Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  •

  Two of the most brilliant tolerationists of the era, the near contemporaries Maimonides (c. 1135–1204) and Averroës (1126–98) were both natives of Córdoba. Yet it was their fate to come along at just the point when things were going wrong, and there is no better indicator of what was happening than the fact that neither man could live out his life in the civilization into which he was born. Averroës, the rationalist Muslim philosopher who can, in many respects, be viewed as a precursor of Spinoza, was detested not only by Catholics but by the more militant fundamentalist Muslims, the Almohads, who, in the 1150s, replaced more tolerant Muslim rulers. Like Maimonides, Averroës was both a physician and a sophisticated scholar. He was a religious judge in Córdoba and Seville and a personal physician to the caliph in Marrakech. But the caliph, under pressure from Almohad religious authorities, banished Averroës in 1195 and ordered that his philosophical writings be burned. (He was apparently permitted to return to the court in Marrakech, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, shortly before his death.) Because Averroës was such a controversial figure in his own lifetime, many of his works survive only in Hebrew and Latin translation, not in the classical Arabic that was the glory and lingua franca of his culture. Two of Averroës’s core beliefs provided ample reason for the loathing he incited in conservative Muslim and Christian authorities. First, he argued that the physical world has always existed, just as God has—that God and nature are, in effect, one. Second, in contrast to Aquinas, he believed that all humans share a common higher intellect—a position leading him to conclude that only the soul, not the body, is eternal. Thus, Averroist philosophy denies the core tenet of both Islam and Christianity. There are no virgins awaiting martyred jihadists in paradise, no risen Jesus and saints sitting at the right hand of God the Father in heaven. One scholar cites an Arab proverb, relying on a homonym meaning both “logic” and “speech,” to explain the hostility incited by Averroës in his Muslim contemporaries: “Their fate has struck all the falsifiers who mix philosophy with religion and promote heresies. They have studied logic (mantiq), but it is said with reason that misfortune is passed through speech (mantiq.)”9

  Maimonides, unlike Averroës, is revered (indeed, no Jewish scholar is more revered) as a teacher and philosopher in his own religious tradition as well as within many other cultures. He entered manhood at a time when persecution of the long-established Jewish community of Córdoba was beginning under the city’s first Almohad ruler. Jews were pressured to convert, or to put on the appearance of converting, by reciting the basic Muslim creed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.” The young Maimonides wrote a famous response to a Moroccan rabbi who insisted that all Jews were required to die rather than feign conversion and practice their religion secretly. (By the early twelfth century, the view that Andalusian Jews were bad Jews in any case because of their close association with Arabs was widespread in Jewish communities outside Iberia, and a similar view of Andalusian Muslims was held by many non-Iberian Arabs.) In his lengthy reply, written in Arabic, Maimonides noted that some Jewish sages had feigned apostasy in order to save their lives and that the obligation to preserve life was primary in Jewish law. “Even heretics,” he argued, “were worthy of reward for a single act of piety. Those who practice the mizvot secretly are even more worthy of reward despite the circumstances of their forced conversion.”10 Nevertheless, Maimonides and his family (his father, Maimon, was a religious judge) decided in 1160 to leave Córdoba for Morocco, which was also under Almohad rule but where the persecutions were, at the time, less severe. Eventually, the family moved on to Palestine and then to Egypt, where Maimonides died. Although Maimonides’ attitude toward forced converts was one imbued with charity and fellow feeling, his own desire to avoid forced conversion drove his actions as a young man. The persistent rumors that Maimonides once lived as a Muslim, or that he actually went through a conversion ceremony himself, have been largely rejected by mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. Shaul Magid, professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University Bloomington, says flatly that there is “no credible evidence” in Jewish sources that Maimonides or his family ever converted to Islam.11 Norman Roth, author of Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain (1994), points out that the rumors about Maimonides, though dismissed by most scholars, have been accompanied in recent years by equally unsubstantiated theories that Jewish soldiers actually fought against Almohad troops and that the Almohads deliberately entered certain Andalusian cities on Saturdays because Jews would not fight on the Sabbath. Had Jews fought at all, their behavior would have broken with a history of adaptive behavior toward previous waves of invaders in al-Andalus. Moreover, the real hatred was between the Almohad invaders and the Muslim Almoravids who had controlled al-Andalus for several hundred years.) The intense strife between competing Muslim sects aided the Christian Reconquista, which gained momentum in 1236 with the fall of Córdoba to the Christian King Ferdinand III (who was later canonized).

  Maimonides and Averroës were the brilliant heirs and late creators of a vibrant but doomed culture. Maimonides, like Averroës (and Aquinas after them), was determined to reconcile his religion with classical Greek culture. And his incalculable contributions to the body of Jewish law were also shaped by his encounters with and deep knowledge of Muslim law in the society in which he was raised. “It has been said without exaggeration that to know Maimonides is to know Judaism,” writes David Shasha, director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage. Maimonides’ genius lay in his adoption of “the parochial traditions of Judaism, its laws, its rituals, and its particular understanding of God and the Covenant, and merging them with philosophy, science and history.”12 Despite their different traditions, both Maimonides and Averroës can be described as religious humanists—a movement that did not gain strength within Christianity until the late fifteenth century.

  Nothing could be more central to the achievements of a Maimonides and an Averroës than the right to practice one’s religion unmolested. That ended with the onset among Muslims in twelfth-century al-Andalus of what would today be called “sectarian violence”—the stupid, religiously correct euphemism beloved by those who refuse to admit that faith can do any wrong. Soon the Reconquista—and the advance of Christian absolutism—would become irreversible. Freedom of conscience in Spain and Portugal could never again be taken for granted by Jews, Muslims, or, eventually, by practicing Christians with a Jew or a Muslim in their backgrounds. Conversion as a weapon would replace conversion by choice.

  * * *

  *1 These population estimates vary enormously among scholars, and the precise numbers are highly questionable. The proportions of different ethnic groups, however, are considered accurate by most experts.

  *2 The Arab-Berber invaders were stopped in their northward advance by the Frankish king, Charles Martel, in a number of battles in the vicinity of Poitiers in 732.

  *3 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was the title of a 1996 book by Samuel P. Huntington, a conservative scholar associated with the American Enterprise Institute. “Judaeo-Christianity” is, of course, a modern term and, in my view, belongs in quotation marks when applied to much of Western history.

  6

  THE INQUISITION AND THE END

  THE FATEFUL YEAR 1492 began in Spain with the fall of the peninsula’s final piece of Muslim-held territory, Granada, to the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler in Iberia, had no choice but surrender if he wished to avoid the destruction of his own people. As legend has it, Boabdil’s Mommie Dearest responded to her son’s tears upon leaving the city with the reproach, “You weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.” Acting like a man would, presumably, have meant fighting a hopeless battle against the combined forces of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Boabdil’s beloved Alhambra palace and the lush gardens of the Generalife, which survive today as a testament to the grace and splendor of Spain’s Moorish past
, would have overlooked the bodies of Granada’s slain Muslims. By signing the articles of capitulation to Ferdinand and Isabella, Boabdil thought he was assuring the city’s Muslims of the right to practice their religion—although the monarchs’ promise would, in a relatively short time, turn out not to be worth the parchment on which it was written. For the moment, though, Ferdinand and Isabella left Muslims alone and focused their attention on Jews.

  In the second historic turning point of 1492, the monarchs expelled all Jews from Spain unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. The expulsion edict, dated March 31, 1492, is a document—like a fair number of notorious historical pronouncements—that elicits strong opinions from nearly everyone but that few people have actually read. It is understandable but unfortunate that the media do not reprint odious public declarations as regularly as, say, The New York Times reprints the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July. Understandable, because there isn’t much of an audience, in modern Spain or anywhere else, for a screed inveighing against “wicked Christians who Judaized and apostasized from our holy Catholic faith.” Unfortunate, because considerable benefit can be derived from the realization that powerful leaders and would-be leaders sometimes spell out their bad intentions in words that say exactly what they mean. Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion edict, like Mein Kampf, is one of those instances.

  Today, many who know or care about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain tend to assume that it was all about anti-Semitism, or Jew-hatred, in the modern sense. It was not. It was about the centrality of valid conversion to the Catholic faith in general, and the specific fears of two Catholic rulers who themselves had many advisers, born into Jewish families, who had converted. The monarchs feared that the very presence of recalcitrant religious Jews in Christian Spain might induce Conversos to revert to the faith of their forefathers. In the view of the king, the queen, and church authorities, Conversos could not be counted on to embrace Catholicism fully as long as faithful Jews were around—Jews who might be relatives or friends—to remind them of the old ways and seduce them from the True Faith. The edict says so explicitly. As long as unconverted Jews “continue to engage in social interaction and communication” with New Christians, they find “means and ways they can to subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith…instructing them in the ceremonies and observances of their law…achieving that the Christians and their children be circumcised, and giving them books from which they may read their prayers and declaring to them the fasts that they must keep, and joining with them to read and teach them the history of their law…carrying to them and giving to them from their houses unleavened bread and meats ritually slaughtered…and persuading them as much as they can to hold and observe the law of Moses, convincing them that there is no other truth except for that one.”

  The pernicious influence of unconverted Jews on New Christians, the edict asserts, had been “proved by many statements and confessions, both from these same Jews and from those who have been perverted and enticed by them.” Since the Spanish Inquisition had been given the go-ahead by the Vatican at Ferdinand and Isabella’s request, there certainly were a good many “statements and confessions” that “proved” the truth of the danger to the faith posed by the very presence of observant Jews. Autos-da-fé do have that effect, and the first was held in Seville on February 6, 1481—less than five months after the appointment of two inquisitors, both Dominicans, for the diocese. Between 1481 and 1488, more than seven hundred were executed in Seville alone, and thousands of others received life imprisonment for “Judaizing” or encouraging others to Judaize.1

  The 1492 edict, before spelling out the specific conditions of the expulsion, actually explains—with a combination of regret, petulance, and outright indignation—that the monarchs themselves had preferred less draconian measures to expulsion. These milder measures had included targeted arrests, torture, imprisonment, executions, and expulsions from areas that were supposedly hotbeds of Judaizing. Ferdinand and Isabella had, to their regret, been too softhearted.

  Notwithstanding that we were informed of the great part of this before now and we knew that the true remedy for all these injuries and inconveniences was to prohibit all interaction between the said Jews and Christians [Conversos] and banish them from all our kingdoms, we desire to content ourselves by commanding them to leave all cities, towns, and villages of Andalusia where it appears that they have done the greatest injury, believing that that would be sufficient so that those of other cities, towns, and villages of our kingdoms and lordships would cease to do and commit the aforesaid acts. And since we are informed that neither that step nor the passing of sentence against the said Jews who have been most guilty of the said crimes and delicts against our holy Catholic faith have been sufficient as a complete remedy…because every day it is found and appears that the said Jews increase in continuing their evil and wicked purpose wherever they live and congregate, and so that there will not be any place where they further offend our holy faith, and corrupt those whom God has until now most desired to preserve, as well as those who had fallen but amended and returned to Holy Mother Church, the which according to the weakness of our humanity and by diabolical astuteness and suggestion that continually wages war against us may easily occur unless the principal cause of it be removed, which is to banish the said Jews from our kingdom…*1

  Here is the straightforward rationale for expulsion, and I see no reason to doubt it. As Joseph Pérez puts it, “The intention was to create an irreversible situation. By eliminating Judaism, it was hoped to discourage reversion to it.”2 But the expulsion of unconverted Jews did not stop suspicion of Conversos (including some who remained in the service of the monarchy).

  Even as the king and queen prepared to expel unconverted Jews from their kingdom, they paid for the voyage of Christopher Columbus with loans from the Converso financiers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez. Columbus’s journey—he set sail on August 3—would have been the third front-page story of 1492, had there been newspapers at that time. As he prepared his ships to set out from the port of Palos de la Frontera, Columbus actually watched the stubbornly unconverted Jewish exiles leaving on other ships and described the scene in his ship’s log as a “fleet of misery and woe.”3 Columbus himself had five Conversos as members of his crew, including a physician and an interpreter who spoke Arabic. (It is not clear why Columbus thought an Arabic-speaking interpreter would be useful wherever he landed; the inclusion may simply attest to the history—soon to be brought to a close—of Arabic as the language of the educated in Spain.)

  In any event, the involvement of Conversos at so many levels of Castilian and Aragonese society and government does not lend support to the idea that pursuit of blood purity was the chief motivation for the expulsion of unconverted Jews. Even Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor, had familial Converso connections. He was the nephew of Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (1388–1468), an important theologian who had a Converso grandmother and wrote a defense of the Converso community of Toledo, in which he criticized the idea that New Christians should be treated differently from Old Christians. Even if the number of secretly observant Jews among the Conversos amounted to an insignificant handful, it does not follow that Ferdinand and Isabella believed this to be so and were therefore motivated by something akin to modern anti-Semitism. A Christian ruler did not have to be an anti-Semite as the term has been understood since the nineteenth century (and especially since the Holocaust) to hate and fear Judaism as a religion and to translate that hate into suspicion of individual Jews’ loyalties.

  Furthermore, people who play an active role in forcing others to convert, as both the monarchy and the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy did, are almost certain to be suspicious of all converts on some level. Those who compel people to give up one religion for another, whether through the pragmatic coercion described by María Rosa Menocal or through direct threats to their lives, have good reason to be suspicio
us of the resulting conversions. Surprisingly, few historians have emphasized the obvious psychological truth that inquisitors and absolute monarchs are in an excellent position to know exactly how much deception people will employ to keep what they have when their only alternative is being crushed by a superior power. Jews and Muslims who were forced to convert may not have remained good Jews and Muslims, but many of them must not have been very good Christians, either. That was the suspicion, but it was also, in unknown numbers of instances, the truth.