by Henry Kamen
Another tobacco administrator in a high social position, Luis Márquez Cardoso, was reconciled together with his wife at an auto in Toledo in November 1669. In August 1691 Simon Ruiz Pessoa, a leading Portuguese financier who had managed the customs duties of Andalucia from 1683 to 1685, was arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid. In 1694 Francisco del Castillo, a member of the Contaduria Mayor de Cuentas, born in Osuna and resident in Ecija, was arrested in Seville by the tribunal.
The most eminent Portuguese financier to suffer in this reign was Francisco Báez Eminente. He took no part in international exchange but restricted his considerable fortune to the administration of the customs duties of Andalucia, Seville and the Indies (the almojarifazgos), as well as provisioning the royal army and navy in Andalucia. During his term of administration in 1686 such severe measures were taken against smugglers that, according to one source, “we came to experience what was held to be impossible in Cadiz, namely that there should be no smuggling.” Eminente was a member of the Contaduría Mayor, and in view of the fact that a good part of Castile’s trade passed through Andalucia his work was of the highest importance to the crown, which he served, as the government later admitted, “for over forty years with credit, industry and zeal that were well known.” Despite this long service and his advanced years, on 6 December 1689 he was suddenly arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid. His colleague Bernardo de Paz y Castañeda was arrested at about the same time. The arrests made no difference to the firm of Eminente, which had been handed over to his son Juan Francisco in April 1689, and continued successfully under him well into the next century.
Thus, once again in the later seventeenth century, judaizers were the main preoccupation of the Inquisition. In the tribunal of Toledo they made up nearly half of all cases, and in the 1670s in Andalucia there was a notable increase in prosecutions.45
The more active Judaism of the Portuguese brought new life to the conversos of Spain. It also helped to create a wholly new Judeo-converso consciousness in Western Europe. The consciousness, ironically, had its roots in Spain. Within the peninsula most conversos remained cut off from the development of international Jewry. It is remarkable, for instance, that the millenarian movement of Sabbatai Zvi, which shook the entire Jewish world and found its ablest controversialist in the North African rabbi Jacob Saportas,46 seems to have caused no tremor in Spain, even though the Inquisition was aware of the phenomenon and warned its tribunals to keep a watch at the ports for any unusual emigration of conversos.
A feeling for Sepharad, however, permeated the thought of West European Jews outside the peninsula and helped to stimulate developments in thought and literature. Ironically, the conversos who lived abroad felt that they were different from others and different even from other Jews, precisely because they were from Sepharad. The cultivation of Iberian cultural habits became a distinguishing feature of exile communities.47 Amsterdam afforded liberty of printing to those who wished to publish. But Sepharad was still home, and many were deeply conscious of their roots there. Among them was the young Spinoza, of Spanish origin even though he lived all his life outside the peninsula. The peninsula itself did not provide congenial ground for Jewish speculative thought, a fact that prompted the exile of one of the best-known converso figures of the period, Isaac Cardoso.
Cardoso (1603–83) was born in Portugal but when he was six his family moved to Spain, where he showed promise as a pupil of the Jesuits, became a professor of philosophy at Valladolid and in 1640 a physician to Philip IV. Direct experience of the treatment of Portuguese immigrants at the hands of the Inquisition began his disillusion with his life as a Christian. He left the country in 1648 at the mature age of forty-five and went to live as a Jew in Venice.48 Here he published his Philosophia libera (1673), which was an exposition of atomist philosophy based on Gassendi, and owed little to Judaism. Six years later, he published at Amsterdam his The Excellences of the Jews, a polemic directed against Spinoza and written deliberately in Spanish for the benefit of the Sephardi community.
A few writers exiled themselves, but could not resist the call home. Enriquez Gómez (b. Cuenca, 1600), whose parents had been tried by the Inquisition and who himself became a Jew in France, remained so attracted by the pull of Sepharad—the only land that could provide him with a public for the language in which he wrote—that he returned to Spain in 1650 and wrote for thirteen years in Seville under the pseudonym Fernando de Zárate. While abroad in Rouen in 1647 Gómez wrote the second part of his Política angélica, a reasoned program for reform of the Inquisition: he asked for the identification of witnesses, the suppression of confiscations, a ban on sanbenitos and speedy trials. He reserved his harshest strictures for the practice of limpieza, which he called “the most barbarous seed sown by the devil in Christendom. . . . Because of it the best families have left the realm; it has created thousands of godless, has injured neighborly love, has divided the people and has perpetuated enmities.”49 While in Seville he had the unusual opportunity to see himself burned in effigy in an auto there in April 1660. The inquisitors eventually caught up with him. He was arrested in September 1661 and died of a heart attack in the cells in March 1663. In July that year he was once again condemned in effigy in an auto.50
A more determined exile was Gaspar Méndez, who fled to Amsterdam, where he changed his name to Abraham Idana and in 1686 wrote a stinging attack on the Inquisition for “using unheard-of tortures to force many to confess what they have not done, this being the cause why many who have been arrested and have entered the prisons without knowing anything other than that they are Christians, have come out as Jews. This is the reason why I left a country where such a tribunal holds sway.”51
Iberia, despite the echoes of the Inquisition, gave to Jewish and converso exiles a common bond that made them all “men of the nation.”52 Even those who were no longer practicing Jews felt a profound kinship, based less on religion than on origins, with the converso world from which they had emerged.53 A few of those who contributed to the new brand of converso consciousness in Europe broke firmly with orthodox Judaism. They included Uriel da Costa, Isaac Orobio de Castro and, at one remove, Spinoza. Orobio, born 1617 in Portugal, moved with his parents around mid-century to Málaga.54 He studied medicine at the University of Osuna. In 1654 he and his family were arrested by the Inquisition of Seville on a charge of judaizing. They appeared in an auto de fe but were lightly punished and eventually, in 1658, released. A couple of years later they left Spain. Orobio arrived in 1662 in Amsterdam, where he participated in the rich intellectual world of the Jews. In the background of the thinking of the Sephardic diaspora, there always remained the memory of Spain. Through men such as Orobio, “the social thinking of Spain found its way into the writings of the Jews of Amsterdam.”55 The undoubted interplay between displaced conversos and the European intellectual environment has inspired Jewish scholars in our day to open up new perspectives about the relationship between the Inquisition, Jewish thought and the modern world.56
The closing years of the seventeenth century, no longer viewed by historians as years of decay, were thus a period when conversos not only looked to new horizons, but also contributed to new trends of thought. In the peninsula, they emerged into public life. Tolerance for them was, however, balanced by residual surges of persecution in several tribunals of the peninsula, notably in the Balearic Islands. The French ambassador, the marquis of Villars, was a witness to this blend of tolerance and persecution. He was present at the great auto of June 1680, and observed that “these punishments do not significantly diminish the number of Jews in Spain and above all in Madrid where, while some are punished with great severity, one sees several others employed in finance, esteemed and respected though known to be of Jewish origin.”57
Among the most significant conversos of the late century, and a man whose career aptly illustrates the strange mixture of tolerance and intolerance of those days, was Dr. Diego Mateo Zapata.58 Born of Portuguese parents in Murcia in 1664, Zapa
ta was brought up by his mother as a secret Jew. In 1678 she was arrested, tortured and emerged in an auto de fe in 1681. His father was arrested on suspicion, but set free. Zapata went to the University of Valencia to study medicine, and then to Alcalá, where he was befriended by Francisco Enríquez de Villacorta, a doctor of Jewish origins. He moved to Madrid and thanks to his connections managed to prosper. In 1692 he was arrested in Madrid by the Inquisition on charges of Judaism, and spent a year in the cells of the tribunal at Cuenca; the prosecution was suspended, and he was released in 1693. In 1702 he was elected president of the Royal Society of Medicine in Seville. The early eighteenth century found him rich and successful in Madrid, in possession of a large library that included the works of Bacon, Gassendi, Bayle, Paracelsus, Pascal and other philosophers, many of them prohibited by the Holy Office. In 1721 he was suddenly arrested again on charges of Judaism, and appeared in an auto de fe in Cuenca in 1725, condemned to ten years’ banishment and the loss of half his goods. He returned to active work in Madrid, helped to found the Royal Academy of Medicine in 1734 and died in 1745.
His posthumously published Sunset of the Aristotelian Forms, which appeared in 1745, was a radical departure from his earlier devotion to the principles of Galen, which still dominated orthodox medicine in Spain. Zapata shares with Dr. Juan Muñoz Peralta the sad fame of being among the last men of medicine to suffer at the hands of the Inquisition.59 Peralta was distinguished enough to have been physician to the king and queen in the War of Succession, and was subsequently summoned to Versailles to attend to Louis XIV himself. In 1700 he was elected first president of the Royal Medical Society of Seville. Tried and imprisoned by the Inquisition shortly before 1724, he never returned to practice as a royal physician.
Thanks to the immigration from Portugal, conversos predominated in the autos of the late seventeenth century. In the Granada auto de fe of 30 May 1672 there were 79 judaizers out of 90 accused, 57 of them Portuguese. The great Madrid auto of 30 June 1680 included 104 judaizers, nearly all Portuguese. The Córdoba auto of 29 September 1684 included 34 judaizers (some of them cried out, “Moses, Moses” as they perished in the flames) among the 48 penitents.60 Autos de fe after the 1680s show a definite decline from these numbers, indicating that the first generation of Portuguese conversos had been purged as surely as the native conversos had been at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
A special exception to this decline of persecution must be noted in Mallorca, where the burnings erupted only in the closing years of the seventeenth century. Mallorca followed a slightly different development from the rest of Spain.61 The medieval Inquisition had existed there since 1232 and the new tribunal was introduced only in 1488. Even before this, the island had a Jewish problem which paralleled that on the mainland. The great massacres of 1391 were repeated here in riots in August 1391, and Vincent Ferrer extended his proselytizing activities to the island in 1413. By about 1435 it was reckoned that the whole Jewish population had embraced Christianity, but as on the mainland it was found necessary to introduce the Inquisition to root out the doubtful cases. The first autos de fe showed the existence of a problem. In 1489 there were 53 relaxations of conversos, most of whom were burnt in effigy as fugitives. On 26 March 1490, after fewer than 424 conversos had responded to the terms of clemency offered in an edict of grace, 86 conversos were reconciled; and on 31 May 1490 there were 36 relaxations and 56 reconciliations. Up to September 1531 every person condemned in the Mallorcan Inquisition was of Jewish origin, and the total number of “relaxations” to that date was 535 (of these, 82 were executed in person, the others were condemned in effigy).62
By the 1530s the same phenomenon that we have noted for peninsular Spain occurred: the number of converso victims declined sharply and a whole generation of judaizers ceased to exist. Now, however, the Morisco problem took its place, aggravated by the fact that Morisco refugees from Valencia often chose to flee to the Balearic Islands. Mass reconciliations of Moriscos occurred in Mallorca from the 1530s, and the first condemnations took place in the auto of 10 July 1535. Between 1530 and 1645 there were ninety-nine Moriscos reconciled in Mallorca, twenty-seven of them in 1613 alone.63 The corresponding absence of judaizers is shown by the fact that between 1535 and 1645 there were only ten people accused, seven of them Moriscos. The absence of judaizers at this particular period, when they proliferated in Spain, is evidence that the Portuguese emigrants did not make their way to the Balearics in any numbers.
After a lull of well over a century, the storm burst eventually over the converso descendants—the Chuetas—in 1675, when a young man of nineteen years, Alonso López, was burnt in the auto of 13 January.64 With him were burnt the effigies of six Portuguese judaizers, indicating that persecution in the Spanish peninsula had at last driven them out into the Mediterranean. Repercussions from this case led in 1677 to a general arrest of conversos, and by 1678 the Inquisition had arrested 237 people on the charge of complicity in what seems to have been a genuine attempt to assert their political and human rights. Now followed two great waves of devastation in 1679 and 1691. In the spring of the former year no fewer than five autos de fe were held in Mallorca, with a total of 221 reconciliations. As we have seen, the confiscations made at these autos reached a record total of well over 2.5 million ducats. Crushed by these events, the conversos waited ten years before they could stir again. In 1688 some of them, led by Onofre Cortes and Rafael Valls, attempted to recoup all in a plot which fell through and led directly to the four autos de fe held in 1691, at which thirty-seven prisoners were relaxed in person; those reconciled or burnt in effigy increased this figure to a total of eighty-six converso victims. After this great suppression, the conversos of Mallorca made no further attempt to improve their position. They remained into modern times a depressed community, subjected to calumny and discrimination.
Throughout Spain, the seventeenth century closed with a renewed attack on conversos. The eighteenth century opened with a new dynasty and an apparently new outlook on religion. Philip V marked the change by refusing to attend an auto de fe held in his honor. The year was 1701 and the Inquisition, wishing to assert its role with the new king, invited him to attend. As we have seen (chapter 10), Philip was advised by his tutor not to show up. The public auto de fe was a disagreeable phenomenon in the eyes of the French and indeed of all foreigners. With the purging of native judaizers and then of the Portuguese immigrants, it appeared that the book was being closed on the converso problem.
However, it appears that very much later the king attended an auto in Madrid in 1721. His presence coincided with a new outbreak of persecution, so that the change of dynasty involved very little change in religious practice, and the persistence of judaizers in Spain was treated with almost as much severity as in the preceding century. The toll of judaizers in the 1720s, though substantial, represented the tail end of a long history of persecution. There were several important autos in 1720 in Madrid, Mallorca, Granada and Seville, but the real wave of repression broke out in 1721 and lasted to the end of the decade. The peak years were 1721–25, when sixty-six autos appear to have been held. We should remember that the auto at this period was usually a small, private ceremony, with a couple of priests and a handful of accused, held for convenience inside a church. Between 1726 and 1730 possibly another eighteen were celebrated. The persecution of the 1720s was directed almost exclusively against Portuguese immigrants, who made up nearly 80 percent of the cases of those years.65 Over the whole period from the 1660s to the 1720s, the Spanish tribunals prosecuted over twenty-two hundred persons for judaizing.66 Some 3 percent of these were burnt at the stake (in the 1720s the incidence was higher, over 8 percent).67 The majority—over three-fourths—spent a short period in confinement.
In the years after 1730 the number of autos and of accused declined rapidly, and by mid-century the converso community had ceased to be a major religious issue. With this last great persecution the practice of Judaism in Spain crumbled and decayed. Cases wer
e rare in the later eighteenth century, the last one to occur at Toledo being in 1756. Among more than five thousand cases coming before the tribunals between 1780 and 1820, when the Inquisition was suppressed, there were only sixteen cases of judaizing, and of these ten were of foreigners while the remaining six were prosecuted only on suspicion.68 The practice of Judaism had been to all appearances eliminated from Spain, the last prosecution being the case of Manuel Santiago Vivar at Córdoba in 1818.
Meanwhile, there were promising signs for Spanish Jews, thanks in part to the capture of Gibraltar by the British in 1704 and its cession to Britain by the Peace of Utrecht (1713). In the peace treaty Spain insisted on a condition “that on no account must Jews and Muslims be allowed to live or reside in the said city of Gibraltar.” The British made no attempt to observe these discriminatory demands, and very rapidly the Jewish community grew. By 1717 there were three hundred Jewish families there, with their own synagogue, and by the nineteenth century Jews were a tenth of the population on the Rock. When I visited the town a few years ago, it had four synagogues. Some of the leading members of the community are direct descendants of Jews who were expelled in 1492.