History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  But internal discipline could not stop the haemorrhage of converts as the Christian pressure increased. Even by the close of the thirteenth century, the Christian kings of Aragon were being reported to Rome by their own bishops for favouring Jews, or not containing them vigorously enough. In 1282 the crown prince, the Infante Sancho, rebelling against his father, played the anti-Semitic card to rally the clergy to his side.125 Jews were progressively eased out of the royal service. After the Black Death disturbances, the whole position of the Jews in Spain began to deteriorate quite rapidly, as the blood libels and other anti-Semitic tales got a grip on the people. In Seville, for instance, there were anti-Semitic riots in 1378 and a positive explosion in 1391.

  These riots are often blamed on the great Dominican preacher Vicente Ferrer (c. 1350-1419), afterwards canonized. But his role was much more subtle, and more sinister from the Jew’s point of view. Indeed he helped to develop a pattern of anti-Semitism which was to reverberate thunderously in the twentieth century. It is true that his public preachings were often associated with anti-Semitic hysteria and outrages. But he did not encourage rioting; on the contrary—he deplored it. He publicly condemned the 1391 riots. He thought it wicked and un-Christian that the mob should take the law into its own hands. Instead, it was the duty of the state to act, and proceed lawfully. The riots showed clearly that the Jews posed a ‘problem’ to society to which a ‘solution’ must be found. Hence Ferrer and his clerical colleagues were responsible for a series of anti-Jewish policies approved by the Spanish-favoured antipope Benedict XIII, and for the selection as King of Aragon of Ferdinand I, who began to implement them. The war against the Jews was taken out of the hands of the mob and made the official business of church and government.126

  It was against this background that the last of the great Jewish—Christian debates took place at Tortosa in 1413-14. It was not a genuine debate, more a public show—even a show-trial. Ferrer did not officially participate but he acted behind the scenes. His aim seems to have been to whip up popular enthusiasm for Christianity as the sole valid religion; to demolish the claims of Judaism in a big public spectacle; and then, with church, state and populace behind him, and the Jews demoralized, to effect a mass conversion. The Jewish leaders wanted to have nothing to do with it. But in many cases the rabbis had no choice but to attend. The antipope, whom Ferrer was later to disown, presided. Ferdinand, the king Ferrer had made, controlled the political framework. Some seventy seats were provided for cardinals, bishops and other grandees. Benedict announced right at the beginning that it was not proposed to hold a discussion between equal parties but to prove the truth of Christianity from talmudic sources. It was, in effect, the trial of the Jewish religion. The prosecuting counsel was Joshua Lorki, one of Ferrer’s converts, renamed Gerónimo de Sante Fé. There were about twenty Jewish participants, including the leading philosopher and apologist Joseph Albo, who later wrote a famous treatise on Jewish religious principles, the Sefer ha-Ikkarim, or Book of Principles. But they were given none of the freedom Nahmanides seems to have enjoyed at Barcelona. They were under threat from Gerónimo right at the start, both for ‘Jewish obstinacy’ and, ingeniously, for heresy against their own religion, which would have put them in the power of the Inquisition.127

  The ground covered was chiefly the familiar one of proving Jesus the Messiah from Jewish sources, though Original Sin and the causes of the Exile were also discussed, and many technical questions on Jewish texts were raised on the Christian side. The Christians were by now very well briefed for this kind of exercise and Gerónimo was both learned and clever. A total of sixty-nine sessions were held, over twenty-one months, and while the rabbis were in Tortosa, Ferrer and his friars were moving through their leaderless communities, making converts. In some cases the converts were brought to Tortosa for display and to provide a triumphant counterpoint to the Christian propaganda within the disputation. Rabbi Astruk ha-Levi protested vigorously as the debates dragged on:

  We are away from our homes. Our resources are diminished and are almost entirely gone. In our absence great damage has occurred to our communities. We do not know the fate of our wives and children. We have inadequate maintenance here and even lack food. We have been put to extraordinary expenses. Why should people suffering from such woes be held accountable for their arguments, when contending with Gerónimo and others who are in the greatest prosperity and luxury?128

  Rabbi Astruk contended that a point was reached when no further purpose was served by repeating the old arguments—it was a matter of what each man believed. What did a stage-managed debate against a background of hostility prove? ‘A Christian living in the land of the Saracens’, he said, ‘may be defeated by the arguments of a pagan or a Saracen but it does not follow that his faith has been refuted.’129 During the later stages of the dispute, the Jews claimed they did not understand the questions and tried, whenever possible, to preserve a dignified silence.

  None the less, Tortosa was a propaganda defeat for Judaism and to some extent an intellectual one too. For the first time in Spain, the Jews could be seen as forming enclaves of obscurantism and irrational backwardness, amid a superior culture. This, as much as the legal and economic pressure, and the fear generated by the high-pressure conversion drives of the friars, produced a stampede of converts. So to a great extent Ferrer succeeded in his object. Alas, converting Jews did not solve ‘the Jewish problem’. What it did, as the Spanish authorities rapidly discovered, was to present it in a new and far less tractable form. For the problem now became racial as well as religious. The church had always presented the Jews as a spiritual danger. Since the twelfth century, popular superstition had presented them as a social and physical danger too. But at least Jews, as such, were an open and public danger: they were known, they lived in recognizable communities, they were forced to bear distinguishing marks and dress. But when they became converts, conversos, or as the populace called them marranos, a term of abuse derived from the Spanish word for ‘swine’,130 they became a hidden danger. Spanish townsfolk knew that many, perhaps most, of the converts were reluctant. They ceased formally to be Jews from fear, or to gain advantage. As Jews they suffered from severe legal disabilities. As conversos they had the same economic rights, in theory, as other Christians. A marrano was thus much more unpopular than a practising Jew because he was an interloper in trade and craft, an economic threat; and, since he was probably a secret Jew, he was a hypocrite and a hidden subversive too.

  The faithful rabbis warned what would happen. Rabbi Yitzhak Arama told converts: ‘You will find no rest among the gentiles, and your life will hang in the balance.’ Of the anusim (forcible converts) he prophesied: ‘One third burnt by fire, one third flying hither to hide and those who remain living in deadly fear.’131 Rabbi Yehuda ibn Verga saw the anusim as three pairs of turtle doves: the first pair would remain in Spain and be ‘plucked’, would lose their property, be slaughtered or burned; the second pair would be plucked too—would lose their goods—but would save their bodies by fleeing when bad times came; the third pair, who ‘will be the first to flee’, would save both body and goods.132

  This pessimistic view was soon confirmed by events. A Spanish Jew found he could not evade anti-Semitic hostility by converting. If he moved to another town, as many did, his Christianity became even more suspect. His Christian persecutor changed tactics. With conversion, anti-Semitism became racial rather than religious, but the anti-Semites found, as their successors were to do in Nazi Germany, that it was exceedingly difficult to identify and isolate Jews by racial criteria. They were forced back, as the Nazis were to be, on the old religious ones. In fifteenth-century Spain, a Jew could not be persecuted on religious grounds, because he was born a Jew, or his parents were; it had to be shown that he was still practising Judaism secretly in some form. The Castilian king Alfonso VII is alleged to have ruled that ‘No converso of Jewish origin be allowed to hold public office or enjoy any benefice in Toledo and its area of jurisdic
tion, since they are suspected in their fidelity to Christ.’133

  How could this suspicion be proved? In Ciudad Real, where the plight of the conversos has been examined in detail by the historian Haim Beinart, the first accusation that a ‘New Christian’ was secretly taking part in mitzvot dated from 1430. The ex-Jews were usually hard-working, anxious to get on, often clever; they rose in wealth and in the public service, and the trouble developed pari passu. In the 1440s, the first anti-conversos riots broke out in Toledo. In 1449 in Ciudad Real they lasted a fortnight. The conversos fought back, organized an armed band of 300, killed an Old Christian; in the struggle twenty-two were murdered and many houses burned. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks and Byzantium, the old enemy of the Jews, was no more; many Jews believed that the Messiah would now come, and some conversos felt they could soon revert to their old religion.134 They even proposed to go to Turkey and live openly as Jews. There were riots in Ciudad Real in 1464, 1467 and 1474, the last particularly severe, perhaps engineered by a semi-professional group of anti-Semites who moved into a city, putting up at friendly religious houses. In 1474 the conversos of Ciudad Real lost houses and furniture, their flocks in the suburbs, their shops and stock in the city. Any list of debtors found by the rioters was destroyed—an invariable practice. The frightened conversos fled to the protection of the corregidor or governor in the citadel, but (states the official deposition), ‘The rioters stormed it, destroyed the central tower, killing many; the corregidor and many of the conversos were expelled; the town was closed to them and none permitted to re-enter.’135 Some fled to the protection of a kind nobleman at Palma, near Córdoba, where they remained three years.

  Riots against converts led to the same sequence of events as riots against Jews. The state was terrified of riots as a symptom of popular unrest. It could not prevent the riots, or even punish them adequately, so it sought to remove the cause by attacking the conversos. This was not difficult. Many were indeed secret Jews. A contemporary Jewish account says that those who fled to Palma observed mitzvot in public, kept Sabbath and festivals, fasted and prayed on Yom Kippur, observed Passover and celebrated other feasts ‘no less than the Jews and no worse than them’. One Franciscan fanatic, Alfonso de Espina, a converso himself, or the son of one, compiled a volume, Fortalitium Fidei, listing (among other things), twenty-five ‘transgressions’ by which treacherous conversos could be identified. These included not only secret Jewish practices but, perhaps more easily noted, evidence of bad Christianity: avoiding the sacraments, working on Sundays, avoiding making the sign of the cross, never mentioning Jesus or Mary, or perfunctory attendance at mass. To these he added all the crimes (such as stealing the host) popularly ascribed to Jews, together with some new ones, such as ‘holding philosophical discussions’. Again we see fear of the Jew, especially in his concealed form as a converso, fomenting disorder, dissent and doubt in society.

  Fra Alfonso was the ideologue of the next phase of anti-Semitism. Having shown that it was indeed possible to identify the secret Jew not on a racial but on a religious basis, he advocated the solution: isolation and segregation. The populace should shun suspect conversos and the state should interpose physical barriers between them and the true Christian population. At the same time, church and state alike should combine to search out and destroy those among the conversos who, by practising Judaism, were legally heretics. He described in great detail the methods and punishments to be used, based on the old thirteenth-century Inquisition. But he hinted that a new kind, suited to Spain’s peculiar national needs, ought to be set up.136

  In due course the state adopted all Fra Alfonso’s programme. Segregation was decreed by the Cortes at Toledo in 1480. At the same time a special Spanish inquisition was being created. The first inquisitors, including the vicar-general of the Dominicans, were appointed to operate a central inquiry for Andalucia, run from Seville. It began work in January 1481 and in the next eight years burned over 700 at the stake there. Some sources put the figure as high as 2,000.137 During the same year the national inquisition replaced the traditional papal one in Aragon, and from February 1483 the entire organization was put under central control, its effective master being a Dominican prior, Tomás de Torquemada. In less than twelve years the Inquisition condemned about 13,000 conversos, men and women, for the secret practice of Judaism. The Inquisition sought all kinds of victims, but secret Jews were among the chief ones. In its whole existence it numbered a total of about 341,000 victims. Of these, more than 32,000 were killed by burning, 17,659 burned in effigy and 291,000 given lesser punishments. The great majority of those killed, some 20,226, suffered before 1540 under the first five inquisitors-general, and most of them were of Jewish origin. But the auto-da-fé continued to claim victims until 1790.138

  Prior Torquemada had become confessor to Queen Isabella of Castile in 1469, the year she married King Ferdinand of Aragon, leading to the unification of the two kingdoms in 1479. The anti-Jewish policy was to some extent a personal creation of these two monarchs. The Inquisition they set up had many opponents, internal and external. One was the queen’s secretary, Fernando del Pulgar, himself a converso. In a letter addressed to the primate, Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza of Toledo, and intended for publication, he complained of the segregation edicts which prevented converts from living in Guipuzcoa and intermarrying with its people or learning the trade of mason; he admitted some converts reverted, but pointed out that in Andalucia there were, for instance, 10,000 young women conversos who had never left their parents’ homes and simply followed their fathers’ ways—to burn them all was extremely cruel and would simply force them to flee. To which associates of Torquemada replied that it was better to burn some innocents than allow heresy to spread: ‘Better for a man to enter heaven with one eye than go to hell with both.’ The only result was the demotion of Pulgar from royal secretary to royal chronicler.139

  The papacy, too, objected to the Inquisition, partly because it was a royal and national instrument outside papal power, partly because it clearly offended natural justice. Sixtus IV in April 1482 demanded that Rome be given the right to hear appeals, that the accused should be told the names of hostile witnesses, and that in any event personal enemies and former servants should be disqualified as such, that repentant heretics should be allowed to confess and receive absolution instead of facing trial, and that they should be given the right to choose their counsel. Ferdinand flatly declined to do any of these things and in his reply insisted that it was essential he should appoint inquisitors, because when the system was run solely by the church, heresy had flourished. Popes continued to object, to little avail.140

  Both Ferdinand and Isabella claimed they were acting purely from orthodox and Catholic zeal. Both hotly rejected the charge, made by their enemies at the time and by historians since, that they wanted to confiscate the property of convicted heretics. Writing to her agents in Rome, Isabella protested that she had never touched ‘a single maravedi’ of confiscated property—that part of the money had been made into a dowry-fund for children of the Inquisition’s victims—and that whoever claimed she had acted for love of money was a liar: she boasted that, from her passionate devotion to the faith, she had caused the ruin of royal towns, emptied them of their inhabitants and desolated whole regions.141 Ferdinand, too, stressed the losses to the royal revenue, but said all the factors had been weighed carefully before the decision to launch the Inquisition on a national campaign was taken and that they had ‘set the service of our Lord God above our own service…[and] in preference to any other consideration’.142 The truth seems to be that both monarchs were driven by a mixture of religious and financial motives and also, more importantly, by the desire to impose a centralizing, emotional unity on their disparate and divided territories. But, most of all, they were caught up in the sinister, impersonal logic of anti-Semitism itself. The historical record shows, time and again, that it develops a power and momentum of its own.