From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Anti-Marrano violence erupted in Toledo from 1449 until the 1470s, and spread to Andalusia. To eradicate crypto-Judaism, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition, whose first courts opened in 1480 in Seville. Not only did the Inquisition have no jurisdiction over the Jews, it sometimes received denunciations from Jews who despised or were jealous of conversos. Pedro de la Caballeria, the son of a convert who had attained high ecclesiastical office and had even negotiated the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, was tried posthumously as a secret Jew; he had reportedly told a Jewish neighbor who reproached him about his conversion : “Silence, fool! Could I, as a Jew, ever have risen higher than a rabbinical post? But now, see, I am one of the chief councilors (jurado) of the city. For the sake of the little hanged man (Jesus), I am accorded every honor, and I issue orders and decrees to the whole city of Saragossa. Who hinders me—if I choose—from fasting on Yom Kippur and keeping your festivals and all the rest? When I was a Jew I dared not walk as far as this (i.e. beyond the prescribed limits of a Sabbath day’s walk) but now I do as I please.”173

  Upon completion of the Reconquista in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella took drastic measures. With the Alhambra Decree, they ordered the final expulsion of Jews who refused to convert. The explicit motivation given for such drastic measures is the bad influence that Jews have on their converted brethren: “You well know that in our dominion, there are certain bad Christians that judaised and committed apostasy against our Holy Catholic faith, much of it the cause of communications between Jews and Christians. […] These Jews instruct these Christians in the ceremonies and observances of their Law, circumcising their children, […].” Believing that “the true remedy of such damages and difficulties lay in the severing of all communications between the said Jews,” the king and queen of Spain had first ordered, in 1480, “that the Jews be separated from the cities and towns of our domains and that they be given separate quarters.” That proved insufficient, and Jews have kept “trying by whatever manner to subvert our holy Catholic faith and trying to draw faithful Christians away from their beliefs.”

  The estimated number of Jews expelled from Spain varies among historians; Yovel sets the minimum figure at 120,000, out of a total of about 160,000 Spanish Jews of whom 40,000 chose baptism. Approximately 80,000 of the expelled accepted the paying offer of temporary asylum proffered by John II in Portugal, with the others settling in the south of France or Italy, Algeria or Morocco, Turkey or northern Germany (Hamburg), and in the Netherlands.

  As in every episode of this type, the Jews who chose exile rather than apostasy were more committed to their faith and their community, and they took with them a deep resentment against Catholicism. The case of Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) is emblematic: born in Lisbon to a rich and powerful family, he had derived great profits from his business ventures and became, thanks to his ability to lend huge amounts of money, the bagman of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1492, he chose exile and took refuge in Italy, where he served the king of Naples and the Venetian Republic. The idea of Israel taking revenge against Edom/Esau (code names for Rome and the Church) is central to the exegeses he published after leaving Spain. For example, the book of Daniel means, according to him, “that at the precise moment the Lord takes vengeance on the nations, Israel will then go from darkness to light and out of bondage,” and “nothing will survive of the house of Esau.” “Indeed, any deliverance promised Israel is associated with the fall of Edom.”174

  The expulsion of Jews from Spain had tripled their number in Portugal, where they grew overnight from 4% to almost 12%, out of a total population of one million. The Jews quickly came to dominate economic life there. But in 1496, as part of a matrimonial alliance with Spain that would unify the peninsula, the king of Portugal Manuel I aligned with Spanish Jewish policy. He required a massive conversion of the Jews but—in an unheard-of move—prevented them from leaving the kingdom because he did not want to deprive himself of their financial manna. However, he guaranteed them that no investigation would be conducted into their religious life during a transitional period of twenty years (a guarantee renewed in 1512 and again in 1524). Portugal now had a population consisting of about 12% New Christians, concentrated in the cities where they represented as much as a quarter to a third of the population. Historian of the crypto-Jews Nathan Wachtel notes that “this was how, under a regime of relative tolerance, the New Christians in Portugal learned and perfected the art of leading a double life: apparently Christian on the outside, while privately given to observing (however imperfectly) the celebrations and rites of the Jewish religion.”175 In Portugal, as in Spain earlier, popular hostility was not slow to manifest itself in massacres like the one in Lisbon in 1506, which caused several hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Consequently, King Manuel eventually allowed the Marranos to leave the kingdom in 1507 and let them engage in international trade.

  In 1540, the new Portuguese king João III introduced the Inquisition following the Spanish model. But the crypto-Judaism of the Portuguese Marranos was much more committed and durable than its nearly-extinct counterpart in Spain. There were three main reasons for this. First, the Portuguese Marranos descended mainly from Spanish Jews who had rejected the alternative of apostasy in 1492. Secondly, they had only converted under the threat of death, being denied the alternate possibility of leaving Portugal. And thirdly, by 1540, they had already Judaized for almost half a century with relative impunity.

  The Portuguese Inquisition was horribly efficient, torturing and burning alive tens of thousands of Judaizers, tracking them down all over Europe and even in the colonies of the New World for harmless beliefs and practices. In light of these events, the papal bull of Clement VIII in 1593, Caeca et Obdurata, took on a sadly ironic dimension when it denounced “the blind and unfeeling perfidy of the Jews,” which “does not recognize the mercy toward them of the Church that patiently awaits their conversion.”

  Judaizing Marranos developed signs of mutual recognition. “Being Marrano means being affiliated with a vast secret society of protection and assistance,” wrote Léon Poliakow.176 The secret, explains Nathan Wachtel, “became an essential component of religious fervor itself,” and “definitively marked what we may call the Marrano lifestyle: secrecy exalted as a value in itself, a sign of eminent virtue.” The Marranos developed discrete signs for recognizing each other: “an allusion, an ambiguous expression, or just a word spoken in a certain way (such as ‘believer’ or ‘faithful’ or ‘good Christian’ meant to be understood ironically). A gesture, a smile, or a glance often sufficed.” By necessity, the Marranos did not reveal their true religion to their children until adolescence; teenagers were then stunned to learn that everything they had been taught before (Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Trinity, saints) was false, and that salvation was not found in the “law of Jesus” but in that of Moses. Thus did Marranism introduce a practice of converting Christians to crypto-Judaism.177

  Among other negative effects, forced conversions and the Inquisition put a stop to sincere conversion. Voluntary converts were amalgamated with forced converts, and like them were considered suspect in the eyes of the Old Christians; if they maintained links with their Jewish relatives, or kept their aversion to pork, they risked torture, destruction, and death.

  Why, under such circumstances, would anyone convert, considering that the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over the unconverted Jews? It is likely that without the Inquisition, Marranism would have influenced Judaism as well as Christianity and served as a bridge between the two. But syncretism, which is a form of religious miscegenation, was persecuted until the early eighteenth century. Accused at this time of Judaizing in Rio de Janeiro, Theresa Paes de Jesus, from a Marrano family, excused herself: “I thought Jesus Christ was the same person as Moses, [. . .] he was the king of the Jews worshiped by Jews and Christians.” For this confession she was burned at the stake. The Inquisition crystallized, amon
g a core group of Marranos, a deeply internalized hatred of Catholicism, which led to such sacrilegious practices as the flagellation of Christ.178 This resentment, combined with a battle-hardened practice of concealment, infiltration, and secret intelligence networks, helped transform European Judaism into an ever-more-formidable anti-Christian force.

  Throughout the sixteenth century, the Marranos migrated to nations with Jewish communities, but were not allowed to officially join them. Many, feeling as foreign to one religion as the other, lost their faith. But their rejection of Jewish religion was not a rejection of Jewishness. On the contrary: beginning in the fifteenth century, a heightened racial pride emerged among the New Christians, in direct contradiction to the Christian concept that, among the baptized, “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28). Having been forced to change their religion, the Marranos minimized the importance of religion and interpreted their Jewishness in racial terms, allowing them to view themselves as fundamentally Jewish, and only incidentally Christian. It was the Marranos who, inspired by the Talmud, disseminated the first racist theories: in 1655 Isaac La Peyrère, a Marrano from Bordeaux, claimed in his treatise Præadamitæ that Adam is the ancestor of the Jewish race, while other breeds are derived from a pre-Adamic humanity, devoid of soul. In an earlier book, Du rappel des Juifs (1643), La Peyrère had already evoked a fundamental difference in biological makeup between Jews and Gentiles, while conceding that the difference is less than that between the bodies of beasts and men’s bodies because only the latter are “capable of resurrection and immortality”; however, “the bodies of Jews are capable of more Grace and Glory than the bodies of the Gentiles.”179

  Far from blending in with Christian society, New Christians socialized and married only among themselves, continued to practice usury, and still served as intermediaries between the elite and the masses of Old Christians, only with increased freedom and legitimacy. This behavior was the determining factor in the transformation of religiously based Judeophobia into the racial Judeophobia that would later be called “anti-Semitism”; the 1449 anti-Jewish revolt against the conversos of Toledo marked the turning point. Until then, both the Church and the people recognized that a Jewish convert to Christianity was not a Jew but a Christian. But conversion, which had reinforced the racial paradigm among New Christians, triggered a backlash among Spanish Old Christians: they too began to exalt their race. The ideology of “pure blood” became a central value of the hidalgo nobility, and resulted in the limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statutes of 1449 denying the conversos access to certain occupations. According to historian Americo Castro, this Spanish purity-of-blood ideology was basically a reaction to, and a mirror image of, Jewish racism. Yet it was milder: one could hardly find among Spaniards the equivalent of this certificate established in 1300 by a rabbi, guaranteeing after investigation that two young candidates for marriage “were of pure descent, without any family taint, and that they could intermarry with the most honored families in Israel; for there had been no admixture of impure blood in the paternal or maternal antecedents and their collateral relatives.”180

  The Marrano Dispersion

  Part of the Marrano community never left Portugal, and in the early twentieth century, ethnographers were able to document remnant Marrano communities that had maintained their secret customs for more than five centuries, oblivious to their specific historical ties with the Jews of the world. For example, the village of Belmonte, a Marrano community discovered around 1920, officially converted to Judaism in 1985, under the guidance of the American Rabbi Joshua Stampfer.181

  But a larger number of Portuguese Marranos spread around the world beginning in 1507, when they were first allowed to trade internationally. Some crossed the Pyrenees to reach Bayonne and Bordeaux, others settled in Northern Europe or in the Mediterranean basin, while others sailed to Lima in South America, or Goa in India. “From the mid-seventeenth century onward,” summarizes Yovel, “the Marranos created a worldwide network of Spanish-Portuguese establishments, a kind of archipelago of islands where they interacted to some degree with their surroundings, bringing with them their languages, their cultures, their Iberian customs, their skills and trade networks along with the restlessness and split identity that was their own special characteristic.” The conversos quickly became first-class international businessmen, confidently exchanging bank notes and IOUs. They “created the first pre-modern, albeit fragmented, model of economic globalization” and “soon began to rise to the forefront of international trade, virtually monopolizing the market for certain commodities, such as sugar, to participate to a lesser degree in trading spices, rare woods, tea, coffee, and the transportation of slaves.”182 Their strength lay not only in their network of solidarity, but also in their great mobility, with wealthy families always ready to respond to constraints or opportunities by a new exile.

  Fleeing the Inquisition, many Marranos took refuge in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the city of Thessaloniki, where they were free to practice their religion. They converted nominally to Islam in large numbers during the seventeenth century, following the example of Sabbatai Zevi, the Kabbalist and self-styled messiah, forming the Dönmeh community, whose numbers were assessed at more than one million in the early twentieth century. In 1550, the French King Henri II allowed “merchants and other Portuguese called New Christians” to settle in Bordeaux, granting them privileges that allowed them to acquire great wealth in maritime trade, including the slave trade.183 In Venice, Portuguese Marranos settled in the early sixteenth century. By the middle of the seventeenth century “they attained the hegemony in local affairs,” according to Cecil Roth.184 It is worth mentioning that the first edition of the Babylonian Talmud was printed in Venice in 1520. From 1512 onward, an even larger Marrano community settled in the Netherlands, then under Spanish rule. Antwerp became their capital and emerged as a booming economic center. Calvinist uprisings led to the independence of the United Provinces in 1579. When, in 1585, Philip II of Spain temporarily retook Antwerp, Jews and Calvinists transferred their businesses to Amsterdam. In the seventeenth century, the Jewish community of Amsterdam, called the “New Jerusalem of the North,” was composed largely of conversos who had returned to Judaism. Ashkenazi Jews also flocked to Amsterdam after the pogroms in Poland and Ukraine in 1648. Many of these Jews and crypto-Jews eventually would join the “New Amsterdam,” later renamed New York.

  When circumstances permitted, the Marranos returned to Judaism. But if it benefitted their affairs, they could also re-don the Christian mask when travelling back to Spain, Portugal, or in the Iberian colonies. Many made use of two names: a Hebrew name within the Jewish community, and a Spanish or Portuguese name in international affairs. A notable example is Moshe Curie, one of the wealthiest Marranos of Amsterdam, who signed his bills, powers, and IOUs with the name Jeronimo Nunes da Costa.185 Thus the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “saw the return of Marrano emigrants to Judaism, a return that did not only occur in the Ottoman Empire, a traditional refuge for Jews, but also in European cities like Venice, Ferrara, Hamburg, Amsterdam and London. Jewish communities also reappeared, barely concealed, in prohibited areas such as Spanish Flanders and the Bordeaux region, where authorities had good business reasons to close their eyes. This led to the phenomenon of ‘New Jews,’ ex-New Christians who returned to the religion of their ancestors.”186

  The distinction between Jew and crypto-Jew gradually became baseless. The term “Portuguese” came to designate the Sephardic Jews exiled in Christian masks, whether or not they retained the mask.“The same commercial network,” writes Yovel, “could contain secret Judaizers in Seville or Mexico, assimilated Catholics in Antwerp or Toulouse, officially declared Jews in London or Curacao, perhaps even a dissident converted to Calvinism, alongside all kinds of undecided Marranos, agnostics and freethinkers.”187 Nathan Wachtel adds: “Quasi- global dispersion, transcontinental and transoceanic solidarity: these huge networks linking New
Christians in Lisbon, Antwerp or Mexico, and the Jews of Livorno, Amsterdam or Constantinople, had a remarkable character, something new at this dawn of modernity, which was to join together tens of thousands of people who did not officially profess the same religious faith, yet shared the feeling of belonging to the same community, designated by the lapidary phrase: the Nação.”188 It is significant that the term “nation,” which comes from the Latin natio, “birth,” was applied to the international community of Marranos before it came to designate any other “peoples.” It may be said that the idea of “nation” is a crypto-Jewish contribution to the Christian West.

  Firmly established in all major European ports, the Marranos played the leading role in the commercial and colonial expansion of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe. Their networks were not only the link between the maritime empires of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English, but also took on a global dimension, connecting Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. Portuguese Marranos mastered large-scale trade, on the routes to the East Indies as well as the newly opened sea routes to the “West Indies,” meaning the American continent. Christopher Columbus—who left Spain during the same month that the decree of expulsion of the Jews was declared—was himself Marrano, according to a thesis defended by several Jewish historians, including Cecil Roth, author of an authoritative history of Marranism: “That epoch-making expedition of 1492 was as a matter of fact very largely a Jewish, or rather a Marrano, enterprise. There are grounds for believing that Columbus was himself a member of a New Christian family.”189 Christopher Columbus, we may recall, was the author of a genocide-by-forced-labor of Caribbean populations, island after island. In 1495, he sent the first shipments of Indian slaves to Spain: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity, go on sending all the slaves that can be sold,” he wrote. Others were enslaved in their own lands for the extraction of the gold that Columbus intended to send back to his sponsors. Each Haitian above the age of thirteen was required to bring in a quota of gold, and those who failed had their hands cut off. The hell imposed on these populations resulted in the first known mass suicides. The population was decimated in two generations. The unspeakable cruelty of Columbus and his men was documented by the priest Bartolome de las Casas.