the infamous Dreyfus case as “el nuevo Judas who got filthy-rich by using his pen to help Jews fight Christ.”

  ARANA WAS ONE of the first Basques to address a question destined to plague Basque nationalists forever: Who is a Basque? This was an especially contested issue in his epoch because, for the first time in history, a large percentage of the population of Basque country did not come from Basque families. Vizcaya had a labor shortage soon filled by the poor of Spain.

  This new and different kind of invasion was one that history had not prepared Basques to face. From 1857 to 1900, the population of Alava grew by only 2.5 percent, which was about the same growth as Navarra. But during the same period, Guipúzcoa’s population grew by 25 percent and Vizcaya’s by almost 94 percent. For the first time in history, more people were moving to Vizcaya than leaving it.

  This immigration to industrial areas tended to further exacerbate the differences between rural and urban life. The countryside was remaining Basque, while the cities were becoming cosmopolitan. In 1850, the population of Bilbao was 20,000. By the end of the century, the population had grown to almost 100,000, more than half of the residents born outside Vizcaya. Some of these outsiders—British, Germans, and other northern Europeans— were entrepreneurs, managers, and supervisors who came with foreign capital. They had a huge impact on the cultural life of Bilbao, especially the British. The Athletic Club of Bilbao, Vizcaya’s now-much-loved soccer team, was founded and trained by the British in 1898. Even Arana’s ikurriña was modeled on the British Union Jack.

  But the great majority of the new residents were workers from Andalusia and other poor regions of Spain. The new wealthy Basque industries were creating jobs that drew desperately poor people. They lived near the mills in dark, crowded housing, often provided by the companies, worked long hours, earned little money, and spent it at company stores. They had no better choice, coming from places that had no work and nothing to eat. Working twelve hour days, breathing black smog, they died young of lung disease or alcoholism.

  An underclass was being created in Basqueland, and Basques sneered at it the way societies usually do at poor immigrants. Basques emphasized the foreignness of these workers by referring to them as Chinese, Manchurians, or Koreans. Another popular expression was maqueto, later translated into Euskera as maketo. This was one of Sabino Arana’s favorite words, and, having a Basque explanation for most everything and a creative approach to linguistics, he theorized that it came from makutuak, which he said was an Euskera word meaning “those with bundles on their back.” However, magüeto is a pre-Roman word from northern Spain meaning “outsider,” and the Greeks used the word meteco to mean “outsider.” In 1904, Unamuno wrote, “With mines and industry facilitating the accumulation of great wealth, now is when a change in spirit can be noted. Enterprising and active, yes, but it has made the Bilbaíno unbearable, with his wealth convincing him that he is of a special superior race. He gazes with a certain petulance at other Spaniards, those who are not Basque, if they are poor, calling them contemptuously, maquetos.”

  If racism is not clear by the use of this word, another Basque term for foreign workers, belarri motx, stumpy ear, leaves little doubt. One of the peculiar characteristic of Basques is their long earlobes. But stumpy ear was not a term of endearment. In the 1870s there had even been a soldier’s song among the Basque Carlists that included the line:

  eta tiro, eta tiro/belarrimotxari

  And shoot, and shoot/at the stumpy-eared ones

  Arana had several objections to the Stumpy Ears. Until they came, the great majority of the population had spoken Euskera; now, these Spanish workers and their families were turning it into a minority language. This was only the most obvious example of how the Basque culture was being diluted. The Stumpy Ears were also less religious than the Basques, and they were increasingly involved in that anathema antirel
igious movement—socialism.

  Arana’s attempts to define who is a Basque make apparent the racist nature of his vision. He declared that for people to be considered Basque, their four grandparents must all have been born in Euskadi and have Euskera names. If married, true Basques must have spouses of similar purity.

  This view was not entirely removed from Basque tradition. Normally, to be eligible for a Spanish title of nobility, a family was required to obtain a certificate of “blood purity,” which proved that the family had no Jewish or Moorish blood. But since Vizcaya had never been controlled by the Moors, the Spanish waived the requirement for Vizcayans. To preserve this status, the Basques had established rules to bar outsiders from settling in Vizcaya. Of course, as with many Basque laws, there was also a commercial angle: It kept outside competitors from setting up shop in the province.

  Arana and his Basque nationalism, like Carlism, idealized peasants, though the ideologues themselves were rarely of peasant background. Basque culture is, in many ways, rural. The etxea, facing the sunrise with the Basque solar cross over the doorway, is a rural concept. And so traditional Basques, even if they live in a city, make reference to a rural origin when they introduce themselves by the name of their ancestral house.

  In 1900, Arana married a peasant, Nicole Atxika Iturri, who had little education and little chance of understanding her husband. But Sabino pointed out that his bride fulfilled his definition of Basque with her two Euskera family names. To him, this marriage was a perfect symbolic act, and Sabino cared far more about symbolism than reality. Instead of applauding his uncompromising beliefs, some in the movement feared the cause of Basque nationalism would be harmed by this mismatch. But while everyone else saw an uneducated impoverished girl from a farm, Sabino saw that great institution, the Basque peasant. He protested to a friend, “She is an original Vizcayan—all of the original Vizcayans descend from nobility, all Basques descend from villagers, farmhouses.”