God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Among the most notable of these scholars are Benzion Netanyahu, who lives mainly in Israel, and Henry Kamen, who lives mainly in Barcelona. As individuals, they could hardly be more different. Netanyahu, now age 101, is the patriarch of one of Israel’s most prominent political families. His son Benjamin, known as Bibi, is the leader of the Likud Party and has twice been prime minister. “Benzion looms above his son,” David Remnick has written, “no less than Joseph Kennedy loomed over his clan, and his views are at the root of Bibi’s sense of a menacing world.”

  Netanyahu came to Palestine from Poland as a child, in 1920. His father, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a prominent early Zionist—he gave one of the eulogies at the funeral of Theodor Herzl—and was active in the Jabotinsky wing of the movement. Nathan adopted the Hebrew name Netanyahu, meaning “God-given.” Politically, Benzion was cut from the same Jabotinsky cloth as his father, taking a hard-line view of Greater Israel as a nation that by rights should extend unbroken eastward from the Mediterranean to somewhere beyond the Jordan. Not until he was in his forties did Benzion find real traction as an academic. For reasons that may combine the personal and the political, he found the path difficult in Israel and eventually moved to the United States, in time becoming a professor at Cornell.

  As a scholar, Benzion Netanyahu has produced dense and massive tomes that stand like fortresses on the shelf. The best known of them—the one most frequently read, or at least hefted into proximity—is The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. The documentation is immense. In starkest outline, Netanyahu’s argument is relatively simple: the charge advanced by the Inquisition—that the conversos of Spain were in fact unfaithful Christians and secret judaizers—had little basis in reality. He presents the testimony of other Jews at the time, notably rabbis in North Africa, who professed no doubt that most of the conversos had indeed abandoned their heritage, and railed against them in withering terms. “The wickedness of these people is greater in our eyes than that of the gentiles,” wrote one rabbi, and another applied to the conversos a line from the Book of Proverbs: “When the wicked are lost, it is a cause for rejoicing.” But here’s Netanyahu’s point: if the judaizing charge was false, or largely false, then the enmity toward conversos was not really about religion. It was about antagonism toward Jews as a people.

  Mainstream scholarship had long accepted the judaizing charge at face value: in other words, had accepted that many converted Jews secretly kept up the old ways, and in their hearts continued to see themselves as Jewish. The short story “The Surveyor” takes this view for granted. (“I knew where the quemadero was,” the Spanish lawyer says, “because I feel the same way about the people who died there that you do. Because I cannot forget their heroic constancy, as you call it.”) This is, after all, what the verbatim record of thousands of Inquisition tribunals would have you believe—it is right there on the page, in the transcripts of interrogations and the testimony of witnesses.

  Some conversos certainly did maintain their original faith in secret. And others, though sincere Christians, kept up certain cultural practices. But whatever the Inquisition documents might say, Netanyahu argues, there was no significant amount of judaizing in Spain; his heart is not warmed by the “incredible romance” (as one historian put it, years ago) of the conventional account. Beginning in the 1960s, Netanyahu posed a radical challenge—and he did so in trademark style. His work is at once magisterial and merciless, vigilant and aggressive. In conversation, too, he takes no prisoners. Netanyahu’s English—American-inflected, with a baritone nasality—is remarkably similar to Bibi’s, and suffused with the sharp, dry heat of disdain. He speaks in precise paragraphs, punctuated with courtly impatience: “You will perhaps permit me to say . . .” “I speak now with candor . . .” “You will forgive me for expressing myself with, shall I say, frankness . . .” He brushes aside a question about what motivates his scholarship: “I do not approach this subject with emotion. People always say, ‘You write in the shadow of the Holocaust. You have Nazis always on your mind.’ But this is not true. I write only as a historian, to find out how it really was. They are the ones who are political.”

  If Netanyahu is right—if relatively few conversos in fact returned to the religion of their fathers, or secretly practiced it all along—then how does one explain the Inquisition? Netanyahu offers a number of linked explanations. For one, he argues, many Christians resented the high station that conversos frequently attained. Because the conversos were now Christian, they could hold public office, which they did with great distinction. Moreover, being Christian, they could no longer be attacked on religious grounds, leaving only the racial argument—impurity of blood. In other words, there was something inherently wrong with Jewishness. Finally, the Spanish crown, especially Ferdinand, saw a political advantage in siding with the Old Christians—and, incidentally, saw an opportunity to strip the New Christians of their wealth.

  Henry Kamen agrees with Netanyahu on one big thing: that most of the conversos weren’t really judaizing. The two disagree on many other points. Kamen is diminutive and soft-spoken, with features that invite speculation about his origins. Despite his surname, he explains, he is not Jewish; colleagues who know his work only from the printed page have been surprised, upon meeting him face-to-face, to find Southeast Asia gazing back. Kamen’s father was an Anglo-Burmese engineer for Shell Oil; his mother was half Anglo-Irish and half Nepalese. His earliest memories come from his childhood in Japanese-occupied Burma during World War II, before the family fled to India. Kamen went on to be educated in England and France.

  The Inquisition was not Kamen’s original research interest, but while pursuing another project, he began spending time in the archives in Madrid—comprehensive, well catalogued, and extending back unbroken to the fifteenth century. He found the gravitational pull irresistible. Kamen was struck by the way Inquisition scholarship has always been politicized. Writers in English (the “Anglo-Saxons,” he calls them, a linguistic tic from his studies in Paris) tended to have a Protestant bias, reflected in the leyenda negra, the Black Legend, about the dark doings of perfidious Spain. Spanish scholars, or at least the liberals among them, carried different baggage. They couldn’t help seeing the Inquisition with vivid memories of the Franco regime—as if all of Spanish history presented a seamless authoritarian weave.

  Acutely aware that he himself was making a politically charged argument, Kamen came to view the Inquisition in different terms. Apart from occasional moments of feverish violence—especially during the earliest decades under Torquemada—the Spanish Inquisition, he believes, was moderately restrained by the standards of the day. Violence and intellectual repression penetrated everywhere, to be sure. But those grand autos-da-fé depicted in epic paintings at the Prado were few and far between; a Spaniard might live an entire lifetime and never see one. As an institution, the Inquisition was always understaffed and never particularly wealthy. For many of those in its employ, it was a means more of advancing a career than of enforcing a worldview; people became invested in it. In the end, Kamen argues, the Inquisition was a bureaucracy like any other—often mindless, often operating out of sheer inertia, often heedless of its consequences, often manipulated by other forces. In some ways, that is part of its horror.

  Kamen agrees with Netanyahu that in the century leading up to the Inquisition, the rivalry between Old Christians and New Christians could be intense—but it did not occur everywhere in Spain, he points out, and even where it did occur, the intensity was by no means constant. He agrees that a doctrine of blood purity began to take hold in public life in the decades before the Inquisition, but he points to instance after instance in which statutes meant to embody that doctrine—for instance, to prohibit Christians of Jewish ancestry from holding public office—were rejected. “Only after the founding of the Inquisition,” he writes, “did the trend to discriminate against conversos on grounds of blood purity become pronounced.” As for Ferdinand’s ulterior motives? The Jews of
Spain, Kamen argues, were for the most part poor, like everyone else, and many of the richest ones were allowed to leave with their assets. Financially, the monarchs stood to gain little from the expulsion. Later on, Kamen notes, Ferdinand continued to stand by his converso advisors, and they by him.

  Where Netanyahu’s life calls attention to the power of roots, Kamen’s life follows a very different model. Kamen admits to having felt oddly globalized from an early age, a citizen of everywhere and of nowhere. His work is devoid of a national perspective or any hint of national feeling. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is French to the marrow—he writes about Montaillou from within the tradition of generations of French scholarship. When he invokes the “green purgatory of rural society,” you have a sense that Gallic ancestry is flowing out the nib of his pen. Kamen writes with distance and dispassion.

  Perhaps because he is rootless, Kamen pays special attention to roots everywhere else. Understanding from below—that is his major difference with Netanyahu. It is one thing to seek to understand the Inquisition as an institution. It did what it did, it was occasionally powerful, it was clever at adapting as times changed, it was entwined like a vine with the structures of secular power. But that does not explain the environment that made it possible. “The real problem,” Kamen told me, “is the state of mind of the Spanish population at specific periods of its history.”

  He explained all this one afternoon in Barcelona, as we walked through the old quarter, the Barri Gòtic, which sits atop the old Roman city and in some places still follows its street plan. Bits of Roman walls are embedded in the cathedral. Kamen pointed them out—and then, turning down an alley, paused at the Palau Episcopal, the headquarters of the Inquisition. The first autos-da-fé were held in the courtyard here, where workmen were setting up chairs for an evening concert. The Inquisition did not plant itself deeply in Catalonia, in part because Catalans have always resented interlopers—such as anyone from a faraway capital—and in part because after the pogroms of 1391, most of Barcelona’s Jews were already gone.

  Kamen kept coming back to a single theme: how something like the Inquisition can take hold. He thinks in terms of organic processes, processes that are slow and perhaps not quite visible even as they unfold. He is skeptical about attributing too much autonomy to the institution itself—as if, in a backward society, a sophisticated machine could just descend from above. The lens needs to be turned in the other direction: something had happened to Spain itself. “All police bodies—all police bodies, whether they’re the village policeman or the Gestapo or the traffic police—all of them are repressive,” Kamen said as we strolled. “They cooperate in exactly the same way. They are created to cause fear. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t; sometimes they overpass the limits, sometimes they don’t; and so on. The important question to ask is why these bodies are allowed to exist. If a country such as Spain allowed a repressive body like the Inquisition to exist for four hundred years, it is not because the Inquisition forced itself on the Spanish nation. It is because the Spaniards allowed it to exist.”

  We wound around to a nearby plaza—a place of execution during the Spanish Civil War—and then to the Plaça Sant Jaume, the seat of Barcelona’s government since antiquity. From the Plaça, a dark, narrow street led into the Call, the Jewish Quarter. A few shops sell Hebraica to tourists. As in Córdoba, the Jewish presence in the Call is thin. Even “veneer” is too ambitious a word.

  “Netanyahu cannot simply discount all these people who are denouncing other people to the Inquisition,” Kamen went on. “For me, the denunciations are the principal problem, not the Inquisition. You have to understand a bit about police systems in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are no police systems. There are no police. There are only one or two people who, if crimes arise, have to deal with the problem. Okay? So how do crimes get denounced? For the most part, in Europe in the fifteenth century, crimes do not get denounced. If there is a rape in your village, how do you deal with it? Well, if you like the guy who did it, you descend on his house and you say, ‘Look, we’ve got to solve this. Do you love my daughter? Are you going to marry her? And you also have to pay some money to make good the wrong.’ If you don’t like the guy, you kill him. The whole thing gets resolved. You don’t go through the courts—there is no legal system. In the same way, if there is a problem of social rejection of certain people, you resolve it in your own way—you attack them, you have riots against them. That is why you have all these riots against the Jews in the Middle Ages.

  “But now, suddenly, there exists a state body called the Inquisition—which from your point of view is really just two priests in a city six hours away—and you have the possibility of taking legal action. As a result, bit by bit, these social pressures against the Jews get funneled toward these two people. What is most important here? Is it the existence of these two people? No, it’s the existence of social pressures—it’s the anti-Semitic nature of society. What exists for me is the common people. It’s the people—lots of them—who are denouncing conversos to the Inquisition. So my interest is in the background and roots of the Inquisition—what brings it into existence.”

  Kamen does not have an answer to the question, but it is a crucial one: What turns a society, any society, from one thing into another? What combination of factors—economic distress, ethnic hostility, physical threat, moral fervor, latent envy, political manipulation—can alter the historic character of a people or place? Spain, Kamen notes, was a land where three religions had gotten along tolerably, though without love, for many years. In most regions of Spain, the Medieval Inquisition had never found a friendly reception. More than those of other nations, its rulers and mariners looked outward to the possibilities of a beckoning planet. And then, in a relatively short period of time, something changed. The Inquisition became a dangerous institution—but only because Spain itself had already curdled.

  Under Sail

  In August 1492, at the port of Palos de la Frontera, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, Christopher Columbus prepared to embark on his voyage west across the ocean. As noted, his expedition had been financed by conversos. There were conversos among his crew. From his caravel he watched as Jewish refugees on other ships—those who had refused to be baptized—took leave of their country. He described the scene in his log as a “fleet of misery and woe.”

  As Columbus set sail, the Inquisition in Spain was at a peak of severity. Statistics on most aspects of the Inquisition are contested, but a widely accepted estimate for the number of people put to death in the Spanish Inquisition’s first two decades is 2,000, with the total rising to about 12,000 during the full course of its history. The corresponding total for Portugal, whose inquisition began somewhat later, is about 3,000. To put this in perspective, in 1450, the combined population of Spain and Portugal was only about 7 million. The pool of potential victims was smaller, given that only a few specific groups constituted the chief targets of the Inquisition.

  But focusing on executions does not convey the extent of the Inquisition’s penetration. Francisco Bethencourt, trying to get a handle on the number of people who were drawn, one way or another, into inquisitorial procedures in Iberia over the institution’s lifetime— not just those actually hauled before a tribunal but all those who were denounced, along with informers and witnesses—puts the overall number at 1.5 million. Perhaps 300,000 of those people stood trial.

  Those are the figures for Iberia. But the Inquisition was not confined to the peninsula. The Medieval Inquisition had been primarily a localized affair. The Spanish, like the Portuguese, traveled vast distances and planted inquisitions all around the world. Columbus helped open the way.

  4. That Satanic Device

  The Roman Inquisition

  It is a fearful thing to fall into the

  hands of the living God.

  —EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS, 10:31

  I myself hardly ever read a book without feeling

  in the mood to giv
e it a good censoring.

  —ROBERT BELLARMINE, CARDINAL-INQUISITOR, 1598

  The Emergency

  THE BASILICA OF Santa Maria sopra Minerva lies a few paces beyond the Pantheon in Rome, facing a small piazza where a modest Egyptian obelisk rises from the back of a marble elephant, in accordance with a design by Bernini. It’s hard to miss. On the church’s exterior wall, plaques in Latin with pointing fingers indicate how high the Tiber’s floodwaters reached on epochal occasions. “Up to here grew the Tiber,” reads one of them, from 1530, “and Rome would already have been completely flooded, had the Virgin not performed here her swift action.”

  Santa Maria sopra Minerva is something of an oddity—the only Gothic church in Rome. Near the altar stands a statue of Christ, sculpted by Michelangelo. Saint Catherine of Siena is buried here. So is the painter Fra Angelico. Like Catherine, he was a Dominican, and Santa Maria was for a long time the order’s headquarters in Rome. The Dominican connection points to an Inquisition connection, and in fact there are many. To begin with, the roof above the nave was built and paid for by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, the uncle of the inquisitor Tomás.

  I asked a Dominican priest if I could visit the adjoining cloister. He took out a set of keys, unlocked a wooden door, and led the way. “Only a dozen of us live here now,” he said. “There used to be hundreds.” The walls and ceilings of the cloister are covered with frescoes. In the open square, cats doze among fallen columns from an ancient building. Palm trees rise high enough above the tiled rooftops to catch a breeze. Here, in 1633, in a second-floor room, Galileo Galilei was made to face an Inquisition tribunal for advancing the view that Earth revolves around the Sun. When the tribunal’s work was done, Galileo formally abjured his beliefs. Santa Maria has not invested heavily in publicizing this aspect of its story. The basilica’s Web site does not mention it. The literature at the front door is silent. “Pay no attention to 1633,” the church might as well be saying. “But look! Over there! The tomb of Fra Angelico! And look—a Michelangelo!”