Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  *4 This may not be surprising, given that, by the time Paul died in 1435, suspicion of the sincerity of all Conversos was on the rise. Even a bishop might not have thought it advisable to keep examples of his old Talmudic scholarship lying around, and many of Paul’s friends had also converted, in the first decade of the fifteenth century.

  *5 The answer Thomas Paine would have given ha-Lorki appears in the author’s profession of his personal faith in Part I of The Age of Reason: “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” This, of course, was not an acceptable conclusion for anyone of any faith in fifteenth-century Spain.

  *6 See Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 63.

  *7 Nor can Aquinas be considered, as Averroës is, a precursor of secular humanist or Enlightenment thought. When the Texas Board of Education decided to replace Thomas Jefferson with Aquinas in textbook discussions of thinkers who influenced revolutionary movements, it failed to take into account what Aquinas would have thought of a Declaration of Independence that rejected the divine right of kings.

  5

  IMPUREZA DE SANGRE: THE CRUMBLING OF THE CONVIVENCIA

  IN 1997, I VISITED BARCELONA and met a Catalan bookseller who traces his lineage, on at least one side of his family, to Conversos who submitted to baptism in the early fifteenth century. There is also a family legend, he told me, that a more distant Jewish ancestor had married a Morisco (a Christian convert from Islam) who translated Greek classics into Arabic. “Of course,” he said, “it’s quite fashionable now to brag about having an ancestry that recalls the glories of al-Andalus—the gardens of Córdoba, the libraries when Northern Europe was going through the Dark Ages, the courts of the caliphs, the brilliant Jewish and Arab scholars. No one will ever tell you that he’s descended from a Jewish or a Muslim janitor. The one thing we do know is that the whole idea of ‘purity of blood’ in Spain was a terrible, lethal joke. You only invent the idea of blood purity if you know that the blood of your people is impure—or, rather, mixed together. No one will ever know what really happened, because people were forced to lie and lie for generations about their religious origins, until it all dissolved into what you call ‘tall tales’ in English.”

  For most modern Spaniards with a Muslim or a Jew in their distant family trees, the precise nature of their ancestors’ occupations will certainly remain a tall tale or a mystery. But the widespread influence of intermarriage and religious conversion, whether voluntary or forced, since the first Muslim Arabs and Berbers crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Iberia in 711, is no longer in doubt. In 2008, a study published in The American Journal of Human Genetics found a mean incidence of 10.6 percent North African Muslim patrilineal genetic markers in a sample from the current population of Spain and Portugal, and a 19.8 percent incidence of Sephardic Jewish markers.1 In practical terms, the figures mean that roughly one in ten Spaniards possesses genes, on the father’s side, originating in those distant centuries of emigration from Muslim North Africa, and one out of five has Sephardic Jewish genes. Some surely possess both sets of markers, although the study does not address that question. The higher incidence of Sephardic Jewish than of North African genetic indicators reflects, among other possible influences, the continuous presence of Jews in Sepharad (the Hebrew word for “Spain”) in Iberia since the early Christian era, while no Muslims arrived until the eighth century. There may also, in later centuries, have been a higher rate of intermarriage between Conversos and “Old Christians” than between Moriscos and Old Christians. The possible explanations are numerous and speculative, given the unreliability of demographic data from the medieval era and the tremendous impetus to lie about one’s religious lineage in a country where non-Christians could never feel safe from persecution after the Reconquista.

  The cult of limpieza de sangre, which began to develop about fifty years after the conversion of Paul of Burgos, eventually became a Spanish obsession, even though it was never codified in a national set of laws. At first the concept of a “purity of blood,” independent of one’s professed religion, was intended to limit the influence of Conversos within Christian society. Soon enough, it would also be applied to Moriscos. The first local law based on blood lineage rather than religion was passed by Toledo’s city council in 1449. Known as the Judgment Statute, the legislation prohibited Conversos from holding local public office. At the time, prominent Spanish clerics condemned the statute and excommunicated the legislators who had framed it, basing their rationale on the church’s position that acceptance of the faith, not ethnicity or previous beliefs, defined a Catholic. (During the Nazi era, this position would lead the church to protest persecution of Jewish converts to Catholicism but not of unconverted Jews.) Despite the initial response of church leaders, the Toledo legislators were eventually forgiven and restored to the church. More important, the original Toledo law became the template for new restrictions on Conversos in other cities, universities, and even religious orders. As my Catalan friend rightly observed, there is no reason for a society to become obsessed with purity of blood unless its people know, deep down, that they have already mingled their flesh and blood. And Spanish society would remain obsessed with bloodlines for centuries after the expulsion of the unconverted Jews in 1492 and the Moriscos in 1609. Byron captures this nicely in his 1819 satiric poem Don Juan, in a description of Don Juan’s father:

  The father’s name was Jose—Don, of course,—

  A true Hidalgo, free from every stain

  Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source

  Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain….

  The mocking tone perfectly fits the larger satiric theme of the poem, which portrays Don Juan not as an expert seducer of women but as easy prey for any clever, attractive lady. A father who is proud to be descended not from Jews or Muslims but from the Visigoths fits the family story.

  The genetic study of modern Iberia’s population is valuable precisely because the genes tell a story that adds some flesh to the maddening, intractably invisible religious conversions of the pre-modern era. We need not speculate here about the inner spiritual lives of religious converts: the diversity of such a large gene pool, after so many centuries of religious persecution and repression (in the Freudian as well as the literal sense), demonstrates the inevitability of conversion on a large scale when people from different religious and ethnic groups mingle closely. Ordinary people may have changed their religion in large numbers, for a variety of reasons, but only the most extraordinary converts told or were able to tell their stories for posterity.

  We may make reasonable inferences (as distinct from ideologically driven generalizations) about Paul of Burgos, because he rose to an eminent position in the church and was both a chronicler of his own life and an object of commentary by others. But who knows what it felt like, when the first invading Muslim forces from North Africa crossed into Iberia, to be a Christian Visigoth woman swept off her feet (through either rape or mutual desire) and married to a Muslim? She would, certainly, have converted to Islam, but did that feel strange? Or was conversion to the religion of the new masters as natural as the conversion of many Roman pagans to Christianity had been in the fourth and fifth centuries, as one secular imperial ruler after another embraced the new religion of Jesus and brought along his subjects? If you were a Jewish man who had suffered persecution, and the threat of forced conversion, under the late rule of the Christian Visigoths, were you simply relieved to be able to practice your religion under the more tolerationist outlook of the Muslims who replaced them as rulers in the eighth century? Or did you look one day with desire at a seductive stranger—one who honored your Holy Book but regarded Muhammad, not Moses, as the most important prophet in history? If you married that stranger, did she convert to Judaism? Was she then dead to her Muslim family? Or, when your first baby was born, did your families get together for a pork-free meal? Did the Convivencia—and th
e mixing of genes evident in modern Spain—begin then and there for some of the inhabitants of Iberia? We can never know the answers to these questions, and all of the subjunctives used by scholars with ideological axes to grind cannot produce a convincing story—although they can produce a persuasive story for those already of a mind to be persuaded.

  Whatever the proportions of religious toleration and religious persecution at any point in history, it is never possible to eradicate the evidence that people of very different beliefs, given sufficient propinquity and proximity, often engage in sexual relations and adopt different religious loyalties as a result of those unions. “Ethnic cleansing” can never fully succeed, because it is impossible to kill or exile everyone before men and women leave their unique genetic mark on the future. Absent force and violence, intermarriage has always been one of the most important secular causes of religious conversion. I say “one of” only because mixed marriages have also been entangled, in proportions that vary greatly according to the level of tolerance within a society, with purposeful social climbing that leads to better financial and educational opportunities. Intermarriage really is a threat to purity of faith as well as purity of blood, if one cares about either.

  •

  Although many of the highest cultural achievements of the Convivencia—from excellence in translation to the splendors of Moorish architecture—were still very much in evidence at the end of the fourteenth century, the cultural cross-pollination that produced these achievements had slowed at least two centuries earlier. The “ornament of the world” had always been an anomaly, and with the onset of severe anti-Jewish violence in 1391, it became a shattered anomaly that would never quite be eradicated from history but would linger as a religiously and politically contested memory and, one day, as a contributor to Iberian DNA.

  •

  The contested history of the Convivencia begins with the first documented arrival of Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula in 711, when the Berbers led an army of some ten to fifteen thousand men. The estimated population of Iberia at the time was seven to eight million, ruled by a Christian Visigoth minority of around two hundred thousand.*1 A Jewish minority—there are no reliable estimates of its size—had definitely existed since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 and may have been present before the Christian era. Nevertheless, it took the Muslim invaders just four years to conquer most of the peninsula, with the exception of the Basque country, Cantabria, Galicia, Asturias, and the northern Pyrenees.2 How did such a relatively small army manage to conquer such a large population?

  First, the Muslims really were an army (although there was already a considerable tension between the Berbers and their Arab leaders, who looked down on the tribesmen they had conquered and claimed for Islam). It should be recalled that Muhammad died in 632, so the conquest of the Middle and Near East and much of Iberia was completed in less than a century by the warriors of the new religion.*2 Second, the Visigoths were not exactly popular with the much larger indigenous population of the old Roman province of Hispania. After sacking Rome under Alaric in 410, the Goths moved westward and wound up as the rulers of the peninsula, although not, as one historian notes, without centuries of “destructive battling over the territory with the Vandals and then among themselves.”3 The invaders named their new territory “al-Andalus,” which literally means “land of the Vandals” in Arabic. The Roman refugees who had fled to the west after the sacking by the Goths made a bad choice by comparison with those who went to North Africa (and who eventually helped solidify the alliance between North African bishops like Augustine and the Roman Catholic Church). The Visigoth rulers in Hispania did not formally renounce their half-pagan brand of Christianity until 589, when they formally accepted the authority of Rome. The time line is important: less than 125 years separate the acceptance of Roman Catholic authority in Hispania from the Muslim occupation of most of the peninsula. But the Muslims, especially the Arabs who would lay the foundations for the splendors of Córdoba in the mid-750s, represented a vastly more sophisticated culture. And that is the most important reason why territory occupied by millions was conquered by a relatively small force representing a new religion.

  The invaders arrived to find the ruins of Roman civilization, left to rot after centuries of misrule by the Vandals and Visigoths. About the only action the Visigoth rulers found the energy to take during the closing decades of their control was the persecution of Jews. That changed when the Muslims—especially those of the Umayyad tradition—crossed the thirteen-mile Strait of Gibraltar. Persecutions and forced conversions of Jews ceased, and Christians (once they stopped fighting the invaders) were also allowed to practice their religion freely. Both Christians and Jews were regarded by Muslims, especially the Umayyads, as dhimmi, the Arabic term for “Peoples of the Book,” who shared monotheism and a common descent from Abraham. However, both religions, though regarded as “protected,” were legally subordinate to Islam—a fact glossed over in many perorations about the glories of coexistence in al-Andalus. The protected minorities were allowed to administer their own religious affairs but were forbidden to proselytize and were subject to a special poll tax.4 Moreover, this protection did not extend to pagans, who had survived not only in Visigoth-ruled Hispania but in rural areas throughout Europe. Under Muslim rule during this period, Christians were considered neither better nor worse than Jews—a theologically based Muslim attitude that permitted and encouraged a new efflorescence of Jewish learning and commerce. That learning was soon to be expressed in Arabic, the language of scholarship throughout most of the region.

  As the Cuban-born historian María Rosa Menocal notes, many of the early Muslim immigrants to Andalusia were an ethnic mix of Arab and Berber (another example of intermarriage despite cultural tensions). Abd al-Rahman, the first Muslim ruler of Córdoba, had an Arab Umayyad father and a Berber mother. “As with the Christians before them,” Menocal argues, “the Muslims’ distinctive power and authority resided in a faith to which conversion was not only possible but desirable and encouraged, pragmatically coerced by the range of civil advantages to any Muslim, whether he had converted the day before or descended from the most prestigious Bedouin tribe, the Quraysh of the Prophet himself. And convert the population did, in droves.”5 (Menocal deserves a gold star for that felicitous phrase, “pragmatically coerced,” which describes so many religious conversions from minority to majority religions.) Naturally, it became prestigious, within a century or two, for Muslims to claim that they were descended from the first Arabs who had led the expeditions westward from Syria and then across the Strait of Gibraltar. No one wanted to claim descent from a Muslim slave, any more than today’s Spaniards want to claim descent from a Muslim or Jewish janitor. But even the emirs and caliphs were nearly all children of mixed marriages between Arabs and mothers from the North who had once been Christians. The light skin and blue eyes of Umayyad-descended Muslims were noted by contemporary Eastern travelers during the Middle Ages, and this heritage is evident in southern Spain today. The story written on the faces of so many residents of Andalusia is the same story told by the DNA study. In the eighth and ninth centuries, another attractive feature of Islam for the indigenous population was that even a recent conversion provided opportunities for immediate social advancements. Unlike the later Christian cult of limpieza, the Muslim incorporation of converts in eighth- and ninth-century al-Andalus did not take into account how far back the faith went in the family tree.

  •

  We know how the story ends—with the relentless Christian Reconquista; the expulsion of countless Jews and Moors; the official denial of centuries of “impure” non-Christian cultural influences; the burning of Arabic books and the prohibition of spoken Arabic; and the Spanish Inquisition. But let us linger, for a moment, in the brightest period of the Convivencia, which began when Abd al-Rahman arrived in Córdoba, having fled Baghdad after the rest of his family was murdered by a rival dynasty. Al-Rahman founded an Iberian caliphate—a term th
at should not be confused with its use either by modern terrorist groups or by conservative scholars who insist that everywhere, in every period of history, there was always a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and “Judaeo-Christianity,” and that things could never have turned out any other way.*3

  Even before the establishment of a caliphate with Córdoba as its capital, the Moorish presence rejuvenated Iberian agriculture, which had stagnated during the long rule of the Vandals and Goths. Building on and reconstructing old Roman aqueducts and roads, Muslims re-established effective irrigation and introduced crops already familiar in the Arab world—including citrus fruits, sugar, rice, and coffee. Amenities such as public bathhouses, unknown since Roman times, were rebuilt. “At its peak in the tenth century,” writes the British journalist Matthew Carr, “Córdoba was a metropolis without parallel in the Christian world, boasting paved roads and streetlights, hospitals, schools, public baths, and libraries. At a time when the largest library in Christian Europe had no more than six hundred volumes, a cottage industry of Arabic calligraphers in Córdoba was churning out some sixty thousand handwritten books every year.”6

  In recent years, depictions of the culturally fruitful encounter among Muslims, Jews, and Christians during the Convivencia have provided a much-needed corrective to right-wing stereotyping of all Muslims, throughout history, as barbarians and terrorists. But some of these scholarly accounts, animated by an understandable but not necessarily fact-based nostalgia, tend to minimize the tensions that always lay beneath the surface, and sometimes boiled over violently. Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002), an evocative and justly praised history focusing on the literary and artistic achievements of that unique culture, nevertheless downplays both the long-term refusal of Spanish Christians to accept the cultural intermingling in al-Andalus, and the outbursts of Muslim as well as Christian violence against Jews, as tolerationism began to recede in the waning decades of the eleventh century. In her lengthy book, for example, she sums up the 1066 massacre of some four thousand Jews with one sentence, noting that “ferocious anti-Jewish riots broke out in Granada.”7 This was one of the more grisly pogroms in Jewish history, following as it did the murder of Joseph Ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier to the Berber king of Andalusia. Naghrela was apparently accused by political rivals of plotting against the king (an accusation the monarch did not believe, because he gave Joseph asylum in his own palace). But on December 30, 1066, Joseph was seized by a Muslim mob and crucified. It seems likely, according to most scholars, that the Jews were caught between battling Muslim factions—invading fundamentalists from North Africa versus the more tolerant Andalusians, who created the marvels of a sophisticated civilization. The Muslims in Granada at the end of the eleventh century could hardly have been unaware of the symbolic importance of crucifixion as a way of murdering a Jewish official, and the butchering of thousands of other Jews afterward followed a familiar pattern of punishing an entire community for what was originally portrayed and seen by the mob as the crime of one Jew. Minimizing the cracks that always existed in the “ornament of the world” actually diminishes the magnitude of the cultural achievement: we are not surprised when people who love one another collaborate in great endeavors, but it is remarkable when people who sometimes find it difficult merely to tolerate one another produce a high civilization. The historian Joseph Pérez aptly describes the relations between the three monotheistic religions during the Convivencia as “a de facto tolerance, suffered rather than desired.”8 Pérez’s analysis of the Realpolitik that characterized the Convivencia is more plausible than idealization based on the desire to emphasize the better angels of the Islamic past for today’s political purposes.