by Henry Kamen
During these last years he devoted himself to messianic reflections (in a trilogy written from 1496 onwards) on the historic vocation of the persecuted Jews, asserting forcefully that his people still had a God-given destiny. Even those who had “betrayed our religion” by embracing Christianity and attaining wealth and honor among the nations would not be able to escape the same destiny, “for God will separate them and keep them distinct and apart.”127 His published writings, infused by a profound rejection of the violence of his time, looked forward to an eventual liberation and may have helped to nurture the messianic tendencies that had already been present among Jews before 1492 but became more pronounced among the leaders of the Sephardic dispersion.128 He felt that the Jews’ current wanderings among “the wilderness of the peoples” would shortly come to an end with the arrival of the Messiah.129
Contemporaries in Europe who heard of the expulsions reacted according to the information they received. Leaders of Church and state congratulated the Spanish king on his action. The movement of refugees from the peninsula was associated by Italians with a new sexual disease (syphilis), which was identified during those months in Italy and dubbed by some “the Jewish disease.”130 Maybe in part as a consequence of the expulsions in the Mediterranean, there grew up among Europeans the legend of a Wandering Jew who had to atone for his offenses to Christ by being condemned to wander the world until the Second Coming.131 The legend had little impact in Spain, where the removal of the Jews was decisive.132
Perhaps the most surprising reaction of all and one too often forgotten when we consider what happened in those years is that many Christians in Spain both then and later thought the expulsion to be wrong. Rabbi Capsali reported that after Ferdinand’s death several Spanish officials criticized the king for banishing the Jews.133 His information is supported by that of Ferdinand’s subsequent biographer, the sixteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor and chronicler Jerónimo de Zurita, who tells us that “many were of the opinion that the king was making a mistake.”134 The first historian of the Inquisition, the inquisitor Luis de Páramo, writing a century after the expulsion, was also firm on this point. “I cannot omit to mention,” he stated, “that there were learned men who did not feel that the edict was justified.”135 He adds that there were those who felt that the expulsion was in effect an invitation to kill Jews, which was contrary to Holy Scripture’s requirement that Jews not be killed but rather converted.
In retrospect, there is every reason to criticize the curiously ambivalent policy of the crown after 1492. The practice of Judaism was forbidden in Spain, its adjacent kingdoms (such as Navarre and Sicily) and its colonies. But historians usually forget to mention that it was permitted in every other territory ruled by the Spanish crown in the early years of the sixteenth century. Jews flourished in Spanish Naples for another quarter of a century. Not until a century after 1492 was Judaism prohibited in Milan (under Spanish control from the mid-sixteenth century). Not until nearly two centuries later was it prohibited in Spanish Oran, in North Africa.136 This tacit acceptance meant that the Jewish religion continued to have some role in the consciousness of Spaniards who traveled through the empire, long after it had officially ceased to exist in Spain. We can rule out, however, the fanciful idea that Jews made it to the New World. In time, those who were converts to Christianity certainly went to America, but there they faced problems with the new Inquisition.137
What Spain lost was neither wealth, for the Jews had not been rich, nor population, for few left. Some later commentators, writing at a time of economic difficulty, imagined that loss of wealth was the main consequence of 1492, and down to the nineteenth century their writings reflect this quaint obsession. But Spaniards who reflected on such things felt that the real loss was the failure of the rulers to protect their own people. The crown turned its back on the plural society of the past, cut off an entire community that had been a historic part of the nation, and intensified the converso problem without solving it. The Jews had finally been driven into the Christian fold. “In this way,” wrote the curate of Los Palacios, Andrés Bernáldez, “was fulfilled the prophecy of David in the psalm Eripe me, which says: Convertentur ad vesperam, et famen patientur, ut canes; et circuibunt civitatem. Which is to say: ‘They shall return at evening, and shall suffer hunger like dogs, and shall prowl round the city.’ Thus these were converted at a late hour and by force and after great suffering.”138
In the end, however, it was a mitigated loss. The expulsion did not destroy the profound links between the Jewish people and Spain. They had lived together for centuries and in reality would continue to do so, since tens of thousands converted and stayed on. Those who left took Spain with them. They took with them some of the cultural heritage of language, music, food and clothing, but above all it was the culture of their faith that endured. The principal language they had spoken was Castilian, which consequently became an important element in books they published outside Spain, as well as in everyday social discourse. Exiles and their descendants continued to speak Castilian in many communities in Italy and the Middle East. A Spanish traveler in Salonika in 1600 reported that Jews he met there spoke a language as fine as that spoken in Toledo.
At the same time the rabbis who ministered to the exiles tried to close the gates on the past by consigning Sepharad to oblivion. The country was treated by them officially as accursed, “a land of idolatry,” and Jews were discouraged from going back to it. Despite the prohibitions, many continued to feel a profound kinship with the land that had rejected them, and held it their chief pride to have come from Spain. Deprivation compelled them to redefine their attitude to their origins. It was not merely a question of looking backwards. In a sense, the land they had lost was also the promised land of the future. In a telling phrase, some of the chronicles refer to “Jerusalem which is in Sepharad,” meaning that Jerusalem was the real home and Spain simply a manifestation of that home. Spain, or at least an imagined Spain, continued to be a focus of attention. At the same time that their rabbis forbade them to go back, therefore, many Jews made an effort to do so (see chapter 14 below), thereby placing themselves at risk from the attention of the Inquisition.
As in other European countries, they managed to return. During the nineteenth century a few Jews visited Spain and lived there without problems, despite being officially prohibited. The Cortes in 1855 sanctioned their presence by voting that no Spaniard or foreigner be harassed for religious beliefs. This affected only private belief. In 1868 the government of General Prim went a step further, abrogating the 1492 expulsion decree and allowing the return of Jews (as well as of Protestants). The ban on the public exercise of other religions was eventually removed by article 21 of the Constitution of 1869, which established religious freedom for the first time.
3
THE COMING OF THE INQUISITION
Keep yourself from the flames! The reverend fathers are coming!
—A FRIAR TO A CONVERSO, SORIA, 1491
The expulsions of 1492 solved no problems, and only aggravated an old one. Those who converted and stayed were able to retain their property, but could hardly expect to be favorably accepted in communities where anti-Semitism had been stirred up. Emigrants were allowed to transfer their property to New Christians, so that assets often continued to remain in the same family. In post-1492 Christian society, the new conversos occupied exactly the same social position as the Jews. As before the expulsion, they continued to work as traders, tax gatherers, moneylenders, farmers, tailors and cobblers. The populace found it easy enough to identify them with the old Jews, both socially and religiously. The process was helped by the conservative habits of the conversos, the survival of Jewish practices and the difficulty many converts found in adapting themselves to Christian usage (particularly in diet). They had to merge into an already existing converso society with which they did not necessarily have much in common.
Who were the conversos?1 At the upper social level, they played a significant role i
n some towns of Castile and the crown of Aragon.2 By changing their religion after 1391, successful Jewish families became qualified to hold public office in the towns, with a consequent growth of rivalry between newcomers and the older oligarchies. In some areas of Castile, such as Burgos (where ex-Jewish families such as the Cartagenas and Maluendas were prominent) and Toledo, conversos were influential on the city council. In others they used their tenure of public office to band together, contributing to the bitter and sometimes bloody clan rivalry that characterized Castilian political life in the late fifteenth century. The converso historian Diego de Valera reports that in Córdoba on the city council “there was great enmity and rivalry, since the New Christians were very rich and kept buying public offices, which they made use of so arrogantly that the Old Christians would not put up with it.” In Segovia, according to the chronicler Alonso de Palencia, the conversos “shamelessly took over all the public posts and discharged them with extreme contempt of the nobility and with grave harm to the state.”3 In the city of Palencia in 1465 “there were great factions of Old Christians and of conversos,” with the principal families of the city supporting the conversos.4 The political role of conversos was evidently limited only to a handful of towns where Jews had been numerous, but in those few it could be significant. In Cuenca, converso families in the late fifteenth century occupied 85 percent of the posts on the city council.5 In Guadalajara the powerful patronage of the duke of Infantado gave them a similar advantage.
Conversions became significant from the end of the fourteenth century and were substantial during the fifteenth. Converts from the Jewish and Islamic elites had the advantage of being accepted on equal terms into the Christian elite. In particular, the laws recognized no blood obstacle to Jews or Muslims being considered noble. A decree of Juan II of Castile in 1415, addressed to his converso treasurer, states: “Whereas I have been informed that members of your family were, when Jews, considered to be noble, it is right that you should be held in even more honor now that you are Christians. Therefore it is my decision that you be treated as nobles.”6 Among the earlier converts at this period was Salomon Halevi, rabbi of Burgos, who was converted along with his brothers in 1390, adopted the name Pablo de Santa María, took holy orders and eventually became bishop of Cartagena and then of Burgos, tutor to the son of Henry III, and papal legate. His eldest son, Gonzalo, became bishop successively of Astorga, Plasencia and Sigüenza. His second son, Alonso de Cartagena, succeeded his father in the see of Burgos.7 In Castile the finance minister of Henry IV, Diego Arias Dávila (d. 1466), was a converted Jew who founded a powerful dynasty that produced one of the conquistadors of central America, Pedrarias Dávila. One of Diego’s sons became bishop of Segovia, and a grandson became first count of Puñonrostro.
In Aragon members of the powerful de la Caballería family converted in the wake of the Disputation of Tortosa. Other important first-generation converts were leading government officials belonging to the Santa Fe and Sánchez families. Of particular importance was the Santangel family, Christians since 1415 and employed as high officials of the crown of Aragon. At the end of the fifteenth century some of the principal administrators of Aragon were conversos. At the very moment that the Inquisition began to function, five conversos—Luis de Santangel, Gabriel Sánchez, Sancho de Paternoy, Felipe Climent and Alfonso de la Caballería—held the five most important posts in the kingdom. Some also played a prominent part at the court of Castile. Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, uncle of the first inquisitor general, was of known converso blood,8 as were at least four bishops. Three secretaries of the queen—Fernando Alvarez, Alfonso de Avila and Hernando del Pulgar—were New Christians, as was one of her chaplains, Alonso de Burgos. Several other officials at court were known conversos, among them the official chroniclers Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia. Isabella’s employment of both conversos and Jews was commented upon with surprise by foreign visitors.
Inevitably, many converso families continued in professions that they had previously exercised as Jews. The majority lived in urban centers rather than in the countryside. But many also lived in the country, disproving the common assumption that Jews were exclusively town dwellers. In the Seville-Cadiz area in the 1480s, about half of a sample of sixty-two hundred conversos lived in the rural areas, where they were under the direct jurisdiction of the great nobles, who were more capable of defending their interests.9 In the countryside, they worked the land. In Aguilar de la Frontera, near Córdoba, of the sixty sanbenitos (penitential garments of the Inquisition) hung up in local churches in the late sixteenth century, about nineteen belonged to converso peasant farmers (labradores).10 In the towns, small independent callings attracted them. Of a sample of 1,641 Toledo conversos who were involved with the Inquisition in 1495, the majority were in modest urban occupations, but there was a significant number of jewelers and silversmiths (59), traders (38), tax-farmers (15) and money changers (12).11 The example of Badajoz, in Extremadura, shows that all the 231 conversos penalized by the Inquisition between 1493 and 1599 came from the professional and commercial classes. They held posts ranging from that of mayor and municipal official to the lesser occupations of physician, lawyer, trader, shopkeeper and manufacturer.12 The same is true of Saragossa and other principal cities for which we have details. In Barcelona, out of a sample of 223 tried during these years, one-fourth were traders and another fourth in the textile industry.13 In Andalucia, a sample for the year 1495 shows that nearly half were occupied in textiles and about a sixth in leather.14
Finance was an area in which conversos are known to have been active. Since medieval times, Jews were often restricted by the law over where they could invest their money, so they preferred to make the money work for itself in the market of loans. It is memorable that Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 was made possible thanks to converso finance. The Aragonese conversos Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sánchez protected and financed the expedition; Jews and conversos, including a Jewish interpreter, formed part of the crew; and it has been argued (on little secure evidence) that Columbus himself was descended from a family of Catalan conversos.15 The role of Jews in the finance market, small but significant, was exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Jewish writers and even by some Spaniards, who suggested that the expulsion of 1492 was responsible for ruining the nation’s economy. In the seventeenth century some Spanish writers claimed that the growing wealth of countries like Holland was due in great measure to the help of converso capital flowing into Amsterdam. The reverse image, of Jews not as a benefit to Spain but as plotters against its well-being, also came into being. The mythical decline of Spain and the consequent triumph of its enemies were blamed on the international Jewish conspiracy. Among the first writers to take this line was the seventeenth-century poet Francisco de Quevedo, who claimed that Jewish elders from all over Europe had held a meeting at Salonika, where they drew up secret plans directed against Christendom. Quevedo went so far as to accuse the count duke of Olivares of planning to invite the Jews back into the country in order to undo all the harm of the expulsion of 1492.16
Conversos, like Jews before them, were also active in medicine.17 As with the financiers, their numbers and importance in the profession should not be exaggerated. The Inquisition in Logroño (Navarre) at the end of the sixteenth century found itself in need of a doctor, but could find no Old Christian with the necessary qualifications; finally it had to appoint a converso. The Inquisition in Madrid was consulted and decreed that the tribunal should keep him but give him no official status, in the hope that an Old Christian might someday be found. An equally embarrassing case occurred in Llerena, where the Inquisition in 1579 reported that for lack of Old Christian doctors the town authorities had appointed as their official doctor “a man who was imprisoned by this Inquisition as a judaizer for three and a half years.”18 The crown regularly employed converso doctors. Francisco López Villalobos was court physician to both Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V. Among other famous conversos
we should mention doctor Andrés Laguna (1499–1560), naturalist, botanist and physician, a native of Segovia and one of the great luminaries of Spanish science. The services of conversos to medicine are amply illustrated by the number of doctors who appear in the records of the Inquisition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Following a long tradition, converso families gave many sons and daughters into the hands of the Church, to be brought up in the religious orders. Converso students were also to be found in the universities of Spain. By the mid-sixteenth century it was maliciously reported that most of the Spanish clergy resident in Rome in search of preferment were of Jewish origin. Anti-converso publicists in the mid-fifteenth century had already suggested that New Christians were infiltrating the Church and threatening to take it over. Conversos, it was argued, had worked their way into the heart of Christian society, into the ranks of the aristocracy and the Church, and were planning to destroy it from within.