The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual
Page 25
The old definition of heresy—a thought-crime that consisted of believing something contrary to the dogma of the Church—was still used by the Spanish Inquisition. Thus, for example, a man named Luis de León was accused of heresy for teaching that the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament was more authoritative than the Latin translation used by the Church. But even more damning was the fact that he was distantly descended from a family of New Christians through his great-grandmother. De León was arrested along with another scholar named Garjal, also descended from a converso family of Jewish origin, which prompted the inquisitor to observe that both “must be intent on obscuring our Catholic faith and returning to their own law.”
Indeed, the single greatest innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime, and the inquisitorial records now included detailed genealogical data that were used to measure the quantum of Jewish blood in the veins of a New Christian. The slightest trace was sufficient to bring a man or woman to the attention of the Inquisition, to raise the presumption of guilt as a crypto-Jew, and to send the victim to the stake.53
Not every converso in Spain fell victim to the Inquisition. Some of the newest of the New Christians of Jewish origin enjoyed the same upward mobility that an earlier generation of converted Jews had achieved. Thus, for example, three royal secretaries in service to the Catholic Monarchs were conversos, and so was one of the chaplains to Queen Isabella. Among the wealthy families who financed the voyages of Columbus were conversos whose religion may have changed but whose role in Spanish commerce did not.* Even the uncle of Tomás de Torquemada—Juan de Torquemada, a prince of the Church who wore the red miter of a cardinal—was reported to carry Jewish blood, although the grand inquisitor himself was held to suffer no such taint.
The ultimate irony of the Spanish Inquisition is that some of its assumptions about the Jewish identity of the conversos later came to be held by certain strands of modern scholarship. Just as the archives of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo preserve the testimony of a witness who insisted in 1483 that “all the conversos of this city were Jews,” so, too, does historian Yitzhak Baer insist that “the conversos and Jews were one people, united by destiny,” and Haim Beinart seconds the proposition: “[E]very converso did his best to fulfil Mosaic precepts, and one should regard as sincere the aim they all set themselves: to live as Jews.”54
On the same assumption, Jewish tradition has enshrined the conversos who were condemned by the Inquisition for the crime of “Judaizing” as authentic martyrs for the Jewish faith. Some of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition were, in fact, unwilling converts to Christianity. A few of the men and women burned alive at an auto in Córdoba on September 29, 1684, for example, were heard to cry out “Moses, Moses” as they died at the stake. And the last prosecution of a converso of Jewish origin on charges of heresy did not take place until 1818, more than three centuries after the Spanish Inquisition had been explicitly charged by pope and king with the task of ridding Spain of its Jewish population.55
The reality of the Spanish Inquisition and the plight of Spanish Jewry are not quite what the conventional wisdom advertises them to be. The point has been made by Benzion Netanyahu, who confesses that he undertook the study of the Spanish Inquisition as a young historian in 1944 with the sure conviction that the Marranos were “moral heroes who courageously withstood the terrors of the Inquisition and adhered to their faith under grueling tortures, frequently unto death.” In that fateful year, when the apparatus of the Holocaust was in full operation on European soil, Netanyahu saw the victims of the Spanish Inquisition in the context of Jewish martyrology: “Once again, I thought, the Jewish people, which produced the first religious martyrs in history and gave so many martyrs to the faith in the Middle Ages, demonstrated its capacity for suffering and self-sacrifice for its moral principles and religious convictions.”56
But Netanyahu came to realize that the conventional wisdom about the Marranos was wrong. “To be sure, I found evidence that some of the Marranos were indeed secret adherents of Judaism,” he writes in The Origins of the Spanish Inquisition. But his “idealistic conception and heroic image” of the Marranos were shattered by the documentary evidence that he gathered and studied: “[M]ost of the conversos were conscious assimilationists who wished to merge with the Christian society, educate their children as fully fledged Christians, and remove themselves from anything regarded as Jewish, especially in the field of religion.” Thanks to the willing and even ardent embrace of Christianity by most Marranos, he insists, “the number of clandestine Jews among them was rapidly dwindling to the vanishing point.”57
The crypto-Jews who actually existed—or at least the ones who came to the attention of the Inquisition—rarely practiced Judaism according to Jewish law and tradition. Rather, most of them cobbled together an “idiosyncratic” and “syncretistic” faith compounded of elements of both Judaism and Christianity in varying proportions and combinations. One converso, for example, confessed to the Inquisition that he recited the Paternoster on rising and then washed his hands and recited the morning prayers of Judaism, too. For some conversos, the only trace of Jewish practice was a lingering food taboo such as the avoidance of pork; for others, it was a prideful claim to biblical lineage, as when one converso reportedly altered the words of the Ave Maria to claim descent from Mary herself: “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” Flesh-and-blood conversos, according to David M. Gitlitz in Secrecy and Deceit, could be found “along the spectrum that runs from wholly Christian to wholly Jewish.”58
The conversos who practiced some form of Judaism were always few in number, however, and their numbers grew steadily smaller as the Inquisition continued to search out and send them to the stake. But the sparsity of real crypto-Jews never mattered to the inquisitors, who were quite content to persecute conversos whose only crime was the accident of a distant and long-forgotten Jewish relative. For the inquisitors, as for the Nazis in the twentieth century, blood mattered more than belief or practice. Thus did the Spanish Inquisition carry out “a holocaust of conversos,” many of whom went up in flames as authentic Christians falsely accused of being secret Jews.59
If most of the Marranos were, in fact, willing and earnest converts to Christianity, what explains the obsessive drive of the Spanish Inquisition to persecute and exterminate them?
One factor was the visceral anti-Semitism of Christian tradition, which was always a subtext of the inquisitorial project in Spain and prompted the inquisitors to regard Jewish blood as an ineradicable taint. Then, too, the opportunity to confiscate the wealth of accused heretics was a source of revenue for the Inquisition, both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and the conversos of Jewish origin provided a rich target. “The ‘converso danger,’” explains Henry Kamen, “was invented to justify the spoliation of conversos.” Above all, the Old Christians resented the rivalry of New Christians whose upward mobility in Spanish society had been so rapid and so remarkable, and they sought to remove these arrivistes from their positions of power and privilege by any means possible.60
All these motives combined to produce the obsession that distinguishes the Spanish version of the Inquisition from all others—the self-appointed mission of purging the Spanish population of Jewish and, later, Muslim contamination through the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). The medieval and Roman inquisitors had been concerned only with the purity of one’s faith, and they were willing to spare accused heretics from the worst penalties if they repudiated the beliefs that the Church called heretical and embraced the ones that the Church prescribed for all good Catholics. The Spanish inquisitors, by contrast, were dubious that any New Christian was capable of authentic conversion or repentance if his or her blood was tainted by Jewish or Muslim ancestry, no matter how slight or how remote. Here begins a dangerous and deadly idea—the punishment of human beings for the crime of having been born with the wrong blood in their veins—th
at would reach its most horrific expression in the twentieth century.
One’s blood was deemed to be pure, in fact, only if it was wholly untainted by Jewish or Muslim forebears, and only those whose blood was pure were entitled to the official designation of Old Christian. One important function of the Inquisition—and a source of revenue to fund its more brutal operations—was performing elaborate genealogical studies and issuing certificates that attested to one’s purity of blood. Since New Christians came to be excluded from various posts and professions by a body of Spanish law called the Strictures of Purity of Blood, such a certificate was sometimes required to secure a professorship or a government job, to win a place in a military academy or the officer corps, to reassure the family of a prospective husband or wife, or to satisfy the curiosity of a suspicious inquisitor.
If one’s purity of blood could not be documented, the label of New Christian would be imposed by law. Depending on the number and nearness of Jewish or Muslim relatives, one might be described as a Half New Christian, for example, or a Quarter New Christian. The quanta of tainted blood were measured and registered all the way down to a fraction of one-sixteenth, but even a single Jewish or Muslim relation on a distant branch of one’s family tree was enough to mark one as “a part of the New Christian” and expose one to all the risks and disabilities imposed on conversos by the Strictures of Purity of Blood. Even if a man or woman escaped the Inquisition, he or she was still subject to the Spanish version of apartheid whenever and wherever the blood laws were in effect.61
The enemies of Spanish Jewry included deeply racist elements among the Old Christians who eventually recruited Ferdinand and Isabella to their radical program of ridding Spain of its Jewish population, not only all practicing Jews but anyone with even a trace of Jewish blood. “Old Christians came to treat the conversos as carriers of a lethal disease,” explains Netanyahu. “What the racists proposed, then, was a large-scale bloodbath, mass extermination or, to use the language of our time, genocide.” No such genocide took place, but the enactment of the blood laws, the expulsion of professing Jews, and the persecution of converted Jews by the Spanish Inquisition were all measures that were intended to achieve the same goal. Whenever a converso was sent to the stake by the inquisitors, it was another victory in the war of extermination against Judaism that began in Spain but did not end there.62
The burning of condemned heretics had been the occasion for a display of pomp and circumstance throughout the long history of the Inquisition, but the Spanish Inquisition aspired to new heights of grandeur and eventually raised the auto-da-fé to “a true art-form of the Baroque.” A certain high point was reached on June 30, 1680, when King Charles II and his bride, Marie Louise, along with some fifty thousand other spectators, gathered in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid to enjoy an auto that started at 6:00a.m. and ended more than twelve hours later. A total of 118 condemned heretics were paraded in front of the crowd to receive their penances, and 51 of them were “relaxed”—that is, burned at the stake.63
Some autos were small in scale and took place in private, but the celebrated spectacles of the Spanish Inquisition were elaborate events that required much preparation. A Sunday or a feast day would be chosen in order to build a suitably large crowd, and—for the same reason—the auto would be announced in advance from pulpits throughout the district. Carpenters and masons were summoned to build the platforms where the invited guests would sit and where the victims would be burned alive. A rehearsal might be held on the day before the big event. At dawn on the morning of the auto, the victims would be offered a last meal, perhaps a beaker of wine and a slice of fried bread with honey. With the tolling of church bells across the city and a solemn processional, the high ceremonial would finally begin.
Local priests and visiting prelates were invited to join the friar-inquisitors and other inquisitorial personnel in the parade, sometimes carrying lighted white tapers, and they were accompanied by soldiers, heralds, flag bearers, drummers, and trumpeters. On especially grand occasions, the procession would include a band and a choir to perform solemn hymns. The accused heretics followed behind, barefoot and bareheaded, and sometimes shaved down to bare skin. All of them assembled at the Palace of the Inquisition and formed up in ranks for the march to the place of judgment and then the place of burning, the dreaded quemadero.
Some of the accused wore ropes around their necks as signs of their imminent punishment, and the most defiant among them were gagged to prevent them from calling out to the crowd. The accused heretics were dressed in a loose-fitting yellow smock called a sanbenito—a corruption of saco bendito or “sacred sack”—and they wore the coroza, a tall dunce’s cap fashioned out of yellow pasteboard. Crowds of spectators numbering in the tens of thousands might attend a well-orchestrated auto, and an elaborately printed program (known as a lista) was sometimes prepared to record the names and crimes of the condemned men and women.
According to the lista for an auto that took place in Lisbon on Sunday, June 17, 1731, for example, there were eighty-three victims, ranging from “persons who wear the sanbenito” to “persons handed over in the flesh”—that is, condemned heretics who had refused to confess, or had offered an insufficient confession, or had recanted and then later relapsed into heresy, and were now turned over to the civil authorities for burning. Thanks to the lista, we know that case 11 was a twenty-nine-year-old woman named María Méndes, native of Beja and resident of Moncarapacho, a New Christian who was described in the program in an urgent shorthand: “Convicted, refused to confess and obstinate.” By contrast, a mule driver from Tondella named João Pereyra, age thirty-two, described as “half New Christian,” was charged with “Judaizing and other sins” and sentenced to “perpetual wearing of the sanbenito and imprisonment without remission” as well as a five-year exile in the Portuguese colony of Angola.64
The sanbenito and the coroza were Spain’s unique contributions to the iconography of the Inquisition. On the sanbenitos were painted scenes and figures that indicated the crime and fate of the wearer. For example, if a man or woman had been convicted of “formal” heresy, the sanbenito was decorated with a black cross with one transverse arm; two arms were reserved for more egregious forms of heresy. The sanbenito worn by those condemned to die was black, and the others were yellow. Also painted on the sanbenito and the coroza were garish scenes of devils and flames; if the flames climbed upward, the wearer was condemned to die; if the flames pointed downward, the wearer had confessed and faced a lesser penance. Sometimes the garment or headgear was made to fit a specific crime, as when a bigamist who had taken fifteen wives was required to wear a coroza on which were painted the figures of fifteen women. “The procession presented an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues,” wrote one English propagandist in the nineteenth century, “as it defiled to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.”65
The ranks of the processional often swelled with various functionaries and honorees. At the famous Madrid auto of 1680, for example, the Company of Coal Merchants, all of them bearing pikes and muskets, were invited to join the procession in recognition of their crucial contribution to the festivities—“the Wood with which the Criminals are burnt.” On that occasion, the Duke of Medina-Celi was given the honor of carrying the official banner of the Inquisition, which depicted a cross, a branch, and a sword to symbolize the heretic’s choice between the Church and the pyre, and the words Justitia et misericordia (Justice and Mercy). Other participants carried pasteboard effigies of escaped or missing heretics who were to be burned in absentia, or trunks containing the remains of defunct heretics who had been posthumously condemned to the stake.66
The inquisitorial parade eventually arrived in the public square where two platforms had been erected, one to accommodate the accused heretics, the attending priests, and the guards, the other for the comfort of honored guests from both the Church and the royal court, assorted noble
s of various ranks, public officials, and the occasional ambassador, although the highest chair was reserved for the grand inquisitor, who dressed for the occasion in a purple robe. Between these two stages was a pulpit from which a Mass was conducted and a sermon preached to the crowd by one of the inquisitors, always an occasion for excoriating the accused heretics and sternly cautioning everyone else against the crime of heresy. Then, as the accused heretics were brought to the pulpit, sometimes one by one and sometimes in groups, the inquisitor recited the charges, announced the verdict, and pronounced the sentence against each, including the effigies and corpses as well as the flesh-and-blood victims.
The lesser punishments might include the obligation to wear the sanbenito to church services every Sunday—a Spanish variant on the medieval practice of requiring heretics to wear yellow crosses—but more severe penances were more commonly imposed, including a public lashing of up to two hundred strokes, forced labor as a galley-slave aboard one of the royal men-of-war, or “perpetual and irremissible” imprisonment. Sometimes the inquisitors devised a punishment that was, at once, both painful and whimsical, as when one victim of the Inquisition in Mexico was anointed with honey, covered with feathers, and left to stand in the sun for four hours.67