The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It was not, in fact, until July 15, 1834, that the Spanish Inquisition was officially abolished. But the Expulsion Edict remained firmly in effect, and for years after that there were repeated urgings from the press and from the pulpit for “the restoration of our beloved Inquisition.” Even by the 1890’s, it seems—while Americans were dancing gaily at Sherry’s and laughing at the antics of Diamond Jim Brady—Spanish zealots were clamoring to have their Inquisition back, nor had the country seemed to have grasped the fact that, in its long and arduous process, the Inquisition had destroyed Spain utterly, robbed it of all the bright promise it had once had in the years of the conquistadores.

  The Inquisition would not die, even though it was based on an unworkable concept. For it set about with fanaticism to perform a labor that could not be done, to erase something that could not be erased, to create something that could not be created, and to solve a problem to which there was no solution, final or even partial. The Inquisition was, by the nature of the visions that bore it, endless, and so, when the end came, Spain lay spent and exhausted and powerless.

  Apologists for the Inquisition, and defenders of Isabella, who inaugurated it, point out that the idea was not original with Spain, that Spain’s version was based on an earlier Italian effort, and that the punishments it inflicted were no more brutal than those in other countries of the period. The technique of expulsion was not new. In England in 1290 the Jews were ordered out on the grounds that they tried to lure recent converts to Christianity back to “the vomit of Judaism.” It has been said that the Inquisition was necessary because Jews had infiltrated Spanish life to such an extent that they had to be removed and that, from the beginning, it had been clear to the Jew that conversion would free him from the possibility of persecution. Also, it has been argued, Jews who were honest about their Judaism were never murdered, tortured, imprisoned, or mistreated in any way. Admission to being a Jew merely resulted in a man’s being stripped of his property and bank account, and sent out of the country. But the terrible fact of the Inquisition, regardless of its origins and methods, was that for all its protracted length it was a massive failure. If its aim was to create a homogeneous Spain, its result was the opposite. It tore the country into warring and irreconcilable factions.

  The Conversos, or New Christians, quickly reoccupied important positions almost identical to those they had held as Jews, those of physicians, lawyers, financial advisers to the nobility, jobs for which training or learning qualified them. Instead of a Jewish conspiracy, it now seemed like a New Christian conspiracy. Meanwhile, the actual strength of their new faith, the fullness of the conversion, was under heavy suspicion—and for good reason. The man baptized at sword point was often less than sincere. When Converso doctors lost patients, the old accusations were muttered, and when the government attempted to take untrained men, who happened to be Old Christians, and turn them overnight into brilliant physicians, the results were equally disastrous. In the somewhat lowlier occupation of tax collector, more ironies appeared. When Old Christians took up these tasks they were looked down upon for performing “Jewish” chores, and soon were accused of being Jews in Old Christian clothing. Of this confused situation, a seventeenth-century writer complained:

  Formerly all who applied themselves to the gathering of taxes were Jews and people of low origin; yet now, when they are not so, people look down upon them as Hebrews, even though they be Old Christians and of noble descent.

  Between Old Christian and New there grew an unbridgeable gulf of dislike and distrust. A number of ex-Jews, obviously supposing that the move would make them safer from the Inquisition, chose clerical careers and some of them rose to positions of importance in the Church. But even the Church’s servants were not spared from suspicion that they were secret Judaizers, and before the Inquisition was over, hundreds of nuns, monks, and friars were marched to the stake. At one remarkable auto-da-fé in Coimbra, which lasted over two days and in which over two hundred suspected Jews were involved, the victims included nuns, friars, curates, priests, canons, professors, vicars, and an unfrocked Franciscan who stubbornly refused to confess that he was not a devout Catholic and was therefore burned alive as punishment.

  The doctrine of limpieza, or purity of blood, was impossible to enforce from the beginning, with so much of the Spanish nobility already “tainted” with Jewish blood, and so it quickly became nothing more than a tool—a powerful tool, for it was an instrument of blackmail—which any noble could use in dealing with his enemies, or which the Church could use in its endless struggle with the nobility, or which one order within the Church could use against another. In 1560, for example, Cardinal Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla, annoyed that two relatives were not admitted to a particular military order, pettishly and vengefully turned over to Philip II a document, later called the Tizón de la Nobleza España (the Blot on the Nobility of Spain), in which he “proved” that the entire nobility of Spain was of Jewish descent. Apparently the Cardinal’s proofs were convincing, for the Tizón became a standard Inquisitional reference book, used right up into the nineteenth century, hauled out whenever new victims were needed, republished, and amended at each publisher’s whim—many times. For a price, of course, one could have one’s name removed from its list.

  Meanwhile, Conversos who had been converted under duress and who were bitter and resentful of the Church became a faction of their own. Outwardly labeled Marranos, they called themselves, in private, Anusim, “the Forced Ones,” and continued to practice Judaism.

  Soon there was agitated talk of “the Converso danger” and “the Marrano peril,” and Conversos, in terror of their lives, fanned the flames by turning informer on Marranos as well as on each other. In Seville, one of the main centers of Conversos, the New Christians, led by Diego de Susan, a wealthy merchant, decided to resist the Inquisition. Diego’s beautiful daughter, however, disclosed this secret to her Old Christian lover, who passed it on to the Inquisitors, and many distinguished Conversos of Seville were tried, convicted, and sent to the stake.

  It was an endless whirlpool of hate and fear. A list was circulated of the thirty-seven signs by which one could recognize a Judaizer. With dismay, it was quickly noted that a number of the thirty-seven signs applied to everybody. There is no way of telling how many Marranos there were at any given point in time, how many had fled, how many remained. Marranos, it was said—and no doubt it was true—worked harder for the Inquisition than most Christians as a way of preserving their disguise. How could you tell the traditional zeal of the fresh convert from what might be smoke screen and deception? There was no way, and the extrazealous Converso was as much under suspicion and surveillance as the indifferent one. And thus the Inquisition revealed its essential dilemma: It was suspicious even of itself.

  When the Inquisitor of Seville wanted to locate the homes of Marranos, he went up on a hilltop on a Saturday and pointed out homes whose chimneys were not smoking. “You will not see smoke rising from any of them,” he said, “in spite of the severe cold. They have no fires because it is the Sabbath.”

  As the Inquisition’s power increased, so did the number of fleeing Marranos, and the number of Judaizers discovered and brought to trial. At the Inquisitional tribunal in Toledo, between the years 1575 and 1610, 175 convicted Judaizers appeared for sentencing. Later, between 1648 and 1794, the number had jumped to 659. Though Judaizing was not the only crime the Inquisitional courts dealt with, it was by far the most popular one. Also punished were those found guilty of being secret Moors (or Moriscos), those guilty of blasphemy, witchcraft, heresy, solicitation in confession, and “those who do not consider fornication sinful.” It is interesting to note that while the number of convicted Judaizers rose sharply, the number of persons accused of condoning fornication declined—from 264 in the years 1575 to 1610 to a mere five in 1648 to 1794.

  The prisons of Spain filled until there were enough prisoners to hold an auto-da-fé—literally, an “act of the faith”—and these autos q
uickly became a tremendously popular form of public entertainment. Today, the phrase conjures up scenes of human victims tied to rafters and fed into blazing pyres while a bloodthirsty populace screamed approval. In actuality, the autos-da-fé were reasonably sedate affairs, conducted as public expressions of religiosity and pious justice. Fidel Fita, a fifteenth-century Spaniard, describes the ceremony that was held on Sunday, February 12, 1486, and we see that it was a restrained occasion:

  All the reconciled went in procession, to the number of 750 persons, including both men and women … from the church of St. Peter Martyr … the men were all together in a group, bareheaded and unshod, and since it was extremely cold they were told to wear soles under their feet which were otherwise bare; in their hands were unlit candles. The women were together in a group, their heads uncovered and their faces bare, unshod like the men and with candles. Among these were many prominent men in high office. With the bitter cold and the dishonour and disgrace they suffered from the great number of spectators (since a great many people from outlying districts had come to see them), they went along howling loudly and weeping and tearing their hair, no doubt more for the dishonour they were suffering than from any offence they had committed against God. Thus they went in tribulation through the streets along which the Corpus Christi procession goes, until they came to the cathedral. At the door of the church were two chaplains who made the sign of the cross on each one’s forehead saying, “Receive the sign of the Cross, which you denied and lost through being deceived.” Then they went into the church until they arrived at a scaffolding erected by the new gate, and on it were the father inquisitors. Nearby was another scaffolding on which stood an altar at which they said mass and delivered a sermon. After this a notary stood up and began to call each one by name, saying, “Is——here?” The penitent raised his candle and said “Yes.” There in public they read all the things in which he had judaized. The same was done for the women. When this was over they were publicly allotted penance and ordered to go in procession for six Fridays, disciplining their body with scourges of hempcord, barebacked, unshod and bareheaded; and they were to fast for those six Fridays. It was also ordered that all the days of their lives they were to hold no public office such as alcalde, alguacil, regidor or jurado, or be public scriveners or messengers, and that those who held these offices were to lose them. And that they were not to become money-changers, shopkeepers or grocers or hold any official post whatever. And they were not to wear silk or scarlet or coloured cloths or gold or silver or pearls or coral or any jewels. Nor could they stand as witnesses. And they were ordered if they relapsed, that is if they fell into the same error again, and resorted to any of the aforementioned things, they would be condemned to the fire. And when all this was over they went away at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Henry Kamen, one of the best historians of the Inquisition, has pointed out that two o’clock is the traditional Spanish hour for lunch, and that 750 transgressors “reconciled” back into the ways of righteousness was most certainly a good morning’s work. As the Inquisition progressed, and the number of penitents grew, the autos-da-fé became longer, often stretching into the night and sometimes going on for days. Burnings, however, seldom took place in public in the centers of town, and were performed in the outskirts of cities, away from the eyes of the morbid or curious. Also, since so many prisoners died in confinement before being sentenced, a good proportion of the victims were burned in effigy only.

  “Scourging” was a more popular form of punishment. The prisoner was ordered to “discipline his body” with whips, or often given added discipline by being lashed to a mule and “whipped through the streets” by the executioner. In these cases, the public was urged to participate by pelting the victim with stones and garbage. How grateful the prisoner must have been to have returned to the True Faith. Children and old people were subject to identical punishment—a teen-age youth sentenced to the same number of lashings as a seventy-year-old woman. The number of lashings prescribed varied according to the offense, but a hundred was the usual minimum and two hundred the maximum.

  An even more bizarre—though effective—device of punishment was the sanbenito, a corruption of the words saco benito, or “holy bag.” An odd garment, cut rather like a poncho, the sanbenito fitted over the head and hung to the knees. It was usually of yellow, the color of cowardice, and decorated with crosses, flames, devils, and other reminders of torture. With the sanbenito was worn a tall pointed headpiece, similar to a dunce’s cap. A reformed heretic might be required to wear this strange-looking outfit for anywhere from a few months to the rest of his life, and any relapse to his old Judaizing ways while condemned to the sanbenito meant, instantly, the stake. In addition to the humiliation the sanbenito inflicted upon its wearers, there was the further disgrace that when a penitent was permitted to remove his sack it was displayed, with his name attached to it, in the cathedral “in perpetuity.”

  Tomás de Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General of the Inquisition, was himself of Jewish descent. He was among those who urged Ferdinand and Isabella to establish the Inquisition in the first place. Both monarchs held him in high regard. The queen consulted Torquemada often and sought his advice on religious matters. He visited her frequently at her palace in Segovia in the years before she took the throne, and he became her personal confessor. Later, he became Ferdinand’s as well, and must have listened to some startling accounts if Ferdinand confessed all. Torquemada was known for his thoroughness and single-mindedness. He was called “a scourge of heresy, a light of Spain, the saviour of his country, and an honor to his Order,” which was the Dominican. Popes Sixtus IV and Alexander VI praised Torquemada for his dedication to ridding Spain of Jews and Moors, and spoke admiringly of the smooth efficiency of his courts.

  A strange, austere, overpowering figure of a man, he comes down through history to us as a compound of myths and contradictions. It was said that he never traveled unless he was accompanied by 250 armed guards and fifty horsemen, that he was pathologically afraid of the dark and could not sleep unless an attendant was at his side to rouse him from his terrible nightmares. It was also said that he never ate unless the horn of a unicorn and the tongue of a scorpion were placed beside his plate. Considering the supply of unicorns’ horns in fifteenth-century Spain, he must have dined little. He was praised for his extreme asceticism, yet a portrait of him by a contemporary painter depicts him as a full-faced, dark-complexioned, oddly worldly-looking bon vivant. One could describe his face as decidedly Semitic in cast, and this may have had something to do with his attitudes.

  It was he, whose own blood was “impure,” who first introduced the doctrine of limpieza into a Dominican monastery, the one that he built in Avila and dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas. This cold and beautiful building, addressing serene courtyards and gardens, built with money extracted from the victims of his Inquisition, is a major tourist attraction in Avila today. Torquemada’s standards were said to be utterly unimpeachable. In 1484 his pope, Sixtus IV, wrote a letter congratulating him for having “directed your zeal to those matters which contribute to the praise of God and the utility of the orthodox faith.” He had a violent temper, and was not even afraid of speaking imperiously to his king and queen. According to one account, Ferdinand and Isabella were offered a ransom of 30,000 ducats by a group of Jews. The king and queen were tempted, and summoned Torquemada for an opinion. When he heard what they suggested, Torquemada is said to have torn his crucifix from his breast, flung it on the table in front of their majesties, and shouted, “Will you, like Judas, betray your Lord for money?”

  As the Inquisition progressed over the tortured centuries, it was not always so incorruptible. If the amount of the bribe sufficiently exceeded the amount that could be obtained through simple confiscation, the king was usually willing to listen. In 1602, a group of ex-Jews offered Philip III a present of 1,860,000 ducats, plus handsome cash gifts to each of the royal ministers, if a pardon was issued to “ju
daizers of their nation for all past offences.” And there was more, the king was told, where that came from. The Conversos openly admitted to a hoard of wealth amounting to over 80 million ducats held in a secret hiding place. This offer, more than sixty times the amount that enraged Torquemada, resulted in the issuance of a papal decree of pardon, and 410 prisoners were released from the Inquisition.

  Torquemada ruled that those who steadfastly refused to renounce their Judaism and to reembrace the Church must die by fire. Only the penitents were given lesser punishments. The results were some extraordinary cases of martyrdom. One of the greatest was that of Don Lope de Vera, who appears to have become actually unhinged by his zeal to be a Jew even though he had not a drop of Jewish blood in him. He had studied Hebrew and become a pro-Jewish fanatic. Denounced and turned over to the Inquisition by his own brother, Don Lope repeatedly declared to the Inquisitors that he wanted to become a Jew. He circumcised himself in his prison cell and stated that he had renamed himself Judah the Believer. While being led to the stake he chanted Hebrew prayers. He was burned alive.

  Torquemada’s successor as Grand Inquisitor was Diego Deza. Until he took his post he had been known as a quiet and scholarly man, a friend and patron of Columbus. Like Torquemada, he was of Jewish extraction. He far outdistanced his predecessor when it came to savagery, and under his leadership the Inquisition became more wanton and ferocious than ever before. In 1500 a Marrano woman “of exalted rank” who considered herself a prophetess was arrested at Herrera. Immediately this was seized upon as an excuse for an enormous auto-da-fé. After months of planning, it was held at Toledo and the woman and thirty-eight of her followers—all of them women—were burned. The next day, sixty-seven more—again all women—suffered the same fate. Under Diego Deza, possession of a trace of Jewish blood was enough to call for execution. The archdeacon de Castro, whose mother was from an ancient Old Christian family, was sentenced, made to perform public penance, and had his considerable fortune confiscated, simply because his father had been a Converso. At one point, 107 people were burned alive; they were said to have been in a church while a sermon containing pro-Jewish sentiments was being preached.