by Henry Kamen
12
RACE PURITY AND ITS CRITICS
What plague could destroy a state more than this matter has destroyed the conscience of our Spain?
—FERNANDO DE VALDÉS, SJ, 1632
The extraordinary role of the concept of honor in pre-modern societies, especially in terms of its relation to blood, has repeatedly attracted attention. In simple terms, “honor” represents the values of a society as represented in the conduct of individuals, but the contentious point is whether individuals observe the code of honor correctly. In a pre-modern society the notion of honor was often a cover for imposing certain preferences of power (superiority of noble blood, of free men over slaves, of Christians over Jews) and of gender (superiority of men over women). Notions of honor, blood and race can be found in all civilizations, including those of Christian Europe, where myths were deliberately fostered in order to demonstrate—one example, among many—that the aristocracy were descended from “pure” races such as the Franks (in France and Germany) and the Goths (in Spain).1 True eminence, many Europeans liked to think, came from blood and heredity, not from effort and improvement.
In Christian society, honor had been earned not simply by personal integrity (in the case of women, their virginity) but also by demonstrating that one had achieved distinction, especially in battle. In time the respected ideals of society—valor, virility, piety, honest wealth—became the basis of “honor” and “reputation.” At its simplest level in the village, “honor” was the opinion held of one by neighbors, and to compromise one’s honor—by crime, by sexual misconduct—brought disgrace. At the apex of the social pyramid a noble was in danger of compromising his honor in many ways, but society allowed him several avenues of defense, because he had broader obligations to his kin, his dependants and sometimes his community. The violent methods of protecting honor—assassinating a seducer, dueling with someone who had uttered an insult—were punishable by law, though in many cases the law gave way to public opinion and let the perpetrator go free.
Much of the concern for honor found its way into printed treatises and dramatic works, and eventually came to influence scholars of literature, as well as historians, who felt that honor—and its attendant violence—was a particular attribute of Mediterranean culture.2 People who lived in the Mediterranean, they argued, followed different moral codes from those in the rest of Europe. Specialists in Spanish literature, influenced by what they knew about the popularity of “honor” theatre in seventeenth-century Castile, went further and suggested that the belief in honor was “a unique and defining element of Spanish culture.”3 Others built on these premises to suggest that the concern for honor and pure blood was first developed by the Inquisition in its fight against the Jews and eventually became a dominant obsession of the Hispanic mind. The Inquisition, indeed, was seen as a key element in generating the concern for blood purity.
Spaniards, of course, had no monopoly of the notion of honor, nor any extraordinary attachment to its blood (that is, racist) characteristics.4 In late medieval Spain, outsiders and people of another race, even if they were not Christian but had status, could enjoy full respect. There is ample evidence of Jews and Muslims of the elite being treated on equal terms by Christians; and Christian writers accepted this equality without hesitation. Intermarriage between Christians and non-Christians could even be contemplated with pride. By the fifteenth century, however, the deterioration in the sociopolitical position of Jews and Muslims had significantly affected their position in the system of values, while the view that Old Christians possessed honor through the mere fact of not being tainted by Semitic blood was growing. “Though poor,” says Sancho Panza in the seventeenth century in Quixote, “I am an Old Christian, and owe nothing to anybody.” Sancho’s pride was that he had no Jewish blood. Some literature specialists argued that Jews themselves were originally responsible for this divisive distinction between Jews and Christians on the basis of blood.5 Whatever the origins of the idea, many Christians began to feel that their status or honor was best preserved by avoiding intercultural marriages. This jarred with the notorious fact that the principal families of Aragon and Castile, and even the royal family, could trace their descent through conversos. Old Christian Spain would collapse, some felt, if this process went on. Now, it seemed, was the time to stop Jewish infiltration. The consequent beginnings of a stress on racial purity gave rise to the idea of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood).
The idea was not new. Unofficial attempts to marginalize Christians of Jewish or Muslim origin had occurred at least since the early decades of the fifteenth century. In Barcelona in 1436 the city banned persons of converso origin from acting as notaries within its jurisdiction. In Catalonia and Valencia that same year complaints were made to the pope that conversos were being excluded from office. In Castile the town of Villena obtained a royal privilege in February 1446 to exclude conversos from residence. By contrast, in Lleida in 1437 the converso brokers fought successfully against attempts to exclude them from civic office.6 These measures reflected wide variations in practice, which depended on specific local conditions and conflicts.
The discriminatory measures of the middle and late century, by contrast, had a wider significance. In Castile in the 1440s and 1460s, and the crown of Aragon in the 1460s, the instability of royal power provoked disorder and rebellion. In Castile the king’s unpopular chief minister, Alvaro de Luna, was of converso origin. Jews and conversos supported him and as a result earned the hostility of the minister’s enemies. The most prominent of these was the chief magistrate of Toledo, Pero Sarmiento, who in June 1449 used his position to push through a municipal law (the Sentencia-Estatuto) excluding people of converso origin from office in Toledo. The excuse given for the law was that conversos had through their nefarious activities been responsible for recent serious street riots. Disturbances were repeated in a handful of Castilian cities in the following years. The same situation occurred in the civil wars in Aragon, when King Juan II received the support of both Jews and conversos. His opponents accordingly directed their attacks at these minorities.
Later, in 1472, Juan II stated uncompromisingly that he had “verified the fidelity of the conversos to his cause and his person, and had promoted them to the highest offices in his court.”7 In both Castile and Aragon during these years of turmoil, many measures were taken against minorities by opponents of the crown. Though obviously motivated by some element of anti-Jewish feeling, they did not necessarily represent the nature of popular opinion. Nor do they suggest that the position of Jews and conversos was worsening. After the return of peaceful conditions, in both realms the crown tried to revoke anti-converso measures.
The troubles in Toledo, however, touched such important issues of principle that an immediate controversy was aroused.8 One of the first attacks on the Sentencia-Estatuto was made by the distinguished legist Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, who emphasized the common traditions and inheritance of Jews and Christians, and pointed out that a baptized Jew was no different from a baptized Gentile. The Mother of God, he said, and all the apostles had been Jews. Those self-styled Christians who had drawn up the Sentencia were moved by material greed and were wolves disguised as sheep in the flock of Christ. At the same time the converso royal secretary Fernan Díaz de Toledo drew up a memorandum (Instrucción)9 for his friend Lope de Barrientos, bishop of Cuenca and the king’s chancellor. In this remarkable document, which openly defended his people, the secretary listed the Jewish origins of the chief families of Castile. On the basis of the memorandum, Barrientos (who was not a converso) wrote a passionate defense of the conversos.10 Another distinguished intervention came from the Dominican cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who was of distant converso origin, in his Treatise against Midianites and Ishmaelites (1449).11 The most important refutation of the Sentencia came from the pen of the bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, son of the converso Pablo de Santa María, his predecessor in the see. Holder of many high offices of state, in 1434 he led the
Spanish delegation to the Church council at Basel, where in a famous speech he defended the international standing of Spain. In his Defence of Christian Unity (1449–50), he argued that the Catholic Church was properly the home of the Jews, and that Gentiles were the outsiders who had been invited in. His moderate arguments were continued by the superior of the Jeronimites, Alonso de Oropesa, who in 1465 completed his Light to Enlighten the Gentiles, which stressed the need for unity in the Church, and outlined the rightful place held in it by Jews.12
The objections raised by these writers, and reflected in the hostility to the Sentencia-Estatuto shown both by the pope and the archbishop of Toledo, may not have exercised much influence on opinion, for it was not an age of printed books or of numerous readers. However, the decades of tranquility in Castile after the Sarmiento riots demonstrate clearly that there was no triumph whatever of moves in favor of racial discrimination. It is a consideration to keep in mind when considering the role of the Inquisition. At the same time there may have been a growing consciousness of the importance of lineage: it has been suggested that the various conflicts of the period were instrumental in encouraging leaders of different religions to affirm their own identity by marking themselves off from each other.13
From the 1480s, when the Inquisition began its activities, it profiled the role of conversos and undoubtedly gave an impetus to the spread of discrimination, whose impact was—we should be careful to note—felt not in Spain as a whole but principally in central and southern Castile. The social antagonism of which Castilians had long been aware was now heightened by the spectacle of scores of “judaizers” being found guilty of heretical practices and sent to the stake. True religion, it seemed, must be protected by the exclusion of conversos from positions of importance. In 1483 a papal bull ordered that episcopal inquisitors should be Old Christians. In the same year the Castilian military orders of Alcántara and Calatrava adopted rules excluding all descendants of Muslims and Jews. A handful of religious bodies—and no more than a handful—began to insert discriminatory clauses into their statutes.
The university college (Colegio Mayor) of San Bartolomé in Salamanca was the first institution in Spain to adopt a statute of exclusion. It did this at the time of the anti-converso hysteria that accompanied the founding of the Inquisition, around 1482.14 At the same date the influential Spanish college of San Clemente in Bologna (Italy), at which some Castilians studied, began excluding “those who fled from Seville [in 1480] because they were not Old Christians.”15 The San Clemente exclusion had, we should stress, important features. It was directed only against those suspected of heresy, from one region alone, and did not apply to all conversos. Conversos therefore continued to attend the college tranquilly. The murder of Pedro Arbués in 1485 changed all this. Arbués had graduated from the college only ten years before, and was highly regarded there. The result was a statute, formally adopted in 1488, excluding all conversos from entry.16 The Colegio of Santa Cruz at Valladolid had a statute as part of its foundation rules in 1488. Other Valladolid colleges took no action for decades. That of San Ildefonso, founded by Cisneros in 1486, had no statutes against conversos, but after the cardinal’s death the college adopted one in 1519. When he founded the great Dominican friary of St. Thomas Aquinas in Avila, Torquemada applied to the pope in 1496 for a decree excluding all descendants of Jews.
None of these moves had any great significance. The colleges were small elite bodies that did not affect open access to the university. The number of institutions that practiced exclusion continued to be extremely small, and restricted to central Castile. It was not until 1531, over thirty years later, that any other Dominican foundation followed Torquemada’s lead. Persecution of judaizers was by then trailing off, and there was evidently no obsession about excluding people because of their origins. The first cathedral chapter in Castile to adopt a limpieza statute was that of Badajoz in 1511. This was thirty years after the foundation of the Inquisition, and clearly not related to that event. The cathedral chapter of Seville in 1515 adopted one on the initiative of its archbishop, the inquisitor Diego de Deza. Decades passed, and few institutions seemed intent on exclusion. Over twenty years later, in 1537, the university of Seville, originally founded by a converso, adopted a statute of blood purity after someone carefully blotted out of the original charter the clause making the university open to all.17
Those years up to around 1530 had been the period of most intense persecution of conversos by the Holy Office, yet as we can see there was no great pressure to introduce into public life measures in favor of purity of blood (limpieza). The Inquisition, certainly, made no move in that direction. Discrimination of some sort was being practiced sporadically in parts of Spain at least a century before the Holy Office came into existence, and the tribunal’s own exclusion rules did not refer to questions of blood but only to offenses. It is important to understand the distinction. From the beginning, it was laid down in Torquemada’s instruction issued at Seville in November 1484 that
the children and grandchildren of those condemned [by the Inquisition] may not hold or possess public offices, or posts, or honors, or be promoted to holy orders, or be judges, mayors, constables, magistrates, jurors, stewards, officials of weights and measures, merchants, notaries, public clerks, lawyers, attorneys, secretaries, accountants, treasurers, physicians, surgeons, shopkeepers, brokers, changers, weight inspectors, collectors, tax-farmers, or holders of any other similar public office.18
The exclusion was a temporary punishment for heresy, and not based on race. This idea was upheld by the Catholic Monarchs, who issued two decrees in 1501 forbidding the children of those condemned by the tribunal to hold any post of honor or to be notaries, public clerks, physicians or surgeons in Castile. We know of course that the decrees were seldom observed. It was a period when laws and regulations evaporated into thin air, and everyone felt free to ignore the list of exclusions. The crucial issue (too frequently forgotten) is that neither the state law nor the Inquisition rule applied to people of Jewish origin in general, but only to those who had been made to do penitence in some way.
From the very beginning of the discriminatory process, then, there was a clear ambivalence in what really happened. There may have been rancor against people of Jewish origin, but the very few institutions that discriminated usually limited themselves to penalizing families suspected of heresy. And even then the process of excluding conversos was not put into effect systematically. In the Spanish College at Bologna young men of known Jewish origin continued to enter without serious problems. The students even elected a converso rector in 1492, four years after conversos were theoretically refused entry.19 In Seville cathedral the rules were repeatedly infringed, and in 1523 the canons had to petition the crown to confirm the validity of their decree of 1515. The statute, however, continued to be unobserved for generations more, as some of the canons complained with feeling to the government in 1586.20
The relative liberality of the Jeronimite order, shown in the writings of Alonso de Oropesa, superior of the order from 1457 and reelected for four successive terms, appears to have attracted judaizers to become members. The problem appeared to be so grave that a special commission of “inquisition,” along the lines of the medieval French one and two decades before the birth of the subsequent Spanish one, was set up at the mother house at Guadalupe in 1462.21 Officials resisted pressure to discriminate against conversos, but in 1485 another scandal broke out when it was alleged that a friar, Diego de Marchena, had been accepted as a member though he had never been baptized, and had continued to practice Judaism (or so it was alleged, citing events of eighteen years before!) within the protection of the monastery.22 A special investigation by the order censured 21 out of the 130 friars for alleged Jewish activities; one of the accused was sentenced to be confined, and Marchena was tortured and handed over to the authorities to be burnt as a heretic.23
The chapter meeting of the order in 1486 adopted a statute excluding conversos.24 I
t was a move that had little support in Castile, and the statute was later revoked after a special appeal by Ferdinand and Isabella. The trend towards exclusion was unfortunately reinforced by the discovery that year of a nest of judaizers in another Jeronimite monastery, that of La Sisla in Toledo. The prior, Garcia de Zapata, used to say when elevating the Host at mass, “Up, little Peter, and let the people look at you,” and when in confession would allegedly turn his back on the penitent. The Inquisition of Toledo burnt him and four other monks of the monastery in 1486–87. The result was that in 1493 the order passed a rule (approved by the pope in 1495) that “non recipiantur conversi.” In 1552 the exclusion was extended to all those of Muslim origin.
Other religious orders were, as it happens, extremely reluctant to follow the Jeronimite example. Not until over thirty years later, in 1525, did the Franciscans adopt a statute of limpieza, doing so against strong internal opposition. The Dominicans began some form of discrimination from as early as 1489, and a limpieza statute was apparently adopted by them in Aragon. In practice, exclusion never became official policy in either order, and decisions were not observed or were countermanded.25 It is obvious from what we have seen that the existence and growth of discrimination cannot in any way be presented as a triumph of ideas of limpieza in Spain, though a handful of scholars have enthusiastically insisted on it in the face of all the evidence.26 The idea of blood purity as a demiurge of Hispanic society is a tantalizing one that has launched several literary essays, but has little historical evidence to support it.27 Let us reconsider some of the evidence.