by Henry Kamen
Though not always active, it remained in the background, its personnel eager to demonstrate that it had a real role to play. Outside of the notable periods of heresy hunting, the cases that came its way were trivial, and had little to do with enforcing the faith. If the inquisitors were lucky, they might pick up a vagrant.83 One such came their way in 1661 in the little village of Méntrida, southwest of Madrid, and we may focus on it as an ordinary case of contact between a Spaniard and the Holy Office in the high tide of empire. Domingo de Chaves was born in Galicia in the last years of King Philip II, and at the age of nine left home to work until he was thirteen as a farm laborer in Castile, moving on to serve in the kitchen of a noble household. At the age of twenty he enlisted in a regiment that went to Flanders, where he served fourteen years, and was captured by English pirates. A prisoner in London for a month, he was ransomed and returned to Flanders in time to take part in the disastrous battle of Rocroi (1643). He was a prisoner in France for a year, and then made his way to Spain, where he took part in campaigns in Catalonia and in Portugal. After a Spanish defeat in Portugal (1659), he returned to Castile and wandered round, looking for employment and begging for his living.
Now aged sixty-five, he was begging in the street in Méntrida when the parish priest approached him and advised him either to find work or suffer his lot with patience, reminding him at the same time that Christ had died for him. “He may have died for you,” Domingo retorted, “but not for me.” Puzzled by the reply, the priest questioned him further. “I am from England,” Domingo explained, “and am not a Christian!” “If you are not a Christian,” the priest responded, “why do you publicly carry a rosary in your hand?” “Only to deceive you so that you and others give me alms!” was Domingo’s cheerful reply. The town mayor was standing behind the priest. When he heard Domingo’s outrageous words he ordered him to be thrown into the town prison. Because heresy seemed to be involved, the prisoner was transferred later to the cells of the Inquisition in the city of Toledo.
Domingo’s full and fascinating life story, covering his wanderings throughout Spain and all over Western Europe, was subsequently narrated to the inquisitors and the secretary, who copied it all down. His words had been typical for a man of his background, illiterate (he had never been to school) but basically a Christian (he knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary), and the inquisitors could hardly ask for more. It was the condition of the majority of all Spaniards. After listening to his life history, they dismissed his case without even a reprimand. The Inquisition still had a role to play when its attention was drawn to cases like that of Domingo, but the religion of the people was not in its power to oversee or control, and Spaniards were already beginning to treat the tribunal as an irrelevance.
14
TWILIGHT OF THE HOLY OFFICE
In a nation like Spain there are many nations, so intermingled that the original one can no longer be recognized. Israel, by contrast, is one people among many, one even though scattered, and in all places separate and distinct.
—ISAAC CARDOSO, THE EXCELLENCES OF THE JEWS, 1679
The large number of judaizing cases with which the Inquisition dealt in the early years of the sixteenth century marked the end of the generation of ex-Jews who had had direct acquaintance with the Mosaic law taught before 1492. Anyone punished for judaizing in 1532 at the age of fifty would have been ten years old in 1492, old enough to remember the Jewish environment and practice of his family. Approximately after the 1530s, this generation and its memories disappeared. The figures suggest that from 1531 to 1560 possibly only 3 percent of the cases dealt with by the tribunal of Toledo concerned judaizers.1
For the rest of the sixteenth century Spain was, with a few exceptions, no longer conscious of a judaizing problem. By the 1540s conversos had virtually disappeared from Inquisition trials.2 In many sectors of public life, particularly in the early part of the century, there was little discrimination against conversos. Samuel Abolafia, who returned voluntarily to Spain in 1499 and became a Christian as Diego Gomez, became integrated into Old Christian society despite a brush with the Inquisition.3 Feeling against people of Jewish origin showed itself more in prejudice than in persecution. Anti-Semitism existed, as in other European states, but the discriminatory statutes of limpieza were seldom enforced and seem to have had little impact. There were attempts to restrict socially damaging aspects of anti-Semitism. It was, as we have seen, a common insult in Spain to call someone a Jew. The Inquisition tried to stamp on the practice. The aggrieved party could take his case to the Holy Office as the body best qualified to examine his genealogy, disprove the accusation publicly, and thus uphold his “honor.” By the 1580s, as the growing feeling against statutes of limpieza shows, anti-Semitic prejudice was itself being called in question. It was a key argument of Salucio that judaizers had almost totally disappeared from the realm, “and although there are signs that some remain, it is undeniable that in general there is no fear or suspicion of them.” He may have been optimistic, but the phrase “no fear or suspicion” in a document that received the approval of the crown, the inquisitor general and the Cortes of Castile, cannot be taken lightly. Other writers admitted that most conversos were now peaceful and reliable Christians. Diego Serrano de Silva in 1623 argued: “we see by the experience of many years that families of this race are at heart thorough Christians, devout and pious, giving their daughters to convents, their sons to the priesthood.”
Many conversos of course retained their hatred for the Inquisition. In 1528 in Catalonia the tribunal arrested a man for distributing a manuscript which accused the Inquisition of lies, perjury, murder, robbery and raping women in prison. His offense, we should note, was also an offense against public law, which prohibited the distribution of slanders. In 1567 in Badajoz the inquisitors seized a notice that had been posted up in public and stated that “the property of every New Christian is at risk, six years from today not a single one will be left to arrest.”4 We cannot doubt that in many corners of Spain there were groups of families who led crypto-Jewish lives, generation after generation, but we venture into the world of make-believe when we imagine—as some writers do—the survival of a Jewish underground that managed somehow both to remain submerged and to dominate Castilian culture in the early modern period.
By and large the conversos, if we follow the testimony of witnesses such as Serrano de Silva, appeared to be integrated. In 1570 when an inquisitor of Cuenca was asked to go on a visit of his district, he preferred not to visit the areas of Castile, “where, by the grace of God, it is believed that there are no heretics,” but instead towards the Morisco areas near Aragon.5 Most conversos seem to have felt no affinity with their distant origins. Occasional problems might be caused by the limpieza regulations where they existed, but these were commonly overcome. In Fregenal de la Sierra (Extremadura) most of the townspeople were conversos and therefore conveniently swore to each other’s Old Christian credentials. The inquisitor reported that the people apparently believed sincerely that baptism made one automatically into an Old Christian. During an inquisitorial visit in 1576, he said, over four hundred false witnesses to proofs of limpieza were found, and “most of those who go to America from this district are conversos.”6 Higher up in elite society, where there was more contempt for limpieza, false testimonials were winked at and some conversos had little difficulty in making their way. The wealthy Márquez Cardoso family, for example, employed agents of Old Christian origin and noble rank to swear to their limpieza.7
There continued, however, to be judaizers. For the most part, it is difficult to describe them as Jews, since their heresies owed more to strong family and community traditions than to active Jewish belief.8 Most external signs of Judaism had disappeared. Circumcision was no longer practiced, since children were liable to discovery; synagogues or meeting places were no longer possible; the sabbath was normally not observed, though token observances might be made or observance even moved to a different day; the great festivals
of the year were not celebrated, though there appears to have been a general preference to celebrate at least one—the fast of Esther. Many learned to eat the forbidden foods since there was no better way of dissimulation. Judaizers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were often unrecognizable as Jews. Those who clung fast to their identity, nevertheless, maintained an ineradicable faith in the one God of Israel, passed down from father to son the few traditional prayers they could remember and used the Catholic Old Testament as their basic reading.
Occasionally, the capacity to conserve age-old beliefs and customs was astonishing. One such survival group was discovered in 1588 in the heart of Castile, in and around the town of Quintanar de la Orden (La Mancha).9 Over a period of several months, culminating in autos de fe in 1590–92, a hundred people here of pure Castilian origin were identified and punished as judaizers. They managed, without access to outside contact or their own sacred texts, to preserve faithfully (in Castilian) the key rituals and prayers of Judaism. A number of other cases came to light in the south of the peninsula in the last decade of the sixteenth century. An auto at Toledo on 9 June 1591 included twenty-seven judaizers, of whom one was relaxed in person and two in effigy (these were from the Quintanar case). In that year 1591 a number of denunciations were made in the tribunal of Granada. “In this case,” the inquisitors reported, “up to now 173 judaizers have been discovered, without counting the deceased, and every day more are being discovered.”10 The accused were natives of the region and mostly women. Their Mosaic practices were purely residual, transmitted stubbornly over two generations by the women.11 A large auto was held in Granada on 27 May 1593, with 102 penitents, 89 of them alleged judaizers. Further accused from the same case were displayed in the auto there on 25 October 1595, with 77 penitents, of whom 59 were alleged judaizers. An auto at Seville in 1595 included 89 judaizers.12
However, the high degree of integration of conversos calls seriously in question any attempt to identify them as a separate religious identity within the population.13 The Inquisition of this period, if we may judge by its edicts of faith, had a somewhat confused image of the type of offense committed by alleged judaizers. In the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, edicts issued by distinct tribunals listed the offenses that could be identified. By around 1630 the Holy Office settled for a single standard edict, common to all the tribunals.14 The text of this edict, whether through the sloth or the ignorance of the inquisitors, described judaizing practices as they may possibly have been identified around the year 1490, but which a century and a half later were evidently no longer practiced as stated. The edicts issued in the seventeenth century described full Jewish customs, when common sense indicated that only an utterly crazy judaizer would have openly practiced any of them. A typical edict, evidently using text dating from a century before, contains the following passage inviting people to identify judaizers in their midst:
If you know or have heard of anyone who keeps the Sabbath according to the law of Moses, putting on clean sheets and other new garments, and putting clean cloths on the table and clean sheets on the bed on feast-days in honor of the Sabbath, and using no lights from Friday evening onwards; or if they have purified the meat they are to eat by bleeding it in water; or have cut the throats of cattle or birds they are eating, uttering certain words and covering the blood with earth: or have eaten meat in Lent and on other days forbidden by Holy Mother Church; or have fasted the great fast, going barefooted that day; or if they say Jewish prayers, at night begging forgiveness of each other, the parents placing their hands on the heads of their children without making the sign of the cross or saying anything but, “Be blessed by God and by me”; or if they bless the table in the Jewish way; or if they recite the psalms without the Gloria Patri; or if any woman keeps forty days after childbirth without entering a church; or if they circumcise their children or give them Jewish names; or if after baptism they wash the place where the oil and chrism was put; or if anyone on his deathbed turns to the wall to die, and when he is dead they wash him with hot water, shaving the hair off all parts of his body . . .
The references made, such as to the giving of Jewish names or the eating of “meat prepared by Jewish hands,” were evidently out of touch with reality, since Jewish names and Jewish butchers had not existed in Spain for a century and a half.15
The genuineness of some of the “judaizing” of these years must, therefore, be called in question. The inquisitors were only too ready to identify a heresy where there was none, on the testimony of uninformed members of the public. Quite apart from recording the animosity of hostile and ignorant witnesses, the Inquisition trial papers also record attitudes and statements that were not peculiar to conversos but were shared by broad sections of the Christian population. Insults to saints, the Virgin, priests, the mass and Christ himself, were (as we have seen) commonplace among the Spanish people. It is possible that such insults were among the few options available to disgruntled conversos.16 But they were no evidence of a tendency to judaize.
The degree of integration can be seen precisely in contexts which appear to show the contrary. The groups of families involved in the autos de fe in Granada in the 1590s were all from the well-to-do bureaucracy, occupying important posts in the city council and the high court (Chancillería). Though scores of their relatives were punished by the Inquisition (mostly the women), not a single male member of these families lost his job.17 As in most of Spain, limpieza rules were a dead letter. The men freely went to university and occupied posts in every major institution. The 1590 cases were a mere hiccup. As the city of Granada stated, the hope was that soon all this would be a mere memory, as had transpired with the cases at Murcia in the 1560s: “not a trace remains of those events.”18
The relatively undisturbed life of Spanish conversos was transformed from the late 1580s by an influx of Portuguese conversos. Of the refugees who fled from Spain before and during 1492, a great number went to Portugal, swelling its Jewish community to about a fifth of the total population. Portugal did not yet have an Inquisition, so the trials now suffered by the Spanish exiles who had gone there were caused by the crown, the clergy and the populace. The permission that had been granted to Jews to reside (at the price of nearly a ducat a head) was limited to six months only, after which they were offered the same alternatives of conversion or expulsion. When the time was up the richer Jews bought themselves further toleration, but the poorer were not so lucky and many went into exile again, over the sea and across to Africa. The final imposition of conversion on the Jews in Portugal was modified in 1497 by the promise not to persecute conversos for a period of twenty years. Although the crown benefited from tolerating this active minority, communal hatreds were soon stirred, and in 1506 Lisbon witnessed the first great massacre of New Christians. Despite such outbreaks, there was little official persecution until about 1530, so that the conversos in Portugal were flourishing undisturbed at precisely the time that their generation was being rooted out in Spain.
In 1532 King João III determined to introduce an Inquisition on the Spanish model. The institution of this tribunal was delayed only by the powerful support commanded in Rome by wealthy New Christians.19 Eventually in 1540 the Portuguese Inquisition celebrated its first auto de fe; but its powers were still not fully defined, thanks to the vacillation of Rome and the enormous bribes offered periodically by the conversos. Only on 16 July 1547 did the pope issue the bull which finally settled the structure of an independent Portuguese Inquisition.
The presence of a native Inquisition was one of the factors provoking a mass emigration of Portuguese New Christians back into Spain, which for many of them had been the land of their birth. In the three tribunals of the Portuguese Inquisition, at Lisbon, Evora and Coimbra, there were between 1547 and 1580 thirty-four autos de fe, with 169 relaxations in person, 51 in effigy and 1,998 penitents.20 This activity, for a country with so large a percentage of Jewish descendants, was arguably less intense than in the
early years of the Spanish Inquisition; but had an impact nevertheless on those affected. The move of conversos back to Spain began around 1570,21 before the union of the crowns in the person of Philip II in 1580. The union, which had as one consequence an increase in inquisitorial rigor, probably accelerated the return movement. In 1586 the cardinal archduke Albert of Austria, at that time governor of Portugal, was named inquisitor general of the country, with the result that within nineteen years (1581–1600) the three Portuguese tribunals held fifty autos de fe, in forty-five of which there was a total of 162 relaxations in person, 59 in effigy and 2,979 penitents.22
It is small wonder that by the end of the reign of Philip II the Spanish Inquisition was alarmed to discover within Spain the existence of a new threat, this time from the Portuguese who had fled from their own Inquisition. Having seen the hostility of the Inquisition to racial minorities, specially the Moriscos, and to foreigners in general but specially to the French, it would be rash to imagine that the tribunal viewed Portuguese immigrants with equanimity. There is every reason to consider that their condition as foreigners, no less than their lineage, made them an immediate focus of attention.
From the 1590s judaizers of Portuguese origin began to make a significant appearance in trials. In 1593 the inquisitors of Cuenca, alerted no doubt by the recent case of native judaizers in Quintanar, began a far-reaching inquiry into a group of Portuguese families in Alarcón.23 In the 1600s the preponderance of Portuguese among judaizers became clear and undeniable. To take a few examples at random: in the auto at Córdoba on 2 December 1625, thirty-nine of the forty-five judaizers made to do penitence were Portuguese, and the four relaxations were all of Portuguese; another auto there, on 21 December 1627, included fifty-eight judaizers, all of them Portuguese, and Portuguese represented all the eighteen relaxations, of which five were in person. An auto at Madrid on 4 July 1632 featured seventeen Portuguese among the forty-four accused, and similarly one at Cuenca on 29 June 1654 featured eighteen of the same nation out of fifty-seven cases. Finally, in the Córdoba auto of 3 May 1655 three out of five judaizers relaxed were Portuguese, as were seven out of nine made to do penitence, and almost all the forty-three reconciled were of the same nationality.24 The ebb of Castilian Jewry was replaced by a tide of Portuguese New Christians who fed the flames and coffers of the Holy Office. Of over twenty-three hundred persons prosecuted for judaizing by the Spanish tribunals between the 1660s and 1720s, 43 percent were Portuguese by origin.25