Whereabout F

Jon Juaristi, Historia mínima del País Vasco (A concise history of the Basque Country), own translation



It was first propagated by the chronicler Esteban de Garibay and was further elaborated by subsequent writers well into the nineteenth century. In short, it is based on an identification between the Basques and the Cantabrians who rebelled against Rome. After Augustus’s defeat of the Astures and the western Cantabrians in 19 BC, only the eastern Cantabrians (that is, the Basques) were believed to have sustained such a fierce and heroic struggle against the Romans that, finally, the invaders were said to have agreed to a lasting peace that respected the integrity of Basque territory and the independence and institutions of its people. This story was further embellished by the tale of the martyrdom of the rebel warriors crucified on Mount Ernio (identifying a Gipuzkoan promontory with the Cantabrian Irnio spoken of by Roman historians), who died singing songs of praise to the cross, because it had been revealed to them in their agony that the Redeemer of the world would die by the same form of torture. Basque-Cantabrianism was thus merged with the myth of the primitive monotheism of the Basques, a sort of ‘pre-Christian Christianity’, intended to reinforce the purity of blood, that is, their status as Old Christians, which the Basques of Spain arrogated to themselves under the rule of the Habsburgs.

Although the Augustinian Enrique Flórez, in La Cantabria (1768), and his disciple, Manuel Risco, of the same order, in La Vasconia antigua (1779), demonstrated with an impressive array of evidence that not only had the Basques not inhabited the Cantabrian region that resisted Augustus, but that they had already come under Roman rule before the war began, the Basques tenaciously maintained Garibay’s thesis, and Wilhelm von Humboldt himself endorsed it, regarding as authentic the so-called Canto de los Cántabros or Canto de Lelo, a Basque forgery from the end of the sixteenth century included in the Crónica de Vizcaya by the scribe Antón de Vedia.




A rumour had begun to circulate in Spain that the Basques were Jewish and that this explained why they engaged in occupations traditionally associated with Jews, such as commerce and administration, for which they had been trained in the homes of converted bureaucrats and merchants. At first, it seemed like nothing more than a joke: the Basques would be descended from Jews whose lives Titus had spared but whose tongues he had cut out, and thus no one understood what they spoke. They were called Biscayans: twice Cains [‘vizcaínos’ (bizcaínes, dos veces Caínes)’] because they would have killed Abel and Christ, their brothers. No one could take this seriously, except, of course, the Biscayans, horrified at the prospect of their purity of blood being questioned.





The philological foundation of the theory of Basque as the language of primitive Spain was laid by the licentiate Andrés de Poza y Yarza, the son of Biscayan parents, born in Antwerp around 1537. Poza affirms that Basque is a parent language, one of the seventy-two that emerged from the division of languages during the construction of the Tower of Babel. Like all the languages of Babel, it shares some of the qualities of the first language, the one infused by God into Adam. Among these qualities is what Poza calls ‘high philosophy’, or infused wisdom, whereby every word reveals the nature or essence of the thing it designates. Poza based his work on Plato’s Cratylus, the dialogue in which Socrates argues with Hermogenes about whether words signify by nature or by convention. For Poza, the matter is beyond doubt. The Adamic language and the parent languages signify by nature; the others, derived from them, do so by convention or agreement. In Basque, the natural connection between words and things has not been lost. He admits that the names of some of the kings of early Spain are Chaldean, as are those of some of the cities they founded, but he explains this by arguing that the princes were conservative in their customs and traditions, and that Tubal and his descendants retained some Chaldean personal names and place names, but that their language was none other than Basque: the one that had fallen to them on the plain of Shinar, when the construction of the Tower of Babel was interrupted by the confusion of languages.

But perhaps the most important contribution of Poza to the Biscayan origin myth is the idea that the Basque language already contains in its ancestral vocabulary the Christian revelation of the mystery of the Trinity. Using the procedures of the Kabbalah, he analyses the Basque word that denotes God, Jaun or Iaon, in three distinct elements: I (You), a (that one) and on (good), drawing the conclusion that, since Tubal, the Basques already knew that God was the supreme good, one God in three distinct persons. With Poza, the theoretical construction of universal Biscayan nobility is brought to completion.