Spain must ban its celebratory medieval toast ‘kill Jews’

The cobblestone streets of León, draped in the somber purple of Semana Santa, offer a chilling study in the banality of evil. As the incense of Holy Week wafts through the air and the rhythmic beat of the funeral drum echoes the Passion of Christ, a different, more garish ritual unfolds in the taverns of the Barrio Húmedo.

There, the sacred and the profane do not merely collide; they coalesce into a tradition that is as intoxicated as it is bigoted. In this corner of Northern Spain, the act of social drinking is rebranded with a genocidal gloss. To “kill Jews”—matar judíos—is the colloquial invitation to grab a glass of limonada leonesa. It is a phrase uttered with a smile, a wink, and the clinking of glasses. Yet, to dismiss this as harmless folklore is to ignore the blood-soaked soil from which such language grew and the moral rot it continues to nourish in the modern era.

The “Spanish Festival of Killing Jews” is not a literal call to arms, but a linguistic haunting. The beverage itself—a potent mixture of red wine, lemons, sugar, and cinnamon—is consumed by the tens of thousands of liters. The “lemonade” is intended to represent the blood of the Jews, and the act of drinking it is framed as a symbolic act of vengeance for the deicide of Jesus. When a local asks, “¿Cuántos judíos has matado ya?” (How many Jews have you killed so far?), they are asking about the number of drinks consumed. But the underlying syntax remains tethered to the medieval pogrom. This is not quirky regional slang; it is the casual normalization of extermination. It is the transformation of a minority’s historical trauma into a punchline for a pub crawl.

The roots of this custom are not found in innocent fun, but in the dark heart of the Middle Ages. During the 15th century, the Jewish quarter of León—the Castrum Iudeorum—was a place of vibrant intellectual and economic life. It was also a target. As Holy Week approached each year, religious fervor frequently curdled into violence. The deicide myth—the false, centuries-long accusation that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the death of Christ—turned the Easter season into a period of terror for Jewish communities.

Historians suggest that the “Killing Jews” tradition may have begun as a dark compromise: authorities encouraged the populace to “kill” their thirst with wine rather than “kill” their neighbors with swords. If this is true, it paints a horrifying picture of a society so inherently violent toward Jews that state-sponsored intoxication was the only available safety valve. After the 1492 Edict of Expulsion, when the Jews were driven from Spain under the threat of death, the language of the hunt remained. The Jews were gone, but the sport of killing them survived in the cups of the faithful.

The modern defense of matar judíos is a masterclass in cultural gaslighting. Locals and bar owners often react with indignant shock when outsiders point out the blatant antisemitism of the phrase. They argue it has nothing to do with real Jews and is merely a historical quirk. This defense relies on the idea that if a word is used long enough, its meaning evaporates.

However, language is never neutral.

To use the phrase “killing Jews” as a synonym for “having a drink” requires a profound, collective silencing of the victims of Spanish history. It requires one to look at the Inquisition, the forced conversions, the autos-da-fé, and the expulsion, and decide that these events are so trivial that they can be converted into a drinking game. Furthermore, this tradition does not exist in a vacuum. Reports from recent years indicate that the drinking is often accompanied by the “Burning of Judas”—the torching of effigies—and, more alarmingly, the occasional “joke” about the Holocaust. When you normalize the language of the pogrom, you inevitably pave the way for the imagery of the Shoah.

Spain has made significant, laudable efforts in recent decades to reckon with its Sephardic past. The 2015 law allowing descendants of expelled Jews to claim Spanish citizenship was a monumental gesture of reconciliation. Villages like Castrillo Matajudíos (Kill Jews Fort) finally bowed to international pressure and common decency in 2014, renaming themselves Castrillo Mota de Judíos (Jews’ Hill Fort).

Yet, in the bars of León, the progress of the 21st century seems to stop at the door. The persistence of matar judíos is a symptom of a broader European pathology: the desire to keep the flavor of ancient antisemitism while shedding the guilt. It is “Antisemitism Lite”—all the linguistic violence, none of the messy legal consequences. By advertising “the season of killing Jews” on social media, bars are not just selling wine; they are selling a sense of transgressive belonging. They are inviting the consumer to participate in a shared identity built on the exclusion and symbolic destruction of an “Other.”

There is nothing sweet about Leonese lemonade when it is stirred with the dregs of genocide. Tradition is often used as a shield for bigotry, but age does not grant immunity to hate. If a custom requires the symbolic murder of a people to be festive, then that custom is not a heritage to be preserved; it is a stain to be scrubbed. To those who claim that the phrase is harmless because there are no Jews left in León to be offended, the answer is simple: the absence of the victim does not excuse the celebration of the crime.

In fact, it makes the celebration more ghoulish. To joke about killing a people your ancestors successfully expelled is the ultimate act of historical cruelty. The city of León, with its magnificent cathedral and rich intellectual history, deserves better than to be known as the place where “Killing Jews” is a pastime. The pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago through these streets should not have to encounter a tradition that mocks the very values of pilgrimage and hospitality.

The persistence of this tradition also highlights a deeply troubling intersection of historical European antisemitism and modern geopolitical hostility. When a tradition literally uses the phrase “Killing Jews” as a synonym for social interaction, it lowers the threshold for genocidal rhetoric globally. For extremist groups who utilize classic European antisemitic tropes, a Western tradition that casually preserves such language is a powerful tool.

Worse still, it allows them to frame the struggle against Jewish existence not as a modern political conflict, but as part of a perennial, global rejection that even “enlightened” Europe cannot shake. They point to such traditions to mock Western accusations of Middle Eastern intolerance, arguing that the West cannot lecture others while hosting festivals dedicated to “killing Jews.”

The common thread between the matar judíos custom and modern extremist rhetoric is the deicide myth. In León, the custom is explicitly tied to Good Friday and the false idea that Jews killed Jesus, requiring “vengeance” symbolized by the lemonade. This same medieval Christian trope has been imported into various modern discourses to characterize Jews as eternal enemies. By keeping the language of the medieval pogrom alive in a festive setting, the tradition inadvertently provides a cultural bridge for modern hostility. It suggests that the “Jewish enemy” is a historical constant, sanctioned by centuries of tradition.

For those focusing on the concept of tikkun (repair), this phenomenon represents a failure of historical memory. When a society treats the language of extermination as quaint, it fails to see how that language can be harvested by those with truly sinister intent. It transforms a regional quirk into a global liability, proving that words, once detached from their original victims, can become weapons in the hands of new ones. It is time for the authorities in León and the Catholic Church—which oversees the Semana Santa festivities—to stop looking the other way.

They must recognize that you cannot honor the “King of the Jews” while encouraging the “killing of Jews” in the streets. The lemonade can remain, the wine can flow, and the social gathering can continue—but the name must die. Until the phrase matar judíos is relegated to the dustbin of history, every glass raised in the Barrio Húmedo is a toast to the Inquisition. It is a reminder that in the heart of modern Europe, the ghost of the pogrom is still being served on tap, cold and sweet, to a public that has forgotten how to blush.

How can the community in León be persuaded to see that retiring this specific phrase is actually an act of preserving their city’s true dignity rather than an attack on their regional identity?