There were to be many more such formal disputations, not only in Spain but throughout Christian Europe, often with the set purpose of determining the fate of the Jewish communities in which they were held. Riots, torture, forced conversions, and murder increasingly concluded these staged debates. Nachmanides would be the last Jewish representative who would speak with what he had thought was impunity; in fact, he was brought to trial for publishing his own account of the debate and, though acquitted, was forced to leave Spain, resettling in Jerusalem.
Now once again, with the turning of the tide against the Jews, the ranks of the New Christians swelled in Spain. The upper Jewish classes, in particular, converted to Christianity in increasing numbers. And Nachmanides’ uncensored words, charging Christianity with shedding more blood than other nations, took on prophetic tones.
The practice of burning heretics at the stake was introduced in the last years of the twelfth century. The Holy Inquisition was a procedure devised and named by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) for exposing Christian heretics, though it was another pope, Gregory IX, who established it as an institution. It was to last for 350 years. Its stated targets were Christian heretics; the Church claimed no official authority over non-Christians. But since the mere presence of Jews was seen as conducive of heresy, they were to suffer severely at the hands of the Inquisition, most especially when the Inquisition took on a new ferocity as it entered Spain and then Portugal. And of course all New Christians were ipso facto Christians, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
The first mass burning of Jews at the stake took place in 1288, following a blood libel. This was in Troyes, France (where Rashi himself had lived a century before). But the Inquisition had already infiltrated Spanish life by this time, quietly at first. Right around the time of Nachmanides’ public disputation, Pope Clement IV granted the Inquisition freedom to interfere in Jewish affairs by allowing the inquisitors to pursue converted Jews who had relapsed into their former faith.Conversos,some of whose families had become Christians centuries before, at the time of the Visigoths, were considered true Christians by the Church, and the lapse of any Christian back into Judaism was punishable by death. Therefore, the Inquisition had jurisdiction over their souls and went after them in elaborate ceremonies of intrigue and torture.
The attitude toward Jews had changed in Spain well before the Inquisition took on its full formidable power. By the mid-1300s, the mobs, incited by the anti-Semitic tirades of priests, were attacking Jews, the authorities intervening only when Christian lives and property were threatened. In 1391, a year which is a blood-soaked marker for the changing fortunes of the Jews of Spain, marauders went from town to town throughout Castile and Aragon, massacring men, women, and children. Sometimes women and children were sold as slaves to the Moslems. All the synagogues of Barcelona were destroyed, and the community that had existed for eight hundred years came to an end. The mounting numbers of conversos after 1391 reflected the markedly different situation that now confronted the Jews.
The new century brought new violence against the Sephardim. The notorious friar Vicente Ferrer preached in the towns of Castile, his Sunday-morning sermons often followed by long nights of violence against Jews. He instigated new anti-Jewish regulations in Castile, proclaimed on January 2, 1412. Jews now had to wear their hair and beards long so that they could be recognized by all. They could no longer be addressed with the honorific “Don.” They could no longer be tax collectors, nor perform any other public services, nor collect interest, nor engage in commerce. Almost all professions were to be closed to them, and Jewish physicians could no longer treat Christian patients. These edicts, however, were difficult to enforce and were largely ignored. Still, they tolled doom.
In June of that same year Ferdinand I became king of Aragon, through the assistance of the very same rabble-rousing friar. Now Ferrer could extend his anti-Jewish edicts in Aragon as well. At this same moment Pope Benedict XII ordered a new staged disputation to be held in Aragon, the designated topics to include the veracity of the Talmud. The rabbis who had been sent to represent the Aragonese community were given no opportunity to express themselves, and a new wave of forced conversions followed their preordained defeat, with Ferdinand ordering that all copies of the Talmud be submitted for inspection so that remarks deemed anti-Christian could be excised.
The final end of Spanish Jewry was determined by a marriage. In 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon, son of John II of Aragon and grandson of Ferdinand I, married Isabella of Castile, the unification of their kingdoms effected by 1479. The royal couple were not only in the debt of various zealot churchmen whom they repaid by imposing restrictions against Jews and conversos; they were also sincerely committed to a religious and ethnic solidification of their country. Their statesmanship was, in many ways, so admirable and enlightened that the question of their acquiescence to the formidable beast that the Inquisition would become forcefully presents itself. Interestingly, there is evidence that both monarchs had converso ancestors, Ferdinand several generations back and Isabel even further back. The Jews of the time secretly believed that Ferdinand had Sephardic ancestry, which might explain why court Jews — the highly influential Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abrabanel in particular — pushed so hard for the match, even providing the betrothal gifts that Ferdinand required to seal the deal, according to contemporary Hebrew sources.8
The first problem, at least as it was explicitly stated, was not with the Jews but with the New Christians. The very designation “New Christian” was itself an indication of the suspicion with which “Old Christians” regarded the conversos. “New Christian” simply meant that the family had once been Jewish, even though the conversion might have taken place generations, even centuries, before.
Some conversos had ardently embraced the new faith. In fact, many who had stirred up anti-Jewish sentiments had been enthusiastic apostates bent on demonstrating the Jewish fallacy. There were important Christian thinkers and reformers who were New Christians. Other conversos did not take their new religion as seriously. There were many, especially among the upper classes, who had pragmatically converted in order to further their social, political, and economic advance. But others had only converted under duress; the Jews called such converts annusim, or “forced ones” (as opposed to meshumadim, voluntary converts), and Christianity perhaps had reason to doubt the forced ones’ sincerity, though not as much reason as the diabolical machinery of the Inquisition could warrant. The historian Benzion Netanyahu argued in The Marranos of Spain, partly on the basis of the response of rabbis outside of Spain and Portugal, that the great majority of New Christians, even when their original conversions were forced, were not secret Judaizers and that this was well known in the Church. Netanyahu’s conclusion leads him to search for covert motives of a political nature behind the relentless persecution of New Christians under the Inquisition.
Still, there is the sinister presence of racist ideology that lurks in the notion of a New Christian, the suggestion that Christian conversion, both in faith and in practice, no matter how sincere, cannot succeed in removing the stain of Jewishness. In fact, this suggestion is more than borne out by the statutes that were enacted as early as 1449 demanding limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, for those who would perform all but the lowliest tasks in churches, for admittance to guilds, colleges, religious and military orders, and even for residence in certain towns. There were those in the Church who protested that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity had been taking place over so long a period of time, stretching back to the time of the Visigoths, that it was impossible for any Spaniard to establish limpieza de sangre. Perhaps this very impossibility fed the racist anxiety. (In varying degrees the Spanish obsession with blood purity would last into the nineteenth century. Blood purity was finally abolished as a requirement for admission to the military academy in 1860.) The persecution of the New Christians, a designation that neither religious belief nor practice could eradicate, was the f
irst European experiment with racist ideology. It was, more specifically, the Marranos who were the designated target of Old Christian wrath, those who had converted to Christianity and whose souls therefore belonged to the Church, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. But racist animus tended to blur the line between New Christian and Marrano.
The two communities of Jews and New Christians were still deeply intertwined, living side by side with each other, related, at the very least, by blood and history. The royal couple took steps to segregate the Jews, so that they could not exert any pernicious influence on the New Christians. Though previous rulers had been wary of allowing the formidable power of the Inquisition to compete with their own rule, in 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella invited the Inquisition into their land. It was in Spain that the full fury of the Inquisition would develop, becoming a powerful political institution that answered to no one, not even the pope. It would terrorize Jews for hundreds of years to come, pursuing its prey all the way to the New World. Late in the twentieth century, Catholic Mexican-Americans in Arizona and other western states would reveal secrets to university researchers, telling of their families’ practice of not eating bread during Holy Week, and of closing all the shutters and lighting candles in secret cupboards on Saturday nights. The tone in which they imparted these family secrets was still one of hushed nervousness, yielding us, over five centuries later, some small sense of what the terror must have been like in its most hellishly active period.
The Dominicans were chosen to manage the Inquisition in Spain, and Tomás de Torquemada, the head of a Dominican monastery in Segovia and confessor to the queen, was appointed inquisitor-general in the autumn of 1483. Torquemada, too, is said to have had converso ancestors, perhaps stoking his hatred. With his ascension, inquisitional reach was extended across the whole of the kingdom. Torquemada was insatiable. There are recorded instances of people being cleared of all charges and Torquemada demanding retrial after retrial, until either the verdict he wanted was reached or he burned the victims anyway. It was he who set up the formidable machinery of the Inquisition, its secret mechanism so perfectly calibrated to do what it was designed to do that it would keep running well after his death (though the greatest concentration of activity was during his lifetime).
Over the course of the next twelve years, the inquisitors, with their irresistible methods of forcing confessions, claimed to have found over thirteen thousand secretly Judaizing New Christians, men and women, many of whom were burned at the stake.9 Everything — accusations, imprisonment, torture, forced confessions, sentencing — took place in the greatest secrecy, contributing to the terror. The verdicts were announced at great public spectacles, the infamous autos-da-fé, where masses of the condemned heard their sentences announced, one by one, the proceedings often stretching into the night, and sometimes protracted over two or three days. The last to hear their sentence pronounced were those condemned to death, the method of execution specified as being “without an effusion of blood,” which meant, of course, being burned alive. This seeming mercy, a bloodless murder, amounted to a death of maximum cruelty and was based on an old legal fiction of the Church dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century and justified by a passage in John 15:6: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Penitent heretics were granted the mercy of being strangled before their bodies were burned. Those who had died under torture were burned as well, and condemned heretics who had escaped were burned in effigy, their goods confiscated, as were all goods confiscated, by the increasingly wealthy Inquisition, though those who had originally brought the accusation of crypto-Judaism — a neighbor, a business partner, even a family member — were entitled to some of the goods, a diabolical plan if ever there was one.
The flimsiest grounds could serve as an accusation. For example, extreme personal hygiene could be interpreted as crypto-Judaism. An old habit from the days before conversion, absentmindedly reverted to, could cost a person his or her life and bring catastrophic attention to his or her extended clan as well. The guidelines the Church issued for detecting a crypto-Jew included such behavior as wearing clean clothes on Saturdays and draining away the blood of meat and cutting away its fat and gristle. An accused person never got the opportunity to face his accusers, so personal vendettas, as well as envy, malice, and greed, could serve as motives.
In 1492, Granada, the last Moslem holdout, fell to the Christians. Now it was only the Jews and the backsliding conversos who spoiled the royal vision of a unified Christian Spain. The autos-da-fé ceased, as plans for the final solution were being put into place. There was one more effort at mass conversion, and then came the announcement. Judaism was to be officially terminated in Spain. There were attempts to bribe the monarchs. Various Jews were members of the royal court or in other ways close to the two rulers, including most prominently Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abrabanel, and a large sum was handed over by way of these intermediaries. Legend has it that Ferdinand and Isabella wavered at the eleventh hour and Torquemada came rushing in to them, with a crucifix held aloft, fulminating, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand. Here he is. Take him and barter him away.” Spain’s Jews had two choices: convert or emigrate. The official justification again was put in terms not of punishing Jews for being Jews, but for corrupting Christians:
We have been informed that within our kingdom there are evil Christians who have converted to Judaism and who have thereby betrayed our holy Catholic faith. This most unfortunate development has been brought about as a result of the contact between Jews and Christians. … We have decided that no further opportunities should be given for additional damage to our holy faith. … Thus, we hereby order the expulsion of all Jews, both male and female, and of all ages, who live in our kingdom and in all the areas in our possession, whether such Jews have been born here or not. … These Jews are to depart from our kingdom and from all the areas in our possession by the end of July, together with their Jewish sons and daughters, their Jewish servants and their Jewish relatives.
Those who converted would of course be allowed to remain in Spain, where the inquisitional torments continued with mounting fury. Considerable numbers of Spain’s Jews, including the chief rabbi, Abraham Seneor (who had been appointed to his post by the royal pair following his help with their nuptials), and most of the members of the most influential families, chose baptism over exile, adding their numbers to the conversos. But between 100,000 and 150,000 Jews packed up their belongings and left, the exodus beginning in May. By the end of the summer there were officially no Jews left in Spain. As the rabbis remarked, the final expulsion occurred just about the time of the Jewish fast day of Tisha Ba-Av, the ninth of Av, which marks the two destructions of Jerusalem, the first by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans in 70 c.e.
An eyewitness to the exodus, an observer generally unsympathetic to the Jews, Andrés Bernáldez, who had enthusiastically endorsed the work of the Inquisition, gives a glimpse of the pathos as the Jews left Castile and Aragon that hot summer:
Confiding in their vain blind hopes, [they] left the lands of their birth, children and adults, old and young, on foot and in wagons, and the caballeros on asses and other beasts, and each journeyed to a port of embarkation. They went through roads and fields with many travails and [mixed] fortunes, some falling, others rising, others dying, others being born, others falling sick, so that there was no Christian who did not feel sorry for them and always invite them to be baptized. And some sorrowfully converted and stayed, but very few. And on the way the rabbis heartened them, and had the women and youths sing and play tambourines to cheer the people, and so they went through Castile and arrived at the ports. … When those who went to embark through Puerto de Santa María and Cádiz saw the sea, they shouted loudly and cried out, men and women, great and small, in their prayers demanding mercy o
f God, and they expected to see some marvel of God and that he would open a path through the sea for them.
Among the masses leaving the land of Sepharad in those anguished summer months were the kabbalists, the visionaries who had seen signs of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, and in this way explained how it was given to them to have so many divine secrets revealed, and how it was that the people with whom God had made his covenant were being subjected to such unholy torment. They had predicted that the year of 5250, or 1490, would bring the final redemption. What kind of effect did the expulsion and the other horrors that had both preceded and would follow this calamity have on these mystical visionaries? They would take the kabbalist tradition with them, many of them eventually finding their way to the ancient city of Safed, in the northern hills of Galilee. According to tradition, the Messiah, from the House of David, would arise in the Galilee and make his way from there to Jerusalem. Presumably, this is why the Spanish kabbalists, forced from their homes in Gerona, chose this destination, making it the new center of kabbalistic mysticism.
Kabbalah would undergo, in the wake of the Sephardic tragedy, a profound transformation. How could it not have affected their mystical apprehension of the universe? How could men who read the world — its natural laws and its history — as a divine code not have interpreted the great calamity in symbolic terms? “I think that the afflictions visited on the Jews in all the Christian kingdoms between the years 5250–55 (1490–95) … are the messianic birth pangs,” wrote Joseph She’altiel b. Moses ha-Kohen on the island of Rhodes in 1495, in the margin of a manuscript he was composing.10
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 9