The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual
Page 22
By its own admission, if also to its regret, the Inquisition enjoyed no jurisdiction over professing Jews.1 Bernard Gui, for example, railed against “treacherous Jews,” whom he suspected of seeking to “pervert Christians secretly and lead them into Jewish treachery,” but readily conceded that the Inquisition was powerless to prosecute them precisely because they were practicing Jews. While the inquisitors were free to proceed against every kind of Christian heresy, their authority over Jewish victims was limited by canon law. Thus, Gui explained to the readers and users of his handbook, the inquisitors were authorized to arrest and punish only Christians who had converted to Judaism, and Jews who had converted to Christianity but continued to practice their old faith—that is, Jews who “return to the vomit of Judaism,” according to Gui’s own hateful phrase.2
Not every inquisitor, however, was entirely scrupulous in following the rules and regulations. Now and then, a cagey or callous inquisitor succeeded in convincing a Jewish man or woman to undergo the rite of baptism, whether by the use of winning words or under the threat of torture and death, and then promptly charged the newly converted Christian with the crime of heresy. On other occasions, the local Jewish populace was ordered to fund the operations of the Inquisition, and if they failed to pay up, the inquisitors proceeded against them as fautors of heresy. To snare a Jewish victim, some inquisitors insisted that the circumcision of a Christian, or the handling of a communion wafer, or even the building of a new synagogue was a crime within its jurisdiction. “The friars acted first,” observes Joshua Trachtenberg in The Devil and the Jews, “and debated afterward.”3
Both kings and popes were occasionally moved to intervene when the inquisitors exceeded their writ. After one bloodthirsty Dominican inquisitor tried and burned thirteen Jewish victims at the stake in France in 1288, Philip the Fair—the same French king who later turned on the Knights Templar—stepped in to restrain the Inquisition from seizing Jewish victims who should have been tried and punished by the royal courts, at least as far as the king was concerned. By 1448, Pope Nicholas V was sufficiently aroused to issue a public reprimand to the inquisitors for such excesses and cautioned them against asserting jurisdiction over Jewish victims “except in cases of manifest heresy or anti-Catholic activity.”4
Although the inquisitors were restricted in what they could do to Jewish flesh and blood, the Inquisition arrogated to itself the right and duty to proceed against Jewish writings. As early as 1233, the books of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides were burned by the Dominican inquisitors at an auto-da-fé in Montpellier. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX issued a decree that obliged the secular authorities across Europe to seize all available Jewish manuscripts and deliver them to the Inquisition for examination. The inquisitors concluded that the Talmud itself and all Talmudic commentaries were, in fact, “perversely heretical” and thus suitable for burning. By 1248, possession of a copy of the Talmud was a crime, and Jewish books were burned by the wagonload in Paris and Rome.5
Still, some inquisitors carved out enough space within the metes and bounds of canon law to persecute the Jews with quite as much aggression and brutality as they directed toward Cathars, Templars, and witches. Ironically, the country in which the Inquisition claimed the greatest number of Jewish victims is the same one that had once served as a unique and remarkable place of refuge for Jews. The so-called Golden Age of Spain, much celebrated in Jewish tradition, was an interlude during the High Middle Ages when Christians, Jews, and Muslims seemed to be able to coexist in harmony and prosperity on the Iberian Peninsula—an accommodation known as convivencia. At the very moment in history when the medieval Inquisition was preparing to exterminate the Cathars across the border in Languedoc, for example, a Castilian monarch called Saint Ferdinand proudly called himself “king of the three religions.”6
Yet it was in Spain that the full weight of the Inquisition fell on Jews and Muslims rather than Christian dissidents. The Spanish inquisitors devised a new and vastly more dangerous principle of persecution, one that sought to ensure purity of blood rather than purity of belief. And the inquisitors continued to maintain and operate the machinery of persecution long after it had fallen into disrepair and disuse everywhere else in Europe. To this day, when the Inquisition is mentioned, our thoughts turn reflexively to the near-mythic phenomenon of the Spanish Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition did not come into formal existence until 1478. When it did, however, the inquisitors were able to tap into a vast reservoir of anti-Semitic tradition that bubbled and boiled just beneath the surface of European civilization. Indeed, the law, literature, theology, and culture of Christendom had always been tainted with a fear and hatred of Jews, starting with those passages of the New Testament in which the execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman authorities in Judea is blamed on the Jews—“Pilate said to them, ‘Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’ They all said, ‘Let him be crucified’”—and continuing through the altar paintings, miracle plays, minstrels’ songs, broadsheets, and even the graffiti of medieval Europe.7
The emblematic medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, which appeared around the time that the first inquisitors sallied forth, proposed that a Jewish man who had taunted Jesus of Nazareth on the way to his crucifixion was condemned by God to wander the earth without rest until Jesus returned at the end of days. The figure is ubiquitous in Christian art of the Middle Ages—variously appearing as Der Ewige Jude (the Eternal Jew) in German and Juan Espera-en-Dios (John Waiting-for-God) in Spanish—and he came to symbolize the hateful notion that Jews were damned by God and thus ought to be shunned by good Christians.8
Jews were slandered not only as rootless wanderers but also as heartless usurers, despoilers of communion wafers, poisoners of wells, and ritual murderers who used the blood of Christian children in their religious observances. Precisely because Jews did not recognize Jesus of Nazareth as divine, Christian true believers were taught by the book of Revelation that they worshipped in “the synagogue of Satan.” By a long and especially ugly tradition, the figure of the Antichrist who appears in Christian apocalyptic writing was expected to be the spawn of a Jewish whore and the Devil himself. The supposed theological offenses of Judaism resulted in the forfeiture of legal rights for ordinary Jews: “Because of the crime which once their fathers committed against our Lord Jesus Christ,” went the so-called Jewry Law of one German kingdom in 1268, “the Jews are deprived of the protection of their natural rights and condemned to eternal misery for their sins.”9
Jewish men and women, in fact, were seen by some Christians as not fully human or not human at all. The medieval laws against bestiality and sodomy, for example, were sometimes applied to sexual intercourse between a Christian and a Jew on the reasoning that “coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog.” Thus, an English deacon was burned alive in Oxford in 1222 on charges of bestiality because he had converted to Judaism and married a Jewish woman, and another man was burned as a sodomist in Paris because he fathered several children with a Jewish mistress. Tragically, his Jewish lover, too, was put to the flames—a horrifying but illuminating example of the dehumanization of victims that has contributed to atrocities ranging from the mass murder of the Cathars to the horrors of the Holocaust.10
So it was that Jews were subjected to all manner of misery, both official discrimination and mob violence, throughout the period during which the Inquisition was in active operation. As late as 1581, Pope Gregory XIII forbade Jews to employ Christian wet-nurses because of the slander, first endorsed by Innocent III in 1205, that Jews “make these women pour their milk into the latrines for three days [after taking Communion] before they again give suck to the children.” Jewish doctors were denounced by Christian clergy as diabolical sorcerers: “It is better to die with Christ,” they urged their parishioners in Swabia, a region in southwestern Germany, in 1657, “than to be healed by a Jew doctor with Satan.”11
Since credit was ess
ential to the economy of medieval Europe, Jews (but not Christians) were permitted to engage in moneylending under secular law but, at the same time, condemned for the practice by the Church: “Jews shall desist from usury, blasphemy, and magic,” according to one inquisitorial decree, which classed moneylending as a crime no less heinous than “sorcery, incendiarism, homicide, sacrilege, and fornication.”12
Surely the most egregious and enduring offense against Judaism in medieval Europe was the so-called blood libel—the wholly imaginary notion that Christians were kidnapped and killed for their blood, which would supposedly be used in various diabolical rituals. The most common variant of the slander was the charge that blood was needed to make unleavened bread for the Passover meal. As early as 1096, and as late as 1891, such charges were actually brought against Jewish defendants in various places around Christendom. The blood libel was the supposed crime that sent thirteen Jews to the stake in France in 1288, as we have already noted, and provoked Philip the Fair into complaining that they should have been burned by a royal judge rather than an inquisitor. But Philip was only quibbling over the question of jurisdiction; he was perfectly willing to believe that Jews, as the sons of Satan, were capable of the vilest crimes.
“What more authentic reflection of the prevailing opinion can we hope to find,” muses rabbi and historian Joshua Trachtenberg, “than Shakespeare’s lines from The Merchant of Venice, ‘Let me say “Amen” betimes lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.’”13
Jews, like convicted heretics, were required to wear badges and distinctive clothing to set them apart from Christians, a law that can be found in the same canons of the Fourth Lateran Council that served as the “first sketch” of the Inquisition. The circular yellow “Jew badge” sometimes also depicted a crude drawing of the devil or a pair of diabolic horns. At various times and places, Jews were denied the right to practice law or medicine, to live outside a designated Jewish quarter, or to own land. On top of these legal disabilities—and sometimes because of them—they were targets of violence offered by casual passersby as well as organized mobs. The Jewish community in Mainz, a center of Jewish law and learning as early as the tenth century, for example, deemed it necessary to suspend the blowing of the shofar—the ram’s horn that is sounded during the observance of the High Holidays—out of fear that it would attract the attention of their Christian neighbors and provoke yet another pogrom.14
Violence toward Jews spiked sharply during the Crusades. The Muslim overlords of the Holy Land were the designated enemy, but the Christian soldiers who took up the cross paused to wet their blades with the blood of the Jewish men, women, and children they encountered en route to Jerusalem. Since the Church taught that Jews and Muslims were both infidels, such atrocities made a certain theological sense to the crusaders. Indeed, they were taught by the priests who preached the crusades and the chaplains who accompanied them on the march to the Middle East that anyone who refused to embrace the truth as offered by the Roman Catholic church deserved to die. “Look now, we are going to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him,” went one such sermon, whose author refers to Muslims by using a biblical term. “Let us first avenge ourselves on them and exterminate them from among the nations so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered—or let them adopt our faith.”15
Perhaps the single strangest but also most telling example of the dangers that faced medieval Jewry dates back to the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. A crowd gathered on the outskirts of a town in the Rhineland to salute a party of knights riding off to join the army of crusaders whose mission it was to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims. The expeditionary force included a miscellaneous assortment of wives, servants, and other camp followers, and one woman among them was followed down the road by her pet goose, which was apparently distressed that its mistress was leaving it behind.
To the modern observer, the scene is comical—a goose waddling after a woman who is herself hastening to keep up with a mounted knight. To the men and women in that crowd, however, the sight of the goose somehow suggested to them that God himself was expressing his enthusiasm for the whole enterprise; surely, they convinced themselves, the goose was filled with the Holy Spirit. Perhaps feeling guilty that they were not following the example of the heroic goose, the men in the crowd were inspired to do their own small part in the crusade. And so they set upon the infidels who were closest at hand—the Jews who lived among them. Nothing more than a glimpse of a goose at the right time and place was sufficient to spark an explosion of murderous anti-Semitic violence in medieval Europe.
Slander, discrimination, and wanton cruelty were facts of life for ordinary Jews throughout Christendom long before the invention of the Inquisition. But the older, cruder expressions of Jew hatred were brought into sharp focus and aimed directly at the Jews of Spain by the grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498) and the other agents of the Spanish Inquisition—“the darkest page in the dark record of the Jewish people,” as historian Cecil Roth wrote in the years just before the Holocaust, “one of the saddest episodes in the history of human thought.”16
Jews had been living in Spain since at least the third century of the common era and perhaps even earlier, a fact that prompted some of them to “disclaim on this ground any conceivable responsibility for the Crucifixion.” Until the late fourteenth century, and especially during the medieval interlude when three faiths managed to coexist peacefully, the Spanish Jews were no worse off than their brethren elsewhere in medieval Europe, and sometimes they fared much better. Unlike the neighborhood set aside for the Jewish population of Venice, known as the Ghetto, and similar Jewish districts across Europe that came to be called by the same name, the Judería in Spanish cities was often a prosperous place where Jewish goldsmiths, jewelers, and other artisans and craftsmen offered their wares and Jewish poets, scholars, and theologians were able to work in comfort and security.17
The principle of convivencia did not mean that Jews and Muslims were entitled to the same rights and privileges as Christian citizens of the various monarchies on the Iberian Peninsula. Muslims were generally restricted to manual labor, and Jews were largely confined to crafts, medicine, money-changing, and tax-collecting. But they were generally free to observe the rites and rituals of their respective faiths. During a time of drought in one region of Spain, for example, Christians, Jews, and Muslims were all called upon to offer their prayers for rain, and a Torah was carried to the public square for the convocation. “The good Jew and the good Muslim can, if they act correctly,” conceded one Spanish author as late as 1490, “go to heaven just like the good Christian.”18
The old fear and loathing of Judaism, however, ran like a sewer beneath the feet of such open-minded Spaniards, and the long-simmering tensions erupted now and then into open violence. During the long hot summer of 1391, for example, Jewish communities across the Iberian Peninsula came under open attack by Christian mobs who were called into the streets by the sermons of a rabble-rousing priest named Ferrán Martínez, a man so vicious that even the king and the pope sought to silence him. A firestorm of anti-Semitic violence took some fifty thousand Jewish lives in the Jewish districts of both Spain and Portugal. To spare themselves from further Christian violence, Jews by the thousands decided to convert to the faith of their oppressors, perhaps as many as 200,000 in Aragón and Castile alone and thousands more in other places around the Iberian Peninsula. These newly minted Christians were called conversos, and they would shortly provide the raison d’être for the Spanish Inquisition and the greatest number of its victims.19
The first conversos embraced Christianity only to save their lives, or so goes one version of the history of Spanish Jewry. According to conventional wisdom, they submitted to baptism, but they “hastened to wash off the traces of the operation as soon as they returned home.” They celebrated their weddings in church and then
repeated the ceremony according to Jewish rites behind locked doors. They married only fellow conversos so that their children, too, would continue to be regarded as Jews under Jewish ritual law. “They were Jews in all but name,” insists Cecil Roth, “and Christians in nothing but form.”20
Such was the near-unanimous verdict of history on the conversos until very recently, both among scholars and by common consent in Jewish circles. They preferred to see the conversos as “crypto-Jews”—that is, heroic men and women who were forced to convert to Christianity under threat of torture and death, secretly practiced their original faith while pretending to be Christians, and tragically ended their lives as Jewish martyrs. Ironically, as we shall see, much the same point of view was embraced by the Spanish Inquisition, which condemned the conversos as insincere and opportunistic and contemptuously branded them as Marranos—“a word of obscure origin” that is often translated as “swine.” The question of whether the conversos were earnest Christians or crypto-Jews turned out to be a matter of life or death in the eyes of the Spanish Inquisition.21
Even if the initial conversion to Christianity by a Jewish man or woman was coerced under threat of death, as it may have been in many cases, the ability to enter Christian circles also bestowed certain undeniable advantages on the conversos and their descendants. Like Jews elsewhere in Europe, Spanish Jewry often suffered under various indignities and disabilities—at certain times and places, they were required to make their homes within the bounds of the Judería, they were commanded to wear beards and badges and outlandish garments to mark them as Jews, they were forbidden to own land or ride on horseback or use the title don, and they were barred from certain professions and public offices. Once they had abandoned their old faith and submitted to baptism, by contrast, the first generation of conversos was relieved of these burdens and permitted to participate more fully in Spanish life.