Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the old Roman Catholic inquisitorial mentality for the modern mind to grasp was its absolute conviction that anyone who had been baptized, regardless of the circumstances, was to be considered an apostate if found by the Inquisition to be practicing any other religion, or even cherishing remnants of another tradition. This would remain a crucial point not only throughout the Spanish Inquisition but well into the nineteenth century for the Roman Inquisition operating in the Papal States of Italy. Forced baptisms of all kinds—whether they were performed by a priest in a mass sacrament administered at the point of a gun (or within sight of a pyre for an auto-da-fé) or by a Christian servant splashing holy water on the head of a Jewish infant—were considered valid forever. (Too bad for you if you were a circumcised Jewish baby sleeping in your crib and a Christian servant girl came along and sprinkled water on your head, baptizing you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In this scenario, which occurred more than once in the history of forced conversion, baptism became the spiritual equivalent of the involuntary transformation portrayed in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

  Suspicion of sacramental betrayal, justified or unjustified, would eventually lend support to anti-Jewish actions based on impurity of blood—a concept originally decried by influential Spanish church officials when it first emerged, in the 1450s in Toledo. As Pérez notes, the demand for blood purity rather than only for religious purity “was a prejudice that eventually poisoned the very spirit of the Spanish public.”4 But the centrality of the concept of “true” conversion to Catholicism came first, limpieza de sangre second.

  The real fusion of limpieza de la fe with limpieza de sangre would not take firm hold until the sixteenth century, with intensifying suspicion of all Conversos, the extension of the Inquisition from Jews to Muslims, and the forced baptisms of Muslims throughout Iberia. In 1609, King Philip III ordered the expulsion of all Muslims, including the converts to Christianity known as Moriscos. During the same period—although there were almost no Protestants in Spain—fear of the Reformation in the North added a new urgency to religious oppression in a land where there had once been coexistence among the three monotheistic faiths.

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  The term “Spanish Inquisition” is used so commonly (and has appeared in so many satirical guises) that a fair number of people are under the impression that it was a purely Spanish phenomenon. There were several inquisitions, with distinct local as well as general religious characteristics involving the defense of Catholic orthodoxy. The initial phase, which began in the early thirteenth century, was aimed at Catharism, a sect that emerged in Europe in the eleventh century and whose adherents were concentrated in the Languedoc region of southern France. The Cathars were dualists, and their beliefs were a revival of the oldest split within Christendom. Catharism (called the “Albigensian Heresy” by the Vatican) was based on a philosophy in which an all-good creator vied with an independent evil power for supremacy. Medieval Cathars also embraced elements of the asceticism that had characterized Manicheans in the early Christian era. The Roman Catholic Church, with its immense secular as well as religious power in the medieval world, was not about to overlook the same type of heresy it had refused to tolerate in the fifth century, when its secular power was not yet fully established. Beginning in 1208, Pope Innocent III decreed a formal Crusade against the Cathars. His first appointee as a leader of God’s army was a Cistercian abbot, Arnaud Amaury (also known as Arnaud Amalric), whose battle cry, “Kill them all, God will know his own,” was the very model for a Christian soldier in that era. That was his reply when the wholesale slaughter was questioned by a knight who had qualms about the possibility that some Catholics would be massacred along with the Cathars in the city of Béziers, a Cathar stronghold. According to the abbot himself, in a letter to Pope Innocent, twenty thousand people were slaughtered on July 22, 1209—a death toll far exceeding that on any of the worst days (or years) of the Spanish Inquisition.5 Eventually, what was truly a war of extermination was taken over by French Catholic rulers. Then, in 1231, Pope Gregory IX installed “inquisitors of heretical depravity,” directed by the Vatican—an action that marked the true beginning of the Catholic crusades against heresy and heretics lumped together today as “the Inquisition.”

  The investigation of the Cathars was conducted under the supervision of the recently founded Dominican Order, and its explicit purpose was to wipe out Cathars who had survived the military actions initiated by Pope Innocent. (The Spanish founder of the order, Dominic Guzmán, was lauded in the saccharine Number One hit song of 1963, “Dominique,” by a performer known as the Singing Nun—also a Dominican.*2 Needless to say, none of the song’s lyrics—which featured an unforgettable, mind-numbing refrain that still pounds in my cortex as “Dominiqua-niqua-niqua”—mentioned the role of the sainted Padre Dominic’s order in finishing off the Cathars. Dominic died in 1221 and was canonized by his friend Pope Gregory in 1234.) The physical destruction of the Cathars was completed by the end of the thirteenth century, although many Cathar ideas would resurface during the Reformation—particularly with the emergence of Protestant denominations dissenting from mainstream Calvinism and Lutheranism. The campaign against the Cathars, unlike later inquisitions, did not have to contend with that most formidable of enemies, the printing press.

  The Spanish Inquisition, which, as already noted, was approved by the Vatican only after Ferdinand and Isabella requested the pope’s assent, was quite different in its aims and more sophisticated in its methods than the medieval inquisition of the Cathars. The specific character of the Spanish Inquisition was determined by the history of the Iberian Peninsula as a place where two large groups, Jews and Muslims, had generally been left alone to practice their non-Christian faiths. It was therefore of ultimate importance to the inquisitors to establish the spiritual authenticity of conversions, as demonstrated not only by the original convert but by his or her descendants. From the Vatican authorization of the Inquisition in 1478, through the widening investigations of Conversos and Moriscos in the sixteenth century, and ending in the expulsion of Moriscos at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the religious preoccupations of Spanish monarchs formed a mirror image of the preoccupations of monarchs in parts of Europe being divided by the Reformation. As Christendom in Northern Europe was splitting into different sects, and rulers were forced, albeit not without endless wars, to make political accommodations to encompass large numbers of people with different religious beliefs, the rulers of Christendom in Spain were attempting to ensure uniformity of belief in a land that, in the medieval era before the Reconquista, had made such accommodations.

  It is fair to state that most Western historians have paid much more attention to the 1492 expulsion of Spanish Jews, and to the Inquisition’s subsequent treatment of Conversos, than to the Inquisition’s treatment of Muslims and their expulsion of Moriscos. Most scholars agree that fewer Moriscos were placed on trial for heresy, and many fewer received the death sentence, than Conversos. Nevertheless, the destruction of the crucial Muslim element in the culture was progressive and relentless under a succession of monarchs. It took Ferdinand and Isabella only a few years to renege on the pledge of religious freedom that they made in their agreement with Boabdil. By 1500, the rulers decided that all Muslims in Castile must submit to baptism (although, for reasons that are obscure, the same policy was not instituted in Aragon for another twenty-five years). The edict ordering Muslims to convert or leave Castile was followed by bans on the use of the Arabic language and the wearing of traditional dress. But, as one historian notes, the baptized Muslims in the first two decades of the sixteenth century “were left mostly to their own devices…when the Inquisition was busy directing its attention towards the Converso community.”6 In other words, a Morisco in 1510 did not have to worry that informers listening at the window might report a spoken word of Arabic to the Inquisition, but Conversos during the same period did have to worry that a
neighborly informer might report suspicions that the family was observing the Jewish Sabbath.

  By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, though, with Spain engaged in military conflict with Turkey and various Protestant states, both the monarchy and the church had come “to regard the Moriscos as a kind of fifth column, enemies within, ready to ally themselves with the Turks or the Protestants of Béarn.”7 (Béarn, an independent state since the mid-1400s and eventually a Huguenot Protestant stronghold, was annexed to France in 1620. The area was a center of conflict between Catholics and Protestants throughout the Reformation.) Even within the Spanish church, there was disagreement about how to solve the Morisco “problem.” The Grand Inquisitor was opposed to expelling the Moriscos in 1609 precisely because they had been baptized, whatever the circumstances, and were therefore considered Christians. But the archbishop of Valencia, which had a large Morisco population, disagreed and insisted that the Moriscos had all secretly remained Muslims. He carried the day, and Philip III signed the expulsion order on April 9, 1609. It is estimated that some three hundred thousand Moriscos—about 5 percent of the total population of Spain—were expelled. Some forty thousand went to Morocco, where, as Pérez dryly observes, they were greeted with contempt “on the grounds that they were Christians!”8 Exiled Jews and Muslims who had refused to convert were affected by this irony in the history of forced religious conversion and persecution. Spanish Jews were regarded with contempt by many Jewish communities in other parts of Europe and North Africa because of their long, close association with both Muslim and Christian rulers. They were considered bad Jews by many rabbis, just as the Moriscos—expelled for their Muslim lineage—would be considered bad Muslims.

  Suppression of books in both Hebrew and Arabic was a preoccupation of the Spanish Inquisitors almost from the start. In 1497, the Suprema (Supreme Council of the Inquisition) ordered the civil courts of Valencia and Barcelona to burn books in Hebrew concerning surgery and medicine as well as Judaism. A year later, Catholic theologians were tasked with examining Qurans and other religious texts before burning them. The preface to the 1583 Spanish Index of forbidden reading materials (not to be confused with the Vatican’s Index, compiled in Rome) provides the best insight into the motivation of the censors. All records of famous disputations between rabbis and priests were to be banned. So, too, would any Christian writings refuting the Quran. The reason explicitly cited was that “such polemics enabled people to form some idea of what infidels believed.”9

  In Rome, where the third phase of the Inquisition began in the sixteenth century in response to the Reformation, what was called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition worked closely with the Congregation of the Index. The campaign against intellectual and religious heresy—it was the Roman Inquisition that put Galileo on trial in 1633—was never divorced from the absolute power the church believed it had the right to wield over baptized Catholics. Even in the nineteenth century, as one European country after another limited the power of the church over both non-Catholics and civil government, the threat of being placed on the Index could still be used by the church against Catholic writers. (Non-Catholics generally regarded being placed on the Index as a compliment.)

  The compilers of the Index in Rome, like the Spanish inquisitors, were worried about any book—even one antagonistic to non-Catholic faiths—that provided information about other people’s beliefs. As the cardinal and inquisitor Robert Bellarmine wrote to a Jesuit friend on July 13, 1598, “I myself hardly ever read a book without feeling in the mood to give it a good censoring.”10 (Bellarmine was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1930 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931, and the timing certainly suited what proved to be the best decade since the Inquisition for ideological censors, as demonstrated in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy.)

  One specific reason for the occasionally disproportionate focus on the Spanish Inquisition in the United States was its influence during the colonial period in the Western Hemisphere. Along with the Portuguese Inquisition, which did not begin until 1536, the Spanish Inquisition was close enough geographically, through its New World colonies, to remind the English settlers in New England of how much they hated Catholicism. In 1492, many expelled Spanish Jews had originally fled to Portugal, which had a policy of greater toleration than Ferdinand and Isabella did at the time. When the Portuguese launched their own inquisition, a fair number of these Jews eventually wound up in Amsterdam—then the most religiously tolerant city in Europe—the Portuguese colony of Brazil, or Spain’s colony of Mexico. Many immigrated to the colonies, in the misguided hope that an ocean would place them beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Fat chance: the shepherd was not about to let his sheep escape on ships.

  A full-scale Inquisition tribunal was established in Mexico City in 1569, and some Conversos fled north to what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the persistent hope of finding a place far enough away from civilization to escape religious barbarity. We will never know how many Jews settled in the Santa Fe area, but we do know that there were prosecutions of both Jews for Judaizing and converted Indians for having reverted to their pagan ways. With the Indians, as with Conversos, the issue was their status as Christians after baptism: only Indians who had been foolish or unlucky enough to be converted through baptism were subject to the New World Inquisition. Executions were conducted in Santa Fe’s main plaza, now an upscale tourist destination. The story is not over yet, because a number of residents of New Mexico have discovered through recent DNA testing that they, like much of the population of Spain, have Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Both Portugal and Spain have offered citizenship to the descendants of Jews who were expelled or forcibly converted. However, the procedures for obtaining citizenship are in limbo in Spain, because descendants of Moriscos have asserted that they should receive the same apology and offer of citizenship. (The strains between Spaniards and new Muslim immigrants—legal and illegal—are beyond the scope of this book. The assimilation of Muslim immigrants is a major issue in much of Europe, but the tension has an added dimension in Spain because of Iberia’s Muslim past. Since the 2004 terrorist train bombings near Madrid, in which at least 181 were killed and thousands injured, there has been considerable Spanish sentiment against Muslim immigration—and the granting of citizenship to everyone of Morisco descent seems unlikely. The terrorists who bombed the trains had the chutzpah to cite the Reconquista as one of their justifications.)

  In general, families of Sephardic Jews who originally came from Portugal have better documentation of their long connection to Judaism than those who came from Spain. The first Jews to arrive in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam had left Portugal for old Amsterdam and immigrated to northern Brazil when it was a Dutch colony, in the first half of the seventeenth century. After the Portuguese regained full control of Brazil by taking Recife in a war with the Dutch that ended in 1650, the Jews who had settled in that city left for both Holland and New Amsterdam.

  In the Old World, the activities of the Inquisition continued in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain even as Christendom continued to splinter throughout Northern Europe. The battle for uniformity of religious belief—with one faith, one monarch, and one law for all—was already lost to the continuing Reformation. That Protestant reformers, such as John Calvin in Geneva, could be just as brutal and repressive as Torquemada when they attained political power only underlined the depth of religious division throughout Christendom, from England to the borders of the tsarist empire.

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  In 1826, in a kind of coda to religious conformity that could no longer be enforced in most of Western Europe, the last execution conducted by the Spanish Inquisition took place, in Valencia. The victim, Cayetano Ripoll, was a deist and schoolteacher accused of spreading freethinking ideas (such as freedom of speech and religion) to his students. A soldier in the Spanish Army during the Peninsular War (1807–14) between Spain and France, Ripoll was capt
ured by Napoleon’s forces. While a prisoner of war, he was exposed to deist writings, which circulated freely in the territories controlled by Napoleon’s army, and became deeply influenced by writings that certainly included Voltaire and possibly even Thomas Paine (whose works were more highly regarded in Napoleonic France than in either England or the United States). Soon after he returned home from the war, he was arrested by the Inquisition for his classroom forays into deism. Ripoll was held prisoner for two years, then sentenced to death, not by burning but by the more merciful method of hanging. The rope, however, was not quite enough to satisfy the blood lust of the inquisitors; when Ripoll was pronounced dead, his body was stuffed into a barrel decorated with flames. Both barrel and body were burned in unconsecrated ground. It is said that Ripoll’s last words were “I die reconciled to God and man.”

  Ripoll was executed on June 26, just over a week before the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—written by the deist Thomas Jefferson. The new American government, unlike European societies that still thought it was possible to stamp out heresy, was able not only to accommodate but to welcome (some of the time) a diversity of religious belief that emerged from the bottom up. From the beginning of the Inquisition, the Spaniards had been trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, even though printing presses could now spread dissident religious ideas to anyone who could read. But the proliferation of Protestant denominations in Northern Europe would leave no doubt—despite the best efforts of Protestant as well as Catholic inquisitors—that the emergence of new religions attracting millions of new converts was an unstoppable and irreversible process.