Hartmann Schedel, the principal author of the Nuremberg Chronicle, collected Hebrew books, perhaps in the hope of sparing them from the burning he anticipated as a harbinger of the imminent end of the world.
Nuremberg Chronicle.
In a notorious case heard in ávila in 1491, on evidence recorded by hearsay or extracted by torture, Jews and some former Jews were condemned for crucifying a child, with a lot of mocking mummery of Christ’s crucifixion, and eating his heart in a parody of the mass, as well as stealing and blasphemously abusing a consecrated Host for purposes of black magic. The allegedly murdered child—never convincingly named, never produced—probably never existed, but he became the hero of sensationalist literature, the object of a popular cult, and the genius of a shrine that attracts worshippers to ávila to this day. The supposed perpetrators of the crimes were garroted, or dismembered with red-hot pincers, and their grisly remains were burned so as not to pollute the earth. The Inquisition gave the case a huge billing. Much of it was heard in the presence of the Grand Inquisitor himself, and the findings—suitably massaged to conceal the implausibility of most of the charges and the contradictions of most of the testimony—were lavishly publicized. Some of the most learned jurists in Spain endorsed the sentence, despite the outrageous deficiencies of the evidence.
The case revealed three troubling aspects of the deteriorating reputation of Jews in the kingdom. First, public credulousness was an index of how far anti-Semitism had penetrated the culture. Second, the imagery of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and in the Eucharist, despite Christians’ moral debt to Judaism, could easily be twisted into service against Jews. Finally, the trial seems, in retrospect, obviously contrived to serve political ends. By showing Jews and former Jews colluding in ritual murder and black magic, the inquisitors managed to establish in policy makers’ minds a suppositious link between Judaism and Christian apostasy.
For what really worried the partisans of expulsion of the Jews was that, while Jewish communities remained in place, converts from Judaism could not escape the corroding effects of a Jewish environment. In the La Guardia case, the only charge that was proved against one of the alleged conspirators was that
not content with the fact that, for humanity’s sake alone, as our holy faith prescribes, he, together with all other Jews, has the right to consort and converse with faithful Catholic Christians, he seduced certain Christians to his damnable law with false and deceitful preachings and suggestions, as a fautor of heresy, saying and expounding to them that the law of Moses was the only true law, in which they must be saved, and that the law of Jesus Christ was a feigned and dissembled law, never imposed or established by God.3
It was therefore the policy of the Inquisition to insulate society from Jewish influence. It was also a popular cause. The result of free association between Christians and Jews, according to Bernáldez, who was dim enough to be representative of popular prejudices, was that converts from Judaism and their descendants tended to be either “secret Jews” or “neither Jews nor Christians”—“like Muhammad’s beast of burden, neither horse nor mule,” as a tract of 1488 said.4 Rather, they were godless antinomians who withheld their children from baptism, respected no fasts, made no confession, and gave no alms, but lived for gluttony and sexual excess or, in the case of backsliders into Judaism, ate Jewish food and observed Jewish customs.
There was probably some truth in the less sensational of these accusations: in a culturally ambiguous, transgressive setting, people can easily transcend traditions, escape dogma, and create new synergies. Investigations by the Inquisition uncovered many cases of religious indifference or outright skepticism. The late-fifteenth-century convert Alfonso Fernández Semuel asked to be buried with a cross at his feet, a Quran on his breast, and a Torah “high on his head”—as we know from a satire denouncing him for behaving crazily.5 A sophisticated Jewish convert who became a bishop and a royal inquisitor felt that “because converts from Judaism are learned and intelligent, they cannot and will not believe or engage in the nonsense believed and diffused by Gentile converts to Catholicism.” 6 In areas where Jews were relatively numerous, their practices infected culture generally. “You should know,” Bernáldez asserted, “that the habits of the common people, as the Inquisition discovered, were no more nor less than those of the Jews, and were steeped in their stench, and this was the result of the continual contact people had with them.”
Anti-Semitism was part of the background that makes the expulsion of the Jews intelligible, but it was not its cause. Indeed, Iberia tolerated its Jews for longer than other parts of western Europe. England expelled its Jews in 1291, France in 1343, and many states in western Germany followed suit in the early fifteenth century. The big problem of the expulsion is not why it happened, but why it happened when it did. Money grubbing was not the motive. By refusing a bribe to abrogate the decree of expulsion, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon surprised the Jewish leaders who thought the whole policy was simply a ruse to extort cash. The Jews were reliable fiscal milch-cows. By expelling those who worked as tax gatherers, the monarchs imperiled their own revenues. It took five years for returns to recover their former levels. The Ottoman sultan Suleiman I is said to have marveled at the expulsion because it was tantamount to “throwing away wealth.” 7 “We are astonished,” the king wrote in self-vindication to one opponent of the expulsion,
that you should think we want to take the Jews’ possessions for ourselves, for that is very far from our thoughts…. While we want to recover for our court, as is reasonable, all that rightfully belongs to us by way of debts the Jews owe in taxes or other dues owed by their community, once their debts to us and other creditors have been paid, what remains should be returned to the Jews, to each his own, so that they may do as they wish with it.8
The monarchs seem to have been entirely sincere in their determination not to profit from the expulsion: to them, it was a spiritual purgation. Synagogues were seized for conversion into churches, almshouses, and other public institutions, and cemeteries were generally turned over to common grazing; but other Jewish communal property was assigned to be held in escrow for settlement of Jews’ debts, which, in theory, were recoverable by Christian and Jewish creditors alike. Jews could realize the value of their assets in cash and, by a modification of the original decree of expulsion, take the proceeds abroad with them, together with unlimited movable wealth in the form of jewels, bonds, and bills of exchange. This was a remarkable concession, as the laws of the realms of Aragon and Castile were strict about absolutely prohibiting the export of money and valuables. Some exceptions were even granted for the removal of bullion: the leading figure among the expulsees, Isaac Abranavel, was allowed ten thousand ducats in gold and jewels. Probably no more than a dozen individuals in the entire kingdom could lay their hands on that much cash.
In every diocese, the monarchs appointed administrators to look after personal property that Jews left unsold at the expulsion and, when its value could be realized, to pay the proceeds to the expulsees in their new homes abroad, and to recover and remit unpaid debts owed to expelled Jews. Some of these administrators labored for years at the job, with mixed results, and their records show how evil some of the unintended consequences were. Buyers extorted property from desperate expulsees. Municipalities acted illegally in seizing Jews’ assets and used every imaginable form of prevarication to avoid disgorging them. In a buyers’ market, it was impossible to get a fair price for Jewish property. Rapacious officials robbed exiles of cash or extorted unlawful bribes or illegal fees. Debtors to Jewish creditors evaded their obligations. Freighters overcharged. Despite honest efforts by administrators the crown appointed, most wrongs were probably never righted. The entire process was ill thought out, and the monarchs had simply not allowed enough time for all the problems to be solved before the Jews were made to leave.
The real motives for the expulsion, the reasons that can explain its timing, must be sought in the immediate circumst
ances of the event. In part, an exalted mood of religious fervor was responsible, kindled by war and fanned by fear. The war with Granada demanded a united effort from the monarchs’ subjects. Legend ascribed to the Jews a supporting role in the first Muslim conquests of Iberian soil nearly eight hundred years before. Scouring the past for material, propagandists reawakened old anxieties about where Jewish loyalties lay. In 1483, the monarchs responded to local petitions by permitting the expulsion of all Jews from Andalusia, as if clearing the frontier zone of suspect aliens. As they conquered territory from Granada, the monarchs shifted Jews out of it, piece by piece, as if afraid of nurturing a potentially traitorous fifth column clandestinely undermining stability from within. And as with the conquest of Granada, the threat or promise of the millennium was like a shadow over the Jews. The conversion of the world, according to traditional Christian eschatology, was one of the signs of its approaching end.
The Inquisition contributed. In 1478, the monarchs persuaded the pope to give them control over appointments and operations of the Inquisition in Spain, turning it effectively from an arm of the Church into a scourge of the state. It was the only institution that operated in the territories of both Aragon and Castile without having to respect the frontiers and the peculiarities of the laws. Previously, the Inquisition had been barely active in the Iberian Peninsula, concentrating strictly on matters of dogma and dealing only with serious heresies. It now became a kind of thought police, a terrifyingly omniscient network of tribunals and informers, prying into people’s lives at every social level and extending its jurisdiction from matters of faith to morals and private life. The rather weak theological justification for this was that moral misbehavior was prima facie evidence of incorrect belief, and that personal lives and customs exhibited practitioners’ true religion.
The Inquisition became an organ for policing and enforcing social conformity—a cauldron for brewing a consistent state, into which elements of heterogeneity were flung and boiled to a pulp. Nominally, the organization’s job was to expunge “heretical depravity.” The only common deviations from orthodoxy in Spain were the result of ignorance, poor education, and inadequate catechization by overworked or under-trained clergy. But the widespread conviction that heresy arose mainly from Jewish example, or from the memory of Judaism in the progeny of converts, trumped the truth. The “justice” the Inquisition delivered was attractive to anyone who wanted to denounce a neighbor, a competitor, or an enemy. It was perilous to anyone who was a victim of envy or revenge. And it was cheap. In no other court could you bring charges without incurring costs or risks. Inquisitorial justice was also secretive. In no other court could you bring a charge without disclosing your identity to the accused. Because the courts had the power to sequester the assets of accused people during their trials, the Inquisition had a vested interest in treating denunciations seriously and protracting cases. All of these features made the Inquisition a popular tribunal, to which complainants were keen to recur, and a juggernaut that its own officials could barely manage and no one could control. Rather, as happened in other parts of Europe at the time, where a craze for witchcraft persecution took off, or as we have seen in our own time with the proliferation of cases of alleged child abuse based on supposedly “recovered” memories, the numbers of accusations seemed to corroborate the Inquisitors’ fears. On flimsy evidence, Spain seemed suddenly to be awash with apostasy.
Ferdinand and Isabella took the peril seriously. Because Ferdinand was a hero of Machiavelli’s, who saw him as ruthlessly calculating, dedicated to success, and unconstrained by moral scruples, a myth has grown up of Ferdinand as a modern-minded, secular politician. On the contrary, he was conventionally pious, susceptible to prophecy, and deeply aware of his responsibilities to God. No monarch of the day could escape exposure to traditional ideas of kingship—in their daily education as princes, in the readings their tutors prescribed, and in sermons and in the confessional when in power. One of the most frequently repeated principles of tradition was the ruler’s responsibility for his subjects’ salvation.
Bernáldez, perhaps, highlighted the most urgent reason for the expulsion. The numbers of conversos—Jewish converts to Christianity—were multiplying alarmingly. Minorities are easy to tolerate until their numbers reach a critical threshold, which varies from case to case and society to society, but which always exists and which, when crossed, seems trapped with trip wires that set off terrible alarms. Against the background of war, the growth of a potentially subversive minority nourished widespread neurosis. Spain was in the grip of a Great Fear—irremediable because irrational and therefore impervious to facts, like the equally irrational fear of terrorists and poor immigrants and “rising crime” in Western democracies today. Crown and church should have been pleased with the growing number of converts to Christianity, but fear subverted pleasure. Every convert was a potential apostate or “secret Jew.” The large turnover in conversions suggested that converts were superficially instructed and perhaps in many cases opportunistic. In the circumstances it might have made more sense to expel the converts than the Jews, but that was an unthinkable strategy. There were too many of them. Society could not function without their services. Natural law and the law of the Church protected them, whereas Jews were technically at the mercy of the crown—present on sufferance, dependent on revocable royal grace. The Inquisition, moreover, had jurisdiction over converts and could command their beliefs, whereas the tribunal had no right to interrogate the faith of Jews. Inquisitors believed, therefore, that without Jews to seduce them into heresy or apostasy, converts could be redeemed or coerced into salvation.
So inquisitors lobbied the crown to remove what they thought was the cause of the problem. They issued the decree expelling Jews from Andalusia. Exceeding their lawful powers, they attempted—unsuccessfully, because of local resentment of their high-handed tactics—to launch similar initiatives in other parts of the realm. The Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, made the first draft of the decree expelling the Jews from the whole kingdom in March 1492. The document, modified at the royal court, and signed and sealed by the king and queen on the last day of the month, was explicit about the arguments that swayed the monarchs. There is no reason to mistrust its declarations. What the monarchs believed about the Jews may not have been true. But it is true that they believed it. “We were informed,” the decree began, “that in our realms there were some bad Christians who Judaized and apostasized from our holy Catholic faith, and much of the cause of this was the communication between Christians and Jews.” The decree went on to detail the particular instances—most of them verified at hearings before the Inquisition—of
the great damage to the Christians…from the information, contacts, and communication exchanged with the Jews, who, according to the evidence, always seek by whatever means they can to subvert and subtract faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and part them from it and attract and pervert them to their accursed faith and opinion, instructing them in the rites and observances of their tradition; convening assemblies where they read out and teach what they must believe and observe according to their tradition; seeking to circumcise them and their sons; giving them books in which to read their prayers and explaining to them the fasts they have to keep, and joining with them to read and teach their versions of their history; keeping them informed in advance of the dates of Passover and advising them of what acts and observances they must perform at that time; giving them, and taking from their houses, the unleavened bread and ritually slaughtered meats; instructing them in what to avoid, both in terms of foodstuffs and other matters their law requires; and persuading them as far as they can to hold and keep the law of Moses and giving them to understand that there is no other law or truth beside it; all of which appears from many statements and confessions both by Jews themselves and those whom they have perverted and deceived.9
The document continued by explaining that the monarchs had hoped to solve the problem by permittin
g the expulsion of the Jews from Andalusia, where most of the harm had been done. The results, however, had been unsatisfactory, and they had decided to resort to a more radical policy because “the said Jews increase and continue their evil and accursed purpose wherever they dwell in company” with Christians. A scruple, however, arising from considerations of natural justice troubled the monarchs: by expelling all the Jews, they were, in effect, punishing the avowedly innocent along with the allegedly guilty. They dealt with this by arguing that the Jews together formed a single corporation, by analogy with a college or university:
because when any grave or detestable crime is committed by certain members of a college or university, it is right that such college or university be dissolved and abolished and that the lesser members incur the consequences on account of their superiors and vice versa.
Like most hurriedly formulated policies, the expulsion had the opposite of its intended effect: it enormously increased the numbers of insincere, underevangelized, and uncommitted converts. The demographics of the expulsion have generated ferocious and inconclusive debate, but two disarming facts are incontrovertible: There were never very many Jews to expel. And many of them—probably most, including most of the rabbis, according to contemporary assertions by a Jewish observer—preferred baptism to expulsion.10 “Expulsion” seems a misnomer. The event should perhaps rather be called a forcible conversion.
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