by Henry Kamen
In Spain, the presence of the Jew continued to be felt long after this date. As long as anti-Semitic prejudices continued to exist, of course, cultural discrimination would be practiced. Nineteenth-century liberals tried to confront the issue by the strategy of passing laws against discrimination. The Cortes of Cadiz in 1811 abolished the practice of limpieza in several areas but the conservative regime of Ferdinand VII in 1824 reinforced all the old regulations. The Liberals under Isabella II in 1865 repeated the ban on discrimination. None of this affected deep-seated prejudices. When in 1797 finance minister Pedro Varela resurrected the long-forgotten idea of Olivares and attempted to bring the Jews back into Spain, his suggestions were firmly rejected by Charles IV. As late as 1802 the crown was issuing threats against those of its subjects who were shielding Jews from the Inquisition. In 1804 a French Jewish merchant of Bayonne was molested by the tribunal, whereupon the indignant French ambassador intervened to say “that the exercise of international rights ought not to depend on an arbitrary distinction about the religion in which a man was born and the religious principles he professed.”69 The struggle continued into the opening decades of the twentieth century, where it merged into problems that are part of contemporary history.
To the new generation of Spaniards, Jews were the dark stain on the history of their country. Their shadow was everywhere present, yet they themselves were extinct. The only surviving memory of them was in the sanbenitos that foreign travelers report having seen hung in churches in the peninsula well into the nineteenth century. But if the Inquisition could claim to have rid Spain of the Jewish menace, it was still partly to blame for the bitter legacy of anti-Semitism in the country. The political right wing in nineteenth-century Spain and Europe adopted the Jew as its prototype enemy, sometimes distinct from and sometimes identified with the Freemason. The Jew, who was now little more than a myth, became identified in certain minds with all that was hostile to the tradition represented by the Inquisition. To be a Jew meant not being a Catholic, therefore not to be a Catholic meant being a Jew: one result of this popular reasoning meant that “Jews and Freemasons,” “Jews and Protestants” and “Jews and foreigners” became self-explanatory identifications. In the constant struggle waged by the right wing to preserve Catholic Spain, all that was hostile and sinister became personified in the Jew who was on the other side. The aberrations of the nineteenth century found their last heyday in the racist literature circulated in Spain during the Second World War, but anti-Semitism as a prejudice continues to feature down to our own day in public attitudes and in the thinking of both right-wing and left-wing politicians.70
Speculation and curiosity still hang around the issue of Jewish survivals in the nineteenth century. The question was put at its most dramatic by the English traveler and linguist George Borrow during his indefatigable journeys with the Bible round western Spain. In 1836 he was riding by night on his donkey through Old Castile, when about two leagues before Talavera he fell into conversation with a figure making the same journey on foot.
Hardly had a few words been exchanged than the man walked on about ten paces, in the same manner as he had previously done: all of a sudden he turned, and taking the bridle of the donkey gently in his hand, stopped her. I had now a full view of his face and figure, and those huge features and Herculean form still occasionally revisit me in my dreams. I see him standing in the moonshine, staring me in the face with his deep calm eyes. At last he said: “Are you then one of us?”71
In this way, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Borrow claimed to have come upon one of the few remaining communities of secret Jews in Spain. The incident has been attacked by writers of all shades of opinion, and there is little doubt that the speeches Borrow puts into the mouth of his new friend Abarbanel verge on fantasy. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that Borrow did meet Spaniards—as he later met an ex-inquisitor—who claimed to know of secret judaizers in the country. Several other travelers made similar reports. One of his predecessors, Joseph Townsend, reported in 1787 after traveling through the country:
Even to the present day both Mahometans and Jews are thought to be numerous in Spain, the former among the mountains, the latter in all great cities. Their principal disguise is more than common zeal in external conformity to all the precepts of the Church: and the most apparently bigoted, not only of the clergy, but of the inquisitors themselves, are by some persons suspected to be Jews.72
Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact remains that Judaism continued to be an issue in Spain long after the last heretic had died at the stake. On the one hand, there was a legacy of suspicion and fear based on anti-Semitism—the willingness to blame the secret and concealed enemy for all the evils of policy and history. On the other, there was a distinct atmosphere of racialism that persisted into modern times. Spain remains still the European country with the highest level of prejudice against Jews and against Israel.73 On both counts the Inquisition had some (and not necessarily a principal) part to play, and some responsibility to bear, in the tragedy of a hunted people.
During the later eighteenth century the Inquisition became openly political in its hostility to the Enlightenment, as we have seen from the case of Pablo de Olavide (chapter 8), and lost the little support it had enjoyed among the progressive elite in Spain.74 The relative frequency of executions in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were executed by burning.75
In the epoch following the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the French regime that occupied Spain in 1808 was to abolish the Holy Office, on 4 December. The patriotic forces in the country were represented at the Cortes of Cadiz (1810), which on 22 February 1813 also decreed the abolition of the Inquisition, by a margin of ninety votes against sixty. It was an act that provoked considerable opposition from traditionalists, and on 21 July 1814 Ferdinand VII restored the tribunal, but in name rather than in reality. Effectively the Holy Office was now moribund. On 9 March 1820 the king was forced by Liberal opposition to abolish it yet again. In Rome the papal authorities objected on the principle that the tribunal had been founded by papal bull and only the papacy could abolish it. However, they conceded, “there is no reason to regret the disappearance of the Inquisition in Spain.”76 The final decree of suppression, issued by the government of Queen Isabella II on 15 July 1834, was little more than a formality. From this date the Inquisition ceased to exist in the Spanish monarchy.
The last person known to have been executed for heresy in Spain was sentenced not by the Inquisition, as often stated, but by a tribunal that replaced it when it was suspended.77 A schoolmaster of Valencia named Cayetano Ripoll had been captured by the French army during the Peninsular War and taken to France, where he became a convert to Deism. Returning home, he took up his post but was accused of not taking his pupils to mass, and of teaching them to say “Praise be to God” instead of “Ave María purissima.” Arrested in 1824, his trial lasted nearly two years. A secular court sentenced him to be hanged and burnt: he was hanged on 26 July 1826, but the burning was only symbolic, in the form of flames painted on a barrel. Execution of heretics had long since disappeared from the penal system of other European states.78
Long before it disappeared, the Holy Office had entered the realm of mythology. Since the sixteenth century, opponents of the tribunal had taken the initiative in attacking it through the useful medium of the printing press. Clinging to its rule of secrecy, it refused to be drawn into any public debate and thereby left the field wide open to its enemies, who set about “inventing” their own image of the Inquisition.
15
INVENTING THE INQUISITION
. . . a wild monster, of such strange form and horrible mien that all Europe trembles at the mere mention of its name.
—SAMUEL USQUE, IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
From its very inception, the Inquisition in Spain provoked a war of words.1 Its opponents
through the ages contributed to building up a powerful image about its intentions and malign achievements. Their propaganda was so successful that even today it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. The first common misconception, found among northern Europeans, was to consider the tribunal a peculiarity of the Mediterranean: “insupportable to free peoples, such as the French, Flemish and Germans, it is suited to Spaniards, Italians and other southerners.”2 The facts that Germans and French were the first in medieval times to have the tribunal, and that the Flemish and English were no less brutal in persecuting heresy, were somehow forgotten. An enduring and persistent misreading of what Spain’s Holy Office was and did helped to fix in the mind an image of a nation infected by exotic ghosts that were peculiarly its own.
When the printing press first began to form public opinion, in the sixteenth century, the most diligent victims of the Inquisition happened to be supporters of the Reformation, and they set about convincing Europe that Spain’s intentions were not limited to Jews and Muslims but were now directed against Christian truth and liberty. For the first time, in the 1560s images of the dreaded (and, we have seen above, newly elaborated) auto de fe were reproduced as proof of the terrible fate awaiting the enemies of Spain. Protestant pens depicted the struggle as one for freedom from a tyrannical faith. Wherever Catholicism triumphed, they claimed, not only religious but civil liberty was extinguished. The Reformation was seen as bringing about the liberation of the human spirit from the fetters of darkness and superstition. Propaganda along these lines proved to be strikingly effective in the context of the political conflicts of the period, and there were always refugees from persecution to lend substance to the story.
Surprisingly, an early major source of anti-Inquisition propaganda happened to be Catholic in origin. With the outstanding exception of the Holy Roman Empire, every significant Catholic state in Europe, including France, was at some time hostile to Spain. From 1494 onwards, Spanish troops intervened in Italy to check the expansion of French influence, and they remained there. Ferdinand the Catholic had been king of Sicily; he now also took over the kingdom of Naples. Under Charles V, Spaniards in addition took over the duchy of Milan and established their power firmly in the Italian peninsula, where many states, including the papacy, quickly came to view them as oppressors. The sixteenth-century humanist Sepúlveda, who lived in Italy for a while, commented that “the Italians are hostile to the Spaniards because of the many ills they have suffered at their hands. It is for this reason that Italians always want to attack the Spanish soldiers in Italy.”3 The artist Rubens saw from his personal experience that in the seventeenth century “the Italians have little affection for Spain.”4 For most thinking Italians, the Spaniards were “barbarians.”5
The unfavorable image of Spain extended also to the Inquisition.6 The most successful revolts against the tribunal occurred in the Italian territories of the Spanish crown. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the familiars. Ferdinand the Catholic attempted to introduce the Spanish tribunal into Naples, which already had its own episcopal Inquisition, but effective protests blocked his bid. In 1547 and 1564 there were further risings in the region because of rumors that the Spanish tribunal was going to be established.
Despite reassurances from Philip II, Italians continued to cultivate their own vision of Spanish policy. When Italian diplomats, whether from independent states (such as Venice) or from the papacy, came to visit the peninsula, they saw little to praise. The reports they sent home described a poor and backward nation dominated by a tyrannical Inquisition. Francesco Guicciardini, Florentine ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic, stated that Spaniards were “very religious in externals and outward show, but not so in fact.”7 In 1525 the Venetian ambassador Contarini claimed that everyone trembled before the Holy Office. In 1557 ambassador Badoero spoke of the terror caused by its procedures. In 1565 ambassador Soranzo reported that its authority transcended that of the king. In the crown of Aragon, he reported, “the king makes every attempt to destroy the many privileges they have, and knowing that there is no easier or more certain way of doing it than through the Inquisition, never ceases to augment its authority.”8 Italians felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the anti-Semitism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence. The Spanish ambassador at Rome reported in 1652: “In Spain it is held in great horror to be descended from a heretic or a Jew, but here they laugh at these matters, and at us, because we concern ourselves with them.”9
The political struggle against Spain in Western Europe, led by the Dutch and English, who opportunely possessed the most active printing presses, focused attention on an alleged threat to liberty from the Inquisition. In France the Protestants feared that Henry III, in concert with Philip of Spain, planned to establish a new Inquisition. In the Netherlands, William of Orange and the count of Egmont were so disturbed that they asked Cardinal Granvelle in 1561 to deny the report. Philip II assured Granvelle unequivocally that the Spanish model of Inquisition was unsuitable for export to the Netherlands or Italy.10 Even in England, where he had exercised some influence as husband of Mary Tudor, no steps were ever taken to introduce the tribunal. Indeed, during that period Philip attempted to restrain the Marian persecution of heretics.11 The truth was that most European countries already had their own machinery for dealing with heretics and had no need for outside help.
At this point a new voice was added to the weapons of propaganda directed against Spanish intentions. Even as the duke of Alba in 1566 was leading his troops towards the Netherlands through the forested valleys of the Rhineland, two Spanish Protestants were running off the presses in nearby Heidelberg the first edition of a book that would became a powerful weapon against Spanish imperialism in Europe. The Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes (Secrets of the Holy Spanish Inquisition), published in Heidelberg in 1567, states (as we have seen in chapter 5 above) that its author was Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus, but it seems in reality to have been written jointly by two Spanish Protestant exiles, Casiodoro de Reina and Antonio del Corro.12 They supplied, for perhaps the first time, a full description of the functioning of the tribunal and its persecution of Protestants. At the date it was published there was almost no negative image of Spain in Europe, and the repression undertaken by Alba in the Netherlands had not yet come to pass.
Indeed, rather than Spain it was the Netherlands where the Inquisition, in the words of Philip II himself, was “more merciless than the one here.” At the very time that magistrates in Antwerp were objecting to the possibility of a Spanish tribunal, they themselves were executing heretics. The Antwerp courts between 1557 and 1562 executed 103 dissidents.13 More heretics died in this one northern city in five years than in the whole of Spain in the entire sixteenth century. Overall, in the Habsburg Netherlands at least 1,300 persons were executed for heresy between 1523 and 1566.14 Rumors of Spain’s intentions—as early as 1546 there were pamphlets in the Netherlands suggesting that the emperor Charles V was intending to introduce the Spanish Inquisition there15—reflected genuine fears but in substance were a legend to discredit Spain and support resistance. William of Orange in his famous Apology of 1581, written in reply to a decree outlawing him, turned the issue into a brilliant exercise in anti-Spanish propaganda. The execution of heretics, he claimed, was a natural occupation for bloodthirsty Spaniards: “the brightness of the fires wherein they have tormented so many poor Christians, was never delightful or pleasant to mine eyes, as it hath rejoyc’d the sight of the Duke of Alba and the Spaniards.” “I will no more wonder,” he added, “at that which all the world believeth: to wit, that the greatest part of the Spaniards, and especially those that count themselves noble
men, are of the blood of the Moors and Jews.”16
Rumors of Spain’s alleged intentions continued all the same to be a useful weapon to discredit Spain and encourage resistance to the military intervention. The author’s firsthand knowledge in the Artes gave authority to his account,17 which was issued between 1568 and 1570 in two editions in English, one in French, three in Dutch, four in German and one in Hungarian.18 From that time, Protestant Europe was taught to recognize its most deadly enemy in the terrible Inquisition of Spain. As time went on, the anti-Inquisition saga grew, thanks to the efforts of zealous Protestants to keep alive the cause for which their martyrs suffered. In England, which had just suffered the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary, John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs (1563) warned his contemporaries: “This dreadful engine of tyranny may at any time be introduced into a country where the Catholics have the ascendancy; and hence how careful ought we to be, who are not cursed with such an arbitrary court, to prevent its introduction.”19
The attacks multiplied, with an increasing fixation on Spain as the source of oppression. The preparation of the Spanish Armada of 1588 encouraged the English government to launch a war of words against Philip II.20 It financed leaflets, among them the successful A Fig for the Spaniard (1591). English sailors who had spent time in the cells of the Inquisition were given help with publishing their stories.21 Antonio Pérez, resident at this time in England, contributed to the campaign by his authorship of the leaflet A Treatise Paraenetical (1598). At the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century propagandists in northern Europe also took part in the same campaign.