by Henry Kamen
The new awareness of the Jewish role gave rise to a number of important studies, both in Spain (the publications of Amador de los Ríos) and outside it (the pioneering researches of Yitzhak Baer). The terrible reality that most of the mortal victims of the Spanish Inquisition were of Jewish origin left an ineffaceable image of the tribunal in the mind of the Jewish people and its historians. Descendants of those who survived the great diaspora of 1492 considered the Inquisition to be their own special historical nightmare. Samuel Usque, Portuguese author of Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (1553), painted a terrifying picture of the Inquisition as a monster that “rises in the air on a thousand wings . . . wherever it passes its shadow spreads a pall of gloom over the brightest sun . . . the green grass which it treads or the luxuriant tree on which it alights, dries, decays and withers . . . it desolates the countryside until it is like the Syrian deserts and sands.”39
This vision created a powerful tradition about the Inquisition that rooted itself in the perception of those who felt that they were better equipped than anyone to understand how it operated. The pioneering researches of Yitzhak Baer paved the way to yet more voluminous studies that discovered in the Inquisition a way of interpreting the place of Jews in the modern world. In developing their ideas, some of these writers often discarded historical evidence and invented a palpably untrue image of the Inquisition. A respected Jewish scholar maintained that the Inquisition “maintained its hold on the Iberian population through its terrorist methods, the dependence of royal power on its support, and the apparent absence of any alternative to combat heresy,” and that “practically no one was safe from its grasp.”40 Others projected the image of a whole people driven into exile (“the entire Jewish population left Spain . . . some 200,000”), and a Spain reduced to slavery (“under the iron grip of an institution that was feared and abhorred”).41 These wholly erroneous presentations were obviously deeply influenced by a generation that had suffered the experience of twentieth-century Nazi Germany.
Writers managed, however, to snatch hope out of the ashes. The Inquisition came to be seen by some scholars as, ironically, an impulse to enlightenment. One writes: “The story of the conversos . . . concerns the attempt of the oppressed to break the silence imposed on them by the persecuting society, and transmit the perspective of the persecuted to future generations.”42 A figure like Spinoza was seen as the paradigm of intellectuality breaking with the medieval past. Thanks to this, Jews could be seen as the precursors of modernity.43 It was a novel and stimulating interpretation, but the emphasis on the role of Jews also had an unhelpful aspect. It helped to skew perspectives of the Inquisition, which came to be viewed and interpreted by many almost exclusively within the context of the sufferings of Jews, when the tribunal also in fact had a much broader significance for the sociology of the Spanish people and of the Christian religion.
Among non-Jewish historians the perception of the Inquisition was complex, and they tended, like Voltaire, to pay more attention to cultural aspects such as the question of human freedom. Llorente was one of the sources used by the American historian W. H. Prescott for his three-volume unfinished study of the reign of Philip II (1855). In this work Prescott found himself fascinated by the Inquisition, which he depicted as “the malignant influence of an eye that never slumbered, an unseen arm ever raised to strike.”44 Prescott’s striking vision of the Inquisition may have contributed in part to the powerful image of the Grand Inquisitor created by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who read Prescott in Russian in 1858)45 in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. The vision of Spain in English-speaking countries was not, however, wholly negative, thanks to the Oriental exoticism conveyed by Washington Irving’s writings, and by the work of painters such as John S. Sargent, who paid a visit to Spain and did a canvas of the Alhambra (1879).
In the 1870s another American scholar, Henry Charles Lea, began collecting material for a proposed history of the Inquisition in Spain. His work, published in four volumes in 1906 (but not consulted by Spanish scholars until some eighty years later), remains still the definitive history of the tribunal. Though Lea had strong prejudices that he expressed uncompromisingly, his work once and for all rescued the tribunal from the make-believe world of invented history, and placed it firmly in the arena of documented fact. He retained, nevertheless, a deep pessimism about the political and moral future of the country he believed to have been paralyzed by the Inquisition.
It was that country where, in effect, opinions about the role of the Inquisition remained most at variance and most deeply rooted. Nineteenth-century Liberals like Alcalá Galiano were ready to attribute every failure in Spanish history to the Inquisition. All the economic problems of the country were blamed on the Holy Office.46 Subsequently, other writers took up the theme. The persecution of conversos and the expulsion of the Jews led, they claimed, to the impoverishment and decay of Spain and the destruction of its middle class. Religious persecution led to the decay of trade and a collapse of Spanish power and wealth. Censorship led to intellectual isolation, the obliteration of learning and the crushing of science and humanism. These views, which can still be encountered in Spain’s press and centers of higher learning, provoked from Menéndez y Pelayo in 1876 a biting satire on those who identified the tribunal with all the ills of Spain: “Why was there no industry in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why are we Spaniards lazy? Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bullfights in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why do Spaniards take a siesta? Because of the Inquisition.”47
In nineteenth-century Spain there were conservatives and Catholics who, while not partisans of the tribunal, rejected the uninformed criticisms directed against it. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the towering intellectual figure of his day in Spain, was perhaps the only competent defender the Inquisition ever had. In his works, which we have cited above (chapter 6), he brushed aside the labor of Llorente as “lacking in erudition, puerile in criticism, insipid in style, without vigor or charm,” and dismissed the History of the Inquisition as “a pile of calumnies, dry and sterile, malicious, indigestible, vague and incoherent.”48 However, he did not have a closed mind, and also helped to promote research on the subject. From 1887 he was in correspondence with Henry Charles Lea, who was then preparing his studies on the medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, and helped obtain for him transcripts of documents from the Spanish archives.49 Maturity and courtesy mellowed the older man, and helped to make his views take their place in the arena of civilized scholarship. The conservative tendency he represented, however, also continued to produce writings of a less scholarly nature. With very rare exceptions, such as the fundamental and pioneering studies by the Jesuit scholar Fidel Fita, Spanish clergy who wrote about the Inquisition up to the 1970s allowed their ideological views to influence their research.
Myths about the Inquisition became both long lasting and deep rooted among Spaniards, because they were essential to the maintenance of political ideology both of left and right. Partisan approaches coinciding with Liberal and conservative views of the past continued to survive with surprising vigor well into contemporary Spain. Both views maintained that vital aspects of Spanish culture could not be understood or explained without bringing into play the responsibility, for evil and for good, of the Inquisition. The nature and impact of the fifteenth-century tribunal consequently came to be seen as a key to the way Spain developed four hundred years later. Whenever it became necessary to explain a particularly contentious issue, there was nothing easier than to raise the cry of “Inquisition!” in the same way that one might cry out “Fire!” Since the Inquisition was perceived as a reactionary body, any attempt to modify its image in respect of the harm it was alleged to have done to the Jews, to liberty and to culture was likewise considered reactionary.
As more serious research began to be published on the theme, the legend of the bloody Inquisition began to disappear among scholars, but continued to survive among those who, since the Gothic novels of the late eightee
nth century,50 made their living from it: writers of popular fiction. Perhaps the most successful (and close to fictional) work ever published on the Spanish Inquisition were the three volumes published in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the British writer Eleanor Hibbert, writing under the pseudonym Jean Plaidy.51 Other popular writers continued in the same vein. Thanks to their labors, the subject has unfailingly excited the interest of the public. The malignant Inquisition also continued to feature as a convenient tailor’s dummy on which to hang venerable myths.52 Spain was particularly vulnerable to this process.53 For a long time, little or no research was done in Spain on the circumstances that presumably provoked the incredible disaster said to have overtaken the country during the lifetime of the Holy Office. Instead, writers offered the public a virtually fictional account of its role. In 1927 an author of a new History of Spain, Mario Méndez Bejarano,54 offered his readers a verdict plucked right out of the air:
An inconceivable passivity, an incomprehension bordering on brain damage and reinforced by apathy, paralyzed all healthy action. The seventeenth century lacked any scientific or literary substance, drawing its learning and its soul only from the preceding century. Religious intolerance stifled all free thought. . . . Fear of error led to a fall into ignorance, Spanish thinkers had to learn to print their books outside the country, and there hardly remained any man of merit who did not in greater or lesser degree suffer persecution from the hateful tribunal of the Inquisition.
From these incredible lines it can be seen that many Spaniards, on the eve of a long Civil War (1936–39) in which hundreds of thousands would lose their lives, were still relying for their ideas and their hopes for the future on a vision of the past that had been totally distorted by ideology and a complete lack of serious historical research.
The distortions of political ideology were matched by the distortions in folk memory. Since the people, as we have seen, had very little active contact with the Inquisition, they preserved in their minds a fictional record of what it must have been like in the experience of the past. For some elderly Galician peasants, who narrated their thoughts to a researcher half a century ago,55 the Inquisition perceived by their forefathers was still a living and frightening memory. The inquisitors (they claimed to remember) came in the night in carriages specially fitted with rubber wheels that would make no noise; they listened at doors and windows to hear what people were saying; they took away beautiful girls; their favorite torture—on this there was absolute unanimity among those interviewed—was to sit their victim down and drip boiling oil on his head until he died. The persistence of this bizarre and completely fantastic image among peasants in a region almost never visited by inquisitors was, one may argue, evidence of the enormous gap that had opened up between the tribunal and the society it purported to defend.
Contact with the outside world was one of the most potent causes of growing disillusion with the Inquisition. Spaniards came to realize that coercion was not inevitable in religion, and that other nations seemed to exist happily without it. We have the opinion of a pharmacist arrested by the Inquisition at Laguna (Tenerife) in 1707. He is reported to have said “that one could live in France because they do not have the poverty and subjection that today exists in Spain and Portugal, since in France they do not try to find out nor do they make a point of knowing who everyone is and what religion he has and professes. And so he who lives properly and is of good character may become what he wishes.”56
A generation later, in 1741, another native of the Canaries, the marquis de la Villa de San Andrés, echoed precisely the same sentiments when he praised Paris, where life was free and unrestricted “and no one asks where you are going or questions who you are, nor at Easter does the priest ask if you have been to confession.”57 This was the spirit that threatened to splinter the defenses of a traditionalist society. It was, in one way, an urge to freedom, but in another way it was a demand for justice. The fate of the Jews and Muslims continued to be on the conscience of intelligent statesmen. When the government minister José Carvajal began to interest himself in the attacks directed a century and a half previously by Salucio against the statutes of limpieza, his main preoccupation was “the cruel impiety with which they have treated those who were outside the Catholic religion, barring all human doors of entry against them.”58 This was in 1751. A similar approach was adopted by the statesman of the Spanish Enlightenment, Jovellanos, in 1798. For him the primary reason for criticizing the Inquisition was the fate of the conversos:
From this arose the infamy that covered descendants of these conversos, who were reputed infamous by public opinion. The laws upheld this and approved the statutes of limpieza de sangre, which kept out so many innocent people not only from posts of honor and trust but also from entering churches, colleges, convents and even unions and trade guilds. From this came the perpetuation of hatred not only against the Inquisition but against religion itself.59
Jovellanos’s comments did not refer to his own time, when discrimination could have had very little impact, but on the situation he deemed to have existed two hundred years before. He argued that the injustices committed against a section of society by the Inquisition now needed to be remedied. The tribunal had lost all theoretical justification for its existence, since the modern threat to religion came no longer from Jews and Moriscos and heretics but from unbelievers. Against these the tribunal would be of little avail, since the inquisitors were ignorant and incapable. The time had come to get rid of such a superfluous body, right the injustices of history and restore to the bishops their old powers over heresy.
Despite their progressive stance, Jovellanos and his Catholic colleagues in the government and the nobility were not radical revolutionaries. Their desire for reform and for changes in society was limited by the concern for stability. The Catholic liberals who opposed the Inquisition were unwilling to look too far. Jovellanos wrote to his friend, the Scotsman Alexander Jardine: “You approve of the spirit of rebellion; I do not. I disapprove of it openly and am far from believing that it carries the seal of merit.”60 Because of this the attitude of Catholics as such towards the Inquisition ceased to be of great consequence, and was lost among the waves of turbulence created by those whose hatred of the Holy Office was only part of their distrust of organized religion.
Because the Inquisition was a conflictive institution its history has always been polemical. The rule of secrecy, unfortunately, gagged the mouths of its own spokesmen and aided those of its detractors, so that for its entire career the propaganda war was won effortlessly by its enemies. The discovery of the riches of inquisitorial documentation has helped to restore the balance of information but also created new dangers. Ease of access to the archives has often encouraged us to rely exclusively on the Inquisition for information, as though prosecution records were a uniquely trustworthy source. In consequence, an enormous amount of data has been produced, but much of it can fail to convince because it does not look beyond the documents. The result is that slow progress has been made towards understanding the social or ideological conditions in which the Holy Office operated.
Undue concentration on the actions and role of the Holy Office, while ignoring the immense range of factors that made up its social context in the peninsula and in Europe, now appears to be the biggest single obstacle to understanding the phenomenon. Attention to the Baroque display of the public auto de fe, an event that might happen once a generation, while ignoring the significance of the feasts and processions of town communities and the Church; or attention to the minute and trivial nature of day-to-day prosecutions, while turning a blind eye to the substantial number of similar offenses in secular and Church jurisdictions; are typical of the way in which research may lose its way. Fixing our gaze too closely and exclusively on the Holy Office, some of us may be tempted to imagine it as “an ecclesiastical power that shaped religious debate, reasserted Catholic doctrine, structured relations between Church and state, diffused a value system and defined boun
daries of behavior and thought among the population.”61 Every part of such an assessment would, nevertheless, be open to question. Few working scholars would apply such ambitious attributes even to the GPU in early Soviet Russia or the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, and by the same token there is no basis for applying them to the tiny handful of clergy who constituted the Inquisition in Spain.
Once the facile use of the Inquisition as an explanation for all the good or ill has been removed, the challenge to explain the evolution of Spain becomes sharper. The decay in the universities, for example, clearly owed little to the Inquisition. Theology fell into a rigid Thomist and scholastic mold. “If they prove to me that my faith is founded on St. Thomas,” exclaimed the writer El Brocense, “I’ll shit on it and find another!” But by the seventeenth century, and with no push from the inquisitors, St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle were the unshakeable pillars of philosophy in Spain. Population decline played a part in the declining intake of Castilian universities, where matriculations reached their peak in around 1620 and declined continually into the eighteenth century. No new universities were founded in Castile between 1620 and the early nineteenth century. As in all periods of economic recession, preference went to “useful” rather than speculative studies and the lack of prospects in certain subjects effectively doomed them. By 1648 it was proposed at Salamanca to suppress the chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and other subjects: Greek and Hebrew had not been taught since the 1550s. For none of this can the Inquisition be blamed. In area after area of Spanish culture it is increasingly obvious that factors were at work which it would be grotesque to try to attribute to the Inquisition.