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.