The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  The era of uncertain belief and fragile coexistence in Spain drew to an end thanks to developments in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs respectively of Aragon and of Castile. Their marriage in 1469 helped bring to an end a decade of civil war over succession to the thrones, and bound together the destinies of the two realms without in any way creating a political union between them. In seeking to stabilize their power in Castile and Aragon, the monarchs inevitably had to make alliances with great nobles and prelates, and at the same time attempt to eliminate social conflict in regions where the presence of Muslims and Jews appeared to be an unsettling factor. There was one region in particular, Andalucia, where social dissidence seemed to be an immediate cause of instability and called for a concentrated peacekeeping effort. It was where they first paid serious attention to calls being made for the introduction of a special court to inquire into the heresy of Christians of Jewish origin. When that court, the Inquisition, eventually came into existence in the year 1478, it received the full backing of both monarchs, but as events turned out it failed to bring about social tranquility, and the machinery of the Inquisition served only to intensify and deepen the shadow of conflict over Spain.

  2

  THE GREAT DISPERSION

  Do not grieve over your departure, for you have to drink down your death in one gulp, whereas we have to stay behind among these wicked people, receiving death from them every day.

  —JUAN DE LEÓN OF ARANDA, 1492

  With the passage of time, the Inquisition that Ferdinand and Isabella set up a decade after the beginning of their reign came to play a significant part in national life, but at the beginning its horizons were limited and regional. The primary concern was with a tiny fragment of the population, the Christians of Jewish origin who lived in the southern corner of the peninsula. Many people in those years, among them officials of the royal court, wondered whether the creation of the new tribunal was much ado over nothing. The Jews of Spain, on the other hand, with their long experience of persecution by both Muslims and Christians, had every reason to be wary.

  Jews had been in the peninsula from at least the third century, and in medieval Spain they constituted the single largest Jewish community in the world. “The kings and lords of Castile have had this advantage, that their Jewish subjects, reflecting the magnificence of their lords, have been the most learned, the most distinguished Jews that there have been in all the realms of the dispersion. They are distinguished in four ways: in lineage, in wealth, in virtues, in science.”1 Penned by a fifteenth-century Castilian rabbi, the claim was a frankly starry-eyed vision of the past. Even had it been true once, by the time he wrote it was barely more than a memory.

  Compared to Christians and Muslims, the Jews were few in number. In the thirteenth century they very likely formed just under 2 percent of Spain’s population, maybe some one hundred thousand persons.2 Many preferred to live in towns that, by modern standards, were small. The Jewish presence created, at least in Christian minds, a stereotype of rich town dwellers. Most Jews, in fact, lived in the small villages that were typical of the medieval countryside. There they farmed, bred sheep, kept vineyards and orchards, and lived for the most part peacefully with their Christian neighbors. In the towns they often occupied professions which involved daily contact with Christians: as shopkeepers, grocers, dyers, weavers. Sometimes they made a profession their own: in Murcia in 1407 there were thirty Jewish tailors.3

  This regular contact of coexistence was typical of the medieval period,4 and encouraged Jews to choose their own criteria for social success, even when it clashed with the preferences of their spiritual leaders.5 It enabled Christians, Jews and Muslims to understand and respect, but not necessarily love, each other. Spaniards of different faiths were able to pursue their daily tasks together. “In the commercial sphere, no visible barriers separated Jewish, Christian and Muslim merchants during the major period of Jewish life in Spain. Christian contractors built Jewish houses and Jewish craftsmen worked for Christian employers. Jewish advocates represented gentile clients in the secular courts. Jewish brokers acted as intermediaries between Christian and Muslim principals. As a by-product, such continuous daily contacts inevitably fostered tolerance and friendly relationships, despite the irritations kept alive in the name of religion.”6 Christians could accept Jewish physicians without prejudice. “I, Miguel de Pertusa,” runs a private contract in Aragon in 1406, “make this contract with you Isaac Abenforma son of don Salomon” to treat his son of a head wound; “and I promise that even if he dies I shall satisfy and pay you” the fee due.7

  The communities lived, for the most part, separate existences. Jews had different food requirements and religious observances, and did not normally intermarry with Christians. The separateness was, in time, made firmer by sporadic persecution. The first great Christian persecution of Jews occurred in the seventh century, making the latter greet with relief the invasions by Muslims from North Africa. Under the subsequent Muslim caliphate of Córdoba, Jews prospered socially and economically. This came to an end in the twelfth century with the overthrow of the caliphate by the invading Almorávides, who persecuted Christian and Jew alike and destroyed their places of worship. Many Jews fled to Christian territory and under the tolerant eye of Christian rulers continued to prosper in their new surroundings. They were not, like Muslims, obviously at war against Christians, and were therefore looked on more favorably. Christian laws ordered that specific areas of the towns be set aside for Jewish and Muslim minorities, but in practice there was freedom to choose. In many medieval towns in Castile, Jewish shops and residences could be found even within Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.8

  Social and religious rivalry helped to break down the security of the minorities. From the thirteenth century onwards, anti-Jewish legislation became common in Europe. The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church in 1215 recommended that religious minorities dress differently. The Church council at Arles (France) in 1235 ordered all Jews to wear a round yellow patch, four fingers in width, over their hearts as a mark of identification. The decrees were never enforced in the Spanish kingdoms, though successive Cortes continued to call for action—in 1371 at Toro and 1405 at Madrid. In most towns Jews began to be restricted to their own quarter (called an aljama when it was organized as a corporate body). Each aljama was a separate society within the towns, with its own officials and its own taxes. It was exempt from most municipal obligations except the duty to defend the town, and paid taxes only to the crown, under whose direct control it came. In practice, the crown had few resources with which to protect the aljamas against hostile municipalities.

  In time the Jewish situation worsened throughout Europe. State and Church authorities began to take a more aggressive attitude towards their minorities. In 1290 England expelled the few Jews in its territory, and in 1306 the French crown followed suit, with further expulsions in other states during that century. In Spain the pattern of coexistence managed to hold out. Hostility continued, however, to come from different groups: from urban elites who owed money to the Jews, from the ordinary Christian population who lived beside the Jews but resented their separateness, and from some rural communities that considered the urban Jews as their exploiters.

  In the mid-fourteenth century the civil wars in Castile gave rise to excesses against the Jewish community in some towns. Religious fanaticism, stirred up in southern Spain in the 1370s and 1380s by Ferrant Martínez, archdeacon of Ecija, lit the spark to this powder keg. In June 1391, during a hot summer made worse by economic distress, urban mobs rioted, directing their anger against the privileged classes and against the Jews.9 In Seville hundreds of Jews were murdered and the aljama was destroyed. Within days, in July and August, the fury spread across the peninsula. Those who were not murdered were compelled to accept baptism. In Córdoba, wrote a Hebrew poet, “there was not one, great or small, who did not apostatize.” In Valencia during the month of July, some 250 were murdered; in Barcelona during August, so
me 400. The major aljamas of Spain were wiped out. Royal authorities in both Castile and Aragon denounced the excesses and tried, in the major cities, to protect the Jews. A Jewish contemporary, Reuben ben Nissim, reported that in the crown of Aragon “many of the governors of the cities, and the ministers and nobles, defended us, and many of our brethren took refuge in castles, where they provided us with food.”10 In many places it was not the mob but the upper classes who were the perpetrators. The city of Valencia blamed “men both of the country and the town, knights and friars, nobles.”11 Many unprotected Jews were forced to become Christians. From this time the conversos came into existence on a grand scale.

  Converso (or New Christian) was the term applied to one who had converted from Judaism or Islam. Their descendants were also referred to as conversos. Given the forced nature of the mass conversions of 1391, it was obvious that many could not have been genuine Christians. At least in the crown of Aragon, royal decrees made it plain that the forced conversions were unacceptable. Jews could, if they wished, return to their own religion.12 But circumstances had changed and in many places, such as Barcelona and Mallorca, the converted felt it safer to remain in their new religion. Their adherence to Christianity was, within this context, voluntary. It posed problems, as we shall see, both for their former coreligionists and for the Christians. The conversos were inevitably regarded with suspicion as a fifth column within the Church. Terms of opprobrium were applied to them, the most common being marrano, a word of obscure origin.13 Though no longer Jews in religion, they continued to suffer the rigors of anti-Semitism.

  Even in the pluralist society of medieval Spain, Jews had always suffered discrimination. Like any other unprivileged minority they were excluded from jobs and professions exercising authority (for example, in town government or in the army), but served in a broad range of middling and lesser callings.14 They still managed to play a role in public life in two main areas: medicine and financial administration. They also on occasion occupied a significant cultural role as translators from Arabic, a tongue the Christians had difficulty in learning. If doctors were in short supply, Jews stepped in to meet the demand. Royal and aristocratic circles relied heavily on them as physicians. In the kingdom of Aragon “there was not a noble or prelate in the land who did not keep a Jewish physician,”15 and a similar situation existed in Castile. In many towns the only practicing doctors were Jews, who received correspondingly favorable treatment. In Madrid in the 1480s one of the Jewish doctors was exempted by the grateful town council from certain laws and taxes.16

  Popular hostility to Jews was based in some measure on their financial activities.17 In specific times and places their role could be important. In the thirteenth century, under Jaime I of Aragon, some bailiffs of royal revenues in the major cities were Jews. Henry II of Castile told the Cortes of Burgos in 1367 that “we farmed out the collection of the revenue to Jews because we found no others to bid for it.”18 In 1369 a Jew, Joseph Picho, was “chief treasurer and manager of the revenues of the realm.” In 1469 the Cortes of Ocaña complained to Henry IV that “many prelates and other ecclesiastics farm to Jews and Moors the revenue and tithes that belong to them; and they enter churches to apportion the tithe among the contributors, to the great offense and injury of the Church.”19

  The number of Jewish tax officials was, in proportion to Christians, always small. By the fifteenth century they served in the lower grades of the fiscal system, as tax gatherers rather than as treasurers. In the period 1440–69 only 15 percent (seventy-two persons) of tax-farmers serving the crown of Castile were Jews.20 But a few Jews also played a significant role at the apex of the financial structure. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Abraham Seneor was treasurer of the Santa Hermandad, David Abulafia was in charge of supplies for the troops at Granada, and Isaac Abravanel administered the tax on sheep, the servicio y montazgo. The tax-farming company headed by the converso Luis de Alcalá, which included among its members Seneor, rabbi Mair Melamed, the Bien-veniste brothers and other Jews, played a prominent role in Castilian finance for some twenty years of this reign.21 Not surprisingly, a foreign traveler commented on Isabella that “her subjects say publicly that the queen is a protector of Jews.”

  In size and numbers the aljamas shrank dramatically after the massacres of 1391, and indeed in some cities they no longer existed. In Barcelona, the medieval Jewish call (street) was abolished in 1424 because it was deemed unnecessary. In Toledo, the ancient aljama consisted by 1492 of possibly only forty houses. It appears that by the end of the fifteenth century Jews were no longer a significant middle class.22 They were not, on the whole, rich (their annual tax contribution to the Castilian royal treasury in 1480 represented only 0.33 percent of its ordinary revenue), and had negligible social status. Their great days were undeniably long past. Within the changed circumstances, however, Jewish life maintained its equilibrium. In some fortunate towns, such as Murviedro on the coast of Valencia, the resident Jews escaped violence and their numbers were indeed augmented by refugees from other areas, principally the capital city, Valencia.23

  Living in a region where the Jews had preferred the protection of the big towns, the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez commented later that they were

  merchants, salesmen, tax gatherers, retailers, stewards of nobility, officials, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, weavers, grocers, peddlers, silk mercers, smiths, jewelers, and other like trades: none broke the earth or became a farmer, carpenter or builder, but all sought after comfortable posts and ways of making profits without much labor. . . . They never wanted to take jobs in plowing or digging, nor would they go through the fields tending cattle, nor would they teach their children to do so: all their wish was a job in the town, and earning their living without much labor while sitting on their bottoms.24

  This picture, sometimes used to set a contrast between rural Christians and urban money-lending Jews, was not entirely true. Jews certainly lived in towns, where they shared much the same professions as Christians. In fourteenth-century Saragossa they were traders, shopkeepers, artisans, jewelers, tailors, shoemakers.25 But there is ample evidence that from the fourteenth century the Jews had put less confidence in the cities and had moved out into the villages, where their relationship with Christians was normal and peaceful. By the late fifteenth century, contrary to what Bernáldez asserts, Jewish farmers and peasants could be found throughout Spain, but above all in the provinces of Castile. In Toledo, a considerable proportion of Jews seem to have worked their own lands, mainly growing wheat and producing olives and wine. In Máqueda (Toledo) there were 281 Jewish families to only 50 Christian.26 Even when they had lands and cattle, however, for practical reasons of religious observance and security the Jews tended to live together, usually in a town or village environment. In Buitrago (Guadalajara), members of the prosperous Jewish community (which in 1492 boasted six rabbis and even a town councilor) owned 165 fields of flax, 102 meadows, 18 market gardens, a large amount of pasture and a few water rights.27 In Hita, in the same region, they had two synagogues and nine rabbis; the major investment was in wine, with Jews owning 396 vineyards totaling no fewer than 66,400 vines.28 Even in the Andalucian countryside, from which Bernáldez came, there were Jewish farmers owning lands, vineyards and herds of cattle.29

  In the crown of Aragon the Jews also engaged in agriculture, but on a much smaller scale. The lands they possessed were smallholdings rather than big fields. For reasons of security, they lived in and limited their activity to the towns.30 In some areas their holdings may have been more ambitious. In Sos in Upper Aragon, birthplace of King Ferdinand himself, Jews were “cultivators of vines, flax and cereals, and their business relations with Christians contributed to fraternal amity,” their main callings being as peasants or as moneylenders.31

  There was considerable variety in the social position of Jews in the peninsula. In Avila, which was untouched by the fury of 1391, the Jews survived as perhaps the biggest aljama in Castile, constituting nearly half the city�
��s population of seven thousand.32 In Zamora, also untouched in 1391, the small Jewish population actually grew in size. On the eve of the expulsion the three hundred Jewish families represented one-fifth of the population.33 In general, it has been argued, “relations between Jews and Christians remained extremely cordial throughout the century” in many parts of Castile.34

  The reduced number of Jews after 1391 did not necessarily imply a cultural decline. The communities preserved their identity, legislated for their people (a comprehensive law was drawn up by them in 1432 in Valladolid), enjoyed the protection of leading nobles as well as of the crown, and coexisted pacifically with Christians.35 In Aragon the crown itself, first with Alfonso V and then with Juan II, favored the recovery of the aljamas, which paid taxes directly to the royal treasury. In 1479 Ferdinand expressly confirmed the autonomy of the Jewish community in Saragossa.36 There were also many rich Jews, among them the financiers who enjoyed royal favor. Seneor in 1490 had a good fortune worth some 6 million maravedis (16,000 ducats), which included wheat fields, vineyards and a dozen houses in Segovia and Andalucia; Melamed had property worth over half that, including houses and lands in Segovia and Avila.37