by Henry Kamen
Between fear and humiliation, many conversos lived in constant dread. “I was concerned because the Inquisition was coming,” a tanner of Segovia said. “I would rather see all the Muslims of Granada enter this city,” a resident of Cuenca exclaimed in 1491, “than the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which takes away life and honor.”122
Punishment by the Inquisition brought with it a number of civil disabilities (see chapter 10 below). In principle this situation could be avoided. From an early period many who admitted their faults during an edict of grace were allowed to wipe the slate clean by making a cash payment to the inquisitors. It was a welcome source of income to the Holy Office. “Rehabilitation” by this means must have appeared to many conversos a worthwhile price to pay for security. A major advantage was that no confiscation of goods was exacted of those who confessed voluntarily.123 Thousands were “reconciled” to the Catholic faith, in Toledo alone some forty-three hundred persons in 1486–87.124 Though there is no evidence of how common it was to rehabilitate offenders, lists that survive from Toledo, Segovia and several Andalucian towns show that the inquisitors were quite happy to exact the cash payment from thousands. The details for some fifteen hundred persons who went through the process in the city of Toledo in 1495–97 show us a normal cross-section of Toledo professions, the largest in number being jewelers, followed by the legal profession, administrators and traders.125 There was, of course, no proof that those who paid for “rehabilitation” were in fact convinced judaizers. Moreover—and this was the sting in the tail of voluntary disclosure—it was a calculated risk whether the inquisitors would accept the repentance implied in confessions. Several persons were subsequently brought to trial for offenses committed after their rehabilitation.126
The determination of the tribunal to strike hard at supposed heresy was unmistakable. Because documentation for the early years has not usually survived, it is difficult to arrive at reliable figures for the activity of the Inquisition. The period of most intense persecution of conversos was between 1480 and 1530. In Aragon many who were not implicated in the murder of Inquisitor Arbués were drawn into the nets of the repression.127 Hernando del Pulgar estimated that up to 1490 the Inquisition in Andalucia had burnt two thousand people and reconciled fifteen thousand others under the “edicts of grace.”128 His contemporary Andrés Bernáldez estimated that in the diocese of Seville alone between 1480 and 1488 the tribunal had burnt over seven hundred people and reconciled more than five thousand, without counting all those who were sentenced to imprisonment.129 A later historian, the annalist Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, claimed that in Seville between 1481 and 1524 over twenty thousand had abjured their errors, and over a thousand obstinate heretics had been sent to the stake.130
The figures for deaths are certainly exaggerated, but it cannot be doubted that the total number of persons passing through the hands of the inquisitors ran into the thousands. The Toledo tribunal may have dealt with over eight thousand cases in the period 1481–1530.131 The overwhelming majority of these were not in fact brought to trial; they were disciplined as a result of the edicts of grace, and had to undergo various penalties and penances, but escaped with their lives. Trial cases were very much fewer, and in them the penalty of death was pronounced for the most part against absent refugees. Effigies, which were burnt in the place of condemned absentees, may well form part of the total figures for executions given by early chroniclers. In reality, the extreme penalty of death for heresy was suffered by a very much smaller number than historians once thought. A recent carefully considered view is that in these years of the high tide of persecution, the tribunal of Saragossa had some 130 executions in person,132 that of Valencia possibly some 225,133 that of Barcelona some 34.134
In Castile the incidence of executions was certainly higher. In the auto de fe at Ciudad Real on 23 February 1484, 30 people were burnt alive and 40 in effigy; in the auto at Valladolid on 5 January 1492, 32 were burnt alive. The executions were, however, sporadic and concentrated only in the early years. In rounded terms, it is likely that over three-quarters of all those who perished under the Inquisition in the three centuries of its existence did so in the first thirty years. Lack of documentation, however, makes it impossible to arrive at totally reliable figures. One good estimate, based on documentation of the autos de fe, is that 250 persons were burnt in person in the Toledo tribunal between 1485 and 1501.135 Since this tribunal and that of Seville and Jaén were among the few in Castile to have had an intense level of activity, it would not be improbable to suggest a figure five times higher, around 1,000 persons, as a rough total for those executed in the tribunals of Castile in the early period. Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1520, it is unlikely that more than 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition.136
The final death toll may have been smaller than historians once believed, but the overall impact was certainly devastating for the cultural minority most directly affected. The reign of terror had an inevitable consequence. Conversos ceased to come forward to admit their errors. Instead, they were forced to take refuge in the very beliefs and practices that they and their parents had turned their backs on. Active Judaism, which existed among some conversos, seems to have been caused primarily by the awakening of their consciousness under persecution. Under pressure, they reverted to the faith of their ancestors. A Jewish lady living in Sigüenza was surprised in 1488 to encounter a man whom she had known previously in Valladolid as a Christian. He now professed to be a Jew, and was begging for charity among the Jews. “What are you doing over here?” she asked him, “The Inquisition is around and will burn you.” He answered: “I want to go to Portugal.”137 After no doubt equivocating for many years, he had made his decision and was going to risk all for it.
Since conversos occupied a significant place in administration, the professions and trade, diminishing numbers through persecution and emigration may have had an impact on the areas where they had been numerous. In Barcelona. according to the consellers in 1485, the refugees “have transferred to other realms all the money and goods they have in this city.”138 In 1510 the few conversos who remained there claimed that they had once been a flourishing group of “over six hundred families, of whom over two hundred were traders,” and that they now numbered only fifty-seven families, close to ruin.139 In Valencia, we know the professions of 736 conversos tried by the Inquisition: 34 percent were in commerce and 43 percent were artisans, principally in textiles.140 The conversos were—it should be stressed—in no way the cream of the population, but their ruin could not fail to cause concern to some civic authorities. This, indeed, together with defense of local independence, was among the main causes of nonconverso resistance to the Inquisition in Teruel. Persecution of conversos was far more damaging to the local economy than the later and more spectacular expulsion of the Jews. The latter, because of their marginal status, had played a smaller role in key sectors of public life and controlled fewer economic resources.
The wish to eliminate conversos from public life was, some have argued, the main reason for the establishment of the Inquisition, and religion was never a genuine motive. In the process, the tribunal and the crown would get rich on the proceeds from confiscations.141 The argument is plausible, particularly if we deny that there was any widespread judaizing movement among conversos. But, as we shall see, other issues were also involved, making it difficult to accept anti-converso greed as a significant motive. Moreover, the crucial fact is that Ferdinand, who vigorously denied any hostility to them, continued at all times to employ conversos in his service. “We have always had these people, like any others, in our service,” he declared in 1507, “and they have served us well. My intention always has been and still is that the good among them be rewarded and the bad punished, though charitably and not harshly.”142 There is ample evidence to support the truth of his words.
The founding of the Inquisition has often been cited as evidence that the Catholic monarchs desired to
impose uniformity of religion on Spain. The expulsion of the Jews would seem to confirm it. The monarchs, as fervent Catholics, certainly wished the nation to be united in faith. But there is no evidence at all of a deliberate policy to impose uniformity. Throughout the first decade of the Inquisition’s career, Ferdinand and Isabella did not cease to protect their Jews while simultaneously trying to eliminate judaizing among the conversos. Even after the expulsion of the Jews, the Muslims remained in full enjoyment of their freedom of religion—in Castile for another decade, in Aragon for another thirty years. The ruthless drive against “heresy,” far from aiming at religious unification, was no more than the culmination of a long period of social and political pressure directed against a specific section of the conversos.
When official chroniclers of those years, most of them sympathetic to the Holy Office, came to give an account of events, they slipped all too easily into a standard version of what had happened. All those who had fled from the Inquisition were considered, by implication, guilty. All those who had come forward for rehabilitation were, equally, written off as guilty; their confessions were there as evidence. It went without saying that all those found guilty and condemned were deemed by the chroniclers to have been rightly judged. The Jewish religion of the conversos became accepted as historical fact.
Yet the trial documents of the Holy Office give little cause to accept such a verdict, and their testimony is no more reliable than that of hostile witnesses in a criminal trial today. Many of the accused undoubtedly had pro-Jewish tendencies, for they had lived their lives in an ambivalent Christian-Jewish environment. But very rarely did the Inquisition manage to find concrete evidence against conversos, of whom the majority seem to have been dragged before courts on the basis of the gossip of neighbors, personal malice, communal prejudice and simple hearsay. According to a Jewish chronicler, conversos testified against conversos who would not pay them off.143 The prosecution papers are full of the type of oral evidence that normal courts would have thrown out.144 Some of the practices denounced to the inquisitors, moreover, by no means implied Judaism. Was it only Jews who turned their heads to the wall when they died?145
Above all, the inquisitors seem to have accepted without question some wholly incredible feats of memory. They had no problem in accepting as reliable the testimony of witnesses who knew nothing of an accused’s present religious life but could testify that twenty or thirty years ago they had seen him change his sheets on a Friday, or nod his head as though praying in the Jewish manner. Sancho de Ciudad, a leading citizen of Ciudad Real, was accused of practicing Judaism on the basis of events allegedly remembered by witnesses from ten, twenty and nearly thirty years before.146 Juan de Chinchilla, tailor of Ciudad Real, made the mistake in 1483 of owning up to Jewish practices after the expiry of the edict of grace. All those who worked with him testified that he appeared to be a practicing Catholic. The only witnesses against him spoke of things they claimed to have seen sixteen and twenty years before. On their evidence he was burnt at the stake.147 In Soria in 1490 the inquisitors accepted the word of a witness who had seen an official say Jewish prayers “twenty years ago,” and that of another who had seen certain objects in a house “over thirty years ago.”148 A man in the same city recalled that a neighbor “forty years ago” never went to mass and an elderly woman reported hearing a specific phrase spoken “fifty years ago.”149 Very rarely indeed could witnesses say they had seen firm evidence of Jewish practices in the previous week or month or year, but their memory seemed to work very well when it concerned words and events of half a lifetime ago. In most cases, the prosecution in these years relied either on voluntary confessions or on fragments of hearsay evidence dredged out from long-range memory. When María González was brought before the inquisitors at Ciudad Real in 1511, the only firm evidence against her was her own confession during an edict of grace in 1483. “Since then,” her defense attorney argued (and there was no evidence to the contrary), “she has lived as a Catholic.” However, her husband had been burnt as a heretic at that time, and in subsequent years she never ceased to maintain that “they burnt him on false witness” and that “he went to heaven like a martyr.”150 On this flimsy evidence she too was sent to the stake.
When Juan González Pintado, a former secretary to the king and now city councilor of Ciudad Real, was tried by the Inquisition in 1484 for judaizing, the only detailed testimony against him dated from thirty-five years before.151 By contrast, many witnesses testified that he was at this moment an excellent believing Christian. In such cases, other motives for the prosecution may be suspected. González, indeed, had been implicated in a rebellion twenty years before,152 and echoes from that event may now have prejudiced his case.
If the idea that conversos were secret Jews is to be sustained principally by the evidence dug up by the Inquisition during the 1480s, there can be no doubt of the verdict. Very little convincing proof of Jewish belief or practice among the conversos can be found in the trials.153 There is no need to question the sincerity of the inquisitors, or to imagine that they maliciously fabricated evidence. It is true that, in the beginning at least, they were not trained lawyers (they had studied Church law but the science of criminal law did not yet exist), nor did they have a very clear idea of Jewish religious practice. But they themselves were instruments of a judicial system in which social pressures and prejudices, expressed through unsupported oral testimony, were given virtually unquestioned validity.
Those convicted of judaizing fall into three main categories. First, there were those condemned on the evidence of members of the same family. Where this happened, the charges often appear plausible, though personal quarrels were evidently involved. Second, there were those condemned in their absence. Here the automatic presumption of guilt, the lack of any defense, and the fact that property of the accused was confiscated tend to make the evidence unacceptable. Third, there were those condemned on the hearsay of often malicious neighbors, most of whom had to reach back in their memory between ten and fifty years in order to find incriminating evidence. The inevitable conflict between various testimonies can be seen in the trial of Catalina de Zamora in Ciudad Real in 1484. She was accused by a number of witnesses of being a convinced and practicing Jew, and thoroughly hostile to the Inquisition (which she evidently was). An equally convincing group of witnesses swore that she was a good Catholic, and that the prosecution witnesses were “vulgar women of low intelligence.”154 The inquisitors were convinced by this last group and threw the charges out, but imposed a punishment on her for having blasphemed against the Virgin.
In short, the trial papers leave no doubt that some conversos were addicted to Jewish practices and culture (like the converso of Soria who in the 1440s insisted on going into the synagogue and praying beside the Jews until one day they got fed up with him and threw him out into the street, despite his loud protests).155 But there is no systematic evidence that conversos as a group were secret Jews. Nor is it possible to build on this fragile evidence any picture of a converso consciousness whose principal feature was the secret practice of Judaism.156 In the perception of contemporary Jews who witnessed the persecution of the conversos, “only a few of them died as Jews, and of these most were women.”157 This testimony was repeated so often at the time by Jews that it is unsafe to call it in question. Isaac Abravanel stressed four times in his writings that the charges made against the conversos were false. Deeply concerned for the fate of his own people, he would hardly have written off the conversos had he felt they were of the same faith. “The people will always call them ‘Jews,’” he wrote about the conversos, “and brand them as Israelites and falsely accuse them of judaizing in secret, a crime for which they are paying with death by fire.”158 Another contemporary Jewish scholar, Isaac Arama, was no less explicit. “The Gentiles,” he wrote, “will always revile them, plot against them and falsely accuse them in matters of faith; they will always suspect them as judaizers, especially in our time, when the smoke of the
autos de fe has risen towards the sky in all the realms of Spain.”159
This picture changed radically with the expulsion of 1492. To the large number of Jews who converted that year was soon added the very many who returned from exile and accepted baptism. Among both converts and returnees, few were happy with the situation. “If it were not for the debts owed to me,” said a man who came back from Portugal in 1494, “I would neither turn Christian nor return from Portugal.” “This is the real captivity,” another (reported in 1502) is said to have commented some years before, “when we were Jews we were lords, now we are slaves.”160 From 1492, accordingly, that is to say twelve years after the establishment of the Inquisition, a real problem of judaizing arose. These judaizers had lived all their lives as Jews and refused now to forgo their birthright.
The major qualitative change that took place in converso culture after 1492 has never been adequately analyzed.161 The new converts were decidedly not a part of the old “converso nation” of Christians. Whereas the older generation had been fundamentally Christian, the new converts were still consciously Jewish and yearned for their former culture.162 “I repent of having become a Christian,” a resident of Medinaceli claimed in 1504. “We were well off in the Jewish faith,” another stated in Sigüenza. The expulsion had taken place because they were not good Jews, said a man in Almazán: “if evil has befallen us we deserve it, for we did not observe the ceremonies nor the other things that we had to do, and so the expulsion came upon us.” The opinion reflects that of a later Jewish chronicler who took the moralistic view that “the exile which appears so terrible to the eye will be the cause of our salvation.”163 Speaking of a refugee who had gone to Portugal, another in Almazán in 1501 stated that “if I were now in that country I would not turn Christian.” “When we were Jews we never wanted for anything, and now we go in want of everything,” was the stated view of a new convert in 1505. “We were better off then and had much more than we now have.”