The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  Similar confirmation of the Inquisition’s role was made by the king in other letters sent the same day. The inquisitors of Saragossa, for example, were informed that the prior of Santa Cruz (that is, Torquemada) had been consulted and that “it has been decided by me and by him that the Jews be expelled.”78

  Though most Jews in Spain were under royal jurisdiction, a few were not. The local expulsions in Andalucia in the 1480s, for example, had not been applicable to Jews living on the territories of the duke of Medinaceli. In 1492, therefore, the crown had to explain to the nobles, such as the Catalan duke of Cardona who had assumed that “his” Jews were not affected, that the edict was universal. However, nobles were granted the property of their expelled Jews as compensation. In Salamanca the royal officials were ordered not to touch the effects of Jews who lived on the estates of the duke of Alba.79

  It is possible that the monarchs thought mass conversions would be more likely than mass emigration. In that sense, the 1492 edict may not have intended expulsion. The rabbi of Córdoba was baptized in May, with Cardinal Mendoza and the papal nuncio as sponsors. In June the eighty-year-old Abraham Seneor, chief judge of the Jewish aljamas of Castile80 and principal treasurer of the crown, was baptized in Guadalupe with the king and queen as his sponsors. Seneor, a prototype “court Jew,” was a striking example of the way in which some Jews rendered faithful service to the crown and in the process managed to protect their community. He and his family adopted the surname Pérez Coronel; a week later he was nominated city councilor (regidor) of his hometown of Segovia and member of the royal council. His colleague Abravanel took over as spokesman for the Jews and began to negotiate terms for the emigration.

  The edict may have come as a shock to communities where Jews lived tranquilly. In some Christian areas, however, public opinion was well prepared for it. Stories of Jewish atrocities had been circulating for years. One concerned an alleged ritual murder performed on a Christian child at Sepúlveda (Segovia) in 1468. The converso bishop of Segovia, Juan Arias Dávila, is reported to have punished sixteen Jews for the crime. The most famous of all the cases concerned the alleged ritual murder of a Christian infant at La Guardia in the province of Toledo in 1491. Six conversos and as many Jews were said to have been implicated in the crime, in which a Christian child was apparently crucified and had its heart cut out in an attempt to create a magical spell to destroy Christians. Such, at least, was the story pieced together from confessions extracted under torture, the culprits being executed publicly at Avila in November 1491.81 The affair received wide publicity: we find a printed account of it circulating in Barcelona shortly after. The timing was ominous, and there can be little doubt that it helped prepare many to accept the expulsion of the Jews. Atrocity stories of this sort, common in Europe both before and since—in England there were the cases of William of Norwich in 1144 and Hugh of Lincoln in 1255—served to feed popular anti-Semitism.

  Spanish Jews could not have been unaware of the expulsions recently put into effect in neighboring states. In Provence, soon to be part of France, an anti-Jewish movement was growing and led soon to expulsions; in the Italian duchies of Parma and Milan Jews were expelled in 1488 and 1490.82 Farther away, in Poland, Jews were expelled from Warsaw in 1483, and partially from Cracow two years later.83 There was therefore nothing exceptional about the case of Spain. In any case, the Spanish decree was not strictly one of expulsion, for (as we have seen) in practice the authorities throughout Spain offered Jews a firm choice between conversion and emigration. Some Jewish communities actually received official invitations, which survive in manuscript, that “those who become Christians will be given aid and be well treated.”84 The edict did not seek to expel a people, but to eliminate a religion.85 This was demonstrated by the efforts of clergy in those weeks to convert the Jews, and by the satisfaction with which converts were accepted into the Church. It is interesting to observe that the king stated expressly to Torquemada two months after issuing the edict: “many wish to become Christians, but are afraid to do so because of the Inquisition.” Accordingly, the king continued, “you will write to the inquisitors, ordering them that even if something is proved against those persons who become Christians after the decree of expulsion, no steps be taken against them, at least for small matters.”86

  The expulsion was a traumatic experience that left its mark for centuries on the Western mind. In that decade there were already prophetic voices which seemed to implicate the fate of the Jews in some greater destiny.87 Among some conversos, and presumably some Jews as well, there emerged a dream of leaving Sepharad (the Hebrew name for Spain) for the Promised Land and Jerusalem.88 Among the Christians, the fall of Granada seemed to be (as it became) the omen for the conversion of the Jews. Was Ferdinand—always a firm believer in his own destiny—influenced by these voices? Was he influenced by the strong Catalan mystical tradition that identified the defeat of Islam in Spain with the destruction of the Jews?89

  In giving the event its due importance, however, historians then and later exaggerated many of its aspects. They measured its significance in terms of immense numbers. The Jesuit Juan de Mariana, writing over a century later, stated that “the number of Jews who left Castile and Aragon is unknown; most authors say they were up to 170,000 families, but some even say they were as many as 800,000 souls: certainly a great number.”90 Jews who took part in the emigration had no doubt of the dimensions of the tragedy. Isaac Abravanel wrote that “there left 300,000 people on foot from all the provinces of the king.”91 For Jewish commentators, inflating the figures was a way of expressing solidarity with the victims.

  In fact, few reliable statistics exist for the expulsion. Those given in standard histories are based on pure speculation. Our first care must be to estimate the possible Jewish population of Spain in 1492. A judicious analysis based on the tax returns of the communities in Castile gives us a fairly reliable total of around seventy thousand Jews in the crown of Castile at this date.92 This accords with the estimate of under eighty thousand already mentioned above. The great days of a large and prosperous community were truly past. The situation was worse in the crown of Aragon, where Jews were reduced to one-fourth of their numbers as a result of the fateful year 1391.93 In these realms, they numbered by the late fifteenth century some nine thousand.94 In the whole of the kingdom of Valencia the Jews numbered probably only one thousand, most of them in the town of Murviedro.95 In Navarre, there were some 250 families of Jews. In total, then, the Jews of Spain on the eve of the expulsion in 1492 numbered just over eighty thousand souls, a far cry from the totals offered by their own leaders or by most subsequent scholars.

  The sufferings of those forced into exile for the sake of religion are vividly detailed by Bernáldez, in a picture that has become all too familiar since the fifteenth century.96 The richer Jews out of charity helped to pay the costs of the poorer exiles, while the very poor managed to help themselves in no other way but by accepting baptism. Many were unable to sell their possessions for gold or silver, for the export of these metals from Castile was forbidden; so they sold houses and property for the most desperate substitutes. “They went round asking for buyers and found none to buy, some sold a house for an ass, and a vineyard for a little cloth or linen, since they could not take away gold or silver,” Bernáldez reported. The ships that met them at the ports were overcrowded and ill managed. Once they had put out to sea, storms drove them back, forcing hundreds to reconcile themselves to Spain and baptism. Others, not more fortunate, reached their desired haven in North Africa only to be pillaged and murdered. Hundreds of others staggered back to Spain by every available route, preferring familiar sufferings to those of the open sea and road. One of the exiles wrote:

  Some traveled through the ocean but God’s hand was against them, and many were seized and sold as slaves, while many others drowned in the sea. Others were burned alive as the ships on which they were sailing were engulfed by flames. In the end, all suffered: some by the sword and so
me by captivity and some by disease, until but a few remained of the many.97

  Without minimizing the transcendence of the expulsion decree, it must be emphasized that only a proportion of the Jews of Spain were affected by it. There were several reasons for this. Aware that a choice of conversion was offered, a great many took the option. It was one that their people had endured through the ages, and there seemed little reason not to accept it now. Chroniclers then and later lamented the rapidity with which their people went to be baptized. “Many remained in Spain who had not the strength to emigrate and whose hearts were not filled with God,” reported one Jewish contemporary. “In those terrible days,” reported another, “thousands and tens of thousands of Jews converted.”98 The evidence suggests that possibly half of all the Jews of Spain preferred conversion to expulsion. Their motives were comprehensible. The majority in Aragon and possibly in Castile as well entered the Christian fold.99 A potent motive was the fear of losing homes and livelihood. A converso woman resident in Almazán some years later observed that “those who remained behind did so in order not to lose their property.”100

  Many others went into exile. Possibly a third of the nine thousand Jews of the crown of Aragon emigrated.101 They went in their entirety to adjacent Christian lands, mainly to Italy. The exiles from Castile went mostly to neighboring lands where their faith was tolerated, such as Navarre and Portugal. For many the journey to Portugal ended in 1497, when all Jews there were ordered to become Christian as a condition of the marriage between King Manoel and Isabel, daughter of the Catholic monarchs. Several exiles, particularly from Andalucia, crossed over to North Africa. Others did so years later, after the Portuguese conversions of 1497. Navarre shut a door when it required its Jews to convert in 1498. Shem Tov ben Jamil, a refugee from Navarre who finally found shelter in Fez, at the end of his life looked back on the terrible events he had experienced. His account began with the words: “I have decided, with a broken heart, to write about” what transpired during the exile.102

  We should not limit our gaze only to the peninsula, for Ferdinand was also directly king of Sicily, where the edict of expulsion was published on 18 June.103 The viceroy of Sicily issued an order a month afterwards encouraging conversion and ordered it read in synagogues; at the same time he promised that converts would be well treated. The measure was not received favorably by all Christians: some of the nobility protested against the expulsion, and in Palermo so did the city councilors.104 Conversions were slow to take place, so that the definitive enforcement of the order kept being put back repeatedly and was finalized only the following January. Those who decided to go into exile did not have to go far; some went to North Africa but most went to the neighboring kingdom of Naples, where the edict of expulsion was not in force, and from Naples many eventually returned a while later, fleeing in particular from the wars in that realm. There are no reliable figures for the number of Sicilian Jews who went into exile. The Italian peninsula, in any case, was a mosaic of states and jurisdictions that sometimes persecuted Jews and sometimes tolerated them. Sephardic Jews were well received, for example, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, where the dukes issued special permissions and thereby enabled the port of Livorno to develop subsequently into the second biggest center of western Jewry after Amsterdam.105

  Despite a persistent but misinformed tradition to that effect, no Jews are known to have gone to Turkey until very much later.106 They had no ships to transport them, and no reliable documents attest their presence there. It was probably over half a century before the first refugees reached the Middle East, for they went initially to other lands that were easier to reach and where their religion was tolerated, such as Portugal and Naples. Christian travelers around the year 1550 reported meeting peninsular Jews in Egypt, in Palestine and even farther east, in Goa in India, but there is nothing to identify them with the exiles of 1492. Asia had its own Jews, of remote and undocumented origin.

  All these emigrations shared one thing in common: suffering. A Genoese diplomat, seeing the refugees who arrived in the port there, commented that “no one could witness the sufferings of the Jews without being moved. . . . They could have been mistaken for wraiths, so haggard and emaciated did they look, undistinguishable from dead men.”107 Wherever they went the refugees were exploited or mistreated. Inevitably, many attempted to return. In their exile in Africa, reported a rabbi from Málaga, “many could not take it any more and returned to Castile. Likewise this occurred to those who came to Portugal and the kingdom of Fez. And it was the same wherever one went.”108 Between those who converted and those who returned, the total of those who left Spain forever was relatively small, possibly no more than forty thousand. The figures place many of the historical issues in a clearer perspective.

  Many writers have assumed that the expulsion was motivated by greed and a wish to rob the Jews. There is little evidence of this, and it is highly improbable. The crown did not profit and had no intention of profiting. No one knew better than the king that Spain’s Jews were a dwindling minority with few resources. By Ferdinand’s own admission, he stood to lose some tax revenue; but the sum realized by the authorities from the sale of goods was negligible. Though Jewish communal property (mainly the synagogues and cemeteries) was seized by the crown,109 it was in most cases handed over to local communities. The exiles were given the right to take permitted wealth with them. Aragonese Jews, for example, were “expressly permitted to take all their possessions, including gold, silver, animals and clothing, and were guaranteed that their property could not be appropriated for debt.”110 Embarkation lists for the ports of Málaga and Almería, in Andalucia, show that many took substantial sums out of the country.111 Several fortunate individuals were allowed to take most of their goods and jewels. One such was Isaac Perdoniel, granted the favor at the direct request of the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil.112 Abravanel and his family were also given a special privilege to take their personal wealth with them. Others bribed officials to let them take treasure. In 1494 an official of Ciudad Real was prosecuted by the government for levying extortionate charges on Jews crossing to Portugal, and for “allowing through many persons and Jews from these realms [i.e., Castile] who were taking gold and silver and other forbidden items.”113 Many individuals and corporations that had owed money to the Jews clearly benefited from the expulsion, but this was an incidental consequence of a measure that was primarily religious in motivation.

  The effects on Spain were, beyond all doubt, smaller than is often claimed in popular literature. The sultan of Turkey is reported to have said at a later date that he “marveled greatly at expelling the Jews from Spain, since this was to expel its wealth.” The statement is completely apocryphal, and comes from a later, uncorroborated Jewish source.114 The Jews had played only a small part in the country’s economy, and their loss had a similarly small impact.115 In any case, in practice Jews had been allowed to transfer many assets to those who converted. In the village of Buitrago116 there had been around one hundred Jewish families before the expulsion; only a few chose to leave, and there were seventy “converso” families there shortly after, so that the real transfer of property was probably minimal. Those exiles who returned, such as Samuel Abolafia of Toledo,117 were immediately given back their property. In Ciudad Real an official was obliged to give back to Fernán Pérez, “formerly named Jacob de Medina,” “some houses that he sold to him at below their fair price, at the time that the Jews had to leave the kingdom.”118 In Madrid in 1494 several expelled Jewish doctors who returned (as Christians) were welcomed back with open arms by the town council, which commented that “the more doctors there are, the better for the town, for all of them are good doctors.”119

  No less mistaken is the claim that the crown’s purpose was to achieve unity of faith.120 The king and queen were neither personally nor in their politics anti-Jewish. They had always protected and favored Jews and conversos. They might be accused of many things, but not of anti-Semitism.121 Nor were the
y anti-Muslim. Ferdinand and Isabella made no move, until several years later, to disturb the faith of the enormous Muslim population of Spain, which in political terms was a far graver danger than the tiny Jewish minority.

  Although the terms of the edict issued in Aragon were unmistakably anti-Semitic, the warm welcome given to returnees confirms that the expulsion was not motivated simply by racialism.122 Jews who returned as Christians were welcomed, and the proportion of those who returned was high. They were, the evidence suggests, given back their jobs, property and houses. Those who had converted were protected against popular anti-Semitism. In 1493 the monarchs ordered people in the dioceses of Cuenca and Osma not to call baptized Jews tornadizos (turncoats).123 The new converts and the old conversos continued to function in the trades and professions in which the Jews had distinguished themselves. The purely economic impact of the expulsion was thereby softened.

  The diaspora (which was extended when the Jews in Naples, who by now included many émigrés from Spain, were ordered to convert or leave that territory in 1508) continued to be seen by some Jews in wholly somber hues.124 Among them, Rabbi Elijah Capsali of Crete, a contemporary of these events, described how the Christians made the Jews suffer, “killing them by the sword, by starvation and by plague, selling them into captivity and forcing them to convert.”125 Because of that suffering, the events of 1492 came much later to be seen by some as a reference point, a pre-figuring of the Holocaust of the twentieth century.

  Not all who left, however, were interested in conserving the role of being victims. Though thrown into strange lands, they often turned defeat into success. As Rabbi Capsali prophesied, “the exile which appears so terrible to the eye will be the cause of the growth of our salvation.” The end of Iberian Jewry represented the closing of one chapter in history, but it also ushered in an age of activity for the Jews in Western Europe, as those from Spain went to other parts of the continent and contributed to their host societies with their knowledge and skills. Venice was the city where the great figure among the first exiles, Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), settled and wrote (in Hebrew) his chief philosophical works. Abravanel’s family came originally from Spain, but he was born in and spent half his adult life in Portugal, moving in 1483 to Castile, where he became one of the chief financiers of Ferdinand and Isabella. “I served them for eight years,” he testified later. “I also acquired great wealth and honor.” But as a result he found little time for what chiefly concerned him, reflecting on the scriptures. “In order to work for a non-Jewish king, I abandoned my inheritance.” When the expulsion was decreed he refused to convert (unlike his distinguished colleague, eighty-year-old Abraham Seneor), and left with all his family for Naples. In recognition of his outstanding services to the crown the king allowed him to emigrate with his gold and valuables, but his remembrance years later was only of “the bitter and hasty exile and forced conversions when we were exiled from Spain.”126 After some uneasy years in Naples, he moved to Sicily and Corfu, then to the Adriatic coast, settling finally at Venice in 1503.