PART TWO—
PERSECUTION AND PERSISTENCE
Seven—
Family and Patronage: The Judeo-Converso Minority in Spain
Jaime Contreras
In 1983, Professor Heim Beinart, who has studied the crypto-Jewish community of Ciudad Real in great detail, called attention to the importance attached in that community to family ties and kinship relations. Searching for formulas to explain the cultural community which the Judaizing conversos of La Mancha had apparently established, Beinart concluded that endogamous matrimony was the essential cause behind the "manifestations of a common destiny"; manifestations which the entire cryptic community expressed openly with the violent eruption of the Tribunal of Faith in the final years of the fifteenth century."[1]
Indeed, it was Julio Caro Baroja who, thirty years ago, spoke of the need to elaborate a "cohesive and organic" history of the Spanish crypto-Jews from a more ethnohistoric perspective. Don Julio recommended that, for such an arduous task, it would be necessary to study "a couple of thousand Inquisition trials," which would eventually lead to the "history of a few hundred families united by a system of lineages." Caro Baroja thus defined a very precise operative method.[2]
As of today, neither the methodology proposed by Caro, nor the attention of H. Beinart, has elicited much enthusiasm among historians of the Hispanic crypto-Jews. It must be recognized that within specialized historiography, the judeoconverso families and their systems of lineage and kinship have hardly attracted much attention. Nonetheless, there is an obvious need to understand the mechanisms that develop within the limits imposed by blood ties, kinship, or relation through marriage. Today, our historiography demands this knowledge. To strike off on that barely intuited path, to delimit its contours, to specify its des-
tiny, and to draw up its outline, are the principal objectives we propose for ourselves as a team of investigators.
Our goal is, without a doubt, ambitious, because tackling the problems presented by the judeoconverso minority from a multidisciplinary perspective is a very involved and complicated procedure. Initially, we are obliged to study previous works in order to construct the first basic levels of study. Obviously, neither the original manuscripts, nor the printed sources, and certainly not the topic's enormous bibliography were conceived of or elaborated in terms of our own original focus. But whatever the methods of study, the questions posed were always similar in both structure and form from the very origins of the converso problem. All historical periods have dealt with the same protagonists, clothed at times in similar garb and at other times in contrasting dress. We are familiar with all the characters: they are the Old Christians and the New Christians; they are the Jews, the Judaizers and the "marranos"; they are also the Inquisition, the Crown, the Church, and the rabbinical authorities of the Jewish communities of the Iberian Diaspora.
The questions ordinarily posed by historians to these protagonists stem from the fact that two religious communities existed—the one a majority and the other a minority—who lived out their relationships in an especially dramatic manner. This much is true, but the issue of the degree to which the members of one community identified themselves vis-à-vis the members of the other, and the degree to which orthodoxy defined itself as such in an antinomian relationship with heresy has produced an inevitably simplistic and excessively rigid methodological framework.
Religious overtones shaded questions formulated from the two sides. Did marranismo exist as a religious phenomenon, or, to the contrary, was it "invented" by the inquisitors? What is the significance of the term Judaizer? Did all the New Christians Judaize? These questions were posed repeatedly, and always from either side of the problem. Not surprisingly, the answers were also inevitably polemical, and always elicited rich and subtle interpretations.
As a result, the issue, always complex and always unfinished, has remained, in my judgment, without precise horizons. Inordinate and at times intentional attempts to establish one sole perspective as a means of targeting and understanding the problem have blocked other interpretations. In this case, the historian must understand his own limitations. Is it possible to render comprehensible and objective a phenomenon which, because of its nature, resists focus?[3] Secrecy and clandestinity, both inherent aspects of crypto-Jewish sociology, complicate
any attempt to understand its nature. The cryptic nature of the Judaizing communities was concomitant with the unstable grounding of their very existence. Heretics in the eyes of the Catholic majority, they also experienced extreme difficulties in being acknowledged as Jews by the Hebrew communities abroad. This lack of adaptation to either system created a constant and permanent tension in the daily existence of the cryptic community; there was no alternative but to accept the situation and to make of it a customary form of internal coexistence. Nevertheless, and in spite of the relative guarantee of institutional security, this state of constant anxiety inevitably generated multiple responses from both individuals and groups. Both the actual situations and the social rejection that caused them resulted in a voluminous documentation from both the Catholic authorities and their Jewish counterparts which, while extremely interesting, is profoundly biased as well. The conversos who Judaized did not bequeath to posterity their own testimony; on the contrary, they were obliged to accept the fact that this task would be undertaken by others: at times, by their bitterest enemies, the inquisitors, and at others, by the Jews of the Diaspora, who frequently demonstrated a manifest unwillingness to integrate them into their communities.
As a result of all this, it is an incontrovertible fact that many historians, of whatever leaning, have found themselves unfailingly "trapped" by the seduction of the documents they have studied, documents not necessarily objective. Partly because of the documental bias and mainly because of the unilateral methodology applied, historiography on Iberian marranismo has turned out to be oversimplified and dualistic. There are two principal positions: (1) that marranismo is clandestine Judaism and (2) that marranismo existed only in the minds of the inquisitors and those who supported them.
These two entrenched conclusions have made it difficult to distinguish the diverse variations existing between one position and the other. More relativized positions need to be adopted: neither do all the trials begun by the Holy Office convey the image of a conscious and orthodox Judaism, nor can we assume from the rabbinical response that many conversos did not wish to Judaize. Liturgical obligations or traditional religious observances do not in themselves define the religion of the marranos. We are not in the presence of a religious creed that conforms to fixed or stable concepts. Clandestinity and secrecy reduced the religious socialization and allowed for a varied religious individuality; the trials of the Holy Office provide an extensive collection of examples in this regard.
Consequently, marranismo resulted less in a ritualistic and observant
practice than in a consciously motivated integration within Mosaic law,[4] undertaken individually or socially. There are many paths that lead to such a level of consciousness, but the ethnic bonds of a community are the first basic step toward initiating the process of social and religious integration. In other words, the term so commonly used in the documents of the times defining the converso ethnically as a "New Christian of Jewish origin" is merely the starting point. From this there developed a more or less singular religious practice—crypto-Jewish religiosity—which, under favorable circumstances, may have culminated in the complete acceptance of actual Judaism. This usually occurred when the individual, having to flee from the Iberian peninsula, arrived at a Jewish community in one of the other European countries.
This process may explain the existence of the cryptic communities of Iberian marranismo and their logical migratory patterns toward the diverse Jewish communities of Europe.[5] This produces, in turn, a "natural" evolution that begins with the New Christian and concludes with the Jew; the marrano is the intermediary stage.[6] There do not appear to be many doubts in this respect. Therefore, ethnic issues were mainly responsible for social segregation and juridical-administrative differentiation. To be marginalized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, it was not necessary to have been tried as a Judaizer by the Tribunal of Faith; all that was necessary was to have a few drops of Hebrew blood. Only by concealing the presence of these drops could the individual begin to aspire to an accepted social status that conferred both respect and honor. A vast amount has been written on these issues,[7] and it also has been pointed out quite clearly that money could expunge dubious ancestry and create ancient and time-honored lineages. Through these means, one purchased the required reputation; yet one error, one small, barely perceptible but intentional indiscretion was sufficient to destroy the entire achievement. When this occurred, the affected individual suffered immediate exclusion. While such a thing rarely happened, the important fact is that it did happen, and this revealed the extent to which lineage, belonging to a clan line, and ethnic origin were the central issues in the drama of coexistence between the majority and the minority. Race and lineage, both separately and barely differentiated from each other, represented the primary characteristics of social exclusion.[8]
The statutes on purity of blood, that neurotic obsession to "stir up entombed bones," as Quevedo wrote,[9] functioned as a means of attacking the social and juridical rights of the New Christians, but what is particularly interesting is that they also made more selective the social mechanisms that led to marriage. The "quality of the blood" was trans-
mitted through lineage and could be purchased with money; yet, like wine that must age with time, only marriage guaranteed it. For this reason the politics of marriage were of vital importance.
The letters patent of nobility and the certificates of purity, results of tedious and complex secret investigations, were superimposed onto the inexorable and selective economic process and provoked a sharply defined and strengthened reaffirmation of the traditional social groups and estates. The social expansion timidly carried out in the first forty years of the sixteenth century was aborted after the generalization of the statutes. Lineages were once more reaffirmed, family ranks closed ever more tightly among themselves, and clans and kinships were consolidated. Very few possibilities remained for persons of questionable background who had not succeeded in establishing themselves within respected and highly regarded lineages.
If, as we know, the Edicts of Faith published by the Holy Office occasionally served as propaganda through which many crypto-Jews, heretofore ignorant of the religion they wished to practice, reaffirmed their faith,[10] the statutes also allowed many New Christians, isolated within the vast expanse of the majority, to discover their unique identity. It was obviously a cultural identity that consequently reinforced the bonds defining them—both social bonds and ethnic ties.[11]
In examining the wide range of implications which these premises suggest, my principal objective is to unravel the complex familial structures developed internally within the ever unstable cryptic communities; such an objective demands as well that we focus carefully on the relations between these judeoconverso groups and the surrounding environment, that is, the Old Christian majority.
We must therefore adopt a rigorously selective criterion with regard to the "diverse messages" transmitted by the documentation of the period. As is well known, the documentation of the time exhibits a virulent anti-Semitism, sometimes latent and at other times quite explicit. The image presented in this vast quantity of paper is stereotypical, but no less real for this reason. The Judaizer is a permanent protagonist in daily reality. His presence is constant—always necessary but always uncomfortable. He embodies adverse stereotypes; he is the typified enemy, the opposing archetype who permits self-affirmation by means of negation. The Judaizer is the expiatory victim, the most hated antisocial agent because he is the heretic par excellence and, affirming the magic aspect of collective existence, he is the cause of all the evils that afflict the realm.
The image, most definitely stereotypical, that emerges from these
mountains of books, documents, and treatises reveals a rarefied cultural atmosphere that logically corresponds to the collective parameters of the Catholic majority. Constant references to this stereotype have slowly formed a strategy of exclusion silencing all divergent manifestations. Uniformity has been imposed and thought has become monolithic.
The polemic over the statutes of purity, described in meticulous and detailed form by Albert A. Sicroff, exemplifies the inexorable tendency to suppress all differences. Sicroff demonstrates how certain positions that emerged triumphant at the end of the process had been very weak at the start. The supporters of the statutes increased in number over time, suggesting the existence of two "periods" of diverse evolution, at the end of which social coexistence fossilized. The various options were polarized into two essential positions: the dominant groups and the excluded ones. The former defined themselves through racial purity, noble lineage, virtuous reputation, and orthodox religion. Wealth was also an attribute. The excluded groups, in contrast, were so defined by the absence of all of these factors.[12]
There were many New Christians, crypto-Jews who accepted their marginalized condition and used it to cement their identities; they viewed their isolation as the feature that most defined them. Thus, in the face of religious persecution, they reconfirmed their desire to Judaize; in the face of social rejection, they reaffirmed their clandestine relations; in the face of the contempt and political neglect of their king, they collaborated with his enemies;[13] and finally, in the face of the baroque exaltation of "the lineage of the peasants," they defined a premeditated familial strategy, distinctly endogamous, as an essential means of ensuring the survival of their ethnic lineage.
Obviously, we cannot deduce a monolithic uniformity in either social structure, belief, or behavior. The attitudes learned in the bosom of the community, as well as those acquired in the contacts with foreign synagogues (aljamas ), blended with difficulty within the limited and asphyxiating boundaries of clandestinity. There, the pressure from the majority was felt as an oppressive burden. It was not easy to resist, and on many occasions the weakness of the cryptic system was unable to withstand it. It was therefore necessary to maintain, among individual tendencies and general requirements, a certain degree of laxity that would guarantee coexistence, minimizing the risk of flight and the profound estrangement which, tragically and irreversibly, resulted in the Holy Office.
Of all the elements that assured the cohesion of the cryptic group, two stand out: the unity of faith and the solidarity of blood ties. Américo
Castro, with remarkable intuition, discovered the enormous importance that the Hebrew community of the Hispanic kingdoms gave to the issue of "blood." When Castro studied the emergence of the statutes, he saw in them the triumph of the Christian "caste" over the Hebrew "caste," a triumph based precisely on a particularly Jewish characteristic: the interest in maintaining at all costs their own specific singularity. Castro's thesis, bold and original, provoked angry and, at times, bitter reactions. This is not the occasion to repeat past dissensions that can only be understood within their social and intellectual context; yet today, when many historians, whether they are Jewish or not, investigate these themes, they arrive at hypotheses quite similar to those formulated earlier by Américo Castro. The topic of blood and lineage is one of these overworked themes.
The Hebrews, argued don Américo, boasted of possessing pure and ancient blood; they thus displayed pride in having an ancestry at least as long and ancient as that of the Old Christians. They considered themselves descendants of a superior ancestry that conferred attributes of nobility upon them. In their theories, the Hebrew minority followed the same arguments as the Old Christians. They explained, for example, that the exaltation of blood and lineage was not, in and of itself, strictly a racist formulation. This was not a mechanistically physiological or biological racism but rather the nourishing of a collective sentiment that inherits the consciousness of a past tradition, culture, and collective family. In the same way that they operated for the Old Christians, the laws of heredity—biological laws—did not alone transmit the blessing of a Jewish ancestry; moral and cultural values acquired in the mythical and courageous past were what determined the quality of blood. Lineage was the end of this process. Lesser nobility, nobility, and purity of blood formed the essential triumvirate of the Iberian Jews' social ethic, which they defended with the same energy as the Christian apologists: "Do not try to shame me by calling my parents Hebrews. Certainly that is what they are, and I desire it so: if near-antiquity is nobility, then who is more ancient?" Alonso de Cartagena eloquently defended his Hebrew ancestry.[14]
The antiquity of those mythical lineages lost in the past was what transmitted the honor, respect, and reputation which the Old Christians claimed exclusively for themselves. The Iberian Jews and New Christians developed an imitative strategy as anti-Semitism was unleashed and, encouraged by popular hatred, the justice system, with its Christian bias, penetrated the synagogues. The contempt of the masses extended everywhere, the Jews' protectors lost power, and the Crown acceded to
the cries for extermination. During those years of violence, Jewish Spain and the newly converted proudly exhibited the antiquity of their lineages. This was a tardily awakened consciousness, since the ghetto had already been formed and its violent siege presaged terrible fatalities. That "historical" consciousness which rejected exclusion was deeply resented by the Christian majority. The palace priest exemplifies this attitude: "They [the Jews] pretended to supreme excellence, presuming that in the entire world there were no better people, neither more discreet nor more respected than they, being of the lineage of the tribes of Israel."[15]
The lineages of Israel, therefore, were ancient. Nobility, virtue, and pure and respected blood: these were the parameters Castro considered fundamental to the Hispanic Hebrews. They are not, in principle, new arguments, but nevertheless it is interesting to see how other historians, with another focus and different documentation, have emphasized the same themes that obsessed Castro.
A recent study by Swetschinski on the Jewish communities of Amsterdam during the seventeenth century stresses the social differentiation of the Sephardic Jews as compared with the Ashkenazi branch. In the city of Amstel, the Jews who had emigrated from the Iberian peninsula acted as if they were superior to natives of other areas. Swetschinski, studying the apologetic writings of the founders of the "Portuguese" community, notes the constantly brandished argument: "the superiority of the Hebrews originally from Sefarad."[16] Mosés Aron ha Leví, chronicler of the recently established community, argued that the Iberian Jews who settled in Amsterdam had brought with them the ancestry of their blazoned lineages. Daniel Levi de Barrios, the most prolific of all the Jewish writers who wrote in Castilian in Amsterdam, referring to the origin of his brothers, could not find more authoritative terms than "purity of blood" and "superior lineage." Daniel Levi de Barrios was so "Hispanicized" that Scholberg, his principal scholar, generalizes that "the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam seem very Spanish in this respect."[17]
Thus, the bourgeois and "tolerant" Amsterdam of the mid-seventeenth century hosted a Jewish community of Iberian origin which, having fled from the Holy Office, was as much obsessed with lineage as were the Old Christians. This obsession was their governing feature and was what distinguished them most clearly from Jews who were emigrants from other areas. Escaping from a closed and secret situation, those Jews who in former days had survived the persecution of the Tribunal of Faith knew better than anyone else that only through blood alliances could they preserve their religious beliefs.
In this as in many other issues, Revah, when studying the "Bocarro-Francés" Jewish clan, understood the interests of family ties and, consequently, the singular importance of marriage for the community.[18] It was therefore essential to employ the appropriate strategy. Only those unions which faced the future with the weight and the duty—ultimately, the heritage—of the past could sustain the magic of the lineage, and with it, tradition, honor, and esteem.
Here we have the Jewish family or the Judaizing family constituting itself as a basic element of social and cultural cohesion. The classical endogamy of the Judeo-Christians was ultimately necessary, because it alone allowed religious affirmation, facilitated the process of socialization, and also assured the reproduction and subsequent development of economic structures. The judeoconverso family thus fulfilled three principal functions: it ensured faith, preserved the entity of lineage, and made possible the attainment of wealth.
Historians of the conversos have scarcely questioned this triple familial function. In this regard, the partial and myopic vision of the historian has portrayed a false and incomplete image of the conversos. We do not know them as forming part of a social group, or within their familial organization, or as participating in their own specific cultural world; nor do we know them, with rare exceptions, as individuals, persons in and of themselves. Our knowledge is limited to an image conveyed by the literature of the period and the documents of the Holy Office, and that image is particularly biased. In the inquisitorial documents, their predominant role is that of victims, and they are recognized as such in the formal and often tragic language of the penal trials. We have rarely sought any meanings beyond this image; we must therefore find and decipher the documents. Histories of the family, lineages, and kinships are, in themselves, suggestive and novel vantage points which the historian cannot ignore.
Caro Baroja has shown us this path. As indicated above, he believed it necessary to write the history of those "hundreds of lineages." But when striking off on that path, we discover that the methodology is unknown to us and that our lack of precision forcefully limits our steps.
Nevertheless, as we know, research on the history of the family has increased since the decade of the 1960s. This growth is due to the qualitative evolution occurring in historical demographic studies.[19] Through the analysis and the quantification of natural factors of population, this discipline has shifted toward the study of the social aspects that develop around the family structure such as types of marriages, transmission of belongings, access to property, and localization and analysis of pa-
tronage. The history of the family is thus an immense field where the interdisciplinary nature of the social sciences may well demonstrate its effectiveness. Whatever the future directions may be, some thoughts have already been firmly established: the family is the key institution sustaining the social system, and this occurs through two opposing yet complementary functions: on the one hand, the transmission of sociocultural values through the biological laws of heredity, and on the other hand, the "control" of any dysfunctional element that might arise within the family.[20] In summary, contemporary cultural anthropology reminds us that the family in the Habsburg period reproduces itself, thus making "commercial strategies" possible, regulating the relations among its members, and perpetuating the force of authority by sacralizing its effects.
Nonetheless, such conclusions result from theoretical speculation, since concrete empirical analysis as applied to past eras is in the initial stages. Moreover, the scarcity of this type of research on minority groups is overwhelming. With such a limited background, to investigate the systems of familial organization of an ethnoreligious minority that also lives cryptically and whose real existence is not legally recognized by the majority implies an effort that remains to be carried out in all its aspects.[21]
The history of the crypto-Jewish family must be patiently reconstructed. Such an objective requires an initial premise on the part of the investigator: in the crypto-Jewish community, the family was always a component of internal solidarity. Let us begin, then, at the beginning.
During the fifteenth century, when the intensity of the conversion process paralleled institutional violence, the converts from Judaism, the New Christians, developed an entire strategy in order to reach the highest levels of the urban aristocracy. Thirty years ago, Francisco Márquez Villanueva explained that the objective was to control many municipal offices.[22]
Essential and complementary elements intervene in that historical process of social and political ascent; one is the economic level attained and the other, the bonds of solidarity woven by family and lineage. The second element is conditional upon the first, as the essential means that assured the marginalized minority's economic success was the harmonious, supportive, and operative inclusion of the individual within the family clan. Only when this had been accomplished could the individual ascend socially and politically, obtaining municipal offices, positions that ensured a certain immunity. This was surely the social direction of the
recently converted minority, whose specific marginality halfway between the two religions gravely endangered their existence as a group.
The propensity toward sociopolitical ascent originating in familial solidarity does not suggest a behavior unique to the crypto-Jews, but their only possible strategy. The dominant sociopolitical system was based not upon the individual but rather upon the larger kinship system. Today, it is obvious to everyone that the group's definitive component was to be found in the hierarchical relations of loyalty, and that such loyalty, a primary characteristic of private family relationships, constituted the fundamental public feature of political relationships as well. For this reason there was no possibility of promotion or of any kind of social recognition not based a priori in these primary structures. The converso, like any other individual, ascended socially and politically through channels attained by the clan and the "family" to which he belonged. The political importance of groups as defined by blood and lineage tainted public life with a sordid and, on occasion, unabashed struggle for higher levels of power. The conversos were not strangers to such conflicts. Márquez Villanueva writes very lucidly on this point: "The clan spirit of the converso cliques impelled the ascent, in the face of all opposition, of their diverse members through tactics as efficacious as they were rancorous and, in the long run, prejudicial against those who employed them."[23]
The "clan spirit" dominated political relations, and all pertinent obligations were derived from it. Given that the attained occupation or post was not an individual achievement but rather a triumph in which the clan played the main role, this same clan could also impose its own internal needs, the two most important being the "cession" by the individual of the office to a third party and the establishment of new ties or obligations of patronage. The degree of kinship relations was a well-known leverage, in the cession of sinecures or municipal offices and in the persistent interest in seeking the "protection" of a powerful house.[24]
Let us summarize: blood ties and kinship bonds, whatever their extent and degree of intensity, wove a tight network of interests and solidarities throughout Iberian society with hardly any individual exceptions. Such were the basic principles of social structures. The conversos followed the same system as the majority group, but their circumstances obliged them to reinforce it. The mere fact of belonging to an ethnic minority was in itself a segregating factor, aggravated besides by harsh religious repression; all of this thrust the conversos to the margins of the system. Internal cohesion thus became the sole essential condition for survival. At
the end of the fifteenth century, when the recently created Inquisition penetrated straight to the heart of the cryptic communities, they had still not found a better solution in their defense than to practice a closed endogamy. Mixed marriages (between Judaizing conversos and Old Christians) were not very frequent, and although there were exceptions, nuptials within the Judaizing group were always the norm.
This endogamous practice established networks of solidarity among most members of a community, and, by extension, it created connections with other small local communities to the point where, at the end of the fifteenth century, almost all communities were affected. The constant references to relatives and friends which abound in the procedural documents of the Holy Office indicate the extent to which the bonds of solidarity were extended far beyond the more precise limits of blood ties. Ethnic ties, family connections, and religious fellowship formed the defenses that guaranteed survival. Heim Beinart discovered a similar situation in Ciudad Real around 1480, which he describes in these terms: "At the end of two or three generations, [the conversos of Ciudad Real] had become one big family whose members were as powerful as ever."[25]
Obviously, a system structured in such a way could not be perfect. Its coherence was not totally guaranteed because it ultimately depended upon the degree of individual and social adhesion. Blind loyalty could not be counted upon, and the existing adhesions are explained by the subtle results and the dialectical play that were developed internally in consequence of the group's needs, expectations, and gratifications. The complexity of these relationships inevitably created frustrations—implicit or explicit—affecting either the individual or the group and constituting the breaches through which the repressive mechanisms of the majority were able to penetrate the interior of the community. The principal mission of the cryptic authorities was to prevent this from happening, giving warning and appealing urgently and anxiously to the community's internal solidarity. Their principal task was to avert the destructive effect of the talebearer. The Judaizers of many small communities had already experienced the devastating consequences brought about by the tribunal. The same thing always took place: the inquisitors penetrated through the breaches left open by private dissatisfactions. When this misfortune occurred, solidarity, which had been attained with such difficulty, was destroyed.[26]
The danger of intrusion was difficult to avoid given the constant fear one lived in: "They always live uneasily and in fear of the harsh Inquisition," wrote Levi de Barrios.[27] Even during the periods of minor repression, security was not guaranteed. Clandestinity and secrecy imposed a
tense and harsh way of life. The crypto-Jew not only had to protect himself from the "raids" of the tribunal but was also severely censured by many former compatriots who, now safely practicing Judaism in some foreign community, bitterly criticized the crypto-Jew's reluctance to flee, as they themselves had, in search of a safe port. Abandoning home and business, they had fled from idolatry in order to live the religious tenets of their faith.[28] The effects of their criticism on the crypto-Jew were thus very important, given the moral authority that such criticism wielded.
It was difficult to live in a state of permanent internal exile; the need to leave the ghetto and participate in some way in the public arena was urgently felt, even when it entailed adopting a false identity. While dangerous, crossing into the hostile exterior of the majority could also alleviate the seriously conflictive tensions that accumulated within the interior. Permanently forced to live a double life, the cryptic community paid dearly for its inherently deficient structure. A progressive loss of cultural patrimony, an increasing weakening of religious devotion,[29] and also the overwhelming presence of the majority weighing down forcefully upon any minority cultural spirit were to blame for the grave deterioration which the community inevitably suffered.[30]
It was necessary to counteract these deficiencies through compensatory means, which were not only helpful to the individual but provided bonds of solidarity for the group. One of these means was the economic influence held by the community as a whole, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We should, however, first consider some specific issues regarding the Jew's so-called aptitude for accumulating wealth. Like all generalizations, this is a simplistic distortion of historical reality. It is no longer possible to maintain that economic prosperity prevailed in all the Judaizing communities on the peninsula; examples proving the opposite abound everywhere, in Iberia as elsewhere. Need it be stated that neither the Jews nor the conversos constitute, in themselves, a specific social group in the production of capital of the period? One can easily demonstrate the presence of Hebrew blood, Jewish or converted, on each and every one of the rungs of the social ladder. Wealth is not a patrimony derived from ethnicity or beliefs. To affirm the opposite is to assume as true the classic typical anti-Semitic argument which endeavors to make a totality out of what can be no more than a partial reflection of reality. The strategy of stereotyping,[31] as we already know, consists of assimilating a partial reality (some conversos were wealthy) into a fictitious totality (all conversos were wealthy).
By affirming these basic principles, the historian does not obscure
reality: a minority of judeoconversos had amassed substantial patrimonies and risen to the highest levels of social prestige. Jewish men played crucial roles in the world of commerce, in business, and in government.[32] Although their participation in such activities assumes far more importance if we compare it with their numerical insignificance, it is also true that their contemporaries' view of this problem was biased, because of the perpetually distorting effects of official propaganda. But when it was said, for example, that "the pulse of commerce is sustained only by the merchants of the Hebrew caste,"[33] we should understand that such a judgment, while not totally accurate, did not convey a completely distorted image of reality. The so-called "businessmen" of the seventeenth century were made up of a contained group of wealthy conversos principally in Portugal.
The people were not too misguided when, humiliated by their poverty, they observed, in contrast, how wealth overflowed the homes of some New Christians. While it would be absurd to deny this fact, it has not been possible to measure its entire extent and significance, nor is this the moment to do so.
Nonetheless, we must ask what the reasons were for this acknowledged economic success. There is no single or direct answer, but an objective reading of Inquisition documents discloses several basic causes, one of which is the organic solidity of the kinship ties. This relation was pointed out above, as was the fact that even though research is scarce, some has been carried out.
In his study of the Bocarro-Francés family,[34] Revah furnished proof of the connections between its kinship ties and the commercial enterprises the family sustained. This is not the only example; in his investigation of the Sephardic communities of Hamburg and Altona, Kellembez[35] patiently worked out the complex networks of commercial contracts uniting them among themselves and with the conversos from the interior of the Iberian peninsula. This splendid work outlines a complex variety of commercial formulas structured and guided by the imperatives of kinship. Kellembez demonstrated with precise genealogical data that these well-known commercial ventures, expanded across oceans and characterizing the rise of early capitalism in the seventeenth century, were built upon the permanence of blood and kinship through marriage. Located throughout the commercial routes that linked other continents to Europe, many Jewish families maintained permanent commercial ties made possible only through kinship or affinity.
New Christians from Portugal and Castilian crypto-Jews who traded wool, for example, maintained close relations that merged together fam-
ily and business. The Judaizing conversos of the interior and Jews who had fled to the exterior organized commercial societies that at times extended to the coastal boundaries under family protection. Neither dispersion nor distance presented any kind of obstacle to families and businesses; on the contrary, the strength of the blood ties conferred fundamental advantages on such risky ventures.[36]
Commerce, whether domestic or destined for the great overseas routes, was the speculative activity par excellence. The most prosperous fortunes were based not on production, but on trade. The secret of a successful business lay in knowing how to exploit the price differential which a particular commodity could generate on its round through diverse markets. The merchant in charge of buying or selling required specialized agents, located in each and every one of the markets on the circuit. He needed to gain the trust of these agents. For this reason, the most suitable partner or employee either was a relative or belonged to the same lineage. Commerce functioned through strong ties of internal solidarity, and such "securities" constituted an essential condition for its development. This is not very difficult to document; we need only list the great fortunes originating in the Portuguese community of Amsterdam. The commercial emporia of Abraham Pereira, of Duarte Fernández, and of Jerónimo Nunes da Costa reveal a hierarchical family organization, with each member of the family assigned a specific task.
Let us summarize: there is no doubt that the history of the crypto-Jews of the Iberian peninsula demands new approaches in order to reveal the fundamental components of the life of this minority interiorized by their own clandestinity. We need to ask how cryptic families functioned. Yet this is only part of the problem. It would be too simplistic to convey the impression of a strong, solid, socially and culturally cohesive minority deriving those characteristics solely from its secret religion, without mentioning that, together with its integrating tendencies, the minority also experienced disintegrative factors and opposing tendencies.
If the study of the interiority of the crypto-Jews is suggestive and attractive, their external profile, their social life, is as much if not more so. In public the judeoconverso was an ordinary sort with no distinguishing characteristics. Like any other individual, he formed part of the complex mesh of social relations; he acted within the framework of duties and privileges inherent in a hierarchical society. He also shared in the consciousness that defined, socially, economically, and ideologically, the social group to which he belonged. The judeoconverso, upon leaving the "ghetto," could not avoid entering the corporate structures that
regulated everyday life. He belonged to guilds and confraternities and participated as well in the factions so frequent at the time. In each and every one of these, the importance of dual loyalty systems (bonds between two people which provide protection and benefit) took precedence over every other form of horizontal relationship. This primary system functioned throughout the entire social pyramid, weaving dense social networks, made hierarchical and vertical according to a set of rights and obligations that were unwritten but were always effective. The society as a whole was formed by a complex graded network of dual relationships that ascended to the apex of the pyramid, the position held by the nobility, the great protector and recipient of diverse loyalties.[37]
The patronage system thus defines relations of dependence whose essential cohesive elements are kinship and lineage. The crypto-Jew was no exception to the "patron-client" relationship. When, from the secret recess of his private life, the Judaizer went out into the world, he did so in obeisance to his noble patron and, like so many others, expected his protection in return. Whatever vantage point on the social pyramid we assume, the spectacle of a society "under patronage" is the same. The judeoconverso behaved the same way as any other individual. At court they depended upon this or that patron; Rodrigo Méndez Silva, for example, belonged to the Cortizo clan, which was very close to the Conde-Duque de Olivares.[38] The great physician and philosopher who fled from the Venetian ghetto, Fernando Cardoso, found himself "protected" by another illustrious Spanish personage: don Juan Alonso Enríquez de Cabrera, duke of Medina de Rioseco and admiral of Castile.[39] These are two examples of very well-known people, but there are many other unknown participants in the same system. To learn about these social mechanisms and to study the intricate network of interests is, ultimately, our essential objective.
Eight—
The Jew As Witch: Displaced Aggression and the Myth of the Santo Niño de La Guardia
Stephen Haliczer
From the perspective of the social historian, one of the greatest successes achieved by Habsburg Spain was its ability to avoid, in large measure, the massive witch-hunts that swept over most of the rest of Christian Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historians have generally ascribed to the Inquisition much of the credit for this achievement. As a highly respected institution with well-established jurisdiction over matters of heresy or other threats to the Catholic faith, the Inquisition was in a position to set the tone for the entire Spanish legal system regarding such offenses. Although the Holy Office never attained complete control over crimes involving witchcraft, its skeptical attitude toward much of the evidence produced in these trials, and its well-advertised role in ending the Navarre witch panic of 1609–1612 profoundly influenced the entire climate of public and learned opinion in ways that tended to discourage witch-hunting on a massive scale.
In most respects, however, early modern Spain was little different from other contemporary societies since it housed the same kind and degree of social and economic pressures that engendered witchcraft accusations elsewhere. Spain shared with other countries, for example, the stereotypical image of women as being morally and intellectually weaker than men and, as a result, more likely to be vulnerable to the temptations of the Devil.[1] Moreover, apart from the reassurance in matters of religion offered by the fact of the Inquisition's existence, early modern Spaniards experienced the same anxieties and insecurities as their contemporaries in France or Germany and were, therefore, equally concerned about the threat from supernatural forces to their everyday life.
For its part, the Inquisition's attitude toward witchcraft accusations can hardly be attributed to any enlightened rationalist negation of the power of the Devil. As late as 1631, seventeen years after Alonso de Salazar Frías's celebrated Seventh Report to the Inquisitor General, Gaspar Navarro published his Tribunal de la supersticion ladina, in which he explicitly accepted the reality of diabolical pacts, maleficia and the witch's sabbath and called for exemplary punishment of witches. The work frequently quoted from the famous Malleus Maleficarum in support of its arguments and carried with it the warm endorsement of Dr. Baltasar de Cisneros, inquisitorial cualificador of the Zaragoza tribunal.[2]
The Spanish rulers of the period were themselves haunted by the threat of foreign aggression and internal subversion, an atmosphere hardly conducive to calm in the face of the witch craze. One of these rulers, Charles II, was himself the reputed victim of witchcraft perpetrated by the royal confessor Froilán Díaz. In the Franche-Comté, Luxembourg, and other parts of the Spanish Netherlands, the governments of Philip II, III, and IV strongly encouraged the persecution of witches and in Luxembourg alone there were 355 executions between 1606 and 1650.[3]
Given the fact that the Inquisition never had complete control over these cases, its increasing concern for the niceties of legal procedure alone could hardly have prevented a witch craze. Indeed this is amply demonstrated by the situation in Navarre in 1610–1612 where local justices aided by certain parish priests carried out the initial arrests, tortured suspects unmercifully, and extorted confessions which were then eagerly and uncritically accepted by the inquisitors on the spot.[4]
Under sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social conditions, therefore, the only thing that could account for Spain's relative inactivity in the face of the European witch craze was the presence in that country of another target of displaced aggression, a target so firmly identified in the public mind with all that was evil and pernicious that it could readily substitute for the witch as the ultimate source of social evil.
During the fourteenth century, with the breakdown of the old toleration that had permitted Christian, Jew, and Moslem to live side by side in relative harmony, the Jew became more and more identified as the chief enemy of Christianity. By the time of the Cortes of Toro in 1371, the Jews were described as "rash and evil men, who sow corruption with impunity so that the greater part of our kingdom is ruined by them in contempt of Christians and the Catholic faith."[5] Ironically, this description came at a time when the Jewish communities had suffered griev-
ously during the recently concluded civil war between Pedro I and his half brother Henry of Trastámara.
By the 1380s the weakened condition of the Jewish communities and the relativistic philosophy then popular among Jewish intellectuals were producing numerous conversions.[6] After the rioting of 1391, Jews converted en masse, led by their rabbis, and from then on Spain's Jewish communities became smaller and more impoverished while the converted Jews grew in numbers, wealth, and political importance. By the middle of the fifteenth century, however, resentment of the conversos was giving rise to a polemical literature that rejected the possibility of their true conversion to Christianity and blamed them for all the crimes normally attributed to Jews. The most interesting and important of these writings was the Fortalitium Fidei (Fortress of the Faith) by the Franciscan Alonso de Espina, first published in 1460. The work is divided into four volumes, each dedicated to describing the iniquity of one of the four chief enemies of the Catholic faith: heretics, Muslims, Jews, and demons. For Espina, Jews and converts did not exist as a separate category; there were only "public Jews and secret Jews." Since conversos were secret Jews, they were naturally guilty of all the offenses traditionally attributed to Jews by European folk tradition, including profanation of Hosts and the murder of Christian children and the use of their blood or body parts in religious rituals. According to Espina, Jewish law, which is equally binding on both Jews and converts, commands the destruction of Christians and Christianity, which they actively strive to accomplish by starting fires, poisoning wells, and doing other evil deeds.[7]
It was left to the Spanish Inquisition, however, to officialize medieval demonological myths about Jews and apply them to Jewish converts to Christianity in such a way as to keep alive the flames of Spanish anti-Semitism long after the expulsion of the Jews themselves. This process began with the case of the so-called Holy Child (Santo Niño) of La Guardia when both Jews and converts were accused of working together to commit a crime of unimaginable horror which threatened the very existence of Christian Spain. So successful were the inquisitors in this that the La Guardia case served to create in the public imagination a kind of bogyman, a larger-than-life image of the Jew/converso who was at once child murderer, blood sucker, rebel, and demonic sorcerer who sought to reverse the divinely established order of things by destroying Christianity so that, according to Licenciado Vegas, the Holy Child's first chronicler, the Jews "would become the absolute lords of the earth."[8] It was this bogyman who provided the Spanish masses with an ideal object of displaced aggression capable of absorbing the sadomaso-
chistic fantasies and infanticidal impulses that provided the psychological force behind the witchcraft panics in other parts of Europe.
The complexity and sophistication of the Santo Niño legend stands out remarkably when it is compared to the closest contemporary ritual murder accusation of which we have a record: the case of Simon of Trent. This case, which began before Trent's podestá in 1475 and concluded in 1478, involved two elements that were traditionally a part of such accusations: extraction of blood for use in Jewish Passover rituals and the grotesque reenactment of the crucifixion of Christ in order to mock Christianity itself.[9]
Of these two elements, however, it was the use of the child's blood for ritual purposes that clearly predominated while the elements related to the mockery of the Passion and of Christians in general were weaker and clearly of secondary importance. Again and again, the podestá, whose earlier prejudices had been confirmed when a convert assured him that his own father had quaffed glasses of wine mixed with blood on Passover, forced his Jewish victims to enumerate the various ways in which they and their coreligionists used the blood of Christian children. Faithful to the traditions of the medieval ritual murder accusation, Samuel and Tobia, two of the most important defendants, admitted after repeated torture that they drank wine mixed with blood at Passover and they also sprinkled blood on the dough used to make the ritual matzos.[10] The court was also told that Christian blood was routinely fed to pregnant Jewesses so that their babies would be born fat and healthy.[11] In a clear reference to Christian fears about the use by Jews of Calamus Draco, the dark or blood-red gum of a species of palm, to relieve pain after circumcision, the Trent Jews were also forced to admit that they applied wine mixed with blood to the circumcision wound.[12]
Of course the truth, the fact that Judaism categorically prohibits its adherents from consuming blood as in Leviticus 17:11–13, did have a way of coming out in proceedings of this nature, and the case of Simon of Trent was no exception. At one point, the podestá asked Mose, one of the defendants, very directly why Jews drank Christian blood when their own law prohibits the consumption of blood in any form. Mose's reply neatly disposed of this issue, however, when he declared that the law applied only to the blood of animals and not to the blood of Christian children, which is consumed to show disdain for Christianity. After another session in the torture chamber, Mose even stated that leading rabbinical authorities had openly declared that it was no sin to consume the blood of Christians. In this way, through careful stage-management and the liberal application of torture, the podestá's potentially embar-
rassing question was turned into yet another way of adding to the trial record more "evidence" of the Jews' insatiable thirst for blood.[13]
Consistent with the emphasis placed on the ritual use of blood by Jews rather than the reenactment of Christ's Passion, the wounds allegedly inflicted on the hapless Simon seem almost haphazard rather than designed to imitate those inflicted on Christ. Simon's cheeks were torn with pincers, his body stuck with pins in many places and then the pincers were used to inflict a wound on his shins from which blood was collected.[14]
In contrast with the vivid imagery invoked to describe the collection and ritual use of Christian blood, the testimony that was forced out of the accused relating to their mockery of Christ's Passion seems strained and unnatural, almost as though the judges themselves were less than convinced of its centrality to the case. In the first place, although Simon was allegedly crucified, this was almost an afterthought since he received most of his wounds before his arms were extended to form a cross and he died shortly thereafter.[15] Furthermore, the description of the actual mockery of Simon's body is clumsy and childlike; the Jews were even made to testify that they had stuck their tongues out and shown their bare buttocks to the corpse.[16]
The case of the Santo Niño de La Guardia involved six Jews and five conversos from the villages of La Guardia and Tembleque near Toledo and was tried between December 1490 and 16 November 1491, when the accused were burned at the stake. From its very inception, the trial unfolded in an atmosphere of intense anti-Semitism stirred up by the Inquisition's tremendous wave of prosecution against the converted Jews of the Toledo region beginning in 1486. Surprisingly enough, however, the case was not brought before the Toledo tribunal. Instead, it was heard by a special inquisitorial court convened under the watchful eye of Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada in the monastery which he himself had founded with money confiscated from the converted Jewish victims of the Holy Office: Santo Tomás of Avila.[17]
In the trial record, the blood libel itself represents only a minor chord in a complex variety of charges. Of course blood was allegedly drawn from the child's body and collected in an earthenware jug, but it was removed by Lope Franco, one of the accused, after the child was brought out for burial. Apart from this, the case omits any mention of the elements that normally comprised the blood libel and which figure so prominently in the Simon of Trent legend. Rather than concentrating on the ritual use of Christian blood by Jews, the case of the Santo Niño brings together a series of charges that are most often separated in
medieval anti-Semitic folk tradition. The affair of the Santo Niño was alleged to have begun as a Jewish plot to use black magic in order to destroy first the inquisitors and then all Christians. According to the confused and often contradictory testimony that was extorted from Yuce Franco, one of the tribunals' Jewish prisoners, this plot started as early as 1487 and involved the employment of Rabbi Abenamias, a master magician, living in Zamora.[18] Abenamias was to be responsible for casting an evil spell using a heart torn from the body of a Christian child and a consecrated Host, both of which would be obtained for him by the accused.[19]
Furthermore, the plotters were alleged to have gone to great lengths in order to imitate Christ's Passion down to the smallest detail. On 24 September 1491, Benito García, one of the hapless conversos, was accused of having carried the child to a cave near La Guardia where he had been nailed to a wooden cross, lashed repeatedly, and a crown of thorns placed on his head.[20] While the child was being beaten, his supposed torturers recited curses designed to mock Christ for whom the child was a substitute. Among other things, Christ was called a "traitor and deceiver who had preached lies against the Jewish faith," an "evil sorcerer who had sought to destroy the Jews and Judaism," and the "bastard son of a perverse and adulterous woman."[21] In this way, out of the pain and torment inflicted on their Jewish and converso victims, Avila's special inquisitors had managed to concoct an extraordinarily suggestive myth which lent itself easily to being further elaborated and made more horrifying by later authors.
We can see how this process began in the very first known account of the case, the Memoria muy verdadera de la pasion y martirio, que el glorioso martir, inocente niño llamado Cristobal, padescio . . . en esta villa de la guardia, written in 1544 by Licenciado Vegas, the apostolic notary of the village. In the Memoria verdadera the vague plot to destroy Christians through enchantment is assimilated to the tradition of Jewish poisoners that had cost so many innocent lives during the Black Death and other periods of unexplained epidemics. Drawing upon a French folktale from some time after the Black Death, Vegas makes the story of the Santo Niño begin in France with the frustrated attempt by several of the individuals involved in the case or their ancestors to poison the wells there with a magic powder made from the heart of a Christian child and a consecrated Host. They were successful in obtaining the Host but were thwarted in their efforts to secure the heart of a Christian child and were tricked into accepting a pig's heart instead.[22] Of course the maleficia that they were planning failed, but somehow these Jews or their descendants
found their way down to Castile, converted nominally to Christianity, and chose La Guardia as the ideal spot to try their enchantment because of its allegedly close resemblance to Jerusalem. But this time, instead of relying on the impoverished parents of the child to murder him and supply his heart as they had done in France, they determined to kidnap a child (whose name turned out to be Christobalico) and cut his heart out themselves after carrying out a mock crucifixion.[23]
It is in describing this crucifixion that Vegas gives free reign to his imagination, transforming the meager details contained in the tribunal's final sentence into a richly detailed imitation of Christ's entire Passion as suffered by the child martyr. According to Vegas's perfervid account, little Christobalico was first forced to carry a heavy cross up the hill to the cave where he was to be crucified. Before he was crucified he was given no less than 6,200 lashes, although we are told that the child informed his tormentors that only the last one thousand really hurt because they were more than Christ himself received.[24]
Vegas's account, which must have circulated widely in Toledo since it was copied by the converso Sebastián de Horozco (1510–1581), was incorporated into Licenciado Sebastián de Nieva Calvos's El niño inocente; hijo de Toledo y martyr en La Guardia . It is in this work, published in 1628, where the Jew/witch connection is made quite explicit. Jews and conversos involved in the Santo Niño affair are depicted as fiendish, physically repellent creatures acting with the support of the devil to carry out his purposes in the world. Benito García de las Mesuras, for example, is described as having an appearance so horrible as to "menace with destruction not only some poor innocent but even the most resolutely defended kingdom." His close associate, Garci Franco, had a "depraved expression" and was so ugly that "it would not be strange if he were to be the executioner of the wrath of heaven." Franco had such an evil reputation in La Guardia that mothers would frighten their noisy or disobedient children by threatening them with his appearance. For his part, Franco is said to have gloried in the hatred and abhorrence of his neighbors, which helped to keep his "vindictive rage against Catholics" at a fever pitch.[25] Like the witches described by Sprenger and Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum, Benito García, Garci Franco, and their companions had made an explicit pact with the Devil, who sought their perdition by convincing them that they could destroy using the very things with which God gave life to the body and the spirit: the human heart and the consecrated Host.[26]
After Vegas's account was published, the myth of the Santo Niño took hold of the popular imagination and became the subject of plays by Lope
de Vega and José de Cañizares and sermons by such popular preachers as Fray Damián López de Haro (Toledo Cathedral, 1614). Little Christobalico became a patron saint of La Guardia and his shrine received visits from such luminaries as Ferdinand the Catholic, Charles V, and Philip II.[27] The case also figured prominently in the anti-Semitic writings of the period, including Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo's fanatical Centenella contra los judios, where it served to demonstrate the "intense hatred" felt by Jews for Christianity.[28]
By the mid-sixteenth century, however, the story of the Santo Niño had become just one element in a pervasive anti-Semitism that was directed first against the Spanish conversos and later against the Portuguese New Christians who came to Spain after the union of the two crowns in 1580. Thus, in Spain and Portugal anti-Semitism was not just a social atavism but had real potential victims who were persecuted and discriminated against as much for their racial origins as for their religious practices. The infamous limpieza de sangre statutes that required genealogical investigations designed to prevent the descendants of Jews from entering honorable corporations only really took hold after the major centers of Spanish crypto-Judaism had been exterminated.[29] For its part, the Inquisition kept popular anti-Semitism at a fever pitch with spectacular show trials directed at prominent New Christian financiers like Joao Nunes Saraiva and his brother Henrique, who appeared at the auto de fe of 1636 in spite of their staunch protestations of fervent Roman Catholic belief.[30] Spain's Old Christian ruling elite was quick to see the hand of the Jew behind any threat to the faith. As early as 1556 Philip II expressed the view that "all the heresies which have existed in Germany and France . . . have been sown by the descendants of Jews."[31]
Interestingly enough, at around the same time that anti-Semitic ordinances were being passed by more and more Spanish institutions, the Spanish Inquisition began staking out a moderate position for itself on the witchcraft issue. In 1526, just one year after the Franciscan Order adopted a limpieza statute, the Inquisition held an important meeting in Granada to discuss its policy toward the witchcraft trials that were beginning to take place with increasing frequency in northern Spain. After careful deliberation, four of the ten inquisitors present, including future Inquisitor General Hernando de Valdés, voted that witches only went to the Sabbath "in their imagination." Those present at the meeting also decided that henceforth witches should be tried by the Holy Office because the murders that witches confessed might be mere illusions.[32]
In spite of the lack of unanimity on the issue of the Sabbath, the 1526 meeting set the tone for the Inquisition's attitude toward witchcraft
cases. In 1538, when witches were accused of having caused harvest failures and other evils, the local inquisitor was instructed to explain that these things are "either sent by God for our sins or are a result of bad weather, and that witches should not be suspected." In August 1614, in reaction to the Logroño auto de fe of 1610 at which six persons accused of witchcraft were burned, the Suprema officially adopted a skeptical attitude toward the crimes supposedly committed by witches and embodied that attitude in a set of instructions meant to guide local inquisitorial tribunals.[33] In fact, the 1614 instructions changed little because, with the sole exception of the inquisitors of Logroño in 1609–1610, local inquisitors tended to be extremely unwilling to hand down harsh sentences in cases that would have earned the death penalty in France or the Holy Roman Empire during the same period.[34]
By officializing medieval anti-Semitic folk traditions and extending them from the Jews to the conversos through a well-publicized show trial, the Spanish Inquisition made sure that anti-Semitism and not Scholastic witch theory would answer the early modern Spaniards' craving for an object of social aggression. Moreover, even though France and the Holy Roman Empire shared many of the same folk beliefs about Jewish iniquity and diabolism, Jews could not provide them with an effective object for collective anxiety and frustrations. The Jews of France had been expelled in 1394 and, even though the decree was repeated in 1615, the sight of Jews was so rare in France that they were regarded as an exotic sight when Frenchmen met them while traveling abroad.[35] In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France witches and Huguenots assumed a "Jewish" role and were widely accused of many of the same things of which the Jews had been accused in former times.[36] In the Holy Roman Empire most Jews were expelled during the sixteenth century and both Catholic and Protestant focused on the witch as an ideal scapegoat for social ills.[37] Only Spain and Portugal among the great European states of the early modern period could combine theories of Jewish diabolism and implacable hatred of the true faith with the actual presence on their territories of large numbers of persons of Jewish origin. Significantly, serious witch persecution in Spain was mainly confined to the Basque region, precisely the area that had had least contact with Jews in the Middle Ages. For the rest of the country the converted Jew substituted for the witch as a pariah, reflecting through antithesis and projection society's most ingrained fears and repressed longings.
Perpetuated in plays, paintings, and histories down to 1955 when Ramón Saravia published his El Santo Niño de La Guardia through a Catholic press specializing in children's books, the myth of Jewish in-
iquity represented by the Santo Niño legend has contributed powerfully to that curious Spanish phenomenon: anti-Semitism without Jews. Even today, in a Spain increasingly secular, pragmatic, and cosmopolitan, the legend of the holy child prowls around like the ghost of past intolerance. Christobalico, the holy martyr, remains the patron Saint of La Guardia, and the Church, which in the mid-1960s disavowed the Simon of Trent blood libel, continues to support and profit financially from the annual celebrations that commemorate the creation of the far more dangerous anti-Semitic myth of the Santo Niño de La Guardia.
Nine—
On Knowing Other People's Lives, Inquisitorially and Artistically
Joseph H. Silverman
The epigraph for my essay comes from the play by Lope de Vega, El niño inocente de La Guardia . Its words—spoken by a Jew—are a dramatic summation of many significant aspects of this conference:
What King and Queen are these [Ferdinand and
Isabella] who
through such chimeric schemes
—based on secret counsel—
would send into exile those
who scarcely offend them?
What flames are these, rekindled
from ash by Dominican hordes?
What new Cross is this, black and white,
that delights the Catholics so?
What new mode of scrutiny and
legal system have we here?
Why are trials now held in secret?
Oh, if only Spain had never known such rulers!
Woe unto us, exiled from our own
fatherland in such misery!
The suffering that so long ago was foretold
has not yet ceased and our
punishment is unending.
(Pp. 59–60)
In an unforgettable moment of epiphanic self-revelation, the squire in the anonymous sixteenth-century novel Lazarillo de Tormes confesses to his young servant that, if he had a chance to serve a noble master, he
Fig. 6.
Auto de fe by Pedro Berruguete.
would—among other virtuous (!) acts—"be malicious, mocking, and a trouble-maker, a malsín , among those of the house and outsiders; [he'd] go prying and trying to know other people's lives so [he] could tell his master about them. And [he'd] do all kinds of other things of this sort which are the vogue in palaces today and please the nobility well" (p. 57). As Covarrubias informs us in his Tesoro de la lengua , the malsín, a word of Hebraic derivation, is "that individual who secretly warns the authorities of the transgressions of others with evil intention and self-interest, and to perform this function is called malsinar" (p. 781b).
The phrase to know other people's lives in this context, closely allied with the activities of the malsín, persuaded me to offer, in 1961, a very negative appraisal of the squire, in contrast with Azorín's judgment of him as the most noble and worthy in Spanish history. But, more importantly, the words saber vidas ajenas , "to know other people's lives" were to become a signpost in my reading and teaching, which in the early 1950s were influenced by the irresistible imperative dimension of the writings and person of Américo Castro. And so, over the years, I collected examples of the phrase, in its exact form or in words that suggested its meaning, which inevitably led me to see the aspects of Golden Age literature I now want to evoke, basing myself on Mordecai M. Kaplan's premise that the full meaning of any text cannot be derived from the contemplation of the text itself, apart from the social, economic, psychological, and intellectual setting to which it belongs.
Antonio de Guevara, who always seems to be saying more than his words denote, even in those commonplace truths and fabulous lies that he manipulates between the remote past and his own moment, writes:
Among the inhabitants of Crete it was customary, even obligatory, not to dare ask any visitor from a foreign land who he was, what he wanted, and from where he had come, under penalty of being whipped or sent into exile. And the purpose involved in promulgating such laws was to rid men of the temptation to be curious, that is to say, to want to know other people's lives and not pay attention to their own. . . . For what men seem to devote most of their time to is asking and investigating what their neighbors are doing; what they're involved in, how they support themselves, with whom they have dealings, where they go, what places they enter and even what they're thinking; because it is not enough that they insist on asking, they even presume to guess . . . For this reason Plato said: "Know thou, if thou knowest not . . . , that the sum of all our philosophizing is to persuade and counsel men that each one should be the judge of his own life and not be concerned to scrutinize the lives of others ." (Menosprecio , 30–36)
It goes without saying—though I'll say it anyway—that despite his reference to Plato's "Know thyself" and the realm of philosophy, Guevara is really talking about what Francisco Márquez termed "el problema del rigor inquisitorial" (p. 350). Elsewhere, becoming more specific about the potential danger and destructiveness involved in knowing other people's lives, that is, saber vidas ajenas as a weapon of an Inquisition-crazed society, he observes that "I have never seen a man insult another without prying into the life he was leading, without scrutinizing his blood line, [every branch and twig of his genealogical tree] . . . or without disinterring his ancestors" (pp. 375–382). These last remarks appear in a letter addressed to a friend who had called recent converts to Christianity "dogs, Moors, Jews, and pigs." With even greater force and specificity, Guevara writes that
one solitary blemish will dishonor an entire generation. A stain on the lineage of some country bumpkin affects no one beyond him, but a stain on an hildalgo's blood affects his entire family, because it sullies the reputation of his forebears, it serves to disinter his ancestors, it leads to the investigation of his living relatives, and it corrupts the blood of those yet to be born. (Pp. 441–442)
Now, Guevara is writing these last words in answer to an Italian gentleman who had sought to implicate Fray Antonio in the disappearance of a vial of perfume. But we can hardly believe that this is the kind of offense that would destroy a family's reputation retrospectively and proleptically. Guevara's broader and deeper meaning—his condemnation of irrational intolerance—is more apparent against the background of an earlier remark to his Italian accuser: "I, sir, am determined to pay no attention to your insult, nor to respond with anger to your letter, for I take much more pride in the religious order I belong to than in the pure blood of my ancestors . . ." (p. 440).
Alonzo de Orozco, in his Victory of Death , proclaims:
O sinner, you who go lost and wandering through the sea of life! Do you want to know why every passion stirs you and draws you after it? The reason is that you forget death, because it seems to you that you are immortal . . . In the dead man's house there is the only true philosophy . . . , but in the gatherings of the living they speak of other people's lives, and not being content to speak ill of the living, they engage in a greater cruelty: they disinter the dead, with great offense to God and infamy to those who died. (P. 136 n. 7)
It is scarcely necessary to mention that the dead alluded to here are the ancestors of New Christians, or that the disinterring of the dead is an
analogue of the inquisitorial practice of exhuming and burning the mortal remains of discovered secret Jews. In 1580—as C. R. Boxer has noted—the remains of the great pioneer of tropical medicine, Garcia d'Orta, "were exhumed and solemnly burned in an auto de fe held at Goa, in accordance with the posthumous punishment inflicted on crypto-Jews who had escaped the stake in their lifetime" (p. 11). For the Judeo-Christian Mateo Alemán, those who dug for this kind of information were like hyenas "who nourish themselves on the dead bodies they disinter" (1:48). Through the animal imagery Alemán communicated what Stephen Gilman called the full horror of inquisitorial dehumanization (p. 179). Juan de Zabaleta observed that "the malicious curiosity of men is so penetrating that it perceives blemishes in the bones of those who lie buried" (p. 247). And Gracián—writing with aphoristic density—recommends that "one should not be in life a book of vital statistics, an archive of genealogies and family traditions, for to concern oneself with the infamy in other people's lives is usually an indication of one's own tainted reputation. . . ." "In such matters," he concludes, "the one who digs the deepest will be most covered with mud," for which reason one must avoid at all costs "the effort to be a walking registry of others' ignominy, which is to be, though alive, like a soulless and despised public record of the Inquisition's trials and convictions" (p. 85 no. 125). In Quevedo's Buscón , don Pablillos's mother is imprisoned by the Inquisition of Toledo "because she disinterred corpses," but not because she did it in order to know other people's lives or to destroy a reputation by discovering some trace of Jewish blood, as an inquisitor in her own right, but because, as a witch with tainted blood no less, she literally disinterred freshly buried bodies, so that "in her house were found more legs, arms, and heads than in a shrine for miracles" (p. 94). The meaning of "to know other people's lives," then, in all these contexts and any number of others that could be cited, tells us something about the inquisitorial bent of the world in which Cervantes lived while writing Don Quixote , a world in which these words from La Celestina had disastrous validity: "When you tell someone your secret, your freedom is gone" (p. 57). In Cervantes's Colloquy of the Dogs , Cipión suggests to his friend Berganza that they should take turns relating their lives, "because it will be better to spend the time in telling their own lives than in delving into the lives of others ." At another point, while discussing police officers and notaries, Cipión observes that not all notaries are corrupt, "for there are many notaries who are good, faithful, law-abiding, and eager to please without harming anybody; for not all of them extend lawsuits, or advise both parties, or pocket more than what they're entitled to; nor do they
go searching and prying into other people's lives to put them under suspicion with the law [or the Inquisition]."
In another vein, but even closer to my subject, are these words spoken yet again by Cipión, who knows something about the difficulties of finding a decent job:
The lords of the earth are very different from the Lord of Heaven. The former, before they accept a servant, first examine his lineage as if they were looking for fleas, then they scrutinize his qualifications and even wish to know what clothes he has. But to enter God's service the poorest is the richest, the humblest is the man of most exalted lineage, and so long as he sets out to serve him with purity of heart [not of blood], God orders his name to be written in his wage-book and assigns him such rich rewards that in number and excellence they surpass all his desires.
"All this, friend Cipión, is preaching," says Berganza, and of course it is. But it was a sermon that Moorish dogs (perros moros ) barked and Jewish pigs (marranos judíos ) squealed, that New Christians and even some Old Christians preached, with the hope of achieving in Spain an open society, that kind of society which—in the words of the spiritual New Christian Henri Bergson—"is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity. A dream dreamt, now and again, by chosen souls, it embodies on every occasion something of itself in creations, each of which, through a more or less far-reaching transformation of man, conquers difficulties hitherto unconquerable" (p. 251).
In Hispanic terms it was a utopian dream that a neutral society might awake from the nightmare of history, offering neutral spaces and public places where the descendants of Moors, Christians, and Jews might mingle civilly and socially, a social system in which differences in culture made no difference in society, so that different peoples could survive and flourish in and through their differences. But what was to prevail in its place was the messianic dream of the Hispano-Christians expressed in the words of Hernando de Acuña: "una grey y un pastor, solo en el suelo," "One flock and one shepherd, alone on earth."
Before looking at the positive aspects of knowing other people's lives as portrayed in Don Quixote , let me provide a few more examples of the oppressive aspects of the phenomenon. Let us hear a brief anecdote that appears in two Lope de Vega plays and in the Segunda parte de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes by Juan de Luna.
In Lope's Mirad a quién alabáis (Look at Whom You're Praising), we read:
A Jewish swindler and cheat,
one of those that abound in the world,
had a pear tree whose fruit
he praised to one and all.
Its renown spread so far and wide
that an official of the Inquisition
sent a page of his to request
a bowl of the pears that he had grown.
The Jew became greatly alarmed
for, though it was cold weather at the time,
the slightest fear seemed to set him ablaze
[recalling, of course, the flames of the
Inquisition]. So, he put an ax to its trunk
and when at last he saw it fall,
in order to have no further cause for fear,
he sent the tree itself to the Inquisitor.
(Pp. 42b–43a)
Juan de Luna wrote:
About this point (even though it lies outside of what I am dealing with now) I will tell of something that occurred to a farmer from my region. It happened that an inquisitor sent for him, to ask for some of his pears, which he had been told were absolutely delicious. The poor country fellow didn't know what his lordship wanted of him, and it weighed so heavily on him that he fell ill until a friend of his told him what was wanted. He jumped out of bed, ran to his garden, pulled up the tree by the roots, and sent it along with the fruit, saying that he didn't want anything at his house that would make his lordship send for him again. People are so afraid of them—and not only laborers and the lower classes, but lords and grandees—that they all tremble more than leaves on trees when a soft, gentle breeze is blowing, when they hear these names: Inquisitor, Inquisition. (P. 693)
Finally, in a play of doubtful authenticity, En los indicios la culpa (Evidence Confirms Guilt), attributed to Lope de Vega, we find the following version of the anecdote:
There was once an hidalgo
who had a most fragrant
orange tree. One day it
occurred to someone to send
a messenger to him for
a sprig of orange blossom.
The one who was to deliver the message
did not find the hidalgo at home.
So, in order not to remain there,
since the dinner hour was at hand
and he was already tired of waiting,
he left word with the hidalgo 's wife
on behalf of Mr. So-and-So,
the inquisitor, that an employee of
the Holy Office had come to see him.
Scarcely had the hidalgo been
informed of the message
when he became so violently ill
that he could not even swallow a morsel of food.
He mulled over and over again in his mind
with prolix detail all that
he had ever said and done from his birth
to the present moment.
And learning finally what the messenger
had come for and that he would probably
return for more, if the whim were
to strike the inquisitor again,
the hidalgo exclaimed:
"By God, I swear that he'll have
no further reason to return to this house!"
And he sent the orange tree to him.
(P. 288a)
Let us examine the major difference in the elaboration of the three texts in order to grasp its implications for a more meaningful appreciation of each version. The central figure in Mirad a quién alabáis is a Jew. In En los indicios la culpa, the brunt of the joke is an hidalgo . In Luna's sequel to Lazarillo de Tormes, however, the victim of the Inquisitor's unintentional, unconscious threat to his very existence is a labrador, a pobre villano, "a farmer, a pitiful peasant."
We have, then, three different levels of Spanish society represented in the texts at hand: (1) a Jew, (2) a member of the lesser nobility, undoubtedly an hidalgo cansado, a convert of recent vintage, and (3) a farmer, a representative of that mythical group of quintessential Old Christians, the last vestige of pure blood on Hispanic soil. In these three figures we have the basic components, the fratricidal antagonists, of the civil war that raged on in Spain throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the time that Lope was writing for the theater the Jew was only a phantasmagorical presence in his land, an imaginary
threat to the catholic unity of the Spanish faith. The hidalgo, however, was a daily irritant to the average Spaniard, a stimulant for envy and resentment, an ideal scapegoat for pent-up frustrations and unfulfilled ambitions; he was the inevitable victim, the perfect object of scorn and derision, whose tainted blood was an ineradicable stigma.
Now, why would Juan de Luna change the main character of the anecdote from a Jew or an hidalgo to a peasant? It is not difficult to suggest a reasonable justification for the change. That a Jew or convert should fear the proximity of an inquisitor or the interest of some Inquisition authority in his possessions, however innocuous that interest might seem, is hardly novel or unexpected. The aesthetic delight provided by the incident derives precisely from the reinforcement of a shared truth. However, that a peasant, a farmer, should fear the mere presence of an inquisitor is an overwhelming indictment of an institution whose supposed function was to assure the religious purity and orthodoxy of an entire nation. Thus, the psychic pleasure afforded by Juan de Luna's text is of a very different order. He was a violent enemy of the Inquisition, perhaps a converso himself, and he wrote from bitterly resented exile in France. He must have found it enormously satisfying to present a peasant—not a Jew or even someone of mixed blood—as a quaking coward, for it enabled him to demonstrate with insidious subtlety that no one in Spain was beyond the reach of the arbitrary and unpredictable injustice of the Holy Office.
In the conclusion to his interlude El retablo de las maravillas (The Wonder Show), Cervantes showed the lunacy of a peasant community that assumed an army quartermaster had to be a coward simply because, as they all mistakenly believed, he was of Jewish ancestry, ex illis, "one of them" (p. 123). With vengeful genius Juan de Luna chose to make a peasant, the very symbol of Old Christianity, a coward. In the process, he revealed how all people in Spain—even lords and grandees—tremble when they hear the words inquisitor and Inquisition . Lope de Vega, faithful to the stereotypical presentation of the cowardly Jew and tainted hidalgo, made now one, now the other, the victim of a joke meant to amuse the Old Christian majority in his audience. And yet, his great gift for artistic empathy enabled him to present, even within the skeletal frame of an anecdote, the sense of anguish experienced by the hidalgo as he rehearsed in his mind a life's words and deeds—words and deeds, even a blemished birth, that might be considered heretical and could soon be the raw materials of a prolonged and painful inquisitional trial.
From three versions of a simple anecdote I have teased a series of
details that help us to experience yet again how the Inquisition—that bastion of un-Christlike Christianity—destroyed the pluralist paradise that Spain might have been.
And now let us look at the theme of knowing other people's lives in Don Quixote, surely one of those creations alluded to by Bergson, which, "through a more or less far-reaching transformation of man, conquers difficulties hitherto unconquerable." That the subject is present in Don Quixote as a kind of commonplace of the period is immediately apparent from the following references. In the opening verses of Part 1, humorously attributed to "Urganda the unknown," we find this advice:
Keep to the business at hand
and don't stick your nose into other people's
lives.
Sancho insists that he is not "one to pry into other people's lives" (p. 201) and Don Diego de Miranda, the Gentleman in the Green Coat, asserts: "I do not enjoy scandal and do not allow any in my presence. I do not pry into my neighbors' lives, nor do I spy on other men's actions" (p. 567). Finally, Doña Rodríguez informs Sancho that "squires are our enemies; for seeing that they are imps of the antechambers and watch us at every turn, such times as they are not praying—and those are many—they spend in gossiping about us, disinterring our bones and interring our good names" (p. 712).
What now remains to be done is to show the unique and genial utilization of the concept in Don Quixote, the way in which the shopworn maxim about knowing other people's lives was infused with a new and revolutionary force, to contrast with the ominously inquisitional overtones that echoed in the texts I have just been citing.
If Américo Castro impressed anything on readers of Don Quixote, it was his position that Cervantes conceived of literary creation as the re-creation of a creative process of life, of life in the making, life unemcumbered by what might be called hereditary determinism. Avalle-Arce brilliantly exemplified Castro's view in his analysis of the novel's opening paragraph, which he compared to the initial pages of Lazarillo de Tormes and Amadís de Gaula, in order to demonstrate the extraordinary freedom of the Cervantine hero. But whereas both Castro and Avalle stressed the reasons for Don Quixote's freedom and the open, undetermined nature of his future, I should like to examine what he was freed from, and how
it prepares us for the attitude toward other people's lives that will prevail throughout the work, though more prominently in Part 1.
In a sense, the first paragraph of Don Quixote is more important for what it does not tell us than for the paradigmatic, illusorily specific, yet ultimately deindividualizing details about the hidalgo's life that it does present; for the narrator has chosen to omit precisely those details that were most crucial to that scrutiny of other people's lives I have just been describing. Let us consider the novel's first two paragraphs:
In a certain village in La Mancha, which I do not wish to name, there lived not long ago a gentleman—one of those who have always a lance in the rack, an ancient shield, a lean hack and a greyhound for coursing. His habitual diet consisted of a stew, more beef than mutton, of hash most nights, bacon and eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a young pigeon as a Sunday treat; and on this he spent three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went on a fine cloth doublet, velvet breeches and slippers for holidays, and a homespun suit of the best in which he decked himself on weekdays. His household consisted of a housekeeper of rather more than forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a lad for the field and market, who saddled his horse and wielded the pruninghook.
Our gentleman was verging on fifty, of tough constitution, lean-bodied, thin-faced, a great early riser, and a lover of hunting. They say that his surname was Quixada or Quesada—for there is some difference of opinion amongst authors on this point. However, by very reasonable conjecture we may take it that he was called Quexana. But this does not much concern our story ; enough that we do not depart by so much as an inch from the truth in the telling of it. (P. 31)
Where was he born, what was his lineage, who are the ancestors we can investigate, inform on, scrutinize, disinter; what, even, was his family name? And we are told that these details, the indispensable material to know other people's lives, the central concern of generations of Spaniards in their literature and lives, is not of much importance to our story. And so Don Quixote is not only free in the Castronian sense to become himself, to realize his full being, but he has been freed of the fear and inhibitions provoked by that infamy that endures forever, the infamy of tainted blood that Fray Luis de León railed against in The Names of Christ, when he wrote: "A noble kingdom is one in which no vassal is considered of vile lineage, nor humiliated for his background, nor considered less well born than another. How can there be justice if some are despised and humiliated from generation to generation and the stigma is unending?" (p. 935). It is this freedom from inquisitional pressures that allows
the vision of a Spain that might have been to emerge, a Spain in which the departure of Ricote's daughter from her village is depicted in the following manner by Sancho Panza:
I can tell you that your daughter looked so beautiful when she went that everyone in the place came out to see her, and they all said she was the loveliest creature in the world. She departed weeping, and embraced all her friends and acquaintances and all who came to see her, begging everyone to commend her to Our Lord and Our Lady His Mother; and all this with such feeling that it brought tears to my eyes, and I'm not generally much of a weeper. There were many in fact who wanted to go out and capture her on the road and hide her away, but fear of breaking the king's decree prevented them. (P. 822)
Need I remind you that Ricote was a Morisco and that his daughter was leaving their village for exile? We have the feeling, though, that the Old Christian villagers loved her as much as the inhabitants of Burgos loved the Cid and feared to disobey King Alfonso's orders. Unlike the informers don Diego Coronel of the Buscón and Guzmán de Alfarache, Sancho will not betray his friend Ricote. "I will not betray you," says the authentic Christian to his Morisco friend. But he will not do treason against the King either, "to favor his enemies" (p. 821). "His enemies," says Sancho, not mine, but he does not dare to help Ricote, since he shares the villagers' fear of breaking the king's decree. And the happy ending of the episode of Ricote and his daughter is the wish-fulfilling dream of a Spain that—as Francisco Márquez has written—"instead of shedding their blood in sterile fratricidal strife, fused the blood of all Spain's children, laying aside the absurd and anti-Christian division between the pure and the tainted" (p. 335).
In this way, Don Quixote is free to face the future on his own terms, precisely because he has been freed of the unending threat involved in having a past. The specifics of his genealogy "are of little importance to our story" for the same reasons that Aldonza Lorenzo, alias Dulcinea, is lovely and virtuous, and her lineage does not matter a bit; "for no one will investigate it for the purpose of investing her with any [religious] order and, for my part"—says Don Quixote—"I think of her as the greatest princess in the world" (p. 210). For similar reasons Sancho could become a count, even if he were not an Old Christian. "I'm an Old Christian," affirms Sancho, "and that is enough ancestry for a count." This remark has been cited over and over again, when what really matters is Don Quixote's answer, in which he minimizes the significance of Sancho's Old Christian background: "And more than enough," responds Don Quixote, "but even if you were not [an Old
Christian] it would not matter, for if I am King I can easily make you noble . . ." (pp. 169–170). For Don Quixote, Sancho's Old Christian stock was as important for his becoming a count as—in Cervantes's interlude The Wonder Show —is a musician's being identified as "a very fine Christian and a well-bred hidalgo," in order to enhance his musician-ship. The ironic reply is that "such qualities are essential indeed in a first-rate musician!" (p. 117). In the dream world of Don Quixote, lineage, purity of blood, Jewish or Moorish ancestry, meant nothing. There was no Inquisition and there were no relentless investigations.
Once Cervantes has insulated his novelistic world against the real and ever-present danger of an Inquisition-style scrutiny of other people's lives, it becomes possible for the work to be comic in the Bergsonian sense: "The comic comes into being [within a neutral zone in which man simply exposes himself to man's curiosity] . . . when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art" (p. 73).
Unamuno was right when he noted that "Don Quixote was extremely curious and given to prying into other people's lives " (p. 90), but so were almost all the other characters in the work! What matters, of course, is what was behind the curiosity. From the moment of Don Quixote's encounter with the prostitutes, transformed through his persuasive will and art into Dona[*] Tolosa and Dona[*] Molinera, we are embarked on a seemingly endless number of encounters with people who will give up the secrets of their lives—or who will create marvelous fictional existences that resemble their own—with more or less artistry to satisfy the insatiable and beneficent curiosity of their listeners. Over and over again we come to recognize the special quality of knowing other people's lives in Don Quixote, the overwhelming delight that derives from entering into the lives of others and thereby living in another dimension. A few examples must suffice.
Having heard some of the details of Grisóstomo's tragic death, recounted by a young villager named Pedro, Don Quixote interrupts to observe that "it is a very good story, and you, my good Peter, are telling it with a fine grace" (p. 93). When Pedro concludes his remarks with an invitation to attend Grisóstomo's funeral, Don Quixote responds: "I will certainly be there, and I thank you for the pleasure you have given me by telling me such a delightful story" (p. 95).
When Zoraida and the Captain arrive at the inn—one of those Hispanic inns described by Angel Sánchez Rivero as "the crossroads of life . . . , more intimate than a modern hotel because of the primitive installations, the hazards of the road, the infrequency of travel, the gen-
erous cordiality of a group of people aware of danger and sensitive to adventure, all obliged to come together in a cramped and poorly lit space to tell one another their lives" (p. 13)—people can scarcely keep from asking them to tell their life story, "but no one cared to ask just then, for at that time it was clearly better to help them get some rest than to ask them for the story of their lives" (p. 338). After they have rested, "Don Fernando asked the Captain to tell them his life's story, for from what they had gathered by his coming in Zoraida's company, it could not fail to be strange and enjoyable" (p. 345). As in so many other cases throughout the work, we are made to feel the importance of the artistry involved, the histrionics in relating a life story as a source of pleasure and edification:
Listen then, gentlemen, and you will hear a true story, and I doubt whether you will find its equal in the most detailed and careful fiction ever written.
At these words they all sat down in perfect silence; and when he saw them quiet and waiting for him to speak, he began in a smooth and pleasant voice. (P. 345)
At the conclusion of the Captain's tale, Don Fernando gives voice to the audience's reaction:
I assure you, Captain, that the way in which you have told your strange adventure has been as remarkable as the strangeness and novelty of the events themselves. It is a curious tale and full of astonishing incidents. In fact we have enjoyed listening so much that we should be glad to hear it all over again, even if it took till tomorrow morning to tell it. (P. 381)
Naturally the content of the narrated life is important; tragic events are to be lamented and joyous reunions celebrated, but what matters most is the willing suspension of belief in the Spain that really was, so as to enjoy to its fullest the parenthetical paradise of Art, offered up to us in these numerous portraits of characters as artists.
When the irresistible Dorotea completes her tale of woe, she is asked to provide some additional details:
She told him, briefly and sensibly, all that she had previously told Cardenio; and Don Ferdinand and his companions were so delighted with her story that they would have liked it to last longer, so charmingly did she tell the tale of her misfortunes. (PP. 331–332)
As if to remind us of that other world where the scrutiny of people's lives is a sinister and venomous pursuit, there are chapters like the "Scrutiny of Don Quixote's Library," a small-scale model of an Inquisi-
tion trial, rich in the lexicon of such investigations, which ends with the heartless destruction of innocent victims. The text reads:
Some [books] that were burnt deserved to be treasured up among the eternal archives, but fate and the laziness of the inquisitor forbade it. And so in them was fulfilled the saying that the saint sometimes pays for the sinner. (P. 64)
Unamuno, blind to the possible meanings of this chapter, refused to examine it, because "it deals with books and not with life" (p. 46). But however much the discussion of the books is conducted in aesthetic terms, ultimately we are forced to believe that these books, constantly described in human terms, are the Anne Franks of Cervantes's day, the innocent victims of whose beauty and genius we have been deprived through the indifference, the cruelty, if not the "laziness of the inquisitor": "The priest was too tired to look at any more books, and therefore proposed that the rest should be burned without further inspection" (p. 63). It is indeed ironic that an escrutinio, a scrutiny, an inquisition, should end on such a note, when Covarrubias tells us that escudriñar means "to look for something with excessive meticulousness, care and curiosity"; escudriñador "he who is curious to know secret things." He concludes, cryptically, that "there are men who are tempted to find out what others have locked up in their breasts and at times what God has concealed in his own" (p. 543a).
In direct contrast with the Inquisition-like proceedings of the scrutiny made in Don Quixote's library is the knight's encounter with the galley slaves and his insistence—due to the infinite care and humanity in his notion of justice—that each galley slave be discreetly and sympathetically examined, since it is "better for ninety-nine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned." Ginés de Pasamonte, a galley slave who knows the dangers that lurk behind the scrutiny of other people's lives—Lope de Vega's "new mode of scrutiny"—and has learned to be wary of such interrogations, tells Don Quixote "you annoy me with all your prying into other people's lives " (p. 176). And these words, which—in the interpretation of Ginés and the intention of Don Quixote—exemplify the collusion of the real world with a utopian Spain, suggest yet another dimension to Don Quixote, one more way to enjoy and appreciate the genius of Cervantes.
In 1973 the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Heinrich Böll was asked: "How do you think a novel about Germany in the 1930s would differ from the idea that most people have of it?" His reply was:
It would be at the same time both worse and better than the propaganda was. If you imagine that children would really give the names of their parents to the police for political offenses, it is terrible. There's really a Shakespearean tragedy behind such a small fact. Reading it as a note in the press, you wouldn't get that. It would be a terrible fact, but you would forget about it. Yet out of that fact a writer can make a very informative and true novel, one that is much more important than nonfiction. What is behind it is up to me, my imagination and my experience of the time.
And, paradoxically, literature makes it possible for us to enjoy, to derive pleasure as well as information and edification from reading and experiencing in an imaginatively insulated setting—the protective privacy of a book, the communal comfort of a theater, the womb-like intimacy of a darkened movie house—the suffering and persecution of others as well as their joys and satisfactions.
Having mentioned suffering and persecution, I should like to close with some general observations, particularly since a distinguished Hispanist claimed some years ago that "as many as ninety-nine out of every hundred conversos lived unmolested by the Inquisition," as if in some paradisiacal sanctuary. (Can one live "unmolested"—even psychically unmolested—with the potential threat of persecution always at hand?) Sister Marie Despina recently wrote in a moving essay entitled "The Accusations of Ritual Crime in Spain" that one is amazed by the similarities between the procedures of the Spanish Inquisition and those of the Russian Gulag, the similar treatment of the accused, overwhelmed by terror, torture, and utter despair (pp. 61–62). In a statement characteristic of any number of references to the oppressively negative effects of the Inquisition on Hispanic life, the great Argentine statesman and author Domingo F. Sarmiento declared that
the crime of the Inquisition is to have destroyed in daily practice and in one's intimate feelings the notion of human rights, the sense of security of life before the law, the awareness of justice, the limits of public power . . . Since crimes of the mind cannot be determined by a law or code, the Spaniard and the Hispanic American lived [because of the Inquisition] under the fear of possibly committing a crime by thinking. (P. 184)
In her book on The Conversos of Majorca, Angela Selke reminds us that
in stressing the terrible injustice which the Holy Office committed by persecuting and punishing innocent people, there is an implicit justification of such persecutions provided they are based on true accusations and verified
evidence. Yet such an attitude tends to obscure what today [we recognize and accept]—that is, the fundamental injustice of all persecutions for dissident beliefs, be the charges true or false. . . . [We] must reject as contrary to Christian ethics not only the abuses of the Inquisition or its proceedings, but, above all, the radical injustice inherent in any institution whose business—whatever its professed purpose may have been—[is] the systematic organization of such persecutions. (P. 19)
Like many New Christians, Cervantes dreamed of a Spain that might have been, recognizing that its fulfillment was impossible. The visionary religious syncretism that the Moriscos of Granada strove to achieve, certain that every individual could be saved under the law of Christ, under that of the Jew, and that of the Moor, if he kept the precepts of his religion faithfully; the unified kingdom of heaven on earth which the New Christians struggled vainly to establish in Spain; the mythical Golden Age of ideal justice which Don Quixote imagined he could restore, can best be summed up in these words of Wallace Stevens:
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
(P. 124)
The majority of Spaniards in the retrospectively halcyon years of Spain's artistic Golden Age chose, through the Inquisition, to renounce the opportunities for "amassing harmony," and to this day Spain has endured the consequences of that tragic choice.
* This essay is for Robert Silverman, who taught me to appreciate the beauty and power of words.
Unforeseen circumstances have made it impossible for me to provide the footnotes I had planned to include. Unless otherwise indicated in the list of works cited, the translations are my own.
Works Cited
Alemán, Mateo. Guzmán de Alfarache, edited by Samuel Gili y Gaya. 5 vols. Clásicos castellanos, vols. 73, 83, 90, 93, 114. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1942-1950.
Anonymous. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, translated by Harriet de Onís. Great Neck, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, 1959.
Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. "Tres comienzos de novela." In Nuevos deslindes cervantions. Barcelona: Ariel, 1975.
Bergson, Henri. "Laughter." In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956.
Boxer, C. R. Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia d'Orta and Nicolás Monardes. Diamante, vol. 14. London: The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1963.
Cervantes, Miguel de. The Adventures of Don Quixote, translated by J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1950. Translation slightly revised.
———. The Colloquy of the Dogs. In Six Exemplary Novels, translated by Harriet de Onís, 3:12-13. Great Neck, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, 1961. Translations slightly revised.
———. ———. In The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels, translated by Walter Starkie, 249, 258, 276. New York: New American Library, 1963. Translations slightly revised.
———. ———. In Exemplary Stories, translated by C. A. Jones, 197, 204-205, 220. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Translations slightly revised.
———. El retablo de las maravillas. In Interludes, translated by Edwin Honig. New York: New American Library, 1964. Translation slightly revised.
Covarrubias, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, edited by Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Horta, 1943.
Despina, Sor Marie. "Las acusaciones de crimen ritual en España." El olivo (Madrid) 3, no. 9 (1979): 48-70.
Gilman, Stephen. "The Sequel to El villano del Danubio. " Revista Hispánica Moderna 31 (1965): 175-185.
Gracián, Baltasar. Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, edited by Arturo del Hoyo. Madrid: Castilla, 1948.
Guevara, Fray Antonio de. Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, edited by M. Martínez de Burgos. Clásicos castellanos, vol. 29. Madrid: Ediciones de "La Lectura," 1928.
———. Libro primero de las Epístolas familiares, edited by José María de Cossío. Vol. 2. Madrid: Aldus, 1952.
León, Fray Luis de. De los nombres de Cristo, edited by Federico de Onís. Vol. 2. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1917. Material adapted and reduced.
Luna, Juan de. Segunda parte de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. In La Celestina y Lazarillos, edited by Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Vergara, 1959.
Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. Personajes y temas del Quijote. Madrid: Taurus, 1975.
———. "Crítica guevariana." Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 28 (1979): 334-352.
Orozco, Alonso de. Victoria de la muerte. Cited in Américo Castro, An Idea of History, edited by Stephen Gilman and Edmund L. King. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977. The translation by Carroll Johnson is slightly revised.
Quevedo, Francisco de. El buscón, edited by Américo Castro. Clásicos castellanos, vol. 5. Madrid: Ediciones de "La Lectura," 1927.
Rojas, Fernando de. The Spanish Bawd: La Celestina, translated by J. M. Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964.
Sánchez Rivero, Angel. "Las ventas del Quijote." Revista de Occidente, año 5, vol. 17, no. 46 (1927): 1-22.
Sarmiento, Domingo F. Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América. Buenos Aires: "La Cultura Argentina," 1915. Cited by Daniel E. Zalazar, "Las ideas de D. F. Sarmiento sobre la influencia de la religión en la democracia americana." Discurso Literario, 2 (1985): 541-548.
Selke, Angela S. The Conversos of Majorca: Life and Death in a Crypto-Jewish Community in XVII Century Spain, translated by Henry J. Maxwell. Hispania Judaica, vol. 5. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1986.
Stevens, Wallace. "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." In Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1960.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. Colección Austral, vol. 33. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1949.
Vega, Lope de. En los indicios la culpa. In Obras de Lope de Vega, publicadas por la Real Academia Española (nueva edición), vol. 5. Madrid: Tipografía de la "Revista de Archeologia, Bibliografia y Museos," 1918.
———. Mirad a quié alabáis. In Obras de Lope de Vega, publicadas por la Real Academia Española (nueva edición), vol. 13. Madrid: Imprenta de Galo Saez, 1930.
———. El niño inocente de La Guardia, edited by Anthony J. Farrell. London: Tamesis Books, 1985.
Zabaleta, Juan de. El día de fiesta por la mañana, edited by María Antonia Sanz Cuadrado. Madrid: Castilla, 1948.
Ten—
Scorched Parchments and Tortured Memories: The "Jewishness" of the Anussim (Crypto-Jews)
Moshe Lazar
If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered; and men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
[JOHN 15:6]
I enter this house [i.e., church], I will worship neither wood nor stone, but only God who governs the universe.
[Converso's silent act of faith]
Inquisitors and inquisitorial institutions initiate their pious enterprise with the burning of manuscripts and books to forcibly halt the dissemination of beliefs contrary to their own dogmas. Failing to eradicate the faith and ritual practices of the "non-believers," stigmatized as heretics, they then resort to mental and physical torture most often leading to conversion. Those accused of being "false converts," stubborn and secret adherents to their earlier beliefs, are destined to burn at the stake, ironically qualified as an auto de fe, an "act of faith." The burning of books is often therefore a classical prelude to the burning of people.
The road that leads from the burning of more than twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud (Paris, 1243), and innumerable Hebrew biblical and parabiblical manuscripts during the subsequent centuries, and to the lighting of the autos de fe is the via dolorosa of medieval European Jewry and its descendants, the Anussim in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere.[1] In the thousands of trial records, which the Holy Office of the Inquisition has left as its enduring legacy, lay buried nightmarish chapters in the lives of men and women among the Anussim, from whose memories the torturers have extracted and transcribed religious practices and utterances as evidence of their secret Judaizing. These carefully elaborated minutes of the trial proceedings endlessly record what sort of rituals the Anussim were accused of practicing (mainly presented in the depositions of the prosecution's witnesses) and the kind of prayers they were reciting daily or on certain Jewish holidays (particularly recorded in the confessions of the accused). It is possible therefore, even from the partially published trial records as well as from other
sources, to present a synthetic overview on the continuity of "Jewishness" and Jewish religious devotion among a large number of Anussim over a period of several centuries.
This very continuity of retaining a hidden religious Jewish life, based on a set of customs and rituals, and strengthened by prayers, by biblical and postbiblical reminiscences, and by yearnings for a messianic deliverance has been questioned by some scholars[2] in a manner that is contradicted by the historical evidence of various sources.
Communities of Anussim in Spain, between 1391 (a year of widespread assaults on the juderías and of mass conversions) and 1492 (the year of Expulsion), living amidst or beside those Jews who did not convert, certainly had different opportunities to preserve their hidden "Jewishness" in comparison with the Anussim of Portugal after 1497 (where all the Jews were forcibly converted)—even more so after the horrible massacre in Lisbon (1506)[3] —and in comparison with those of Spain after 1492. While the Anussim of Spain between 1391 and 1492 maintained close contacts with those who lived openly as Jews and had no major difficulties in obtaining prayer books, biblical, rabbinical, and Jewish-philosophical texts,[4] special ritual objects, and kosher food products, the Anussim of Portugal were more dependent on their memory and oral transmission, on symbolic observance of traditional rituals, and on occasional contacts during business trips with former Anussim now living as Jews in Italy and the Netherlands.[5] These latter Anussim, many of them educated now in convents and monasteries, submitted to the teaching and the preaching of the friars, and had the opportunity to learn a great deal about Judaism, Jewish history, biblical prophecy, and theology excerpted in the literature of the Fathers of the Church and in the anti-Jewish polemical treatises; they could read in the missals, psalms, and other hymns derived from ancient synagogal liturgy; for generations they learned about their patriarchs from Villegas's Flos Sanctorum ; and whatever details they ignored concerning specific Jewish customs, they were introduced to them in the cellars of the Inquisition, learning from both the inquisitors and the confessions of the "Judaizers" the traditional list of Judaizing practices.[6] Beinart's statement concerning the conversos of Ciudad Real during the fifteenth century is appropriate also to the Anussim of later periods:
And though the memory and knowledge of mitzvoth [religious commandments] became increasingly blurred as the generations went by, and Mosaic laws were the first to be forgotten, customs and traditions nevertheless remained in the Conversos' memory and were handed down for
centuries from generation to generation. Furthermore, for as long as the Inquisition courts existed, the inquisitors were always there to remind the Conversos of what Jewish tradition was, and to revive their memories of Judaism.[7]
In the Inquisition's cellars in Lima for some twelve years (1627–1639), Francisco Maldonado de Silva, shortly before his death at the stake, composed a letter destined for the Jewish community in Rome, writing that he had a solid knowledge of the Prophets,
. . . et memoriter teneo omnes praedictiones promissionum Dei nostri per ipsos et deprecationes illorum pro populo suo Israel omnesque psalmos David absque nulla exceptione, proverbia multa Salomonis et [eius] filii Sirach, et plurimas orationes tam idiomate Hispano quam Latino a me compositas, sed horum maiorem partem in hoc lacu inclusus didisci, quae omnia (scilicet orationes prophetarum et laudes et psalmos) singulis sabbatis absque libro repeto flexis genibus in conspectu Dei mei depraecans illum pro peccatis meis et populi sui si forte possim (licet indignus) placare furorem suum, ut salvet et congreget eum sicut per suos prophetas promisit. Ego quidem a die qua captus fui devovi illi mori pugnans argumentis viribus et posse propter veritatem eius et observare legem eius usque ad aras ignis qui mihi paratur in brevi (ut colligo) utque me in holocaustum pro peccatis nostris Deus suscipiat . . .[8]
[ . . . and I know by heart all the predictions related to the promises of our God, revealed through them, and His deprecations in favor of his people Israel, as well as all the Psalms of David without exception, many Proverbs of Salomon and of his son Sirach, and many prayers in both Spanish and Latin versifications composed by me; but most of all these I have learned while confined in this [lion's] den; all these [i.e., the Prophets' prayers, the hymns and the psalms], without any book, I recite every Saturday, kneeling in the presence of God, supplicating Him for my own and His people's sins, in the hope I could (though unworthy) placate His wrath so that He may save and ingather his people as He has promised through his prophets. Verily, from the day I was arrested I vowed to fight to death, with my power and arguments, against the adversaries of His truth and to uphold His Law until the altar of fire being now (I think) prepared for me, so that God may accept me as a holocaust for our sins . . .]
While in prison, Francisco Maldonado de Silva held fourteen disputations with theologians and wrote a great number of essays and two longer works, signing them "Heli Judio, indigno del Dios de Israel, por otro nombre Silva." He was led to his auto de fe in Lima (January 1639) at the age of forty-nine; a friar describes his last moments as follows:
frail, gray-haired, long-bearded, and with the books he had written tied around his neck, when led to the fire the wind had ripped off the curtain behind the podium; seeing this, he exclaimed: "This has been so arranged by the Lord of Israel as to see me face to face from heaven!"[9]
Martyrs such as Luis de Carvajal (el Mozo), Maldonado de Silva, and José de Silva, like hundreds before them during the Middle Ages, went to the stake sanctifying their monotheistic faith (qiddush ha-Shem ), and imitating the martyrology of the ten celebrated rabbis ('asarah harugey malkhuth ) which occupies a special place in ancient Jewish lore and in the traditional prayer books. One of these sages, Hanina ben Teradyon, we are told, had been draped in a Torah scroll by his persecutors and thrown into the fire. Seeing his daughter distressed, he said to her: "Were I to be burning alone, it would be dreadful to me; now that I am in the fire with the Torah around me, whoever will avenge the honor of the Torah will at the same time avenge mine." His disciples asked: "Rabbi, what do you see?" And he replied: "Burning scrolls, I see, and letters rising in the air."
Contrary to those scholars who doubt the degree of "Jewishness" of the Anussim, the source materials and the sprouting of new communities of former Anussim in Italy, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire present a reality which shows that their "Jewishness" was more than a bundle of vague memories. Yerushalmi rightly therefore states that
the yearning which impelled them to seek the God of Israel in Amsterdam, Venice, or Constantinople remains difficult to understand unless there existed a continuing crypto-Jewish tradition in the Peninsula itself. If, between one hundred and two hundred years after the extinction of the last vestiges of organized Jewish life in Spain and Portugal, this force was still strong enough to graft these withered branches back onto the trunk of the Jewish people, it must have been considerable.[10]
Concerning the oral transmission among the Portuguese Anussim and, in particular, the important role played by the women, Revah writes:
In this continuous or discontinuous transmission of marranism two social groups performed a decisive role: the family milieu and the professional or university milieu. The women have greatly contributed to the perpetuation of marranism, often behind the back of their husbands: they figure also in greater numbers than men in the autos de fe. Marranism was a simplified religion which ignored hierarchy. Its articles of faith and its essential practices were perpetuated not only through the clandestine oral
transmission but also through the constant harassment by the inquisitorial persecution.[11]
A confirmation of this role played by women in the preservation of "Jewishness" among the Anussim is already clearly articulated in a letter written (1481?) by Fernando del Pulgar (of converso origin himself): "In Andalusia there are at least ten thousand young women who have never left their parents' home. They observe the ways of their fathers and learn from them. To burn them all is an extremely cruel and difficult act and will force them to flee to places where their correction will be impossible."[12] During his trial in the Canary Islands, Antonio Correa Núñez relates how his grandmother had initiated him at age thirteen to Judaism:
In this book [Psalms?], he will be able to see all what God did to David and to those who kept the Law God gave to Moses. Through guarding this Law and its ceremonies he will attain the merits King David and all the other attained. By fulfilling the commandments he will receive God's blessing; not keeping them he will be cursed by God.[13]
The women's role as activists in the dissemination of Jewish customs and prayers,[14] and their outstanding courage in proclaiming their faith and accepting martyrdom at the stake,[15] are corroborated during the centuries by the trial records from Portugal, the Canary Islands, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil,[16] as well as by the testimonies from a community of "New Christians" rediscovered in this century by S. Schwartz in Belmonte, Portugal.[17] Even at the time that Anussim came out from their schizophrenic existence and returned to open Jewish life, Rabbi Yom Tob Zahalon (in a responsa ) expressed his admiration for the stature and quality, among the Portuguese Anussim, of the women amidst them, "from whom Torah and Judaism shall yet go forth!"[18]
The knowledge of traditions and rituals was also preserved through smuggling in from abroad books printed in Italy and the Netherlands, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[19] But even before that time, information was available from books hidden in wells, buried in gardens, secretly kept inside walls, or acquired from Christians who had snatched them from the flames.[20]
To put this in its proper historical context, let us follow Rabbi Abraham Saba's description of his flight from his hometown during the tragic events of 1497 in Portugal:
Then the anger of the Lord burnt against his people, so that all the Jews who were in Portugal were ordered by King Emmanuel (God blot out his
name and memory!) to leave the land. Nor was this enough; but after the king had commanded that boys and girls should be torn [from their parents for baptism and Christian education], and then we should be deprived of our synagogues, he ordered that all our books should be seized. So I brought all my books into the city of Porto in obedience to the royal decree; but yet I took my life in my hands by carrying with me to Lisbon the Commentary on the Law which I had composed, as well as a commentary on the treatise Ethics of the Fathers, and one on the Five Scrolls. . . . But when I reached Lisbon all the Jews came to me and told me that it had been proclaimed to the community that every Jew who might be found with a book or with philacteries in his possession would be put to death. So straightaway, before I entered the quarter outside the city, I took these books in my hand; two brothers went with me and dug a grave among the roots of a blossoming olive tree; there we buried them. . . . Tree of Sorrow, for I had buried there all that was pleasant in my sight—the Commentary on the Laws and the Commandments, more precious than gold. . . . For in them I had found consolation for the loss of my two little ones, torn from me by force to become unwilling converts. And I had said: these [books] are the inheritance of those who worship God; therefore must they be better for me than even sons and daughters.[21]
Commenting upon this rabbi's dramatic description of losing his children to forced baptism and endangering his life in trying to save his own manuscripts, W. Popper writes: "Hidden in wells, buried among the roots of trees, snatched from the very flames, there were always some volumes saved. And as soon as the watchfulness of enemies became a little relaxed, these treasures were brought from their hiding-places; others were smuggled into the city from distant lands by various devices; and still others perhaps were bought from neighbors."[22] At the end of the fifteenth century, in Soria, a mason working in the home of Juan de Salzedo (formerly Rabbi Yantó [Yom Tob?]) discovered inside a hidden niche in a wall some scrolls in Hebrew which, according to his testimony at a trial, he refused to hand over to their owner, instead taking them home and burning them in his stove.[23] Several centuries later, in 1848, during the dismantling of an old house in the former call (Jewish Quarter) of Barcelona, three late-fifteenth-century manuscript prayer books in Catalan were discovered inside one of the walls, including one complete traditional Jewish Ritual of daily and holidays prayers, the two others being of a hybrid type (personalized prayers, somewhat spiritually Christianized), having belonged probably to a converso originally from Valencia.[24] The historian Caro Baroja remembers having seen in his childhood a leather-covered desk whose owner, while doing some repair work, uncovered two scrolls of Hebrew prayers hidden by some
crypto-Jew.[25] One could multiply these cases to show that in spite of the burning of thousands of biblical and parabiblical manuscripts and books, the Anussim were able to procure for themselves over the centuries copies of Bibles, prayer books, commentaries on the Law, essays on Jewish history, and cabalistic and other mystical treatises to maintain their faith; and wherever those books were not available, they memorized a portable Judaism often transferred from scorched parchments and from inquisitorial sessions to their tortured souls.
Accusations against the Anussim, as well as their confessions, in Spain and Portugal and the New World, used customs and rituals to define them as Judaizers, or "Jews on all four sides" (judeus dos quatro costados) as some of them were called in Portugal. The collection of bits and pieces in the already published trial documents[26] corresponds to the thirty or more specific "Judaic" beliefs, practices, and customs by which a Judaizing converso could be detected (observance of one of them being sufficient to be brought before the Tribunal of the Holy Office). The list of these practices and customs was published time and again, the edict issued by the Seville inquisitors Morillo and San Martin in 1481 serving as the basic model for all subsequent promulgations. One may sum them up in the following groups:
1. sweep the house clean Friday afternoon; wear clean clothing and festive garments that evening and Saturday; bring out fresh linen and a white tablecloth for the occasion; cook the necessary meals for the Sabbath on Friday, keeping in the over overnight a special dish [adafina, calyente, hamin ];[27] abstain from work on Saturday;
2. light newly prepared candles on Friday before sunset; at dinner, make a blessing over a cup of wine (baraha , or baraha del vino ) and have each family member drink from the same cup;
3. fast from sunset to sunset, particularly on the Day of Atonement (çinqepur, çonqipur [ = tzom qippur : "Fast of Yom Kippur]), on the eve of Purim (Ayuno de la Reina Esther [Ta'anith Esther : "Fast of Queen Esther"]);[28] and fast on Mondays and Thursdays;
4. ritual bathing of women on Friday afternoon, on the eve of fasting days, possibly in a special bathhouse [batibila, bet tebilah ];
5. observance of special holidays, such as Passover (pascua del pan çençeño [hag ha-matzoth = "feast of the unleavened bread]), which occurs at the time of "semana santa"; the feast of the Tabernacles (pascua de las cabañuelas ), which occurs in the Fall;
6. reciting certain Jewish prayers such as Shema Yisrael Adonay
Elohenu, Adonay, Ehad ("Hear, o Israel, God our Lord, God is one"), or specific prayers when washing the hands,[29] when partaking at a meal, and so on;
7. praying in a "Jewish" fashion: facing the wall, standing rather than sitting or kneeling [related to prayers like the amida ], cabdis [= qaddish ], moving head, limbs, and body in a rhythmic manner (sabadear );[30]
8. bury or burn nail clippings, rather than throw them away;[31]
9. ritual slaughter of cattle and fowl, reciting some specific prayer during the process; covering the spilled blood with earth or ashes;
10. purifying the meat by cleansing it from any blood, salting and rinsing it; removing all fat, and the sinew from the animal's leg;[32]
11. abstaining from eating certain animals, birds, or fish considered as impure by the Mosaic law; eating therefore manjares caseres ("kosher food");[33]
12. observance of special funerary rites when mourning the dead (sitting on the ground, eating hard-boiled eggs and olives); pouring out the water from the jars [cohuerco ], for fear that the soul of the departed might bathe in it);
13. when kneading bread, throw a piece of dough [hala ] into the fire (a custom that was still preserved among the Anussim in Belmonte in this century);[34]
14. celebrating, on the eve of the eighth day following the birth of a male child (the night before the prescribed circumcision), with dancing and music [hazer hadas ];[35]
15. when baptizing their children, rubbing off immediately the crisma (baptism);
16. read in books of prayers [ccedil;idur, rezar en hebrayco, meldar como judio[36] or other books on Jewish matters in Hebrew or in the vernacular [libros judiegos ]; possess amulets with Hebrew inscriptions [nomina escripta en hebrayco ],[37] and the like;
17. in church, acting hypocritically (not looking at the elevation of the Host, at the Cross; kneeling imperfectly; changing the Pater Noster; etc.).[38]
All these, and some others,[39] amply documented in all trials, testify to the permanence and widespread preservation of essential and symbolic rituals among the Anussim over many centuries. It is in the context of the accusations and confessions that one finds the greatest number of Hebrew words, particularly frequent in fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century documents, such as: baraha, varaha (blessing); baraha del vino (blessing on wine); baraha de la mesa (blessing after meal); Dio barohu (for barukh hu , "blessed be He"); trefa, trefe ("non-kosher food"); caser, caxer ("kosher food"); maror ("bitter herbs"); ccedil;edaca ("alms, charity");[40]çidur ("prayer book" in Hebrew or vernacular); çilhod, zelahod (for selihoth , "penitential prayers"); targun (for targum , Aramaic translation of Pentateuch); quidux (blessing on the wine); cabdis (for qaddish , "mourner's prayer"); guezera ("edict" of Expulsion); tafelines (for thefillin , "phylacteries"); çeçit (generally for talith , "prayer shawl"); çefer, çefer tora ("parchment scroll of the Law"); humas ("Pentateuch"); hevel, vanidad ("vanity, Christian dogmas"); çara ("trouble, tribulation"); quinyan ("property"); midras (for beth midrash , "synagogue, school");[41]tibila ("ritual bath"), and bitibila ("house of the ritual bath"); and so on. Concerning the frequent use of euphemisms one may note: wood (for "cross"); bread ("Holy Host"); house ("church"); stone ("statue of Christ or saint"); stick ("wooden cross");[42] very good man ("practicing Judaizer"); servant of God ("of the Jewish faith"). Finally, it should also be noted that Adonay (rather than Señor ), Dio (instead of Dios ), and meldar (more than leer ) are frequently used in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents as they are in parallel Judeo-Spanish texts after the Expulsion.
The depth and continuity of "Jewishness" of many Anussim may best be grasped through a comparison between two testaments, written centuries apart, couched in a language that testifies to the profound roots of religiosity in both tortured souls. They reflect in content and in style a cleaving devotion to the faith and practices of Judaism. Don Juda (from Alba de Tormes) in 1410, two decades after the forced conversions of 1391, writes a long will from which I quote the following excerpt:
I give thanks to the almighty Lord God who created the universe and governs us, who did not make me an animal and has kept me to this day in his commandments, for pious and noble is the man who in his last years and old age dies to start a new life—God willing—for I have always placed my hope in His love. And as I am dust and will return to dust, I desire not to be moaned and mourned; nor should you, doña Sol, act despondently, for I hold you in such esteem that should I give you a letter of divorce you would not accept it, as you have stated: "Were you to give me the letter [of divorce] I would refuse it, for your shoe is a firm warrant . . . of my heart";[43] and I would respond: "May it be God's will!" . . . Let my body be buried in the golden field where our parents are resting—God grant them everlasting peace . . . placed in the grave with my eyes and face looking eastward . . . At learning about my death in the Jewish quarters of Segovia
and Alba, where I was well loved by all my relatives, hoping for the same in the next world, let them say: "Alas, alas, the one who did good deeds has passed away!"[44]
Luis de Carvajal el Mozo, after some ten years in the Inquisition's cellars of New Spain, having changed his name to Joseph Lumbroso,[45] writes his final testament a short time before his anticipated auto de fe (December 1596), in which he states the ten principles of his monotheistic creed, partly modeled after the "Thirteen Principles of Faith" of Maimonides (quoted by Luis in his discussion with two doctors of theology during his incarceration):
I believe in the one and only God, almighty and true, Creator of heaven, earth, and sea . . . I believe that God our Lord and universal Creator is one and no more . . . I believe that the law of God our Lord, which the Christians call the dead law of Moses, is alive and everlasting, as recorded in the holy Pentateuch . . . The fourth belief of mine is that it is a sin to worship idols and images;[46] I believe that the Sacred Sacrament of Circumcision is eternal . . . I believe that Christ [literally "the anointed," as in Hebrew mashiah] the true Father of the future son, Prince of Peace, real son of David, possessor of the scepter of Judah has not arrived . . . I believe in what relates to the mysterious vision of the holy Daniel . . . Tenth:[47] I believe that King Antiochus, whom the Holy Scriptures called root of sin, because he was the persecutor of God's people and of His holy law, represents the kings of Spain and Portugal . . . from which originate the branches of the inquisitions and the persecutions of the blessed martyrs . . . true Jews [whom they call] Judaizing heretics. However, Judaizing is not heresy but is living according to the Commandments of God our Lord.
Luis de Carvajal concludes with a confession that sounds like a prayer recited on the Day of Atonement:
I again swear, in the name of the Almighty, to live and die for His faith. May it please Him, so that, imitating the zeal of Hananiah, Azariah, Mishael,[48] and Matathias,[49] I shall joyfully give away my soul for the faith of the Holy Testament for which they died . . . I hope for strength from the Lord. I do not trust myself, since I am only flesh and of frail nature; and just as I have placed a mother and five sisters in danger for this faith,[50] I would give away a thousand, if I had them, for the faith of each of His holy Commandments . . . My Lord, look upon me with grace, so that it may be known and seen in this kingdom and upon all the earth that Thou art our God and that Thine almighty and holy name, Adonay, is invoked with truth in Israel and among Israel's descendants. I commit this soul that Thou gavest me to Thy holy hands, promising with Thy help not to change my faith till death nor after it.
I end happily the narrative of my present life, having lively faith in Thy divine hope of saving me through Thine infinite mercy and of resurrecting me, when Thy holy will is accomplished, together with our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his faithful sons, for whose holy love I beg Thee humbly to confirm this and not to forsake me. May it please Thee to send the angel Michael, our prince, to defend and help me. . . . O Lord, have mercy on the glory of Thy name, Thy law, and Thy people, and the world which Thou Thyself didst create; fill it with Thy light and the truthful knowledge of Thy name, so that heaven and earth will be filled with Thy glory and praise, amen, amen.[51]
In the spaces between the multiple autos de fe over three centuries, and in the shadow of celebrated martyrs, thousands of humble Anussim led a life filled with shame and fear, guilt and despair, hoping for some Moses to deliver them from the Christian Pharaoh, or some new Esther who would defeat the Hamans of the Inquisition. Asked if he were not a New Christian, a certain Gonçalo, who was suspected of avoiding crossing himself in church, replied: "No, I am not; but I am a converso." Commenting on this seemingly paradoxical statement, Carrete Parrondo writes: "This sentence, if it is correct, is quite surprising as New Christian and Converso are synonyms."[52] They might certainly have been synonymous in the common language and in the minds of the Christians, but this Gonçalo was resisting being identified as a Christian, New or Old, stressing the fact that he had been converted against his will. Elvira García declared that "in the faith she was born in she wishes to die;" and to the question why she had converted, she replied: "for the sake of my children."[53] Pedro Núñez de Santa Fe, formerly don Yuça of Valladolid, confessed that if not for all the debts owed to him he would not have converted [in 1492] nor returned from Portugal [in 1494].[54] Ruy Dias confided to a witness[55] that "if not for his children, he would leave for the land of Judaea."
Guilt feelings for having converted, or for going on to live as Anussim, dreaming of leaving Christian kingdoms for Jerusalem or Constantinople, and keeping alive the hope of messianic redemption are some of the most frequent themes in the confessions of the Anussim as well as in the most memorized traditional prayers among them and in the personalized poetic versions of certain Psalms transmitted from one generation to the next. Don Yuça, who would send a barrel of wine to his Jewish parents every year for Purim and Passover, confessed that "he repented of having become a Christian, that he would give his wife all their common property, have her return to her father's home, because
he wished to leave for Jerusalem."[56] In Tras-os-Montes, Portugal, the following fragmentary prayer has survived the centuries:
O meus Deus, quem ja se vira
N'aquela santa cidade
Chamada Jerusalem.
Jerusalem está esperando
cada hora e cada dia . . .
O alto Deus d'Israel,
Cumpri vossas profecias . . .
[O my God, pray one would be so fortunate / to reside in that holy city / called Jerusalem. / Waiting for Jerusalem, / every hour and every day . . . / O exalted God of Israel, / accomplish your prophecies . . .]
From a crypto-Jewish physician living in Guarda, Portugal, who had been denounced in 1582 to the Inquisition in Lisbon, we possess a poetic expression of the deep-seated yearnings for messianic redemption and the ingathering of the captives and exiles in the Holy Land:[57]
O SONHO
O Sonho que eu sonhava
Se o ouzasse a dizer,
Mas eu ey grande vergonha
Que mo não quizessem crer.
Que sonhava com prazer
Que os mortos se erguião
E tornavam a viver
E que todos [se sahião];[58]
Os que estavão nas prisões
Traz dos montes escondidos,
Sonhava que erão sahidos
Da dura e forte prisão.
Vi a tribu de Adão
Com as dentes apreganhados
E muito espedaçados
Da serpente do dragão.
E assi vi a Ruben
Co hua voz de muita gente.
O qual vira mui contente
Cantando em Jerusalem.
O quem vira a Belem
E os montes de Syon
E a esse bom Jurdão
Para se lavar mui bem . . .
[THE DREAM. The dream I have dreamed, / if I dared to tell it; /but I feel so ashamed / for fear of not being believed.
For I dreamed with joy / that the dead were resurrected / and returned to live, / that all of them left their graves.
Those who were in the prisons / beyond the mountains hidden, / I dreamed that they went free / from the harsh and cruel prison.
I saw the tribe of Adam / caught in the gnashing teeth / and bitten to pieces / by the serpent, the dragon.
And I also saw Ruben / with the noise of a multitude / coming in great happiness, / singing in Jerusalem.
Fortunate who would see Bethlehem / and the mountains of Zion, / and reach the good river Jordan / to completely wash oneself, etc.][59]
To give expression to their guilt feelings and yearning for a prompt divine redemption, the Anussim made the Psalms the most important vehicle to convey their innermost emotions, projecting in the texts they often learned by heart personal variations and allusions to their own situation. We find therefore in the surviving documents of the Inquisition a great number of paraphrased Psalms, particularly those dealing with contrition and repentance, with yearning for messianic deliverance and dreams of returning to Zion. Thus, the book of Psalms, available to them in Jewish or Christian translations in Spanish, became for the Anussim the most continuous source of hope and consolation, prayer and meditation, personal devotion and mystical spirituality. From Christian apocalyptic literature, in particular from the commentaries on Daniel brought by the preachers as persuasive arguments for converting to Christianity, the Anussim appropriated the same texts to deepen their faith in the messianic redemption yet to come. Juan de Salzedo,[60] when asked one day about how he felt, replied "that he was feeling fine, but that it was said in the Scriptures of the Jews that happy the man who will be found as a Jew after the passing of these [troubled] times," referring probably to Daniel 12:2–3: "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And then they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."[61]
A typical poetic paraphrase and personal adaptation of a psalm, fre-
quently alluded to in inquisitorial confessions, has been preserved in two complete versions (in Portuguese and Spanish), with slight variations between them, and recorded during two different trials.[62] The Portuguese version of 1596 opens as follows:
Alto Dio de Abraham,
Rey forte de Israel,
tu que ouuiste a Ismael,
ouue a minha orazón;
tu que en las grandes alturas
te aposentas Señor,
ouue a esta pecadora
que te chama das bajuras;[63]
The Spanish version of 1643 reads:
Oh, Alto Dios de Abraham,
Dios fuerte, Dios de Israel,
tu que oíste a Daniel,
oye mi oraçion;
tu que en las grandes alturas
te pusiste, mi Señor,
oye aquesta pecadora[64]
que te llama de las basuras;
tú que a toda criatura
abres caminos y fuentes;
alce mis ojos a los montes,
donde vendrá mi ayuda.[65]
Yo bien sé que en mi se encierra
gran pecado que en mi hay.
Mi ayuda de Adonay,
que hizo cielos y tierra;
Santo(s) Dios, fuerte Dios,
misericordioso Dios immortal,
Habed misericordia de mi, Señor.
[O exalted God of Abraham, / almighty God, God of Israel, / you who hearkened to Daniel, / listen to my prayer; / you, who in the high spheres / have residence, O my Lord, / listen to this sinning woman / who calls upon you from the abyss; / you who open for every creature / pathways and water sources; / I lifted up my eyes unto the hills / whence my help will come. / I confess that in me enclosed / a great sin is hidden.[66] / My help comes from Adonay / who created heaven and earth. / Holy God, almighty God, / merciful and immortal God, / have mercy on me, O Lord.]
Manuel de Morales, an active Judaizer in Portugal, who had arrived in New Spain with the Carvajals and played a major part among the Anussim there, wrote many poetic prayers (some erroneously attributed to Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo)[67] which were recited on the High Holidays during several generations. One of them opens as follows:
Recibe mi ayuno en penitencia,
Señor, de todo mal que te he cometido;
no permites me falte tu clemencia
pues ves con cuanta angustia te la pido;
ensalzaré tu suma omnipotencia,
será de mí tu nombre engrandecido
y no me des, Señor, lo que merezco,
pues ves que aún en pensarlo estremezco.
Si te he ofendido gravemente,
era por falta de entendimieto . . . (P. 307)
[Accept, O Lord, my fast as penitence for any evil I have done to Thee; do not withhold Thy clemency from me, seeing how anxiously I beg Thee for it; I will extol Thy almightiness, Thy name will be exalted by me; do not retribute to me, Lord, according to my merits, seeing how I tremble only at this thought. / If I have gravely sinned in Thy eyes, it was for lack of understanding; etc.]
His disciple, Luis de Carvajal (el Mozo), destined to become the charismatic martyr of sixteenth-century New Spain, wrote a sonnet that might well be considered as one of the most outstanding mystical and penitential texts ever written, in the style of the traditional piyyutim (sacred hymns) recited in the synagogue on the High Holidays. This composition, in fact, was composed for Yom Kippur and was still known among the Anussim in the mid-seventeenth century:
I have sinned, my Lord; but not because I have sinned
Do I abandon plaint and hope for Thy mercy;
I fear that my punishment will equal my guilt,
But I still hope for forgiveness through Thy kindness.
I suspect that, as Thou hast awaited my return,
Thou hast held me in contempt for my ingratitude;
My sin is made still greater
Because Thou art so worthy of being loved.
If it were not for Thee, what would become of me?
And who, except Thee, would free me from myself?
Who would free me if Thy hand did not shower Thy grace on me?
And except for me, my God, who would not love Thee?
And, except for Thee, my God, who would bear with me?
And, without Thee, my God, to Thee who would take me?[68]
From single sentences, fragments of psalms and hymns, and poetic paraphrases preserved in both inquisitorial documents and other sources, one can ascertain that the Anussim had at their disposal more than just memorized bits and pieces of traditional prayers. However, the mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, or Catalan and Spanish (in Majorca), in earlier phases illustrates the new presence of books of prayers and other texts in the Spanish language, smuggled in from Ferrara and Amsterdam in the sixteenth century. From the surviving quotations and fragmentary texts it is possible to state without equivocation that the Anussim knew the most important prayers of the Sephardic ritual, the daily prayers as well as those used for the Sabbath, the holidays, and for special occasions (blessings before and after meal, before sleeping and after awakening, before leaving on a journey by land or sea; rules and precepts for certain ceremonial customs; etc.), including some texts of cabbalistic origin which were not in use among non-Sephardic worshipers. We will illustrate these points with a select number of samples from various sources and different periods.
In spite of the mass conversion of the Jewish community in Majorca in 1435, almost fifty years before the official establishment of the Inquisition in the Spanish kingdom, and their seeming insulation from the Jewish and crypto-Jewish communities on the mainland, these Anussim denigratingly known as xuetes, chuetas (the Majorcan equivalent of marranos), who 250 years later were still branded as "New Christians" and excluded from the "Old Christian" society, seem to have preserved important fragments of prayers from the Sephardic ritual.[69] Isabel Martí y Cortés, noted for her disparaging remarks to her torturers, brings up in her complaints verses from Psalms among Jewish articles of faith:
Christians believe in a God made by the hands of man, who has eyes and does not see, ears and does not hear, mouth and does not speak, hands and does not touch, feet and does not walk; and they have invented a law adapted for their needs which gives them sustenance, and the inquisitors and their secretaries obtain a good salary which sustains them, but the Christians know very well that the Law given by the Lord of Israel to Moses is the true one, and that at the hour of death they believe in the Law of Moses, and so are saved, and that if they would read the Bible without distortions they would all become Jews, but they have mixed up everything, including all the commandments, for the third commandment of the Mosaic Law says to observe the Sabbath . . .
The following text, for example, recorded at her trial in 1678 and transcribed by Braunstein as one unit, represents in reality three different segments of the introductory portion of the morning service (the order being II, I, III; segment II is recited when entering the synagogue):
I. Bendito tu Adonay, nuestro Dios, Rey del mundo, que formó el hombre con sabiduría, y crió en el orados orados, huecos huecos. Descubierto(s) y sabi[d]o delante çilla de tu trono, que si serasse uno dellos, o si se abriesse uno dellos, no [seria] possible sustenarse [por] una hora. Bendito tu Adonay, mel[e]ci[n]an toda criatura, y maravilha(s) para hazer.
II. Yo [1] / con muchedumbre [2] / de tu merced [3] / vendre [4] / a tu cassa [5] / a humillarme [6] / a [7] / Palacio(s) [8] / de tu santidat [9] / (6) con temor [10]
III. Todos criados de arriba [y] abaxo . . .[70]
Segment II, recited when one enters the synagogue, comprises in the Hebrew original ten words from Psalm 5:8, representing the number of persons necessary (a minyan ) for a regular full service. Segment III here constitutes just the opening line of a special prayer (see next example) of cabbalistic origin, composed by Shelomoh Mosheh Alsaqar, and only incorporated in the Sephardic ritual of prayers.[71] This composition (which starts in Hebrew, Kol beruey ma'alah u-matah ye-'idun yagidun, etc.), accompanying the other two segments, is already present in an early sixteenth-century Catalan version of the Book of Prayers (Brit. Museum, MS Bodl. Or. 9):[72]
II. Beneyt tu A[donay], nostre Deu, rey del mon. que crjha l'home ab sabiesa, y cria en ell forats forats, buyts, buyts; descubert y sabut davan cadira de ta honra, que si [sera obert un d'ells, o] sis tancha un d'ells no li es posible per se sostenerse sols hora una. Beneyt tu A[donay], medecinant tota criatura y maravelha[n] per far.
I. Y io en multitud de ta merçe vindre en ta casa, encorbarme a palau de ta santedad, en ta temor.
III. Tot criat alt y baix testificaran y recontaran tots ells [com uno] que A[donay] 1, y son nom 1; 30 y 2 çenderos, y tot entene[n]t sa puritat recontara[n] sa grandeza . . .
[Blessed be Thee Adonay, our God, King of the universe, who createth man with wisdom, and createth in him openings, holes; it is clear and known before the throne of Thy glory, that if one of them would be obstructed, or one of them would burst open, he could not possibly sur-
vive even for a short time. Blessed be Thee Adonay, who careth for all creatures, and createth with marvel.
But as for me, I will come into Thy house in the multitude of Thy mercy, and in Thy fear will I worship toward Thy holy temple.
All the creatures in heaven and on earth will testify and proclaim unanimously that God is one and His name is one. Thirty-two pathways, for those who understand their secret, will proclaim Thy greatness . . .]
The following prayer, equally from among those preserved in the community of Chuetas, was used particularly during the Sabbath service, and is found with more elements in most Hebrew Rituals of Prayer as well as with some variations in the surviving prayers of several communities of Anussim (the original in Hebrew [starting Barukh she-amar we-hayah ha-'olam comprises eighty-seven words, a number which has some esoteric connotations):[73]
Bendito tu Adonay, nuestro Dios, Rey del mundo, y Rey el grande, el Santo Padre ["santo" not Hebr. text], el Piadoso, lloado en boca de su Pueblo; afermo[z]icado en lengua de todos sus buenos, y sus siervos . . . y con cánticos de David tu siervo. Te lloa[re]mos, engrandeceremos, te alabaremos, te glorificaremos, te enaltezeremos, y nombraremos tu nombre, nuestro Rey, nuestro Dios, unico vivo de los mundos. Alabado y glorificado sea tu nombre sienpre de sienpre. Bendito tu Adonay, nuestro Dios, Rey alabado con alabamiento.
[Blessed be Thee Adonay, our God, King of the universe, exalted King, holy Father ["holy" not in Hebr. text], the merciful, praised on the lips of His nation; extolled in the tongue of His pious followers and servants, . . . and with the psalms of David Thy servant. We will praise Thee, exalt Thee, extol Thee, glorify Thee, magnify Thee, and we will mention Thy name, our King, our God, uniquely alive in all eternity. Praised and glorified be Thy name for ever and ever. Blessed be Thee, Adonay, our God, King exalted with hymns of praise.]
Another prayer, paraphrasing Psalm 91 with additions from other psalms, known as Oração da Formosura ("Prayer of Exaltation"), is found with slight variations in a great number of specimens preserved for centuries among the Anussim of Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere.[74] I present here the opening sequence of various versions, among many others, in Portuguese. It was recorded at the trial of Brites Henriques between 1674 and 1683. Arrested at the age of twenty-two and tortured over a period of eight years, this young woman recited a great number of prayers, some very extensive, including the Oração da Formosura [notice the use of first person singular in this version (as in the original psalm) contrary to first person plural in the next examples]:
A honra e louvor do Senhor dos altos Ceos: Seja a santa formosura de Adonay, nuestro Dios, perfeita a obra das minhas mãos compõe, perfeita a obra das minhas mãos comporá. Sobre my cobertura do alto, que me lembre do abastador. Digo Adonay é meu Deus, meu abrigo, meu catelo, e meu Senhor, que vos Senhor dos altos Ceus me livreis e me guardeis do laço do encampamento, de mortandade, de quebranto. Não temo o pavor da noite . . .
In a different version recorded in Belmonte half a century ago the prayer reads as follows:
Em honra e louvor dos 73 [in Hebrew text: 72] nomes[75] do Senhor seja! A Formosura santa do meu Deus de Adonai sobre nós seja. O Senhor dos Ceus compõe as obras das nossas mãos, o Senhor dos Ceus as comporá. Estamos encobertos no alto, á sombra do abastador nos adormecemos. Viva Adonai, meu brio, meu rei, meu Senhor, meu castelo, meu edifico. Elle nos guardará e nos livrara do mau laço, tortura, mortandade, castimento da sua santidade. Debaixo da sua santa Saquiné [for Hebrew shekhinah , "divine presence"] não temeremos o pavor da noite . . .
And at the trial of Diogo Teixeira, the inquisitors recorded the following version:
Em formosura de ti Adonai, nosso Deos, exalçado sobre nos e sobre os feitos de nossas mãos, Adonai Sabaho, sobre nos a conta do alto, a sombra do Abastado, maris (? meu?) rei, Adonai meu grande abriguo, minha penha, meu castello, o Senhor me livrará de laço encampado, de mortandade arrebatosa; debaixo de suas asas me estaziarei . . .
Another hymn of praise, paraphrasing Psalm 148 with personal interpolations, has been recorded in many trial documents or simply alluded to. Recorded in the 1920s in Belmonte, Portugal, the traditional example starts as follows:
Louvai o Senhor, os moradores dos Ceos,
Louvai-o nas alturas;
Louvai-o todos os seus anjos,
Louvai-o todas as suas virtudes.
Louvai-o o sol, a lua, as estrellas e a luz,
Louvai-o todos . . .
A Spanish variation on the same Psalm 148, recorded at the trial of Juan López de Armenia in 1590, starts as follows (showing clearly some individual interpolations):[76]
A. a S. [Alabad al Señor] todos los arcangeles y los profetas,
A. a S. todos los patriarcas,
A. a S. todos los martires,
A. a S. de dia y de noche,
A. a S. de ynvierno y en verano y en frio y en calor,
A. a S. la luz y las tinieblas,
A. a S. las alturas,
A. a S. las baxeças de la tierra,
A. a S. que no come ni beue, y juzga y ue . . .
In Belmonte, the same psalm has been elaborated in a short song, easy to learn, following the structure and the style of the popular cantigas de amigo of the Gallego-Portuguese tradition, and adapted to a female congregation as a morning prayer:[77]
Levantai-vos meninas cedo,
Ja quere amanhecer;
Louvaremos ão altissimo senhor
Que nos ha de fortalecer.
Louvai o Senhor ão som da viola
Ele è tudo som e tudo gloria.
Louvai o Senhor meninas
Louvai-o com vozes finas.
Louvai o Senhor donzelas
Louvai-o com vozes belas.
Louvai o Senhor casadas
Louvai-o com vozes claras.
Louvai o Senhor viuvas
Louvai-o com vozes puras.
O Senhor de todos os amores,
Louvai meninas e flores.
Amén, Senhor, que fizeste o dia.
[Awake and rise, O maidens, hastily, / the time of dawn is near; / we will praise the almighty Lord / who will give us strength. / Praise the Lord with the lute / for He is sound and glory. / Praise the Lord, O maiden, / Praise Him with noble voices. / Praise the Lord, O damsels, / Praise Him with beautiful voices. / Praise the Lord, O spouses, / Praise Him with clear voices. / Praise the Lord, O widows, / Praise Him with pure voices. / The Lord of all the loves, / Praise ye maiden and flowers. / Amen, O Lord, who maketh the new day.]
Among the poetic adaptations of the prayer to be recited before retiring to bed at night, we quote one recorded in Idanha-a-Nova :
Na minha cama me deitei,
As minhas portas fechei
Com as chaves de Abrahão;
Os bons entrarão,
Os maus sahirão;
Os anjos do Senhor
Comigo estão.
Amén, Senhor . . .
[I lay down in my bed, / I have closed my doors / with the keys of Abraham; / the pious will come in, / the evil ones will leave; / the angels of the Lord / are here with me. Amen, Lord, etc.]
As the women in Portugal were particularly active among the Anussim and served in a way as lay "cantors" or "priests" (sacerdotisas ) in conducting the secret religious services and educating their children, many prayers for all the various occasions were adapted in song form, including allusions to their own tragic situation. These could then be memorized with ease and preserved as popular songs for generations. A good example is such an adaptation for the Day of Atonement (Oração que se diz no "Dia Puro do Senhor"), possibly composed in 1500 or 1543 (depending on the interpretation of line five in the fragment quoted here; the allusion could be to D. Manuel or Don Juan III):
. . . . . . .
Quebrai, Senhor, este jugo
Que nos peza deshumano;
Livrai-nos, Senhor, livrai-nos
Das garras d'este tirano.
Ha trez annos que o teu povo
Em ferros geme e suspira,
Bastem os males passados,
Aplaque-se a tua ira!
Livraste-o de hum pharãó;
Por santo prodigio novo
De outro pharãó mais duro
Outra vez livra o teu povo.
A tua voz formidavel
Quebrem-se os duros grielhões,
Hoje, porque he o teu dia
Deve ser o dos perdões.
Para nos he a ventura,
Para ti, Senhor, a gloria;
O teu dia sacro santo
Seja o dia da victoria.
Amèn, Senhor . . .
[Break, O Lord, this yoke / of inhumane oppression; / deliver us, O Lord, deliver us / from this tyrant's claws. / For three years already your people / in chains cry and complain; / suffice the past evils, / placate now your anger. / You delivered him from a Pharaoh; / with a new sacred miracle, / from another Pharaoh more cruel, / free once more your nation. / At the sound of your tremendous voice, / let the harsh chains be smashed; / this day, for it is your day, / has to be the day of forgiving. / It should be good fortune to us, / and glory to you, O Lord; / let your sacred holy day / be the day of victory. / Amen, O Lord . . .]
From a series of Passover songs that have survived among the Anussim, I selected the following examples (the first two from Belmonte):
Caminhamos e andamos
Louvaremos ão Deus d'Abrahão,
Que nos livrou do Egypto
De terra da escravidão.
[Let us go forth and march, / praising the Lord of Abraham, / who has freed us from Egypt, / the land of slavery.]
Caminhamos e andamos
Louvaremos ão Deus d'Israel
Que nos livrou do Egypto
Da quelle Rei tão cruel (bis).
[Let us go forth and march, / praising the Lord of Israel, / who has freed us from Egypt, / from that very cruel king.]
The traditional and popular song ("Who knows One? / I know One. / One is God. / Who knows two?" etc.) was preserved among the Chuetas in Majorca in the seventeenth century (with the typical opening part common to the Sephardim: "Qui sabes y entregues; qui es Deu alt en cel? Alabat sie el seu santo nom. Amen. Amen."):
El Uno: El gran Dios de Israel; / Los Dos: Moysen y Aarón; / Los Tres: Abram, Isach y Jacób; / Los Quatro: Maridos de Israel; / Los Cinco: Libros de la Lei; / Los Seis: Dias del Sábado (Misna); / Los Siete: Dias de la Semana; / . . . Los Doze: Tribus de Israel; / Las Treze: Palabras que dijo Dios omnipotente a Moyses. Amen. Amen.
Compare this with a later version sung among the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, recorded in two versions by Camhy and Samuelson.[78]
And, finally, let us quote here a poetic adaptation of the Ten Commandments, originating in Belmonte, which the mother recites to her son as an initiation to their secret monotheistic faith. In this song form, the youngsters could learn with ease the basic tenets of Judaism:
Eu sou teu Deus e Senhor,
Deus dúm poder infinito
Que, piedoso, te salvei
Do captiveiro do Egypto.
Não terás alheios Deuses—,
Que em mim tens o sumo bem;
Ama-me, como a ti mesmo,
E ão teu próximo tambem.
Não tomarás do teu Deus
O seu santo nome em vão—;
E nem por Elle, debalde,
Jures na mais leve acção.
Ao sabbado não trabalhes,
Nem tu, nem filho, ou criado—,
Santificando este dia,
So para mim reservado.
Honrarás teu pãe e mãe—,
Com particular dever;
São pessoas respeitaveis,
Porque te dérão o ser.
Irado, não matarás
O teu proprio semelhante—,
E não conserves jamais
O odio, nem por um instante.
Com castidade serás—,
Modesto em tuas acções,
Sem manchares a tua alma
Com obscenas corrupções.
Não furtarás—, porque o furto,
De propósito e vontade,
E' um crime abominavel,
Que revolta a sociedade.
Contra o próximo não falles,
De todos dizendo bem;
Nem com falso testemunho
Jamais insultes alguem.
Nem por leve pensamiento,
Desejarás a mulher,
Que não seja a tua propria—,
Intentando-a corromper.
Não cubiçarás, emfim,
Aquillo que não for teu—,
Contenta-te com os bens,
Que a Providencia te deu.
Aqui tens, querido filho,
Do bom Deus a lei primeira,
Que devemos observar
Com a fé mais verdadeira.
[I am thy God and Lord, / God of infinite power, / who mercifully delivered thee / from captivity in Egypt. // Thou shalt not have alien gods, / for in me is your supreme good; / thou shalt love me as thyself, / and also thy neighbor. // Thou shalt not use for naught / the holy name of thy God; / and, in His name, never swear / in vain even for a trifling sum. // Thou shalt not labor on the Sabbath day, / neither thy son nor thy servant; / sanctify this day, / set aside only for me. // Thou shalt honor thy father and mother / with particular devotion; / they are respectable people / having given thee thy being. // Irate, thou shalt not kill / any creature in thy likeness; / and never harbor in thy heart / hatred, not even for an instant. // In chastity thou shalt dwell, / modest in thy deeds, / not tarnishing thy soul / with obscene corruptions. // Thou shalt not steal, for theft / done with purpose and intention / is an abominable crime / that subverts society. // Thou shalt not malign thy neighbor; / say good things about all people; / never cause harm to anybody / by false testimony. // Thou shalt not desire, / not even in furtive thought, / a woman which is not thine, / causing her to be defiled. // Lastly, thou shalt not covet / whatever is not thine; / be happy with thy lot / which Providence has given thee. // This is, my beloved son, / the good Lord's First Law; / and we have to observe it / with perfectly sincere faith.]
On 8 December 1596, Luis de Carvajal the Younger was led to his auto de fe. All the way to the quemadero, Father Alonso de Contreras was begging him to kiss the cross—to save his soul, and thus deserve being garroted before burning instead of being burned alive—but in vain. He wanted to die, writes Father Contreras, as the "great zealot, grand teacher and restorer of the forgotten Law":
He was always such a good Jew and he reconciled his understanding, which was very profound and sensitive, with his highly inspired divine determination to defend the Law of God—the Mosaic—and fight for it. I have no doubt that if he had lived before the Incarnation of Our Redeemer, he would have been a heroic Hebrew, and his name would have been as famous in the Bible as are the names of those who died in defense of their Law when it was necessary.[79]
These words of Father Alonso de Contreras, which sum up the life and martyrdom of Luis de Carvajal, could well serve as an epitaph to
thousands of known and anonymous Anussim as well as a conclusion to our inquiry on the degree and continuity of their "Jewishness."*
Eleven—
The Inquisition and the Crypto-Jewish Community in Colonial New Spain and New Mexico
Stanley M. Hordes
Within the scope of Mexican history, the subjects of the Inquisition and crypto-Jews have long been the focus of heated controversy and misplaced value judgments.[1] The unfortunate result of this has been, and still remains today, a lack of understanding of the Inquisition, particularly in its relation to the crypto-Jewish community. The polemical nature of the historiography reflects the same Black Legend-versus-White Legend debate that has plagued colonial Latin American historiography continuously since the Spanish conquest. Because the theme of inquisitorial persecution strikes at the very nerve center of this debate between assailants and defenders of the Spanish colonial system, that is, the rigid enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy and exclusivity, historians of both schools have demonstrated a great deal of emotion and self-righteousness in the pursuit of their respective causes. Many authors have placed a heavy emphasis on the role that the Holy Office of the Inquisition played in the persecution of crypto-Jews, despite the fact that the inquisitors concerned themselves far more with more mundane breaches of faith and morals such as blasphemy, bigamy, witchcraft, impersonation of priests and solicitation of women in the confessional. One of the great barriers to gaining an understanding of the Inquisition and the crypto-Jews in New Spain has been the inappropriate imposition of current value-judgments on people and events in the past. The stress placed by certain historians on the persecution of crypto-Jews reflects an implicit and explicit application of twentieth-century values to an institution and a society of an earlier age.
It will be the purpose of this essay to examine in a more critical and
dispassionate manner the experiences of the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain in the colonial era, not only their treatment at the hands of the Holy Office of the Inquisition but their role in the economy and society of the viceroyalty. I will conclude by offering some preliminary observations concerning a new project, just under way, to study a living remnant of the Mexican crypto-Jewish community only now emerging from the shadows in New Mexico.
With the conquest of New Spain by Hernando Cortés in 1521, the long arm of the Inquisition extended across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to Mexico. The small number of Judaizing cases tried by the Mexican Inquisition during the first half-century of Spanish colonization in New Spain indicates that crypto-Jews were able to practice their faith in an atmosphere of relative toleration.[2] This situation began to change in the 1580s, when crypto-Jewish immigration to New Spain increased dramatically. The establishment of Spanish hegemony over Portugal in 1580 motivated Portuguese conversos to move in unprecedented numbers to other areas of the world, including the Indies. The new arrivals were considerably more educated and better versed in Jewish doctrine than were their predecessors, and their presence resulted in a new infusion of religiosity in the viceroyalty.[3]
The increase in the number and activity of the crypto-Jews in New Spain did not go unnoticed by the Mexican Inquisition, only a few years earlier strengthened by elevation to the status of Tribunal del Santo Oficio. Between 1589 and 1596 almost two hundred persons were tried for the crime of judaizante . During this period, the most notable and celebrated campaign by the Holy Office was directed toward Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, his family and associates.[4] The vigorous activity of the Mexican Inquisition against the crypto-Jews at the end of the sixteenth century was short-lived, however. After the auto de fe of 1601 the prosecution of those accused of judaizing declined, and the tribunal concentrated on other breaches of Catholic orthodoxy. The nucleus of Portuguese crypto-Jewish settlement formed in the late sixteenth century served to attract ever-increasing numbers of their countrymen in Spain and Portugal to New Spain in the early seventeenth century.
Indeed, the climate in New Spain was favorable for the settlement of crypto-Jewish immigrants in the early 1600s. The Mexican economy was experiencing a boom period at the end of the sixteenth century that carried over into the early decades of the seventeenth century. The mining sector enjoyed unprecedented expansion from the 1590s through 1620. Agriculture, stock raising, and textiles kept pace with the demand produced by the mining boom, and the level of trade between
New Spain and Europe reached new heights. In the succeeding decades the Mexican economy grew more autonomous, and, despite the decline in trans-Atlantic trade, it continued to grow.[5] In this atmosphere of economic expansion, enterprising crypto-Jewish merchants found themselves ready and able to participate actively in all levels of commerce throughout the viceroyalty.
While crypto-Jews were to be found in almost every region of New Spain in the mid-seventeenth century, Mexico City served as the focal point for converso society just as it did for the larger Spanish economy and society. With few exceptions, crypto-Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal traveled directly to the capital after landing at Veracruz.[6] Of the majority who initially settled in Mexico City only a little over half remained there after two or three years. The rest dispersed to more remote regions of the viceroyalty in search of greater economic opportunities. Many left to take advantage of the lucrative trade in the mining areas of Pachuca or northern New Spain; others established themselves in the ports of Acapulco, Veracruz, or Campeche, where they had direct access to the fleets arriving from Spain or in the Philippines. Still others continued westward in search of greater opportunities in the Philippines themselves.
The crypto-Jews who arrived in Mexico City from their distant homelands in Spain and Portugal were quickly absorbed into the mainstream of economic and social life. The established converso community in the capital was a closely knit group with a well-developed system of extended family and patron-client relationships. Several extended family units operated in Mexico City from the 1610s through the 1640s, the most notable of which was the family of Simon Váez Sevilla, without question the wealthiest crypto-Jewish merchant in the viceroyalty. At the head of each such clan there generally appeared a wealthy patron who, like Váez, not only directed the commercial activities of his family but also supervised such mundane functions as the housing, relocation, marriage, burial, and religious ceremonies of those in his charge. Often the passage of a nephew or cousin from Spain or Portugal was financed by the head of one particular clan, arranged through contacts with a relative in Seville or Lisbon.
In their role as merchants, the crypto-Jews blended very well into the mainstream of Mexican society, not distinguishing themselves as a distinct element apart from the general community, except, perhaps, by their particular orientation toward mercantile careers. In a sense it is proper to see the converso experience in this perspective. Crypto-Jews were, after all, first and foremost Iberians, maintaining the language
and customs of their forebears in Spain and Portugal. Many had the opportunity to leave the Spanish dominions in favor of lands where they were free to practice Judaism openly and in peace, but most opted to remain in familiar cultural surroundings.
Mexican crypto-Jews were not singled out as a separate group until 1642, when for a variety of reasons to be examined below, the Inquisition embarked on a campaign against the community. It must be emphasized that from 1610 until 1642 there was very little attention paid by the Inquisition, or by any other body, to the crypto-Jewish element in New Spain. Nevertheless, to judge from the testimony offered by the conversos in the trials of the 1640s, it is evident that in certain respects Mexican conversos did conduct themselves in a manner that reflected a consciousness of their ethnic identity.
The patterns demonstrated by crypto-Jews living in Mexico City strongly suggest the presence of a certain degree of ethnocentrism. The Mexican conversos exhibited a strong tendency to live in close proximity to one another, clustered mostly in a three-block area between the cathedral and the Church of Santo Domingo, ironically within a stone's throw of the palace of the Inquisition. Converso traders tended to concentrate their commercial associations within the ethnic community. In almost every area of trade, crypto-Jewish merchants relied upon one another as sources of supply and credit, as agents in remote regions, as fiadores , and as bondsmen in business ventures.
A further demonstration of ethnocentrism may be seen in the propensity of Mexican crypto-Jews to marry within the faith. The practice of endogamy was almost universal. In over ninety-five percent of the marriages, conversos chose partners from within the community. In certain instances efforts were made to "convert" a prospective bridegroom to Judaism in order to gain the approval of the bride's family. In 1638 Isabel Tinoco, niece of Simon Váez Sevilla, found herself being courted by Manuel de Acosta, a young man recently arrived from Lisbon. Relations between Acosta and Isabel's family were cordial throughout the courtship, and eventually Acosta asked her grandfather, Antonio Rodríguez Arias, for her hand in marriage. On the day that Rodríguez's response was to be delivered, Acosta visited him at his house on Calle Tacuba. During a stroll around the nearby Alameda, Rodríguez offered his consent to the marriage, but only on the condition that Acosta abandon the Law of Jesus Christ in favor of the Law of Moses. Acosta agreed, proceeded to learn the practice of Judaism from Rodríguez's wife, and married Isabel Tinoco shortly thereafter.[7]
Perhaps more than any other factor, religious observances served as
a vehicle for achieving and maintaining a sense of religious identity within the Mexican crypto-Jewish community. Fast days, especially that of Yom Kippur (referred to as el día grande ), provided an opportunity for families to stop their normal routine and gather together in the home of one of the worshipers. Inquisition procesos are filled with the detailed accounts of Yom Kippur observances, identifying the location of the service and the names of the worshipers, and vividly describing the manner in which the fasts were broken. Not all conversos were able to meet the stoic test of the fast. Pedro de Espinosa, a traveling merchant in the mining region of Tierra Adentro, stole away from the service at about three o'clock in the afternoon to relieve his hunger.[8] The Sabbath was also generally observed by Mexican conversos. Men refrained from working, and women bathed, changed clothes, and put out clean bed linen on Friday in preparation for the day of rest. Upon the death of a member of the community, the body was prepared for burial in the traditional manner whereby it was bathed, dressed in a shroud, and then placed in virgin soil.[9] Another jewish rite that was almost universally practiced among Mexican conversos was that of male circumcision. Inspections by Inquisition surgeons revealed that almost ninety-one percent of male conversos were circumcised. When confronted with this evidence, one crypto-Jew made an effort to exonerate himself, explaining that the scar was due to "an earlier infirmity that I had in those parts." Another dismissed it as the result of "the mischief of women." Still another admitted that he subjected himself to the circumcision, but protested that it was only to please a Jewish lover in Italy.[10]
These expressions of ethnic identity manifested by the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain passed virtually unnoticed from 1610 to 1642 by the Holy Office, the body entrusted with the enforcement of religious orthodoxy in the viceroyalty. With few exceptions, Mexican conversos lived their lives, pursued their careers, and discreetly practiced their observances in relative obscurity. In the early 1640s, however, a complex series of developments took place that would dramatically shatter the calm that had prevailed in the converso community for the previous three decades.
In 1640 the Portuguese Duque de Bragança led a successful movement for independence from Philip IV of Spain, thus ending a sixty-year period of Spanish domination. Fear on the part of royal officials in Mexico City that a Portuguese invasion of New Spain was imminent stimulated a series of anti-Portuguese measures aimed at potential subversives.[11] The viceroy suspected of harboring pro-Portuguese sympathies was deposed in 1642 and replaced by the strongly anti-Portuguese
archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza.[12] It is no coincidence that within days of Palafox's assumption of viceregal power, the Holy Office issued orders for the arrest of nearly one hundred persons, most of Portuguese descent, on suspicion of being judaizantes . Letters sent by Mexican inquisitors to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid after the mass arrests shed a good deal of light on the motivation for their actions. The letters clearly place the arrests in the context of the widespread fear of invasion by the Portuguese armada that gripped Mexico in June and July of 1642. Constant reference was made to the threat posed to New Spain by these "portugueses, " not so much because of their Judaizing activities as on account of their allegiance to the leaders of the Portuguese revolt. The inquisitors felt that it was their duty as zealous defenders of the kingdom to lend whatever assistance was necessary to counter the threat posed by these perceived subversives within their midst.[13]
On Saturday night, 12 July 1642, agents of the Inquisition arrested seven persons for Judaizing. The next night thirty more were apprehended. Within a year, over seventy-five conversos had entered the secret prisons of the Holy Office, charged with the criminal offense of observing the Law of Moses. By 1647, over 130 had been taken. The Holy Office issued warrants for the arrest of many more but could not follow through on them because the suspects had either died or successfully evaded the Inquisition's agents.[14] Only a small percentage of those convicted were relaxed and burned at the stake (and only one person burned alive). Most were reconciled by the Holy Office, suffering confiscation of their goods and exile from the Indies. In many cases, this sentence of exile was never enforced, and certain crypto-Jews were found to be living in New Spain years after leaving the Inquisition prisons.[15]
Following the Gran Auto de Fe of 1649, little attention was paid to the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain by the Inquisition. The period of vigorous activity against judaizantes from 1642 to 1649, like that of 1585–1601, stands as an aberration in the context of three centuries of colonial Mexican history. What happened to those crypto-Jews who left the secret prisons of the Holy Office, or to those countless others who successfully evaded the suspicions of the Inquisition? One can only assume that most melded into the mainstream of Mexican society, some gradually losing all ethnic identity, others passing on vestiges of their Sephardic heritage from generation to generation.
Today, in the former Spanish frontier province of Nuevo México, it appears that a small remnant of these crypto-Jews is just beginning to
emerge from the shroud of secrecy that has protected it for two dozen generations. Stories of Hispanic Catholic residents in diverse parts of the state refraining from eating pork, lighting candles on Friday nights, and marrying only within certain families who performed the same customs, have appeared with such regularity that they cannot be dismissed out of hand as anomalies.
There appears to be some strong historical evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that New Mexico was the locus of converso settlement. The period of the expansion of New Spain's northern frontier into New Mexico coincided directly with the most significant crypto-Jewish immigration to New Spain, as well as with the conversos' difficulties with the Inquisition in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Following the disappointing search for the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola and the Kingdom of Quivira undertaken by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540–1542, Spanish officials and entrepreneurs turned their attention toward exploiting the lucrative silver mines on northern New Spain closer to central Mexico. But in the 1580s and 1590s several entradas, both official and unsanctioned, were initiated northward into New Mexico. There are indications that at least three of these expeditions might have been designed to allow crypto-Jews from central Mexico and Nuevo León to escape from the inquisitorial persecutions that centered on the Carvajals and their coreligionists.
In 1582, Governor Carvajal commissioned the expedition of Antonio de Espejo, ostensibly for the purpose of rescuing three Franciscan friars who had been left behind by the Rodríguez-Sánchez Chamuscado mission the year before.[16] The timing of this expedition, coinciding with the arrival of growing numbers of secret Jews into Nuevo León, however, suggests that Carvajal may have had another motive. Perhaps he sought to undertake a discreet search for a refuge on the northern frontier of New Spain for crypto-Jews, should the need arise. Such a need did indeed arise after the crackdown by the Holy Office of the Inquisition against the governor's nephew and his associates in 1589. The following year, Carvajal's lieutenant governor, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, led a hastily organized and unauthorized expedition of some 170 men, women, and children northwestward out of Nuevo León, to the Pecos River, and upriver into northern New Mexico. Castaño's mission did not receive the authorization of the royal officials in Mexico City, and thus was considered to be illegal.[17]
The close ties maintained by Castaño to Governor Carvajal, and the allegations that he might have been a practicing crypto-Jew in Nuevo León,[18] suggest strongly that he might have initiated the dangerous ex-
pedition for the purpose of leading other secret Jews to a secure haven on the far northern frontier. This hypothesis is strengthened by a comparison of names of the expedition with those found in contemporary Inquisition records, accused of the crime of judaizante. Others possessed family names identical to those tried by the Holy Office in Mexico City, such as Rodríguez, Nieto, Carvajal, Díaz, Hernández, and Pérez, and may well have been practicing crypto-Jews themselves.[19]
In 1598, after several years of preparation, Governor and Adelantado Juan de Oñate led some 135 colonists and soldiers northward to establish the first permanent colony in New Mexico. Substantially more is known about the makeup of this expedition than that of Castaño de Sosa. As in the case of the earlier expedition, several indicators point to a crypto-Jewish presence among the founding settlers of New Mexico. The names of several individuals listed on the 8 January 1598 Muster Roll recruited for the enterprise also appear in the records of the Inquisition. Juan Rodríguez, Francisco Hernández, Miguel Rodríguez, and Antonio Rodríguez were cited by the Holy Office as "fugitives"; three of them were burned in effigy in the autos de fe of 1596 and 1601. Sebastián Rodríguez, another member of the Oñate expedition, was possibly one of two individuals by that name taken by the Inquisition. One was reconciled in the auto de fe of 1596, and the other denounced by another judaizante in 1601 as a crypto-Jew. Several other soldiers and colonists maintained either family names associated with conversos, or demographic profiles similar to others known to be practicing crypto-Jews.[20]
Because the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 resulted in the destruction of almost all of the locally generated documentation from New Mexico, very little is understood about life in the new colony during the seventeenth century. On the basis of material unearthed in the archives of Spain and Mexico by pioneer scholars such as France V. Scholes, it is known that the Inquisition was administered by the Franciscan missionaries from their base in the Salinas Province. The inquisitorial powers vested in the friars, however, appeared to have been used selectively for political purposes in their struggle for power with governors and other civil officials. The most notorious case during this period was initiated against Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, his wife, Teresa de Aguirre y Roche, and certain members of his entourage in 1661–1662 for the crime of judaizante. Most of those charged were ultimately acquitted, including Francisco Gómez Robledo, against whom the inquisitors had amassed the most compelling evidence.[21] Regardless of the official outcomes of these and other trials, the evidence presented
raises provocative questions concerning the extent of the crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico in the seventeenth century.
In the wake of the Reconquest of New Mexico by Governor Diego de Vargas in 1692–1693, thirteen years after the Pueblo Revolt came a new wave of settlers to recolonize New Mexico. By this time the Inquisition was no longer actively prosecuting judaizante cases anywhere in the viceroyalty, and consequently there are no contemporary lists of prisoners against which to compare. Nevertheless, the account of new colonists who accompanied Vargas in 1693, and of those recruited by Juan Páez Hurtado two years later, reveal some familiar names and demographic profiles, strongly suggesting a renewed crypto-Jewish presence.[22] Vargas's secretary, for example, was named Alfonso Rael de Aguilar. A persistent family legend repeated by the present-day descendants of Rael holds that the name derives from "Israel." This story is validated by an examination of baptismal records from the mission of Isleta, where two entries from the year 1756 include references to María Manuela Israel de Aguilar, the granddaughter of Alfonso.[23] Several of Rael's descendants have come forward and acknowledged the presence of Judaic practices among the family's customs.
The families that persevered in this remote province for the next three hundred years left behind few clues to explain their ethnic identity and origins. Many of the descendants of the converso families who settled here apparently assimilated, to a greater or lesser extent, into the mainstream. On the basis of preliminary ethnographic evidence, however, it appears that others continued to practice vestiges of their ancestral faith, some with no consciousness of their ethnic identity, and others maintaining a strong sense of Jewish identity.