God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  The most comprehensive survey of crypto-Judaism and its tenacity, covering many centuries and many areas of the world, is Secrecy and Deceit, by David M. Gitlitz. Considerable evidence indicates that crypto-Judaism in the Americas and elsewhere proved remarkably durable. In 1917, for instance, a small Judaic remnant preserving vestiges of Jewish ritual was identified in an isolated region of Portugal, on the border with Spain. Among other things, the people there still used Hebrew phrases in their prayers. There has been more-tenuous speculation about a survival of Jewish practices among immigrants from the Azores in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

  The debate is over which examples are “real” and which can be attributed to some other explanation. Certain evocative and seemingly persuasive instances of crypto-Judaism have been called into question. In the late 1940s, the anthropologist Raphael Patai looked closely at the so-called Jewish Indians of Venta Prieta, a small town in Mexico about sixty miles north of Mexico City. Many residents of the town had long believed themselves to be Jewish, preserving customs handed down from generation to generation. Patai suggested, however, that sincere as these people were, their history was different from what they thought: their ancestors a few generations before had been swept up in a Pentecostal movement, Iglesia de Dios, which employed a number of Hebraic rituals, including Hebrew songs and prayers. Whatever the truth about their origins, the self-proclaimed Jews of Venta Prieta got to their desired destination—they eventually converted to Judaism officially (and many emigrated to Israel). The town continues to attract heritage tourists.

  During the last few decades of the twentieth century, ethnographers and historians began to take note of certain practices among small groups of Hispanics in rural areas of New Mexico—for instance, the lighting of candles on Friday evening, the observance of Saturday as a day of rest, the shunning of pork, the ritual slaughter of animals, the circumcision of males, the use of the Star of David in folk art and on headstones, the naming of sons Adonay (Adonai is Hebrew for “Lord”), and the practice of sweeping debris in a room toward the center rather than out the door (historically, to avoid desecrating a mezuzah on the doorpost). The people involved were often only vaguely aware of what the origin of such practices might be. Stanley M. Hordes, a former state historian of New Mexico, is the scholar who has most prominently made the argument that these rural Hispanics—“the crypto-Jews of New Mexico”—represent a case of true cultural survival. Other historians and ethnographers have pursued the subject and come to the same conclusion.

  The most prominent skeptic is the folklorist Judith'S. Neulander. She has methodological issues with some of the evidence-gathering and provides alternative explanations for proposed pieces of evidence. The Star of David, for instance, is “a cross-cultural commonplace.” Her conclusion parallels Patai’s: the ancestors of the “crypto-Jews” of New Mexico were originally Catholics who embraced an aggressive, Hebrew-inflected strain of Pentecostalism. She believes that their descendants, perhaps caught up in the media attention the topic has received, are inventing an “imaginary crypto-Jewish identity”—and that some are doing so because “by negating Mexican national origin,” they can achieve “a promotion in social rank or prestige.” In a sense, Neulander argues, this amounts to a quest for a form of limpieza de sangre, and is tinged with racism.

  So the debate has been hot. Stripping away the emotion, the crux of the matter is this: can one establish a firm link between now and then—between suggestive cultural practices in our own time and the reality of events that occurred centuries ago? Neulander is certainly correct in observing that the swirl of cultural influences in the New World, in both the recent and the distant past, is chaotic. People don’t necessarily know where family traditions come from. Scholars are not always able to sort things out. And you can’t discount the possibility of wishful thinking, among either the people being studied or the experts with their tape recorders and notepads. “Lost tribes” have been turning up for centuries. Hordes and his camp, for their part, have accumulated a wealth of ethnographic and circumstantial evidence. They are also able to show, from Inquisition records, that families known to be of Jewish descent—and individuals suspected of being crypto-Jews—were among the earliest settlers of New Mexico. Genealogical research by Hordes has established connections between these settlers and people in New Mexico who claim crypto-Jewish ancestry.

  There is no question that in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, people of Jewish blood left Spain and Portugal in significant numbers and made their way to imperial colonies. The documentary evidence is abundant. There is possible genetic evidence as well. DNA testing of the male Y chromosome shows an unusually high incidence of likely connection to the Jewish priestly class, the cohanim, among Hispanics of the Southwest. Hispanics in parts of that region also appear to share with Jews an unusually high incidence of a serious skin disease, pemphigus vulgaris. And both groups are disproportionately susceptible to a mutation—designated 185delAG—of the BRCA1 gene that markedly increases the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

  Judaic culture, as amply documented by Gitlitz, often survived the passage from Iberia, taking root in distant lands. The prevalence of the phenomenon cannot be known—adherence to old practices was secretive, and some of the evidence, such as inquisitorial accusations of “judaizing,” cannot be taken at face value. But many Jews held on to elements of their faith, and did so for generations and even centuries.

  Crypto-Hindus?

  It was not just Jews who tried to maintain their identity. The spread of empire brought the Inquisition into contact with unfamiliar religious outlooks of many kinds. Christians, Jews, and Muslims had been known to one another for centuries. Whatever the hostility, they shared a frame of reference. They were monotheistic, revered common prophetic figures, and regarded the Bible as a sacred text. But in America, Asia, and Africa, Christian conquerors and clerics faced something else entirely. The human sacrifice of the Aztecs had horrified the Spaniards, but this was just the first of many new religious practices they would encounter. In India, the Portuguese came face-to-face with Hinduism and Buddhism as well as Islam. In China, the imperial powers confronted Confucianism. In Africa, they faced a variety of animist religions.

  The challenge to conventional thinking was immense, and the response in some quarters was original and admirable. The Jesuits entered China in a spirit of intellectual engagement. They took pains to learn the language, introduced Western science and mathematics, and showed themselves to be shrewd observers and advisors. They also sought to adapt Christianity to Chinese folkways, and translated the works of Confucius into European languages. In the early 1700s, the engraver Bernard Picart and the printer Jean-Frédéric Bernard produced their monumental Religious Ceremonies of the World, a foray into what today would be called comparative religion. The illustrated folios documented not only the differences among religions but also their many common elements.

  Picart and Bernard wrote from a perspective of tolerant curiosity, in the middle of the Enlightenment. Two centuries earlier, such a perspective was rare—the governing interests were missionary or mercantile. “I seek Christians and spices,” the explorer Vasco da Gama declared, and he meant what he said. In the eyes of Catholic missionaries, there was a whole world to convert—and a potentially vast number of new Christians who, once converted, might slide back into their old satanic ways.

  In 1510, the Portuguese established a colony at Goa, one of a string of possessions they would control along the western coast of India. They did not relinquish the colony until 1961, when India had been independent for more than a decade. Goa became a thriving mercantile outpost. To this day, it enjoys the highest per capita income in India. Parts of the capital look like the urban neighborhoods of old Iberia. The Portuguese Inquisition arrived in Goa in 1560, and henceforward its tribunal held sway over all Portugal’s possessions in Asia and around the Indian Ocean. The Inquisition in Goa had urgent business a
nd great authority—enough authority to displace the viceroy from his palace, forcing him to find other quarters.

  The urgent business was twofold. First, many Indians had converted to Christianity during the half century of Portuguese rule, but had often done so to obtain food and jobs. The sincerity of these so-called Rice Christians was highly suspect, and in fact many had quietly reverted to their traditional practices. Although the Portuguese destroyed Hindu temples, the faithful managed to save their idols and carry them to safety in areas beyond Portuguese control—the “flight of the deities,” as this process has been called. The idols, just out of reach, were a taunting presence.

  The second order of business was not a surprise: the Jews. Many Jews and New Christians had fled the Inquisition in Europe and made their way to places where its authority might prove less likely to reach. In Goa (and other parts of Portuguese India) they soon formed a large and prosperous community. This was intolerable. The New Christians of Portugal apparently got wind of what was coming and sent a substantial payment to Pope Paul IV, in the hope of keeping the Inquisition away from the colonies. Paul took the money but then pleaded that his hands were tied—it was a matter for the Portuguese king to decide.

  The Inquisition in Goa got to work quickly, holding its first auto-da-fé within two years. A documentary saga seems to lie at the heart of every inquisition: records lost, records found, records hidden, records kept under seal. In its several centuries of existence, the Inquisition conducted some 16,000 trials in Goa. All the actual transcripts were burned in the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese Inquisition was finally abolished. Indexes and letters survive, however, and provide a general picture. Over the course of its first six decades, the Inquisition held twenty-seven autos-da-fé in Goa and sentenced about 3,800 people to punishments of some kind. Of these, 114 were burned at the stake. Two thirds were New Christians accused of judaizing. The rest were alleged crypto-Hindus or crypto-Muslims.

  The Inquisition treated Goa by far the most severely among Portugal’s colonies. Brazil was a distant second. The Church’s censorship regime there was strict enough that printing presses were kept out of Brazil until the nineteenth century. In other colonies—Angola, Congo, São Tomé, Mozambique—the Inquisition was more relaxed. The secular authorities in Angola at one point even sold the right to collect taxes to a man known to be a Jew (and who was in fact secretly a rabbi). Factional fighting among the Europeans often diminished any zest for persecution. One petty dispute in Angola between civil authorities and the Jesuits—over the slaughter of a few dozen pigs—had to be sorted out by the dowager queen of Portugal and the pope. The Inquisition in these places was not a relentlessly efficient machine. But the Church made converts everywhere. The beginnings of an administrative structure spanned the planet.

  The inquisitions in Asia, Africa, and the New World all came to an end when the inquisitions in the mother countries did, unless independence had achieved this result already. Two of the heroes of Mexico’s war of independence—the priests Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos—were excommunicated and condemned by the Inquisition; two hundred years after their executions, the Church has publicly rehabilitated both men. In Spain and Portugal, the death of the Inquisition was long and slow—it was suppressed, revived, and then suppressed again, with finality. Its last decades in Spain were chronicled by Francisco Goya, who had personal experience of being brought before the tribunal. Many of the grim, mordant aquatints known as the Caprichos, from the 1790s, depict the Inquisition literally or allegorically. In 1815, Goya was summoned to answer for his painting The Nude Maja, which the Inquisition had confiscated as obscene. Goya refused to say who the woman was, or who had commissioned the painting. Soon after that episode, he completed Court of the Inquisition, in which the accused men wear sanbenitos and pointed hats, and a man in black directs the questioning. A cross on a gold chain hangs from his neck. He seems unaware that time is running out.

  A Second Wind

  By 1840, only the Roman Inquisition remained alive. It was already a weakened institution, its temporal sway limited to the Papal States in the central region of the Italian peninsula. Within them, the Inquisition could still act in definitive ways, as the case of Edgardo Mortara had shown. But its days, too, were numbered. On September 20, 1870, the military forces of the Kingdom of Italy trained their cannons on a section of Rome’s ancient Aurelian Wall and commenced a barrage that would last for three hours. The process of Italian reunification had been under way for decades, and the Papal States represented the last holdout. Pope Pius IX remained obdurate, but after France withdrew its protection—Napoleon III had just fallen from power—the outcome was never in doubt. Italian forces laid siege to Rome, and for the sake of appearances, the pope deployed Swiss Guards and the multinational Papal Zouaves to defend the walls. They surrendered when Italian artillery opened a breach not far from the Porta Pia. The pope refused to recognize the unified government and withdrew into the walled enclave around St. Peter’s, becoming the self-proclaimed “prisoner of the Vatican.” A monument on the restored Aurelian Wall, marking the place where the artillery did its damage, states simply, “Through this breach Italy once again entered Rome.”

  In terms of temporal power, the authority of the Holy See was now restricted to 108 acres. But the moment was a turning point. From that time onward, the Church would seek to put its stamp more firmly—and more globally—on the minds of believers, particularly the intellectual class among them. This class included not only theologians, who typically held posts at Church-related institutions, and were therefore subject to some sort of control, but also the growing ranks of educated Catholics, who kept informed and tried to think for themselves. Modern communications, which helped to create this class and make it significant, provided tools that anyone could employ. They could be used to nourish intellectual freedom or to discourage it.

  One possible approach was epitomized by Pope Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius IX in 1878. Leo was the first pope who seems recognizably of our own time. He was thin and ascetic, a skilled linguist, a canny diplomat. He believed in the value of scholarship of a contemporary kind. It was Leo who opened up much of the Vatican archives (but not the Inquisition archives) to independent researchers, and who re-established the Vatican Observatory. Leo was the first pope whose movements are preserved in a motion picture, and the first pope whose voice survives in a recording. His 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, with its critique of economic inequality and its prescient warning that neither capitalism nor communism offered the answer, made Catholic social teaching a living force. The encyclical joined an ongoing debate in the world outside the Church, and joined it squarely and with distinction. It was headline news in Europe and America—highly atypical for papal pronouncements up to that point. With electronic messaging literally at their fingertips, reporters followed the progress of its drafting and editing. They published leaks. They tracked the reaction and the debate in real time. An account in one British newspaper begins, “The Standard’s Rome correspondent telegraphs on Thursday . . .” Rerum Novarum was an event, and is widely cited to this day. The New York Times in 1895 called Leo “not an individual, but the expression of his century.”

  Leo was hardly “liberal” in the way secular observers would use that term, and some of the ways in which he was “modern” were oddly antiquarian. Once, years ago, I spent several weeks with a group of Dominican priests outside Rome and in Louvain. Using the most sophisticated techniques available, they were attempting to produce, in scores of volumes, the perfect Latin edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was a task that Leo himself had set in motion a hundred years earlier, and the Dominicans were still at it. The work will not be finished for decades. (One of the scholars involved, Antoine Dondaine, also happened to be the foremost authority on Inquisition manuals.) The editions they had published were superb—each a testament to fastidious scholarship and deep faith. It may seem counterintuitive that this monument to a thirtee
nth-century theologian would be erected just as physicists were coming to terms with quantum mechanics. Leo would have observed, in his own defense, that Thomism represented a philosophy in which religion and science are not antithetical. A scientist would have replied, But they are.

  Leo’s was one approach to engagement with an evolving world. The other approach prevailed. It was a sensibility that considered the world’s Catholics as, in effect, the spiritual subjects of a spiritual monarch. Doctrine was rigid, hierarchy was sacred, and theological speculation was impermissible. In 1864, Pius IX had promulgated his Syllabus of Errors, a list of eighty beliefs that Catholics must condemn. These included the belief that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”; the belief that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”; and the belief that the pope “ought to come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” The first Vatican Council, under the same pope, had proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility. It was this peremptory action, not the claims of some secular ruler, that provoked Lord Acton’s famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Acton, himself a Catholic, filed trenchant dispatches from the council and tried to rally opposition to infallibility. In his eyes, one historian writes, the doctrine epitomized all the tendencies he hated: “towards power and against freedom, towards persecution and against toleration, towards concealment and against openness.”