Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories In The Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives Of Fear And Hatred [1st Edition] 9004395504, 9789004395503, 9004395601, 9789004395602

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Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_001

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The Iberian Religious World Edited by Ana Valdez Ricardo Muñoz Solla Scientific Board Alisa Meyuḥas Ginio (Tel-Aviv University) Carlos Eire (Yale University) Eleazar Gutwirth (Tel Aviv University) Fernanda Olival (University of Évora) Filomena Barros (University of Évora) Herman Prins Salomon (SUNY at Albany) José Ramos (University of Lisbon) Natalio Fernández Marcos (High Council of Scientific Research of Madrid, CSIC) Thomas M. Cohen (Catholic University of America) Veronica Williams (University of Buenos Aires, CONICET)

VOLUME 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/irw



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Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World Narratives of Fear and Hatred By

François Soyer

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Portuguese conversos scourging a crucifix of Christ in Madrid. Francisco de Rojas Nieto, Vespertinas de los opprobios de la Pasión de Cristo (Madrid, 1634). Printed with the permission of the Bibliotheca Sefarad (http://www.bibliothecasefarad.com/). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019003732

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2213-9141 isbn 978-90-04-39550-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-39560-2 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Illustrations xi Abbreviations xii Maps xiIi xvI

Introduction 1 1 The ‘Secret Jews’ and Proto-Racialism of Early Modern Spain and Portugal 1 2 Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracism 7 1 Conspiracism and Society in Early Modern Europe 17 1 Defining the Conspiracy Theory 19 2 Delusional Paranoia, Collective Emotions and the Emotional Dimension of the Conspiracy Theory 24 3 Explaining the Popularity of Conspiracy Theories 32 4 Moral Panics: the Social and Political Function of the Conspiracy Theory 36 5 ‘Modernity’ and the Origins of Conspiracism 40 6 Conspiracism in Early Modern Europe: the Demonic Superconspiracy  43 7 Conclusion: the Conspiracy Theory in the Age of ‘Confessionalization’ 48 2 Forged Documents and the Fear of Jewish Infiltration: the Jewish World Plot and the Early Modern Iberian World 54 1 The Early Notions of a Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy in Medieval Europe  56 2 The Forged Letter of the Jews of Toledo to Those of Jerusalem: a Fatal Precedent? 59 3 Warrant for Hatred: the Forged Letters from Toledo and Constantinople 64 4 The Obscure Origins of the Forged Letters 69 5 The Reception of the Forged Letters 79 6 Francisco de Quevedo’s La Isla de los Monopantos 81 7 The Legacy and Influence of the “Toledan Letters” in Modern Antisemitism 84 8 Conclusion 89

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3 “Seeking to Build a Synagogue within the Church of God”: the Alleged Converso Plot to Infiltrate and Destroy the Catholic Church  93 1 The Insidious Converso Threat to the Church 95 2 Perceiving Judaism as a Militant and Missionary Faith 100 3 The Spectre of the Jewish Dogmatizadores 106 4 The Menace of Jewish Proselytism amongst Africans and Amerindians 116 5 Reckless Resistance or Narrative Assault?: the Desecration of Religious Objects and the ‘Jewish Conspiracy’ 121 6 Conclusion 133 4 Medical Murder: the Myth of the Jewish Serial-Killer Doctors 138 1 Jews and Medicine in Medieval Iberia 140 2 Fear of the Homicidal Jewish Doctor and its Medieval Roots 144 3 The Archetypal Homicidal Doctor: Dr Meir Alguadex  150 4 Converso Doctors and the ‘Jewish Plot’ 156 5 Ethnic Discrimination and the Medical Professions  164 6 Medical Antisemitism in the Eighteenth Century 171 7 Other Medical Conspiracy Theories: a Comparative Study  175 8 Conclusion 182 5 “Traitors Who Dwell amongst Us”: the Conversos as Collaborators and Masterminds of the Muslim and Protestant Onslaught against Spain and Portugal 184 1 The Archetype of Jewish Treason: the Fall of Toledo in 711 CE 186 2 The ‘Jewish Origins’ of the Reformation: Linking Conversos and Protestants 196 3 The ‘Jewish Plot’ against the Portuguese Empire 200 4 A New Toledo in the Americas: Jewish Treason and the Fall of Bahia (1624) 202 5 Dutch Brazil and the Image of the Conversos 207 6 The Dutch, the Conversos and the “Grand Conspiracy” against the Spanish Empire (1610–1650) 213 7 Conclusion 228 6 “Sponges That Suck Up the Wealth of Spain”: the Jewish Plot, Economic Parasitism and the Fear of Economic Decline 230 1 The Trope of Jewish Lust of Gold and Usury beyond 1492 233 2 The Converso Merchant: a Parasite Growing at the Expenses of the Host 239

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3 The Merchant in the Ancien Régime: a Figure of Suspicion and Fear 250 4 An Easy Hate Figure: the Converso Tax-Farmers and Asentistas  254 5 Conclusion 261 Conclusion 265 1 The Elusive Converso Enemy: a Tool to Construct a Collective Identity 267 2 Epilogue: the Survival of the Conspiracist Narrative after 1750 275 Bibliography 283 Index 312

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Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments This book would not exist without the assistance and encouragement that I received from many institutions and individuals during the past seven years. Its inception began during a wonderful period of research leave spent at the University of Adelaide and funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions between January 2012 and December 2014. The generous funding of the centre allowed me to undertake research in Spanish and Portuguese archives and libraries that was vital to the completion of this book. It also enabled me to discuss various aspects of my research in seminars, conferences and lectures held in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, London and Salvador da Bahia (Brazil). In the United Kingdom, I received financial assistance from the University of Southampton, especially a whole semester of research leave between September 2016 and January 2017. I have benefitted from the kind advice and constructive criticism of numerous colleagues and scholars from around the world since 2012. These include David Lemmings, Katie Barclay, Claire Walker, Susan Broomhall, Susana Bastos Mateus, Marco Antonio Nunes da Silva, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, James Nelson Novoa, Monique Combescure-Thiry, Fernando Bravo López and Bruno Feitler. The two anonymous reviewers who peer-reviewed the manuscript of this work for Brill were extremely fast, generous and helpful with their critical feedback. I am sorry that I cannot name them and give them the credit that they are due. Ana T. Valdez and Ricardo Muñoz, the editors of Brill’s The Iberian Religious World series, have offered useful comments and criticism and endured the many delays that I inflicted upon them with saintly patience. Moreover, I must confess that I have learnt a great deal from the many students at the University of Southampton who participated in the seminars of my module HIST3133–3134 Heresy and Inquisition in the Early Modern Iberian World and who discussed anti-converso conspiracy theories with me. Any errors that remain in this book are entirely my own responsibility. For the last six years, my family – Katie, Abigail, Christian and Elsa – have all patiently endured the inevitable ups and downs of my research and writing with good grace. My debt to them is enormous. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Philippa Maddern (1952–2014), late Winthrop Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. I only met Philippa during the final two years of her life but I consider it to have been a great privilege. Philippa’s

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passion for history was undiminished by her illness and the treatment it required. She very kindly and spontaneously offered me advice and feedback less than two weeks before she passed away. She was, and will always remain, a source of great inspiration to me as a historian.

Illustrations Illustrations

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Illustrations 1 2 3

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Maps Map of Spain, with locations mentioned in this book xIIi Map of Portugal, with locations mentioned in this book xiV Map of the Americas, with locations mentioned in this book XV

Figures Julián de Medrano, La Silva Curiosa (Paris, 1608), 156–7 67 Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon, 1623), folio 55v 69 Portuguese conversos scourging a crucifix of Christ in Madrid. Francisco de Rojas Nieto, Vespertinas de los opprobios de la Pasión de Cristo (Madrid, 1634). Printed with the kind permission of the Bibliotheca Sefarad 126 Flagellation of a crucifix by conversos in the Tambo de Montero (Cuzco). ­Anonymous 18th-century painting. Museo Histórico Regional de Cuzco. Printed with the permission of the Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano (ARCHI) 136

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Abbreviations

Abbreviations A.D.C. A.G.S. A.H.N. A.N.T.T. B.N.E. B.N.F. B.N.P. B.L.

Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca (Cuenca) Archivo General de Simancas (Simancas) Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid) Arquivo Nacional da Torre Do Tombo (Lisbon) Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid) Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Lisbon) British Library (London)

Abbreviations

Map 1

Map of Spain, with locations mentioned in this book

Maps Abbreviations

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Map 2

Abbreviations Maps

Map of Portugal, with locations mentioned in this book

Maps Abbreviations

Map 3

Map of the Americas, with locations mentioned in this book

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Abbreviations

Introduction Introduction

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Introduction 1

The ‘Secret Jews’ and Proto-Racialism of Early Modern Spain and Portugal

The Jews were officially expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 but these expulsions, ordained by the crowned rulers of those kingdoms, did not end what might be described as the ‘Jewish presence’ in early modern Spain, Portugal and their respective overseas empires. Rather than leave, thousands of Jews converted to Christianity and continued to reside in the Iberian Peninsula. In Portugal, King Manuel I did not actually allow the Jewish population to leave but forced the vast majority of them to convert after seizing their children. This was, in fact, only the latest wave of conversions as thousands of Jews had already converted following the outbreak of anti-Jewish riots in Spain at the end of the fourteenth century as well as vigorous (and forceful) missionary campaigns conducted in the early fifteenth century by charismatic preachers such as Saint Vincent Ferrer. These neophytes were generically known as ‘converts’ (conversos) or ‘New Christians’ (Spanish cristianos nuevos / Portuguese cristãos novos) and this designation continued to be commonly used to describe their descendants until the second half of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to know exactly how many Jews converted to Christianity in the medieval Iberian Peninsula but what appears certain is that the numbers were significant enough (in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands) to prevent their total assimilation within the wider Christian population. Moreover, the often-harrowing and expedited circumstances in which their conversion took place – amidst riots, expulsion edicts or after compulsory attendance at Christian sermons and ‘debates’ between theologians and rabbis – left many members of the majority Christian population who were not descended from Jews, the so-called ‘Old Christians,’ highly suspicious of the motivations and sincerity of the conversos’ Christian beliefs. Even before the expulsions of 1492 and 1497, anti-converso sentiment ran high and expressed itself in the form of social ostracism. Suspicion was exacerbated by acute resentment at the social ascent of conversos in both the royal administration and the church. From the middle of the fifteenth century, various ecclesiastical institutions endeavoured to prevent conversos from entering their ranks by compelling prospective candidates to undergo a genealogical investigation. Antagonism sometimes also gave way to violence and the conversos were targeted by outburst of rioting in Toledo (1449 and 1467), Córdoba (1473) and Lisbon (1506). Seeking to put an end to divisions amongst their Christian subjects, Queen Isabel of Castile and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_002

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Introduction

King Fernando of Aragón pressured the papacy to permit the establishment in Spain during the 1480s of inquisitorial tribunals whose mission was to hunt down and punish judaizing conversos. In similar circumstances, King João III of Portugal oversaw the establishment of inquisitorial tribunals in Portugal during the 1530s and 1540s. The activities of the inquisitors and the expulsion of the Jews did not, however, put an end to the ‘converso problem’ as the rulers of Spain and Portugal had fondly hoped. The survival of Jewish beliefs and practices amongst some conversos and the religious suspicions and social resentment of some ‘Old Christians’ do not completely explain the persistence of prejudice against conversos in early modern Spanish and Portuguese society. In a recent broad analysis of antiJewish thought throughout the history of the Western world, David Nirenberg has argued that anti-Judaism – a term he prefers to antisemitism – was a constituent factor in Western history starting in Antiquity and even before the advent of Christianity. For Nirenberg, “ideas about Jews and Judaism” and “pathological fantasies of Judaism” have played a central role in how people in the Western world have “constructed the reality of their world.” When it comes to Spain, even though he does not examine the conspiracy theories that are discussed in this book, Nirenberg sees the same phenomenon occurring in the form of “the thorough ‘Judaization’ of Spain” as the ghostly spectre of the Jew and “Jewishness” became a perennial social, religious and intellectual concern. 1 The mass conversions of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries certainly had no equivalent elsewhere in medieval or early modern Europe and they caused another social phenomenon unique to the Iberian world: the emergence of a proto-racialized form of anti-Jewish antipathy. In an article predating his book, David Nirenberg had already provided the clearest explanation of the causal link between the mass conversions and the rise of the role that lineage played in the way that individuals and communities identified and defined themselves: (…) Over the course of little more than a century, previously marginal logics of lineage had moved to the centre of Jewish, converso, and Old Christian communal identity and memory in Iberia. This transformation was achieved, not by the implacable migration of ideas from one culture to another, but by the jostling of countless individuals, Jew and Christian, reorienting themselves in the strangely unfamiliar religious landscape that emerged as the flood-waters of baptism receded. 1 David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), especially 217–245 (quoted passages are from pages 244 and 468).

Introduction

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 The genealogical turn was itself an attempt to conceal this unfamiliarity, this rupture, by establishing new continuities, new links to family, faith, ‘race,’ and ‘nation.’2 From the standpoint of the Old Christian population, this “genealogical turn” was doubtless largely influenced by pre-existing beliefs about genealogical determinism. The prevalent Hippocratic/Galenic medical theory that children were conceived as a result of the mixing of semen – essentially refined blood – produced by both parents had far-reaching implications in the early modern Iberian world. The ‘nature’ (naturaleza) of an individual was thought to be primarily the result of physical, mental and behavioural traits inherited via the semen/blood of his or her parents. In the seventeenth century, the famous lexicographer Father Sebastián de Covarrubias explained that an individual’s naturaleza was indeed “the product of their caste or of their homeland or nation.”3 The terms raza (race), casta (caste) and nación/nação (nation) were used interchangeably and understood to be practically synonymous, denoting groups of individuals who shared physical and behavioural characteristics due to their shared ancestry. This understanding of heredity extended even to religious beliefs. Many writers came to argue that Judaism – both the belief in the Jewish faith and the practice or observance of its ‘ceremonies’ – was transmitted not just by the teachings of rabbis but also biologically from one generation to another through ‘Jewish blood.’ In 1637 the Portuguese preacher Luis de Mello drew upon Jeremiah 13:23 to warn his listeners that conversos were likely to judaize just “as the Ethiopian cannot cease being as black skinned as he was when he was brought into the world by his mother” since it was “impossible for the Hebrew people to perform good deeds and to live cognizant of its guilt, however much they are admonished and punished (…); an inborn vice is hard to correct.”4 The lamentable consequence of such beliefs in genealogical determinism was that many Christian commentators came to lend credence to the notion that the converts and their descendants, as innate Jews, could never become genuine Christians. The logical corollary of such rhetoric was that the untrustworthy conversos must be marginalized and prevented from having access to positions of power and influence. 2 David Nirenberg, “Mass conversion and genealogical mentalities: Jews and Christians in fifteenth-century Spain,” Past and Present, 174 (2002): 40. 3 Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), letter N, 561r. 4 Edward Glaser, “Invitation to Intolerance: a study of the Portuguese sermons preached at autos-da-fé,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 27 (1956): 365.

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Introduction

Whilst many Old Christians and inquisitors believed, until well into the eighteenth century, that an organized crypto-Jewish movement operated in the Iberian world, the real state of affairs regarding the religious identity of the conversos remains elusive and the subject of much contentious debate. To what extent did normative Judaism thrive or merely survive amongst converso families? Most conversos, living under the watchful eye of the Inquisition and their Old Christian neighbours, were isolated from Jewish communities outside the Iberian Peninsula and exposed to Catholicism on a daily basis through their interaction with their neighbours and their participation (whether sincere or not) in catholic religious rituals. Moreover, although the practice of endogamy contributed to the preservation of a corporate identity amongst many converso families and communities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these same families were nonetheless increasingly ‘diluted’ by intermarriage with Old Christians as the decades and centuries progressed, in spite of the social stigma that afflicted them. Historians have previously tended to argue about the biased nature of inquisitorial sources as evidence for converso religious beliefs and represented them as either Jewish martyrs or, alternatively, sincere Christians victimized because of their ethnicity. More recently, researchers have sought to warn against such generalizations and the categorization of conversos into a Jew/Christian dichotomy. They have emphasized the complex nature of converso religiosity and the need to understand conversos as ‘cultural commuters.’ Thus, it is likely that conversos and converso communities established in different areas of the Iberian world (and at different times) probably espoused a wide spectrum of religious beliefs spanning between Judaism and Christianity.5 This book does not concern itself with the problematic religious beliefs of the conversos themselves but rather with the beliefs that many Old Christians entertained about them. A hatred of Judaism and of suspected judaizers amongst the conversos drove some men of the church (as well as laymen) to espouse and promote views seemingly contradictory to Saint Paul’s well-known 5 José Faur, “Four Classes of Conversos: A Typological Study,” Revue des Études Juives, 149 (1990): 113–24; Thomas F. Glick, “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, ed. B. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 59–76; David Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora (Philadelphia: Princeton University Press, 2004); Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within. The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Mercedes García-Arenal, “Religious Dissent and Minorities: The Morisco Age,” The Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009): 887–920 and “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by Ángel Alcalá),” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 38 (2013): 1–18.

Introduction

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appeal in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28) for equality between Christians of different backgrounds and for the creation of a collective Christian identity that transcends ethnic divisions. A striking example of this uncompromising attitude can be found in the sermon preached by a canon of Lisbon cathedral during a public inquisitorial sentencing (auto de fe) held in Lisbon in 1629. A clearly frustrated João Mendes de Távora denounced the seemingly insurmountable nature of converso judaizing, arriving at the conclusion that it was an “incurable disease”: It is the doctrine of [the Greek physician] Galen that when a patient comes to a state where there is no hope left for his life, he ought not to receive any further remedies so that these remedies should not lose their prestige. This [Jewish] disease, gentlemen, is terminal and it has lasted for more than sixteen hundred years. These people are paralyzed and, in accordance with the pulse which we have taken today, there is no longer any hope for their improvement. Let us, therefore, not offer them any more of the medicines that have cured others so that these should not lose their reputation for healing.6 The climate of social tension between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Christians endured in spite of the dwindling numbers of conversos caused by emigration out of the Iberian Peninsula and intermarriage with ‘Old Christians.’ In eighteenth-century Portugal, it was obvious even to foreign visitors. An Englishman visiting Lisbon in 1701 could not fail to notice these tensions and describes them in the account of the visit that he subsequently penned: There are amongst [the Portuguese] some families that are known as New Christians, which is to say that they recently converted from Judaism to Christianity. It is an insult to call any person a New Christian and the other [inhabitants of Portugal] do not gladly intermarry with them. What they call good blood is that which has not been tainted by Jews or Muslims.7 Likewise, the French author of a description of Lisbon written three decades later notes that “[the conversos] are disdained and forever tarred by the 6 João Mendes de Távora, Sermão que pregou Joanne Mendes de Tavora (…) no Auto da Fé que se celebrou em Lisboa em 2 de Setembro de 1629 (Lisbon: Antonio Aluares, 1629), fols. 4r–4v. 7 Thomas Cox, Relação do Reino de Portugal 1701, ed. Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2007), 62.

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Introduction

infamous epithet of cristão-novo or ‘new Christian.’” Like the Englishman before him, the Frenchman reports that they are shunned by ‘Old Christians,’ who refuse to marry their children with those of the conversos although he admits that such mixed marriages occur either as the result of some “amorous adventures” or between rich converso men and the daughters of impoverished ‘Old Christian’ families. The Frenchman notes that even an individual whose family was, through intermarriage, mostly ‘Old Christian’ would still be labelled as “partly New Christian.”8 The decision to employ the term ‘antisemitic’ in this book is therefore a conscious one that is made in full awareness of the controversy that employing such a term might cause. The majority of historians who have studied the history of anti-Jewish thought and persecutions in medieval and early modern Europe have consistently criticized the use of the expression ‘antisemitism’ to describe the situation prior to the nineteenth century. Noted historians including Johannes Heil, Nicholas de Lange and Anna Sapir Abulafia have argued that the use of ‘antisemitism’ is anachronistic since the advent of scientific theories of race took place at the end of the eighteenth century and this precludes any continuity with an earlier period.9 Such a view is certainly not wrong but it fails to engage with the very specific nature of anti-converso sentiment in the early modern Iberian world. In early modern Spain and Portugal there were no Jews but only conversos. Polemical anti-converso rhetoric and discourse nevertheless often used the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘converso’ interchangeably and frequently promoted a hatred of conversos founded on the belief that Judaism and Jewish culture were transmitted in a hereditary or biological manner from generation to generation. This was a form of reductivism in which, it can be argued, faith and culture were transformed into the functional equivalent of the modern concept of race. Recent research has put forward the notion that ‘race’ did exist prior to the nineteenth century even though the modern ‘scientific’ vocabulary of race and racism dates from this later period. Francisco Bethencourt and Max Hering Torres have advocated caution and urged researchers to avoid any interpretation of ‘racism’ in the early modern Iberian world based upon a linear history of racism and an understanding of ‘racism’ as a trans-historical and monolithic phenomenon. Instead, Hering Torres argues, we must “recognize that there have been previous manifestations of the idea of ‘race’” with “different and 8 Anon., Description de la ville de Lisbonne (Paris: Pierre Prault, 1730), 97–9. 9 For a nicely concise summary of historians’ positions on the debate of the appropriateness of the use of ‘antisemitism’ before the 1800s see J.D. Martin, Representations of Jews in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006), 1–32.

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independent historical meanings which may have contributed to the emergence of racialization processes.” Thus, we should accept the existence of different forms of racisms (plural) rather than racism (singular).10 Could the same not be said of ‘antisemitism’? Must we always treat antisemitism as a monolithic concept or should we posit the existence of independent historical meanings and thus of antisemitisms (plural)? Some historians who have examined anti-Jewish sentiment in late medieval and early modern Spain in the specific context of the ‘converso problem’ have argued that its unique association of genealogical determinism with the more ‘traditional’ religious antiJudaism of medieval polemics makes it unique.11 They have chosen to employ the expression “religious antisemitism” to describe the mixture of religious themes and proto-racialism in anti-converso propaganda. The author of this book largely agrees with their point of view and has therefore decided to employ the expression ‘antisemitism’ in this nuanced sense. 2

Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracism

The origins of modern conspiracy culture or ‘conspiracism’ – the belief that the fate of governments, institutions and society as a whole is secretly determined by a small group of individuals bound by a common purpose and interests – are often traced by cultural historians and psychologists to the final decade of the eighteenth century and particularly the French Revolution. The works of the French Jesuit Augustin Barruel and Scottish physicist Professor John Robison have indeed been identified as playing a key role in the development of mythologies relating to ‘secret societies’ and their purported role in the political upheaval in Europe that followed the French Revolution. Likewise, studies of modern antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracism have maintained that their development followed the gradual emancipation of the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe and the resulting anxieties that Jews

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Max S. Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood. Problems of Interpretation,” Race and Blood in the Iberian World, ed. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez and David Nirenberg (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 12–3; Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Henri Méchoulan, “Du racisme religieux de Torrejoncillo à l’antijudaisme «éclairé» de Feijoo,” Revue des Études Juives, 154 (1995), 363–85 and Albert Sicroff, “Spanish anti-Judaism: a case of religious racism,” Encuentros y Desencuentros, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, Marcelo Dascal, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Ángel Sáenz Badillos (Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 2000), 589–662.

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Introduction

were making use of their new rights to dominate and control European socie­ ties and states.12 This book challenges the notion that conspiracism is a modern (or even postmodern) social construct or phenomenon. It argues that, contrary to the established consensus, the essential components and rhetoric of conspiracism existed much earlier in European history. Their existence can be traced centuries before 1789 and at the very least to the development of the printing press and the advent of printed propaganda destined for a lay readership. To make this point, this book focuses on the antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in Spain, Portugal and their overseas empires between 1450 and 1750. It examines how antisemitic conspiracism was exploited by some elements within the Iberian ecclesiastical hierarchy seeking, firstly, to influence government and church policy and hoping, secondly, to promulgate a sense of collective identity by exploiting the fear and hatred generated by an elusive figure of hate: the secret Jew. Until well into the eighteenth century, a remarkable number of vernacular books, pamphlets and sermons printed in Spain and Portugal expounded upon the purported danger presented by the conversos as the covert agents of the Devil. The authors of these texts stridently pointed to the various secret strategies that these conversos had allegedly elaborated and adopted to destroy both the Catholic Church and the Christian inhabitants of the Iberian kingdoms and empires. These strategies were not just mentioned in works of printed propaganda but were discussed in meetings of government and church officials and even feature in anti-converso poems. To a certain extent, it could be argued that, at various points between 1450 and 1750, the early modern Iberian world became gripped by an obsession with the ‘Jewish peril’ or the ‘Jewish plot’ and fears about the covert deeds of ‘secret Jews’ who, as converts, could no longer be differentiated from the remainder of the population. Many authors and preachers stridently supported conspiracist arguments to advocate either for the more stringent implementation of racial statutes discriminating against conversos, for further support for the mission of the Inquisition or even for the wholesale expulsion of any Spaniard or Portuguese descended from Jews. The existence of antisemitic conspiracism in the Iberian world between 1450 and 1750, despite the official absence of ‘public Jews’ or tolerated Jewish communities such as those that could be found in the Holy Roman Empire and parts of Italy, gives rise to the following important questions:

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See Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2011).

Introduction

1.

9

What were the principal themes of these conspiracy theories and why did they become such enduring features of anti-converso discourse from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century (and even beyond)? 2. Were these conspiracy theories merely a perpetuation of popular antiJewish folklore or myths dating back to the medieval period, or did they acquire new characteristics in the Iberian world during the early modern period? 3. To what extent was antisemitic conspiracism in early modern Spain and Portugal supported and endorsed by elements of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities and, if so, to what ends? These questions are addressed in the following chapters by an analysis of the different antisemitic conspiracy theories that existed in early modern Spain, Portugal and their overseas empires. This work highlights the clear emotional and psychological dimensions of these early modern anti-converso conspiracy theories insofar as those who fielded them obviously sought to exploit religious, social and economic anxieties to produce fear of the supposed ‘Jewish peril’ and a racialized hatred of the conversos. The remit of this book is therefore to provide an analysis of the nature, development and objectives of antisemitic conspiracist propaganda in the early modern Iberian world. It is not my intention to advocate a facile teleological argument according to which all anti-converso policies and sentiments can somehow be traced back to antisemitic conspiracism. There are certainly ­examples of antisemitic conspiracism being used to directly influence and legitimate institutional and popular antipathy towards conversos. By way of illustra­tion, the conspiracist narrative was used to justify the exclusion of conversos from positions of authority in churches, vindicate their persecution by inquisitors in Peru and incite outbursts of popular violence in 1630s Portugal after an incident of alleged host desecration. These examples will be discussed along with the existing evidence for the popular reception of antisemitic conspiracy theories but it is fair to admit that the documentary evidence for the popular reception of anti-converso conspiracism is limited. As is the case with most conspiracy theories, it is often impossible to conclusively attribute popular anti-converso sentiments or a government/church policy to any particular author, text or idea. This book’s analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in early modern Spain and Portugal rests upon a variety of different sources. They include polemical anti-Jewish literature alongside printed sermons, inquisitorial trials, archival documents as well as a multitude of manuscript and printed chronicles/histories. Early modern Iberian polemical literature provides the majority of the evidence fielded in this book but it is important to note, as Bruno Feitler

10

Introduction

has done in a concise analysis of early modern Portuguese polemics, that it included various strands.13 Whilst some works remained focused on demonstrating the theological superiority of Christianity over Judaism, others offered far more vitriolic attacks upon Jews and conversos. Such works hardly distinguish conversos from Jews and generally assume that the conversos are practising Jews in their overwhelming majority. It was this latter type of polemic, often written in vernacular Spanish or Portuguese, that sought to incite fear and loathing of Jews/conversos by disseminating, and elaborating upon, conspiracy theories. Likewise, the many printed sermons that are frequently ­quoted in this book were mostly preached during the Inquisition’s public sentencings (autos de fe). In many cases the most extreme sermons served a similar purpose to the printed polemics. They sought to incite fear and hatred of the supposedly judaizing converso as the heretical ‘other’ amongst the crowd of spectators at the auto and, later, amongst the readers of the printed versions. There is another, methodological, reason to be wary of extrapolating from the available evidence in order to formulate grand claims about the popular impact of antisemitic conspiracism in the Iberian world. It is impossible to measure and quantify levels of ‘tolerance’ or ‘intolerance’ in the early modern Iberian world. No statistical data comparable to modern polls exists that would permit such an endeavour. This is an issue already apparent in the recent work of Stuart Schwartz, who has used a variety of documentary and printed sources to argue that “in the Iberian world, a cultural sphere in which because of official policies of intolerance such ideas might be least expected, dissidence in matters of faith was common and an attitude of tolerance, at least among some elements of the population, had long existed.”14 Clearly, as Schwartz has demonstrated, early modern Iberian societies were complex and multifaceted, defying the caricature of all-pervasive fanatical intolerance painted by hostile (often Protestant) propagandists. Nonetheless, just as Schwartz has been able to unearth considerable documentary evidence of religiously tolerant attitudes in inquisitorial documents, it is likewise possible to offer abundant and contradictory evidence of popular hatred and fear of conversos (from anti-converso riots in 1630s Portugal to the denunciations of neighbours and friends in inquisitorial trials). It is important to acknowledge that the historical contexts in which the more overtly conspiracist works were produced varied and that individual 13 14

Bruno Feitler, The Imaginary Synagogue. Anti-Jewish Literature in the Portuguese Early Modern World (16th–18th Centuries) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2015), 3–4. Stuart Schwartz, All Can be Saved. Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 243.

Introduction

11

authors had different motives for writing their books, sermons, pamphlets or reports. Early conspiracist and polemical works written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were either printed in Latin or remained manuscript. The second edition (1575) of Bishop Diego de Simancas’ Defensio Statuti Toletani, for instance, had the specific aim of defending discrimination against conversos within the cathedral chapter of Toledo. Later seventeenth-century vernacular works calling for the mass expulsion of the conversos – most notably those of Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo – were written and printed in periods (c.1615-c.1630 and c.1665-c.1675) when the Portuguese and Spanish inquisitions found themselves under considerable political pressure. The existence of such works, despite the official ban on the publication of vernacular religious polemics in the inquisitorial Index of banned books (‘Rule VI’), seems to demonstrate that they were produced with the support of (and possibly even commissioned by) inquisitors. In other cases, the works were responses to particular events that sparked heightened anti-converso sentiment such as incidents of sacrilege (for example the writings of Francisco de Quevedo and Timóteo Seabra Pimentel) or inquisitorial autos de fe. Some readers may well think that this book suffers from a lack of contextualization in the way that it jumps from one epoch to another and between Spain and Portugal. This work, however, charts the history of an antisemitic idea – the existence of a Jewish plot against the Iberian crowns and churches – and its focus is on its different thematic strands (forged letters, infiltration of the church, medical murder, political treason and economic sabotage). It would be easy for this book to maintain a narrow (somewhat parochial) focus on antisemitic conspiracism in either Spain or Portugal. Nonetheless, this book has been written with the deliberate aim of not focusing on a single Iberian kingdom and its colonial dependencies. As it will become clear in the following chapters, the similarities of both Iberian societies, of the origins of the ‘converso problem’ in both Iberian monarchies and of the propaganda produced by anti-converso polemicists means that it would make little sense to restrict the scope of this work to either Spain or Portugal. The polemical attacks and conspiracy theories targeting the conversos in both monarchies were remarkably similar and often mutually influenced. The notorious 1674 diatribe of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo, for example, was influenced by the earlier (1622) work of the Portuguese writer Vicente da Costa Mattos, which, in turn, owed much to earlier Spanish authors such as Ignacio del Villar Madonado (1614) and Alonso de Espina (fifteenth century). Consequently, it would make no sense to limit the scope of this book to either Spain or Portugal. The ‘union’ of Spain and Portugal under the same Habsburg rulers between 1580 and 1640 doubtless helped this process, as well as the fact that most of the

12

Introduction

conversos prosecuted by the Inquisition in Spain and its empire during the seventeenth century were of Portuguese origin. This decision to analyse the problem of antisemitic conspiracism across the early modern Iberian world (encompassing Spain, Portugal and their respective overseas empires) is made in full cognizance of the fact that there were some differences between the situation of the conversos in Spain and Portugal during the early modern period. I do not wish to overlook the fact that there were indeed differences in the way that the Portuguese and Spanish crowns treated conversos in different periods of the early modern era or that the inquisitorial persecution of suspected crypto-judaizing conversos in both kingdoms differed markedly. In Spain there were fluctuations in the rate of anti-converso repression by inquisitorial tribunals with distinct spikes of activity and periods when, conversely, many tribunals made other heretical groups their primary targets.15 In contrast to this, the Portuguese Inquisition remained remarkably focused on conversos until the middle of the eighteenth century with the vast majority of cases brought to trial involving conversos. Furthermore, whilst the Spanish conversos were the object of a ferocious campaign of repression waged by the Inquisition between 1480 and 1530, the Portuguese conversos were spared inquisitorial persecution between their forced conversion in 1497 and the late 1530s. This respite appears to have allowed them to form a stronger communal identity than their counterparts in Spain.16 Even though it will become apparent in the following chapters that the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions played a major role in the dissemination of antisemitic conspiracy theories, the focus of this book is not on the persecutory activity of the Inquisition but on the anti-converso rhetoric and propaganda produced and circulating in both Iberian kingdoms. Some historians might wish that this book had also examined the conspiracy theories affecting the Morisco minority for comparative purposes. In a recent study, James Amelang has noted that there exist strong parallels between the persecution suffered by the converso and Morisco minorities in early modern Spain. The two groups were collectively suspected of apostasy and heresy by secretly remaining faithful to Judaism and Islam despite their official status as baptized Christians. They were also accused of political disloyalty and 15

16

J. Contreras and G. Henningsen, “Forty-four thousand cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): analysis of a historical data bank,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Henningsen and Tedeschi (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 100– 129 (especially page 125). On the Portuguese Inquisition’s “obsession” with conversos see Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva, História da Inquisição Portuguesa (1536–1821) (Lisbon; Esfera dos Livros, 2013), 49–76.

Introduction

13

sympathy for the outside enemies of the church and crown. Nevertheless, as Amelang has persuasively argued, there existed important socio-cultural differences between the two minorities that render comparisons problematic.17 Mindful of this, and to avoid unnecessary digressions, I only examine antiMorisco conspiracism very occasionally and only when this is directly relevant to my analysis of anti-converso conspiracism. This book argues that the diffusion of antisemitic conspiracy theories in printed propaganda produced in the early modern Iberian world was not merely the consequence of the ‘recycling’ of traditional anti-Jewish folklore derived from the medieval period. Neither was the sustained obsession of Iberian conspiracists with the ‘Jewish peril’ during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, merely the result of a seemingly ‘irrational’ popular impulse. On the contrary, these antisemitic conspiracy theories were part of a conscious and sustained effort by some members of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities in both kingdoms, most notably by the Inquisition, to foster a ‘moral panic’ about conversos. Those seeking to promote this ‘moral panic’ could only achieve this aim through the creation and promotion of a conspiracist narrative demonizing the conversos. Sara Ahmed has emphasised in her influential work The Cultural Politics of Emotion that narratives seeking to demonize others work by “generating a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (…), but to take the place of the subject.” Ahmed’s exploration of what she has described as the “affective politics of fear” theorizes that fear not only gives form to the “others” as objects of fear and disgust but also constitutes those who are threatened into a clearly defined and idealized collective, whilst the “others” are presented as a danger to the subject and his/her community. The collective “self” becomes separated from the fear and disgust inducing “others.” This “organization of hate” and “economy of fear” has, Ahmed argues persuasively, been a crucial factor in the shaping of identities by governments and ruling elites that cultivate and exploit fear and also promote the performativity of disgust toward the “others.”18 In the conspiracist narrative, the judaizing conversos became the quintessential ‘folk devils’ of the early modern Iberian world and some members of the ecclesiastical and lay hierarchies, including inquisitors, sought to exploit popular fear of the ‘secret Jew’ as the Devil’s agent and the ‘enemy within’ as a tool

17 18

James Amelang, Historias paralelas: Judeoconversos y moriscos en la España moderna (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2011), especially 173–9. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.

14

Introduction

by means of which a new moral order and a sense of collective identity could be constructed. The main arguments of this book are thus the following ones: 1. That antisemitic conspiracism clearly existed in the early modern Iberian world, sharing a common rhetoric and themes with modern conspiracism targeting both Jews and other groups. 2. That this conspiracism was not a ‘marginal’ social phenomenon but was instead supported by elements of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies, often in power struggles within the early modern state and church over policies relating to the conversos. 3. That some supporters of antisemitic conspiracism targeted conversos in order to turn them into ‘folk devils’ and create a moral panic that could be used to strengthen a sense of communal identity bound by fear of the converso/Jew and a new moral order based on Tridentine Catholic values. The first chapter (Conspiracism and Society in Early Modern Europe) provides the contextual information necessary for readers as well as a discussion of the problems that arise when studying conspiracism. This includes (1) an examination of the present state of historical deliberations relating to how conspiracy theories should be defined and the origins of conspiracism, (2) a discussion of the concept of moral panics which this book applies in relation to the treatment of conversos in the early modern Iberian world and (3) a brief survey and analysis of other groups in early modern Europe who were accused of secretly working to undermine the foundations of society (such as witches, Catholics in Protestant England and Protestants in Catholic Europe) in order to provide both a comprehensive historical context and a comparative setting for this book. The second chapter (Forged Documents and the Fear of Jewish Infiltration: the Jewish World Plot and the Early Modern Iberian World) examines the emergence of a coherent conspiracist narrative targeting Jews/conversos in early modern Spain and Portugal and the origins of the forged documents that became the vital pillars supporting such a narrative: two letters (cartas) purporting to have been exchanged between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople at the end of the fifteenth century. It analyses the documents and seeks to shed light upon their obscure origins in the sixteenth century, their transformation into one of the most powerful elements in the polemical arsenal of antisemitic authors in both Spain and Portugal and, finally, their enduring popularity well into the twentieth century. The third chapter (“Seeking to Build a Synagogue within the Church of God”: the Alleged Converso Plot to Infiltrate and Destroy the Catholic Church) focuses on an analysis of the belief that crypto-Jews, acting as agents of the Devil, engaged in a coordinated campaign of religious desecration in Spain, Portugal

Introduction

15

and their empires aiming to destroy or ridicule Christian beliefs and damage Christian sacred objects (by means of the defilement of sacred objects such as crucifixes, statues of saints or the Virgin Mary and consecrated hosts). Taking into consideration the prior medieval origins of these accusations, this chapter highlights the manner in which the fear of attacks upon Christian sacred objects and rituals by secret-Jews became a central tenet of early modern Iberian antisemitic propaganda and was disseminated by the Inquisition in particular. Such accusations garnered increased emotional power in the wake of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Church’s conscious efforts to appeal to the emotions and senses of Catholic worshippers. Moreover, the developing postTridentine confessionalization of the secular state and politics meant that these attacks on religious objects and rituals were often presented in antisemitic propaganda as attacks on the monarchy itself. The fourth chapter (Medical Murder: the Myth of the Jewish Serial-Killer Doctors) continues on the theme of the fear of Jewish infiltration by specifically analysing the fear that judaizing conversos were purposefully infiltrating the medical professions (becoming doctors, physicians and surgeons) in order to murder their ‘Old Christian’ patients by administering false cures or poisons and that they particularly targeted high-status individuals. This chapter examines the origins of such fears in the seemingly disproportionate role of Jews in the practice of medicine in the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period. It closely links these original fears to deep-seated anxieties about the efficaciousness of medicines in general and the dependency of ‘Old Christian’ patients upon converso doctors in particular. It examines how such fears were used by propagandists to fuel demands for the exclusion of conversos from all medical professions. The fifth chapter (“Traitors Who Dwell amongst Us”: the Conversos as Collaborators and Masterminds of the Muslim and Protestant Onslaught against Spain and Portugal) throws light upon the dread of “Jewish treachery” and the notion that crypto-Jews in Spain and Portugal were actively collaborating with Muslim and Protestant enemies overseas to bring about the downfall of the Iberian monarchies and empires. These accusations of Jewish treachery originate in the thirteenth century but mushroomed with the forced conversion of the conversos and the development of Spain and Portugal’s overseas empires. Early modern Spaniards and Portuguese were encouraged by propagandists to feel besieged by outside enemies – Muslims in the Mediterranean and Protestants in northern Europe – and to blame the secret Jews operating in the ­Iberian world for the latter’s military successes. The chapter also argues that the accusation of secret treachery by conversos provided the secular and ecclesiastical authorities with convenient scapegoats against whom the ire of the

16

Introduction

people could be directed. Moreover, its appeal also lay in the fact that it offered a rationale through which individual Spaniards and Portuguese could make sense of humiliating military reverses during the first half of the seventeenth century. The sixth and final chapter (“Sponges That Suck Up the Wealth of Spain”: the Jewish Plot, Economic Parasitism and the Fear of Economic Decline) focuses on the common stereotype that the economic activity of conversos was deliberately limited to ‘non-productive’ and ‘passive’ professions that enriched only members of their own community. Out of this negative stereotype, a con­ spiracy theory emerged in early modern Spain and Portugal that promoted the notion of a terrifying plot: that converso economic activity calculatingly aimed to sap the prosperity of the Iberian kingdoms and channelled their wealth to benefit the economies and governments of their rivals in northern Europe (England, France and the United Provinces of the Netherlands). It examines the medieval origins of beliefs about Jewish economic parasitism and the emerging anxieties about converso/Jewish involvement in developing international trade between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. The chapter focuses especially on the conspiracy theory’s deliberate use by both government officials and intellectuals in early modern Iberia as a device to rationalize their fears of economic decline by ascribing a simple and clear causality to it.

Conspiracism And Society In Early Modern Europe

17

Chapter 1

Conspiracism and Society in Early Modern Europe A great deal of Judaism is to be found in Spain in spite of the indefatigable zeal with which the Holy Tribunal [of the Inquisition] stands guard, as is proven by its trials and numerous autos de fe (…). These vile people are concealed, infecting so much (…). Their usual life is one of profit and usury: their professions are those of doctors, rentiers, merchants, confectioners, and all their trades are those of idlers. They are clever and shrewd (…) and seek to take out their revenge on Christian blood.1 Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres, Manifiesto universal de los males envejecidos que España padece (1727)

⸪ In 1727, the Spanish economist Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres submitted a memorandum to King Philip V in the form of a printed and public manifest in which he claimed to be identifying the “old evils” (males envejecidos) that were afflicting Spain. Amongst these, the author highlighted a secret conspiracy by “concealed” Jews living as Christians that was deliberately undermining the social order and economy of the Spanish monarchy. The claims made by Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres in the passage cited above bare all the hallmarks of the later antisemitic conspiracy theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to focusing on the antisemitic conspiracy theories in the early modern Iberian world, it is perforce important to begin with a careful analysis of the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, examining their nature and characteristics. Conspiracy theories – not least antisemitic ones – are one of the most complex and controversial social phenomena. They have enjoyed and continue to enjoy a widespread popularity that transcends race, class, politics, religion or gender. Such is the popular success of conspiracy theories that historians and political scientists have argued that they now constitute a distinct 1 Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres, Manifiesto universal de los males envejecidos que España padece, y de las causas de que nacen, y remedios que à cada uno en su clase corresponde (Madrid: Francisco Laso, n.d.), 121–6.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_003

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Chapter 1

international cultural movement – ‘conspiracism’ – with its own set of values and beliefs as well as a worldview in which conspiracy theories occupy a central role in the course of history. The different sections of this chapter address a number of questions that are vital to enhancing our understanding of the nature and function of antisemitic conspiratorial beliefs not only in the early modern Iberian world but in any given place and time. Exactly what are conspiracy theories and how can we define them? What makes them so appealing to so many people? Do they have a social and/or political function? What is the role of ‘fear’ and ‘paranoia’ in the conspiracy theory? Many of these questions are still the focus of considerable discussion and debate amongst historians, psychologists and researchers in many other fields. Examining these basic questions about the nature of conspiracy theories will permit an analysis of the more specific questions that this book addresses. Accordingly, this chapter starts with an examination of the different manners in which scholars have sought to define and categorize conspiracy theories. It then progresses to an analysis of the ‘emotional dimension’ of the conspiracy theory and of the methodological problems that result from any attempt to understand them as collective emotional phenomena (the collective fear of Jews, communists, etc…). From the role of emotions, the focus switches to an exploration of the reasons underpinning the appeal of conspiracy theories and of how governments and institutions have consciously exploited them to foster ‘moral panics.’ Finally, the chapter draws to a close with a study of the now well-established narrative assigning the origins of the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ to the secularization brought about by the Enlightenment. This narrative is then challenged with a brief exploration of the world of conspiracy theories in late medieval and early modern Europe. The final section of this chapter emphasizes the relevance of studying the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and what some thinkers have described as the ‘culture of conspiracy’ (‘conspiracism’) or the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ in an early modern European context. If, as many historians and philosophers assert, the rise of a ‘culture of conspiracy’ (‘conspiracism’) is linked to an increasing secularization of European society from the late eighteenth century onwards then is it legitimate for this book to refer to a culture of conspiracy – antisemitic or otherwise – in an early modern European context? As will become clear in this chapter, this book deliberately courts controversy by claiming that a ‘culture of conspiracy’ and ‘conspiracy theory of society’ was in no way a product of the Enlightenment or increasing secularization but existed prior to 1750.

Conspiracism And Society In Early Modern Europe

1

19

Defining the Conspiracy Theory

What is a conspiracy theory? The concept of the conspiracy theory has proved to be a particularly arduous one to define for historians, social scientists and psychologists. The verb ‘to conspire’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “to combine privily for an evil or unlawful purpose; to agree together to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible (esp. to commit treason or murder, excite sedition, etc.” and the noun ‘conspiracy’ is explained as “a combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose.” The etymology of the term is to be found in the Latin verb conspirare, which literally means “to breathe together.” The figurative image of two or more individuals conferring in such close proximity that their breaths merged implied secretive discussions. It therefore acquired negative connotations and came to mean “to conspire” in its present sense. In Romance-speaking Europe, notably in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, the more explicit term used was conjuración (Spanish) or conjuração (Portuguese), with the slightly different meaning of ‘to take an oath or to make a pact together.’ As such, it would appear straightforward that any attempt to explain a historical event by suggesting that it is the result of secret collusion between a group of individuals can be defined as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ The problematic aspect of the conspiracy theory, however, revolves partly around the nature, and reality, of the conspiracy itself. Conspiracies – secret plans by a small number of individuals, generally to eliminate or replace a government – have always existed. Innumerable examples of such conspiracies exist, from the Catilinarian conspiracy or the assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome during the first century BCE to the Gunpowder plot of 1605 in England and the conspiracy of some leading members of the Andalusian aristocracy to secede from Spain in 1641. Whether they were successful or not, some conspiracies have become (in)famous and others have lapsed into historical obscurity. The “crime of conspiracy” exists in the modern legal system of both the United Kingdom and the United States and it was the first charge in the indictment brought against the Nazi war criminals prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials (1945–6), namely that their actions amounted to a “participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace.”2 In more recent times, numerous conspiracies have been revealed to be true. One example is the infamous secret clinical study of the progression of 2 See the official indictment published by the Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) (Nuremberg, 1946), 5–6: [accessed 3 January 2016].

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Chapter 1

untreated syphilis by the U.S. Public Health office in Tuskegee (Alabama) between 1932 and 1972, which was eventually exposed by a whistle-blower working on the project. Another famous and real conspiracy was the 1972 attempt to clandestinely (and illegally) spy on the Democratic National Committee headquarters established in the Watergate building in Washington, which was exposed by the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein acting on information from FBI insider Mark Felt. It is not without irony that, at the height of the Watergate scandal, the Nixon administration went so far as to label Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as conspiracy theorists in its attempts to discredit them.3 It is not the real conspiracy but the ‘imagined conspiracy’ that is so crucial to our understanding of the dynamics and popular appeal of both conspiracy theories and the culture of conspiracism that has arisen around them. The conspiracy theorist is obsessed with the existence of a secret plot, one for which there is no conclusive evidence but which the conspiracy theorist is nonetheless convinced is real. The obsession creates and supports a worldview in which the imagined conspiracy and imaginary plotters control (or aspire to control) everything and are behind nearly every significant occurrence. In his The Mythology of Secret Societies – an examination of the birth and development of the conspiracy theories relating to the Illuminati or the Freemasons from the late eighteenth century onwards – the British historian John Roberts has offered a straightforward definition of the conspiracy theory as the belief that there exists “an occult force operating behind the seemingly real, outward forms of political life.”4 Like all myths, conspiracy theories that revolve around imagined plots base their claims on real foundations, by referring to real institutions or individuals. By initially basing their narrative and explanation on real facts, conspiracy theorists can, in the famous words of the American historian Richard Hofstadter, make “the leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable.”5 This has particularly been the case with antisemitic conspiracy theories. In the twentieth century, conspiracists have anchored their theories and explanatory rhetoric upon real institutions such as the Rothschild Bank, the B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, claiming that these institutions are the tools through which ‘Jewish supremacism’ and ‘Jewish interests’ have established their control of governments or suppressed dissent. In 3 Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2011), 30 and 68. 4 John M. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (St. Albans: Paladin, 1974), 29–30. 5 Richard J. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 37–8.

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the early modern Iberian world, as it will be explained in the following chapters, antisemitic polemicists acted similarly. They referred to (and named) real individuals who had fled the Iberian Peninsula to seek refuge in the Sephardic Jewish communities established in Amsterdam, Italy or the Ottoman Empire. The imaginary nature of the plot is not, however, the only distinguishing mark of the conspiracy theory. The belief of conspiracy theorists in the plot that they claim to have knowledge of, and often seek to denounce, is pushed to an extreme level. For conspiracy theorists, the conspiracy itself becomes an unassailable truth whose reality cannot be brought into question by any form of contrary evidence. For Richard Hofstadter, who examined the role and the influence of conspiracy theories and “the paranoid style” in the politics of the United States, the believers of conspiracy theories uncritically accredit “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.”6 More recently, Jovan Byford has underscored the decisive characters of what could be described as the conspiracy theorist’s dogmatic nature: This brings us to what is probably the most important feature of conspiracy theories: they are by their very nature irrefutable. Logical contradictions, disconfirming evidence, even the complete absence of proof have no bearing on the conspiratorial explanation because they can always be accounted for in terms of the conspiracy: the lack of proof about the plot, or any positive proof against its existence, is turned around and taken as evidence of the craftiness of the secret cabal behind the conspiracy and as confirmation of its ability to conceal its machinations.7 Thus, it is not possible to convince a conspiracy theorist that his or her obsession is a fantasy. As the German historian Dieter Groh has pointed out, the refusal of conspiracy theorists to recognise the validity of any counter-argument is not just an idiosyncratic trait of the believers themselves but rather it is the direct result of three points upon which all conspiracy theories are constructed and which connect them all: 1. The underestimation of the complexity and dynamics of historical pro­ cesses; 2. The belief that one can ascribe, in a linear manner, the results of actions to certain intentions, in other words that the active parties are more in control of their actions than they actually are; 6 Richard J. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 9. 7 Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 36.

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Chapter 1

3.

The connection of two or more historical facts by a causal nexus that, in the end, is not demonstrable.8 Intentionalism, the belief that events are always the product of premeditated intentions, is the essential explanatory framework through which the conspiracy theorist interprets any event as the result of the secret agency of the conspirators (be they the Illuminati, Jews, communists, imperialists or others). Many conspiracy theorists have sought to legitimise their position by arguing that their theories are on an equal par with the legitimate and ‘rational’ questioning of official versions of history. Such claims, however, fail to stand up to close scrutiny. In an interview published in the New Internationalist Magazine, the political scientist Michael Barkun highlighted the absurdity of such attempts to legitimate conspiracism by comparing it to historical research: The issue of conspiracism versus rational criticism is a tough one, and some people (…) argue that the former is simply a variety of the latter. I don’t accept this, although I certainly acknowledge that there have been conspiracies. They simply don’t have the attributes of almost superhuman power and cunning that conspiracists attribute to them. A sure sign that we have gone past the boundaries of rational criticism is the conspiracy theory that’s nonfalsifiable. Such a theory is a closed system of ideas, which “explains” contradictory evidence by claiming that the conspirators themselves planted it.9 Any similarity between conspiracy theories and rational criticism is therefore certainly dispelled by the unwillingness (perhaps even inability) of the conspiracy theorists to critically self-examine their beliefs, their oversimplification of historical processes, their presentation of the conspiracy as a self-evident truth and the theory’s tautological (circular) reasoning. In his work on modern America, Michael Barkun has identified the same three common elements in the narrative or worldview of the conspiracy theorist. Barkun argues that they are expressed in three ‘principles’10: 8

9 10

I am citing these three points verbatim from Dieter Groh, “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or Why do bad things happen to good people? Part I: Preliminary draft of a theory of Conspiracy theory,” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. C.F. Graumann and S. Moscovici (New York: Springer Verlag, 1987), 10–1. Michael Barkun, interview by Chip Berlet in “Understanding the relationship between antisemitism, conspiracism, and apocalypticism,” in New Internationalist Magazine (September 2004). Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3–4.

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1. Nothing happens by accident (intentionalism); 2. Nothing is as it seems (occultism); 3. Everything is connected. The historian Geoffrey Cubitt has argued that conspiracy theories have two more psychological properties beyond intentionalism: dualism and occultism. The dualism of conspiracy theories offers believers a binary worldview (and Manichaean narrative) of good versus evil in which malign conspiratorial for­ ces are (depending upon the kind of conspiracy theory involved) endeavouring to either (a) destroy an existing socio-politico-economic status quo, (b) subvert it or (c) secretly preserve their control or existing domination of a society. Finally, occultism is the property that enables the dualist narrative of the conspiracy theories to thrive and develop. In the conspiracy theory, the conspiracy and the controlling forces behind human affairs are both, by their very nature, concealed from public view. Only the conspiracy theorists hold the ‘truth’ and, correspondingly, the ability to restore justice and order to the world by exposing the conspiracy.11 The refusal of the conspiracy theorist to entertain doubts about the ‘truth’ of his or her theory is but one aspect of what differentiates a conspiracy theory from legitimate scepticism of the actions of official institutions or historical enquiry into the causes of any given event. As the social psychologist Jovan Byford has noted, conspiracy theories are also characterised by a distinctive “thematic configuration, narrative structure and explanatory logic as well as by the stubborn presence of a number of common motifs and tropes.”12 More specifically still, Geoffrey Cubitt and Jovan Byford have pointed out that the narratives of all conspiracy theories share three central elements: 1.  The secret conspirators: conspiracy theories consistently accuse a group of individuals who, despite acting covertly, are (somewhat paradoxically) well identified, such as the Jews, freemasons, etc. 2.  The secret objective: conspiracy theories always maintain that the conspirators have a malevolent secret aim or ambition that (again somewhat paradoxically) is well known to the exponent of the conspiracy theory, such as the destruction of the Christian faith, to achieve global domination, etc. 3.  The secret plan: conspiracy theories will state that the conspirators have elaborated a plan to surreptitiously achieve the malevolent aim of the

11 12

G.T. Cubitt, “Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 20 (1989): 13–8. Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 4.

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conspiracy. It is this supposedly secret plan that the conspiracy theorist denounces and which he or she seeks to publicize. As such, it is noteworthy that there exists a remarkable similarity between conspiracy theories, regardless of their cultural and historical context, and it can be confidently claimed that they have a shared anatomy. Whilst conspiracy theories may thus have shared ‘principles,’ the scope of such conspiracies may nevertheless vary considerably. Michael Barkun has divided conspiracy theories into three separate categories or types: 1. Event conspiracy theories, in which the conspirators are held to be responsible for only one well-defined event (or for a limited set of events) such as a political assassination or terrorist attack; 2. Systemic conspiracy theories, in which the conspirators are presented as having a broad objective such as securing the domination of an institution, a country or even the world; 3. Superconspiracy theories, in which the conspirators in multiple events or systemic conspiracies are connected through an intricate hierarchical web dominated by an obscure evil force that controls the subordinate groups of conspirators in the conspiracy (its ‘tentacles’). The significance of these three categories for our understanding of the history of conspiracy theories and the culture of conspiracism in European history goes beyond the fact that they distinguish conspiracy theories in terms of their scale. As we shall see below, there is presently an existing consensus amongst historians and other researchers, a consensus challenged in this book, that ‘systemic’ and ‘super’ conspiracy theories are a ‘modern’ phenomenon that can be dated to the final decades of the eighteenth century and the political, social and religious upheaval of the French Revolution.

2

Delusional Paranoia, Collective Emotions and the Emotional Dimension of the Conspiracy Theory

Are the believers of conspiracy theories subject to a form of collective delusional paranoia? Can conspiracism be defined as a collective mental or emotional state? Is there even such a thing as a collective mental or emotional state? These questions are crucial to our understanding of the social function of conspiracy theories. Whilst psychologists have tended to approach the problem of conspiracy theories from a clinical point of view and as a condition that affects individuals, historians have studied conspiracy theories as socio-cultural phenomena. As such, it is not surprising that historians and

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psychologists have used the term ‘paranoia’ differently and in the case of the former in a sense that is cultural or even metaphorical and largely devoid of its clinical meaning. The frequent use of the term ‘paranoia’ by modern historians – starting with Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays – has led to a frequent association of conspiracy theories and delusional paranoia. Collective mental states have nonetheless proved to be problematic for psychologists who approach paranoia with diagnostic criteria as a delusional condition exhibited by patients suffering from schizophrenia and, therefore, as an individual pathology. In clinically defined paranoia, the patient suffering from delusional paranoid ideation is both the producer and the consumer of the delusion(s) at an individual level. Whilst a second individual (usually a close family member) may come to accept uncritically the ‘truth’ of the sufferer’s delusions – thus forming what has been described as a folie à deux – there is no clinical framework that can be used to define paranoid delusions as a collective phenomenon extending beyond that which has an essentially ‘private’ character.13 The advent of a structuralist approach to paranoid delusions – one in which the conspiratorial delusion is understood to derive from communally formed concepts – has paved the way for a ‘cultural’ understanding of the creation of what can be described as ‘collective mental states.’ ‘Mental structuralists’ such as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961) accepted the existence of a collective unconscious and therefore of collective mental states that influence individuals (such as ‘war fever’ or the collective ‘love’ of the leader that sustains personality cults).14 The notion of ‘collective mental states’ is buttressed by the structuralist theory that there exist ‘universals’ and ‘archetypes’ of the human mind comparable to instincts and that these ‘collective mental states’ can be the result of a variety of trigger situations. These ‘triggers’ can include an explanatory framework through which events are rationalized as the result of persecution or of a secret conspiracy orchestrated by identified conspirators.15 The vague concept of the ‘collective mental state’ does not, however, provide a satisfactory scientific basis upon which one may distinguish the collective expression of an emotion on one hand from a collective mental or 13 14 15

Erich Wulff, “Paranoic Conspiratory Delusion,” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. C.F. Graumann and S. Moscovici (New York, Springer Verlag1987), 171–3. C. Jung, “Wotan,” Neue Schweizer Rundschau, III (Zurich, 1936): 657–669; Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1921). Erich Wulff, “Paranoic Conspiratory Delusion,” Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, 174– 5.

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emotional state on the other. Just because a large group of individuals take part in collective rituals or actions that seems to imply a shared emotional experience – such as listening to a sermon preached during an inquisitorial auto de fe and witnessing the burning of convicted heretics – does not prove that individuals actually did experience these emotions or, if they did, did so in the same manner. The lack of empirical scientific data relating to the generation of emotions is a problem that remains unresolved when examining collective emotional states. More recently, psychologists have tended to interpret collective emotional states as a mass sociogenic illness: a medical condition similarly affecting numerous individuals within a wider group.16 Finally, even if conspiracy theorists are not to be collectively defined as ‘paranoid’ in a clinical sense, other recent psychological studies have exposed persecutory delusions in a not-inconsiderable percentage (up to ten percent) of the general population. As such, it is argued that individual conspiracists might well be exhibiting a milder form of ‘paranoid cognition.’17 Social constructionists, in stark contrast to structuralists, do not conceptualize the emotions as individual states of mind but rather as transpersonal in scope and to be understood as structured by relational interaction. For constructionists, emotions are influenced (or rather ‘constructed’) by a social or cultural context and, as such, they have pointed to the problem of conceptualizing emotions as individual states of mind. The sociologists Mustafa Emirbayer and Chad Alan Goldberg, have outlined the following comprehensive definition of collective emotions: By collective emotions we mean (1) complexes of processes-in-relations that are (2) transpersonal in scope and that consist in (3) psychical investments, engagements, or cathexes, where these encompass (4) embodied perceptions and judgments as well as bodily states, forces, energies, or sensations.18 This approach has recently been bolstered by a comprehensive review of the existing scientific data produced by neuroscientists, which has noted that there exists little concrete evidence proving that emotion categories originate 16 17 18

Robert E. Bartholomew and Simon Wessely, “Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness. From possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears,” The British Journal of Psychiatry, 180 (2002): 300–306. Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 123. Mustafa Emirbayer and Chad Alan Goldberg, “Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics,” Theory and Society, 34, 5 (2005): 469–518 (quotation from page 472).

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in a particular section or area of the brain19. The conceptualization of emotions as social constructs that are shaped by cultural context and human interaction offers a theoretical framework within which collective emotions can be studied from a transpersonal point of view. A focus on this framework is particularly interesting for historians seeking to discern a collective emotional state in discursive psychology: the study of how people describe and invoke emotions in everyday language and written texts. It was from such a constructionist approach that Barbara Rosenwein formulated her pioneering analysis of the language of emotions in early medieval texts and their role in the formation of ‘emotional communities.’20 Moreover, it has opened the road to debate between cultural relativists who perceive emotion to be culturally specific and universalists who would argue the contrary.21 In spite of the theoretical advances that have been made in the history of emotions, collective emotions continue to be problematic and no less so when they are analysed in the context of the conspiracy theory. Do conspiracy theorists share a common emotional experience? Did the believers of antisemitic conspiracy theories in the early modern Iberian world share the same experience of ‘fear’ or ‘hatred’? The former of these two emotions is one that evokes a particularly personal and individual response. The historian Joanna Bourke has described fear as “fundamentally about the body”: Fear is felt, and although the emotion of fear cannot be reduced to the sensation of fear, nevertheless, it is not present without sensation. In noting that the body is not simply a shell through which emotions are expressed, the social constructivists are correct. Discourse shapes bodies. However, bodies also shape discourse: people are ‘weak or pale with fright,’ ‘paralysed by fear’ and ‘chilled by terror.’ The feeling of fear may be independent of social construction, a one-sided process. (…) Nevertheless, emotions are fundamentally constituted.22

19 20 21

22

Kristen A. Lindquist, Tor D. Wager, Hedy Kober, Eliza Bliss-Moreau and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The brain basis of emotion: a meta-analytic review,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35 (2012): 121–202. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). For an example of a universalist position on emotions see the work of Bill Reddy: “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology, 38, no. 3. (1997): 327–351 and The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 8.

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It is nevertheless important not to let the theoretical concerns about the nature of collective emotions obscure how emotions have been made to play a part in collective actions. The individuals who formed the crowds flocking to jeer at condemned converso heretics during an inquisitorial auto de fe, or who sought out and read or listened to the antisemitic diatribes produced in Spain and Portugal between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, may not have experienced exactly the same emotions of ‘fear’ and ‘hatred.’ Their responses and behaviour at an auto de fe, however, were shaped by emotional discourses, regardless of whether they were actually experienced or merely used to legitimate an existing prejudice. The role of fear in conspiracy theories has been the subject of much scru­ tiny. Jovan Byford and other social psychologists have argued that whilst “paranoid ideation” and conspiratorial beliefs have shared features they are nevertheless distinguished by a number of important differences. The first is that the sufferers of paranoid delusional thoughts tend to represent themselves as the direct target of their supposed persecutors whilst conspiracy ­theorists do not subscribe to such a personalization or “self-referential” understanding of the conspiracy. On the contrary, the conspiracy theorist perceives the whole world as endangered by the conspiracy that preoccupies him or her. For social psychologists, delusional paranoia is thus characterised by its idiosyncratic nature and lack of “social currency,” in stark contrast to the “shared and social nature of beliefs” in the conspiracy theory.23 Another point is that fear plays a different role in delusional paranoia and conspiracy theories. The psychologist David Harper has emphasised the role of fear in delusional paranoia.24 Whilst it is clear that obsessively paranoid individuals are driven by fear to seek to isolate themselves, conspiracy theorists, however, are not. It is a striking difference that Jovan Byford has neatly summed up: The frightening nature of paranoid beliefs leads to isolation and contributes to individuals becoming obsessed with the supposed threat. Such fear is notably absent in conspiracy theories. (…) Conspiracy theories often have a strong apocalyptic tone, terror is not the main emotion and withdrawal not the principal reaction that they provoke in those who subscribe to them. On the contrary, conspiracy theories are underpinned by the kind of naïve optimism about the ultimate vulnerability of the evil 23 24

Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 124–5. David J. Harper, “Delusions and Discourse: Moving Beyond the Constraints of the Modernist Paradigm,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11, no. 1 (March 2004): 55–64.

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forces that instils a desire to resist and to fight the conspirators. This kind of optimism is difficult to find among individuals affected by paranoid delusions.25 As this book will demonstrate, some of the views put forward by social psychologists are open to challenge. The notion that the believers of conspiracy theories can be differentiated from the sufferers of paranoid delusions because of their failure to develop a “self-referential” understanding of the conspiracy (as opposed to one in which the conspiracy is an all-encompassing global one) is a hollow distinction. For the conspiracy theorist, the all-encompassing global conspiracy is a direct threat to both the individual and society as a whole. Whether or not it is actually possible to historically study ‘collective emotions,’ one fact seems beyond doubt: it was firmly believed by both the ecclesiastical and secular authorities in the early modern Iberian world that collective emotions existed. Through oral and written propaganda, disseminated via ritualised ceremonies as well as printed texts, these authorities sought to establish norms relating to these emotions. In his work on the emotions, the historian and anthropologist Bill Reddy has coined the phrase “emotional regimes” to describe such a situation, in which “any enduring political regimes must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions.”26 The early modern European secular and ecclesiastical authorities believed in the power of emotions as a means of shaping their subjects and bringing about (or alternatively preventing) social, religious or political change. In the early modern Iberian Peninsula, the rituals associated with religious processions, the public sentencing of criminals and the public baptism of infidels were all geared towards stirring powerful emotions amongst the laity. The notorious and spectacular inquisitorial auto de fe (auto da fé in Portuguese), in which convicted heretics wearing penitential habits were publicly humiliated and sentenced on stages in front of large crowds of onlookers, probably constitute the most vivid example of this. Contrasting starkly with the secrecy that shrouded inquisitorial trials, the theatrical public autos de fe always featured a ‘fire and brimstone’ sermon delivered by a firebrand preacher that was deliberately designed to provoke popular hatred of religious deviants and instil a fear of heresy. They are perhaps the clearest formulation of what has been described by his-

25 26

Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 124. Bill Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124 and 129

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torians as a church-sponsored “pedagogy of fear” whose objective was social control.27 As the following chapters will reveal, antisemitic propagandists, and those who sponsored and supported them in the early modern Iberian world, used antisemitic conspiracy theories to encourage the propagation of a collective sense of fear amongst the Spanish and Portuguese populations. The myths disseminated by these conspiracy theories offered a worldview in which the individual was made to feel that the plots of secret-Jews, operating in the territories controlled by the Iberian monarchies, directly threatened to destroy him or her. Moreover, the failure to act against this threat was itself presented as, and perceived to be, just as dangerous. Natural disasters (such as earthquakes and droughts) and military reverses were presented as the result of divine anger with the actions (or inaction) of rulers and governments, especially their failure to take active measures to repress heresy. God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and their inhabitants in the Old Testament book of Genesis offered a terrifying justification for this belief. There is evidence indicating that such fears found a receptive audience amongst the populace. In his incomplete chronicle of the reign of João III, the sixteenth-century Portuguese historian Gaspar de Correia stated that the Bishop of the Algarve informed King João III of the alarming visions of a paralyzed girl whom he had visited in his diocese. His report of the visions offers singularly clear evidence of this association of personal danger and the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ at a popular level: [The girl saw that] God allowed the evil earthquakes, plagues and famines afflicting Portugal because of the evils perpetrated by the New Christians who were rumoured to have secret synagogues in Lisbon and that never had any realm been so governed and dominated by New Christians as Portugal now was.28 This belief that crypto-Judaism represented a direct mortal danger to all Iberian Christians led to its frequent comparison with the plague. In a sermon delivered in front of a large crowd in 1616, the Jesuit Francisco de Mendonça compared crypto-Judaism with the plague to emphasise the dangers presented by converso heretics: 27 28

On the use of the expression “pedagogy of fear” see Bartolomé Bennassar, L’Inquisition espagnole XV e-XIX e siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 101–137 and Herman Roodenburg, Social Control in Europe 1500–1800 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 126. Gaspar Correia, Crónicas de D. Manuel e de D. João III, ed. J. Pereira da Costa (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências, 1992), 304 (fol. 378v).

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Tell me, if a man infected by the plague entered this city without the knowledge of the public authorities, and if he walked through the squares, the streets, our churches, our houses, speaking and dealing with everybody, what would happen to us? In two days, the city would be ravaged by the plague. Well, this Jewish blindness is a plague if it moves among us without being detected. Portugal, I fear for you!29 In 1630, the Augustinian friar Felipe Moreira drew the same comparison in another sermon preached during the public sentencing of converso prisoners by the inquisitorial tribunal of Évora in Portugal: The company of Jews [i.e. judaizing conversos] is contagious like the plague. One would be safer living in the desert than residing alongside them in towns. Flee! Flee! Flee to the hills! But not you, o thou faithful [Catholics], who should only consider this solution as a remedy of last resort, when there is no other way to preserve your purity. There is another solution and one that is presently easier: let them [i.e. the conversos] take flight and we shall remain untainted.30 Later in the same century, the Spanish friar and antisemitic polemicist Francisco de Torrejoncillo similarly warned the readers of his Centinela contra Judíos in 1674 that a Jewish plague (peste) threatened to engulf Spain.31 References to the ‘Jewish plague’ such as those made in the sermons or books of Francisco de Mendonça, Felipe de Moreira, Francisco de Torrejoncillo and other churchmen were not intended to be purely literary metaphors. Periodic outbreaks of the plague – most notably in 1599–1601, 1629–1630, 1647–1654 and 1676–1682 – decimated entire regions of the Iberian Peninsula and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. As such, there can be no doubt that anti-converso preachers deliberately wanted to harness and exploit traumatic memories, pre-existing fears about disease and sudden mortality and finally the popular association of heresy and divine punishment to strike

29 30

31

Edward Glaser, “Invitation to intolerance. A study of the Portuguese sermons preached at autos-da-fé,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 27 (1956), 378. Felipe Moreira, Sermam que pregou o Padre Mestre Fr. Philippe Moreira, Religioso da Ordem de Sa[n]to Agostinho, Doutor pola Vniuersidade de Coimbra, & qualificador do S. Officio no auto da fe que se celebrou em Euora a 30. de iunho de [1]630 (Évora: Manoel Carualho, 1630), fol. 11v. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 169, 212 and 230.

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fear, even outright terror, into the hearts of early modern Spaniards and Portuguese. The conscious aim of antisemitic polemicists in the early modern Iberian world was to encourage Spaniards and Portuguese to feel like they lived in a society under siege: surrounded by external enemies and infiltrated by an invisible Jewish threat undermining its foundations. These foes were all agents under the control of the Devil himself and included the respective Iberian monarchies’ outside enemies (France, Protestant Europe and the Muslim threat in the Mediterranean) but especially their enemies within the Iberian Peninsula: secret-Jews, secret-Muslims and other heretics. This sense of embattlement found expression in the imagery of a besieged citadel representing the Christian faith (but also the Iberian monarchies) assailed and undermined by its foes. It was an image used in the mid-fifteenth century by the Franciscan polemicist Alonso de Espina in the very title of his “Fortress of faith against the Jews, Saracens and other enemies of the faith” (Fortalitium Fidei contra iudeos saracenos aliosque christiane fidei inimicos) and in the later seventeenth century by his emulator Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo in his vitriolic “Sentinel against the Jews stationed in the Tower of the Church of God” (Centinela contra Judíos puesta en la Torre de la Iglesia de Dios). Writing in the early 1460s, Alonso de Espina neatly sums up the belief that Christendom in general, and “wretched Spain” (misera hispania) in particular, are both threatened by a vast coalition of enemies working at the behest of the Devil. In a single resonating phrase, Espina warns his readers that “the enemy is the heretic; the enemy is the Jew, the enemy is the Muslim; the enemy is the Devil.”32 3

Explaining the Popularity of Conspiracy Theories

The enduring popularity of conspiracy theories, both past and present, probably remains their most singular and remarkable feature. Recent research has indicated that different conspiracy theories enjoy a widespread popularity that transcends cultural, religious, ethnic, social, gender and educational divisions. To account for this popularity, many have pointed to the feeling of empowerment that conspiracy theories produce amongst their believers.33

32 33

Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium fidei contra judeos, sarracenos aliosq[ue] christiane fidei inimicos (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), I, fol. 2r. See the concise analysis of Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 120– 143.

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The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) has posited that what he termed the “conspiracy theory of society” – the belief that the development of events and society is determined by secret human plots – emerged as the result of the social and intellectual transformations that took place in Europe during the eighteenth century.34 According to such an approach, it would be logical to argue that the appeal of the “conspiracy theory of society” is to be found in the individual believers’ compulsive need to ascribe human agency to complex events. When examining the origins of the conspiracist mythology that arose around secret societies in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the historian John Roberts also pointed to its links with a ‘maturing bourgeois society’ that was increasingly literate: For about a century and a half large numbers of intelligent Europeans believed that much of what was happening in the world around them only happened because secret societies planned it so. An enormous literature embodied and reflected this view. Hundreds of books and pamphlets in every major European language drove home the message in many variants and ludicrous detail (…). It is, therefore, an aberration of maturing bourgeois society and had some expressions characteristic of this.35 Whether or not one agrees with Popper and Robert’s analysis of the origins of conspiracy theories as the replacement of divine agency by human agency, it is unquestionably the case that the conspiracy theorist believes that events in the world are never random or left to chance but are always influenced by human agency. The popularity of conspiracy theories must therefore be found in their intentionalist explanatory framework, which offers their believers what social psychologists working on attribution theory have described as the ‘illusion of control.’36 The seductive power of a conspiracy theory’s explanatory framework lies chiefly in its simplicity and its dualism. As the political scientist Michael Barkun has argued, the appeal of conspiracy theories is intrinsically linked to its intentionalism and Manichean dualism.37 Believers rationalize a confusing 34 35 36 37

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1945). John M. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies, 1–16. G. Bains, “Explanation and the need to control,” in Attribution theory, ed. M. Hewstone (Oxford, 1983), 126–143. Michael Barkun, Interview by Chip Berlet in “Understanding the relationship between antisemitism, conspiracism, and apocalypticism,” New Internationalist Magazine (September 2004).

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and threatening world by dividing it between the forces of good and evil and thus create a single source for all the perceived evils of the world. For many believers, conspiracy theories therefore offer a worldview that is both terrifying and comforting: terrifying because of the threat represented by the plotters but comforting because knowledge of, and belief in, the conspiracy offers a coherent explanation for the state of the world. Moreover, by attributing a malign agency to a group of individuals, the conspiracy theory not only rationalises any perceived injustices but also appeals to the conspiracy theorist’s sense of self-worth by representing him or her as a ‘special individual’: the possessor of secret knowledge and set apart from the ‘brainwashed herd’ of the uninitiated masses of the general population. As such, it can be argued that conspiracy theories fill a clear emotional need, which is expressed through the believer’s unquestioning obsession with the alleged conspiracy. The believer’s emotional investment in the conspiracy theory is often absolute since without it his or her understanding of the world falls apart. There develops a dependency on the conspiracy theory that is in a way analogous to other recognised vectors of addiction. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to see frequent references to individuals “addicted to conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy addicts” in modern works on the subject.38 In many cases, perhaps even all of them, the conspiracy theory caters to, and exploits, existing pre-conceptions and prejudices, helping to formulate a worldview that confirms these prejudices, whatever they may be (antisemitic, anti-imperialist, anti-communist, etc…). Most believers in conspiracy theories are pre-disposed to believe in them and to hate the alleged plotters. Thus, for instance, those individuals who espoused antisemitic views in the early modern Iberian world or twentieth-century Germany were raised in a social and cultural environment that nurtured firmly established notions about the malevolent nature of ‘the Jew’ dating back centuries. In the case of the early modern Spaniard or Portuguese, every man or woman would have been exposed since childhood to Easter celebrations commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ and perpetuating the notion of collective Jewish guilty for deicide as well as to local folktales about the Jews (such as those that are recorded in the polemical diatribes of Alonso de Espina in the fifteenth century and Francisco de Torrejoncillo in the seventeenth century).39 38

39

See, for instance, Martha F. Lee, Conspiracy Rising: Conspiracy Thinking and American Public Life (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 85; Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 161–183 (chapter 5: The Logic of Addiction). F. Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire: Francisco de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela Contra Judíos (1674) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2014), 78.

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Since the alleged conspirators are universally characterised in conspiracy theories as a small group of individuals who resort to secret schemes in order to make up for their small numbers, it is not surprising that ethnic and/or religious minorities have featured largely in the development of conspiracy theories. One of the key aspects of conspiracy theories targeting marginalised ethnic, religious or social groups is the reversal of the roles of persecutor and persecuted. As it will become clear in the following chapters, this is exactly what transpired in early modern Spain and Portugal. Antisemitic polemical literature and propaganda did not present the conversos as victims of inquisitorial persecution and social ostracism by the wider ‘Old Christian’ population. On the contrary, the conversos became the aggressors: a minority moved by an inveterate hatred of the Old Christian population and Christianity, whose ultimate aim was their complete destruction. Correspondingly, it was the ‘Old Christian’ population that was portrayed as beleaguered and under constant attack: enduring passive victimhood (indeed in danger of complete annihilation) at the hands of the converso minority. It must be noted that the conspiracy theory often has an almost apocalyptic/messianic aspect to it, irrespective of who the supposed conspirators are. The conspiracy theory offers the conspiracy theorist hope that an unjust world can be ‘righted’ or made just. Such a belief is an inevitable result of the dualist character of the conspiracy theory and its particular worldview, in which the forces of good and evil are pitted in a savage struggle. Once the conspiracy has been exposed and thwarted, and the conspirators have received their just deserts, the conspiracy theorist believes that the world will return to its just order. As it will become clear in the following chapters, such a belief was widely shared by the proponents of antisemitic polemics and propaganda in early modern Spain and Portugal. They argued that the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies would only enjoy domestic social peace, economic prosperity and God’s favour once the judaizing conversos had been rooted out by the Inquisition and racial statutes were effectively implemented to prevent the descendants of Jews from having access to positions of power or responsibility. In the most extreme cases, some polemicists even argued for a wholesale expulsion of all conversos, regardless of whether they have been convicted of judaizing or not. Finally, it is also possible to speculate about the part played by the emotional dimension of conspiracy theories in their remarkable popularity. In her work on the “affective politics of fear,” Sara Ahmed has argued that fear and disgust are crucial elements in the construction of a collective “self” separated from the menacing “others” and, by extension, play a key role in the shaping

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of identities by ruling elites that promote fear of the “others.”40 The simplistic dualism, intentionalism and apocalyptic character of the worldview inherent in all conspiracy theories have a similar emotional underpinning through their evocation of a plot directly threatening to destroy both society as a whole and (by extension) the individual. The use of highly emotive language in the conspiracist narrative aims to provoke emotional responses: deep-seated fears and hatred directed at the purported conspirators. In the case of the early modern Iberian world, antisemitic polemicists deliberately used such emotive language and especially stressed the supposedly pathological “hatred” (odio) of the Jews and conversos towards all Christians. In 1622 the Portuguese author Vicente da Costa Mattos repeatedly refers to the “capital hatred,” “enormous hate” and “most intense hatred” of the Jews/conversos against the Christian faith and faithful Christians.41 Half a century later, in 1674, Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo followed this trend but sought to add emphasis to it by frequently adding “aborrecimiento” (loathing or detestation) to “odio” that the Jews/conversos feel towards Christians.42 4

Moral Panics: the Social and Political Function of the Conspiracy Theory

The widespread but erroneous equation of the conspiracy theorist with the clinically diagnosed sufferer of paranoid delusions, an association lent credibility by the somewhat casual use of the term ‘paranoid’ by scholars such as Richard J. Hofstadter, means that it is tempting to think of conspiracy theorists as socially stigmatised loners and of the conspiracy theory as a socially unacceptable belief. Furthermore, Christopher Hitchens has famously described conspiracy theories as “an ailment of democracy” and “the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version,” in essence the product of the vast amount of information that circulates and is available to citizens.43 Such a simplistic perception of conspiracy theories, however, fails to acknowledge the fact that they are not just an insignificant phenomenon confined to the margins of society. On the contrary, they play an important role in the legitimising discourse of numerous institutions and political regimes. 40 41 42 43

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43. See, for instance, Vicente da Costa Mattos’s Breve discurso contra a heretica perfidia do iudaismo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), fols. 76v, 148v and 175v. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 35, 43, 89, 131 and 141. Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of an Argument (London: Verso, 1993), 14.

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Conspiracy theories have long been a powerful instrument of political propaganda and of social control through their ability to foster what Stanley Cohen defined as ‘moral panics’: situations in which individuals or groups of individuals – whom Cohen described as “folk devils” – come to be defined as threats to “societal values and interests.”44 The emotional dimension of conspiracy theories, their apparent ability to generate mass popular expressions of fear and/or anger and to steer these emotions against a group of individuals has turned them into a powerful tool for governments or institutions seeking to achieve political or social objectives. The conscious exploitation of conspiracy theories has thus become a staple in the creation of a ‘culture of fear’ or what Sara Ahmed, as we have seen above, has described as the “affective politics of fear.” The ability of conspiracy theories to be co-opted by governments and institutions in order to initiate ‘moral panics’ – though perhaps the expression of ‘conspiracy panics’ might be more appropriate in such circumstances – has become their most fearsome (and feared) characteristic. In some cases, it is no exaggeration to state that conspiracy theories have even become the keystone of the narratives used to legitimate various authoritarian regimes and political/religious movements. Writing in the early 1940s, and thus after having witnessed the rise of Nazi Germany and having had to personally flee from the effects of the Nazis’ antisemitic policies, Karl Popper argued that the “conspiracy theory of society” was dangerous because its promulgation of false ideas about the intentions of others served the purposes of authoritarian political regimes and threatened the liberal “open society.”45 In the twentieth century, this phenomenon can be widely observed: from the shrill denunciations of the fantastic ‘Judeo-Bolshevik-Masonic plot’ in Nazi propaganda to the capitalistimperialist conspiracy condemned by Soviet propaganda and, more recently still, the citing of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in article twentytwo of the 1988 founding charter of the Palestinian Islamist movement HAMAS. Unsurprisingly, it is the very causes of the mass appeal of conspiracy theories – their implacable dualism, intentionalism, emotiveness and circular logic – that render them so attractive to governments, institutions and political movements. Authoritarian regimes, institutions and movements usually build their legitimacy (and that of their ideology) upon Manichean lines that divide the world into clearly demarcated and seemingly irreconcilable factions. The ideology of the regime/movement/institution is presented to its members as an unassailable and manifest ‘truth’ in much the same manner that the 44 45

Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (St Albans: Paladin, 1973), 9. Karl Popper developed this argument in his now famous two-volume work The Open Society and its Enemies (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1945).

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conspiracy theorist presents his or her theory as a manifest and unfalsifiable truth. In his philosophical work on epistemology, Karl Popper has noted the link between an uncritical acceptance of a ‘truth’ and authoritarianism: Yet the theory that truth is manifest not only breeds fanatics – men possessed by the conviction that all those who do not see the manifest truth must be possessed by the Devil – but it may also lead, though perhaps less directly than does a pessimistic epistemology, to authoritarianism. The simplistic dualism of the conspiracy theory and division of the world into irreconcilable spheres of good and evil thus renders it a perfect propaganda tool for an authoritarian entity. The raw emotional power of conspiracism is built upon this dualism and its ability to generate fear and hatred in a population has been frequently harnessed by various political regimes. Numerous governments and political movements have exploited conspiracy theories to bolster the legitimacy of their authority and hold on power. They have been used to divert public attention and anger away from economic or social problems by focusing this anger upon groups identified either as the supposed conspirators themselves or as being sympathetic to the aims of the conspirators. In the conspiracy theory, the group labelled as ‘conspirators’ is demonized in propaganda and described as the cause of all evils and problems afflicting society. Any empathy with the alleged conspirators and their supporters is rendered impossible. For some social psychologists, this demonization is essentially a pathological phenomenon. In a provocative psychoanalytical study of antisemitism, David Terman has argued that the demonization of a minority is an unconscious psychological defence mechanism of a majority group that believes its ideology to be threatened by the existence of a minority: The fury which may then be unleashed is proportional to so dire a threat. The narcissistic rage of the group, like that of the individual, by definition precludes empathy: the offender appears not as an individual or group with needs, motivations, and goals which arise from quite separate or different concerns, but only as a malevolent force whose sole purpose is to destroy one’s most precious asset [the majority group’s ideology], so the proper response is the obliteration of the danger. All manner of evil is then perceived in the dissenter [the Jew]. Such a phenomenon has often been explained as the projection by the offended party of its own disavowed evil, but in this framework that would be a secondary rather than

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a primary cause. More pertinently, the malevolence attributed to the dissenter has to do with the [collective] narcissistic injury to the group.46 Such an interpretation is, of course, controversial and problematic since it reduces a collective historical movement to an individual pathology. Whether or not such a demonization is indeed unconscious, as Terman and others who have worked on the ‘historical psychology’ of Nazi Germany and its leadership have claimed, or is rather the result of a conscious act of political propaganda, its effect is the same.47 In any society that officially espouses a single social model and/or faith to the exclusion of all others, which was just as much the case with the Catholic monarchies of the early modern Iberian Peninsula as with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, dissenters, and the perceived ‘injury’ to the group ideology that their very existence represents, constitute a challenge. This transforms the dissenters into the embodiment of an evil whose destruction is the sole means of preserving the established order. The powerful emotions of fear and hatred are to be found in all human societies and are widely shared within populations, although they may be directed against specific groups (Jews, witches, etc…) according to differing cultural and historical contexts. In his study of Nazi Germany, the political scientist Franz Neumann (1900–1954) characterised this seemingly obsessive need to find, blame and demonize a group of individuals for the ills of society as a social pathology: an anxiety about status amongst the “middle classes,” which was institutionalised and directed against the Jews by the Nazi party.48 Neumann’s identification of the “middle-class anxieties” as the font of conspiracy theories targeting Jews would appear to make it anachronistic to extend such a concept to the early modern period. Nevertheless, fears and anxieties are clearly not the preserve of a post-industrial social category. In the early modern period, secular governments and ecclesiastical authorities in the Iberian world institutionalised the fears or anxieties of the general population (whatever their social status) – be they religious, social and economic in character – in 46 47 48

David Terman, “Anti-Semitism: a study in group vulnerability and the vicissitudes of group ideals,” Psychohistory Review, 12, no. 4 (1984): 18–24 (quotation from page 20). For other examples of psychological studies of National Socialism see Rudolph Binion, Hitler among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976) and George M. Kren, “Psychohistorical interpretations of National Socialism,” German Studies Review, 1, no. 2 (1978): 150–172. See Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny, from Plato to Arendt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 394–402 and Axel Honneth, “‘Anxiety and Politics’: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Franz Neumann’s Diagnosis of a Social Pathology,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 10, no. 2 (2003): 247– 255.

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order to turn them against the conversos and their alleged plot against the state and church. 5

‘Modernity’ and the Origins of Conspiracism

Historical consensus amongst cultural historians and social psychologists presently holds that the origins of ‘modern’ conspiracy culture can be traced to the final decades of the eighteenth century and particularly the French Revolution in 1789. By ‘modern,’ historians and psychologists have essentially meant the ‘systemic conspiracy theory’ or the ‘superconspiracy theory’ and the belief that the fate of governments, institutions and whole societies is secretly directed by an overarching plot orchestrated by a small group of individuals bound by a common purpose and interest. The works of the French Jesuit Augustin Barruel (1741–1820) and the Scottish physicist Professor John Robison (1739–1805) have indeed been identified as playing a key role in the development of mythologies relating to ‘secret societies’ and their purported role in the political and social upheaval caused by the French Revolution.49 Studies of modern antisemitic conspiracy theories have followed a similar path. Historians have maintained that their development followed the gradual emancipation of the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe and the anxiety that resulted from the belief that Jews were making use of their newly gained rights to dominate European societies and states. They have also pointed to the development of ‘scientific racism’ in the nineteenth-century through the works of theorists such as Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) and the consequent racialization of antisemitism. The antisemitic fear of ‘infiltration’ by emancipated Jews, who were represented as holding no loyalty to the ‘nation state’ but rather as beholden to the interests of ‘international Jewry,’ led to the notorious Dreyfus affair in France (1894–1906) and the profusion of antisemitic pamphlets and books fantasizing about Jewish plots for global domination. In the twentieth century, antisemitic conspiracism would reach its apex in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and the 1940 Nazi antisemitic propaganda film “The Eternal Jew” (Der Ewige Jude), which vociferously warns of the danger presented by “the assimilated Jews” who “alter their outward appearance and (…) always try to hide their origins when among non-Jews (…) to infiltrate Western civilization.”50 49 50

Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories. A Critical Introduction, 40–47. Der Ewige Jude (1940), directed by Fritz Hippler, [sequence located between 17:53 and 30:00].

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How can it be that conspiracy theories, and the culture of conspiracism associated with them, are held to be modern developments if conspiracies themselves (real or imagined) have existed since the most remote Antiquity? Karl Popper’s notion of the origin of the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ (as discussed above) traces its development back to the social, political and religious upheavals that shook Europe from the last decades of the eighteenth century onwards with the Enlightenment and collapse of the Ancien Régime. For Popper, the origin of the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ lies in what might be described as the increasing secularization of society, which saw men and women seek to transfer agency in the course of history from the divine to human groups with shared (and usually malevolent) interests. Popper characterised the conspiracy theory as a new, secular, form of superstition: It is the view that whatever happens in society – including things which people as a rule dislike, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages – are the results of direct design by some powerful individuals or groups. The view is very widespread, although it is, I have no doubt, a somewhat primitive kind of superstition. It is older than historicism (which may even be said to be a derivative of the conspiracy theory); and in its modern form, it is the typical result of the secularization of religious superstitions. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies were responsible for the vicissitudes of the Trojan War is gone. But the place of the gods on Homer’s Olympus is now taken by the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.51 Thus, Popper argues that whilst humans once perceived themselves as puppets controlled by the Olympian will of divine forces, they are now seeking to rationalise events by ascribing them to the controlling forces of secretive human cabals. The result of Popper’s theory on the origins of the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ is essentially a personification of history in which a clear connection is drawn between an increasing ‘rationalization’ (or even ‘secularization’) of humans and the growth of belief in the ‘conspiracy theory of society.’ Unsurprisingly, such a connection leads to the conclusion that the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ traces its roots back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the rise of Cartesian logic and new perspectives on nature and human agency. In his brief analysis of conspiracy theories, Geoffrey Cubitt has posited that their 51

Karl Popper, “Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences,” in The Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), 281.

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all-encompassing character defines the conspiracy theories that appeared in the wake of the French revolution of 1789. The secret plotters were no longer accused of plots with specific aims such as personal enrichment or the removal of a monarch. The ultimate aims of the purported conspiracy therefore became more complex and far grander in scale and conspiracy theories offered a single linear narrative in which historical and contemporary plots are linked. The alleged conspirators now influenced or controlled every development in society and sought to destroy or dominate it. The claims made by Augustin Barruel in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1797) bear all the hallmarks of this obsession with an all-encompassing conspiracy: We will affirm and demonstrate that of which it is important that the peoples and their leaders should not be ignorant; we will tell them: in this French Revolution, everything, down to its most appalling crimes, everything was foreseen, premeditated, contrived, resolved on, ordained in advance: everything was the product of the deepest villainy, for everything was prepared and brought about by men who alone held the thread of conspiracies long woven in the secret societies, and who knew how to choose and hasten the moments favourable to their plots.52 The apparent consensus amongst historians that all-encompassing ‘modern’ conspiracy theories are a development of the late-eighteenth century – what one historian has even described as the ‘universal-historical caesura’ of the eighteenth century and Max Weber termed the ‘occidental rationalization process’ – is highly problematic for historians of both the early modern period and the history of antisemitism.53 This book argues that such an interpretation of the origins of the ‘systemic’ or ‘super’ conspiracy theory fails to properly understand that the religious worldview of early modern Europeans created conditions which were entirely propitious for the development of what Popper describes as a ‘conspiracy theory of society.’

52 53

G.T. Cubitt, “Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 20 (1989): 14. Dieter Groh, “The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or Why do bad things happen to good people? Part I: Preliminary draft of a theory of Conspiracy theory,” 12–3.

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Conspiracism in Early Modern Europe: the Demonic Superconspiracy

Historians of early modern Europe have repeatedly used the concept of the conspiracy theory when referring to claims made in anti-Huguenot or antiCatholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion or the anti-Catholic ‘Popish Plot’ fabricated by Titus Oates in Restoration England (1678–1681).54 A volume edited by Barry Coward and Julian Swann, has delved into conspiracies and conspiracy theories in early modern Europe, collating chapters by individual contributors focusing almost exclusively on a variety of political and religious conspiracies in England and France (with two separate contributions on Italy and the Waldensians). In their brief introduction, Coward and Swann appear to agree with Karl Popper’s view that early modern Europeans sought to personify history and looked to conspiracy theories to ascribe human agency to rationalise complex events that seemed to defy understanding. Their definition of the causes and nature of conspiracy theories is the following one: In a devoutly religious age, divine providence offered a potentially allencompassing explanatory model, but total submission to the Lord’s mysterious ways proved difficult, especially when events seemed to be pointing in an unwanted direction. As a result, when they confronted such perplexing questions as why bad luck, ill-health or misfortunes befell those whose morals and behaviour seemed not to merit it, or why sudden or unexpected political or religious upheavals occurred, many turned to conspiracy theory for a plausible and convincing explanation. There was a general tendency to blame human agency for these events, an intervention that was understood in terms of the individual, or groups of individuals, and not as the result of impersonal socio-economic ­forces.55

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Penny Roberts, “Huguenot conspiracies, real and imagined, in sixteenth-century France,” in Conspiracies and Conspiracy theories in Early Modern Europe, ed. Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 55–69; Luc Racaut, “Religious Polemic and Huguenot self-perception and identity, 1554–1619,” in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, ed. Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29–43; John Philipps Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Phoenix Press, 1974). Barry Coward and Julian Swann, “Introduction,” in Conspiracies and Conspiracy theories in Early Modern Europe, ed. Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1–2.

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This straightforward understanding of the causes of the early modern conspiracy theory, focusing on the need to perceive human agency in unfolding historical events, is in agreement with that of later historians and thinkers. Nonetheless, it does not engage with what appears to be an obvious and fundamental contradiction. If the ‘conspiracy theory of society,’ as defined by Karl Popper, has its origins in the increasing secularization of society, and the replacement of divine agency by human agency, then is it possible to claim that there existed ‘systemic’ or even ‘superconspiracy’ theories in a “devoutly religious age”? The assumption that the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ is the product of the Enlightenment and the increasing secularization of the Western world appears to rest upon a stubborn desire to highlight the social consequences of the ­Enlightenment and distinguish post-1789 ‘modern’ European society from its medieval and early modern past. Such a theory rests, unfortunately, upon a fundamental misunderstanding of medieval and early modern European society. Medieval or early modern conspiracy theories fitted into an all-encompassing worldview. The increasing persecution of the Jews, lepers and Christian groups deemed to be heretical by the papacy – what R.I. Moore has famously termed “the formation of the persecuting society” in Western Christendom – was built upon the officially sanctioned notion that these groups were linked and part of “a malignant and diabolically inspired universal conspiracy” against Western Christendom.56 This belief in a demonic ‘superconspiracy’ extends far back into the medieval period and maybe even as far back as the birth of Christianity in late Antiquity. In his magisterial and justly celebrated work Europe’s Inner Demons, the British historian Norman Cohn has argued that fantasies about demonic ‘antihuman conspiracies’ led to the literal demonization of religious deviancy and systematic accusations that heretics engaged in black magic, homosexual intercourse (‘sodomy’) and the ritual murder of children. Norman Cohn asserts that this transformation lay at the root of the great witch-crazes and witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Cohn, the association of social or religious deviancy and ‘demonic’ practices caused deviants to become “an incarnation of the anti-human.”57 Many early modern Europeans, like their medieval ancestors, believed that the Devil used human agency to achieve his evil aims. In fact, all evil deeds aiming to disrupt the proper functioning of a Christian society, or even to de56 57

R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159–160. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons. The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (London: Tavistock, 1975), quotation from page 12.

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stroy it, were perceived to be part of a demonic ‘superconspiracy’ in which the Devil sought to destroy the Christian monarchies and the church through his use of secret operatives: witches; secret-Jews; secret-Muslims; homosexuals and other heretics. Using Michael Barkun’s categorization, it is therefore possible to distinguish between a ‘superconspiracy’ ascribed to the Devil and the ‘systemic’ and ‘event’ conspiracies that were credited to his human minions. The immensely popular and widely re-printed treatise on witches and witchcraft authored by the German Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in 1486 and first printed the following year in Speyer – the Malleus Maleficarum – represented witchcraft as part of a secret, all-encompassing and coherent Satanic conspiracy against the Christian faith and Christian society. In the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, Pope Innocent VIII clearly stated in 1484 that the plots of witches were carried out “at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind,” which is to say the Devil.58 Such a clearly conspiracist worldview is repeated across Catholic and Protestant Europe countless times in later centuries in a variety of texts, including the famous 1597 Daemonologie of James VI of Scotland. Early modern Catholic and Protestant writers present the demonic ‘superconspiracy’ against Christendom as an equal threat to both the Christian faith as well as the order of the secular world. Heresy, ‘sodomy,’ alleged Jewish attacks on Christians or the apostasy of witches were all understood to be demonically inspired and were thus all characterised as a dual act of treason: against the crown and against the state. In his posthumously published treatise on witchcraft, which was elaborated from his sermons on the subject, the English (Protestant) theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) clearly expresses this view by drawing an analogy between treason against the crown and treason against God: It is a principle of the law of nature, held to be a grounded truth in all countries and kingdoms, among all people in every age, that the traitor and rebel who is an enemy to the state, and rebels against his lawful prince, should be put to death. Now the most notorious traitor and rebel that can be is the witch. For she renounces God himself, the King of Kings. She leaves the society of His church and people, she binds herself in league with the Devil.59 58 59

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans. Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1971), xliii–xlv. William Perkins, A discourse of the damned art of witchcraft (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1618), 651.

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In Catholic Spain, theologians followed a similar line and readily equated secular and divine treason when discussing the threat of heresy. Only a few decades later, in a sermon delivered before thousands of onlookers during an inquisitorial auto de fe staged in Lisbon in June 1645, Fray Felipe Moreira uses the same equation of religious and secular treason in a vociferous outburst against homosexuals: Sodom means treason and Gomorrah means rebellion (…). The contagiousness and danger presented by the epidemic [of sodomy] is such that to show any compassion is [in itself] a crime. [God punished Sodom and Gomorrah with a rain of fire and] that is the example [we must follow], fire and utmost rigor, without compassion or mercy! This vice [of sodomy] has afflicted this place with such strength that, in order to free even an innocent [person] of it, the violence of many angels is necessary.60 Beyond the terror unleashed across large parts of Catholic and Protestant Europe by early modern witch crazes and witch hunts or the perceived threat of ‘sodomy,’ a crime with which Jews were often associated in anti-Jewish polemics produced during the medieval and early modern periods, the widespread obsession with the demonic conspiracy in the early modern Iberian World found another target: the Jews, or at least their converted descendants. The same demonization also affected Jews who, from the twelfth century onwards, were routinely accused of practicing black magic and host desecration, poisoning wells, ritually murdering Christian children (the Blood Libel) and associated with the ‘abominable sin’ of sodomy. Moreover, in what is an early formulation of the concept of the existence of an ‘international Jewry,’ now a tenet of the modern antisemitic conspiracy theory, it was believed by some medieval Christian commentators that the Jewish communities dispersed across Europe coordinated their demonically-inspired attacks on Christendom. The twelfth-century English chronicler and Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth, for example, claimed that a monk who was a convert from Judaism had told him that the ritual murder of a child in Norwich in 1144 was the result of a conspiracy of all European Jews whose leaders and their ‘king’ regularly gathered in the southern French town of Narbonne:

60

Felipe Moreira, Sermam, que pregou O.P.M. Fr. Philippe Moreira da Ordem de S. Agostinho no Auto da Fé, que se celebrou no Terreiro do Paço desta Cidade de Lisboa em 25 Junho 1645 (Lisbon: Domingos Lopes Rosa, 1646): [no pagination].

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Wherefore the chief men and rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together at Narbonne, where the Royal seed [resides], and where they are held in the highest estimation, and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit; and whatever country the lot falls upon, its metropolis has to carry out the same method with the other towns and cities, and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfil the duty imposed by authority.61 The medieval belief in a worldwide Jewish plot against Christendom will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter but this association of the Jews with the demonic conspiracy was in part responsible for the sharp downturn in their fortunes during the latter part of the Middle Ages. From Saint Augustine’s ‘witness people,’ essentially a minority to be contemptuously ignored, the Jews were transformed into an active threat to all Christians, regardless of whether the latter’s social status was high or low. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities took measures that sought to mark Jews out from the Christian population (such as the obligation to wear badges) and physically separate them (such as the obligation to reside in clearly defined quarters in towns).62 Whilst the ‘demonized’ Jews were perceived to represent a clear threat to medieval Christendom through their black magic, in one respect they were still less of a threat than witches or heretical groups like the Waldensians.63 Unlike heretics, the Jews were clearly distinguished from the Christian population. As such, the ecclesiastical and secular authorities could seek to implement legislation aiming to isolate Jews and limit their daily contact with Christians to a minimum. Whether or not segregationist legislation was effective – and the repeated calls for its implementation in the parliaments of the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula suggests otherwise – at the very least it denotes the belief that the threat posed by the Jews could be contained. The medieval Inquisition did not have jurisdiction over Jews and the fact that they were a precious source of fiscal revenue for the crowns of Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula, offered them a degree of official protection. 61 62

63

Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791, rev. Marc Saperstein (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999), 139. There is now a vast literature on the evolving status of medieval European Jewry and its increasing demonization in Christian society. Amongst the most notable works see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943) as well as Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: the evolution of medieval anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Wolfgang Behringer, “Detecting the ultimate conspiracy, or how the Waldensians became witches,” in Conspiracies and Conspiracy theories in Early Modern Europe, ed. Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 13–34.

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Events in late medieval Spain and Portugal, however, created a unique situation that set the Iberian Peninsula apart from the rest of Europe. The mass conversion of Jews to Christianity, in many cases under duress, during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries changed the nature of the alleged ‘Jewish threat.’ The new converts and their descendants found that their position in Spanish or Portuguese society had been transformed by their baptism. Whilst not quite an ‘emancipation’ in the same sense as that experienced by Jews in many European countries after 1789, the situation of the conversos certainly emancipated them from the legal restrictions and segregation imposed upon unbaptized Jews. Since they were no longer considered Jews, the conversos could live where they pleased and now had access to professional and social opportunities that were officially closed to Jews. The appearance of the conversos also led to a change in the nature of antiJewish sentiment in the Iberian world. Many members of the majority Christian population who were not descended from Jews – the so-called ‘Old Christians’ – were convinced that the conversos continued to practice their Jewish faith in secret whilst publicly pretending to be Christians. Whether or not the majority of the conversos were indeed ‘judaizers’ (judaizantes) is a question that has caused much academic controversy and is unlikely to ever be satisfactorily answered. The actual religious beliefs of the conversos lie beyond the scope of this book. What is incontrovertible, however, is that many ‘Old Christians’ were convinced that most conversos were judaizantes: heretics and apostates who had reneged from their new faith. Worse still, they feared that the baptized Jew could now go ‘undercover’ and take advantage of his or her new religious identity to infiltrate and undermine institutions from within and thus advance the aims of the demonic conspiracy. The ‘Jewish threat’ had become an invisible one and consequently was perceived to be all the more dangerous. 7

Conclusion: the Conspiracy Theory in the Age of ‘Confessionalization’

It is important to challenge the notion developed by Karl Popper and others that the development of belief in all-encompassing conspiracy theories about society is linked to the ‘secularization’ of European society and constitutes a ‘secular’ form of superstition. Early modern Europeans were just as much exposed to conspiracy theories (both ‘systemic’ and ‘super’ in nature) as those who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even before the advent of ‘modern’ mass media, the power and appeal of these conspiracy theories was

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certainly not weaker than it is at present. The medieval and early modern ‘conspiracy theory of society’ differed from Karl Popper’s theorem in that the ‘systemic’ human plots (of Jews, heretics, etc.) where subsumed within a wider ‘superconspiracy’ orchestrated by the Devil, who oversaw the secret plots of his human agents. The commonplace notion that there were no ‘systemic’ or ‘superconspiracy’ theories prior to the late eighteenth century is thus far too facile to go unchallenged. The anti-converso conspiracy theory in Spain and Portugal presents a particularly fascinating case study in this respect. This is because it contains elements that fit all three of the separate categories of conspiracy theories defined by Michael Barkun. As the following chapters will make clear, fears about the conversos range from ‘event’ conspiracies (alleged plots to weaken the Iberian monarchies and church through specific acts of treason), to ‘systemic’ conspiracies’ (the purported long-term plot to infiltrate and undermine the church and Iberian monarchies) and finally, as the vivid quotation from Alonso de Espina’s work mentioned above demonstrates, the ‘superconspiracy’ (since the plots of the conversos were, ultimately, a part of the greater conspiracy controlled by the Devil himself). The answer to the question of whether the antisemitic conspiracy theory in early modern Spain and Portugal was deliberately used by sections of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy to further their own ends will become readily apparent in the following chapters. The early modern period witnessed the growth of the modern European state system and what historians have described as the process of ‘confessionalization.’64 Throughout Catholic and Protestant Europe, rulers sought to secure the loyalty of their subjects, and their hold on power, by promoting among them a homogeneity of religious belief. In both the Spanish and Portuguese realms, Iberian theologians and political theorists presented the unquestioning acceptance of the Catholic faith and its dogmas by the subjects of the crown as an indispensable precondition to social and political stability. In his 1578 commentary on the medieval Manual for Inquisitors of Nicholas Eymerich, the canon lawyer Francisco Peña (c.1540–1616) reminded his readers that heresy was not only an attack upon the church but on secular society (“the republic”) as well. It resulted in “tumults and seditions against the tranquillity of social order (…)” and any kingdom 64

See H. Schilling, Konfessionskonflict und Staatsbildung (Gütersloh, 1981), W. Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State: a Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review, 75 (1989): 385–403; W. Reinnard and H. Schilling (eds.), Die Katholische Konfessionalisierung (Gütersloh and Münster: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995); and R. Po-chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London: Rout­ledge, 1989).

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that did not extirpate it was condemned to fall prey to subversion and even collapse. Seemingly referring to the upheaval and wars caused by the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe, Peña points to the “spectacle of the prosperous regions and flourishing kingdoms, which in our times have suffered the greatest of calamities.”65 In a similar vein, the anti-converso polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos reminds his readers in 1622 that the prosperity, safety and growth of the realm could only be achieved “through a unity of religious belief (união da religião).”66 Even the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, a trenchant critic of the discrimination against conversos, argues in his seminal 1599 Latin treatise on royal government that a shared faith was the only “social bond” (societatis vinculum) that could maintain social order in a kingdom and that lack of religious unity was a path that led only to anarchy.67 The focus on religion as a cement in the construction of a collective identity in the process of ‘confessionalization’ was crucial in an early modern Iberian world that lacked any sense of overarching ‘national identity.’ The crown cultivated an image of the monarch as a father figure to his subjects but the effectiveness of the paternal metaphor was limited in an age when sovereigns were no longer as peripatetic, and far less accessible than they had been in the medieval period.68 The term ‘nation’– nación in Spanish and nação in Portuguese – certainly existed in the early modern Iberian world but its exact meaning was still evolving. In 1611 the Spanish lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539–1613) limited his definition of a nación to a purely political entity such as a kingdom or a geographical province and does not refer to its inhabitants. Over a century later, in 1734, the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy elaborated further by describing the meaning of nación as “the inhabitants of a certain province, kingdom or country.”69 These two definitions of the concept of nación belie the complexity of collective identity in early modern Spain and Portugal. As its etymology suggests, the term was linked to birth (nación could, like nacimiento, mean birth) and a common genealogical descent. Yet it also came to acquire religious overtones as it was employed to refer to men and women with a shared cultural and/or religious identity. The Portuguese 65 66 67 68 69

Nicholas Eymerich and Francisco Peña, Directorium inquisitorum (Rome: Aedibus Populi Romani, 1585), 247. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve discurso contra a heretica perfidia do iudaismo, fol. 162v. Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione (Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1599), vol. 3, 421–6. Luis R. Corteguera, “King as father in Early Modern Spain,” Memoria y civilización, 12 (2009): 49–69. Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), letter N, 560r; Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana (…) compuesto por la real academia española (Madrid: Los Herederos de Francisco del Hierro, 1734), vol. 4, 644.

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c­ onversos came to describe themselves, and were described by others, as forming a separate nação. Likewise, the morsicos and gypsies were perceived, or perceived themselves, as separate ‘nations.’ The intermeshing of religion and ethnicity in the early modern Iberian concept of ‘nation’ is perhaps most obvious in the manner that the ‘Old Christian’ inhabitants of Valladolid in Spain described themselves as “men and women of the Christian nation” (cristianos y cristianas de nación) in a petition submitted to the crown in 1545.70 Early modern Spain was, and to an extent still remains, a collection of diverse kingdoms and regions with a strong sense of their own distinctiveness including deeply entrenched cultural and linguistic divisions (such as those dividing Castilians, Catalans, Aragonese, Basque and Galicians). Even within Castile, the largest territorial entity, there existed strong regional identities. Moreover, other powerful centrifugal forces worked against the consolidation of political power in the hands of a crown largely based in Castile. These included jealously guarded legal customs and privileges as well as parliaments (cortes) in the different territories of the Crown of Aragón. Resentment against the perceived Castilian dominance and encroachment upon their rights in Catalonia led to a succession of armed revolts against the monarchy in 1640– 1652, 1687–1689 (the Revolta dels Barretines) and 1705–1714. Comparatively, the political situation in Portugal was far more stable than in Spain but the dynastic union with Spain between 1580 and 1640 created more tensions. Beyond the realm of politics, the societies of Spain and Portugal, to say nothing of their overseas territories, were characterized by a significant cultural and/or ethnic diversity in terms of their populations. With some regional variations, they included ‘Old Christians’ (whether Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Valencian, Aragonese and Galician), conversos, moriscos, gypsies and a significant population of slaves (and freedmen) imported from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. Catholicism, the only publicly tolerated religion, was therefore the only secure foundation upon which a collective identity could be constructed. In the Iberian Peninsula ‘confessionalization’ brought about a close alignment of the interests of the church and crowns of Spain and Portugal as they supported and legitimized one another. As early as 1496, Isabel of Castile and her husband Fernando of Aragón petitioned for and secured the title of “Catholic Monarchs” (Reyes Católicos) from the papacy not out of vanity but rather to underscore this point. The process only started in earnest from the 1560s onwards, when the influence of the Council of Trent began to be felt in Spain 70

See F. Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire, 27–8.

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and Portugal. Historians of the early Iberian monarchies have argued that they should be described as “confessional monarchies” and the Italian scholar Agostino Borromeo has even gone as far as to posit that we should describe them as constituting a form of “confessional absolutism” or proto-absolutism since the Spanish (and Portuguese) crowns both supported and controlled the church’s efforts to impose doctrinal uniformity on their subjects.71 The confessionalization of the monarchy is evident in the mission entrusted to the tribunals of the Inquisition to police the religious beliefs of the population. The inquisitorial tribunals sat astride the ecclesiastical and secular divide. They were not only ecclesiastical tribunals but also part of the secular state apparatus since the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were each represented by a council (consejo/conselho) in the royal government and the Inquisitor-General was always a royal appointment. Last but not least, heresy, including judaizing, was officially a crime of ‘lèse-majesté,’ against both God and the crown. The relationship between the church and monarchy in the early modern Iberian world was not without conflicts. The occasional granting of amnesties to the conversos in Portugal in exchange for large bribes, for example, was one such bone of contention but the shared interests of both parties was too close to be threatened by occasional tensions. In 1619, the Benedictine Juan de Salazar explicitly reminded his readers of this interdependence in his treatise Política española. Whilst the crown was responsible for defending the church, Salazar notes that “it is also clear that those who hold the [common] people subject, submissive and obedient to their superiors are the learned men and members of the church who continuously preach to the people that it is the will of God that they should obey monarchs.”72 The ‘confessionalization’ of Europe gave rise to renewed anxieties about the status of religious minorities within the body politic in many European states which tied their legitimacy to an unquestioning compliance with, and acceptance of, the rituals and dogmas of a single state-recognized church. These fears affected not just Jews and Muslims but minorities from different Christian denominations as well, such as Catholics living under Protestant rule. In the Iberian world – both in Europe and in the overseas territories – the conversos were obvious magnets for suspicions and fears. Such fears were manipulated by the Inquisition and sections of the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy that sought to define and articulate a Christianized – or perhaps more 71 72

Agostino Borromeo, “Felipe II y el absolutismo confesional,” in Felipe II, un monarca y su época: La monarquía hispánica (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1998), 185–196. Juan de Salazar, Política española: contiene un discurso cerca de su Monarquia, materias de Estado, aumento, i perpetuidad (Logroño: Diego Mares, 1619), 210–211.

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accurately a Catholicized – communal identity through the stoking of moral panics about the conversos and their depiction as an immediate existential threat to all sincere Catholics as well as to the church and state. To make its case, this book focuses on the different facets of antisemitic conspiracism in early modern Spain, Portugal and their overseas empires. It examines fears about the alleged plots of crypto-Jewish conversos: their part in a worldwide anti-Christian conspiracy, their desecration of sacred religious objects, their infiltration of religious and secular institutions, their treasonous relations with foreign enemies, their use of the medical professions to commit murder and, finally, their deliberate destruction of the Spanish and Portuguese economies. It will never be possible know how many Spaniards or Portuguese shared such fears and believed such conspiracy theories. No statistical data exists that would enable us to provide even a rough estimate. What is clear, however, is that elements within the secular governments (in this case the ­early modern Spanish and Portuguese monarchies) and the church exploited these fears to promote political, social and religious agendas favouring their interests.

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Chapter 2

Forged Documents and the Fear of Jewish Infiltration: the Jewish World Plot and the Early Modern Iberian World The success of the modern antisemitic myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy rests to a large extent upon the legitimacy conferred upon it by documents presented as authentic and factual evidence of its existence. Inevitably, to bolster their credibility, these ‘secret’ documents have been presented as written by Jews themselves and never intended for publication beyond the closed circle of Jewish communities. In the twentieth century, that role has been played by the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a list of twenty-four points supposedly agreed upon by rabbis from around the world at a gathering held in Prague. These points detailed their plans to undermine the morals of the Gentile world, to dominate its economy and control its press and to enslave all Gentiles. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a keystone of antisemitic propaganda. They offered (and continue to offer) antisemitic conspiracy theorists throughout the world with a secure basis for their vision of the world. Although they were rapidly exposed as a forgery, plagiarising amongst others a nineteenth-century French political satire entitled The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu that had nothing to do with anti-Jewish propaganda, attempts to refute their authenticity are presented as directed or inspired by Jews keen to suppress the ‘truth’ and thus have only reinforced their standing amongst antisemites. Ultimately, as Norman Cohn has evocatively stated, the Protocols became a “warrant for genocide” in the 1930s and 1940s.1 The emergence of a sizeable converso population in the aftermath of the massacres, expulsions and forced conversions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, created a situation that was propitious for the circulation of myths surrounding a Jewish plot involving the close collaboration of judaizing conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and Jewish communities scattered across Europe and the Mediterranean. Though frequently shunned and the subjects of popular opprobrium, the judeoconversos became part of Catholic society and were no longer subject to the segregationist legislation that had 1 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Harper & Row, 1967).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_004

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compelled Jews to wear distinctive clothing or live in segregated areas. Moreover, as Christians, the converts and their descendants could seek to accede to positions of power and influence in the secular and ecclesiastical establishments that had previously been barred to them or their Jewish ancestors prior to their conversion. This unprecedented situation amounted to an emancipation of sorts though not in the sense that historians usually use the expression when referring to the later ‘emancipation of the Jews’ in nineteenth-century Europe. It created new opportunities for conversos but also paved the way for a completely new level of fear about the aims of judaizing conversos. The socio-economic emancipation of the conversos could only be perceived with horror by many in the Iberian Peninsula who feared that the conversos were in their vast majority dissembling judaizers and who, as a consequence, divided Spanish and Portuguese society into two distinct sections: one with ‘pure’ Old Christian ‘blood’ running through its veins and the other tainted by ‘Jewish blood’ and predisposed to judaizing. The power of such a simplistic and divisive view of Spanish (and after 1497 Portuguese) society was eloquently expressed by none other than Juan Martínez Silíceo, the archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain. Silíceo did not invent the notion of limpieza de sangre but his campaign in the middle of the sixteenth century against the rise of conversos within the church played an essential role in the establishment of a coherent and reductionist conspiracist narrative that focused upon the theme the Jewish infiltration: There exists today in Spain two distinct kinds of lineages: one of men who are Old Christians and who, along with their ancestors, have never trampled the [Christian] faith and [in contrast to them] the conversos, who are descended from heretics and the enemies of our faith.2 This chapter examines the emergence of a coherent conspiracist narrative targeting Jews/conversos in early modern Spain and Portugal. It focuses particularly on the origins and dissemination of the forged documents that became the vital supporting pillars of this conspiracist narrative targeting conversos: two letters (cartas) purporting to have been exchanged between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople at the end of the fifteenth century. These letters were presented as conclusive evidence exposing the ‘Jewish plot’ and revealing the ‘truth’: crypto-Jews, pretending to be Catholics, were deliberately attempting to gain admittance into ecclesiastical and secular institutions. 2 Juan Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española. El debate de los estatutos de limpieza (siglos XV–XVII) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011), 136.

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Their aims, the letters seemingly confirmed, were to occupy positions of power and influence that the conversos could then exploit in order to undermine the foundations of Spain, Portugal and the Catholic Church. Correspondingly, such fears surrounding the religious and ethnic identity of applicants to these positions were used to rationalize and legitimize the attempts of various institutions to implement racially discriminatory measures (the statutes of limpieza de sangre) barring the admittance of conversos. These crucial documents are analysed and light is shed upon their obscure origins in the sixteenth century. Their transformation into one of the most powerful elements in the polemical arsenal of antisemitic authors in both Spain and Portugal is also examined, as is their enduring popularity, which has led them to feature in European antisemitic propaganda produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 1

The Early Notions of a Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy in Medieval Europe

The nature of the Jewish diaspora scattered throughout both Christendom and the Islamic world in the medieval period – and particularly the close religious, cultural and commercial links binding different Jewish communities in different areas and across shifting political or religious boundaries – encouraged many Christians to perceive the Jewish diaspora as having a sinister purpose. In a western European context, the belief in a secret worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christendom is closely tied to the rise of the myth of ritual murder in the High Middle Ages. As has been noted in the previous chapter, the twelfth-century English monk Thomas of Monmouth presented the murder of the child William of Norwich – the first known case of the notorious Blood Libel – as the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews from “all the countries that the Jews inhabit.” For Thomas of Monmouth, who claimed to have obtained his information from a Jewish convert to Christianity, the crime of ritual murder of a Christian child was an annual occurrence commissioned by a gathering in the town of Narbonne of “the chief men and rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain (…) where they are held in the highest estimation.”3 The designation of the Jewish community in Narbonne – a town in southern France, close to the border with Catalonia – as the fulcrum of a Jewish conspiracy was probably not accidental. There existed a flourishing and 3 Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791, rev. Marc Saperstein (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999), 139.

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prosperous Jewish community in that Mediterranean city. Also writing in the twelfth century, the Sephardic authors Abraham ibn Daud and Benjamin of Tudela both describe the elite of the Jewish community of Narbonne as claiming Davidic descent and enjoying an exalted position within the Jewish dia­ spora. Rumours or accounts of the prosperity of the Jewish community in Narbonne must surely have reached England and provided the basis for the tale of the alleged gathering of rabbis in the town.4 Thomas of Monmouth was not alone in his beliefs that all Jewish communities were under the control of the rabbis in Narbonne. The respected Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable refers to a “king of the Jews” in Narbonne and another twelfth-century English monk and writer, William of Malmesbury, also claims that there existed a Jewish religious official in Narbonne – whom he describes as a summum papa, equating his authority with that of the Pope – whose wealth was enormous and whose judgements were obeyed by all the Jews in the world.5 Whatever the nature of its origins, the conspiracy theory formulated in Thomas of Monmouth’s narrative is unusually clear in its depiction of a worldwide – or at the very least Europe-wide – Jewish plot headed by a council of Jewish elders and rabbis. Most other medieval accounts of ritual murder tend to limit the scope of the Jewish conspiracy to a kingdom. Thus, for instance, when the English chronicler Matthew Paris recounts the tale of the ritual murder of Saint Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, he accuses all the Jews of England but stops short of attributing the ritual murder to a European-wide Jewish plot.6 The idea that Sephardic Jews played a prominent role in organising a Jewish conspiracy against Christendom has also left traces in various other sources. In the fourteenth century, this belief also manifested itself in various parts of Europe in the theory that Jewish communities throughout Christendom had operated a coordinated conspiracy to poison wells, firstly in alliance with lepers in 1321 and then in 1348 at the time of the Black Death pandemic. Following the arrest and interrogation of Jews in the castle of Chillon on suspicion of poisoning wells in Switzerland and Savoy, it was alleged (and confessions were accordingly obtained through torture or fear), that they had been acting under 4 Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom: 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81–2 and 86–7 and Aryeh Grabois, “Le ‘roi juif’ de Narbonne,” Annales du Midi, 218 (1997): 165–188. 5 Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, ed. and tr. Irven M. Resnick (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 140; José Maria Canal, El Libro De Laudibus et miraculis sanctae Mariae de Guillermo de Malmesbury (Rome: Alma Roma, 1968), 73. 6 Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 237–62.

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precise instructions received from a certain Rabbi Jacob of Toledo, who had also provided them, and other Jews in the region, with a special poison.7 Two centuries later, the readers (and listeners) of an anonymous German rhyming pamphlet entitled Entehrung Mariä durch die Juden (1515) and attributed to the Franciscan polemicist Thomas Murner (1475–1537), were informed that the Jews of the “Spanish lands” (hyspanier landt) had held a “synod” (concilium) in which they had decreed that all Jews must consume Christian blood in their unleavened bread during Easter.8 The notion of a secret Jewish plot existed in Spain as much as it did elsewhere in medieval Europe. The Visigothic ruler Egica (687–702) had accused the Jews of Spain of treasonous communications with their coreligionists of North Africa as early as 694.9 Furthermore, prior to their expulsion or conversion in 1492, the Jews were accused of collaborating both with Muslims (notably during the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711–756) and judaizing conversos to bring about the deaths of Christians and destruction of Christendom. After 1391, however, the emergence of religious and social tensions between the conversos and the Old Christians created a situation that was propitious for the propagation and intensification of fears of a clandestine Jewish plot to destroy both the church and secular monarchies. These fears focused on the access of converts and their descendants to positions of power and influence in the ecclesiastical and secular institutions. Early supporters of the racial statutes (estatutos de limpieza de sangre) that excluded conversos from such positions justified their stance by pointing to a risk of Jewish infiltration presented by Judaizing conversos. An analysis of the infamous sentencia-estatuto of limpieza de sangre promulgated by the rebels of Toledo during their rising against the Crown of Castile in 1449, reveals that the rebels certainly subscribed to such an ideology. When they sought to exclude any Christians who were “descendants of the perverse lineage of the Jews” from holding office in the municipal government of Toledo, Pedro Sarmiento and his supporters clearly articulated the notion that there was a secret Jewish plot against both the church and Castile and that judaizing conversos were an integral part of this scheme. In the sentencia-estatuto, Sarmiento justified ethnic discrimination by presenting as fact the judaizing of all conversos and holding them accountable for the ‘crimes’ of their forebears (from the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to the alleged betrayal of Toledo 7 Justus C.F. Hecker, Der Schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Herbig, 1832), 97–102. 8 Adam Klassert, “Die Entehrung Mariä durch die Juden: eine antisemitische Dichtung Thomas Murners,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Sprache und Litteratur Elsass-Lothringens, 21 (1905): 78–155 (see page 135). 9 See chapter 5 of this book.

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to invading Muslim forces in 711) and ruinous mismanagement of the municipal finances. He concluded by noting that the seemingly unquenchable thirst for power of the conversos was primarily motivated by a desire to become “lords [of Toledo] to destroy the holy Catholic faith and the old believing Christians in it.” Nevertheless, it must be recognised that the notion of a Jewish conspiracy formulated in the sentencia-estatuto of 1449 remained a strictly localized one in terms of its focus, largely limited to Toledo and its specific problems. The author(s) of the sentencia-estatuto did not go so far as to openly claim that all Jews and conversos in the Iberian Peninsula were secretly plotting to destroy both the church and Old Christians, still less that such a plot extended beyond the borders of the Iberian Peninsula.10 2

The Forged Letter of the Jews of Toledo to Those of Jerusalem: a Fatal Precedent?

The notion of a Jewish conspiracy against Christendom orchestrated by Jewish communities established in different parts of the world clearly existed in medieval Europe. It is amidst this tense context that a remarkable document appeared in fifteenth-century Spain. This document is a letter supposedly written in the first century CE by Jews of the then Roman provinces of the Iberian Peninsula which is often presented in early modern Iberian works with the heading “Letter of the Jews of Toledo to those of Jerusalem on the subject of the coming and death of Jesus” (Carta de los judíos de Toledo á los de Jerusalem sobre la venida y muerte de Jesús). The letter purports to be part of correspondence exchanged between the Jews of Jerusalem and Toledo at the time of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Its authors are supposed to have been “Levi, head of the synagogue and Samuel and Joseph, elders of the Jewish community (aljama) of Toledo.” The missive claims to be a response to a letter received from Eleazar, “head of the Spanish (i.e. Sephardic) synagogue and people in Jerusalem (archisinagogo ó presidente de la synagoga i gente española en Jerusalen),” in which the deeds of Jesus Christ and his claims to be the Messiah are briefly outlined. The response is not addressed solely to Eleazar but to the other Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, including the high priests Caiaphas and Annas. The content of the letter from the Jews of Toledo can be rapidly summarized. In it, the Jews of Toledo express their dismay at the treatment inflicted upon Christ by their coreligionists in 10

For the full text of the sentencia-estatuto see Eloy Benito Ruano, Los orígenes del problema converso (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2001), 83–94.

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Jerusalem and their admiration for him. Moreover, they vigorously assert that they cannot consent to his death and will not be persuaded otherwise by the arguments of their brethren in Jerusalem. The various versions of the letter of the Jews of Toledo to those of Jerusalem became famous in early modern Spain and are cited in numerous works. In the sixteenth century, for instance, they are mentioned in Pedro de Alcocer’s well-respected history of the city of Toledo (1551 with more editions in 1554 and 1641). Alcocer vaguely cites his source of information as “some of our Castilian chroniclers” and, as will be discussed below, the letter became a regular feature of historical works in the early seventeenth century.11 Modern historians have interpreted the letter as a forgery and as a somewhat paradoxical attempt by the Jews or conversos in fifteenth-century Spain to exploit the notion that Jewish communities scattered throughout the world actively consulted with one another in their attacks on Christianity, and to turn it on its head in order to protect themselves against Christian persecution. Thus, according to such an analysis, the letter is probably a fifteenth-century forgery, created by Jews and/or conversos with the principal aim of providing evidence that the Jews were already in Spain in the first decades of the first century CE and that they had explicitly opposed the death of Christ. The logical implication was that, unlike Jews elsewhere, their descendants in the late medieval and early modern Iberian Peninsula could not be accused of being complicit of deicide by association. Such a document would certainly have been a welcome addition to the polemical arsenal of pro-converso apologists in the wake of the emergence of the statutes of limpieza de sangre in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth century, José Amador de los Ríos attacked the letter as apocryphal and, more recently, Rica Amrán has also pleaded in favour of such an interpretation. Amrán argues that the letter “emerged from a line of defence of the Jewish, and also judeo converso, minority according to which they could not be accused of deicide and which became part of the apologetic literature produced after the Toledan revolt of 1449.”12 The Carta de los judíos de Toledo á los de Jerusalem thus represents a daring move to conduct the main force of the accusation of Deicide away from Sephardic Jewry and its converted descendants. 11 12

Pedro de Alcocer, Historia: o descripcion dela imperial cibdad de Toledo (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1554), fols. 14r–14v. José Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal (Madrid: Imprenta de T. Fortanet, 1875), vol. 1, 501–2 and Rica Amrán, “Calumnias y falsificación histórica: dos casos de correspondencia apócrifa relacionadas con judíos hispanos durante el medioevo,” Cahiers de linguistique hispanique medieval, 29 (2006): 317– 326 (quotation from page 322).

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A historical analysis certainly leaves little doubt that the letter was an anachronistic forgery. To date, there is no documentary or archaeological evidence of Jewish settlement in Spain as early as the first century CE. Moreover, the Roman town of Toletum was not a particularly important economic centre in Roman Spain and did not possess the political, economic and religious importance that it acquired from the later Visigothic period onwards. The real question for historians is whether Jews/conversos were actually the authors of such a forgery. At face value, the case for converso authorship of the letters is bolstered by the fact that its content replicates an established line of defence in Sephardic apologetics against the Christian charge of deicide. There were certainly numerous legends circulating within the Jewish communities of the medieval Iberian Peninsula concerning their origins and the supposed nobility of Sephardic Jews (in comparison to other Jews). One important legend concerned the purported arrival of the Jews in Spain at the time of the great dispersion that followed the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BCE. This origin-story of early settlement in the Iberian Peninsula was, of course, useful in that it placed the Jews in Spain centuries prior to the Crucifixion and thus strengthened the attempts of Sephardic Jews and conversos to exculpate their communities from the charge of culpability in Christ’s death.13 The earliest verified reference to the letter appears to date from the end of the fourteenth century. In the 1390s Mosen Juan Figuerola, a theologian and canon of the Cathedral of Valencia, wrote a Latin Summa contra Judeos in which he asserts that the Jews arrived and settled in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and that the Sephardic Jews had refused to condone the crucifixion of Christ. Although Figuerola’s work was not printed, it is cited by sixteenth-century authors, including his fellow Valencian, the historian Antoni Beuter (1490–1554), in his Primera parte de la coronica general de toda España (1538) and the Franciscan Fray Juan de Pineda (c.1513–c.1593) in his hugely influential Monarquía eclesiástica o Historia universal del mundo (first edition in 1576).14 In these sixteenth-century works, the letter is merely mentioned and not reproduced verbatim. The influence of the claims of Figuerola and the work of Beuter was nevertheless considerable as 13

14

Haim Beinart, “¿Cuándo Llegaron los judíos a España?,” Estudios, 2 (1961): 5–32 and Adam Beaver, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions: Sephardic Legends’ Journey from Biblical Polemic to Humanist History,” in After Conversion Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2016), 21–65. Antoni Beuter, Primera parte de la coronica general de toda España (Valencia: Ioan Mey Flandro, 1563), fol. 78v; Juan de Pineda, Los Treynta libros de la Monarchia ecclesiastica, o Historia universal del mundo (Salamanca: Iuan Fernandez, 1588), fols. 265v–266r.

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they are cited in many seventeenth-century historical works written by respected historians such as Francisco Pisa (1534–1616), and Francisco de Padilla (c.1527–1607).15 The fame of the story meant that even a distinguished author like the historian Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa (1533–1600) felt compelled to cite the claims of Figuerola and Beuter in his universal chronicle, which he wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, even though he dismissed them as “completely fictitious” (todo esto es fabuloso).16 Figuerola’s work demonstrates that a version of the legend exonerating Sephardic Jewry from any culpability in Christ’s death existed in the fourteenth century. The main evidence to support the argument that conversos forged a legendary correspondence between the Jews of Jerusalem and Toledo to combat hostility from Old Christians actually dates from the fifteenth century. Such an exchange of letters is mentioned in a manuscript chronicle dating from the middle of the fifteenth century. Variously known to modern historians under the title of Refundación de la Crónica de 1344, Crónica Refundida de 1344 or even as the Arreglo Toledano de la Crónica de 1344, it is actually a revision of an earlier fourteenth-century chronicle. The Crónica Refundida contains copies of an alleged correspondence between the Jews of Jerusalem and Toledo, including the letter supposedly sent by the Jews of Toledo. Its author remains anonymous but it has been argued by the distinguished historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal that he must have been a converso writing with an apologist agenda since the chronicle was rewritten at the time of the 1449 revolt in Toledo and the controversy surrounding the adoption of a municipal statute of limpieza de sangre by the rebels.17 The Crónica Refundida de 1344 was not printed and the widespread dissemination of the forged letter in the seventeenth century appears to have been brought about by two widely read historical works written in Latin and at­ tributed to ancient authorities that emerged from obscurity at the end of the sixteenth century. These works are the Chronicon Omnimodae Historiae (“Chron­icle of Universal History”) attributed to Flavius Lucius Dexter, a fifthcentury praetorian prefect, and the Chronicon (“Chronicle”) of Julian Peréz, supposedly an eleventh-century Mozarab (Arabic-speaking Christian) archpriest of the Church of Santa Justa in Toledo. The works of Flavius Lucius 15 16 17

Francisco Pisa, Descripcion de la imperial ciudad de Toledo, y historia de sus antiguedades, y grandeza (Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1605), fol. 13r; Francisco de Padilla, Historia ecclesiastica de España (Málaga: La viuda de Claudio Bolán, 1605), vol. 1, fols. 21r–21v. Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa, Los XL libros del compendio historial de las chronicas y vniversal historia de todos los reynos de España (Antwerp: Christophoro Plantino, 1571), vol. 1, 131–2. Haim Beinart, “¿Cuándo Llegaron los judíos a España?,” Estudios, 3 (1962): 6–8.

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Dexter and Julian Peréz appeared in print in 1627 and 1628 respectively but were clearly circulating in manuscript form for some decades before that.18 The influence of these works was such that the respected chronicler and Benedictine Bishop of Pamplona, Fray Prudencio de Sandoval (1553–1620), includes a transcription and translation into Spanish of the whole letter in his 1615 chronicle of the reigns of five medieval monarchs of Castile and León.19 The letters are also reproduced in Spanish (or mentioned) by the antiquarian Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (c.1589–1641) in 1624; the historian and poet José Pellicer de Ossau i Tovar (1602–1679) in 1630; the historian Rodrigo Mendez-Silva (1606–1670) in 1645 and the Jesuit hagiographer Antonio de Quintanadueñas (1599–1651) in 1651.20 Most early modern authors who cite the letters, including Prudencio de Sandoval, ascribe the discovery of the correspondence between the Jews Toledo and Jerusalem in Toledo to Julian Peréz and they do not mention either Figuerola or the anonymous author of the Crónica Refundida de 1344. According to the Chronicon of Julian Peréz, the original letters are supposed to have been in Hebrew but were translated first into Arabic and then by Julian Peréz himself into Latin and vernacular Castilian at the behest of King Alfonso VI of Castile-León. No reference is made to the Crónica Refundida de 1344 and it is claimed that Julian Peréz discovered the letter amongst other ancient documents in the Church of Santa Justa in Toledo. To explain the disappearance of the original letters, it was claimed that the Jews had stolen them around the time of their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Unfortunately, it is now widely accepted that “the archpriest of Santa Justa” and Flavius Lucius Dexter are, in fact, both false authors who never existed and are creations of the notorious Jesuit pseudo-historian and forger Father Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (c. 1563–1611). As early as the seventeenth century, various Spanish authors openly attacked Higuera as a forger. The venerable Jesuit historian and scholastic Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) vehemently denounced the work attributed to Julian 18 19 20

Flavius Lucius Dexter, Chronicon Omnimodae Historiae (Lyon, 1627), 46–8 and 72–3; ­Iuliani Petri, Chronicon cum eiusdem Aduersariis (Paris: Claudii Landry, 1628), 8–10 and 111–2. Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de los reyes de Castilla y de León (Pamplona: Carlos de Labayen, 1634), fols. 71v–72r. Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, Flavio Lvcio Dextro, caballero español de Barcelona, prefectopretorio de Oriente. Governador de Toledo (Madrid: Pedro Tazo, 1624), fols. 45r–49v; José Pellicer de Ossau i Tovar, Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Don Luis de Gongora y Argote (Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1630), cols. 647–8; Rodrigo Mendez-Silva, Población general de España (Madrid: Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1645), fols. 10v–11r; Antonio de Quintanadueñas, Santos de la ciudad de Sevilla y su arzobispado (Madrid: Pablo de Val, 1651), 140–1.

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Peréz and the Chronicon Omnimodae Historiae as “false, fabricated and not credible.”21 If the letter from Toledo to Jerusalem was indeed intended to fulfil a proconverso role in safeguarding Sephardic Jews and conversos by distancing them from the accusation of deicide, then it succeeded only partly in its function. Early modern Spanish and Portuguese antisemitic propaganda largely glosses over the legendary early settlement of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and their alleged refusal to agree to the death of Christ. In his Centinela contra Judíos, for instance, Francisco de Torrejoncillo mentions the letter in passing, citing the false authors dreamed up by Jerónimo Román de la Higuera as his sources. He either did not note its significance or, as seems more likely, chose to overlook it entirely. He focuses instead on another letter, supposedly sent to Toledo by the Jews of Jerusalem, advising the former to exert themselves to undermine the efforts of early Christian proselytisers, as proof of an age-old Jewish malice against Christians.22 3

Warrant for Hatred: the Forged Letters from Toledo and Constantinople

Whether or not its existence was the result of a deliberate act of pro-Jewish/ converso apologetics, the forged letter from the Jews of Toledo to those of Jerusalem indubitably presented a serious problem for those individuals who espoused antisemitic views and therefore supported statutes of limpieza de sangre and the racialized exclusion of conversos from public life. The existence of this letter and the widespread references to it demonstrate the power that documents presented as genuine historical artefacts held in debates about the conversos in medieval and early modern Spain. For Spanish antisemites, the letter and the positive image of Sephardic Jewry that it created presented a significant polemical obstacle that needed to be overcome. It is therefore not surprising that polemicists resorted to the same device in their endeavour to whip up anti-converso sentiment during the sixteenth century. Two letters that first appear in the sixteenth century came to buttress the credibility of a ‘Jewish plot’ against the church and monarchy in Spain and 21

22

See Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 256–260 and Katrina Olds, “‘The False Chronicles,’ Cardinal Baronio, and Sacred History in Counter-Reformation Spain,” The Catholic Historical Review, 100 (2014): 1–26. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 94–5 and 133.

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Portugal. One purports to have been sent by the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula to Jewish rabbis in Ottoman-ruled Constantinople and the other is the alleged reply of the rabbis of Constantinople. In a short article analysing these two letters in 1887, the French historian Isidore Loeb masterfully exposed them as forgeries. He did this chiefly by comparing them to a real example of correspondence between the Jews of Salonika and Provence, contrasting the completely different style of letter writing between the real and forged letters.23 Insofar as is known, the first printed version of these letters appeared in an unlikely work: an eclectic collection of “various silly and curious stories that will be useful for ladies and gentlemen in honest and virtuous conversations” that was entitled La Silva Curiosa. Compiled by Julián de Medrano, La Silva Curiosa was printed in Paris in 1583 and 1608 (see fig. 1).24 These letters became such a central element in Iberian antisemitic propaganda that it is worth reproducing them in their entirety: Letter that the Jews of Spain sent to those of Constantinople Honoured Jews, greetings and blessings [upon you]. You know that the King of Spain has issued a public decree converting us into Christians and seizing our property and even our lives and destroying our synagogues as well as inflicting other vexations upon us, all of which has plunged us into a state of confusion and uncertainty as to what we should do. In the name of the Law of Moses, we ask and beg you to call together a council [to consider this] and send us as soon as possible the decision to which you will have arrived. Chamorra. Leader of the Jews of Spain.  Response of the Jews of Constantinople to the Jews of Spain Beloved brothers in [the Law of] Moses, we received your letter in which you informed us of the travails and misfortunes that have befallen you. News of these has moved us just as much as they have affected you. The

23 24

Isidore Loeb, “La correspondance des Juifs d’Espagne avec ceux de Constantinople,” Revue des Études Juives, 15 (1887): 262–276. An edition supposedly printed in Zaragoza in 1580 appears to be a later pirated version of the Paris edition. On the different editions see Julián de Medrano, La silva curiosa de Julián de Medrano, ed. Mercedes Alcalá Galán (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 3–4.

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learned opinion of the satraps and rabbis [of Constantinople] is the following one: Regarding what you state about the King of Spain compelling you to become Christians, let him do it for there is nothing that you can do to stop it. Concerning what you write about the fact that they are seizing your goods: well, turn your children into merchants so that, bit by bit, they may seize theirs. In connection with what you have said about their murdering you: well, turn your sons into doctors and apothecaries, so that they may murder them. As regards what you say about their destroying your synagogues: turn your sons into clergymen and theologians, so that they may destroy their churches. Finally, vis-à-vis what you have to say about the vexations that they make you suffer, strive so that your sons may become lawyers, attorneys, notaries and counsellors and that they should always know how public affairs work so that they may dominate them and gain lands. Follow these instructions in the same order and this way you will get your revenge and through experience you will witness how you shall be transformed from being social outcasts to being held in considerable esteem. Vssusff. Leader of the Jews of Constantinople. Julián de Medrano’s version of the letters was not, however, the only one. Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, a respected jurist, reproduced (in vernacular Spanish) only one of the forged letters in his influential work Sylua responsorum iuris: in duos libros diuisa, first printed in Madrid in 1614. Ignacio del Villar Maldonado claims that the existence of the two letters was brought to his attention by a friend of his, a clergyman and theologian who “led a good life and was racially pure” (de buena vida, y limpia generación). This anonymous friend had himself heard of these letters from “the mouth of Don Juan Martínez Silíceo, the late and beloved Archbishop of Toledo” (el qual lo oyò de la boca de Do[n] Iua[n] Martinez Siliceo). Villar Maldonado thus ascribes the origins of the letter to Cardinal Juan Martínez Silíceo, the archbishop of Toledo between 1546 and 1557. He dates the letters as having been written at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, literally “when the Catholic Monarchs had determined to expel the leprosy of the synagogue from our Spain and had granted them a delay [in which to leave].” Unlike Medrano, he only provides a version of the reply from the Jews of Constantinople, which is slightly more detailed and does not bear any signature by “Vssusff”:

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Figure 1

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Julián de Medrano, La Silva Curiosa (Paris, 1608), 156–7

Our brothers and friends. We received a letter from you, by means of which you informed us of the travails and misery in which you find yourselves and asked us for our advice, favour and assistance to be freed from these. We would have gladly offered you this help, from both our persons and our possessions as our law and nation obliges us to do so, if the size of the distance [separating Constantinople and Spain] did not prevent it. Nevertheless, we can offer you a useful piece of advice by means of which you shall be able to preserve your property and gain your revenge upon the Christians of Spain, a people that has sought and still seeks to diminish both our holy [Jewish] law and the state of Judaism. Our advice is that you should soothe your spirits and patiently hide your pain as best you can. Those of you with considerable property who can sell it without notable loss should do so and come here, for we shall assist you to preserve the [social] status in which you have lived. This will be done so that you shall not feel too

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homesick for your homeland. Those of you who cannot: accept baptism as the edict of that King orders, but only to fulfil its conditions and always preserving in your hearts our holy law. You state that they have seized your possessions, well then have your sons become lawyers and merchants and they will seize the possessions of their sons. You say that they take your lives, well then have your sons become doctors, surgeons and apothecaries and they will take the lives of their sons and their descendants. You declare that the aforesaid Christians have violated and desecrated your ceremonies and synagogues, well turn your sons into clergymen who will easily be able to violate their temples and desecrate their sacraments and sacrifices.25 Villar Maldonado’s version of the letter from Constantinople was particularly influential. In the seventeenth century, it was cited and reproduced verbatim in Portugal and Spain by Vicente da Costa Mattos in his work Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon, 1623, folios 55v–56r, see fig. 2) and by Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo in the Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid, 1674, pages 86–7). Likewise, in his unpublished antisemitic pamphlet Execración de los Judíos (1633), the celebrated author and poet Francisco de Quevedo cited the letters and Villar Maldonado as his source. Quevedo’s reaction differed somewhat from that of Villar Maldonado and Mattos. He was not willing to uncritically accept the authenticity of the letters but believed that Spain had indeed suffered from a Jewish secret plot. With a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Quevedo bemoans that the counsel of the “evil Jews” of Constantinople is “so full of venom that it is infectious to even read it and it is hateful to witness the cunning with which [the conversos] have implemented it.”26 The jurist Antonio Fernández de Otero went so far as to insert not only the letter itself but also the comments of Villar Maldonado, in their original Spanish, in his own work Tractatus de officialibus reipublicæ (Lyon, 1682, pages 15–6). In the eighteenth century, Villar Maldonado’s version of the letter was reproduced by Fray Félix Alamín in his Impugnacion contra el Talmud de los judios, al Coran de Mahoma, y contra los hereges (Madrid, 1727, page 57), by Antonio de Contreras in his Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos (Madrid, 1736, pages 130–2) and by Sebastian de Acuña in his Dissertaciones sobre el orden que los medicos deben observar en las juntas (Madrid, 1746, pages 49–50). 25 26

Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, Sylua responsorum iuris: in duos libros diuisa (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1614), fols. 132v–133r. Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Santiago Fernández Mosquera (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1996), 58.

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Figure 2 Vicente da Costa Mattos in his work Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon, 1623), folio 55v

4

The Obscure Origins of the Forged Letters

It is possible (though as yet impossible to prove) that the forged letters may have been circulating in manuscript form years (perhaps even decades) before they appeared in print in the 1580s. Since they are not mentioned in the midfifteenth century by Alonso de Espina in his Fortalitium Fidei – in which ­Espina deploys just about every other anti-Jewish libel – it does not seem that stories about conspiratorial communications between Spain and Constantinople were circulating before the start of the sixteenth century.

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Although Julián de Medrano is the first author known to have produced a printed version of the letters, a similar story is mentioned in the second edition (1575) of the Defensio Statuti Toletani, a vitriolic polemic defending the statutes of racial purity preventing the descendants of Jews from acceding to positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Cathedral of Toledo. Its author, Bishop Diego de Simancas (who wrote under the alias of Diego Velázquez) alludes to the “rumour” that the conversos had communicated with “foreign synagogues” in order to obtain their advice (fama est eos consuluisse synagogas externas). The counsel the conversos had received was to pretend to be Christians in order to inflict as much damage and death upon the Old Christians as possible by infiltrating the clergy as well as the medical and legal professions.27 This explicit reference to a rumour about an exchange of letters between the Jews of Spain and “foreign synagogues” is significant since it establishes the existence of a (presumably oral) conspiracist narrative: It is rumoured that they [i.e. the Jews of Spain] consulted foreign synagogues and received their response: that they should pretend to be faithful Christians in order to be able to inflict great harm upon the Christians. To this they added: devote yourselves to the study of letters [i.e. to study at university], and with your theology you will subvert the faith of the Christians; with your expertise in law you will despoil them; with your medical knowledge you shall kill them with impunity. Furthermore, wherever you can obtain ecclesiastical benefices abuse their sacraments and pervert the Church. Enter into monasteries and shatter their peace and concord. Finally, acquire these arts [i.e. skills] and secular offices and you shall devour the goods of the Christians without labour.28 Diego de Simancas does not specify that the letters were supposedly exchanged between the communities of Toledo and Constantinople. He also admits that the authenticity of the letters was open to doubt although he immediately reassures his readers that their content was “close enough to the truth.”29 Later in his work, Simancas actually quotes words from the letter subsequent Spanish authors attribute to the Rabbis of Constantinople: “they kick us out of our syn27 28 29

Diego de Simancas was successively bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo (1565–9), Badajoz (1569– 79) and Zamora (1579–83). Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani a Sede Apostolica saepe confirmati (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1575), 18–9. Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani, 18–9: “… et si forte fabula ficta sit, rerum tamen exitus declarauit, eam fuisse proxima vero.”

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agogues, well, let them do it, for we will expel them from their churches” (Eiiciunt nos ex synagogis nostris, nos eos è suis ecclesiis expellemus).30 The modern historian Fernando Bravo López has argued forcefully that this is not sufficient proof of the existence of the forged letters before the 1580s but, even though these are not the exact words of the later versions of Medrano and Villar Maldonado, the coincidence is highly suggestive. It seems that either Simancas must have been writing down words he had heard in oral conversations about the ‘Jewish plot’ against Spain or, alternatively, that he had read in manuscript documents circulating between individuals.31 The mention in both Medrano and Villar Maldonado’s versions of “a public decree” issued by the “King” ordering the Jews to convert and seizing their property is most likely a reference to the 1492 edict of expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Castile and Aragón) promulgated by Queen Isabel of Castile and King Fernando of Aragón. Villar Maldonado clearly places the date of this exchange as taking place in the wake of the edict of March 1492. The exact date of the purported letters was not clear to all in early modern Spain. A different date can be found in one manuscript copy preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona) and previously in the private collection of the Catalan cultural historian Ramon d’Alòs-Moner (1885–1939) though their origin can be traced further back to the capitulary archives of the cathedral of Valencia. The letters in Barcelona are dated as having been written in 1487 but are actually written in a sixteenth-century cursive hand.32 The allusion made by Diego de Simancas in his Defensio Statuti Toletani and the later assertions of Ignacio del Villar Maldonado seemingly place the origins of these forgeries in the controversies surrounding the introduction by archbishop Silíceo of statutes of racial purity seeking to stop the descendants of Jews from entering into the cathedral chapter of Toledo. During the bitter controversy that divided ecclesiastical opinions in Spain about the religious legitimacy of racial discrimination between Christians, Archbishop Juan Martínez Silíceo and his supporters waged a savage propaganda war between 1547 and 1556 in support of the discriminatory statutes. As the research of Albert Sicroff has revealed, Silíceo and his partisans wrote and circulated a large number of 30 31 32

Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani, 102–3. Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani, 102–3; Fernando Bravo López, “La historiografía ante la correspondencia apócrifa entre los judíos de España y los de Constantinopla: una revisión crítica,” S‪ tudia Historica. Historia Moderna, 38 (2016): 467–502. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ Maria Isabel Toro Pascua, “Nuevos y viejos poemas para el ‘Cancionero del siglo XV (c. 1360–1520)’: fuentes manuscritas,” in Praenstans labore Victor: homenaje al profesor Víctor García de La Concha, ed. Javier San José Lera (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2005), 73–92 (page 89).

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manuscript manifestos containing a veritable battery of arguments supporting their campaign to exclude conversos.33 Amongst the many libels thrown against the conversos by Silíceo was their plot to take over the Spanish church: Moreover, it is public knowledge (cosa publica) that in the time when the Jews were expelled from Spain [in 1492] by the Catholic Monarchs of glorious memory some of them who were held to be wise men [i.e. rabbis] said that since [the Christians] were expelling them from their synagogues, they would soon expel the Christians from their churches. This is what we experience every day because, for better or worse, they seek to reach and obtain benefices and position of authority within [the church], and when they have a dispute with an Old Christian [over the possession of an ecclesiastical benefice], they worry him until they obtain the benefice even though they are in the wrong.34 As Fernando Bravo López has noted, Silíceo’s report of what amounted to a public rumour does not refer to Constantinople or even to any letters and it is therefore not sufficient evidence to ascribe authorship of the later cartas to the archbishop of Toledo.35 The nineteenth-century historian Adolfo de Castro, who reproduces the two versions of the letters in his pioneering work Historia de los Judíos en España, claims that the archbishop personally concocted these letters but, whilst this is indeed a possibility, there is no documentary evidence to support such a specific assertion.36 It is interesting to note that the priest Baltasar Porreño (1569–1639), the author of numerous historical works including a famous encomiastic biography of King Philip II of Spain, only slightly expands and modifies the rumour related by Silíceo in a 1608 unpublished work defending the statutes of purity of blood introduced by archbishop Silíceo in Toledo: One of the pretend Christians who remained when the Catholic Monarchs compelled the Jews to leave or be baptised stated: ‘They are kicking us out of our synagogues, we will kick them out of their churches’ (…). At the same time [in 1492], a Jewish boy was pressing his elderly father, [to 33 34 35 36

Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XVI y XVII (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010), 135–191 (especially page 162), who cites B.N.F., Ms. 354, fols. 15r–15v. B.N.E., Ms. 10,608, fols. 53v–54r. Translated from the original Spanish cited by Fernando Bravo López (see footnote below). Fernando Bravo López, “La historiografía ante la correspondencia apócrifa,” 467–502. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ Adolfo de Castro, Historia de los judíos en España (Cádiz: Imprenta Castro, 1847), 137–142.

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convince him] that they should leave these kingdoms and the old Jew responded: ‘where can we go that would be better than here? Let us pretend to be Christians and we shall intermarry with people of the highest lineage (…) and our sons shall become churchmen and we shall live with honour.’37 Whilst Silíceo and Porreño articulate a narrative in which judaizing conversos were consciously orchestrating a plot to take over the church after 1492, they do not appear to refer to the plot having a worldwide dimension, nor to its involvement of the medical professions, nor even to letters exchanged between conversos and Jews outside of the Peninsula. The direct attribution of authorship to archbishop Silíceo is problematic as it thus rests entirely on Ignacio del Villar Maldonado’s vague second-hand testimony from an anonymous theologian. Nevertheless, it would be an oversight to fail to acknowledge the evident link between the mid-sixteenth-century rumours reported by Silíceo and the forged cartas. The presence of the phrase indicating that the secret Jews would force Old Christians out of their churches just as they themselves had been expelled from their synagogues is noteworthy. This suggests that an oral conspiracist narrative that served as the basis of the forged letters existed in the middle of the sixteenth century. Either inspired by Silíceo’s writings or, alternatively, by the widely circulating oral public rumour that Silíceo claimed to be reporting, it was then given its written epistolary form by later writers and appeared in the works of Julían de Medrano, Bishop Diego de Simancas and Ignacio del Villar Maldonado. Various manuscript copies of Silíceo’s manifesto have survived and, according to Albert Sicroff, copies of the forged letters appear in at least three manuscript manifestos relating to the Toledan controversy. One of these is preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and another exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, although the latter claims to be an exchange of letters between the Jews of Spain and the Jews “of Babylonia” (a vague geographical reference to the Middle East).38 Unfortunately, it is difficult to precisely date these two manuscripts and determine whether these references to the forged letter were later additions, as may well be the case. The third manifesto with a copy of the forged letters can be found in a manuscript of the Spanish Royal Library in Madrid but the other (unrelated) texts in that manuscript date the compilation 37 38

B.N.E., Ms. 13,043 (Defensa del Estatuto de limpieza que fundó en la Santa Iglesia de Toledo el cardenal y arzobispo don Juan Martínez Silíceo), fols. 88v–90r. Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 162. Sicroff cites B.N.E., Ms. 721, fols. 73r–73v and B.N.F., Ms. 354, fol. 221v.

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of the manuscript to the very end of the sixteenth century at the earliest.39 The same problem of dating affects the extant manuscript of the Libro Verde de Aragón (the “Green Book of Aragón”), a genealogy of converso families in Aragón, in which the forged letters are included. Even though its anonymous author wrote the Libro Verde in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the only manuscript that contains a copy of the forged letters – which is preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina of Seville – is a copy that can be dated from 1575 at the very earliest and may well be older. It seems likely that the forged letters were added to this particular copy of the Libro Verde at this much later point.40 As such, the manuscript copies of Silíceo’s manifesto do not offer evidence convincingly linking the Archbishop of Toledo to the forged letters. At some point, manuscript Latin translations of the letters were also produced. The Portuguese historian Joaquim Mendes dos Remedios (1867–1932) found a reference in a manuscript of the library of the University of Coimbra to “three letters sent by the synagogues to the [conversos] and seized by the Old Christians” and which were in the possession of a Dominican friar in Lisbon and in the library of the Franciscans in Évora. However, the excerpt in Latin quoted by Mendes dos Remedios leaves no room for doubt that these were merely Latin translations of the original forgeries. An annotation in the manuscript reveals that this Latin version was circulating in Portugal during the first decades of the seventeenth century.41 Furthermore, it is to the Latin version of the letter that the polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos refers his readers in a marginal note of his Honras christãs nas afrontas de Iesu Christo, printed in 1625.42 A fascinating insight into the early circulation of stories about epistolary evidence of a Jewish plot against Catholic Spain and Portugal in the 1560s can be found in a singular memorandum preserved in the archive of the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan in Madrid.43 The short document – it is only two pages long – is entitled “A warning about an affair that has been brought to light by the Inquisition in Llerena.” Its author was Andrés de Noronha, a Portuguese 39 40

41 42 43

Biblioteca Real, Palacio Real, Madrid, Ms. 570, fol. 60r, cited by Angel Goméz Moreno, España y la Italia de los Humanistas. Primeros Ecos (Madrid: Gredos, 1994), 186–7. Biblioteca Colombina de Sevilla, Ms. 56-6-15 as cited by Monique Combescure-Thiry, “Genealogía y política en el Siglo de Oro: el Libro Verde de Aragón,” in Actas del Congreso “El Siglo de Oro en el Nuevo Milenio” (Pamplona: Eunsa, 2005), vol. 1, 457–466. I am extremely grateful to Monique Combescure-Thiry for generously providing me with a transcription of the manuscript. Joaquim Mendes dos Remedios, Os Judeus em Portugal (Coimbra: França Amado, 1895), vol. 1, 28. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Honras christãs nas afrontas de Iesu Christo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1634), fol. 79r. Instituto Valencia de Don Juan (Madrid), Envío 91, caja 131, doc. 473 (recto/verso).

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churchman who was bishop of Portalegre in Portugal between 1560 and 1581 and then of Plasencia in Spain between 1581 and his death in 1586. The addressee of the document is not identified beyond the abbreviation V.M., which commonly stands for vuestra merced (“your honour”). It cannot, however, have been King Philip II of Spain himself as Bishop Noronha refers to “su magestad” separately, using the third person. The archive of the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan preserves thousands of documents from the reign of Philip II and his personal secretaries Mateo Vázquez y Antonio Pérez. It thus seems likely that the letter was dispatched by the bishop to one of the royal secretaries in the hope that its content and the request of its author would be referred on to the King. Fernando Bravo López has used other documents in the archive of the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan to show that Andrés de Noronha frequently corresponded with Mateo Vázquez and it would thus appear logical that Vázquez was the intended recipient of this “warning.” Moreover, Bravo López has also been able to establish the most probable date when it was written: 15 February 1584.44 Andrés de Noronha claims that, at an unspecified date during his time as bishop of Portalegre, he received a visit by Martín de Salvatierra, an inquisitor in the tribunal of Llerena in the neighbouring Spanish province of Extremadura, who told him a curious and alarming story. Inquisitor Salvatierra informed the Portuguese prelate that he had recently questioned a Christian who had been a slave of Jews in Constantinople (presumably after being captured by the Ottoman Turks). According to Salvatierra, the ex-captive claimed that he had fallen in love with (and had been loved by) the daughter of his Jewish master. During their secret conversations, the young Jewish woman had revealed the existence of a covert correspondence between her father and “the Jews of Portugal”: The Jews of Portugal wrote a letter to the father of this woman, who showed it to the captive, and gave him the original copy, in which they wrote of the travails which they suffered and that, in order to be free from these (…), there was only one remedy, which was to teach their sons the science of medicine and the art of pharmacy as the means by which to kill their persecutors. She also showed him the response of her father to those in Portugal, and gave it to the Christian, in which the 44

For a complete analysis of the authorship of the document see F. Soyer, “The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal and the origins of the Carta de los judíos de Constantinopla: New Evidence,” Sefarad: Revista de estudios hebraicos y sefardies, 74 (2014): 369–388 and Fernando Bravo López, “De Ceilán a Constantinopla: el Advertimiento de Andrés de Noronha, el Memorial de Felipe Botello y la correspondencia apócrifa entre los judíos de España y los de Constantinopla,” Sefarad, 76 (2016): 333–361.

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father consoled them by stating that, however great the travails and oppression they suffered over there [in Portugal], they should persevere in their ardour to teach their sons the sciences that they had named. Moreover, they should also seek to turn their sons into clergymen so that they should turn the Christians into idolaters when they celebrate the Mass and also into lawyers so that they may use their position as judges to seize the property of those who are not of their caste.45 Andrés de Noronha states that inquisitor Salvatierra gave him the letter – whether the gifts were the ‘originals’ supposedly presented by the captive or copies is not specified – and he in turn had forwarded them on to King Sebastião of Portugal. Noronha believed that the letters had been the decisive factor in convincing the Portuguese monarch to introduce a special bursary for Old Christians wishing to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Coimbra and to support discriminatory statutes of purity of blood for those seeking employment as judges. The bursary in question was established by King Sebastião at the University of Coimbra in September 1568.46 The exchange of letters reported by Noronha was not between the “Jews of Spain” and the “Jews of Constantinople” but rather one between “the Jews of Portugal” and an individual Jew in Constantinople. Although the wealthy Jew in Constantinople is not identified by Bishop Noronha, the claim that he possessed the conspiratorial correspondence means that there is an implicit assumption that he was one of the communal leaders of the Sephardic Jews of Constantinople. The Christian source of the information, an anonymous Spanish ex-prisoner of war enslaved in Constantinople, is similarly not identified by name. Although there is a later example of a Christian prisoner who apparently found his way back to Spain after having been in contact with the Jewish community in Constantinople, the verisimilitude of the story is open to doubt.47 At first glance, the tale related in this document appears to be little more a recycling of the Letter that the Jews of Spain sent to those of Constantinople and the Response of the Jews of Constantinople to the Jews of Spain adapted to appeal to a Portuguese audience. In most respects the reported content of the alleged correspondence is exactly the same as that of the alleged epistolary exchange between the Spanish Jews and the Jews of Constantinople. It features the same plea for assistance from Iberian Jews and the same advice to infiltrate and 45 46 47

Instituto Valencia de Don Juan (Madrid), Envío 91, caja 131, doc. 473 recto. See chapter 4 of this book. Michael Alpert, “A ‘Crypto-Christian’ before the Toledo Inquisition,” in Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from their Expulsion in 1497 through their Dispersion, ed. Israel J. Katz‬(New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 2000), 29–34.

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destroy Iberian Christian society from the Constantinopolitan Jews. It would therefore be tempting to assume that this was merely a Portuguese version of the Spanish tale. Appearances can be deceiving, however, and new light on this document has been shed by Fernando Bravo López’s discovery of a remarkable document in the Spanish National Archives. Bravo López has unearthed documentary evidence proving that the story actually has its origins in a bizarre memorandum that inquisitor Salvatierra had received from a certain Felipe Botello, a priest in Valencia de Alcántara (a small town within the district of the inquisitorial tribunal of Llerena). Nothing is known about Felipe Botello although he may well be the same person as a sexagenarian Portuguese priest with the same name and residing in Extremadura (Spain) who was prosecuted by the Inquisition of Llerena in the early 1580s on the charge of soliciting sexual favours from parishioners whilst absolving sins in the confessional.48 According to the story conveyed to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid by Salvatierra in January 1570, Botello claimed that he had travelled all over the known world and that he had learned that Jews from as far as Italy and Greece were secretly infiltrating Spain under the guise of being Spanish merchants. To support this claim, Botello told practically the same story related above about the Christian captive held as a slave by Jews and the plot against Portugal but he alleged that he himself had been the slave of Portuguese origin. Moreover, Botello asserted that the location of his enslavement was not Constantinople but rather the distant island of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean. Botello maintained that his master was an old rabbi from Portugal who remained in contact with judaizing conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and that the rabbi had boasted to him that “his [converso] relatives (…) who were doctors, pharmacists and lawyers” secretly murdered one hundred Christians for every Jew or converso put to death by the Inquisition in Iberia.49 In many ways, the letter of Bishop Noronha and the memorandum of Botello raise more questions than they answer. Did inquisitor Salvatierra modify the outlandish tale he had heard into one more suited for the Portuguese bishop by substituting Constantinople for Ceylon? Was it bishop Noronha who converted the tale for the benefit of the missive he sent to the court over a decade later? Noronha may have done this deliberately in order to give it greater credibility or, alternatively, it is possible that his hazy memory of his meeting with Salvatierra may have merged with accounts of the Response of the Jews of 48 49

Fernando Bravo López, “De Ceilán a Constantinopla”; A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,987, exp. 11 and legajo 1,988, exps. 17 and 77. Fernando Bravo López, “De Ceilán a Constantinopla,” 352.

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Constantinople to the Jews of Spain he had read or heard elsewhere. There is, however, one question that can be answered conclusively: did the story influence the introduction of discriminatory bursaries for medical students at the University of Coimbra in September 1568? Bravo López has been able to date the meeting between Salvatierra and Noronha to the end of 1569. There can therefore be no doubt that, contrary to his explicit claim, Bishop Noronha did not influence events at the University of Coimbra.50 Finally, one of the most significant revelations to come out of the “warning” of bishop Noronha, the memorandum of Botello, the work of Diego de Simancas and Julián de Medrano’s La Silva Curiosa is that the conspiracist narrative of a global Jewish conspiracy against the Iberian monarchies and churches was still in a state of flux and had still not adopted its final form prior to the late 1580s. It is worth noting that literary scholars have formulated a very different understanding of the origins of the forged letters. For Angel Goméz Moreno, who studied the copy of the forged letters contained in the late-sixteenth century manuscript in the Spanish royal palace, the forgeries were comical pieces originally intended to amuse their readers rather than to be understood as historical documents. Similarly, in a short article devoted to “the Spanish ‘Jewish conspiracy’ letters,” John Beusterien has argued that “the trajectory of the Spanish Jewish conspiracy letters is that of a sixteenth-century joke turned into a seventeenth-century truth.” To support their claims, Goméz Moreno and Beusterien have both pointed to the literary genre of the “epistolary joke” that was common in early modern Spain. The fact that they were included amongst a miscellany of other epistles and literary texts in the manuscript that he studied prompted Goméz Moreno to interpret them as such. Furthermore, and more importantly, Beusterien has pointed to the name of the putative author of the first letter (Chamorra, the alleged “leader” of Spain’s Jews) and argued that it is a deliberate and jocular play on words, since in Spanish a chamorra indicated a shaved head and was used in this case to refer to the circumcised penis of a Jew.51 It is certainly possible to speculate that Villar Maldonado (and most later antisemitic polemicists who reference his work) chose not to reproduce the letter signed by Chamorra and not to assign the authorship of the ­reply from the Jews of Constantinople to Vssusff “leader of the Jews of Constantinople” because they feared that such information would undermine the credibility of the letters.

50 51

Fernando Bravo López, “De Ceilán a Constantinopla,” 350–1. Angel Goméz Moreno, España y la Italia de los Humanistas, 186–190; John Beusterien, “The Spanish ‘Jewish conspiracy’ letters,” Monographic Review, 22 (2006): 33–45.

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Such an interpretation of the letters as literary jokes nevertheless rests upon the belief that the forgeries first appeared in Julián de Medrano’s miscellany when, as it has been argued above, they appear to originate in the antisemitic propaganda produced by supporters of the statutes of limpieza de sangre in the second half of the sixteenth century. It would rather seem that even though the letters became a pillar of antisemitic propaganda in the early modern Iberian world, they also came to be perceived as comical by some writers who, like Julián de Medrano, were less inclined to accept their authenticity at face value. Awareness of the comical potential of the forged letter may well have been what caused even committed antisemites like Diego de Simancas and Francisco de Quevedo to express doubts concerning their genuineness. Moreover, the fact that most antisemitic polemicists in the seventeenth century and later preferred the version offered by Ignacio del Villar Maldonado – which does not attribute the letters to the Jewish ‘leaders’ Chamorra and Vssusff – would appear to indicate that these authors were well aware that the attribution of authorship to such unlikely characters diminished the credibility of the letters. 5

The Reception of the Forged Letters

The letters feature widely in works written (though not always printed) during subsequent centuries but assessing the impact of the forged letters of the Jews of Toledo and Constantinople, beyond their frequent appearance in later antisemitic polemics, presents challenges. For antisemitic authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their importance as documentary evidence of the Jewish/converso conspiracy was inestimable. Thus, when Vicente da Costa Mattos cited the reply from the Jews of Constantinople to those of Spain in his Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, he noted its significance for the case against the conversos. For Mattos, the letter was the ultimate proof “from which it is clear, without any possible doubt, that all of [the conversos] perpetuate the diabolical scheme that they received [from the Jews of Constantinople] and [accordingly] they make their living from the diverse forms of employment that we can see [mentioned in the letter].” Later in his book, Mattos notes that “it is clear that the Hebrews [i.e. conversos] who reside in Portugal act in accordance with the orders of the letter from Constantinople.”52 Likewise, in his Centinela contra Judíos, Francisco de Torrejoncillo turned the letter of the Jews of Constantinople into the centrepiece of the sixth chapter of 52

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), fols. 55r and 118r.

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his work, which he entitled “Why the Jews should not be trusted, nor should any faith be placed in their deeds.” After reproducing the letter, Torrejoncillo urges his readers to consider “how well they [the conversos] have heeded this advice” and he proceeds to present numerous ‘true’ examples as evidence to support the notion that judaizing conversos had infiltrated Catholic society and especially the medical professions.53 References to the forged letters in surviving documents are not as plentiful but those that have been unearthed also indicate that, amongst the inquisitors and sections of the Iberian Catholic clergy at least, their function as a conductor of antisemitic fears was fulfilled. The striking reaction of Bishop Andrés de Noronha, as described above, when presented with a somewhat different version of the letters, and his alarmed letter to Philip II, certainly offers an illuminating insight into the power of these forgeries. Many decades later one Portuguese bishop bemoaned the fact that the conversos in Portugal were granted a general amnesty in 1605 by referring to the forged letters with a tone of exasperation: What one Jew in Constantinople wrote to others of that nation in these parts, namely that they should turn their sons into doctors and churchmen so that they should become the lords of the bodies and souls of the Christians, has finally come into effect!54 Later in the seventeenth century, the letters make an appearance during the inquisitorial trial in Lisbon of the famous Jewish martyr Isaac de Castro Tartas, following his arrest in Brazil. During a theological debate with the prisoner, the Dominican friar Pedro de Magalhães cited the letters as corroborating ­evidence of the Jews’ evil intentions towards Christianity.55 Their notoriety ­extended even beyond the shores of Europe. When the inquisitorial tribunal of Cartagena de Indias (modern-day Colombia in South America) arrested Blas de Paz Pinto, a wealthy Portuguese converso surgeon, on suspicion of judaizing in 1636, the official indictment accused Pinto of having acted “as a judaizing Jew, observing the Law of Moses, following the advice contained in the letter that the Jews of Constantinople wrote to those of Toledo, in which 53 54 55

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 86. J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses (Lisbon: Teixeira, 1921), 198, n. 1. Miriam Bodian, “Behind Closed Doors: A Dominican Friar’s “Debate” with a Dutch Jew, from the Records of an Inquisition Trial, Lisbon, 1645–1647,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 21 (2014): 381–2.

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they instructed them to desecrate the religious edifices and [sacred] images [of the Christians].”56 6

Francisco de Quevedo’s La Isla de los Monopantos

Francisco de Quevedo’s 1633 Execración de los Judíos was never printed and its circulation in manuscript form limited its diffusion and influence. The doubts expressed by Quevedo about the authenticity of the letters to and from Constantinople did not prevent him, however, from having recourse to a similar antisemitic conspiracy theory to suit his polemical needs and even to develop the theme further. The theme of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy reappears in Quevedo’s far more (in)famous work La Isla de Los Monopantos (“The Island of the Monopantos”). This short satirical piece was written around 1635–8 and it is included amongst a collection of short works of morality and satire gathered together by Quevedo in 1644 in a work entitled La Fortuna con seso y La Hora de Todos, which appeared in print in 1650.57 The Isla de Los Monopantos recounts the gathering of an assembly of rabbis in the town of Salonika, a Greek city then under Ottoman rule. The rabbis include representatives of Jewish communities “from the whole of Europe,” including Venice, Raguza, Livorno and Rome in Italy; Rouen in France; Oran in North Africa; Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Vienna and Prague in the Holy Roman Empire and Constantinople, the Ottoman capital itself. In addition, there was another rabbi, representing the “secret Hebrews who conduct their business clandestinely whilst dressing and speaking like Christians” (hebreos disimulados, y que negocian de rebozo con traje y lengua de cristianos), clearly a reference to the conversos of the Iberian Peninsula. The rabbis conduct discussions not just amongst themselves but with the Monopantos, the inhabitants of islands located “between the Black Sea and Moscovy,” who are, Quevedo assures his readers, “men of quadruple malice, perfect hypocrites and extreme dissemblers” and with whom the Jews seek to forge an alliance. Quevedo has Rabbi Saadías, one of the chief organisers of the gathering, ­address the participants with a long monologue in which he outlines the history of the Jews for the benefit of the Monopantos and their leader Pragas 56 57

A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,601, exp. 18., fol. 41r. Cited by Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española (siglos XVI–XVII) (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, 2008), 326, n. 130. Francisco de Quevedo, La Fortuna con seso y La Hora de Todos (Zaragoza: Herederos de Lanaja, 1650), 159–182.

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Chincollos. Rabbi Saadías informs them that the Jews are “the preeminent lineage in the world” but also bemoans their current lowly status throughout the world. He proceeds to admit that the Jews were responsible for their own fate and reminds his coreligionists (and the readers of Quevedo’s work) that the Jews had knowingly rejected the Messiah Jesus, whom they had crucified and for which crime of deicide they continued to suffer exile and a divine curse. Moreover, he confesses that “of the Law of Moses we have only kept the name,” since it had been largely replaced by “the deviations that the Talmudists dreamed up to contradict the Holy Scriptures.” The Jews are presented as followers of atheism and beholden to the “Reason of State” rather than to any religion. Moreover, Rabbi Saadías also declares that the Jews are responsible for supporting and funding the enemies (whether Protestants, Ottomans or French) of the Catholic Church and the pious Habsburg rulers of Spain and Austria. Quevedo’s short work ends with one of the Monopantos outlining their own similar beliefs and presenting a copy of the works of the controversial fifteenth-century Italian political theorist Nicola Machiavelli, the famous author of The Prince, a work banned by the Catholic Church because of its irreligious approach to political theory. The Jews and Monopantos end their meeting by agreeing to collaborate in order to promote unbelief and dinerismo (devotion to material policies and wealth over spiritual ones) in Christian lands. Whether or not Quevedo was inspired by the forged letters when writing La Isla de los Monopantos is not known. The letters are not mentioned in it and there are certainly stark differences between the Jewish conspiracy as it is presented in the forged letters and the story presented in La Isla de los Monopantos. Whilst the gathering in Salonika does include a representative of Iberian conversos and does present the Jews as collectively plotting to undermine the Spanish monarchy by supporting its outside enemies, it does not, as the forged letters do, focus exclusively upon the Iberian Peninsula or even formulate a clear picture of a Jewish plot seeking to undermine the foundations of the Iberian monarchies from within. There is no explicit reference indicating plans to infiltrate secular or ecclesiastical institutions or even the legal and medical professions. The reason for this is doubtless that the Jews are just a means towards an end in La Isla de los Monopantos. They were not the main target of this work, which is in fact, as numerous historians have pointed out, a satirical political pamphlet targeting the Count-Duke of Olivares (the favourite of King Philip IV of Spain) his supporters and his policies, especially the mercantilist policies through which Olivares sought to restore the Spanish crown’s military fortunes. The Monopantos are deliberately intended to play the part of Olivares and his followers and the names of the Monopantos are anagrams referring to them,

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with the chief Monopanto, Pragas Chincollos, standing in for Olivares himself.58 La Isla de los Monopantos is therefore an antisemitic text pandering to conspiracist beliefs but not in the same sense as the forged letters. Its antisemitic theme – the image of the worldwide Jewish plot – is only of secondary importance to its author. The Jews and the Jewish conspiracy are in fact a cover, used to mount a polemical attack upon Pragas Chincollos/Olivares and his ministers. La Isla de los Monopantos may well have achieved a higher degree of fame since the nineteenth-century than the forged letters, chiefly because of the renown of its author, but its impact upon antisemitic thought and attitudes visà-vis the conversos was nil compared to that of the forged letters. So far, modern research has not revealed a single reference to Quevedo’s satire in antisemitic polemics produced in Spain and Portugal in the second half of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth century. Like Quevedo, other opponents to the regime of the Count-Duke of Olivares frequently turned his relations with Portuguese converso bankers and North African Jews into propagandistic capital. He was accused of considering an abrogation of the expulsion edict of 1492 and permitting open Jewish worship in the Iberian Peninsula. In the 1630s and up until the minister’s fall from royal favour in 1643, contemporary commentators recorded the circulation of rumours that Olivares intended to allow Jews back into Spain and public worship in synagogues. In a private letter, the Jesuit Rafael Pereira confidently asserted that Olivares wished to have “the Jews enter into Spain” and that, to his great disgust, he had himself observed a Jew dressed in a white burnoose at the royal court. The historian José Pellicer de Ossau Salas y Tovar made a similar claim in 1641, claiming to have heard it said that Olivares was seeking to lure back to Spain the Sephardic Jews “in the synagogues of Holland and other places.”59 In reality, Olivares and his advisors never considered any plan to reverse the expulsion edict of 1492. The Jew observed by Father Pereira was a Jew from Oran, an isolated Spanish military outpost on the coast of North Africa where a small community of Jews continued to be tolerated by the Spanish crown because of their usefulness as interpreters until their eventual expulsion in 1669.60 A number of these Jews were granted special licenses to travel to ­Madrid to discuss affairs pertaining to North Africa with Spanish ministers. 58 59

60

J.H. Elliott, “Quevedo and the Count-Duke of Olivares,” in Spain and its World 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 189–209. Joseph Pérez, Los judíos en España (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2005), 244. See also Fernando Díaz Esteban, El frustrado retorno de los judíos en el siglo XVII: nuevos documentos: discurso leído el día 28 de marzo de 2004 en el acto de su recepción pública (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2004). See J.F. Schaub, Les juifs du roi d’Espagne. Oran 1509–1669 (Paris: Hachette, 1999).

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Similarly, Pellicer’s distorted account of the rumours seems to be referring to schemes seeking to entice conversos (and their wealth) back to the Iberian Peninsula but not to legalise public Jewish worship. 7

The Legacy and Influence of the “Toledan Letters” in Modern Antisemitism

The influence of the forged letters of the Jews of Spain and Constantinople extended both beyond the eighteenth century and beyond the geographical confines of the Iberian Peninsula. They appeared in a context that had little to do with the Iberian ‘converso problem’ and enjoyed a rather surprising popularity in neighbouring France, where they were shamelessly converted into letters purporting to be an exchange between the Jews of the town of Arles (southern France) and Constantinople. Claiming to have discovered them in “the archives of one of the most famous abbeys in Provence” which he does not identify, the priest Jean-Baptiste Bouis reproduced a Lettre des Juifs d’Arles envoyée aux juifs de Constantinople and the Responce des Juifs de Constantinople à ceux d’Arles et de Provence in his historical work La Royalle Couronne des Roys d’Arles, which was printed for the first time in 1641.61 Whether Bouis was the forger personally responsible for the creation of French versions of the Spanish letters or whether he genuinely found copies of them in a monastic archive, as he claims, cannot be determined. As yet no copies predating Bouis’ publications have been discovered in French archives. The letters reproduced by Bouis are in the local French dialect and were supposedly sent by the Jews of Arles to those of Constantinople but they are practically identical to the Spanish ones. Interestingly, the reply from Constantinople was left in Spanish (though a French translation was also provided) since, Bouis seeks to explain, “that language was widely understood at the time.” Amongst the few details that were altered was the reference to the King of Spain (who is logically replaced by the King of France) and the addition of two dates mixing the Jewish and Christian calendars: the letter from Arles is dated 13 Sabath (i.e. Shevat) 1489 and the reply from Constantinople is dated 21 Kislev 1489. Likewise, Chamorra, the “leader” of the Jews of Spain accordingly becomes the “rabbi of the Jews of Arles.” As Aeskoly has shown, this uninspired French adaptation of the Spanish forgeries indubitably has its origins in a similar local

61

Jean-Baptiste Bouis, La Royalle Couronne des Roys d’Arles (Avignon: Bénéficier de S. Pierre d’Avignon, 1641), 475–9.

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context of heightened resentment against Jewish converts to Catholicism in early modern Provence.62 These patently plagiarised forged letters of the Jews of Arles and Constantinople ‘discovered’ by Bouis remained ignored until the final decades of the nineteenth century. Two articles published in 1880 revived interest in the letters. One was published in a local Provençal journal – Armana Prouvençau – in which the letters were reproduced and the second, citing the latter journal, was written for the French journal Revue de Études Juives by the Jewish ­historian Arsène Darmesteter (1846–1888). Darmesteter, somewhat naively, decided not to analyse them in any detail but rather chose to moot the possibility that they could be authentic.63 This failure to properly analyse the letters was a colossal oversight. Even though Isidore Loeb exposed them as clumsy forgeries in the same journal only seven years later, Darmesteter’s article did little more than bring them to the attention of antisemitic polemicists who promptly seized upon them with alacrity. The antisemitic writer and priest, Emmanuel Chabauty (1827–1914) analyses the letters very closely in his 1882 work Les juifs nos maîtres!. Chabauty notes their almost exact similarity to the forged letters printed by Julián de Medrano in 1583 although he sees this as proof that the Jews of Constantinople had sent a memorandum to all Jewish communities in France and Spain. Whether in their Spanish or French versions, the letters were for him the conclusive evidence of a worldwide Jewish plot against Christianity. Moreover, he seizes upon the fact that they had been printed in the Revue de Études Juives and that Darmesteter, a Jew, had not categorically rejected them as added proof of their authenticity.64 Chabauty’s highly influential work thrust the letters back into the limelight and revived their importance for the polemical efforts of antisemitic members of the Catholic clergy and their lay supporters. They feature prominently in the phenomenally popular La France juive, first published in 1886 (with no less than 200 editions before 1914) by the virulent nationalist and antisemite Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) and in the 1889 book Le mystère du sang chez les juifs de tous les temps, written by the fanatically judeophobic priest and essayist Henri Desportes.65 Far from being limited to the lower clergy, belief in the au62 63 64 65

Jean-Baptiste Bouis, Ibid.; A.Z. Aeskoly, “The correspondence between the Jews of Spain and Provence and the Jews of Constantinople, and the History of the Marranos of Provence” (Hebrew), Zion, 4 (1945): 102–139. Arsène Darmesteter, “Lettres des juifs d’Arles et de Constantinople, 1489,” Revue des Études Juives, 1 (1880): 119–123. Emmanuel Chabauty, Les juifs nos maîtres! (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1882), 4–15 and 46–59. Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1887), 220; Henri Desportes, Le mystère du sang chez les juifs de tous les temps (Paris: Albert Savine, 1889), 336.

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thenticity of the letters extended to the upper levels of the Catholic hierarchy. When not featured in antisemitic books or pamphlets, the letters of the Jews of Arles and Constantinople became staple elements of antisemitic articles featured in right-wing Catholic newspapers printed in the 1890s, such as La Croix du Nord, as well as works aimed at both Freemasons and Jews, such as the nationalist Paul Copin-Albancelli (1851–1939)’s 1909 Le Drame maçonnique: la conjuration juive contre le monde chrétien.66 The German-born Jesuit León Meurin (1825–1895), the archbishop of Port Louis (on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean), highlights their importance in his 1893 work La Francmaçonnerie, synagogue de Satan: The instructions that this [Jewish] prince in Constantinople outlined for the benefit of the Jews of Provence has been admirably followed until the present day. Chabauty has demonstrated that the Jews currently obey, as they did in the past, a single secret leader. This leader exists and has the same power [today] as he had in the Middle Ages and he leads [the Jews] in much the same manner.67 Although they were rapidly supplanted by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the twentieth century, the influence of the Spanish forgeries in their ‘French version’ extended well into the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, many amongst both the victorious and the defeated were prepared to blame the occult forces of ‘international Jewry’ for the bloodbath in the trenches and subsequent social upheaval. Even after the Protocols became the principal ‘proof’ of a Jewish conspiracy in antisemitic propaganda, the letters between the Jews of Arles and Constantinople continued to be presented as their precursors and, if anything, evidence of the timeless nature of the Jewish plot against Christendom. In the intro­ duction to one of the first English translations of the Protocols, the British ­journalist Victor Marsden (1866–1920), describes the letters of the Jews of Arles and Constantinople as “a fifteenth-century protocol” and cites them as evidence that “the principles and morality of these latter-day Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] are as old as the [Jewish] tribe.”68 They are also included in the 66

67 68

Danielle Delmaire, Antisémitisme et catholiques dans le Nord pendant l’affaire Dreyfus (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1991), 84; Paul Copin-Albancelli, Le Drame maçonnique: la conjuration juive contre le monde chrétien (Paris: La Renaissance française, 1909), 359–366. León Meurin, La Franc-maçonnerie, synagogue de Satan (Paris: Retaux et fils, 1893), 207–9. Victor Marsden, Protocols of the meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion (London: Britons Publishing Society, 1922), introduction.

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documentary appendix of the 1924 French translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion edited by Urbain Gohier, under the title “the Elders of Israel in the fifteenth century.” Likewise, in his L’Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs, also published in Paris that very same year, the exiled Russian aristocrat, general and convinced antisemite Alexandre Dmitrievitch Netchvolodov (1864–1938) noted the existence of both the Spanish forgeries and the Arles version. For him their authenticity was beyond doubt and they constituted precious documentary evidence of the long history of Jewish subversion of Christian socie­ ties that had, in his opinion, culminated in the Bolshevik revolution.69 References to the letters between Arles and Constantinople appear frequently in German-language works printed in the 1920s and 1930s as discontent with the terms of the Versailles treaty, political dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic, economic woes and growing nationalist sentiment pushed many Germans to focus their anger upon German Jews and blame a worldwide ‘Jewish conspiracy’ for Germany’s misfortunes. Starting with Ernest Klee’s “­Aryan Manifesto” in 1922,70 the letters are indeed referenced in various anti­ semitic works. These include works by Hans Blüher (1888–1955),71 Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch (1883–?),72 Ulrich Fleischhauer (1876–1960)73 and even field marshal Eric Ludendorff (1865–1937), in one of his works bitterly blaming Jews and Freemasons for the “stab in the back” (Dolchstoß) that he and many other Germans felt to have been responsible for the defeat of Germany in 1918.74 Once the Nazi regime was in power, the letters became an integral part of Nazi propaganda featuring in publications such as the official party journal Der S.A.Führer and even in an article entitled The Jew and Healing that was personally written in 1934 by the fanatical Nazi Karl Holz (1895–1945) in the short-lived Nazi medical periodical Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden!75 It is 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

Urbain Gohier (ed.) and Serge Nilus, Protocoles des Sages d’Israël (Paris: Urbain Gohier, 1924), 134–5; Alexandre Dmitrievitch Netchvolodov, L’Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs (Paris: Étienne Chiron, 1924), 50–1. Ernest Klee, Das arische Manifest (Leipzig: M. Ruhl, 1922), 37. Hans Blüher, Die Erhebung Israels gegen die christlichen Güter (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1931), 108. Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, Die Freimaurerei: ihr Ursprung, ihre Geheimnisse, ihr Wirken (Weimar: Alexander Duncker Verlag, 1928), 52–3 and Jüdischer Imperialismus – 3000 Jahre hebräischer Schleichwege zur Erlangung der Weltherrschaft (Berlin: Theodor Fritsch Verlag, 1937), 182–4. Ulrich Fleischhauer, Die echten Protokolle der Weisen von Zion: Sachverständigengutachten, erstattet im Auftrage des Richteramtes v in Bern (Erfurt: U. Bodung-Verlag, 1935), 101. Eric Ludendorff, Kriegshetze und Völkermorden in den letzten 150 Jahren (Munich: Volks­ warte-Verlag, 1931 though the first edition was printed in Munich in 1928), 26. Der S.A.-Führer (Munich, 1939), I, 2; Karl Holz, “Jude und Heilkunde,” Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden!, II (number 23), 1 December 1934: 1–2.

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quite possible that Ernest Klee and Karl Holz read about the letters in Chabauty’s work since, even though they accredit them to the Jews of Arles, they were aware of their Spanish origins and describe them as the “Jewish Letter of Toledo.” Beyond France and Germany, the ‘Toledan letters’ or ‘Letter from the Jews of Arles and its reply from Constantinople’ have also had an impact in various lands and have appeared in some surprisingly modern contexts. In the Iberian Peninsula itself, the forged letters were not forgotten by authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who continued to cite information found in early modern Spanish and Portuguese works. Nevertheless, their knowledge of the forgeries was, just as with German writers, largely derived from the work of Emmanuel Chabauty rather than from early modern Iberian works. The Arles versions of the letters are presented as genuine documents by authors such as the Basque nationalist Luis de Eleizalde Breñosa in his work Raza, lengua y nación vascas (1911) or Victorio Justel Santamaría in his vicious essay Bajo el yugo de la masonería judaica (1937).76 Across the Atlantic Ocean, in the United States, the antisemite Robert Edward Edmondson (1872–1959) mentions the forged letters in his 1937 pamphlet The Jewish system indicted by the documentary record.77 Similarly, they found a receptive public in both Hispanic and Lusophone South America, amongst many conservative Catholics, nationalists and fascist admirers of the Third Reich and its ideology prior to 1945. In Argentina, the letter from the Jews of Constantinople is featured in an article entitled “The discourse of a Grand Rabbi” published in the nationalist and pro-fascist newspaper Bandera Argentina in 1932.78 Five years later, the Brazilian priest José Cabral uses the letter of the “Jews from the south of France” – evidently Arles – to a supposed Jewish council (literally described as a “Sanhedrin”) based in Constantinople as evidence of the long-standing existence of a worldwide Jewish plot and of the urgent need to find a solution to the ‘Jewish question.’79 The Spanish forgeries have continued to enjoy a limited popularity in antisemitic circles even after the Holocaust and fall of Nazi Germany. A reference 76 77 78

79

Luis de Eleizalde Breñosa, Raza, lengua y nación vascas (Bilbao: Elexpuru Hermanos, 1911), 27–8; Victorio Justel Santamaría, Bajo el yugo de la masonería judaica: ensayo (Seville: Giménez y Comp., 1937), 136–7. Robert Edward Edmondson, The Jewish system indicted by the documentary record (New York: n.n., 1937), 20. Daniel Lvovich, “Trajetória de um Mito Conspirativo: Circulação e Usos dos Protocolos dos Sábios de Sião e seus Textos Epigônicos na Argentina (1923–1945),” in O anti-semitismo nas Américas: memória e história, ed. Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2007), 129. José Cabral, A questão judaica (Porto Alegre: Livraria do Globo, 1937), 84–5.

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to the letters appears in the Complot contra la Iglesia, an antisemitic tract published in 1962 under the pseudonym of Maurice Pinay but probably written by a group of ultraconservative Spanish and Latin American clergy. Translated into English in 1967 as The Plot against the Church, this vitriolic denunciation of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) as an elaborate Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to take control of the Catholic Church refers to the letters of the Jews of Arles and Constantinople, citing the work of Chabauty as its source. For its anonymous author or authors, “the aims of infiltration of the Jewish mockclergy” are “clearly laid out” in the letter of the Jews of Constantinople, thus exposing the “Jewish fifth column” in the clergy.80 Likewise, in the dying years of the Franco Regime in Spain, the Catalan monarchist and nationalist Jorge Plantada, the Marquis of Valdelomar, reproduces the letters in works printed in 1972, 1973 and 1974 that denounced what he perceives to be a Jewish and masonic infiltration of the Catholic Church after 1962.81 Even today, the forged letters still enjoy a degree of currency in some, arguably marginal, antisemitic circles. As recently as 2009, the French antisemite and nationalist polemicist Hervé Ryssen cites the letters in his book Le Miroir du judaïsme: L’Inversion accusatoire to argue that “in the Middle Ages the Jews were already learning to disguise them­selves.”82 Moreover, various far-right, neo-Nazi and white su­ prem­acist online forums and websites continue to cite the letters as evidence of the supposedly on-going Jewish ‘conspiracy’ to destroy Western ­civilization.83 8

Conclusion

For the Franciscan Friar Francisco de Torrejoncillo, writing in the late 1660s and early 1670s, the Jewish/converso plan outlined in the forged letters – to take over Spain by infiltrating its secular and ecclesiastical institutions – amounted to an attempt to establish a “soft tyranny” (suave tiranía) over Old Christian Spaniards. This somewhat misleading expression was intended less to suggest any lack of brutality in the Jewish plot but rather its secretive nature. For 80 81 82 83

Maurice Pinay, The Plot against the Church (Los Angeles: St. Anthony Press, 1967), see chapter 24. Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España: la imagen del judío, 1812–2002 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002), 459–460. Hervé Ryssen, Le miroir du judaïsme: l’inversion accusatoire (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2009), 39. See for instance [accessed 22 July 2015]; [accessed 22 July 2015] and [accessed 22 July 2015].

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Torrejoncillo, the success of the secret infiltration of Spain and Portugal by judaizing conversos was evidenced by what he considered to be the obstinacy of so many Old Christians who refused to recognise the reality of the Jewish conspiracy. In a classic piece of conspiracist rhetoric – presenting himself as the possessor of ‘the truth’ and set apart from the mindless ‘herd’ – Torrejoncillo castigates his fellow Old Christians who, “enslaved” by the secret Jews, prefer to bury their heads in the sand in spite of the abundant ‘evidence’ of the Jewish plot revealed by the Inquisition: Taking care, we would see the same happening here today, if not exactly in the same manner then by others means by which the industry and wisdom of the Jews teaches them to have control over everyone, either through bribes or through their loans. With this form of soft tyranny, they bring justice to a halt and bind the freedom of action of judges, making themselves masters of the will of others for the sake of their own selfpreservation. This is considered to be a permanent situation by the inhabitants of the kingdom (enslaved in so many ways) who do not understand that a remedy can be found and who refuse to face up to the truth and believe the confessions that so many conversos ordinarily make after their arrest [by the Inquisition] in order to better conceal the collective evilness of the rest.84 The myth of a Jewish world-conspiracy existed before the converso ‘problem’ emerged in the late-medieval Iberian Peninsula. The scope of such conspiracy theories was nevertheless limited by the absence of a document that could be presented as ‘proof’ of such a conspiracy and which could be conveniently reproduced from one work of antisemitic propaganda to another across decades and centuries. The forged letters from the Jews of Spain and the reply from the Jews of Constantinople provided the essential framework upon which the claims of early modern Spanish and Portuguese propagandists (and later modern authors writing outside of the Iberian world) could construct a coherent narrative of coordinated and systematic Jewish violence and destruction inflicted upon Christendom in general and Spain and Portugal in particular. The forged letters became the lynchpin of an antisemitic conspiracism that coalesced the key elements underpinning the fear of the secret Jew in early modern Spain and Portugal and which will be analysed in the next four chapters: the infiltration of the Catholic Church (chapter 3), Jewish medical murder 84

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos, 30.

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(chapter 4), collaboration with Muslims or Protestants (chapter 5) and, finally, the deliberate destruction of the Iberian economies (chapter 6). In his analysis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Norman Cohn expressed his belief that the Protocols were “only the most celebrated and influential in a long series of fabrications and forgeries reaching back almost to the French Revolutions.”85 Cohn acknowledged the existence of the letter of the Jews of Arles and Constantinople as well as their Spanish origins – having read about them in Chabauty’s 1882 book – but he dismissed their historical importance. Unaware of their origins in the bitter propaganda battle over the statutes of limpieza de sangre in sixteenth-century Spain, Cohn believed them to be of interest only to the “literary historian” and claimed that “what is certain is that they were meant as a joke.”86 Such an assessment unfortunately could not be further from the terrible truth. The forged letters between the Jews Spain and Constantinople were certainly considered by some writers in early modern Spain, such as Julián de Medrano, to be humourous fictions and by some, like Francisco de Quevedo, as documents with a questionable historical authenticity. This does not detract, however, from the fact that the letters served as a polemical weapon promoting a clearly antisemitic objective. They were promoted in works printed with the sanction of the crown and church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and seemingly accepted as genuine documents and proof of the worldwide Jewish plot by a significant number of Spaniards and Portuguese, especially members of the clergy and inquisitors. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a warrant for genocide in twentiethcentury Europe and although the forged letters from Spain were never officially endorsed by the Spanish or Portuguese crowns, they constituted a powerful polemical weapon for those extreme voices in the early modern Iberian world calling for ethnic cleansing. The extreme fears that they played upon meant that the letters became part of the polemical rhetoric supporting widespread suspicion and hatred of conversos, the racial discrimination of the statutes of limpieza de sangre and the continued campaign of anti-converso repression waged by the Inquisition until the middle of the eighteenth century. Ultimately, the most extreme antisemitic propagandists in seventeenth-century Spain and Portugal, Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo, sought to convert the letters into a warrant for the ‘final solution’ to the ‘problem’ of judaizing that they actively advocated but which was never adopted by the crown. This ‘solution’ was not genocide or extermination but rather a 85 86

Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 29. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 50–52.

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wholesale expulsion of any Spaniard with ‘Jewish blood’ akin to that decreed against the moriscos of Spain in 1609. It was nonetheless a ‘final solution’ that was never implemented in the case of the conversos because, in contrast to the moriscos, the intermingling of the converso and Old Christian populations meant that in practice, as the modern historian Juan Ignacio Pulido has pointed out, it was impossible to draw a line between them.87 87

Juan Ignacio Pulido, “The Unexecuted Plans for the Eradication of Jewish Heresy in the Hispanic Monarchy and the Example of the Moriscos: The Thwarted Expulsion of the Judeoconversos,” in The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2014), 179–196.

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“Seeking to Build a Synagogue within the Church of God”: the Alleged Converso Plot to Infiltrate and Destroy the Catholic Church  … turn your sons into clergymen and theologians, so that they may destroy their churches.

Forged Letter of the Jews of Constantinople to those of Spain, Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, Sylua responsorum iuris: in duos libros diuisa (Madrid, 1614)

⸪ The forged letters supposedly exchanged by the Jews of Spain and Constantinople that circulated in anti-converso propaganda reinforced a pre-existing belief in the malign intentions and designs of conversos seeking to climb up the hierarchical ladder in Spanish and Portuguese society. Acute fears of the infiltration of secular and ecclesiastical institutions by judaizing conversos seeking to injure Old Christians are already explicitly articulated in the discriminatory statutes of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) that emerged in the previous century. The sentencia-estatuto (municipal statute) promulgated in 1449, during the revolt of the Old Christians of Toledo against Juan II of Castile and his favourite Álvaro de Luna, sought to legitimate the exclusion of “the conversos descended from the perverse lineage of the Jews” by pointing to their supposedly nefarious designs: Since by reason of the heresies and other offences, insults, seditions and crimes committed and perpetrated by them up to this day … they should be had and held, as the law has and holds them, as infamous, unable, incapable and unworthy to hold any office and public or private benefice in the said city of Toledo and in its land, territory and jurisdiction, through which they might have lordship over Christians who are old believers [sic] in the holy Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and thereby inflict harm and injury upon them…1 1 John Edwards, The Jews in Western Europe 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester University

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_005

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The words of the sentencia-estatuto of 1449 leave little room to doubt that its authors believed in the existence of a coordinated plot to subvert the church and Catholic society from within. One of the ideologues of the rebellion, the bachiller Marcos García de Mora, composed a public proclamation addressed to the Pope, King Juan II and the whole kingdom in which he blames the king’s favourite Álvaro de Luna and a cabal of “baptized Jews” who had risen in the royal administration for the civil strife afflicting the kingdom. Fernán Díaz de Toledo, a court official (relator) appointed by the crown, was the object of particular hatred and is consistently referred to in the document with the Jewish name of Moses Hamomo. The author justifies the murder of various conversos at the start of the uprising by asserting that, with the complicity of the “tyrant” Álvaro de Luna, the conversos plotted to take over Toledo and “kill the Old Christians” in order to seize their possessions, judaize freely and subvert the church. Amongst the conversos, the bachiller warns, are some judaizing priests who stole consecrated hosts, and he also rails against those converso priests who “yesterday taught in synagogues and today sing in churches” and “under the appearance and name of Christians are accustomed to inflict much harm and injuries upon true Christians.”2 The controversial adoption by numerous Spanish and Portuguese university colleges and ecclesiastical institutions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the discriminatory statutes of limpieza de sangre barring the admission of those ‘tainted’ by Jewish ancestry has been the object of considerable academic study.3 This chapter does not intend to re-examine the history of the statutes or the acrimonious discussions that they generated amongst the Catholic clergy. It focuses instead on the notion that there existed an organised and secret plot by Jews to infiltrate the Spanish and Portuguese church and destroy Catholicism from within. In the words of a seventeenth-century notary of the Spanish Inquisition and apologist for the statutes of limpieza de sangre, the aim of this conspiracy was nothing less than to “build a synagogue within the church of God, along with all of its Jewish superstitions and ceremonies.”4 Press, 1994), 100–1. The translation into English is that of John Edwards, with only a few stylistic alterations on my part. 2 Eloy Benito Ruano, “El memorial contra los conversos del bachiller Marcos García de Mora,” Sefarad, 17 (1957): 314–351. 3 To name but a few of these studies see E. Benito Ruano, Los orígenes del problema converso (Madrid, 2001); Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XVI y XVII (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010) and Juan Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española. El debate de los estatutos de limpieza (siglos XV–XVII) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011). 4 Bartolomé Ximenes Paton, Discurso en favor del santo y loable estatuto de la limpieza (Granada: Imprenta de Andres de Santiago Palomino, 1638), fol. 4r.

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This chapter argues that the plot against the Iberian church is consistently presented in anti-converso propaganda as coming in two distinct stages. The first phase of the conspiracy supposedly involves the infiltration of judaizers within the ecclesiastical establishment itself. Antisemitic authors claimed that there existed a secret campaign by judaizing conversos to enter into the church by becoming ordained priests, monks and nuns. Aside from entering the church, judaizing conversos are also accused of seeking to create an ever-greater number of judaizers. This growth in the number of judaizers, it is claimed, would be achieved through a deliberate policy of intermarriage with Old Christians and the mixing of Jewish and Christian ‘blood’ to ‘infect’ the wider Christian population or, less commonly, by endeavouring to convert Old Christians to Judaism. The second stage of the plot involves an organised campaign of religious sacrilege executed by means of the desecration of consecrated hosts and Christian sacred imagery. Such acts would, it was believed by Christian polemicists, provoke God’s anger and bring His fearful wrath down upon the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies as well as their faithful Christian subjects. 1

The Insidious Converso Threat to the Church

Anti-converso propaganda produced in the early modern Iberian world consistently presents the threat of converso infiltration within the church as both severe and immediate. As the treatise of the Bachiller Marcos García de Mora makes clear, such fears emerged within the first generations following the mass conversions. They continued to subsist, unabated, for the following three centuries. Even though the statutes of limpieza de sangre were intended to ease anxieties of a secret Jewish infiltration of the church by preventing such an occurrence, they actually appear to have had the opposite effect by exacerbating such fears. The controversy surrounding their introduction caused their defenders to insist upon the reality of the conspiracy. It is no coincidence that the forged letters of the Jews of Spain and Constantinople appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the adoption of discriminatory statutes by the Cathedral chapter of Toledo. As converso churchmen were arrested by the Inquisition and (rightfully or wrongfully) convicted of crypto-Judaism, anti-converso polemicists sought to capitalize on the scandal, revulsion and horror provoked by the detection of instances of heresy within the church. These cases, presented as exemplary stories, feature prominently in works produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1570s, Bishop Diego de Simancas defended the validity of the statutes of limpieza de sangre adopted by the chapter of the Cathedral

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of Toledo by claiming that a converso cleric had clandestinely infiltrated the monastery of San Jerónimo of Toledo and persuaded his peers to elect him to be their leader. The “pseudo-Christian Jew,” Simancas asserts, observed “Jewish superstitions and the ceremonies of the old [Mosaic] law with great secrecy” until he was arrested by the Inquisition and publicly burned. Even though Simancas does not mention a name, he appears to be referring to the arrest, trial and execution of Fray García de Zapata, prior of the Hieronimite monastery of Santa Maria de la Sisla in Toledo.5 Another alarming example offered by Simancas to his readers is that of the alleged takeover by conversos of a religious order in Murcia. In this case, it was claimed that a judaizing converso who had become the prior of a religious house “preached the Law of Christ with great fervour but by night went out with another Jew, whom he had made porter of his college, to teach Jews the Law of Moses in a private house.” As in the case of the Hieronimites of Toledo, Simancas claims that only the intervention of the Inquisition had ended the activities of this particular group of Murcian crypto-Jews.6 The image of judaizing priests and monks secretly undermining the church became an even more important part of the anti-converso narrative in the early seventeenth century. Vicente da Costa Mattos devotes a significant portion of his vitriolic anti-converso polemic to the issue of judaizing converso priests. The conversos, he informs his readers, seek “with all their strength” to place judaizers within the church and especially as ordained priests, friars and other “guardians of souls” in order to propagate “their ceremonies” not only amongst the conversos but also amongst Old Christians. They thus “disturb the peace and tranquillity of the church” by publicly practicing simony as well as by daring to desecrate consecrated hosts and sacred images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and Saints. To support his claims, Costa Mattos presents the example of an unnamed “boy” (moço) from Portugal, whose mother was burned by the Portuguese Inquisition and whose siblings were forced to abjure their heresies by the inquisitors, and forced to wear penitential sambenitos, “in one of the past autos.” Like his siblings, the boy was also a convicted judaizer condemned to wear a sambenito. Costa Mattos asserts that, after fleeing to Spain, the boy deliberately joined an unnamed religious order and, despite his past and origins, eventually became an ordained priest. Fortunately, in Costa Mattos’s opinion, the judaizer died mysteriously on the morning of the day in which he was to 5 On Fray García de Zapata, see Stefania Pastore, “Nascita e fortuna di una leggenda antigiudaica: fray García de Zapata e gli inizi dell’Inquisizione di Toledo,” in Le Inquisizioni cristiane e gli ebrei (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2003), 65–104. 6 Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1575), 66–8.

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celebrate (and desecrate) his first Mass, a miracle that the Portuguese author attributes to God’s beneficence. The exemplary character of this miracle story resides in its demonstration that whilst a judaizing converso priest could fool men, he could never deceive God.7 Without identifying either the individual or the institution concerned, Francisco de Torrejoncillo relates the bizarre story of a converso who is supposed to have hypocritically affected modesty. The secret judaizer claimed not to seek promotion within the church when it was in fact his most earnest desire. Once this false modesty had convinced his Old Christian colleagues to appoint him to a position of power he openly and publicly gloated that he was “of the Jewish race” and would “commit acts of insolence.” This absurd tale – whose credibility is undermined by the fact that such an extraordinary public admittance of judaizing would have drawn a swift inquisitorial response – demonstrates the irrationality that accompanied the fear of a ‘Jewish plot’ to take over the Catholic Church from within.8 One sensational case, however, came to epitomize above all others the dangerousness of the Jewish plot for the church for anti-converso writers: the arrest, trial and execution of António Homem in 1624. The scion of wealthy converso parents, António Homem studied at the University of Coimbra and eventually rose up the academic/ecclesiastical career ladder to become a canon of the cathedral of Coimbra, professor of Canon Law and deacon of the university. In 1619 António Homem and a large number of conversos in Coimbra were arrested and the inquisitorial investigations ultimately led to the arrest of a staggering 131 men and women, amongst whom were 4 canons of Coimbra cathedral and 52 nuns from 4 different convents. Homem himself was accused of running a covert Jewish movement in Coimbra and indicted on the twin charges of being a judaizer and a “sodomite.” Many of those arrested were publicly sentenced at autos de fe held in 1621 and 1623 but the sixty-year-old Homem, refusing to confess, was found guilty, garrotted and burned at the stake on 5 May 1624.9 7 Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), fols. 155v–157r. 8 Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 189–190. 9 For the trial of António Homem see A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo no 15,421. See also Antonio José Teixeira, António Homem e a Inquisição (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1895) and the more recent study of João Manuel Andrade, Confraria De S. Diogo. Judeus secretos na Coimbra do séc. XVII (Lisbon: Nova Arrancada, 1999), which seems to assume that the crypto-Jews arrested in Coimbra were guilty of all the crimes imputed to them by the inquisitors.

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As is so often the case with inquisitorial investigations, the truth behind the allegations is difficult to establish. Terrified prisoners turned on one another, confessions were extracted under torture and leading questions encouraged the accused to tell the inquisitors what they wished to hear. Moreover, acute personal enmities between Homem and some of his Old Christian colleagues in Coimbra also appear to have played a part in this sad affair. It is, of course, entirely possible that António Homem was indeed the leader of a group of crypto-Jews in Coimbra but the affair rapidly acquired a significance that extended beyond the mere prosecution and conviction of a group of alleged judaizers. The repercussions of the affair in Portugal and Spain were enormous. This sensational case included the highest number of senior churchmen ever to have been convicted of judaizing, and tarnished the names of the cathedral and university of Coimbra as well as various convents in the area. The house of António Homem was demolished and a memorial to his infamy constructed. The speed with which António Homem came to personify the Jewish plot against the church in anti-converso propaganda is striking. Even before his gruesome death, António Homem had become a cause célèbre for antisemitic polemicists. Resorting to overblown rhetorical bombast, Vicente da Costa Mattos describes the “crimes” committed in Coimbra as “monstrous and worthy of marvel” and as “stupendous abominations” unequalled since the death of Christ.10 The preacher who addressed the crowd that gathered to observe the auto de fe at which Homem was sentenced and executed emphasised the status of the prisoners sentenced in the early 1620s and the alarming extent to which judaizers had infiltrated the church establishment: A few years ago, only low-class Jews (sic) were sentenced in autos de fe. Observe now, those who have featured in recent autos de fe. In this one are present many churchmen, members of religious orders, graduates, university bachelors, holders of doctorates and professors related to noble families, who are only half, a quarter or an eighth descended from conversos and who have confessed and been convicted of judaizing.11 The official sentence pronounced against Homem presents him as the leader of a circle of judaizers in Coimbra who had acquired the status of a Jewish “high priest.” It claims that Homem enjoyed unparalleled power over his disciples, who in return treated his pronouncements on matters of faith as “infallible” and that his homosexual encounters desecrated his office. This image of 10 11

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 50r– 50v. Antonio José Teixeira, António Homem e a Inquisição, 286.

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Homem was turned to derision by the Portuguese Franciscan Fray João de Ceita (and later Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo) as symptomatic of the foolish arrogance and perversity that underlay the Jewish plot to subvert the church.12 Anti-converso sermons delivered at inquisitorial autos de fe frequently refer to the danger of judaizing within the church. Beyond his attack on António Homem, Fray João de Ceita also took aim at all conversos who entered into the clergy and religious orders, claiming that their true motivations were no secret: to mock Christ and the sacraments. The popularity of his sermon ensured that it was subsequently immortalised in both Spanish and Portuguese printed versions. For his colleague Fray Manuel Rebello, the prospect of Judaizing converso priests standing at the altar was “an abomination greater than all other abominations.”13 Unsurprisingly, the fear of secret Jews masquerading as ordained priests produced appeals to the ecclesiastical authorities to take urgent measures to prevent the infiltration of the church by secret judaizers. This, it was argued, could be achieved by bolstering support for the proper implementation and extension of statutes of limpieza de sangre and thus effectively bar conversos from entering into the clergy. In a sermon that he delivered at an auto de fe held in Évora on 1 April 1629, the Franciscan Fray Manuel dos Anjos makes an impassioned plea in this respect: I beg, with the greatest of humility, the church prelates not to admit them into [holy] orders for how can it be suffered that the Catholic Church, the pure and immaculate bride, should be wedded by its prelates to a dirty Jew of infected origins. I beg the prelates of the religious orders not to admit [conversos] into them since how can they ever vanquish and triumph over the outside enemies [of the church] with so many and such great enemies within.14

12 13

14

João de Ceita Sermão da fee pregado em o acto, que o Sancto Tribunal de Evora fez em a mesma cidade no anno de 1624 a 14 de Julho (Évora: Lourenço Crasbeeck, 1624), fols. 13v– 14r; Cited in Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 103. João de Ceita, Sermão da fee pregado em o acto, que o Sancto Tribunal de Evora fez em a mesma cidade no anno de 1624 a 14 de Julho, fol. 19v; Manuel Rebello, Sermão que pregou o Padre Mestre Fr. Manoel Rebello no auto da fé celebrado nesta cidade de Lisboa, em cinco de Setembro deste anno de seiscentos & trinta & oito (Lisbon: Paulo Craesbeek, 1638), fols. 8v–9r. Manuel dos Anjos, Sermaõ que pregou o Bispo de Fez D. Fr. Manoel dos Anjos no auto da fee que se celebrou na praça da cidade de Evora o primeiro de Abril de 1629. na quinta dominga de Quaresma (Évora: Manoel Carvalho, 1629), fol. 22v.

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Over four decades later, these words were considered to be relevant by Francisco de Torrejoncillo, who saw fit to copy them verbatim (albeit without proper referencing) to form the concluding plea of his Centinela contra Judíos.15 Preachers and polemicists regaled their listeners and readers with horrifying tales of the outrages supposedly perpetuated by judaizers within the church beyond those of António Homem and his ‘accomplices.’ Vicente da Costa Mattos, for instance, reminds his reader that one converso burned at the stake in Lisbon “a little while ago” had been a knight of the Order of Santiago, a prestigious military order whose members were expected to pass a genealogical investigation prior to admittance.16 Interestingly, anxieties about the Jewish infiltration of the church cast a pall of suspicion even upon its female members. In their report to the crown, the Portuguese churchmen gathered at the Council of Tomar in 1629 noted the arrest of many nuns of converso origin and perceived this to be further proof of the converso conspiracy. They accused the conversos of deliberately placing daughters, whom they had brought up to be judaizers, in convents so that they could “offend Christ and commit sacrileges in the holiest of places.”17 Without citing a source, but recalling a story that he had probably heard in his native Extremadura, Francisco de Torrejoncillo apprises his readers of cases supposed to have occurred in the town of Villa Viçosa, just over the border in Portugal, and in Alconchel in Castile. According to the friar, some “devout Jewesses” who pretended to be beatas (lay women who sought to lead a pious life) waged a secretive campaign of desecration, offering local friars preserves in which they had mixed some of their excrement as well as wine mixed with urine and donating large candles that they had previously inserted into their “filthy body parts” to be used in church services.18 2

Perceiving Judaism as a Militant and Missionary Faith

In stark contrast to Christianity or Islam, Judaism did not develop into a proselytizing religion that actively sought to convert Gentiles to Judaism even though it did permit the formal conversion of Gentiles who desired it. Historians still debate the existence of Jewish proselytizing during the first two 15 16 17 18

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 229–230. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 89r– 89v. Martin A. Cohen, The Canonization of a Myth. Portugal’s “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002), 45. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 151–2.

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centuries of the Common Era but any proselytizing (if it actually took place) came to an end with the rise of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and the explicit prohibition on Jewish proselytizing in CE 407. In the medieval period, the status of Jews as a minority under Christian and Muslim rule in Europe and the Mediterranean (where Christian and Muslim religious authorities strictly forbade proselytising by minorities) was added to existing rabbinical condemnation of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles as a further deterrent.19 In the early modern Iberian world, however, the perceived threat of Jewish proselytising was not limited to the proselytising of judaizing conversos or Sephardic Jews amongst ‘lapsed’ conversos. It also revolved around the belief that Old Christians were at risk of being turned into Jews. Judaism, or at least the crypto-judaizing of the conversos, is presented in the works of antisemitic polemicists as well as sermons denouncing judaizing as an active religious force seeking to spread throughout Spanish and Portuguese society and undermine Christianity. This ‘spread’ of Judaism, often compared to that of a disease infecting society and the body politic, was perceived to take place in two distinct manners. The first through intermarriage and the consequent mixing of the ‘bloods’ of Old and New Christians and the second was as a result of efforts by Jewish communities located outside the Iberian Peninsula to despatch proselytizers into the Iberian World. The fear that Judaism was secretly spreading throughout the early modern Iberian world as a result of intermarriage is closely linked to the reasoning that underpinned the statutes of limpieza de sangre. As in the rest of early modern Europe, Spaniards and Portuguese accepted the Hippocratic / Galenic medical theory that men and women both produced seed (sperma) necessary for the conception of a child and that the seed of each parent was derived from their distilled blood. Consequently, a child inherited physical and behavioural characteristics that would be passed on by parents to their offspring through their ‘blood’ (sangre). The milk of a mother or wet-nurse was similarly understood to be a blood-product capable of transmitting a woman’s traits to a nursing child. Religious beliefs could, it followed, be transmitted from parents to children in much the same manner as physical traits such as skin or hair colour. A number of apologists for the statutes of limpieza de sangre draw comparisons between the hereditary nature of ‘Jewishness’ and the skin colour of those 19

See Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion. Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 38–90; Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) as well as Claude Orrieux and Edouard Will, Prosélytisme juif? Histoire d’une erreur (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1992).

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descended from Africans. The Spanish historian Fray Prudencio de Sandoval uses exactly this comparison in 1606 to highlight the hereditability of ‘Jewishness,’ its perennial malignancy and the danger that it represents to society: … who can deny that there remains and persists in the descendants of the Jews an evil inclination from their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding? This is just like with the negroes, who cannot free themselves from the black colour [of their skin]. Even if the latter father children with white women a thousand times, these children are born with the dark colour of their fathers. Thus, it is not sufficient for a Jew to be three parts [descended] from the nobility or Old Christians since even being only one part of the raza [of the Jews] infects and corrupts him so that all his deeds are those of Jews and extremely damaging for the community.20 The harmful consequences of intermarriage between Old Christians and conversos, namely the birth of children with ‘tainted’ ancestry and a propensity to judaize, are a recurrent theme in the works of antisemitic polemicists and preachers who, like Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, insisted that it represented a serious threat to Catholicism. In a passionate sermon delivered during an inquisitorial auto de fe held in 1624, the firebrand Portuguese preacher João de Ceita follows a similar line of thought, railing against the malign potency of ‘Jewish blood.’ ... in order for these [conversos] to be born enemies of Christ by ancestry and blood, it is not necessary that both parents should be practising Jews. It seems that only one is enough, such is the corruption of this evil people. It is not even necessary that this should be the father as the mother alone is sufficient. She does not even have to be a full-blooded [Jewess]: one-half Jewish ancestry is sufficient. Not even that much is required, as a quarter or even less of Jewish ancestry is sufficient. In our times, only one eighth [of Jewish ancestry] is enough. God help me, that such a small cause should have such a potent effect!21 In another sermon preached during an auto de fe celebrated in Lisbon only two months before, Ceita’s colleague, Fray António de Sousa, is just as explicit. The 20 21

Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Segunda parte de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos Quinto (Valladolid: Sebastian de Cañas, 1606), 569. João de Ceita, Sermão da fee pregado em o acto, que o Sancto Tribunal de Evora fez em a mesma cidade no anno de 1624 a 14 de Julho, fol. 4r.

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preacher bemoans the ‘fact’ that ‘people of quality’ had become corrupted by “cross-breeding with the perverse Jews” so that individuals, including members of the clergy and highly educated individuals with very little “Jewish blood” were accused (and sometimes accused themselves) of abandoning the Christian faith and espousing Judaism.22 The extreme rhetoric of Prudencio de Sandoval, João de Ceita and António de Sousa should not come as a surprise as it was formulated in the context of a vigorous controversy that broke out at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with critics of racialism over the utility of statutes of limpieza.23 Nonetheless, such anti-converso rhetoric proved to be enduring. Later in the middle of the seventeenth century, in Spain, the bishop of Tarazona and the influential churchman Diego de Castejón y Fonseca perpetuated this idea, warning his readers that the “heresy of the apostates” was akin to a “venom that we can receive from our ancestors,” transmitted from generation to generation through the bodily humours as a result of a mésalliance with a converso family.24 By the seventeenth century, intermarriage between conversos and Old Christians had become a subject of considerable controversy in Portugal and it is frequently presented as an integral part of the Jewish plot against Spain and Portugal. Portuguese Inquisitor General Fernão Martins Mascarenhas warned King Philip IV in 1622 that converso men deliberately married Old Christian women in order to father large numbers of mixed children and further the spread of Judaism.25 Six years later, in an official letter from the Portuguese Inquisition to the King, the monarch was warned that the supposedly exponential growth of the converso population threatened the orthodoxy of Portuguese Catholicism and was the calculated result of their “mixing with Old Christians.” Moreover, the inquisitors assert that “experience has shown that the marriages of New and Old Christians aggravate the illness instead of curing it. For the offspring turn out Jews even though the amount of this [Jewish] blood running in their veins is in many cases too negligible to quantify.”26 22

23 24 25 26

Fray António de Sousa, Sermam Qve o Padre Mestre Frei Antonio de Sovsa da Ordem dos Pregadores, Deputado do S. Officio da Inquisição desta Cidade de Lisboa pregou no Auto da Fè. Que se celebrou na mesma Cidade, Domingo cinco de Mayo do Anno de 1624 (Lisbon: Geraldo da Vinha, 1624), fol. 13r. See H. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London: The Folio Society, 1998), 236–250. Diego de Castejón y Fonseca, Primacía de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo, su origen, sus medras y sus progresos (Madrid: Diego Diaz de la Carrera, 1645), vol. 2, 1029–1030. António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory. The Portuguese Inquisition and its New Christians 1536–1765, ed. and tr. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon (Leiden:. E.J. Brill 2001), 131–3. J. Lúcio de Azevedo História dos cristãos novos portugueses (Lisbon: Teixeira, 1921), 472–3.

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The lobbying of Portuguese inquisitors at the royal court for greater restrictions on intermarriage was echoed in the public writings of anti-converso polemicists. In his manuscript work Execración contra los Judíos (1633), the poet and writer Francisco de Quevedo paints a terrifying picture of the consequences of intermarriage between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Christians. For Quevedo, “Jewish blood” is a malign and unstoppable force that will always overwhelm the pure blood of the ‘Old Christian’ population: A single drop of Jewish blood causes disorders against [the blood] of Jesus Christ (…). Time does not diminish its evilness. It always corrupts good blood with which it mixes and, for this reason, it seeks it out. It never ameliorates when mixed with good blood and for this reason does not fear it.27 Quevedo’s claims are fascinating in the manner that he bizarrely personifies “Jewish blood,” presenting it as a quasi-sentient force that calculatingly seeks to merge with Old Christian blood and corrupt it. “Jewish blood” retains it destructive potency no matter how ‘diluted’ it is or how many generations separate an individual from his or her Jewish forebear(s). The logical result of such intermarriage will be an ever-expanding number of men and women ‘tainted’ by ‘Jewish blood’ and at risk of judaizing. The polemicists Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo both explicitly state in their printed works that Jews – and therefore judaizing conversos – are “born enemies of Christians (i.e. Old Christians).” Costa Mattos repeatedly hammers the point home for his readers in the Breve Discurso but Torrejoncillo goes even further in his Centinela contra Judíos. Not content with only citing Ceita’s sermon, Torrejoncillo emphasizes the menace of contamination by converso blood and how it can ‘turn’ any individual with the even the slightest converso ancestry into a dangerous judaizer: [Jews] are produced from birth almost as if it were an original sin to be an enemy of the Christians, of Christ and His Divine Law. There is no need for them to be born of a Jewish father or mother, only one is enough and it is not important if it is not the father. The mother by herself is sufficient, even if she is not herself wholly a Jew since a half, a quarter or even an eighth part is all that is required. In our times, the Holy Inquisition has uncovered judaizers even within twenty-one degrees of consanguinity. 27

Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Santiago Fernández Mosquera (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1996), 60.

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To illustrate and buttress his point, Torrejoncillo regales his readers with a story he had heard from “some persons worthy of credit” about a foundling girl of unknown parentage who was abandoned as a new-born in the Portuguese town of Marvão and raised by a distinguished Old Christian family. As a teenager, she was allegedly surprised whilst in the act of scourging an image of Christ. This spontaneous “wicked deed,” Torrejoncillo concludes, was clear proof of her Jewish “bloodline and nature.”28 The vehemence of the claims of Portuguese churchmen can be explained by the fact that they were part of a proactive attempt by the Portuguese Inquisition to persuade the crown to prohibit or at least severely penalise mixed marriages. It was also part a wider debate. By putting an end to the toleration of Judaism in their respective realms at the end of the fifteenth century, the rulers of Spain and Portugal had hoped that the converso population would be assimilated through intermarriage. In 1498, King Manuel of Portugal went as far as to seek to promote enforced exogamy by passing an edict prohibiting Portuguese conversos from marrying other conversos. In the seventeenth century, the assimilationist position was still defended by men like the famous Jesuit António Vieira, who insisted in a 1646 tract addressed to the King that intermarriage would lead to the complete assimilation of the conversos and the extinction of Judaism in Portugal. Vieira was far from the only critic of this proto-racialism and even an apologist for the statutes of limpieza de sangre such as the Spanish Bartolomé Ximé­nez Patón, a notary of the Inquisition, conceded that intermarriage with Old Christian spouses could help conversos become sincere Christians.29 The voices of what could be termed ‘matrimonial assimilationists’ were nevertheless fiercely contested by those of the segregationist conspiracists. The latter also lobbied the crown in Portugal to introduce more wide-ranging segregationist restrictions that went beyond the adoption of statutes of limpieza by various religious institutions. In 1616, the Habsburg monarchy promulgated an edict in Portugal that officially sought to protect the status and reputation of the nobility by ordering nobles not to marry their children to the sons and daughters of rich but unworthy families unless they had received an authorization to do so from the crown itself. Wealthy converso merchants appear to have been the main targets of this edict. The 1616 edict was rescinded by order of the Count-Duke of Olivares in 1628 as part of his strategy to cultivate the goodwill 28 29

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 192. António Vieira, Obras escolhidas, ed. ‪António Sérgio‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‪and Hernâni Cidade‬(Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa-Editora, 1951), vol. 4, 61; Bartolomé Ximénez Patón, Discurso en favor del santo y loable estatuto de la limpieza (Granada: Imprenta de Andres de Santiago Palomino, 1638), fols. 8r–8v.

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of wealthy converso merchants but apparently re-implemented in 1633.30 Acting from a belief that the conversos systematically sought to secure matches with Old Christian noble families by offering attractively large dowries to their daughters, opponents of intermarriage strove to persuade the crown to mandate limits upon the seize of such dowries and to threaten Old Christian aristocrats with the loss of any public office or even of their status as titled nobility. Support for such restrictions was voiced during the church council held at Tomar in 1629 and, after Portugal regained its independence in 1640, by representatives of the aristocracy at parliaments held in 1641, 1653 and 1668. Eventually, the anti-converso campaign did culminate in a ban on mixed marriages decreed by the regent Prince Pedro of Portugal in June 1671. The prince regent’s decision was, without doubt, a response to mounting pressure from the population and parts of the ecclesiastical establishment to take action against judaizing conversos following the uproar caused by the case of host desecration in Odivelas, which is discussed below. It provoked yet another pamphlet in defence of mixed marriages by António Vieira although the extent to which this edict was actively enforced, like so many segregationist edicts promulgated against minorities by the crown during the medieval period, is unclear.31 Although opponents of intermarriage were occasionally successful, their victories were apparently relatively short-lived or ineffective. 3

The Spectre of the Jewish Dogmatizadores

It is not possible to fully appreciate the level of the threat that crypto-Judaism was perceived to pose to the existence of the Catholic Church without also analysing the fears that existed over the potential ‘contamination’ of the church by ‘Jewish blood.’ To a lesser extent, however, the ‘threat’ was also understood by some early modern Iberian theologians to emanate from Jewish attempts to proselytise within the Iberian world, targeting not only ‘lapsed’ conversos but even Old Christians. The existence of Jewish proselytising amongst gentiles during the first centuries of the Common Era is, as we have seen above, still hotly debated by modern historians. Even though Judaism was not a ‘missionary faith’ like 30

31

See Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, ‪Preconceito racial em Portugal e Brasil Colônia: os cristãosnovos e o mito da pureza de sangue‬ (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005), 112 and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Injurias a Cristo: Religión, política y antijudaísmo en el siglo XVII (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2002), 86–105; J. Lúcio de Azevedo História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 216. António Vieira, “Papel a favor dos Cristãos-Novos,” Obras escolhidas, vol. 4.

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Christianity or Islam, Saint Jerome as well as later medieval and early modern theologians like Nicholas of Lyra, Denis the Carthusian and the Capuchin Frans Titelmans interpreted Matthew 23:15 as concrete evidence to sustain the belief that Judaism was indeed a proselytising faith which sought out Gentile converts.32 Iberian authors were aware of this passage but do not appear to have seen it as relevant to their time. Jerónimo de la Cruz, the author of a 1637 work that manages to be both a defence of the statutes of limpieza de sangre and also a call for their reform, bluntly criticises such an interpretation of ­Matthew 23 as an “imprudent assumption.”33 In an Iberian context, the notion of active Jewish proselytising was nevertheless lent credence by a series of laws enacted by the Visigothic councils of Toledo in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. The councils held in 589, 612 and 633 provide evidence of acute fears that Jews would convert (and circumcise) Christians and marry Christian women. These potential converts to Judaism included not only ex-Jews (converts to Christianity in danger of relapsing) but also those Christians over whom Jews enjoyed a degree of power and influence, particularly slaves and concubines.34 In the thirteenth century, King Alfonso X reiterated the ban on Jewish proselytising in his Siete Partidas, the king closely associating it in his legal compendium with the offence of blasphemy against the Christian faith.35 The Inquisition and Spanish/Portuguese authorities were well aware of the existence of a flow of conversos from Sephardic communities back into the Iberian Peninsula. Some ex-conversos, disillusioned by the normative Judaism that they experienced in those communities, spontaneously sought out the Inquisition, voluntarily confessed their offences and requested to be re-admitted into the Catholic fold. The phenomenon of ex-conversos returning to the “lands of idolatry” in the Iberian Peninsula and (re)converting to Catholicism was 32 33 34

35

Matthew 23:15: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” Jerónimo de la Cruz, Defensa de los estatvtos y noblezas españolas: destierro de los abvsos, y rigores de los informantes (Zaragoza: Hospital Real, y General de nuestra Señora de Gracia, 1637), 80–1. There is now a sizeable literature on the subject of the anti-Jewish laws in Visigothic Spain. See, for instance, R. Hernández, “La España visigoda frente al problema de los judíos,” La Ciencia Tomista, 99 (1967): 627–685; N. Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain. Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994); R. González-Salinero, Las conversiones forzosas de los judíos en el reino visigodo (Rome: CSIC, 2000) and A.P. Bronisch, Die Judengesetzgebung im katholischen Westgotenreich von Toledo (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005). Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los judíos” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 63–4.

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commented on with alarm in the 1620s by the scholar Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–1693). It was deemed to be serious enough by the ruling body (Mahamad) of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, which publicly sought to address the problem. In 1644, the Mahamad decreed that any Jews known to have engaged in “idolatry” and temporarily abandoned Judaism whilst in the Iberian Peninsula would, upon their return to Amsterdam, be forced to acknowledge their errors before the assembled community and banned from reading from the Torah in the synagogue for a period of four years.36 Many others, however, clandestinely re-entered the Iberian Peninsula for pragmatic reasons, especially to further their commercial endeavours, despite the risk of inquisitorial arrest. They often subsequently returned to their communities in northern Europe, Italy or even further afield.37 Recent research by David Graizbord seems to indicate that the second category, those whose motives were commercial, constituted the significant majority of such individuals. In a search of inquisitorial records between 1609 and 1678 he has found evidence of at least 111 individuals whose return to the Iberian Peninsula, usually via the land border with France, was driven by a desire to conduct business. Graizbord has only been able to identify 27 individual conversos whose return was caused by a rejection of normative Judaism and who intended to settle permanently in the Iberian Peninsula as Catholics.38 Some conversos arrested by the Inquisition claimed during their interrogation that they had received religious instruction from Jewish travellers who illegally entered the Iberian Peninsula or men who deliberately dissembled by falsely claiming that they wished to convert to Christianity. In 1612, for example, María López told the inquisitors of Seville that she had been taught “Jewish rites and prayers” at the age of ten by an unnamed “man of the Portuguese Nation who had come from Constantinople.”39 Later, a Portuguese converso turned informer of the Inquisition named Esteban Ares de Fonseca claimed to have been circumcised by a Jew named Isaac Farque, who travelled under the alias of Antonio de Aguiar. Farque/Aguiar allegedly officiated as a circumciser (mohel) amongst the converso families in Spain and was “paid a great deal of 36 37

38 39

Natalia Muchnik, “Du judaïsme au catholicisme: les aléas de la foi au XVII e siècle,” Revue historique, 623, (2002/3): 571–609. Yosef Kaplan, “The Travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Lands of Idolatry’ (1644–1724),” in Jews and Conversos, ed. Y. Kaplan (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1985), 197– 224; Isabel M.R. Mendes Drumond Braga, “Uma Estranha Diáspora Rumo a Portugal: Judeus e Cristãos-Novos reduzidos à Fé Católica no século XVII,” Sefarad, 62 (2002): 259–274. David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Pres, 2004), 77–8. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 2,075, exp. 22, fol. 15r.

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money” for his services. In 1663, members of the converso community in Málaga arrested by the Inquisition maintained that a North African Jew, who had insincerely converted to Christianity, played a key role in helping them maintain their Jewish faith by teaching them about the Jewish calendar and other “things of the Law of Moses and its observance.”40 In the jargon of the inquisitors, Jews who entered the dominions of the Iberian monarchies to proselytize amongst conversos were known as maestros dogmatizadores. The term itself was not used exclusively to refer to proselytizing Jews and judaizers. In the Americas, the same expression was used to indicate those Amerindians who actively sought to persuade others to cling to their pagan beliefs.41 Whatever the true extent of attempts by some Jews and conversos to actively support and sustain the faith of converso families and communities, the figure of the judaizing maestro dogmatizador looms large in anti-converso texts. In Portugal, this fear was expressed in a letter written on 10 February 1542 by none other than the archbishop of Évora and inquisitor-general Dom Henrique (1512–1580), the son of King Manuel I of Portugal and briefly King of Portugal for the last two years of his life. Dispatched to Henrique’s representative in Rome, the letter refers to the commotion caused in Portugal by a converso cobbler of the port of Setúbal: Luis Dias. The inquisitor-general highlights the risk that even Old Christians would find themselves seduced by this self-proclaimed Messiah and his supporters: Others have made themselves prophets and a certain Master Gabriel, a New Christian doctor, went about in Lisbon from house to house preaching the Law of Moses to the New Christians. It has been proven that he circumcised many of them and caused a great deal of harm. Another man in Coimbra acquired many disciples, to whom he read in Hebrew and who converted to the Law of Moses. Moreover, in Lisbon, they turned an Old Christian woman into a Jew. With great solemnity they cut her nails, as they customarily do on such occasions, and performed all the other superstitions.42 40

41 42

Natalia Muchnik, “Du judaïsme au catholicisme: les aléas de la foi au XVII e siècle,” Revue historique, 623, (2002/3): 571–609 (see page 572, n. 7); Bernardo López Belinchón, “Aventureros, negociantes y maestros dogmatizadores; Judíos norteafricanos y judeoconversos ibéricos en la España del siglo XVII,” in Judíos en tierras de Islam, II: Entre Islam y Occidente: los judíos magrebíes en la edad moderna, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003), 87–92. See, for instance, Antonio de la Calancha, Coronica del orden de S. Avgvstin en el Perv (Barcelona: Pedro de Lacavallería, 1639), 627. A.N.T.T., Gavetas, Gaveta 2, maço 2, no 54.

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Dom Henrique’s clear alarm at this example of active crypto-Jewish ‘evangelisation’ affecting not just conversos but even an Old Christian led him to conclude that “there is great evil amongst those New Christians” and that “what was suspected about them has [finally] been experienced through observation and a great deal more.” The original letter was a private document but a copy of it was later retrieved from the royal archives and reproduced verbatim in the seventeenth-century polemics of Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo.43 Another case that raised alarm and which became notorious is the trial the Portuguese royal judge (desembargador da casa do cível) Gil Vaz Bugalho, who was arrested by the Inquisition in 1537 on charges of crypto-Judaism. An Old Christian with no known Jewish ancestry and a member of the prestigious Order of the knights of Christ, Gil Vaz Bugalho was prosecuted and accused by witnesses of keeping the Jewish Sabbath by feigning illness to avoid discharging his professional duties on Saturdays, avoiding pork and criticising the presence of images and statues of Christ, Mary and Saints in churches. One of the main causes of Gil Vaz Bugalho’s arrest, however, appears to have been his interest in Messianism that led him to translate books of the Old Testament from the Latin version of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate into vernacular Portuguese. His marriage to a converso wife as well as his close links with other conversos knowledgeable in Hebrew – whom he apparently consulted during his work on the translations – induced the inquisitors to suspect that these conversos had conspired to persuade him to embrace Judaism despite his own lack of Jewish origins. Despite the intervention of the Papacy, Gil Vaz Bugalho was burned at the stake as an unyielding apostate after an auto de fe held in December 1551. The alarm and dismay caused by this ‘judaizing Old Christian’ from a high-status social background explains the fact that he was the only inquisitorial prisoner not to benefit from the papal amnesty granted to all suspected judaizers imprisoned by the Portuguese Inquisition in 1547.44 In a letter sent to the Pope in 1545, King João III explicitly declared his fear of the spread of Judaism amongst the Old Christian population. The monarch laments “the rise of new Messiahs with false miracles, pulpits of heresiarchs, schools of Judaism 43

44

The letter is mentioned in passing by Vicente da Costa Mattos in his Breve discurso contra a heretica perfidia do iudaismo, fol. 100r and copied verbatim in Costa Mattos’s Honras christãs nas afrontas de Iesu Christo continuadas nos presentes Apostatas de nossa Santa Fè (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1634), fols. 116v–117v and Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos, 105–6. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Évora, processo no 8,760; J. Lúcio de Azevedo História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 447–450; G. Marcocci, “Bugalho, Gil Vaz,” Dizionario storico dell’Inqui­ sizione (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), I, 233–5.

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(…) and the apostasy of many Old Christians, both laymen and priests,” naming Gil Vaz Bugalho (“an Old Christian who converted to Judaism”) as a prime example.45 The trial of Gil Vaz Bugalho offers a perfect example of how a seemingly specific and isolated case can be transformed – as it was by King João III, Dom Henrique as well as by later propagandists such Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo – into a symptom of a wider converso/Jewish plot to convert Old Christians to Judaism. For Costa Mattos, Gil Vaz Bugalho’s heresy was nothing less than a “monstrous and horrendous spectacle” that must serve as a warning to all good Catholics.46 Whilst the particularities of the Gil Vaz Bugalho case made it easy for inquisitors to explain his supposed ‘conversion’ to Judaism, later instances of Old Christians accused of crypto-Jewish beliefs alarmed and baffled them profoundly. One such case is that of Jacinto Vázquez Araujo, an ordained priest aged thirty-eight serving in the Cathedral of Orense in Galicia (northwestern Spain). A Galician by birth, Jacinto was denounced in 1687 by a fellow priest who claimed that the latter had secretly confided to him that he “did not believe in the Law of Christ but in that of Moses.” Jacinto was apprehended by the inquisitors and, when questioned, he admitted to converting to Judaism despite also recognizing that “his entire family have been Old Christians.” Jacinto stated that he desired to become a “new Jew” (judío nuevo) after having witnessed first-hand the firmness of the religious convictions of those conversos burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Paradoxically, he also declared that he had become acquainted with the fundaments of Judaism by reading the antisemitic Centinela contra Judíos of Francisco de Torrejoncillo. The inquisitors launched investigations into his family background. They did not find evidence of any converso ancestry but discovered instead that he was the grandson of an agent of the Inquisition. Unable to uncover any trace of converso ancestry, the frustrated inquisitors pondered whether Jacinto Vázquez Araujo might be suffering from a mental disorder. The prisoner was duly examined by medical experts but declared sane. Forced to recant after being tortured, he was condemned to serve in the galleys for a term of five years.47 The sad story of Jacinto Vázquez Araujo remained recorded in the trial transcript that was filed away in the secret archives of the Spanish Inquisition and appears to have been ignored by anti-converso polemicists. The same cannot 45 46 47

Antonio Lourenço Caminha, Obras Ineditas de D. Hieronimo Ozorio (Lisbon: Impressão Regia, 1818), 158–9. Vicente da Costa Mattos’s Breve discurso, fols. 103r–103v and Honras christãs, fols. 116v– 117v; Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos, 105–6. Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la españa moderna y contemporanea (Madrid: Ediciones Arión, 1986), I, 532–6.

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be said, however, for the cases of Fray Diogo da Assunção and Lope de Vera y Alarcón, who were burned at the stake as judaizers in 1603 and 1644 respectively. In both these cases, the conversion to Judaism could not be linked to any converso family ties. Lope de Vera, in particular, appears to have ‘self-converted’ himself whilst studying Hebrew at the University of Salamanca through conversations with converso students in Salamanca as well as by reading books such as the banned Annotations of Desiderius Erasmus on the New Testament (Annotationes in Novum Testamentum) and, somewhat paradoxically, in the exposition of Jewish objections to Christ’s Messiahship that were rebutted in the anti-Jewish Fortalitium Fidei of Fray Alonso de Espina.48 Although isolated and statistically insignificant within the total number of cases of alleged crypto-Judaism prosecuted by the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, these cases of Old Christian judaizers fired the imaginations of Jews and antisemites alike. For Jews, and especially those in the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, Lope de Vera y Alarcón, who renamed himself Judah the Believer, became a martyr and a symbol of the triumph of the Jewish faith over its Christian persecutors. He is mentioned by the Jewish apologists Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and Isaac Cardoso. Furthermore, only a year or two after his execution, Lope’s death was immortalized in a romance written by the converso exile Antonio Enríquez Gómez and straightforwardly entitled “Ballad to the Divine Martyr, Judah the Believer, martyred in Valladolid by the Inquisition” (Romance al divín mártir, Judá Creyente, martirizado en Valladolid por la Inquisición). He is even mentioned in a letter sent in 1675 by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza to a Jewish friend who had converted to Catholicism.49 Conversely, Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo exploited the case to stoke the fears of Jewish ‘contamination,’ seeking to expose a ‘biological’ explanation to account for Lope’s conversion to Judaism: In the city of Valladolid, thirty years ago, they burned alive a judaizer named Don Lope de Vera, a native of the town of San Clemente in La Mancha. It was confirmed that the man was from an illustrious bloodline and discovered that the wet-nurse who had fed him was from an infected bloodline. Thus, as a confirmation of this truth, the following refrain is pronounced when something is not what is seems: Con la leche lo mamaste (“You must have drunk that with the breast milk”).50 48 49 50

Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses. Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 79–116 and 153–177. B. Spinoza, Letter LXXIV. From Spinoza to Albert Burgh, ed. R.H.M. Elwes (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883), 418. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 214.

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Torrejoncillo does not provide a source for this passage in his work but it is most likely that he is repeating a story widely circulating in Castile. Inquisitorial documentation indicates that the steadfast refusal of Lope de Vera to abjure and subsequently his immolation was remembered and discussed in his Castilian hometown in the years following his execution.51 To further illustrate the peril presented by ‘Jewish missionaries’ infiltrating Spain and Portugal, Vicente de Costa Mattos relates the singular story of Bartolomé Diaz Rabasco, a man who rose to become an important royal official (guarda-mor) in Portugal. Journeying to Portugal from Valladolid in Spain at some point between 1601 and 1606, Rabasco stopped at an inn and met some travellers from Flanders. One of these, a young man aged roughly twenty-six, offered to travel with him to Lisbon and, once they had started their journey, asked Rabasco many questions that aroused his suspicions. Pretending to be a converso from Venice, Bartolomé lured his companion into a false sense of security and eventually got him to admit that he was himself a converso from the Italian city of Livorno who had “decided to come and teach our [Jewish] Law to these ignorant Christians, since the only salvation lies in it.” Rabasco cunningly did not reveal his real identity and travelled onwards to Évora, where he finally denounced his companion to the authorities, who handed him over to the Inquisition. During his trial, which ultimately ended with his execution, Rabasco’s erstwhile travelling companion confessed to being a converso, a native of Castelo de Vide in Portugal and that his real name was Daniel Franco.52 At the basis of this remarkable story is an event that undeniably took place: Daniel Franco certainly was a real person and his original inquisitorial trial can be found in the Portuguese National Archives. The trial dossier reveals that Franco, whose Portuguese name was Fernão Gomes, was indeed denounced and arrested in Évora. Put on trial and lengthily interrogated by the Inquisition, a despairing Fernão Gomes unsuccessfully attempted to kill himself in his cell. Found guilty of being a judaizer and withholding information about “accomplices,” Gomes was burned at the stake in Évora on 22 July 1608, aged only twenty. Although his parents were originally from Castelo de Vide, he was actually a native of Bordeaux in France and a large part of his childhood was spent in Salonika. Far from the figure of the fanatical Jewish missionary hell-bent on evangelizing Iberian conversos that Vicente da Costa Mattos presents in his work, Fernão Gomes’s trial dossier suggests that his journey to the Iberian 51 52

Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses, 175–6. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 51v–52r, the passage is reproduced verbatim in chapter 9 of Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos.

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Peninsula was motivated by economic reasons and a possible wish to join an older brother who resided in Mexico. Furthermore, his very young age at the time of his arrest, he was aged only seventeen in 1605, hardly lends much credence to the profile of a learned ‘rabbi’ seeking to instruct ignorant conversos.53 Vicente da Costa Mattos is unambiguous when expounding his belief that conversos would seek to turn Old Christians to Judaism and apostasy whenever an opportunity presented itself. Citing Matthew 23:15 as evidence of Jewish proselytism, the Portuguese polemicist claims that many of those convicted of judaizing and sentenced by the Inquisition had been led into apostasy because they had “found themselves in Jewish [i.e. converso] houses” and worked as domestic servants for conversos. For Costa Mattos, this was a frightening risk that all “weak and ignorant Old Christians” faced: This [presence of weak and ignorant Old Christians] can be seen every day amongst those sentenced in the autos of the Holy Office [of the Inquisition], where they are penanced and some are burned. It is possible to observe from this that social intercourse [with conversos] and knowledge of the diabolic doctrine of the aforesaid [conversos] is more powerful than the [Christian] faith which these [ignorant Old Christians] have received from their own parents…54 The subsequent Dutch occupation of large parts of Portuguese Brazil between 1630 and 1654, their toleration of public Jewish worship and the arrival of Sephardic Jews from the Netherlands created an atmosphere that was propitious for the spread of such alarming rumours. According to a seventeenth-century Portuguese chronicler, Portuguese rebels fighting the Protestant Dutch in Pernambuco sent letters to the Portuguese authorities in unoccupied Brazil and to the Portuguese crown. In these letters one rebel expressed his fears that the Dutch occupation would lead “the false sects of Luther and Calvin, and even worse Judaism, to take control of the hearts and souls of so many Christians, as had happened in Pernambuco” and another warned that the Dutch sought to “extinguish the Catholic faith in Pernambuco by introducing the false sects of Calvin and Luther as well as the Jewish perfidy.”55 The language used is ambiguous and the writer could well have been referring to the public conversion 53 54 55

For further details see António Borges Coelho, Inquisição de Évora 1533–1668 (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 2002), 251–4. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Évora, processo no 8,424. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 155v– 156r. Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e o Triunfo da Liberdade. Primera Parte (Lisbon: Paulo Craesbeeck, 1648), 164 and 170.

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of conversos to Judaism that the Dutch tolerated. It may well, however, have been intended to play upon fears of supposed Jewish missionizing amongst Christian in general. The careful research of Bruno Feitler in the inquisitorial archives has nevertheless demonstrated that conversions to Judaism by Portuguese Old Christians in Dutch Brazil were exceptionally rare. Such exceptional conversions were usually the result of an intimate relationship between an Old Christian and a converso/Jew.56 The claim that judaizing conversos sought to disseminate Judaism amongst the Old Christian populations of Spain and Portugal was considered serious enough that the Jewish apologist and ex-converso Isaac Cardoso decided to ­devote an entire chapter of his Las Excelencias de los Hebreos (printed in 1679) to rebutting the allegation. Indeed, Cardoso lists the notion that Jews seek to “convert Gentiles to Judaism” (persuadir las gentes al Hebraysmo) as one of the ten “calumnies” levelled against the Jews. His response makes it clear that he is not concerned with the issue of conversos returning to Judaism (such as himself) but with the assertion that Jews were actively proselytizing amongst Gentiles with no Jewish ancestry. After surveying and repeating the common theological arguments demonstrating that Judaism was never an actively proselytizing faith, Cardoso tackles the problem represented by the documented cases of Gentile converts, from Antiquity to the seventeenth century. These converts, Cardoso asserts, “came looking for the Law of the Jews, without being induced to do so but rather illuminated by their own understanding, for the Lord grants to all the ability to come to know the truth.” The conversion of Gentiles, though rare, was thus a clear sign for Cardoso of Judaism’s superiority over Christianity. Insofar as the early modern Iberian Peninsula is concerned, Cardoso does not deny the reality of those singular cases of Old Christians who had converted to Judaism. He insists, however, that it was the convert who initiated such conversions and that they were not the consequence of active Jewish proselytising. To support this argument, Cardoso actually refers to the two examples of Old Christians burned as judaizers that are also regularly cited by antisemitic authors: Fray Diogo da Assunção and Lope de Vera y Alarcón.57

56 57

Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et nouveaux-chrétiens au Brésil. Le Nordeste XVII e et XVIII e siècles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 166–9. Isaac Cardoso, Las Excelencias de los Hebreos (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1679), 357–366.

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The Menace of Jewish Proselytism amongst Africans and Amerindians

Anxieties and fantasies about Jewish proselytizing did not just arise in a European context. In the overseas colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the presence of large indigenous populations, whose Christianization was relatively recent and indoctrination often inadequate, gave rise to the fear that judaizing conversos would seek to turn them into Jews. The first contacts of Iberian explorers and missionaries with the various sub-Saharan African peoples gave rise to speculation about the presence of Jews amongst these populations. It was believed, for instance, that there existed Jews, albeit non-practicing ones, settled amongst the coastal populations of West Africa. In an early work printed in 1506, the Lisbon-based German printer Valentim Fernandes claims that among the Wolof people of Senegambia “there are Jews called Gaul [gawol] and they are black like the people of the land although they do not have synagogues nor practice the rites of the other Jews. They do not live with the other blacks but apart in their own villages.” Later Portuguese authors similarly argued that the griots – the itinerant storytellers who lived in the midst of the populations of West Africa – must be Jews. The role played by deeply ingrained antisemitic prejudices in pushing Portuguese observers to fantasize about the existence of Jews residing amongst West African peoples is evident in André Alvares d’Almada’s 1594 description of Cape Verde. For that Portuguese author, the Jewish origin of the griots is confirmed by the fact that, like Jews, they possess “large noses.”58 In eastern Africa, more suspicions arose after contact was made with the Christian Ethiopians and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Many Iberian theologians considered the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with its heavy emphasis on teachings sourced from the Old Testament, to be heretical and tainted by Judaism. As early as 1520, the Portuguese theologian and polymath Pedro Margalho dismissed Ethiopian Christianity as a mixture of Catholicism and “dogmas and customs from the Old Law.” Despite the attempt of the Humanist Damião de Gois to defend the Ethiopian Church in his famous work Fides, religio, moresque Aethiopum sub imperio Preciosi Ioannis, first printed in Leuven in 1540, the perception of the Ethiopians as judaizers endured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.59 The influence of Old Testament rituals and 58 59

Toby Green, Masters of Difference. Creolization and the Jewish Presence in Cabo Verde, 1497– 1672, PhD Thesis (2007), University of Birmingham, 61–2. Quotation translated into English by Toby Green. Giuseppe Marcocci, “Prism of Empire: The Shifting Image of Ethiopia in Renaissance Portugal (1500–1570),” in Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters, ed. Maria Berbara and Karl A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), 447–466.

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practices clearly made Iberian observers uncomfortable. The historian Luis del Mármol Carvajal commented in 1573 that the Ethiopians “remained loyal to the [Christian faith] even though they follow many Jewish superstitions” and, similarly, the theologian Juan de Pineda describes Moses as “having taught circumcision” to the Ethiopians.60 In one fascinating case, an author sympathetic to the Ethiopian Church laid the blame for tensions between Ethiopians and European Catholics at the door of none other than the conversos. In his 1610 Historia eclesiastica, politica, natvral, y moral of Ethiopia, the Spanish Dominican Luis de Urreta claims that in around 1555 “over three hundred” judaizing Portuguese conversos entered into Ethiopia. When their true identity was uncovered, before they could spread their heresies, Urreta’s story runs, the Ethiopian king acted upon the counsel of Dominican missionaries and expelled them. The conversos allegedly fled either to Muslim territories or to Portuguese-held Goa. According to Urreta, those who sought shelter in Portuguese India supposedly aimed to sow divisions between the Portuguese and Ethiopians and prevent an anti-Muslim alliance by falsely accusing the Ethiopians of being schismatics.61 Anti-Portuguese sentiment in Spain and the rivalry opposing the Dominicans and Jesuits may well have been the root cause of this bizarre story. Moreover, the initial unwillingness of the Jesuits to adopt statutes of limpieza de sangre, and the presence within the Order of many Jesuits of converso ancestry, was also often exploited by critics within the church to malign the disciples of Ignatius de Loyola. The date of 1555 coincides with the dispatch of the first Jesuit mission to Ethiopia. The very next year, a Portuguese Jesuit felt compelled to pen a furious rejoinder to the “calumny and infamy” written by Urreta.62 It is nonetheless interesting to note how, regardless of the Dominican-Jesuit rivalry, Urreta’s strategy to fend off claims that the Ethiopian Church was tainted by Judaism was to blame another group of Jews: judaizing Portuguese conversos. Urreta is not the only Iberian writer to claim that the converso penetration into Africa represented a danger. Arguing in the late 1610s and early 1620s 60

61 62

Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Primera parte de la descripcion general de Affrica (Granada: Rene Rabut, 1573), fols. 45r–45v and Juan de Pineda, Historia marauillosa de la vida y excelencias, del glorioso S. Ivan Baptista (Medina del Campo: Iuan Godinez de Millis, 1604), fol. 118r. Luis de Urreta, Historia eclesiastica, politica, natural, y moral, de los grandes y remotos reynos de la Etiopia, monarchia del emperador, llamado Preste Iuan de las Indias (Valencia: Pedro Patricio Mey, 1610), 614–5. Fernão Guerreiro, Relaçam annal das covsas que fizeram os padres da Companhia de Iesvs, nas partes da India Oriental, & em alguãs outras da conquista deste reyno nos annos de 607 & 608 & do proceso da conversaõ & christiandade daquellas partes, com mais hua addiçam á relaçam de Ethiopia (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1611), fols. 314v–318r.

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against the practicality of deporting all conversos to Portugal’s overseas colonies, the polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos warns that such a move would actually be counterproductive and go against the Catholic Church’s best interests. He claims that conversos were actively spreading the “plague” (praga) of Judaism to Portugal’s African colonies and that sending them to live amongst the newly Christianized native populations in the colonies would only serve their judaizing aims and have disastrous consequences. Costa Mattos notes the practice of circumcision by a West African people of Guinea called the Bexarins as well as amongst the native inhabitants of Angola, where “nearly everyone is circumcised (…) even when they have been baptised [as children].” He surmises that this must be a practice taught to these Africans by judaizing conversos who travelled there for commercial reasons.63 In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the inquisitors in Lisbon became concerned that converso merchants based on the coast of Guinea were seeking to convert “ignorant Christians” but their language is too vague to know for certain whether they meant African converts, conversos or Old Christians residing in the remote Portuguese trading posts along the coast.64 The picture of the relationship between Africans (both in Africa and in the Americas) and conversos that emerges from the surviving inquisitorial documentation reveals that beliefs about the real or potential ‘vulnerability’ of Africans to conversion to Judaism were largely an exaggerated fantasy. In the overseas colonies, conversos, just like Old Christians, owned African slaves and the very limited number of cases of Africans who were prosecuted for judaizing by the Inquisition featured slaves or freedmen/freedwomen who had been owned by conversos. It was plausible that, in an intimate domestic setting, converso masters might seek to persuade a slave to espouse similar spiritual beliefs. In the Canary Islands, for instance, an African slave woman denounced her converso master in 1520 not only for blasphemous utterances but also because he had sought to “terrify her into adopting their customs, but she would not.” One of these alleged “customs” the black slave asserted, was to be made to carry a cross “just as Christ carried it” whilst she was beaten by her master. Her denunciation may or may not have been malicious but it was one that the inquisitors were willing to consider as credible.65 63 64 65

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a Heretica Perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 170r– 170v. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 205, fol. 580r and livro 210, fol. 455v. Lucien Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands: Being a Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Records of the Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute (London: Jewish Historical Society, 1926), 23–4.

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In some cases, individuals of African descent accused of judaizing were of mixed-ethnicity, the offspring of African slave-women and their converso owners. The official printed account of the auto de fe held by the Inquisition in Mexico in 1649 notes that one of the charges against Francisco López Blandón, who was condemned to be burned, was that he had “demonstrated the false zeal that he felt for his defunct faith” by circumcising a new-born son he had fathered with a mulata woman. By later teaching his son/slave to prepare kosher food for him, Francisco allegedly hoped that when the boy was old enough he could “induce him to judaize.”66 Likewise, amongst the trials of African and mixed-race individuals accused of judaizing in Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a large number involved cases of individuals of mixed converso-African parentage.67 In Spain’s American colonies, a somewhat analogous situation developed. The fear that conversos would turn the conquered Amerindian peoples against the Spaniards by spreading Judaism amongst them was a matter of concerns for some government officials. One royal official reporting from South America in the 1620s fretted that conversos arriving in the port of Buenos Aires and moving overland to Peru would “teach Jewish ceremonies and rites to the gentiles” and that this threat was a serious one since “experience has shown that they have done this in some parts of Guinea.”68 This perceived ‘vulnerability’ to judaizers of unconverted, or recently converted, Amerindians was doubtless buttressed by speculation about the origins of the Amerindian peoples of the New World and their possible descent from the lost ten tribes of Israel. In the sixteenth century, the Dominican writer Diego Durán unambiguously ascribed Jewish origins to native Americans: Thus, we can almost positively affirm that they are Jews and Hebrews, and I would not commit a great error if I were to state this as fact, considering their ways of life, their ceremonies, their rites and superstitions, their omens and hypocrisies, so akin to and characteristic of those of the Hebrews; in no way do they seem to differ.69

66 67 68 69

Mathias de Bocanegra, ‪Avto general de la Fee celebrado en la mvy noble, y mvy leal Civdad de Mexico‬(Mexico: Antonio Calderon, 1649). ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ Bruno Feitler, “Escravos judaizantes? Cristãos-Novos, negros, índios e mestiços no Brasil Colônia,” Devarim: Revista da Associação Religiosa Israelita, 17 (2012): 47–52. B.L., Egerton 344, fols. 98r–98v. Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, tr. and ed. Doris Heyden (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 3.

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This theory was roundly criticised by the Jesuit José de Acosta in his influential Historia natural y moral de las Indias but it continued to be an attractive one for some Iberian writers.70 Fray Agustín Dávila Padilla, a churchman born in Mexico who rose to become archbishop of Santo Domingo in 1601, drew a link between Judaism and Amerindian beliefs in his history of the Dominican province of Santiago in Mexico. Commenting on the robes of Mexican pagan priests, he noted that “it is noteworthy that in this way the Devil wished to mimic the sacerdotal robes that God gave to the old [Jewish] religion.”71 This information was deemed significant enough to be included by Francisco de Torrejoncillo in his anti-converso diatribe. Torrejoncillo also points to the improbable theories of the sixteenth-century French theologian Gilbert Génébrard that the greater part of the lost tribes of Israel had migrated to the Americas via the Azores and Greenland.72 In a letter sent to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in 1604, the Mexican inquisitor Alonso de Peralta reveals that he understood the official ban on conversos moving to the New World to have been caused by a fear that they would convert the Amerindians to Judaism.73 The association that some churchmen saw between Jews/conversos and the indigenous populations of the Americas and their pre-Christian religions is evidence of the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish attitudes, to the extent that one author refers in a 1692 work to native priests as “Indian rabbis.”74 Nevertheless there is, as yet, practically no documentary evidence to suggest the acceptance at a popular level of the belief that conversos/Jews would seek to pervert the minds of Amerindians, leading them away from Christianity and tempting them to follow the Devil. The only documented instance of such a claim can be found in the region of Oaxaca (southern Mexico). In a denunciation made in 1739 to the Inquisition of demonic rituals practiced by Amerindians, a woman asserted that “Jews and heretics” not only attended their black masses but that these “Jews” also magically transported the natives through the air to their “synagogues” in northern Europe in order to indoctrinate the Amerindians into their “abominable sects.”75 70 71 72 73 74 75

José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville: Imprenta de Juan de León, 1590), book I, chapter 23. Agustín Dávila Padilla, Historia de la fundación y discurso de la provincia de Santiago de México (Brussels: Iuan de Meerbeque, 1625), book II, chapter 90, 644. Gilbert Génébrard, Chronographia: libri quatuor (Lyon: Jean Pillehotte, 1599), 159; Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 220–1. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, libro 1,050. María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions Genealogical Fictions Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 209–212. Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 38–9.

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Reckless Resistance or Narrative Assault?: the Desecration of Religious Objects and the ‘Jewish Conspiracy’

One of the most common accusations levelled against the conversos in the early modern Iberian world is that they were implementing a Jewish plot to destroy the Church not simply by infiltrating its hierarchy but also by means of a deliberate and organised campaign of sacrilege. As elsewhere in Europe, accusations of Jewish sacrilege took the form of the desecration of consecrated hosts and communion wine, the very flesh and blood of Christ, as well the destruction or defilement of other objects held to be sacred by Christians. The reality behind such claims is difficult to fathom. Historians such as Gavin Langmuir and Miri Rubin have interpreted such accusations as persistent manifestations of anti-Jewish or antisemitic prejudice. In a comprehensive examination of accusations of host desecration during the medieval period, Miri Rubin has put forward a persuasive case in favour of understanding such tales as antisemitic narratives – “Gentile tales” – that became part of the religious and cultural fabric of western Christendom. Such an interpretation helps us comprehend how, alongside the infamous blood libel and other claims that Jews ritually cursed Christianity and Christians in their acts of worship, such tales came to be transmitted from generation to generation and the accusations endured across the centuries and spread throughout Europe.76 Recently, some scholars have begun to question the narrative in which accusations levelled against Jews of pronouncing curses and verbal attacks on Christianity in Jewish prayers, blasphemous from a Christian perspective, are presented as complete antisemitic fantasies. Rather, they have pointed to such practices as evidence of a passive form of Jewish/converso resistance to Christian oppression. It must be emphasised, however, that these studies have restricted their claims to verbal attacks upon Christianity and have not extended to the accusation of physical attacks upon consecrated hosts or Christian sacred objects.77 In stark contrast, and more controversially, Elliott Horowitz has put forward the theory that the accusation of host desecration and sacrilege may have had a basis of truth in expressions of anti-Catholic resentment that

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Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales; the Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). See, for instance, Maria Diemling, “Navigating Christian space: Jews and Christian Images in early modern German lands,” Jewish Culture and History, 12 (2010): 397–410 and Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

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emerged during the Purim celebrations.78 It is, of course, entirely possible that some judaizing conversos in the Iberian Peninsula did vent the frustrations provoked by inquisitorial persecution and social ostracism by means of such sacrilegious acts. In 1569, for instance, a converso named Alonso Mendes Carapito hurled himself at the curate during a religious service held in the parish of São Sebastião in the Portuguese town of São João da Pesqueira and seized the host. For this act of profanation, the crown ordered him to be burned alive in Lisbon. The polemicists Costa Mattos and Torrejoncillo seize upon this incident, presenting it as an archetype of systematic Jewish perfidy and as representative of the burning hatred against the Christian faith of all conversos in early modern Iberia without any distinction.79 The possibility of that some judaizing conversos, unable to physically and publicly resist and attack their oppressors, really did seek revenge for their persecution by secretly lashing out at consecrated hosts and Christian sacred images is in some respects quite attractive for historians. It challenges a narrative of helpless Jewish/converso victimhood and grants conversos agency by representing them as actively resisting the pressure to assimilate. Such a notion places the Jews/conversos alongside other oppressed minorities in history in practicing a form of what the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott has termed the “ideological resistance” of subordinate groups. In this case, however, the resistance would have gone a step further than secret verbal attacks in prayers by extending to acts of physical resistance.80 Protestant heretics were similarly accused of such sacrilegious acts and there is certainly no doubt that Protestants did engage in anti-Catholic iconoclasm, even in the Iberian Peninsula. The most (in)famous case of such sacrilege in the Iberian world is undoubtedly that which occurred in December 1552, during a mass celebrated in the royal chapel in the presence of King João III and his court. An English Calvinist merchant named William Gardiner suddenly leapt from the crowd, punched the elderly priest and seized the consecrated host from his hands. Before he could be stopped, William Gardiner tore the host in front of the horrified congregation, hurled it to the ground and stamped upon it. Only the personal intervention of the King prevented Wil78 79

80

Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University press, 2006). Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discuro contra a heretica perfidia do Iudaismo, fols. 71v– 72r; Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 132; Diogo Barbosa Machado, Memorias Para A Historia De Portugal Que Conprehendem O Governo Del Rey D. Sebastiaõ (Lisbon: Sylva, 1747), III, 124–5. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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liam Gardiner from being lynched in the chapel itself and he was later executed after a brief trial.81 Were Gardiner and Carapito’s suicidal actions motivated by fanatical religious zeal or an undiagnosed mental illness? It is, of course, impossible to tell but even the inquisitors were willing to acknowledge the possibility of mental illness as a cause for brazen acts of religious desecration. In 1581, for instance, a conversa woman who publicly desecrated a consecrated host in the monastery of São Domingos in Lisbon was released by the Inquisition into the care of her family when witnesses confirmed that she was “crazy” (douda).82 To complicate the situation further, Old Christian Spaniards and Portuguese with no known Jewish ancestry or Protestant beliefs also committed many acts of sacrilegious desecration. The hypersensitivity of the Catholic Church to the perceived defilement of sacred objects and images was only heightened by the Protestant reformers’ attacks on Catholic sacred iconography. The result, in the Iberian World, was that the Inquisition was regularly called upon to investigate and prosecute Old Christians for this crime. Far from being motivated by any well-defined religious animus against Catholic orthodoxy, it would seem that such deeds by Old Christians were often the result of mindless vandalism, anger or perhaps mental illness. In 1589, for example, a Spanish soldier serving in Portugal was flogged and handed over the inquisitorial tribunal of Lisbon by his commanding officer when, angered by losses incurred by gambling, he slashed with his sword at a crucifix whilst walking in the countryside outside of the port of Setúbal along with a number of fellow soldiers. In this case, the inquisitors merely condemned him to an act of public repentance in a local church and spiritual penances.83 Up to the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cases of physical sacrilege committed by Old Christians continued to be brought to the attention of the Inquisition. By way of illustration, an Old Christian named Francisco León was prosecuted in Toledo in 1790 for vandalising a statue of the Christ Child. All accusations of sacrilege were treated seriously, even when they appear to have been prompted by excessive zeal such as in 1743, when a rose seller was denounced to the tribunal of Toledo for having an image of Christ tattooed onto his arm with the “dirty word” carajo under it. In a few cases, the bizarre or extreme nature of the offence clearly 81

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Isaías da Rosa Pereira, “O desacato na capela real em 1552 e o processo do calvinista inglês perante o ordinário de Lisboa,” Anais da Academia Portuguesa de História. 2ª série, 29 (1984), 597–623. For other examples of sacrilege and blasphemy committed by “Lutherans” in the Iberian Peninsula see Werner Thomas, Los protestantes y la Inquisición en España en tiempos de Reforma y Contrarreforma (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 371–384. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processos nos. 7,643; 9,906 and 16,999. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo no 12,447.

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hints at a mental illness afflicting the alleged perpetrator. Between 1760 and 1765, the same tribunal investigated the crimes of José Jiménez, who was accused of masturbating into a chalice and smearing his semen on a statue of Christ.84 The fact that Old Christians committed acts of sacrilege did not prevent the crime from being perceived as a quintessentially ‘Jewish’ one. When the social and religious context is taken into consideration, it is easy to discern how the association of judaizing conversos/Jews with the scourging of images of Christ came to be so well anchored in the minds of Old Christians. The iconographic theme of a humble and suffering Christ attached to a column during his flagellation at the command of Pontius Pilate or during the procession to Calvary was vividly depicted, often in gruesome detail, in sacred works of art and sculpture prominently displayed in early modern Spanish and Portuguese churches (and throughout Catholic Europe). In both the Iberian kingdoms such representations of the flagellation would also be paraded through the street during the religious processions of the Semana Santa before Easter Sunday, often by religious confraternities dedicated to this specific episode of Christ’s Passion such as the Real e Ilustre Hermandad y Cofradía de Nazarenos de la Sagrada Columna y Azotes de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo y María Santísima de la Victoria in Seville (1569) or the Cofradía del Santísimo Cristo de la Columna in Ciudad Real (established at least since 1575). This iconographic phenomenon extended to the overseas colonies of Spain and Portugal, where paintings of the flagellation of Christ were plentiful in churches. It appears even in as unlikely a location as the church of the remote high-Andean village of San Cristóbal de Rapaz in Peru, where an eighteenth-century mural, probably by a mestizo artist, depicts Christ being whipped. Fascinatingly, the men flogging the Messiah are not represented as Roman soldiers but dressed in eighteenth-century European clothing and, in what would appear to be a direct link with medieval anti-Jewish iconography, wearing an assortment of odd hats that seems to imply that they are Jews.85 Although the passages in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John clearly state that it was Pilate who ordered the scourging, it took place straight after the Jewish crowd had demanded the release of Barabbas instead of Jesus. Many commentators in Iberia and elsewhere in Europe therefore assigned the final blame for Christ’s scourging to the Jews. In 1647, for example, the Benedictine Agustín de Benavente informed his readers that Pilate was only a conduit 84 85

A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 225, exp. 19 and 22 and legajo 3,733, exp. 343. F. Soyer, “The Passion of Christ in the Church of San Cristóbal de Rapaz: An example of Medieval Anti-Jewish Iconography in Colonial Peru?,” eHumanista/Conversos, 5 (2017): 392–416.

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for the hatred of the Jews and that he had ordered the whipping of Christ “to acquiesce to the rabid impetus of the Jews.”86 Given this emotionally charged social and religious context, it is hardly surprising that the image of the converso as a defiler of sacred objects became a seemingly pervasive element of early modern Iberian lore. The enduring association of Jews with religiously motivated sacrilege in the popular psyche is brilliantly illustrated in a fascinating inquisitorial trial dating from as late as the nineteenth century. In 1801, a Spanish soldier serving in the garrison of the port of Santa Cruz in the Canary Island of Tenerife caused an immense uproar when he spat out of his mouth and defiled a consecrated host during communion. Numerous witnesses alleged, and the soldier later admitted, that he had loudly and repeatedly shouted out, for the whole horrified congregation to hear, many blasphemies including “that he was not a Christian, that he was a Jew and that his parents were Jews.” The inquisitorial investigation, undertaken between 1801 and 1802, seriously considered the possibility that the soldier, Ramón Martínez, was a judaizing converso. Martínez, who was a smalltime delinquent and army deserter posted to the Canaries as a punishment, actually denied having any converso ancestry and claimed to have acted out of frustration and anger against his enforced presence in the archipelago. The accusation of judaizing was dropped and the wayward soldier was condemned to a public act of repentance and spiritual penances. Clearly, however, centuries of anti-converso and anti-Jewish propaganda had taught Martínez to link Judaism and anti-Catholic sacrilege.87 The case of the Cristo de la Paciencia in Madrid is probably the most infamous and absurd manifestation of this ‘narrative assault’ on conversos. Acting on the testimony of a young converso child, the Inquisition arrested the members of a Portuguese converso family residing in Madrid in 1629 on the accusation that they had organised a secret conventicle in which they flogged and burned a large crucifix (see fig. 3). During the profanation, the crucifix miraculously admonished them three times for their conduct. Although no physical remains of the crucifix were found and the story appears to echo the three questions Jesus put to Peter after he had thrice denied him (John 21), the prisoners were prosecuted, tortured and forced to make confessions. The alleged ‘ringleaders’ were convicted of “the greatest atrocity ever seen” and sentenced to be burned at an enormous auto de fe held in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in 86 87

Agustín de Benavente, Segunda Parte de las Luzes de Dios. Resplandor de las Llagas de Cristo Señor Nuestro Empleo del Pensamiento Cristiano en la vida del mismo Señor, y su santissima Madre (Valladolid: Antonio de Rueda, 1647), 62. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,820, exp. 14 and legajo 3,727, exp.13.

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Figure 3

Portuguese conversos scourging a crucifix of Christ in Madrid. Francisco de Rojas Nieto, Vespertinas de los opprobios de la Pasión de Cristo (Madrid, 1634)

1632, in the presence of King Philip IV, his minister and favourite Olivares, and the assembled courtiers.88 88

See Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Injurias a Cristo; Juan Gómez de Mora, Auto de la Fé celebrado en Madrid este año de MDCXXXII (Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1632), fol. 14v.

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The sacrilege of the Cristo de la Paciencia was far from a unique case. Many Old Christians were quick to cast the blame upon conversos for real cases of desecration when there was no hard evidence to support such an allegation. The mysterious appearance throughout Lisbon of anonymous posters defending the “Law of Moses” and the theft of a silver box containing consecrated wafers from the sacrarium of the Lisboan church of Santa Engracia, on the night of 15–16 January 1630, led to an outpouring of popular anti-converso sentiment across Portugal. The conversos were designated as the obvious culprits by popular rumours, and news of the robbery caused anti-converso rioting in Portugal’s university town of Coimbra.89 Simão Pires Solis, a converso seen riding in the vicinity of the church on the night of the burglary, was arrested, prosecuted by the secular authorities, repeatedly tortured and finally condemned to death. On 3 February 1631, Solis suffered the gruesome death reserved for those convicted of sacrilege. His hands, with which he was accused of having desecrated the host (the body of Jesus Christ himself), were amputated before he was burned alive.90 The outrage produced by the sacrilege of Santa Engracia led to the printing of one of the most explicitly conspiracist antisemitic works to appear in print in the Iberian Peninsula during the seventeenth century: the Honda de David (“sling of David”), by the Carmelite Friar Timóteo Seabra Pimentel. It this work, a compilation of five sermons with a prologue, Fray Pimentel accuses the conversos of having successfully infiltrated (or rather ‘infected’) all levels of Portuguese society. He denounces conversos who were able to acquire honours and positions of power within the Church that should have been barred to them by the statutes of limpieza de sangre. Quoting Jeremiah 2:8 (“the priests said not, Where is the Lord?”), which he erroneously references as from Isaiah, Pimentel interprets it as a prophetic reference to the converso priests who work to provoke the ire of God and cites as proof of this the “many priests of proven Jewish race who hold prebends, abbacies and benefices in this kingdom, who have been convicted as unrepentant heretics or have confessed; most of whom have been condemned to exile, the galleys and the stake.”91 89 90 91

António de Oliveira, “O motim dos estudantes de Coimbra contra os cristãos-novos em 1630,” Biblos, 57 (1981): 597–627. See J. Lúcio de Azevedo História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 202–4; António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory. The Portuguese Inquisition and its New Christians 1536-1765, 201–3. Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David: con cinco sermones, o piedras, tiradas en defension del Santissimo Sacramento del Altar, contra hereges sacramentarios, y Iudios baptizados en el Reyno de Portugal, apostatas de nuestra Santa Fè, por la ocasion del robo sacrilego, cometido en la Iglesia Parochial de S. Engracia, en la Ciudad de Lisboa (Barcelona: Estevan Liberòs, 1631), fol. 19v.

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To justify his claims, Pimentel explains in his prologue that the sacrilege of Santa Engracia is part of a wider crypto-Jewish plot. Referring to the affair of the posters defending Judaism and attacking Christianity in Lisbon and the other outrages supposedly committed by the conversos across Portugal in January 1630, he concludes in his prologue that this was evidence of a concerted campaign “as if they have been disseminating the order in all the secret synagogues of the kingdom.” He ruefully bemoans the fact that he was having to defend Catholicism in his sermons “as if I were in Judea or [Calvinist] Geneva” and, moreover, that Christian minorities residing in Muslims lands did not have to fear for the safety of the consecrated host whilst those Christians in the heart of the dominions of the most Catholic King of Spain and Portugal lived in fear of sacrilegious attacks by judaizing conversos. Furthermore, Pimentel states that acts of sacrilege committed across Portugal are part of a plot to lure Christians to Judaism. He reminds his readers of notices, supposedly attached by conversos to the doors of churches at the time of the outrage of Santa Engracia, in which Old Christians were warned: “the Law of Moses is the only true faith and the only one in which there is salvation.”92 The sole effective remedy, Pimentel argues, is a wholesale purge of the kingdom and the mass expulsion of all individuals with Jewish blood running in their veins. Comparing Portugal to a foundering ship, Pimentel asserts that “the Jews must be thrown overboard to save the vessel” and that this is the only manner in which God’s wrath can be averted: My dear faithful, do you want God to raise His punitive hand, with which He has castigated this kingdom for so many years? Let us satisfy Him, by changing our [sinful] way of life, by purifying our consciences and by an expulsion of [this] sacrilegious people, in whose company our sinfulness is magnified.93 Directly addressing the judaizing conversos, Pimentel adopts a defiant, almost taunting, attitude. He points out that their conspiracy to commit sacrilege aimed to endanger the physical bodies of all Portuguese Christians by provoking divine retribution but he also asserts that sacrilegious attacks will never cause trueborn Old Christians to apostatize: Seeking to provoke our punishment [by God], you may well attempt to instigate great sacrileges and unheard-of acts of wickedness against our 92 93

Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David, prologue (unfoliated pages). Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David, fol. 18r.

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God and Lord in this land but it is not within the power of your hands and diabolic malice to remove peace from our souls and block the fount [of our faith].94 Pushing for this expulsion to take place, he urges the papal representative currently in Lisbon to inform the Pope of events in Portugal and stridently calls upon the nobility to lobby the monarch and show themselves as energetic in their opposition to the conversos as they are to the Muslims in North Africa. The extreme nature of Pimentel’s work lies not only in the hate-filled anger that he clearly articulates in his denunciation of the supposed converso conspiracy but also in his explicit and public call for the mass expulsion of all “baptised Jews.” To justify such a drastic course of action, and to deflect the anticipated counter-argument that this could severely affect the population and economy of Portugal, Pimentel references the Book of Revelation (12:7–10) to remind his audience that a third of the angels were cast out of heaven after Lucifer’s revolt and that an expulsion of conversos is a painful but necessary precondition for the conservation of God’s favour and the survival of the Church and Portuguese Empire.95 The shock and outrage were equally severe in the case of the robbery of Odivelas, committed in May 1671. Consecrated hosts were removed from a church and some sacred objects either damaged or stolen. Many of the missing objects, including consecrated hosts, were not immediately recovered and the crown decreed a period of mourning throughout the kingdom. The edict ordered that public “demonstrations of repentance of sins” must be undertaken in all churches and penitential processions accordingly organised to ward off God’s wrath. Contemporaries were remarkably quick to assign blame to the conversos/Jews, just as their grandparents had done in the 1630s. In a letter sent to the regent Pedro, the highly influential Duke of Aveiro and inquisitor-general Pedro de Lencastre, who prior to inheriting his dukedom was also Archbishop of Braga and Primate of Portugal, impulsively denounced the sacrilege as the work of judaizing conversos. The latter’s culpability was obvious, he reasoned, because “it has always been held to be certain that such outrages are committed by Jews for they have been the authors of all sacrileges and wicked deeds in all the cities [of Portugal].”96 Roque Monteiro Paim, a jurist who rose to become the secretary of state of Pedro II when he ascended to the Portuguese throne in 1683, was another high-ranking Portuguese official who could 94 95 96

Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David, fol. 19r. Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David, fols. 27r–29r. B.N.P., Secção de Reservados, Códice 1,703, fol. 162v.

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only believe that the culprits were conversos. Angered by the news from Odivelas, he penned a vicious attack upon the conversos calling for the expulsion of those convicted of judaizing and the placing of severe restrictions upon the remainder. In his work, which interestingly was printed in Madrid rather than in Portugal, Paim outlines the evidence to support the notion of religiously motived acts of Jewish host desecration “for which reasons we cannot doubt that [the conversos], and no one else, committed this abominable and atrocious act.”97 In a very public act of defiance, an anonymous poem was attached to the door of the royal chapel accusing the regent, the Infante Pedro, of cowardice for failing to immediately punish the conversos.98 The poem explicitly compares the regent Pedro with Saint Peter, asking the regent to take inspiration from his biblical namesake who had not only become the rock upon which the Catholic Church was built but who had also not hesitated to draw his sword to defend Jesus against the soldiers sent to arrest him in the garden at Gethsemane and cut off the ear of Malchus, a servant of the Jewish High Priest, Caiaphas. The author of the poem compares the conversos to a noxious weed (zizânia: darnel or ‘false wheat’) that resembles wheat and calls for their removal from the kingdom:  Não deixe crescer tanto  Nesta Católica herdade  A zizânia da maldade  Que destroi o trigo santo;  Arranque-se com espanto  Esta zizânia; e pois é  Tão perniciosa à Fé,  Pelo que se há-de arrancar  Para que não possa estar  A Nação Hebreia em pé.

Do not permit to grow In this Christian field The rot of wickedness That destroys the holy wheat; The rot must be uprooted with horror; for it is So pernicious for the Faith, Thus the Hebrew nation Must be uprooted so that It may not remain standing.

Under acute pressure to act, Pedro responded by issuing a decree on 22 June 1671 in which he ordered the expulsion of all conversos previously convicted by the Inquisition of judaizing. The edict also imposed severe legal and social restrictions upon the remainder of the converso population.99 97 98 99

Roque Monteiro Paim, Perfidia judaica, Christus Vindex, Manus Principis Ecclesiae ab Apostatis liberata (Madrid: Francisco Paes Ferreira, 1671). B.N.P., Secção de Reservados, Códice 589, fols. 84v–86v. For a comprehensive analysis of the case of the sacrilege committed in Odivelas see Jorge Martins, O Senhor Roubado. A Inquisição e a Questão Judaica (Lisbon: Europress, 2002).

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The Portuguese authorities eventually apprehended the actual culprit of the outrage of Odivelas, a certain António Ferreira, in October of the same year during another robbery, although this time merely of chickens belonging to a nearby monastery. His guilt was confirmed when he revealed a hidden stash of items purloined from the Church. Instead of being a converso, António Ferreira was a common thief and Old Christian. Ferreira’s sacrilege does not appear to have had any religious motives but rather was the result of thievery and vandalism caused by excessive drinking. He confessed that during the robbery he had eaten some of the consecrated wafers that had disappeared. After an expedited trial, he was gruesomely executed for his offence the month following his arrest. His official sentence, read at his public execution, makes no mention of ‘Jewish perfidy’ or conversos.100 It is interesting to note that António Ferreira displayed an awareness of the antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in Portugal prior to his arrest. He appears to have deliberately played upon antisemitic feelings in order to allay any suspicions about him in his entourage. A witness at his trial recalled that António once proclaimed his belief that the sacrilege in Odivelas could only have been committed by a group of individuals who were “important Jews” (grandes judeus).101 Moreover, António Ferreira’s defence attorney, Manuel Álvares Pegas, wrote an account of his defence in which he had sought to mitigate his culpability. He did this not only by pointing to his drunkenness but also by differentiating his conduct in the desecrated church from the organized sacrilege perpetrated by Jews, whom he presented as the normal perpetrators of such abominable deeds.102 Despite the accepted fact that the culprit was an Old Christian, a sermon preached a quarter of a century later to commemorate the sacrilege committed in Odivelas still sought to cast blame upon the Jews/conversos for the outrage.103 It would be tempting to dismiss the host and crucifix desecration libels of Madrid, Lisbon and Odivelas as isolated instances of anti-converso hysteria but they are not. Such accusations are frequent in the registers of denunciations of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions. In Madrid, a large number of conversos residing in the Calle del Lobo were arrested and prosecuted between 1714 and 1720 for desecrating a crucifix in secret conventicles. Although no systematic survey has yet been conducted, it is possible to find conversos accused of 100 101 102 103

For the sentence see Jorge Martins, O Senhor Roubado, 93–4. Jorge Martins, O Senhor Roubado, 85. Manuel Álvares Pegas, Tratado historico e iuridico sobre o sacrilego furto, execrável sacrilégio que se fez em a Paroquial Igreja de Odivelas, Termo da Cidade de Lisboa, na noite de dez para onze do mês de Maio de 1671 (Madrid: Roque Rico de Miranda, 1678). Jorge Martins, O Senhor Roubado, 58–9.

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desecrating Catholic sacred objects right up until the eighteenth century; the accusations preserved in inquisitorial documentation were by no means confined to European shores. In the Americas, numerous allegations of this type of crime surface in Brazil and it was one of the charges levelled against María Ana de Castro, a conversa of Portuguese origin, the last person burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Peru in 1736.104 From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the alleged incidents described to the inquisitors by denouncers had often occurred years before the denunciation was made and, in many cases, the claims perpetuate recurring themes that were well established since the medieval period. The most common theme was that conversos gathered in secret to ritually attack a crucifix or a consecrated host. These attacks involved one or more acts of verbal or physical violence: it was claimed that the sacred object had been defiled (by urinating or defecating on it), cursed at, and whipped or stabbed. There were, however, some variations on this leitmotif. In 1593, for instance, a converso inhabitant of Olinda in Brazil was accused of placing a crucifix under his black slave woman before they copulated.105 Likewise, in 1644, a rumour circulated in Madrid that some Portuguese conversos sent stuffed pastries (empanadas) to be cooked in a bakery and that an Old Christian baker had found a consecrated host in an empanada that mysteriously would not cook.106 It is clear that most denunciations never led to prosecutions and, in some cases, the inquisitors found that they were difficult to substantiate (often because there was only one witness). In 1539–1540, a large group of conversos in Alicante and Valencia were arrested and the local inquisitors claimed to have uncovered a sacrilegious conspiracy after they extorted confessions of judaizing and of scourging a crucifix during secret conventicles. The whole investigation nevertheless stalled when over forty of the accused retracted their confessions. This fiasco threatened to damage the reputation of the Inquisition in the region, prompting the Supreme Council to intervene directly and send a

104

105 106

Michael, Alpert, “Did Spanish Crypto-Jews desecrate Christian Sacred Images and why?: the case of the Cristo de la Paciencia (1629–32), the Romance of 1717 and the events of November 1714 in the Calle del Lobo,” in Faith and Fanaticism: Religious Fervour in Early Modern Spain, ed. Lesley K. Twomey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 85–94. For Brazil see A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processos nos. 13,946; 13,988 and 13,989; Jerry M. Williams, ‪Inquisición peruana en tela de juicio: la vindicación de Ana de Castro‬(Potomac, Md: Scripta Humanistica, 2008). A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 781, fol. 9r–9v. José Pellicer de Salas, Avisos: 17 de mayo de 1639, 29 de noviembre de 1644, ed. Jean-Claude Chevalier; Lucien Clare and Jaime Mol (Paris: Éditions Hispaniques, 2003), 527.

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special commissioner to take control of the investigation.107 In the following century, an Old Christian murderer condemned to hang in the town of Albacete in 1634 claimed to have discovered a hidden crucifix in the house of a converso during construction work and that the converso reacted to the discovery with dismay. Investigations undertaken by the Inquisition, however, determined the claims to be false and only made by the desperate prisoner to stave off his execution.108 6

Conclusion

The link between accusations of religiously motivated sacrilege and the wider ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to destroy Spain and Portugal is often implied and subsumed with the narrative of religious dissent (alongside such crimes as observing the Jewish Sabbath and ‘Jewish fasts’) rather than formulated explicitly in the denunciation made to inquisitors. Occasionally, however, denouncers were more explicit and an accusation concerning various conversos in the northern Portuguese town of Vila Flor in 1610 provides an interesting example of this. A young woman aged nineteen and named Catarina spontaneously presented herself to the inquisitors of Valladolid in Spain. She told the inquisitors that, three years previously, a riot broke out in the town on Christmas day when a shocking discovery was made in the church of São Bartolomeu. A statue of the Virgin Mary had been knocked down and damaged whilst the altar was defiled with human excrement. A group of conversos, whom the witness describes as “known to be Jews” and who wore sambenitos as a result of previous inquisitorial convictions for judaizing, were standing by the door of the church when the discovery was made by the local priest and curate. A large crowd of conversos and Old Christians gathered and the Old Christians immediately turned on the conversos, accusing them of having committed the sacrilege “to kill all the Old Christians.” A full-scale riot appears to have started despite the intervention of the priest and curate who, respectively holding statues of the child Christ and Virgin Mary, desperately sought to calm the crowd and ended up becoming the target of stones thrown during the mêlée. The testimony of Catarina, who was only sixteen at the time of the events she recalled and who had worked as a domestic in converso households, is interesting not just because 107 108

A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, libro 322, fols, 295–297; 314–320; 322–325 and legajo 598 (2), exp. 3; William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy. The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 128. Juan Blázquez Miguel, La Inquisición en Albacete (Albacete: Instituto de Estudios Alba­ cetenses, 1985), 78–79.

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it sheds light on an otherwise unrecorded event but also as evidence of the climate of antisemitic fear that pervaded Vila Flor. Catarina reports secondhand rumours that the conversos wished to murder all the villanos (a pejorative name for Old Christians) and possessed an arsenal of “ready weapons” (armas prevenidas) stashed in the house of a converso. Moreover, she believed that “this brawl and event [i.e. desecration] was committed intentionally and premeditated” in order to “kill the Old Christians.”109 Official support for the anti-converso conspiracy theories underpinning the major anti-converso desecration accusations of Lisbon, Madrid and Odivelas culminated in attempts by the crown and church to establish veritable cults with varying levels of success. The Madrid house in which the 1629 sacrilege was supposed to have been perpetrated by Portuguese conversos was demolished and replaced by a church dedicated to the suffering Christ and the desecration committed in Santa Engracia was commemorated each year in anti-Jewish sermons that were also printed.110 Stories of host desecration also gave rise to local cults devoted to perpetuating the memory of cases of host desecration and of the Jewish/converso plot to attack the church through sacrilege. In the Galician town of Monforte de Lemos in north-western Spain, a local converso family was accused of having whipped a crucifix in 1539–1540 but the denunciation was only brought to the attention of the Inquisition forty years later in 1580 and never led to any detailed investigations, let alone a trial. Nevertheless, it entered the local folklore; alongside another story claiming the Inquisition had punished a converso woman for plunging another representation of Christ into a washing tub filled with boiling water. In both cases, the sacred objects, known as the Cristo de los Azotes and the Cristo de la Colada were proudly exhibited in the town’s Franciscan monastery and became the focus of local worship. An eighteenth-century history of the Franciscan province of Santiago refers to the cults and it is worth noting that pious bequests to help defray the costs of candles were made by pious individuals as late as 1785.111 In his Centinela contra Judíos, Torrejoncillo reports a similar cult in the Extremaduran town of Casar de Palomero, involving a frenzied act of desecration committed in secret by the Jews of that locality against a cross as well as its 109 110 111

A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Coimbra, livro 70, fols. 1r–9r. Helga Bauer, “Suhnungs-predigten im 17 und 18 Jahrhundert in Portugal,” Aufsatze zur Portugiesischen Kulturgeschichte, 13 (1974/1975): 12–78. Jacobo de Castro, Primera parte de el Arbol Chronologico de la Santa Provincia de Santiago (Salamanca: Francisco García Onorato y San Miguel, 1722), 215–6; A.H.N., Sección Inqui­ sición, legajo 2,045, exp. 10 cited in (accessed 16 June 2015).

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miraculous discovery by the Christian inhabitants in 1488. Torrejoncillo, who personally visited Casar de Palomero, reports that “[the desecrated cross] is today venerated with great reverence and has produced prodigious miracles” and that he found an account of the story “in the authentic documents that are preserved and normally read out [to the villagers] on the day of the Holy Cross.”112 Nearly ten thousand kilometres away, the same kind of cult took hold in the Peruvian town of Cuzco after the alleged discovery of a group of Portuguese judaizers, led by a man named Pedro Montero de Espinosa, who gathered at night to desecrate a representation of Christ in an inn which served as their “secret synagogue” (see fig. 4). The origin behind this story is difficult to establish as the episode is recorded in later sources that are contradictory. Whether it is supposed to have taken place during the 1630s or 1640s (or even whether it took place at all) and whether the desecrated object was a crucifix or a painting is not clear. The story, though perhaps legend is probably a better description, became part of the local folklore. The street in which the Portuguese resided still bears the name of Tambo de Montero (“the inn of Montero”) and a crucifix purporting to be the desecrated image of Christ and known as El Señor del Tambo de Montero is still preserved in the Mercedarian church of Cuzco and an object of veneration.113 From the middle of the fifteenth century, the notion of a secret Jewish plot to take over control of the church and destroy it by incurring the wrath of God through deliberate mismanagement (especially simony), the desecration of ­religious objects and the spread of judaizing, even amongst Old Christians, gained currency. Its propagation was aided by the fact that the conspiracy theory was constantly repeated in both polemical works and sermons. In the direct style favoured by early modern Catholic preachers, the Dominican Jorge Pinheiro called for an expulsion of convicted converso judaizers in a sermon preached at an auto de fe held in Coimbra in 1620. Whilst he addressed the prisoners gathered on the public stage constructed for the auto, his fiery rhetoric indubitably aimed to hammer home his point amongst the large crowd of spectators:

112 113

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 161–5. Diego de Esquivel y Navia, Anales del Cuzco, 1650–1750 (Lima: Imprenta Del Estado, 1901), 83; Clorinda Matto de Turner, Tradiciones cuzqueñas completas, ed. Estuardo Nuñez (Lima: Edciones Peisa, 1976), 11–3.

Figure 4

Flagellation of a crucifix by conversos in the Tambo de Montero (Cuzco). Anonymous 18th-century painting. Museo Histórico Regional de Cuzco

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You have infected Spain, you have infected Portugal, you have infected the nobility, you have infected the [professorial] chairs at universities, you have infected cathedrals, you have infected the religious orders.114 However, it would be simplistic to uncritically endorse the notion that belief in this conspiracy theory was merely fed to a credulous populace by a cynical ecclesiastical elite. Even though conspiracy theorists are frequently represented as residing (willingly or not) on the margins of society, this was certainly not the case in the early modern Iberian world. The existence of a ‘Jewish plot’ to destroy the Church and Christian community was seemingly accepted as an incontrovertible fact by members from all social ranks: from the teenage girl who denounced the plot of the supposedly sacrilegious conversos in Vila Flor to the Inquisition in 1610 to the influential and high-powered churchmen who gathered at Tomar in 1629 to consider a solution to the Iberian monarchy’s ‘Jewish problem.’ As this chapter and the previous one have shown, belief in and/or support for the conspiracy theory of a Jewish plot to subvert the Church was expressed in private correspondence by monarchs (notably, as we have seen above, Kings João III and Sebastião in Portugal) as well as by archbishops and inquisitor-generals in both Spain and Portugal. 114

Jorge Pinheiro, Sermão que o Padre Frei Jorge Pinheiro pregou no acto da fé, que se celebrou na cidade de Coimbra a quarta Dominga da Quaresma vinte e nove de Março do ano de 1620 (Coimbra: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1620), fol. 8v.

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Medical Murder: the Myth of the Jewish SerialKiller Doctors … a multitude of doctors, surgeons and apothecaries have been arrested in Lisbon and other parts of the kingdom, not counting those who have fled (leaving their wives imprisoned), and they have all confessed to wilfully perpetrating many murders of [Old] Christian noblemen and men of the church. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaísmo (1622)

⸪ The relationship between doctors and their patients has always implied a clear position of trust and dependency of the latter upon the former. The anxieties generated by such a clearly unequal relationship – one in which doctors hold the advantage of knowledge and (hopefully) the ability to cure patients of their ailments – has always created a fertile breeding ground for fear, suspicion, resentment or ever outright hostility. These anxieties were often reflected in the satirical and comical treatment of the figure of the doctor – represented as a charlatan or quack – in literary works, particularly sonnets and plays, produced in early modern Europe, including Spain and Portugal. One such sonnet, for instance, was Francisco de Quevedo’s famous Médico que para un mal que no quita, receta muchos (“The doctor who, for a [real] illness which he does not cure, diagnoses many [false others]”).1 Likewise, in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (1611), the lexicographer Father Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539–1613) offers a wonderful illustration of anxiety regarding the efficacy of medical treatment when examining the definition of the term “physician” and discussing why physicians were also known as “doctors” (doctores).

1 Jesús Maire Bobes, “El doctor, figura cómica de los entremeses,” in Actas del VI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro, ed. María Luisa Lobato and Francisco Domínguez Matito (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2004), vol. 2, 1217–1228.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_006

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They are called doctors, and for them this is the designation par excellence since it is especially necessary that they should be most learned [doctos], even more than graduates in theology or law; because if theologians make mistakes then they can be amended by the church and the Holy Office of the Inquisition and if a lawyer errs then one can appeal to a higher judge. The errors of medical practitioners, however, are irre­ parable…2 In its most extreme form (now a clinically diagnosed social phobia: iatrophobia), this fear and suspicion of doctors will cause patients to actively avoid seeking medical advice or a cure for their ailments. The fear of doctors who abuse this position of trust has been largely responsible for the modern popular fascination, expressed in intense media coverage, of infamous cases of doctors who have been exposed as serial-killers and mass murderers during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: men such as Marcel Petiot in France, Harold Shipman in the United Kingdom or Michael Swango in the United States. When the medical practitioner is a member of a religious or ethnic group which is different from that of his patients, this general suspicion of doctors will easily graft itself onto existing xenophobic beliefs or religious bigotry. The mixture of xenophobia and anxieties relating to medical practitioners can be traced to the very distant past and is not unique to Christian Spain or even Christendom. In a remarkable passage of his Natural History, the first-century Roman philosopher and naturalist Pliny the Elder recorded the words of the Roman statesman and moralist Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE), a noted opponent of the Hellenization of Roman culture. Cato’s claims about the malign intentions of Greek physicians and their abuse of their medical knowledge offers startling evidence of the ancient association of both xenophobic hostility and the anxieties or fears generated by medicine and medical practitioners. Concerning those Greeks, son Marcus, I will speak to you more at length on a suitable occasion. I will show you the results of my own experience at Athens, and that, while it is a good plan to dip into their literature, it is not worthwhile to make a thorough acquaintance with it. They are a most iniquitous and intractable race, and you may take my word as the word of a prophet, when I tell you that whenever that nation shall bestow its literature upon Rome it will mar everything; and that all the sooner, if it sends its physicians among us. They have conspired among themselves to 2 Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1611), Letter F, fols. 406r–406v.

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murder all barbarians with their medicine; a profession which they exercise for lucre, in order that they may win our confidence, and dispatch us all the more easily. They are in the common habit, too, of calling us barbarians, and stigmatize us beyond all other nations, by giving us the abominable appellation of Opici. I forbid you to have anything to do with [Greek] physicians.3 Over a millennia later, in twelfth-century Islamic Seville, the jurist Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn ʿAbdun expressed the opinion that Muslims should not be treated by Jews or Christians since the hostility towards Muslims of these subject dhimmis (‘protected peoples’ living under Islamic rule) meant that any Muslim who consented to be treated by such doctors risked his life.4 From the fifteenth century until well into the eighteenth century, antisemitic propaganda printed in early modern Spain and Portugal actively encouraged the Spanish and Portuguese populations to live in fear that secret Jews operating within the medical professions were systematically murdering Christian patients. The scale of this campaign, the astounding longevity of this conspiracy theory and the campaign of discrimination that it unleashed have no precedent or parallel in the history of European medicine. 1

Jews and Medicine in Medieval Iberia

The reputation of Jewish physicians and surgeons was well established in the medieval period and a shortage of trained medical practitioners in the Iberian Peninsula meant that Jewish physicians and surgeons were in great demand in the Christian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. Jewish physicians found employment in all the royal courts of medieval Iberia and their skills were even called upon by high-ranking churchmen.5 The remarkable popularity of Jewish physicians amongst Christian patients, in spite of religious differences, is highlighted by the late fourteenth-century Jewish physician Leon Joseph of Carcassonne in a personal remark he penned in the prologue to his translation into Hebrew of Gérard de Solo’s Latin manual Practica super nono Almansoris. 3 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXIX, chapter 7. Translation by John Bostock (London: H.G. Bohn, 1855). 4 Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Séville musulmane au début du XII e siècle. Le traité d’Ibn ʿAbdun sur la vie urbaine et les corps de métiers (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001), 91. 5 Yom Tov Assis, “The Jewish Physician in Medieval Spain,” in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: an Intercultural Approach, ed. Samuel S. Kottek and Luís García-Ballester (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 33–49 (especially pages 46–8).

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Leon Joseph, who studied and practiced medicine in southern France and Cata­lonia, vividly (and somewhat candidly) recalls that the elevated status of Jewish physicians within Christian society was a major factor in his own decision to pursue a medical career: When I lived among the Christians, I was of an inferior condition in their eyes, for there is none of our nation who is honoured in their eyes except him who is a physician and who cures them of their ills; in such a case, he sits at the table of kings and remains standing before them, whether he be of humble birth or of high rank, owing to his knowledge of medical science (…). I understood this and I took it as my model, and I said unto myself: I shall go in search of Jewish physicians and I shall beg them to have mercy on me and to teach me their science in exchange for a small payment or free of charge, for the money of my purse has been ex­ hausted.6 Evidence of the high consideration in which some Jewish physicians were held is also available in documentary sources. In northern Portugal, during the reign of King Dinis (1279–1325), the town council of Porto authorized Jews to practice medicine in the town because Christian doctors “are worse” (lhe som peiores).7 In the fourteenth century, the cultured Infante Juan Manuel (1282– 1348), the nephew of King Alfonso X of Castile and author of numerous works, developed such an amicable relationship with his Jewish physician Salomón that he would have appointed him to be his executor, had the law not prohibited Jews from acting as the testamentary executors of Christians. Juan Manuel’s testament nevertheless included a remarkably effusive encomium of the physician and a recommendation that his heirs should continue to place their trust in Don Salomón: I have found him [to be] always so loyal that one would scarcely be able to say or believe it. I therefore beg my sons that they might take him into their service and entrust their affairs over to him. I am certain that they will find themselves better off for doing this. Were he a Christian, I am convinced that I would have left my affairs in his hands [as an executor]. 6 Luis García-Ballester, Lola Ferre and Eduard Feliu, “Jewish appreciation of fourteenth-century Scholastic Medicine,” in Luis García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society. Christian, Jewish and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 110–1. 7 Maria José Ferro Tavares, Os Judeus em Portugal no Século XIV (Lisbon: Guimarães & Cª Editores, 2000), 82.

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Likewise, I beg that my executors will do the same. As I am certain that he shall be as loyal to my soul as he was to my body.8 The esteem for the quality of Jewish medical practitioners was occasionally also enhanced by their more affordable fees in comparison with universitytrained and licenced Christians. A few decades later in the middle of the fourteenth century, the town council of Porto complained to King Afonso IV of Portugal (1325–1357) that the chief royal official of the province was preventing Jewish physicians from exercising their medical skills in the town. The councillors alleged that this prohibition greatly inconvenienced the population of the town since Jewish medical men had always worked in the town and their presence in the town meant that Jewish doctors “are better value than Christians who were the only ones allowed to practice the aforesaid [medical] art by the chief royal official].”9 The dearth of trained and licenced medical practitioners available to cure patients was a problem throughout medieval Europe and the Iberian Peninsula was no exception. Inevitably, it also boosted the demand for Jewish doctors and physicians. In Barcelona, a royal official wrote to the queen in 1350 to ask her to prohibit a Jewish physician named Benvenisti Ismael from leaving the city to practice his medical skills elsewhere.10 The shortage nevertheless seems, logically, to have been most acute in smaller provincial urban centres and the crown received repeated complaints in the fourteenth and fifteenth century about the unavailability of trained physicians of any faith. In response to the scarcity of medical professionals, a number of smaller provincial towns across the Iberian Peninsula were compelled to offer incentives to encourage Jewish doctors to settle and cure their inhabitants. In 1335, the council of Jaca in northern Spain offered an annual stipend in wheat in its effort to tempt a Jewish physician to move to the town.11 In the town of Cuenca (eastern Castile), the crucial role of Jewish doctors in ministering to the needs of the Christian population of the town was remembered many decades after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. One witness in the posthumous trial of a 8 9 10 11

Mercedes Gaibrois de Ballesteros, “Los testamentos inéditos de don Juan Manuel,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 99, cuaderno I (julio-septiembre 1931): 25–59 (quotation from page 46). Maria José Ferro Tavares, Os Judeus em Portugal no Século XIV, 99: “…porque os ha de melhor mercado que se os cristãos sós houvessem de obrar da dita arte.” Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 38, n. 69.

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converso by the inquisitorial tribunal of Cuenca in 1525 vividly recalled the town’s reliance upon Jewish doctors prior to the expulsion: In the aforesaid town of Cuenca, there were no physicians or doctors who could cure diverse illnesses except Samuel the Jew or Rabbi Aaron the Jew. Moreover, in those times, there were no doctors or physicians except Jews and because of this, many citizens [of Cuenca] went to houses of the aforesaid Jews to be cured and the aforesaid Jews ministered to the Bishop Lope de Barrientos.12 In those days, [the Jewish doctors] would enter the houses of those seeking to be cured and would spend a long time speaking of their illnesses.13 The same situation existed in the lands of the Crown of Aragón, where both municipal authorities and even the crown strove to retain the services of individual Jewish physicians. In the town of Villareal (north of Valencia), for instance, the council subsidised the rent due on a house leased by Isaac Gracia, its Jewish mestre en medicina.14 The crown itself granted numerous fiscal exemptions to Jewish medical practitioners. These included relief both from royal taxes as well as from other duties and services, including those levied within the Jewish communities. Pragmatic exceptions could also be made to legislation seeking to segregate Jews from Christians. In June 1315, King Jaume II of Aragón granted a special privilege to Vidal Ruben, a Jewish doctor in Barcelona, exempting him from the requisition of the horse he used for visiting patients when the royal army was mustered and that Christians seeking to show him urine samples would be allowed to enter into the Jewish quarter of Barcelona, even when its gates were closed.15 Jews did not have a monopoly upon the medical sciences and there were many Christian (and Muslim) medical practitioners in the Christian kingdoms of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. In the province of Valencia, Jews, Christians and Muslims frequently had recourse to medical practitioners from other 12

13 14 15

Lope de Barrientos (1382–1469) was the bishop of Cuenca between 1445 and 1469. He was a distinguished theologian and the author of numerous works. A noted defender of the conversos and harsh critic of the statutes of limpieza de sangre, he nonetheless was also a vocal advocate for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain as a means of facilitating the assimilation of the conversos. A.D.C., Inquisición, legajo 90, expediente 1,325. José Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 225. Jean Régné, History of the Jews of Aragon. Regesta and Documents 1213–1327 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), 206. For some examples of tax exemptions granted by the Crown of Aragón to Jewish physicians see pages 607, 622–3 and 627 of Régné’s work.

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faiths.16 There are nevertheless strong indications that Jews were overrepresented (at least in relative demographic terms) in this area although Christian medical practitioners remained the most numerous. The paucity and disparity of extant records means that it is impossible to arrive at precise figures but what exists, or at least what historians have uncovered so far, from the eastern lands of the Iberian Peninsula and from Portugal tends support such a conclusion. In the Catalan town of Perpignan, over half of the physicians known to have been practicing between 1250 and 1418 were Jews. In fifteenth-century Zaragoza, the chief city of Aragón, they accounted for just over a third of the 65 recorded physicians and surgeons.17 A study by Luis García-Ballester of the licenced physicians and surgeons practising in Valencia between 1300 and 1400 has uncovered 25 Jewish and 141 Christian physicians – thus just under a fifth of all physicians were Jews – but only 3 Jewish surgeons compared to 83 Christians.18 On the other side of the peninsula, in Portugal, the imbalance seems to have been even more marked as a remarkable sixty percent of those known to have received licenses from the crown to practice medicine in the fifteenth century were Jews.19 When Manuel I of Portugal forced his Jewish subjects to convert to Christianity in 1497, this significant Jewish presence amongst licensed medical practitioners in Portugal moved him to decree that converso physicians unable to read Latin would be allowed to keep any medical books in Hebrew even though all other books in Hebrew were to be confiscated and their possession strictly prohibited.20 2

Fear of the Homicidal Jewish Doctor and its Medieval Roots

The extant documentary evidence demonstrates the prominent role occupied by Jewish medical practitioners in the medieval Iberian Peninsula but also offers striking proof of the ambivalent attitude, and occasionally the outright suspicion and hostility, that Jewish doctors generated amongst some Christians, in the church and amongst some secular rulers. This ambivalence was expressed in legislation and in the criticism of anti-Jewish authors.

16 17 18 19 20

Mark D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University press, 2004), 154–5. Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, 104–8. Luis García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society, art. III, 34–5. I. Gonçalves, Imagens do Mundo Medieval (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1988), 9–53. A.N.T.T., Gavetas, Gaveta 15, maço 5, doc. 16; A.N.T.T., Chancelaria de D. Manuel I, book 16, fol. 75v and book 17, fol. 31v.

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The anxieties caused by the prevalent use of Jewish medical practitioners by Christian patients led to the promulgation of numerous laws seeking to regulate and/or limit their interaction with their Christian patients. Strangely, the Fourth Lateran Council held under the aegis of the formidable Pope Innocent III in 1215, and which set the tone (and offered an inspiration) for many antiJewish laws and edicts in the following centuries, does not mention Jewish medical practitioners. The main legal authority on the use of Jewish doctors by Christians was the compendium of Canon Law assembled in the twelfth century by Gratian, the Decretum Gratiani. It was unambiguous in its strict prohibition of the use of Jewish doctors under pain of excommunication.21 Initially, the main emphasis of anti-Jewish legislation affecting medical practitioners in the Iberian Peninsula seems to have been on the Jews’ role as apothecaries for Christian patients and the anxiety that Jews would adulterate their remedies in order to poison and injure or kill Christians. The thirteenthcentury Siete Partidas, an influential legal compendium collated and composed at the behest of King Alfonso X of Castile, forbade Christians from receiving medicinal potions or emetics prepared by Jews. Such remedies were only to be prepared “by the hand of a Christian” although that Christian was permitted to follow the instructions of a Jewish doctor.22 A similar law was also enacted in the east of the Iberian Peninsula, in the kingdoms of Aragón and Majorca. In a document dating from 1320, the bishop of Majorca protested against the presence of Jewish apothecaries on his Balearic Island and denounced the illegality of their trade with Christian customers.23 The suspicions against Jewish medical practitioners inevitably spread beyond their role as apothecaries. Amongst the various anti-Jewish and antiMuslim measures adopted by the churchmen who gathered at the church council of Valladolid (1322), was a stern injunction to avoid Jewish and Muslim doctors because of their purported malicious objectives. Citing the precedent set by Gratian’s Decretum, the churchmen gathered at Valladolid essentially sought to reiterate its validity: The canons of the Holy Fathers established with great reason that ailing Christians should not seek out Jewish and Muslim [doctors] or receive the remedies that they dispense in order to counter the obstinate malice of the Jews and Muslims who under the guise of acting as doctors, 21 22 23

Decretum Gratiani, Pars Secunda, Causa XXVIII, question I, c. XIII. Cum Iudeis nec manducandum, nec habitandum, nec ab eis medicamentum accipiendum est. Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los judíos” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 87–8. Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, 88.

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surgeons and apothecaries injure the Christian people when administering medicaments to them and often place their lives in danger. Since these canons have not been observed in the past due to the negligence of the [past] prelates, we order (…) that they should be observed under pain of ecclesiastical censure….24 This decree was reasserted at the council held in Salamanca in 1335. The historical significance of these two councils resides not only in their expressed desire to prevent Jewish-Christian interaction in the context of the relationship between a Jewish doctor and his Christian patient but in their implicit admittance that such contacts took place and they reveal the difficulties faced by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities seeking to prevent them. There is little evidence, as discussed in the previous paragraph, that regulations affecting Jewish apothecaries were vigorously implemented and the same can also be said for Jewish doctors and surgeons. The resolution adopted at Valladolid in 1322 explicitly admitted the failure of the ecclesiastical authorities to implement the segregationist canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, convened in Rome by Pope Innocent III, in Castile. The fact that they were compelled to reiterate their warning in 1335, a little over a decade later, is further testimony of their relative ineffectualness. They mirrored similar injunctions made by Christian prelates elsewhere in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that, similarly, went largely unheeded.25 As late as 1397, Queen Maria of Aragón promulgated a law that was similar to the law of the Siete Partidas affecting Jewish apothecaries but she extended it to all Jewish medical practitioners. Moreover, her edict was couched in particularly harsh terms that underlined its religious motivation: … because these perfidious Jews are thirsty for Christian blood, as enemies would be, and it is dangerous for Christians to obtain any medical help from Jewish doctors when they are sick (…) we ordain and establish that no Jew, in any case of a Christian’s infirmity, should dare to exercise his office unless a Christian doctor will [also] take part in the cure.26 The practicalities of real life and the dependence of numerous Christian patients upon Jewish physicians meant that, inevitably, these legal strictures 24 25 26

Juan Tejada y Ramiro, Colección de cánones de la Iglesia española (Madrid: Jose Maria Alonso, 1851), III, 501; Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, 88. See chapter 5 in Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, 87–8.

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were often circumvented or adapted to allow Jews to attend to the urgent needs of their Christian patients. In 1302, a Jewish physician in Zaragoza received a privilege from the crown entitling him to leave the Jewish quarter at any time of day or night and not worry about the night-time curfew imposed on Jews. The privilege was apparently the result of a plea submitted by the town council of Zaragoza, for whom the Jewish physician’s talents were “indispensable.”27 In 1331, Queen Leonor ordered the councillors of Zaragoza to open a door that had previously been sealed in order to incorporate it into the wall dividing the Jewish quarter from the rest of the town. The order was driven by the necessity to allow the Jewish physician Jehuda de la Caballeria to be able to exit the Jewish quarters and visit Christian patients at night, when the gates of the judería were locked shut.28 In fifteenth-century Portugal, the royal laws threatened severe punishments for any Jews found outside of their gated quarters (judiarias) after the night-time curfew imposed upon Jews but a law passed by King João I (1385–1433) made an exception for Jewish doctors and surgeons. Those Jewish medical practitioners accompanied by Christian attendants during their medical visits were amongst those exempted from this law.29 Later in the same century, the town council of Leiria in central Portugal obtained permission from the crown in 1455 to open up a door in the house of a Jewish physician that had been blocked up when the Jewish quarter had been walled up in compliance with an earlier law on the segregation of Jews. Once again, it was the town council’s desire to facilitate the access of the Jewish physician to his Christian patients after the night-time closure of the gates of the Jewish quarter that motivated the petition.30 Beyond the anxieties expressed through restrictive legislation, the fear of Jewish doctors amongst the literate clergy appears to have received a decisive impulse in the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period from the influential works of two late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century authors who were themselves conversos: Alfonso de Valladolid (c. 1270–1346) and Alfonso Chirino (c. 1365–1429). Alfonso of Valladolid, alias Rabbi Abner of Burgos, was a convert to Christianity around 1321 and the author of various polemical texts including the Libro de las batallas de Dios (“The Battles of the Lord”). The work was extensively cited in the following century by Alonso de Espina in his Fortalitium Fidei and particular emphasis was placed upon Alfonso de Valladolid’s warning to his readers to avoid Jewish doctors. He outlined three 27 28 29 30

Jean Régné, History of the Jews of Aragon. Regesta and Documents 1213–1327, 518. Ignacio de Asso, Historia de la economía política de Aragón (Zaragoza: Francisco Magallon, 1798), 328–9. Ordenações Afonsinas, book II, title 80. A.N.T.T., Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, book 15, fol. 62v.

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reasons justifying this. The first reason alleged that the dietary obligations of Jews rendered them ignorant of the restorative properties of numerous nonKosher foods. The second was that their lack of belief in the Christian concept of sin and their lust for wealth rendered them either callous practitioners or encouraged malpractice: Every Christian should avoid taking medicines from a Jew for three reasons: first because the Jew knows by hearsay and not by experiment which he ought to carry out himself the nature and temperament of all the foods he prescribes. For instance, the Jewish physician knows neither through experience nor through books the nature of the hare, the rabbit, small fish, and the conger eel and other meats, as he knows only the meat of beef, lamb, goat, and other foods which he usually eats. And wise physicians have said many times that book knowledge is not enough (…).  The second reason [for avoiding Jewish physicians] is that such a physician is either afraid of sinning according to his law or is not afraid. It is clear that he is not [afraid of sinning] because the Jewish wise men said that the best physicians will go to Hell. And the reason is that the physicians’ intentions are generally to acquire wealth and renown and not to serve God. And this is why they sometimes prolong an illness or make it worse or precipitate the patient’s death. And if such is the nature of healers in general, it is even more so in the case of the Jews, for, by and large, they are not afraid of sinning, as has been said (…).31 Neither of these two reasons, however, suggests an organised Jewish plot. It was in the third reason or justification outlined by Alonso de Valladolid that he planted the seed of such a conspiracy. As believers in the Torah (or the “Jewish Law”), all Jewish doctors, irrespective of their actions, presented a danger to Christians since, Alfonso de Valladolid emphasised, “their Law orders them to kill Christians and take their property.” Alfonso claims that the Talmud ordered Jews to avoid receiving medicine from Christians and other Gentiles. As such, he argued, it seemed just that the Christian should reciprocate since any Christian who did so would render onto God “a great service.”32 In contrast to Alfonso de Valladolid, Alfonso Chirino came from a less distinguished background. He rose to become personal physician to King Juan II 31

32

Marcelino V. Amasuno, “The converso physician in the anti-Jewish controversy in fourteenth-fifteenth century Castile,” in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: an Intercultural Approach, ed. Samuel S. Kottek and Luís García-Ballester (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 103–5. Marcelino V. Amasuno, “The converso physician in the anti-Jewish controversy,” 107.

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of Castile and is chiefly famous for his treatise Espejo de Medicina (“Mirror of medicine”), which was written between 1414 and 1418. In his work, Chirino criticised, often quite violently, numerous aspects of medical practice in Spain that seemed to him to be lacking in rigour. His criticism of Jewish physicians and especially those serving aristocratic families and at the royal court was, however, much more personal than that of Alfonso de Valladolid and particularly acerbic: By means of their malevolent tricks they build their reputation among the ignorant. They sow the seeds of lies and harvest vanity, thus becoming the physicians of powerful noble men and women. Through these aristocratic connections, some of these physicians are introduced to the kings and queens and the grandees; and once they have their favour, they exert their power to hurt whoever they wish.33 It is tempting to speculate that professional rivalry – with Jewish royal physicians such as Moses ibn Çarçal and Meir Alguadex – may have been at the root of such criticism. For Chirino, Jewish doctors were predisposed to injure or kill Christian patients. This predisposition was innate to the Jewish faith and to emphasise this point Chirino quotes Psalms 57:4: “the wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies” (alienati sunt peccatores a vulva erraverunt ab utero). It must be emphasised that at no point did Alfonso de Valladolid or Alfonso Chirino suggest that medical practitioners who had converted from Judaism to Christianity, as was their own case, represented a danger. Nevertheless, antisemitic authors in following centuries, most notably Alonso de Espina and Francisco de Torrejoncillo, repeatedly cited Alfonso de Valladolid’s work, often quoting him verbatim and extended the fear of Jewish doctors to cover their converted descendants. Another voice that helped to spread fear of Jewish medical murders in the first decades of the fifteenth century was that of the firebrand Dominican preacher Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419). Ferrer’s preaching campaigns sought to convert Jews and Muslims, encouraged the royal authorities to segregate those who did not convert and incited strong anti-Jewish feelings amongst the general Christian population. In one of his sermons, Ferrer urged Christians not to grant power over them to Jews as notaries, lawyers or holders of government offices. His starkest warning, however, was to avoid Jewish doctors, surgeons and apothecaries: 33

Marcelino V. Amasuno, “The converso physician in the anti-Jewish controversy,” 116–8.

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They wish a greater evil upon us Christians than we wish upon the Devil (…). A certain Jewish doctor who was about to die said [the following] to those who were present and weeping: “Do not cry, for it does not pain me to die. This is because I have caused the deaths of over five hundred Christians thanks to my medicine.”34 In spite of such alarming claims and notwithstanding the condemnations emitted by Gratian’s Decretum and various church councils or laws seeking to segregate Jews from Christians, Christian patients in Spain and Portugal continued to seek treatment from Jewish medical practitioners right up to the expulsions of 1492 and 1497. As late as July 1490, less than two years before the general expulsion from Spain, the stipulations of a signed and witnessed contractual agreement between the family of a gravely ill Christian resident of Ourense in Galicia and “Rabbi Juda the surgeon” show more concern to ensure the surgeon’s professional conduct than any religious fears. The most striking aspect of the contract is a stipulation that the surgeon could not absent himself from the town, leaving his patients unattended, and the contract also sets out the terms for the timely payment of his fees.35 The moral force of the legal restrictions and polemical criticism was largely nullified in the Iberian Peninsula when royal and aristocratic houses and even members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy publicly set such high store by their Jewish physicians. In the fifteenth century, Alonso de Espina could only comment with obvious disgust on the prevalence of Jewish physicians at the Christian courts of Spain, noting that “one could not find a single one [of the ecclesiastical and secular princes] who does not have one of those devilish Jewish doctors in his close entourage and who does not boast about it, stating that Christian doctors are not as well versed in that art.”36 3

The Archetypal Homicidal Doctor: Dr Meir Alguadex

It is amidst this context of rising anti-Jewish sentiment and growing suspicion against Jewish doctors that the legend of the murder on 25 December 1406 of King Enrique III of Castile by his Jewish physician and the Chief Rabbi in 34 35 36

Francisco Diago, Historia de la vida y milagros, muerte y discípulos del bienaventurado predicador apostólico valenciano San Vicente Ferrer de la Orden de Predicadores (Barcelona: Gabriel Graells y Giraldo Dotil, 1600), 134–5. María Gloria de Antonio Rubio, Los Judíos en Galicia (1044–1492) (La Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2006), 208–9 and 582–3. Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), fol. 147r.

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Castile, Meir ben Solomon Alguadex, came into existence. It became a constant feature of antisemitic works and its authenticity was so widely accepted that it was included in a number of historical narratives produced in early modern Spain. According to the legend, Meir Alguadex was amongst a group of Jews accused of desecrating a host in Segovia. He confessed to having previously poisoned the king for reasons that are never explained, although the story clearly implies that the murder was religiously motivated, and he was made to suffer the gruesome execution reserved for regicides: to be drawn and quartered. The allegation of regicide is supplemented by the claim that Meir Alguadex and various Jewish accomplices had unsuccessfully conspired to murder, again by poison, the Bishop of Segovia, Juan de Tordesillas.37 The origins of the legend are impossible to trace but it was probably part of oral lore in fifteenth-century Spain from either the moment that King Enrique III died or very soon afterwards. Interestingly, the alleged poisoning of the king by Meir Alguadex is not mentioned in the Crónica de Juan II, an official history of the reign of King Enrique’s son and successor composed by various authors. Neither does Solomon DaPiera, a Jewish contemporary of Rabbi Meir, mention his supposed martyrdom in a mournful poetic lament that he wrote to commemorate his death.38 The first written source to refer to the case is actually Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium Fidei. Espina’s strong anti-Jewish bias renders his account highly suspect and it is doubly so because of his alleged sources. Espina claims to have heard the tale second-hand from an Augustinian friar named Martín de Córdoba, who had himself heard it from Juan de Canallas, a Dominican who was supposedly present when the terrified Jews of Segovia handed over the stolen host to the prior of the town’s Dominican monastery.39 The real fate of Meir Alguadex after 1406 is still mysterious as he disappears from written records between 1406 and 1415. It is possible to speculate that Meir Alguadex may well have been the victim of a political and religious purge that followed the death of Enrique III and the accession of the infant king Juan II. The actual ruler in this period was the foreign-born English queen mother, Catherine of Lancaster, whose hostility to Jews was responsible for many antiJewish measures and decrees, including one ordering the physical segregation of Jewish and Muslim communities in 1412. Alguadex’s downfall could have been caused by the enmity of the prominent convert Pablo de Santa María 37 38 39

For further information about the political context in which these allegations against Meir Algaudex and other Jews were made see Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 177–182. Susan Einbinder, “Meir Alguades: History, Empathy and Martyrdom,” Religion & Literature, 42 (2010): 185–209. Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei, III, fols. 172v–173r.

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(who had been Rabbi Solomon ha-Levi before 1391). The ex-rabbi became bishop of Burgos and Meir Alguadex seems to have been on intimate terms with him before 1391. It is difficult to believe that the former friendship between the two men could have survived Pablo de Santa María’s unquenchable zeal for his new faith and his contempt for his former co-religionaries.40 In addition to Pablo de Santa María, there were other potentially hostile conversos at the court, most notably the physician Alfonso Chirino. Yet even Chirino, does not explicitly link Rabbi Meir with the death of King Enrique in polemical attack on Jewish medical practitioners. He only states that the death of the monarch should be attributed to the general incompetence of the various royal doctors consulted by the crown (Rabbi Meir is not named). Their inability to diagnose the illness afflicting the king and the erroneous remedies that they each administered led “each one of them to do damage until they finished him off.” Elsewhere in his work, Chirino refers to the alleged murder of an admiral by a Jewish physician and it is difficult to understand why Chirino would not have relayed the claim of Rabbi Meir’s deliberate medical regicide. It may well be that, writing decade before Alonso de Espina, Chirino was simply not aware of the existence of this particular tale.41 Whether or not Meir Alguadex was actually executed for the alleged murder of Enrique III or even for the libel of host desecration, the story acquired a legendary status. Alonso de Espina turns it into an exemplary tale by informing his readers that the converso bishop Pablo de Santa María had warned King Enrique III not to heed the advice of Jews or other conversos and to ban them from holding public office. The King, however, ignored the advice of the bishop, with fatal consequences for himself.42 The spread of the popularity of the legend of Doctor Meir was doubtless aided by the fact that, prior to its destruction by a fire in the nineteenth century, all visitors to the Church of Corpus Christi in Segovia – the ex-synagogue turned into a church following the host desecration libel in 1410 – could observe a prominent mural painting representing the royal physician Meir Alguadex desecrating a consecrated host.43

40 41 42 43

See Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, 177–182. Angel González Palencia and Luis Contreras Poza, Biblioteca Clásica tomo XIV. Menor daño de la Medicina. Espejo de Medicina (Madrid: Real Academia De Medicina, 1945), 115–7. Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei, fols. 172v–173r. Yolanda Moreno Koch, “La judería y sinagogas de Segovia,” in Juderías y sinagogas de la Sefarad medieval, ed. Eloy Benito Ruano, José Luis Lacave, Ana María López Alvarez, Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2003), 383–396 (page 386).

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This exemplary moral story of Jewish betrayal and murder achieved through the abuse of the confidential trust placed in a Jewish medical practitioner is repeated from the fifteenth century onwards by a host of authors and chroniclers. Unsurprisingly, it features not only in the Fortalitium Fidei of Alonso de Espina but also in most later Spanish and Portuguese antisemitic polemics which were inspired by Espina’s work. These included the Breve Disurso of ­Vicente da Costa Mattos (1622), the unpublished Execración de los judíos of Francisco de Quevedo (1633), the Centinela contra Judíos of Francisco de Torrejoncillo (1674) and the Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos of Antonio de Contreras (1736).44 The popularity of the legend in the sixteenth century extended beyond works that had purely antisemitic aims and it entered into the canon of Spanish historical writing. In the sixteenth century, it can be found in such diverse works as Álvaro Gutiérrez de Torres’s 1524 compendium of “wondrous and astounding events,” Gonzalo Argote de Molina’s 1588 history of the aristocracy of Andalusia and Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla’s 1597 manual for the proper conduct of royal officials and lords.45 The first of these authors, Álvaro Gutiérrez de Torres, found the omission of the story of Rabbi Meir’s medical regicide and host desecration from the early Crónica de Juan II to be so scandalous that he expressed his opinion that the author of the work – for he assumes that there was only one author – was not only negligent and malicious but also a traitor to the office of historian, to his king, Juan II of Castile, and to the memory of Enrique III.46 These assertions were later cited verbatim by the historian Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa in his highly respected 1571 historical compendium of the kingdom of Spain and this probably greatly assisted the perpetuation of the accusation in the following two centuries.47 44

45

46 47

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon, 1623), fol. 66v; Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Santiago Fernández Mosquera (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1996), 70; Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 129–130; Antonio de Contreras, Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos (Madrid: Oficina de Don Gabriel del Barrio, 1736), 121. Álvaro Gutiérrez de Torres, Sumario de las maravillosas y espantables cosas que en el mundo han acontecido (Toledo: Remón de Petras, 1524), unpaginated (fols. 76r–775); Gonzalo Argote de Molina, Nobleza del Andaluzia (Seville: Fernando Diaz, 1588), fol. 289r; Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, Politica para corregidores y señores de vassallos en tiempo de paz y de Gverra (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1597), 104–5. Álvaro Gutiérrez de Torres, Sumario de las maravillosas y espantables cosas, fols. 76r–76v. Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa, Los XL libros del compendio historial de las chronicas y vniversal historia de todos los reynos de España (Antwerp: Christophoro Plantino, 1571), vol. 2, 1066–8.

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In the seventeenth century, the diffusion of the legend gathered pace. It is indeed remarkable that when the biographer of Emperor Charles V, Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, began his biography with a list of the names of the erstwhile rulers of Castile and their most memorable achievements, he summed up Enrique III thus: “King Enrique III the Sickly, to whom a Jewish doctor who was his personal physician administered poison.”48 The story of the murderous Doctor Meir features in both local chronicles such as Fray Luis Ariz’s 1607 history of the town of Ávila and Diego de Colmenares’ similar history of the town of Segovia printed in 1637 as well as more general historical works such as the description of the churches and cathedrals of Castile, authored by the antiquary Gil González Dávila in 1645, and the work of the Benedictine chronicler Gregorio de Argaiz (1598–1679) in 1668.49 In his 1667 history of the “Kings of Toledo,” the humanist writer Cristóbal Lozano, went further and speculated that Doctor Meir must have been acting on behalf of the Muslim ruler of Granada when he allegedly poisoned King Enrique III: I ask: did the war [against the Muslims] not come to an abrupt end with the death of our King and did the Muslim [ruler of Granada] obtain relief and peace? Yes. Was it not the doctor of our king, a man of the Jewish race called Don Meir, who confessed under torture that he had murdered the king? This is indeed what is said. Did he confess his motive for committing this treachery? This is not known. Are the Jews and Muslims not equal enemies of the Christians? There can be no doubt about this. Was the king not at the point of gathering all his forces in Toledo to attack the Muslims when the doctor murdered him? This is certain. Well, consider then if you can guess through my conjecture whether this infamous Jew committed his act of treachery either as a result of Muslim bribery or due to his own conceit as a member of his race.50 48 49

50

Prudencio de Sandoval, Primera parte de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos Quinto (Valladolid: Sebastian de Cañas, 1606), unpaginated section at the beginning of the book that follows the description of its contents. Luis Ariz, Historia de las grandezas de la ciudad de Ávila (Alcalá de Henares: Luys Martinez Grande, 1607), fol. 47r and Diego de Colmenares, Historía de la insigne ciudad de Segovia y Compendio de la historias de Castilla (Segovia: Diego Diez, 1637), 324; Gil González Dávila, Teatro Eclesiastico De Las Iglesias Metropolitanas Y Catedrales De los Reynos de las Dos Castillas (Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1645), vol. 1, 557; Gregorio de Argaiz, Corona real de España por España fundada en el credito de los muertos y vida de San Hyeroteo Obispo de Atenas, y Segovia (Madrid: Melchor Alegre, 1668), 233. Cristóbal Lozano, Los Reyes Nuevos de Toledo (Valencia: Juan Bautista Ravanals, 1698), 405–6.

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The murderous Doctor Meir features in the 1611 play La próspera fortuna del famoso Ruy López de Avalos by Damián Salucio del Poyo, and Tirso de Molina similarly refers to the death of Meir Alguadex in his own interpretation of the same play, with the barely altered title Prospera Fortuna de Ruy Lopez Avalos y adversa de Ruy López de Avalos: primera parte (circa 1635). As late as the eighteenth century, it features in a list of “evil deeds perpetrated by Jews” included in the 1721 “moralised encyclopaedia” produced by the Capuchin Fray Martín de Torrecilla as well as in the major ecclesiastical history authored by the Hiero­nymite monk Pablo de San Nicolas.51 The story of the execution of Meir Alguadex and the accusation of host desecration became so notorious that it was even reported in the narratives of two sixteenth-century Jewish chroniclers writing in Italy. It was mentioned by Samuel Usque (c.1497–c.1567), who was born in Portugal to Jewish parents of Castilian origin and lived there as a convert until escaping to Italy and reverting to Judaism. Usque includes it in the list of tragedies that befell the Jewish people in his Portuguese work Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, which was printed in 1553 in the Italian town of Ferrara.52 A few decades later, the story also features in the work of the Jewish chronicler Joseph Ha-Cohen (c. 1496c. 1577), whose family were converso exiles in Italy, in his Hebrew work entitled “the Valley of Tears” (‫)עמק הּבכא‬.53 The accounts of Samuel Usque and Joseph Ha-Cohen are nearly identical, although Ha-Cohen mistakenly places the events later in the fifteenth century, and both accounts appear to be derived from the same (doubtless Christian) source. In both cases, the accusation of host desecration and the execution of Meir Alguadex are recounted but no mention is made of the alleged murder of Enrique III. Is it only in the seventeenth century that the famous Jewish apologist, ex-converso doctor and exile Isaac Cardoso, roundly denounces the claim of medical regicide by Rabbi Meir. For Cardoso, the tale is a “historical falsehood (…) born out of hatred and malevolence,” a libel concocted by those who bear “little affection for the Jewish ­Nation.” After pointing out that Espina is the source of the tale, Cardoso asks his reader to consider why a favoured doctor should assassinate his king,

51 52 53

Martín de Torrecilla, Encyclopedia canonica, civil, moral, regular y orthodoxa (Madrid: Blas de Villa-Nueva, 1721), 495; Pablo de San Nicolas, Siglos Geronimianos. Historia general eclesiastica, monastica y secular (Madrid: Blas de Villa Nueva, 1744), XIX, 433. Samuel Usque, Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, ed. Y.H. Yerushalmi and José V. de Pina Martins (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), vol. 2, fols. 194v–195r (facsimile edition). Joseph ha-Cohen, ʿEmeq ha-Bakha, ed. and tr. H.S. May (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 61–2.

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e­ specially when, he argues, diaspora Jews were required to pray for the welfare of the monarchy and government they lived under during Sabbath prayers.54 4

Converso Doctors and the ‘Jewish Plot’

In view of the development of antisemitic fears about the sincerity of the conversos and the concept of limpieza de sangre during the fifteenth century, it was all-but inevitable that the medieval myth of the murderous Jewish doctor would come to affect converso medical practitioners as well. Prior to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 there is only limited evidence that the converso doctors were subjected to the same degree of suspicion as their Jewish counterparts. A rare incidence of an allegation of the use of poison by a converso in a religiously motivated killing can be found in an anecdote that the fifteenth-century chronicler Luis Panzán includes in his work. Panzán claims that King Fernando I of Aragón (1412–1416) survived a plot to assassinate him before his accession by a converso who had once been a treasurer of King Enrique III of Castile. According to Panzán, a converso named Juan Sánchez Abravanel was “moved by the Devil” to pour poison into a fish pie but that the plan failed when Fernando ordered his would-be assassin to taste the pie before he himself ate it. The story is doubtless apocryphal and it is noteworthy that the converso involved was not a medical practitioner but rather a royal ­official.55 By 1524, however, an antisemitic ribald ballad printed in Spanish includes a judaizing converso physician amongst its Jewish and converso protagonists.56 The forged letter purporting to be from the Jews of Constantinople to the conversos of Spain was a major factor in the extension of the myth of medical homicide from Jews to judaizing conversos. The letter clearly refers to the medical professions as a means by which the conversos could assuage their thirst for revenge against the ‘Old Christians’ of Spain and Portugal. Claims about the danger of homicidal converso doctors and apothecaries using their skills to gain revenge upon unsuspecting ‘Old Christian’ patients were widely echoed in early modern Spain and Portugal and offer startling proof of the diffusion of 54 55 56

Isaac Cardoso, Las Excelencias de los Hebreos (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1679), 373–4. Luis Panzán, Recordanzas en tiempo del Papa Luna, ed. G. de Andrés (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1987), 42. Adrienne L. Martín, “Antisemitismo canino en las coplas del perro de Alba,” Creneida, 2 (2014): 298–315.

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the forged letters of the Jews of Constantinople and conversos of Spain. In his 1575 defence of the racial purity statutes of the Cathedral of Toledo, Bishop Diego de Simancas (alias Diego Velázquez) warned that foreign Jews had advised their secret co-religionists in the Iberian Peninsula that “through medicine you shall kill them with impunity” (cum medicina eos impunem occidetis).57 Likewise, the claim that conversos were acting upon advice received from Jews overseas and seeking to use their medical knowledge to kill Christian patients, was articulated in a letter sent to the crown in 1584 by Andrés de Noronha, the Bishop of Plasencia in Spain. With a tone of shrill urgency that verged on panic, Andrés de Noronha urged the crown to heed this warning and take immediate action to prevent conversos from becoming medical practitioners.58 The conspiracy theorists also seized upon sixteenth-century papal bulls prohibiting contact between Jewish medical practitioners and Christian patients issued by the pontiffs Paul IV, Pius V and Gregory XIII. They presented these bulls as evidence to support their claims about converso doctors. The promulgation by Pope Gregory XIII in 1581 of a bull that prohibited Christian patients from seeking medical assistance from Jews offered precious polemical ammunition to seventeenth-century anti-converso writers. The bull itself – Multos adhuc ex Christianis – does not endorse any conspiracy theories but seems more concerned with the possibility that vulnerable Christian patients, especially the dying, might endanger the salvations of their souls and that Jewish (or other non-Christian) physicians would not encourage them to seek absolution and confess their sins.59 In a sermon dating from 1624, Fray João de Ceita praised the Pope for recognising the urgent need to prevent interfaith medical treatment because of the “inner hatred” (odio interno) of the judaizing conversos and in 1674 Fray Torrejoncillo claimed that the Pope acted against the Jews because of the “hatred and abhorrence in which they hold us.”60 Armed with the ‘evidence’ provided by the forged letters and what they claimed to be papal sanction, anti-converso polemicists worked hard to buttress the concept of a converso medical conspiracy with stories relating specific instances of medical murder. For Diego de Simancas, there was abundant 57 58 59 60

Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani a Sede Apostolica saepe confirmati (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1575), 18–20. Instituto Valencia de Don Juan (Madrid), Envío 91, caja 131, doc. 473 (recto/verso). H. Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944), vol. 2, 584–7. João de Ceita, Sermão da fee pregado em o acto, que o Sancto Tribunal de Évora fez em a mesma cidade no anno de 1624 a 14 de Julho (Évora: Lourenço Crasbeeck, 1624), fol. 18r and Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 35–6.

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evidence proving that the advice of the Jews of Constantinople had been implemented by judaizing Iberian conversos and he pointed to the example of an unnamed converso doctor in Valencia who had been burned for judaizing “many years ago.” The judaizing converso doctor would return home “after murdering many Christians” and be greeted by his children with the following phrase: “Welcome, avenger,” to which he would reply “Come to [greet] the avenger” as if he were saying “Welcome, here is the avenger.” Diego de Simancas adds, although without providing any specific information to back this claim, that the Inquisition had unmasked six hundred cases of murder committed by converso doctors.61 The claims regarding serial-killer converso doctors and lurid accounts of their methods are repeated in polemical works printed from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards. The Spanish Jurist Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, who reproduces the forged letter in his work Sylua responsorum iuris: in duos libros diuisa (printed in Madrid in 1614), offers the same cautionary tale to his readers: We know it for certain, and it has been confirmed, that a doctor who was descended from Jews was condemned as a heretic by the inquisitors of a certain district of Spain. It was established that the man, whilst residing in a certain village whose name has not been revealed in order to avoid offending anyone, murdered more than three hundred people through his false and adulterated medicine as well as with his poisons. Every time that he returned home from visiting the sick, or perhaps it should be said after procuring their death, his wife who was also one of that race of Jews would say: “our avenger is welcome.” To this, her Jewish husband would lift and wave his right arm whilst clenching his fist as a sign of victory and utter “He is come and will wreak his revenge.”62 The same story is included in later polemics including the 1622 vitriolic antisemitic polemic Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, of the Portuguese author Vicente da Costa Mattos and in the 1674 Centinela contra Judíos of Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo.63 In Portugal, the myth found a potent advocate in João Baptista d’Este, a Jew of Sephardic origin from Ferrara in Italy, who travelled to Portugal and converted to Christianity. Baptized in Évora in 1600, he became a particularly 61 62 63

Diego Velázquez, Defensio Statuti Toletani a Sede Apostolica saepe confirmati, 18–20. Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, Sylua responsorum iuris: in duos libros diuisa (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1614), fol. 133r. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, fol. 56v and Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 87–8.

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virulent polemicist against Judaism and crypto-Judaism and his fanaticism led him, somewhat bizarrely given his own status as a convert, to vigorously campaign for the expulsion of all conversos from Portugal and Spain. In a manuscript memorandum written in 1622 and addressed to the crown, João Baptista d’Este wholeheartedly embraces the medical conspiracy theory. He warns the Habsburg monarch that conversos (whom he straightforwardly refers as “Jews”) working as physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were either poisoning their patients or allowing them to die by deliberately providing the wrong type of medical care.64 Writing at exactly the same time as João Baptista d’Este, the polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos particularly highlights and expounds upon the significance of the claim regarding the medical profession that was made in the forged letter from Constantinople. He adds an account of the evil deeds of Master Rodrigo, a converso doctor arrested by the Inquisition and burned in Lisbon. According to the Portuguese polemicist, Master Rodrigo performed the exact same ritual with his sister as did the anonymous Spanish converso doctor with his wife featured in Ignacio del Villar Maldonado’s book. The Portuguese polemicist laments the fact that conversos had been able to accomplish their murderous objective so effectively under the cover of their medical profession. … a multitude of doctors, surgeons and apothecaries have been arrested in Lisbon and other parts of the kingdom, not counting those who have fled (leaving their wives imprisoned), and they have all confessed to wilfully perpetrating many murders of [Old] Christian noblemen and men of the church. In some cases, the exact numbers are known because they killed one out of every twelve patients. One of them, who was also found to possess a book attacking our holy faith and who was burned at the stake in Évora, confessed that he had killed one hundred and fifty Old Christians, including eighteen noblemen.65 Vicente da Costa Mattos assures his readers that he would have to add a second volume to his work even if he only wrote down half of what he knew regarding the evils of converso doctors. He marvels that any Old Christian could still, in the light of such public knowledge, place his or her life in the hands of a converso doctors and praises the measures taken by the crown to prevent 64 65

José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “‘Murdering Doctors’ in Portugal (XVI–XVII Centuries): The accusation of a revenge,” El Prezente. Studies in Sephardic Culture. Magic and Folk Medicine, 5 (2011): 89–91. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, fols. 56v– 58r.

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conversos from having access to medical training or work in hospitals and houses for the indigent. He thus offers his readers a truly terrifying portrait of the converso doctor as an inveterate serial-killer who was moved by a rabid hatred of Old Christians and a thirst for revenge. Documentary evidence demonstrates that these fears also circulated amongst the ecclesiastical hierarchy. They were not dismissed as absurd but, on the contrary, considered to be a serious and very real danger. They surface in a letter sent by a Portuguese bishop to the Papal curia at an unknown date although certainly in the early seventeenth century. Vehemently protesting against a papal pardon accorded to the conversos, the bishop directly repeats the central claim of this conspiracy theory. The bishop is adamant that “[the conversos] have complied with a letter sent by a Jew of Constantinople to the [conversos] of these regions, that they should make their sons doctors and ecclesiastics, so that they might control the souls and bodies of the Christians.”66 Even inquisitors feared the converso doctors. In 1619, an inquisitor of the tribunal based in Coimbra wrote to the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon to inform them that his tribunal had arrested a number of converso doctors, and to remind them of an old case of religiously motivated murders perpetrated by such a man: A [converso] doctor confessed to the Holy Office (after confessing his Judaism) that he killed many Old Christians using purgatives and other drugs that did not cure the illnesses from which they were suffering. If he treated some [Old Christian patients] with the appropriate drugs, it was only done to preserve his standing and reputation. [He acted in this way because], had he killed all of his patients, nobody would have wanted to be treated by him and he would thus not have been able to earn a living through his profession.67 When a gathering (junta) of Portuguese bishops and ecclesiastics assembled in the town of Tomar to find a “remedy against Judaism” (remédio do Judaismo) in the spring and summer of 1629, they alluded to the danger posed by converso doctors in the report that they submitted to the crown. They demanded an immediate ban on the practice of medicine and pharmacy by conversos, basing their claim on similar bans implemented by the Papacy and the gravity of the threat: 66 67

J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses (Lisbon: Teixeira, 1921), 198, footnote 1. J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 469, doc. 12.

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… the instances of injury and death inflicted upon their sick patients and confessed by them when penanced by the Inquisition are so many that it can never cease being a source of amazement that people still entrust them with their health.68 In the wake of ecclesiastical junta held in Tomar, a manuscript list offering examples of such homicidal conversos appears to have begun circulating widely. Obviously seeking to both horrify its readers and boost its credibility, the list offers both the names of such criminals and their terrifying victim-counts. The figure of the homicidal converso doctor engaged in the serial murder of his Old Christian patients is thus transformed from a somewhat abstract and faceless figure, such as in “the Avenger” legend, into a personalized one. One such work featuring a list of murderous converso doctors that appeared in the 1630s, is an anonymous diatribe with the somewhat prolix title Treatise in which it is proved that the New Christians of the [Hebrew] Nation who dwell in Portugal are secret Jews and in which the evils that they inflict upon Old Christians are pointed out. The list enumerates 51 converso physicians, surgeons and apothecaries working in Portugal and Spain who had been accused of heretical beliefs and, in some cases, even of mass murder. Some of them are merely designated as “a doctor in Ciudad Real” but the list includes the names and places of residence of the majority. The most conspicuous amongst the men listed are a physician named Garcia Lopes of Portalegre, who is accused of having murdered 150 Old Christian patients including 25 fildalgos (members of the lower nobility), and a certain Pero Lopes of Goa, who had allegedly taken the life of 70 of his Old Christian patients.69 The accusations made in the list against other individuals are less specific. Thus the apothecary Gabriel Pinto, a resident of Coimbra burned at the stake in 1600, “has confessed to killing many Old Christians, including churchmen and nuns.” A converso doctor practicing medicine in Ciudad Real is accused of dipping one of his fingernails into poison and then into his remedies to kill his patients whilst a converso in the Spanish town of Toledo was apparently less subtle as he merely poured poison into wounds and ulcers of Old Christians patients. The anonymous author(s) of the list reflects that “in Portugal there is no need for such [secretive] measures since [the conversos] control the apothecaries and the doctors murder us without being detected by delaying 68 69

Martin A. Cohen, The Canonization of a Myth. Portugal’s “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002), 48. A.N.T.T., Conselho Geral do Santo Ofício, livro 301, fols. 66r–97v (Tratado em que se prova serem christãos fingidos os da nação, que viuem em Portugal, apontando os males que fazem aos christãos velhos).

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medicinal bleedings (…), the surgeons do not apply the remedies in a timely manner and the apothecaries by only delivering remedies when they wish to.70 The fact that the list features the names of a number of real individuals who were actually prosecuted by the Inquisition is significant since, once again, this indicates a desire to lend verisimilitude to the claims made by its author(s). In reality, and unsurprisingly, the claims seem to have been complete fabrications. The recent research of José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, who has analysed the surviving inquisitorial trial records of some of these men preserved in the National Portuguese Archives, has not found any trace of such accusations of medical murder in those dossiers that can still be consulted.71 Evidence that such propaganda found a ready reception amongst the populace can be deduced from various sources. In his book on medical proverbs, the Spanish physician Juan Sorapan de Rieros, a familiar of the inquisitorial tribunal of Llerena in Extremadura, lists racial purity, and especially the absence of any Jewish ancestry, as the most essential of the desirable qualities that patients should seek in their physicians: Above all, lords should take care that the doctor who is in charge of their health should be literate, an expert, prudent, pious, humble and full of humility, and of a pure and noble caste. With these qualities, he will not commit the betrayal committed by that doctor (descended from Jews and named Sedechia) who in exchange for money took the life of King Charles the Bald of France.72 In our times the Holy Office [of the Inquisition] in Portugal apprehended a judaizing Portuguese doctor who had practiced his art in Castile. When he was tortured, he confessed that he had murdered, merely out of pleasure, seven friars in Ciudad Real who were ill. He had prognosticated their deaths many days beforehand so that he could be held to be a very wise man.73

70 71 72

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J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 465–8. José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “‘Murdering Doctors’ in Portugal (XVI–XVII Centuries),” 81–98. The Carolingian king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles II the Bald (823–877 CE). Various chronicles, including the Chronicon of the Benedictine abbot Regino of Prüm (d. 915) and the ninth-century Annals of Saint-Vaast, relate the story of his alleged murder in 877 by a Jewish physician named Sedechia. Juan Sorapan de Rieros, Medecina española contenida en proverbios vulgares de nuestra lengua (Granada: Martin Fernandez Zambrano, 1616), 229.

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Juan Sorapan de Rieros states that there were “innumerable examples” of such murderous converso doctors whose notoriety was such that they did not need to be repeated by him. The fear of conversos practicing medicine was regularly expressed by representatives of the commons during the parliaments held in Portugal in 1525, 1641 and 1653. Their widespread concern over the threat supposedly posed by malevolent judaizing doctors led the representatives assembled in the parliament held by João IV in January 1641 to demand that a royal decree be issued to forbid all conversos from studying to be apothecaries in Portuguese universities. Furthermore, all doctors and surgeons should be compelled to provide their prescriptions only in plain vernacular Portuguese rather than Latin since it was feared that conversos could take advantage of their patients’ ignorance of Latin to place their lives in jeopardy.74 Popular fear of converso doctors was also voiced in denunciations preserved in the archives of the Inquisition. Particularly interesting are those made against Manuel Duarte, a converso surgeon who was exiled to Brazil after having been found guilty of judaizing but continued to exercise his profession in the colony despite his previous conviction. Amongst the denunciations made against him in Bahia, by no less than thirty-two witnesses in 1612, is the accusation of medical murder. Although some witnesses gave positive assessments of Manuel Duarte’s healing skills, others clearly had imbibed the conspiracy theory of Jewish medical murder. One witness claimed to have suspicions about the deaths of patients over whom Manuel Duarte had exclusive care, presuming that “he gave them medicines to kill them, in accordance with his [Jewish] Law.” Others alleged that Manuel Duarte was a religiously motivated serial murderer: killing ten Old Christian patients for each converso burned at the stake by the Inquisition and secular authorities.75 The obsession in early modern Spain and Portugal with the purported danger represented by judaizing conversos secretly operating within the medical professions reached such fevered levels that it was noted even by contemporary critics of racialism. The anonymous author, or authors, of a memorandum (parecer) submitted to a royal committee investigating the possibility of reforming the statutes of limpieza de sangre in the first years of the reign of King Philip III (1598–1621) ironically asked why a swordsmith should be automati74 75

J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 238 and 272; Teófilo Braga, Historia da Universidade de Coimbra nas suas Relações com a Instrução Publica Portugueza. Vol II. 1555 a 1700 (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, 1895), 779. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 223, fols. 219v–220r, 221v, 229r–230r, 236r and 237v– 238v.

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cally considered to be racially “clean” whilst a doctor was always considered “to be a Jew” (i.e. a converso)?76 5

Ethnic Discrimination and the Medical Professions

The fear of judaizing converso doctors and apothecaries, who were able to secretly operate their murderous designs under the cloak of their official Christian identity, rapidly led to calls in both Spain and Portugal for measures to prevent any person of Jewish ancestry from having access to medical training. Unsurprisingly, the measure favoured in both kingdoms was the adoption of statutes of limpieza de sangre that would force candidates to universities or medical institutions to undergo a genealogical investigation and establish their racial pedigree. The first instance in which discrimination affecting conversos was applied to the medical profession appears in the set of regulations for the Inquisition printed at the behest of Inquisitor General Tomas de Torquemada in 1484. These inquisitorial instrucciones specified that the sons and grandsons of individuals convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, which in the 1480s could only mean conversos, were prohibited from holding public office or becoming ordained priests as well as doctors, surgeons, apothecaries and “bleeders” (san­ gradores).77 The Inquisition’s edict was followed by two royal decrees issued by Queen Isabel of Castile nearly two decades later. On 10 September 1501, a royal edict banned all those convicted by the Inquisition of “heresy and apostasy,” as well as the sons and grandsons “of those burned [for heresy],” from occupying positions of authority in royal and municipal government and extended the measure to any individuals seeking to work as physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. In this document, Queen Isabel also specifies that the ban would extend to the second generation in the case of direct male descendants for those individuals whose parents had been convicted but had not re-offended (and thus not been burned at the stake). For reasons that are not explained, but appear to be linked to the belief that the heretical views of judaizantes were overwhelmingly transmitted by fathers to their children, the ban on the descendants of convicted heretics only extended one generation in the case of descent through the female line. In the second edict, whose exact date is not known but which was issued later the same month, the crown reserves the right to 76 77

Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XVI y XVII, 284. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, libro 497, fol. 4r.

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declare which professions would be subject to statutes of limpieza.78 It is important to emphasize that neither the inquisitorial edict of 1484 nor the royal edict of 1501 amount to an ethnic ban affecting all conversos since the measures only applied to those conversos arrested and convicted of judaizing by the Inquisition as well as, to varying degrees, their direct descendants. The study of medicine at university was the key to a career as a licenced medical practitioner but a number of university colleges adopted of statutes of limpieza de sangre. Whilst statutes often began with prohibitions on those conversos with relatives convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, they were later expanded to exclude all conversos regardless of whether or not their family was ‘tainted’ by heresy. Statutes of limpieza were adopted by colleges in many Spanish universities, including the colleges of San Bartolomé at the University of Salamanca (1482); Santa Cruz at the University of Valladolid (1488); San Antonio de Porta Coeli in the University of Sigüenza (1497); and San Ildefonso at the University of Alcalá de Henares (1519). Other institutions followed suit in the sixteenth century in both the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón, including the University of Seville and the Colegio Mayor of the University of Cuenca as well as the Colegio Imperial de Santiago and the Colegio de San Vicente Mártir, both in the Aragonese town of Huesca (maybe even as early as 1515 although the exact date is difficult to determine). It is important to note that whilst many prestigious institutions adopted discriminatory statutes, very few of the so-called ‘lesser colleges’ (colegios menores) followed suit and this provided conversos with a legal way to seek a medical education at university. On 20 November 1522, the Inquisition issued a decree prohibiting any converso from graduating from the universities of Salamanca, Valladolid and Toledo but this decree seems to have remained a dead letter.79 Statutes of limpieza were also introduced in many colleges of apothecaries in the lands of Castile and Aragón. The college of surgeons in Barcelona adopted statutes of limpieza as early as 1506.80 In 1564 King Philip II confirmed the fifteenth-century statutes of the College of Apothecaries in Valencia, which banned those “of Jewish descent” from training as apothecaries and also in78 79

80

Miguel Eugenio Muñoz, Recopilación de las leyes, pragmáticas reales, decretos, y acuerdos del Real Protomedicato (Valencia: Imprenta de la viuda de Antonio Bordazar, 1751), 71–4. Baltasar Cuart Moner, Colegiales mayores y limpieza de sangre durante la Edad Moderna. El estatuto de san Clemente de Bolonia (ss. XV–XIX) (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1991); Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XVI y XVII, 123–130; Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la españa moderna y contemporanea (Madrid: Ediciones Arión, 1986), vol. 2, 415–425. Antonio Fernández Luzón, La Universidad de Barcelona en el Siglo XVI (Barcelona: Edicions Universitat Barcelona, 2005), 255.

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cluded another provision, dating from 1529, that prohibited the admission any Old Christian married to a woman of Jewish ancestry. Any individual of Jewish descent who attempted to conceal his ancestry through deceit and underwent an examination by the college to gain a licence to work as an apothecary incurred a fine of 500 ducats and perpetual exile from the city. Comparable racial statutes affecting the colleges of apothecaries in the cities of Barcelona, Zaragoza and Seville were also adopted or confirmed by the crown during the sixteenth century.81 Documentary evidence indicates that the faculty of medicine at the University of Barcelona compelled applicants to establish their racial purity from 1566 at the very latest, a situation that was formalised with the faculty’s adoption of discriminating statutes the following year. The impetus for this measure appears to have been driven by the Old Christian college of doctors, which controlled the faculty of medicine, rather than any exterior pressure from the university itself which unsuccessfully protested against such unilateral action by the faculty. Three decades later, in his treatise on the Spanish aristocracy, the Catalan friar Juan Benito de Guardiola held up the faculty of medicine of the University of Barcelona as an example to be emulated by similar institutions elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula. Guardiola praised the faculty’s insistence on systematically rejecting any applicant “when the stain of the Jewish race is discovered” as a result of its “good and laudable statute [of limpieza].” The Barcelonan faculty of medicine served as a precedent and in 1596 the requirement of limpieza was extended by the university to all of its faculties.82 In the case of the University of Salamanca itself, as opposed to its individual colleges, the university constitutions of 1538 and 1561 do not refer to limpieza de sangre. Consequently, it follows that conversos aspiring to become doctors could always seek entry into university colleges that did not have limpieza de sangre as one of their admittance requirements or could endeavour to find medical training in other European universities. The latter option was prevented in Spain, however, by the introduction in 1559 of a royal ban preventing Spanish students from studying elsewhere in Europe except in a few universities in Portugal and Italy. The edict was primarily the result of the ‘protestant scare’ that shook Spain between 1557 and 1562 but it indiscriminately affected all potential students, including conversos. The ban did not affect Portugal although the right to examine and issue licences to foreign-trained doctors in 81 82

David C. Goodman, Power and Penury. Government, Technology and Science in Philip II’s Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 219–220. Antonio Fernández Luzón, La Universidad de Barcelona en el Siglo XVI, 256–8; Juan B. Guardiola, Tratado de Nobleza, y de los Títulos y Ditados que oy dia tienen los varones claros y grandes de España (Madrid: la biuda de Alonso Gomez, 1591), 10.

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that kingdom became a bone of bitter contention between the royal physician and the medical faculty of the University of Coimbra. Ultimately, the right to licence foreign-trained doctors was won by the latter institution and recognised by a royal decree issued in 1608.83 Even after completing their training, conversos were likely to encounter discrimination as some medical establishments adopted their own discriminatory statutes. The 1524 constitutions of the royal hospital of Santiago de Compostela, for instance, specifies that the hospital’s apothecary must not only be an expert but also a “pure Christian” (christiano limpio).84 In Portugal, similar laws and decrees targeting medical professionals with tainted ancestry were issued. In 1565, a royal edict forbade the apothecaries of Lisbon from employing conversos in their establishments and another one, issued in December 1585, decreed that municipalities, charitable institutions (misericórdias) and hospitals should give preference to the employment of Old Christian doctors. They were instructed to immediately oust any converso doctors whenever an Old Christian medical practitioner was available and willing to accept employment with them. In 1599 this racial preference was extended to doctors employed by the supreme royal law court (Casa da Suplicação) and the appellate law court (Casa do Cível).85 Further legislation enacted during the seventeenth century strengthened this measure. On 1 September 1622, any individual condemned by the Inquisition was barred from working as a doctor in the kingdom. On 17 August 1671, the regent of Portugal issued another decree prohibiting any individual condemned by the Inquisition from practicing medicine in Portugal “under pain of extermination” (sob pena de ser exterminado).86 The task of policing the religious orthodoxy of licenced medical practitioners in early modern Castile fell upon the institution that regulated the medical professions from the fifteenth century onwards: the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato. Little research has, as yet, been conducted on the Protomedicato’s attempts to exclude conversos sentenced by the Inquisition from the medical professions but the little information that has been brought to light suggests that it struggled to effectively enforce the decree of 1501. The mobility 83 84 85

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Teófilo Braga, Historia da Universidade de Coimbra, 794–8. João Manuel Vaz Rêgo, «A honra alheia por um fio»: os estatutos de limpeza de sangue no espaço de expressão Ibérica (sécs. XVI–XVIII) (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2011), 230. José Pedro de Sousa Días, Droguistas, boticários e segredistas. Ciência e Sociedade na Produção de Medicamentos na Lisboa de Setecentos (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2007), 48; Jorge Valdemar Guerra, “Judeus e Cristãos-novos na Madeira (1461–1650),” Arquivo Histórico da Madeira. Série de Transcrições Documentais. Transcrições Documentais 1 (2003): 163–4, n. 331. Teófilo Braga, Historia Da Universidade De Coimbra, 810–1.

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of converso doctors across the Luso-Spanish border, even after the end of the ‘union’ of Spain and Portugal under the Habsburg dynasty in 1640, was another problem that came to its attention. On 10 November 1678, the Protomedicato officially banned any doctors, surgeons or apothecaries from Portugal from exercising these professions in Spain: Recently, it has been noticed that numerous doctors, surgeons and apo­ thecaries of that infected nation (nación infecta), with unfavourable investigations of limpieza de sangre, have presented themselves to be examined. Many of them were expelled from Portugal by the royal decree that was issued in Lisbon by the Lord Prince Regent on 31 August 1672 that forbade those with infected blood from exercising their [medical] skills in that kingdom. It is because of this, that many have entered, and continue to enter, into this realm [of Spain]. It also stipulated that exceptions would only be made in the case of individuals able to present certificates of limpieza issued by the University of Coimbra or the Portuguese royal council in Lisbon.87 On 26 March 1686, the Spanish royal council asked the Protomedicato to emit its opinion on a petition submitted by a Dr Medina of Illescas, who had been exiled and prohibited from exercising his profession by the Inquisition. The Protomedicato confirmed the sentence of the Inquisition but the fact that the Royal Council was apparently ignorant of the decree of 1501 is probably the most remarkable fact to emerge from the document. On 25 September 1691, the government of King Carlos II was compelled to re-issue a decree banning heretics convicted by the Inquisition of exercising medical professions and claiming that many such individuals had flouted the prior prohibition. The decree of King Carlos implemented an absolute ban on medical practice by convicted heretics and threatened the confiscation of property and perpetual exile from Spain and its colonies for those who contravened it. The decree notes that such doctors “are naturally opposed to the Catholic Faith, they consequently are the mortal enemies of those who profess it.” The insistence on the “natural opposition” of the heretics to Catholicism as well as another reference to “the necessity to prevent those sentenced and infected (penitenciados e infectos) from a skill that is so dangerous to the health and lives of Catholics,” seems to clearly indicate that conversos were the principal targets. Produced in a context in which conversos were the object of a campaign of renewed inquisitorial repression in late seventeenth87

María Soledad Campos Díez, El Real Tribunal del protomedicato castellano, siglos XIV–XIX (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-la Mancha, 1999), 105 (n. 259).

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century Spain, the decree thus reproduces the rhetoric of the conspiracy theory regarding alleged judaizing doctors.88 Beyond seeking to exclude supposedly judaizing conversos from entering the medical professions, discriminatory legislation and statutes of limpieza could also be used to attempt to replace those already practicing medicine professions with Old Christians. In September 1568, King Sebastião of Portugal decreed that the University of Coimbra should admit thirty students of Old Christian stock to study medicine and surgery. The Portuguese monarch also made provisions to cover the cost of their training by ordering that it should be funded by taxes raised in the region of Coimbra. The measure was subsequently confirmed by King Philip II of Portugal (Philip III of Spain) on 7 February 1604 and 18 February 1606. King Philip not only ordered the stipends of the students to be increased but also decreed that a number of Old Christian students of pharmacy should be added to the existing stipendiaries and he created a Regimento dos Médicos e Boticários Cristãos-Velhos (a set of regulations to govern the appointment of bursary holders). The plan did not, however, meet with universal approval since some churchmen believed that it did not go far enough to counter the ‘Jewish threat.’ Francisco de Bragança, a canon of the cathedral of Évora appointed by the crown to reform the University of Coimbra, thought that the provision of bursaries was insufficient and un­successfully suggested that a medical college exclusively for Old Christians (literally a collegio para os medicos christãos velhos) should be founded instead. The bursary scheme for Old Christian medical students soon ran into financial difficulties as the taxes meant to finance it failed to do so adequately. In 1632, the Rector of the University wrote to the King to beg for a rapid resolution to these financial problems “because the penury means that there is no Old Christian who wishes to study medicine and it is feared that the entire faculty [of medicine] will be extinguished.” As late as 1653, the set of regulations for the bursaries at ­Coimbra created in 1604 was re-edited and printed the following year.89 King Sebastian’s scheme to rid the medical professions of conversos came to be celebrated by some authors as one of his noblest deeds despite its lack of success. In 1642, the Portuguese author Domingo Pereira Bracamonte praised the “­valorous” monarch for his attempt to put an end to this “occult plague” – the murder of Old Christian patients – by barring conversos from “learning and

88 89

María Soledad Campos Díez, El Real Tribunal del protomedicato castellano, 107 (n. 265). Teófilo Braga, Historia Da Universidade De Coimbra, 779–783; P.M. Laranjo Coelho, Terras de Odiana. Subsídios para a sua história documentada (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 1924), 384.

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practising a science that is so well suited to the designs of their perfidy and depravity.”90 The effectiveness of statutes of limpieza de sangre in excluding conversos from medical studies at university and thus from the medical profession in the Iberian world is certainly open to doubt. As it has been noted above, not all university colleges adopted statutes of limpieza, Furthermore, the genealogical investigations conducted by those that did were always vulnerable to deceit or bribery. Antisemitic authors such as Francisco de Torrejoncillo certainly believed that the system of racial exclusion adopted by many university colleges was not stringent enough. A survey of thirty-six converso medical practitioners known to have been arrested by the Inquisition between 1560 and 1610 for alleged judaizing reveals that the overwhelming majority of them were able to acquire a university degree (as bachelors, licentiates or doctors). Research in the archives of the University of Salamanca in Spain demonstrates that large numbers of Portuguese students sought to train in medicine there. Although not all of them were from converso backgrounds a very significant number were and inquisitorial evidence shows that some claimed that they purposefully selected to study in Castile to avoid the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition, which their converso ancestry might attract in their native Portugal. Nonetheless, they could not avoid prejudice by moving to Spain. Rioting between Basque and Portuguese students in November 1633 began because the Basques “called the Portuguese Jews.”91 Amongst these Portuguese converso students in Salamanca was the famous converso Fernando/Isaac Cardoso, who left Spain in 1652 and openly lived as a Jew in Italy. Cardoso appears to have obtained his philosophical and medical training at the University of Salamanca before teaching at the University Valladolid and rising to become the personal physicians of King Philip IV of Spain.92 90 91

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Domingos Pereira Bracamonte, Banqvete qve Apolo hizo a los embaxadores del rey de Portugal don Ivan Quarto (Lisbon: Lourenço de Amberes, 1642), 99–100. Luis García-Ballester, “The Inquisition and minority medical practitioners in CounterReformation Spain: Judaizing and Morisco practitioners, 1560–1610,” in Medicine and the Reformation, Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London: Routledge, 1993), 156– 191; Ángel Marcos de Dios, Gabriel A. Coelho Magalhães and Pedro Serra, “La Universidad de Salamanca y la Medicina Portuguesa. Médicos, Judíos y Cristianos Nuevos,” in Las universidades hispánicas: de la monarquía de los Austrias al centralismo liberal: V Congreso Internacional sobre Historia de las Universidades Hispánicas, ed. Luis Enrique Rodríguez San Pedro-Bezares (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1998), vol. 1, 337– 352. The exact details of Cardoso’s university training and career are obscure but the evidence that exists has been examined by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his biography: De la Cour d’Espagne au ghetto italien. Isaac Cardoso et le marranisme au XVII e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 61–79.

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Medical Antisemitism in the Eighteenth Century

The horror inspired by the image of vengeful judaizing doctors and surgeons holding power over the lives of their Old Christian patients survived well into the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the myth of the murder of King Enrique III by his Jewish doctor continued to be presented as a historical fact after 1700 by ecclesiastical authors such as Fray Martín de Torrecilla and the Hieronymite monk Pablo de San Nicolas. The stories of murderous converso doctors were not only perpetuated by the eight editions of Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos that were published in the eighteenth century – five in Spanish and three in Portuguese – but also in new works. In most cases, eighteenth-century authors merely copied verbatim into their works claims made in the prior two centuries. In the 1727 Impugnacion contra el Talmud de los judios, al Coran de Mahoma, y contra los hereges, for instance, the polemicist Fray Félix de Alamín repeats the reference to the forged letter of the Jews of Constantinople by Antonio Fernández de Otero.93 Finally, in the 1736 Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos, Antonio de Contreras reproduces the claims made in the early seventeenth century by Ignacio del Villar Maldonado in his Sylua responsorum iuris although he may well have been citing Villar Maldonado via the vernacular works of Francisco de Torrejoncillo, whom he also plagiarises extensively.94 The economist Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres does not refer to Meir Alguadex in his memorandum to King Philip V, printed in 1727, but he does list medicine alongside trade, tax-collection and confectionary as one of the professions (oficios) by which the conversos ordinarily made a living. Accordingly, he pleads with the crown to stop them from working as medical practitioners.95 Renewed life was breathed into the myth of medical murder with the notorious trial of Diego Mateo Zapata (1664–1745), a converso whose parents were arrested and prosecuted by the Inquisition when he was a teenager. Despite his ‘tainted’ ancestry, Doctor Zapata studied philosophy at the University of Valencia and then medicine at the University of Alcalá de Henares although his converso ancestry meant that he was not able to obtain a formal qualification in medicine. Even though Zapata could not be examined in order to obtain a formal medical licence from the Protomedicato because of his lack of limpieza de 93 94 95

Félix de Alamín, Impugnacion contra el Talmud de los judios, al Coran de Mahoma, y contra los hereges (Madrid: Imprenta de Lorenço Francisco Mojados, 1727), 57–8. Antonio de Contreras, Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos (Madrid: Oficina de Don Gabriel del ­Barrio, 1736), 132–3. Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres, Manifiesto universal de los males envejecidos que España padece, y de las causas de que nacen, y remedios que à cada uno en su clase corresponde (Madrid: Francisco Laso, n.d.), 121 and 124.

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sangre, influential friends assisted him in obtaining a position in the General Hospital of Madrid. A first arrest and trial by the Inquisition of Cuenca in 1691– 3 for suspected crypto-Jewish beliefs was suspended because of a lack of evidence. After 1700, the learned Zapata became famous for his skills as a medical practitioner, counting the powerful Duke of Medinaceli amongst his patients and protectors, as well as for being the author of various scholarly medical works. A second arrest in March 1721 resulted in a lengthy trial and imprisonment in the gaols of the Inquisition. Zapata confessed to judaizing under torture, was found guilty and condemned at an auto de fe held in Cuenca in 1725 to wear a sambenito, to serve a period of imprisonment and exile from Cuenca and Madrid for ten years and, last but not least, to suffer two hundred lashes. The following year, the influential friends and protectors of Zapata came to his aid once more and were able to persuade the crown to order the Protomedicato to waive its requirement of limpieza de sangre and examine him in view of issuing a royal licence to practice his skills in Madrid notwithstanding his earlier inquisitorial condemnation.96 After the death of Diego Mateo Zapata, his legacy continued to inspire heated debate. In a defence of the exclusion of conversos from the medical professions, published in 1746, one of his critics – named Sebastian de Acuña – published a vitriolic attack on both the man and his work in which the subject of his Jewish ancestry features prominently. Concerning Zapata himself, Acuña also speciously refers to the tenor of various statements made by Zapata to his patients to accuse him of being a “Talmudist” and, consequently, an individual worthy of the greatest suspicion, like all conversos convicted or suspected of judaizing. To support such an attack, Acuña calls the attention of his readers to the forged letter of the Jews from Constantinople and lists three cases of alleged serial homicide committed by converso doctors. One is that of the “Avenger” mentioned by Villar Maldonado in the early seventeenth century and discussed previously in this chapter. The two others, however, are stories that Acuña appears to have heard orally. One of these is an account, supposedly obtained second-hand, of a Franciscan Provincial who claimed to have met an old Jew in the Italian port of Livorno who had confided that converso medical practitioners had conspired to administer poisoned syrups and laxatives to Old Christian patients in the town of Plasencia in Spain. The mortality amongst the Old Christian patients had been so high that it had been assumed that the town was being affected by an outbreak of the plague. Sebastian de Acuña also reports an even more absurd rumour, this time of a murderous converso surgeon of Portuguese origin living in the locality of Martín-Muñoz. The 96

Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la españa moderna y contemporanea, vol. 3, 83–7.

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man had allegedly been arrested by the Inquisition and subsequently executed for the staggering murder of over 4,600 patients by means of a lancet coated with an adder’s venom.97 If anything, Acuña’s repetition of the libel of medical murder for propagandistic purposes demonstrates that it could still be counted on as an effective antisemitic weapon as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. The first public rejection of the conspiracy theory regarding homicidal converso doctors by an Old Christian was penned by the Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, one of the leading figures of the Spanish Enlightenment. Feijóo tended to consider many antisemitic accusations of organized plots, such as those of host desecration, with a degree of scepticism but was loathe to entirely discount their reality. Accordingly, his attitude towards the malign intentions of converso doctors was exactly the same. Feijóo describes the belief that Jewish doctors (by which he meant converso doctors as well) murdered one in every five of their patients as one of the two “common errors” (errors comunes) circulating amongst Spanish Christians about Jews (and conversos), the other being that Jews/conversos had tails. This myth about doctors descended from Jews is rejected as a manifest “falsehood” (falsedad) that does not withstand a logical analysis: Firstly, there is no doctor whatsoever who does not treasure his own personal interest and reputation more than the ruin of others. For this reason, he will seek to cure his patients, upon which his reputation depends and therefore also his personal interest. The only exceptions will be one or two individual cases of doctors who hope not to be detected [as a result of their high patient death rates]. There can be no doubt that a doctor at whose hands so many patients died would lose his reputation. Secondly, even if some were to succeed in their malevolent intent, then within two or three months everyone would flee from such a mortiferous doctor, even if they only attributed his patients’ [high] death rates to his ignorance or bad luck.98 For the Benedictine writer, the murder of one in every five patients would cause such “enormous ravages” amongst the population that it would be impossible to dissimulate. With a hint of humour, Feijóo remarks that no sensible person would ever consent to even have their pulse taken by such a medical 97 98

Sebastian de Acuña, Dissertaciones sobre el orden que los medicos deben observar en las juntas (Madrid: Luis de Correa, 1746), 45–54. Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, Teatro crítico universal, ó, Discursos varios en todo género de materias, para desengaño de errores comunes (Madrid: D. Joachin Ibarra, 1773), vol. 5, 110–1.

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practitioner, who would rapidly lose his career and income after two or three months during which time he could only have killed “eight or ten” Old Christian patients at most. Indeed Feijóo ponders that, somewhat conversely, it would better serve the purpose of any malevolent converso doctor to ensure the proper recovery of all his patients and thus escape suspicion. Feijóo’s denunciation of the antisemitic myth regarding doctors is tempered, however, by his belief that whilst there was no organised plot amongst converso doctors, a few of them did represent a real threat to the lives of Old Christians. Whilst he scorns the idea of a Jewish medical plot, he nonetheless qualified his position by giving credence to the notion that a few secret Jews did abuse their position as medical practitioners to avenge themselves upon Old Christians. Indeed, Feijóo explicitly notes that his rejection of the myth only went so far: What I, therefore, will only choose to believe is that a few of that rabble may cause the death by homicide of Christian [patients] in spite of the difficulty of doing this. Apart from a few patients that they decide to eliminate due to some private hatred, they will specifically target those persons that they consider to be useful to the church or the most zealous in the true faith. This is reason enough to flee from Jewish doctors and to loathe them. Feijóo’s attitude offers remarkable evidence of the power and longevity of the myth of homicidal converso doctors in Spanish society but it also demonstrates that attitudes were slowly changing. The work Retratos de los Reyes de España desde Atanarico hasta nuestro católico monarca Don Carlos III, first published by the engraver Manuel Rodríguez in 1782 with the patronage of the Real Academia de Historia, scornfully attacks the legend of the murder of Enrique III by his Jewish physician: The strange illness of King Enrique III led many to believe that his death was caused by a Jewish doctor. As if a long-term illness, contracted normally, would not be sufficient to end his life and [his prolonged suffering] did not contradict the use of poisons, which are always active and rapid in their effects!99

99

Manuel Rodríguez, Retratos de los Reyes de España desde Atanarico hasta nuestro católico monarca Don Carlos III (Madrid: Lorenzo de San Martín, 1788), vol. 3, 208–9.

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Other Medical Conspiracy Theories: a Comparative Study

In comparison with conversos, medical practitioners from the Morisco minority largely escaped suspicions that they were orchestrating a campaign of secret medical murders. Whilst the statutes of limpieza regulating admittance to many university colleges as well as colleges of surgeons and apothecaries also applied to them, no similar conspiracy theory of medical murder by Moriscos materialised. The reason why this was the case is not entirely clear. The research of Luis García Ballester has demonstrated that Morisco medical practitioners tended to practice their skills not only within their communities but also amongst a wide variety of Old Christian patients as unlicensed “healers” (sanadores). Even King Philip II had recourse to Morisco doctors to attend to the illnesses of his sons.100 Various factors may have mitigated the fear that Old Christian patients might unknowingly be entrusting their lives to crypto-Muslim doctors with malign intentions. Firstly, the bulk of the Morisco population resided in parts of Spain where Morisco settlement was at its densest – Granada (until 1571) and Valencia – and those Moriscos remained quite culturally distinct from the Old Christian population after their forced conversion. Secondly, in stark contrast with the Jews and conversos, there did not exist an ­established medieval tradition of suspicion relating to Muslim medical practitioners. There were no stories or myths about Morisco doctors comparable to that of Rabbi Meir Alguadex or conspiracist documents such as the forged letter from Constantinople. Moreover, there were few licenced or universitytrained Morisco doctors or surgeons and thus fewer reasons for professional rivalry between Moriscos and university-trained Old Christian doctors. It is indeed striking that when Jaime Bleda, a Dominican historian, theological advisor of the Inquisition and ardent proponent of the expulsion of the Moriscos, refers his readers to the danger of consulting Morisco doctors, he immediately draws parallels with accusations against Jewish doctors. Writing at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bleda turns the story of Meir Alguadex into an example and an opportunity to highlight the “great dangers” that patients expose themselves to when they seek remedies from the descendants of Muslims and Jews. Furthermore, Bleda also launches into a tirade about the murderous rage of Jewish and converso doctors citing many tales beyond the regicide purportedly committed by Rabbi Meir as proof of their existence. These include the story related by Saint Vicente Ferrer in one of his sermons of a Jewish doctor who confessed on his deathbed to having 100

Luis García Ballester, Los Moriscos y la medicina. Un capítulo de la medicina y la ciencia marginadas en la España del siglo XVI (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1984), 99–118.

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killed five hundred Christian patients.101 It is fascinating that the myth of ­Jewish medical murder was obviously so notorious that, in the absence of an equivalent conspiracy theory affecting the Moriscos, Bleda felt that he had to rely upon antisemitic examples in order to taint Morisco medical practitioners by association as suspect Catholics. A rare exception in which an explicit reference was made to an alleged plot by Morisco doctors can be found in a September 1607 meeting of the parliament of Castile, when the parliamentarian Pedro de Vesga called for Moriscos to be prohibited from attending medical faculties and even from attending public medical lectures. Vesga claimed that Moriscos were using their medical knowledge to “kill more [Catholic Christians] of this kingdom than the Turks and English and other enemies.” Moreover, he argued that a Morisco doctor in Madrid named “the Avenger” had apparently murdered three thousand of his patients with a “poisonous ointment” whilst another Morisco used his skills to mutilate his patients in order to stop them from being able to use weapons. Pedro de Vesga made these claims in an atmosphere of heightened anti-Morisco sentiment and popular anxiety during the years immediately preceding the royal decision to expel the Moriscos from Spain in 1609. What is more, his claims are clearly inspired by the conspiracist beliefs about the ‘medical plot’ of converso doctors. The reference to a doctor surnamed “the Avenger” is a rather evident and clumsy recycling of the myth of the murderous “avenging” converso doctor that features in the earlier work of Diego de Simancas.102 The fear of Jewish doctors was not a phenomenon limited to the early modern Iberian Peninsula and the same anxieties existed elsewhere in Europe. The German writer Hans Wilhelm Kirchhoff, writing in the sixteenth century, castigated Christians for being “careless fools” (unbesunnen narren) for seeking medical assistance from doctors who were their “archenemies” (ertzfeinden): The Jews who pretend to be doctors bring only poverty and physical danger to the Christian who seeks their medical skill. They are convinced that they are serving God when they cruelly torture Christians, when they kill them secretly, or when they cheat them. They also teach this to both 101 102

Jaime Bleda, Defensio fidei in causa neophytorum, siue Morischorum regni Valentiæ (Valencia: Ioannen Chrysostomum Garriz, 1610), 371 and Coronica de los Moros de España (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1618), 546–8. Rafael Muñoz Garrido y Carmen Muñiz Fernández, Fuentes legales de la medicina española (siglos XIII–XIX) (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1969), 195–6; F. Soyer, “The recycling of an Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory into an anti-Morisco one in early modern Spain: the myth of El Vengador, the serial-killer doctor,” eHumanista/Conversos, 4 (2016): 233–255.

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their children and their disciples. We Christians are such careless fools that when our lives are in danger we turn to our archenemies in order to save [our lives], thus shaming both God and the medicines of righteous Christian doctors.103 There was, however, a crucial difference between the Iberian world and the remainder of Europe in the early modern period. Fear and suspicion of the Judendoktor in the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire essentially retained the same characteristics that had characterised the medieval period (including the medieval Iberian Peninsula). For early modern Germans, Jews remained an easily recognizable social category that was compelled by law to dress distinctly or wear distinguishing symbols on their clothes and to reside in segregated residential quarters.104 As such, the critics of Christians who consulted Jewish medical practitioners could always put their trust in legally sanctioned segregation to prevent, or at least deter, contact between Jewish doctors and Christian patients. In Spain and Portugal, the mass conversion of the Jews at the end of the Middle Ages created a new and far more terrifying bogeyman in the form of the judaizing converso doctor. Physically indistinguishable from any other Christian and with access to the same medical training as Old Christians, it was often impossible for Old Christian patients to know whether or not the doctor, surgeon or apothecary treating them was descended from Jews. Far from appeasing such fears, the introduction of statutes of limpieza de sangre in many university colleges with the sanction of the crown probably served as a constant reminder that many conversos sought to enter into the medical professions. The combination of general anxieties regarding medical treatment and the fear of a secret campaign of demonically inspired poisoning, conducted by judaizing conversos, therefore created a powerful emotional response amongst wide sections of the Spanish and Portuguese population – indeed a moral panic – that was readily exploited by antisemitic propagandists from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For antisemitic propagandists like Alonso de Espina, Diego de Simancas, Vicente da Costa Mattos or Francisco de Torrejoncillo the figure of the murderous Jewish/converso doctor was a boon that was amply exploited in their works. 103 104

Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof, Wendunmuth, ed. Hermann Oesterley (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1869), vol. 3, 255–6. Robert Jütte, “Contacts at the Bedside: Jewish Physicians and their Christian Patients,” in In and out of the Ghetto. Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. by R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–150.

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The myth of the Jewish medical conspiracy brought the issue of the converso ‘peril’ uncomfortably home to a significant section of the population in Spain and Portugal who were likely to consult a licenced medical practitioner during their lives. The conspiracy theory, moreover, was probably given added credibility by the fact that the Inquisition, together with the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, openly backed it through their own support for the statutes of limpieza de sangre affecting the medical professions. The conspiracy theory relating to Jews and their supposed abuse of the medical professions for malevolent objectives has manifested itself during the twentieth century in both Nazi Germany and the USSR, where the authorities actively encouraged their populations to fear Jewish doctors. A comparison with the myth of the murderous Jewish or judaizing medical practitioner in early modern Spain and Portugal reveals that these three conspiracy theories (Iberian, Nazi and Soviet) share interesting similarities. The suspiciousness of the doctor as the possessor of medical knowledge and feelings of vulnerability linked to a dependency are associated with existing antisemitic fears of the Jew as an alien “other” with different loyalties. Nevertheless, there are also important contrasts between the characteristics of these conspiracy theories. In Nazi Germany, the figure of the murderous Jewish doctor appears in propaganda produced in the early years of the regime and has a surprising connection with Spanish antisemitic propaganda. German Jewish doctors were accused of murdering Gentile German patients in a 1934 article entitled Jude und Heilkunde (“The Jew and Healing”), which was authored by Karl Holz and published in the Nazi medical periodical Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden! (“German People’s Health through Blood and Soil!”). With the subtitle of “The Talmud forbids Jews to heal Gentiles. Instead, they must murder them,” the article features the forged letters of the Jews of Constantinople (­albeit in their French/Arles version, see chapter 2 of this book) as its centrepiece and claims that Jewish doctors slavishly obey the murderous commands of the Talmud.105 Published by the hysterical Jew-baiter Julius Streicher (1885–1946), the Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden! waged a campaign of fear-mongering against Jewish medical practitioners that included an attack on vaccinations as a method of secret medical murder operated by Jews. When such claims came into conflict with the Nazi state’s support for vaccination cam-

105

Karl Holz, “Jude und Heilkunde,” Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden!, II (number 23), 1 December 1934: 1–2.

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paigns, Streicher’s medical periodical was forced to cease publication in 1935.106 From then onwards, instead of being portrayed as conspiring to end the lives of his adult patients through the use of poison, the jüdische Doktor is instead presented as a risk to the racial integrity of the German people or race (Volk). The preoccupation of the Nazi authorities and propagandists was clearly to spread the notion that Jewish doctors were seeking to “destroy the German Volk” by practising abortions on Gentile women and taking advantage of ‘vulnerable’ Gentile female patients to have sexual relations with them. By ‘polluting’ the ‘German race,’ Jewish doctors were thus responsible for Rassenschande (“racial shame” or “racial pollution”) and Blutschande (“blood defilement”). In 1938, the venomous work of illustrated antisemitic propaganda for children, Der Giftpilz, presents Jewish doctors as paedophilic sexual predators who prey upon young German girls.107 The work’s chapter on the story of a blonde German girl who narrowly avoids being raped by a Jewish doctor ends with a short and easy to remember rhyming poem designed to help inculcate this belief amongst young children: The Devil, it was he who maliciously Der Teufel war’s mit böser Hand Sent the Jew to Germany. Der den Juden sandte in deutsches    Land Like a devil he defiles Wie ein Teufel er begehr’ The German woman, Germany’s honour. Die Deutschen frauen, deutsche Ehr’. The fear of “racial pollution” was officially expressed in the Nuremberg racial laws of September 1935, which directly led to the prohibition of Jews gaining access to medical training in December 1935 and the removal of medical licences from all Jewish doctors in 1938.108 In stark contrast to this focus upon sex, the conspiracy theory about Jewish doctors in the early modern Iberian world does not revolve around anxieties of sexual ‘pollution’ or victimization of vulnerable young children and women. As this chapter clearly reveals, the focus in Iberian propaganda was on the supposed use of poisons, adulterated medicines and intentional misdiagnoses. The non-sexualisation of the conspiracy theory affecting converso doctors is all the more surprising in the context of the obsession with limpieza de sangre, the fear that an injudicious marriage could ‘contaminate’ the bloodline of an ‘Old Christian’ Spanish or 106 107 108

Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 246. Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (Nuremberg: Stürmer Verlag, 1939), 30–3. On the persecution of Jewish medical practitioners in Nazi Germany see Michael H. Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 176– 221.

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Portuguese family and the clamorous warnings of propagandists like Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo that Judaism was ‘transmitted’ across generations through Jewish ‘blood.’ The fear amongst Old Christians of the consequences of intermarriage with conversos was a generalized one and, as such, did not specifically affect converso doctors. All Jews in Nazi Germany were suspected of seeking to ‘pollute’ the German Volk but the particular emphasis on the Jewish doctors as sexual predators may well be linked to the strong emphasis on the racial purity of the Volk in Nazi propaganda. Closer parallels exist between the medical conspiracy theory targeting early modern Iberian conversos and the infamous “Doctors’ Plot” in the USSR in 1952–3. The purge was the fruit of the ageing Stalin’s increasing paranoia and entrenched antisemitic views. It reached its most extreme phase with the publication of an article in the state-newspaper Pravda on 13 January 1953, denouncing a conspiracy of Jewish “saboteur-doctors” and “poisoner-doctors” with Zionist and imperialist sympathies whose goal was to “shorten the lives of leaders of the Soviet Union by means of medical sabotage.” Those who denounced alleged plotters were awarded the Order of Lenin for “unmasking killer doctors.” The language used by the article and the themes it contains – especially connecting the Doctor’s Plot to a wider worldwide conspiracy – are entirely reminiscent of those of the conspiracy theorists in the early modern Iberian world, as the following excerpt demonstrates: Documentary evidence, investigations, the conclusions of medical experts and the confessions of the arrested have established that the criminals, who were secret enemies of the people, sabotaged the treatment of patients and undermined their health.  Investigations established that participants in the terrorist group, taking advantage of their position as doctors and abusing the trust of their patients; deliberately and malevolently, undermined the patients’ health; intentionally ignored the data produced by objective examination of the patients; made incorrect diagnoses which did not correspond to the true nature of their illnesses; and then doomed them by incorrect treatment. (…)  The criminal doctors sought, above all, to undermine the health of leading Soviet military personnel, to put them out of actions and to thereby weaken the defence of the country (…). It has been established that all these homicidal doctors, who had become monsters in human form, trampling the sacred banner of science and desecrating the honour of scientists, were enrolled by foreign intelligence services as hired agents.

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 Most of the participants in the terrorist group (…) were connected with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organisation, “Joint,” established by American intelligence for the alleged purpose of providing material aid to Jews in other countries. In actual fact this organisation, under the direction of American intelligence, conducts extensive espionage, terrorist and other subversive work in many countries, including the Soviet Union.109 The association of Jewish doctors in the USSR with an international plot orchestrated by a shadowy “Jewish bourgeois nationalist organisation” bears a striking similarity to the claims made in the forged letters widely reproduced in early modern Spain and Portugal that linked converso doctors with an overseas plot directed by Jews in Constantinople. The antisemitic purge in Russia led to hundreds of arrests and was only halted by the fortuitous death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. The ‘Doctors’ Plot’ created a climate of terror and panic in which all Jewish medical practitioners were suspect. The journalist and novelist Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) remembered that “a dark cloud hung over Moscow… many [people] refused to be treated by Jewish doctors” because of wild rumours of poisoned pills and infants infected with syphilis.110 In comparison with the myth of the murderous conversos doctors in early modern Spain and Portugal, the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ and the intense public outburst of antisemitism directed against Jewish medical practitioners in the USSR was shortlived. The ‘Doctors’ Plot’ lasted only a year whilst the Iberian conspiracy theories endured for well over three hundred years in large part due to the work of a succession of enthusiastic antisemitic propagandists. The short duration of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ means that, regardless of its intensity, the concept of a medical conspiracy theory involving Jews in Russia did not develop into an enduring element of an officially-sponsored antisemitic discourse, as it clearly did in the early modern Iberian world. The remarkable longevity of the antisemitic medical conspiracy theory in the early modern Iberian world was doubtless linked to five separate factors: 1. The Natural Anxieties Inherent to the Patient/Doctor Relationship. 2. The disproportionately large number of Jewish/converso doctors and surgeons in medieval and early modern Spain and Portugal. 109 110

Benjamin Pinkus and Jonathan Frankel, The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 219–220 (doc. 78). For a concise account of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ see Benjamin Pinkus and Jonathan Frankel, The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967, 198–201.

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The credibility that the conspiracy received from the long-standing censure by the church of the use of Jewish medical practitioners by Christian patients. 4. The inclusion of the medical professions in the infamous forged letter supposedly written of the Jews of Constantinople. 5. The ‘social invisibility’ that the converso medical practitioners were able to enjoy in the early modern Iberian world in comparison with their openly Jewish predecessors in the medieval period, which allowed them to blend into society and that thus lay them open to accusations of committing secret assassinations. When combined, these five elements created a myth whose appeal and power was harnessed both by early modern Iberian antisemitic propagandists and by those advocating the extension of racially discriminatory statutes to medical studies and professions. 8

Conclusion

The seemingly unrelenting wave of fear-mongering and hateful comments relating to doctors, physicians and surgeons of Jewish ancestry and their alleged plot to murder Old Christians offers a dismal perspective on relations between conversos and Old Christians in general as well as the lives of converso medical practitioners in particular. Few conversos would have deliberately drawn attention to their Jewish ancestry but individuals, whose ancestry became public knowledge, did not necessarily face universal rejection by the Old Christian population of their community. A case in point is the remarkable (albeit troubled) medical career and personal life of Simón de Castro, a converso doctor who was prosecuted and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition as a judaizer in November 1722. Simón de Castro, who claimed to have studied medicine at the University of Salamanca, was reconciled at a public auto de fe held in Llerena (in Extremadura, western Spain). He was compelled to wear a penitential habit (sambenito) when out and about in public as well as to serve a sentence of exile in the town Osuna in southern Spain along with a stern prohibition not to earn his living by curing patients. The converso doctor nevertheless broke the terms of his pardon and returned first to his native province of Extremadura and, after he was denounced by non-converso doctors, fled to neighbouring Portugal taking only a few of his medical texts. Simón de Castro continued to practice his medical skills until the Portuguese Inquisition arrested him in response to a petition from the Spanish inquisitors for his extradition. The most conspicuous aspect

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of the second trial of Simón de Castro in Portugal is the absence of popular animosity towards a doctor who was widely known to be of Jewish-stock. A total of fifteen defence witnesses, including a distinguished deacon, were called by Simón de Castro to offer testimony in his favour and they unanimously provided positive reports about his character and religious beliefs. The author of a manuscript newssheet (gazeta) noted that Simón de Castro was “a famous Castilian doctor” and that “marvels are said of him” (… medico famoso castelhano […] se contão delle maravilhas). The chief focus of animosity came from his medical colleagues in Spain and may well have been motivated by professional rivalry. The Portuguese Inquisition lifted the sentence imposed upon Simón de Castro for his flight from Spain and allowed him to sail to the Portuguese East Indies, where the shortage of doctors was apparently even more acute than in Portugal. Simón de Castro distinguished himself in Portuguese India by curing the Portuguese viceroy of a particularly dangerous fever and was actively plying his skills as late as 1744. Interestingly, however, the author of the manuscript gazeta notes that Simón de Castro’s move to Asia reportedly upset one of his patients in Portugal. The influential archpriest of the Cathedral of Lisbon, Paulo de Carvalho e Ataíde, unsuccessfully strove to have Simón de Castro remain in Portugal “because he was the [doctor] who healed him” (por ser quem o curava).111 The case of Simón de Castro is not an isolated one as the shortage of trained medical professionals meant that many Old Christians continued to rely on conversos for their care despite the climate of antisemitism. Even the inquisitorial tribunals of Logroño and Llerena in Spain found themselves reluctantly compelled to seek the permission of the Supreme Council in Madrid to engage the services of converso doctors in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the case of Llerena, the converso in question was actually a man who had languished for three and a half years in the jail of the tribunals for alleged judaizing.112 111

112

See F. Soyer, “Un Médico entre las Garras de la Inquisición: el proceso de Simón de Castro (1728–1730),” Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 10–11 (2011): 373–388. Also Gazetas Manuscritas da Biblioteca Pública de Évora, ed. João Luís Lisboa, Tiago C.P. dos Reis Miranda and Fernanda Olival, vol. 1 (1729–1732), (Lisbon, 2002), 117 and vol. 2 (1729–1731), (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2005), 88 and 266. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London: The Folio Society, 1998), 32.

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“Traitors Who Dwell amongst Us”: the Conversos as Collaborators and Masterminds of the Muslim and Protestant Onslaught against Spain and Portugal I can find something else about them that is worthy of the greatest abhorrence. It is that they are all treacherous. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid, 1674)

⸪ The antisemitic notion that treachery constitutes an essential character trait of Jews was well established in the medieval period. It was closely linked to the belief that Jews (and later conversos) harboured a quasi-rabid and irredeemable hostility to Christianity and Christians, to whose destruction they were committed. Their hatred and deceitfulness was believed to underpin the efforts of conversos to secretly undermine the religious and secular institutions of the early modern Iberian kingdoms, to commit acts of sacrilege and to infiltrate the medical professions. In a world in which religion and politics were so closely entangled, it was therefore inevitable that the belief in the innate treachery of the conversos should also acquire a political dimension in relation to Spain and Portugal’s military and diplomatic relations with their foreign foes, especially non-Catholic ones. If secret Jews wanted to destroy the Catholic Church, how could they not also wish to destroy the Christian kingdoms that protected it by covertly aiding their Muslim and Protestant enemies? In military terms, the menace presented by the conversos was perceived to be of a quite different nature from that posed by the Morisco minority. The Morisco population was widely suspected of not only sympathizing with Spain’s Muslim enemies in the Mediterranean but also of active military collaboration. These fears were certainly not groundless as the Moriscos in Granada and the surrounding Alpujarras Mountains rose against the Spanish monarchy between 1568 and 1572 and there were indeed examples of sympathy and collaboration by individuals and groups of Moriscos. Nevertheless, the fear of treason rapidly came to affect the perception of all Moriscos, wherever

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_007

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in Spain they resided. At an official level, suspicion of the Moriscos was expressed in the enactment of laws seeking to disarm them and the promulgation of royal edicts ordering their deportation from coastal areas in the region of Granada.1 Unlike the Morisco population concentrated in Valencia and Granada, however, the dispersed converso population was not perceived to represent a direct military threat of the same nature to the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Another factor that probably contributed greatly to this difference was the well-entrenched medieval antisemitic stereotype of Jewish cowardice and effeminacy, which found ready acceptance in the medieval and early modern Iberian Peninsula. It was loudly echoed in a remarkable variety of works, from the biblical exegesis of a fifteenth-century theologian like Alfonso Tostado (in his commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 28), to the plays of Miguel de Cervantes (who describes them as “gente afeminada” in his play Los Baños de Argel) and finally, predictably, throughout the diatribes of seventeenth-century antisemitic polemicists such as Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo.2 Whilst the antisemitic trope of the Jews and conversos as intrinsically timid and lacking any bellicose spirit may have prevented the development of fears that the conversos sought to destroy the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies through an armed uprising, it was largely compensated by their depiction as innately treacherous and cunning. This characterization helped to further the rise of a different fear about Iberian conversos: that they secretly assisted the Iberian monarchies’ external non-Catholic enemies in the first half of the seventeenth century, especially the hated Dutch Protestants. This chapter examines how this vision of the treacherous collaboration between conversos/Jews and the Dutch evolved from real concerns about the role played by the Sephardic communities in Holland in the Dutch war effort. The often-ambiguous position of conversos in the Iberian-Dutch conflict led to the creation of a fully-fledged conspiracist narrative. In this conspiracy theory, the conversos are not only believed to be systematically passing intelligence and economic support to their Dutch allies but are presented as controlling the entire strategy and direction of the Dutch campaigns against the Spanish and 1 See L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain 1500–1614 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), chapters 6 and 7 as well as Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos. Juan de Ribera and Re­ ligious Reform in Valencia 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 20–1. 2 On the notion of congenital Jewish effeminacy, it is worth noting the point that Jewish males were believed by some in medieval and early modern Spain (and elsewhere in Europe) to menstruate like women. See Irven M. Resnick, “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” Harvard Theological Review, 93 (2000): 241–263 and J.L. Beusterien, “Jewish male menstruation in seventeenth-century Spain,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999): 447–456.

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Portuguese monarchies. This conspiracy theory mirrors, and was almost certainly directly inspired by, the precedent set by the development of a medieval legend that attributed a crucial role to the Jews in the successful Muslim conquest of most of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century CE. Numerous Spanish authors from the thirteenth century onwards uncritically accepted this version of Spanish history. This chapter argues that antisemitic hatred of the conversos was rapidly grafted onto increasing anxieties about military decline, especially after the death of King Philip II of Spain in 1598. Moreover, it is interesting that in the seventeenth century the most conspicuous expression of this fear of a ‘fifth column’ of Judaizing conversos in league with Spain and Portugal’s Protestant enemies did not manifest itself in the Iberian Peninsula but where the Spaniards and Portuguese felt themselves to be at their most vulnerable from any outside attack: their overseas colonies. 1

The Archetype of Jewish Treason: the Fall of Toledo in 711 CE

Just as was the case with the myth of medical murder and the legend of the murder of King Enrique III of Castile by his Jewish physician Meir Alguadex, the theme of the treasonous collaboration of the Jews with hostile external forces was based upon an archetypal medieval precedent. This was the alleged role played by the Jewish community of Toledo in the surrender of the town to invading Muslim forces in 711 CE. The version that became the most popular in the early modern period was that featured in the 1236 Chronicon mundi of the chronicler Lucas de Tuy (?–1249). In the chronicle, the Jewish conspiracy to hand over Toledo to the Muslim invaders is presented as an act of religious sacrilege, taking place at Easter, just as much as an act of military and political treason: The city of Toledo, conqueror of many peoples, defeated in the triumphs of the Ishmaelites, succumbed owing to the treason of the Jews (…). For while the Christians were gathered on Palm Sunday at the church of Saint Leocadia outside the royal city, out of reverence for such a solemn feast day, in order to hear the word of the Lord, the Jews, who had given a sign of their treachery to the Saracens, shutting the doors on the Christians, opened them to the Saracens. Thus, the faithful Toledan populace, found defenseless outside the city, was destroyed by the sword.3 3 Lucy K. Pick, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 175–6.

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Another thirteenth-century chronicler, the formidable Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c. 1170–1247), does not attribute the fall of Toledo to the Jews but implies that the Muslim conquerors actively recruited the Jewish populations of Toledo, Seville, Córdoba and Granada to secure their hold over these newly conquered towns. Finally, the Franciscan polymath Juan Gil de Zamora (c.1241–c.1318) includes the claim of Jewish treason in one of his works.4 The antisemitic significance and power of what may be called the ‘anti-Jewish myth of 711’ can be gauged from the fact that it appears in anti-converso propaganda and the narrative embraced by those seeking to turn the crown against the conversos from the fifteenth century onwards. The story of Jewish treason in 711 became an exemplary and cautionary tale of the direct existential threat to all Old Christians in the Iberian Peninsula that resulted from the permanence a Jewish minority whose allegiance to the church and State was suspect. When the rebels who seized Toledo from the crown in 1449 sought to legitimate their desire to legally exclude the conversos from positions of power in the city, it is to the betrayal of 711 that they refer in their sentencia estatuto, presenting their own version of the events: According to the old chronicles, after the death of King Roderic when this city was surrounded by our enemies the Muslims under their leader Tariq, the Jews who resided in Toledo at the time made a treaty [with the Muslims], selling the said city and its Christians and letting the Muslims enter. After this, three hundred and six Old Christians of the city were put to the sword and more than one hundred and six prisoners, men and women, young and old, were taken from the cathedral and from the church of the Santa Leocadia, and carried off into slavery.5 Similarly, in his Fortalitium Fidei, written not long after the Toledan revolt, Alonso de Espina makes the fall of Toledo and the slaughter of its Christian population – for which he gives the date of 714 CE – the first event to feature in his list of seventeen “cruelties” inflicted by Jews upon Christians. His sources are Lucas de Tuy and Juan Gil de Zamora.6 Following the appearance of Alonso de Espina’s work, the legend became a mainstay of nearly all antisemitic works

4 See Lucy K. Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, 175–6; G. Cirot, De operibus historicis Johannis Aegidii Zamorensis (Bordeaux: Féret, 1913), 8. 5 Eloy Benito Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV (Madrid: CSIC, 1961), 193–4. 6 Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), fols. 142v–143r.

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printed in the following centuries including those of Vicente da Costa Mattos and Francisco de Torrejoncillo.7 The influence of Lucas de Tuy on early modern (and even modern) Spanish historiography has been immense and nowhere is this more evident than in the claim that the Jews handed Toledo and Spain over to the Muslim invaders in the eighth century. Lucas of Tuy’s account of the fall of Toledo in particular was reproduced verbatim in many influential works of history printed in vernacular Spanish. This includes the influential Primera Crónica General, composed at the behest of King Alfonso X (1252–1284), re-edited in the sixteenth century and re-printed numerous times in the early modern period. Other medieval authors known to have incorporated it into their works include not only the thirteenth-century theologian Fray Juan Gil de Zamora but also the fourteenth-century chronicler Pedro López de Ayala and the fifteenth-century poet Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (better known as the “Archpriest of Toledo”).8 In spite of their obvious significance, it would nevertheless be an error to attribute to whole responsibility for the accusation of Jewish treachery in 711 to Lucas de Tuy. There can be no doubt that a variety of popular stories and legends attributing the fall of Visigothic Spain to Jewish perfidy were circulating in the later mediaeval period if not before. A remarkable indication of how elaborate some of these stories were can be garnered from the Crónica del Rey don Rodrigo, a text about the life and death of the last Visigothic sovereign attributed to Pedro del Corral. Composed in the 1430s and printed for the first time in 1499, the Crónica enjoyed considerable success and went through numerous reprints during the sixteenth century. It is unclear whether the author of the Crónica intended it to be a chronicle or a fictional historical romance but what is striking in the work is the decisive role attributed to the Jews in the fall of Toledo, which is the subject of no less than eight short chapters. Whilst following the general narrative in which the unarmed Christians were slaughtered during a procession on Palm Sunday, the Crónica goes much further than Lucas de Tuy, describing in great detail how the Jews secretly conspired with the besieging Muslims by negotiating with the Muslim commander for their safety. Moreover, the Jews are accused of devising the cunning plan that betrayed the town by secretly admitting the Muslims into Toledo through a postern in a section of the town walls that had been entrusted to their care. The author of the Crónica may well have invented all these details from his own 7 Vicente da Costa Mattos Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), fols. 81v–82r; Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 18. 8 Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 74.

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imagination but it seems more likely that he was condensing the details of various oral stories and folklore about the fall of Toledo into his own account.9 Finally, a contribution to the myth of Jewish betrayal in 711 CE was made by the Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera through one of his forged chronicles.10 In the false Chronicon attributed to the archpriest Julian Peréz, the story contains similarities with other versions but is given a new twist since it is claimed that, at the time of the arrival of the Muslim army of Tariq, five thousand Jews resided in Toledo under the leadership of a certain Rabbi Moses. The Jews conspired to open a postern gate of Toledo to the Muslims on Palm Sunday whilst the Christians were distracted by their religious observances. The plot, however, was discovered with the consequence that Rabbi Moses and numerous other Jews were put to death by the Christians whilst the remaining Jews were subjected to a strict curfew. In this version of the tale, the Jewish conspiracy is therefore not actually responsible for the fall of Toledo, which is presented as an honourable capitulation forced upon the besieged Christians by a lack of provisions. Jewish perfidy, however, remains just that, whether it was successful or not.11 This tale was later repeated and cited in 1663 by Pedro de Rojas in the second part of his Historia de la imperial, nobilissima, inclita y esclarecida ciudad de Toledo in a chapter that, tellingly, refers to the Jews as “the traitors to their homeland” (traidores a su patria).12 Whilst the nefarious role attributed to the Jews in the events of 711 CE was clearly a well-established part of the early modern Spanish historical narrative, it did not go wholly unchallenged. Thus, Pedro de Alcocer, the author of a celebrated history of Toledo first printed in 1551, presents the fall of Toledo not as the result of Jewish treachery but of a negotiated capitulation by the Christian population after a short siege and some costly fighting around the town. Yet, elsewhere in his work, he still thought it necessary to point out to his readers that the Visigothic King Witiza (700–c.710–1 CE) had sinned grievously in not enforcing measures against the Jews, “who were later the cause of the tyranny and yoke to which the Muslims subjected Spain.” Alcocer was therefore still linking the Jews with Christian Spain’s misfortunes in 711 CE and his failure to repeat the tale of Jewish treachery may well be due more to an oversight than 9 10 11 12

Pedro del Corral, Crónica del Rey don Rodrigo, con la destruycion de España y como los moros la ganaron (Alcalá de Henares: Juan Gutiérrez, 1587), fols 141v–143v (chapters 36 to 43). See chapter 2 of this book. Iuliani Petri, Chronicon cum eiusdem Aduersariis (Paris: Laurentium Sonnium, 1628), 86–9. Pedro de Rojas, Historia de la imperial, nobilissima, inclita y esclarecida ciudad de Toledo. Parte Segunda (Madrid: Diego Diaz de la Carrera, 1663), 558–567.

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historical scepticism.13 A far clearer critique of the master narrative is expressed in the second half of the sixteenth century by the respected historian Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa (1533–1600), who adopts a tone of measured neutrality but nonetheless is clear about where his preferences as a historian lay: Regarding the Muslim conquest of Toledo, some claim, following the Fortalitium Fidei [of Alonso de Espina], that it came about by means of the deal that the Jews of Toledo made with the Muslims on Palm Sunday but [Pedro de] Alcocer and many others whom he follows, and whom I believe had a clearer understanding of this matter, write that the inhabitants of Toledo seeing themselves without any leadership and fearful of a lack of provisions, surrendered to Tariq, agreeing that the Christians should be able to freely live according to their [Christian] law, paying no more taxes than they customarily paid to the [Visi]gothic kings.14 In a similar vein, the formidable Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) alludes to the role assigned to the Jews in the fall of Toledo in the account of Lucas de Tuy (whom he erroneously identified as Rodrigo de Rada), but not without declaring his considerable scepticism about the historical accuracy of their claims in his influential 1592 work Historiae de Rebus Hispaniae (translated into Spanish as the Historia general de España in 1601 and 1609). Like Garibay y Zamalloa, Mariana explicitly states that he prefers to lend greater credence to those accounts presenting a negotiated capitulation of Toledo by its Christian inhabitants rather than to the story of a heinous Jewish betrayal.15 Another sceptic was the theologian Francisco de Pisa (1534–1616), who recounts in his 1605 Descripcion de la imperial ciudad de Toledo, y historia de sus antiguedades that he was aware of the prior accounts of Espina and Tuy claiming that the city fell on Palm Sunday “without a struggle, betrayed by the treachery and cruelty of the Jews who dwelt within it.” Yet, despite acknowledging almost apologetically and regretfully that “it is true that it can be presumed that those of that people and caste are capable of any treachery,” Pisa 13 14 15

Pedro de Alcocer, Historia, o Descripcion de la Imperial cibdad de Toledo (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1554), fols. 30r and 38v–39r. Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa, Los XL libros del compendio historial de las chronicas y vniversal historia de todos los reynos de España (Antwerp: Christophoro Plantino, 1571), vol. 1, 380. Alfonso X, Las quatro partes enteras de la Coronica de España, ed. Florián de Ocampo, (Valladolid: Sebastian de Cañas, 1604), part 3, fols 2r–2v; Juan de Mariana, Historiae de Rebus Hispaniae libri XXX (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1617), vol. 1, 307.

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felt obliged to present the opposite account of Pedro de Alcocer in a manner that suggests that he gave it greater credence.16 The extent to which the Jews of Visigothic Spain actually welcomed and may even have actively aided the more ‘tolerant’ Muslim conquerors, in the wake of the acute and repeated persecutions and forced conversions they suffered under many of the Visigothic rulers, has been the subject of considerable debate amongst historians.17 Medieval Muslim sources offer no evidence to support Lucas de Tuy’s assertion. The tenth-century Muslim chronicler Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Razi, the author of a work (the Crónica del moro Rasi) that was widely read and cited in medieval Christian Spain including by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, describes the Jews of Toledo as recognising Muslim rule and their new status as subject dhimmis (a religious minority ‘protected’ by the Islamic authorities in exchange for a special tax) but does not present them either as active combatants or treacherous collaborators in the service of the Islamic conquerors. A later eleventh-century Muslim account of the conquest, the anonymous Akhbar Majmuʿa, seems to go a bit further by asserting that “whenever [the Muslims] found Jews in a town, they entrusted the city to them, leaving a detachment of Muslims with them” just as they had done in many other conquered Iberian towns. Even then, this vague claim must not be taken out of context and certainly does not automatically entail military service or even service alongside the Muslim garrisons left by the advancing Muslim host in its wake. It may well imply that the Jews were entrusted with administrative duties to maintain order in the newly conquered towns.18 A similar version of events appears in the account of a seventeenth-century Muslim historian, al-Maqqari, who cites the work of the eleventh-century historian Ibn Hayyan (987–1075). Ibn Hayyan claimed that the advancing Muslims found Toledo “deserted” by its inhabitants and that, before moving on, they contented themselves with entrusting it to a small Muslim garrison and the Jewish population of the city that they “collected together.”19 In the Muslim sources, therefore, there is absolutely no claim that the Jews actively conspired to deliver Christian towns into Muslim hands but rather that they played an 16 17 18 19

Francisco de Pisa, Descripcion de la imperial ciudad de Toledo, y historia de sus antiguedades (Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1605), fols. 125r–125v. These debates are discussed by Norman Roth, “The Jews and the Muslim Conquest of Spain,” Jewish Social Studies, 37 (1976): 145–158. David James, A History of Early Al-Andalus: The Akhbar Majmuʿa (New York: Routledge, 2012), 52–3 and 55. Norman Roth, “The Jews and the Muslim Conquest of Spain,” 153–4 and Fernando Bravo López, “‘La traición de los judíos’. La pervivencia de un mito antijudío medieval en la historiografía española,” MEAH. Sección Hebreo, 63 (2014): 27–56.

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auxiliary role after the conquest. Whatever the truth of the matter, the medieval chroniclers and early modern antisemitic authors and conspiracy theorists were convinced of the historicity of the Jewish treason that had placed Spain into Muslim hands in 711 CE. Beyond the fall of Toledo, there are other instances of alleged Jewish treachery in favour of Christendom’s Muslim enemies in Spain and elsewhere deriving from sources located both within and outside the Iberian Peninsula. By way of illustration, in 694 CE, as Muslim armies were advancing westwards in North Africa, the Visigothic King of Spain, Egica, approved anti-Jewish measures passed at the seventeenth council of Toledo, most notably the seizure of Jewish children from their parents, by claiming that Jews and Jewish converts had been conspiring “with other Jews from beyond the sea [i.e. North Africa] to unite in their desire to fight and ensure the defeat the Christian people as well as the ruin of the Christian faith.”20 In a similar vein, the ninth-century Carolingian Annals of Saint Bertin, written in the north of France, accused the Jews of having helped Muslim forces capture Barcelona in 852 CE (after they had also previously handed Bordeaux over to the Vikings in 848 CE!).21 Nevertheless, the religious and political significance of Toledo in medieval Spain made the story of the Jews’ evil deeds in 711 all the more significant to early modern Spaniards. In fact it can be said that just as the supposed assassination of Enrique III by his physician Meir Alguadex was used to demonstrate that no Old Christian was safe from doctors with Jewish ancestry, the betrayal of Toledo was deployed in anti-converso propaganda to act as evidence that Christians could never be safe with the presence of Jews or secret Jews living amongst them. Whilst the treason allegedly committed in 711 CE remained the epitome of Jewish perfidy and fired the imagination of medieval and early modern Spanish and Portuguese writers, Jews are also frequently presented as working discreetly to undermine the ability of the Christians to successfully fight their Muslim foes. The humanist writer Cristóbal Lozano claimed in 1667 that the murder of Enrique III by Meir Alguadex was part of a plot orchestrated by the Jews and Muslims of Granada to prevent Christian forces from taking the last Muslim strongholds in the Iberian Peninsula. Even when they are not depicted as actively involved in military collaboration with Muslims, the Jews are presented as a threat to the Christian war effort against the Muslims. From the end 20 21

Sylvia Dümmer Scheel, “‘Cuestión Judía’ en España durante el reino visigodo: acusación de conjura contra el monarca bajo el reinado de Egica (694),” Historia y geografía, 20 (2007): 83–114. Janet Nelson, The Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 65–6 and 74.

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of the thirteenth century, a legend attributed the misgovernment of King Alfonso VIII (1158–1214) of Castile, and by implication the stinging defeat suffered by his forces at the hands of the Muslims at the battle of Alarcos in 1195, to an illicit sexual liaison with a Jewish sorceress in Toledo. Only her removal, by assassination, had restored Christian fortunes and led to their decisive victory over the Almohad Caliph at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Whilst the significance of such a ludicrous medieval story may seem limited for the modern historian, it is important to realise that it resonated loudly amongst early modern Spaniards. The story became so famous that it featured in numerous literary productions. Amongst these are the verse romances written and published in 1551 by the poet Lorenzo de Sepúlveda (c.1505–c.1580). In the seventeenth century, the playwright Lope de Vega refers to King Alfonso’s Jewish paramour, inventing the name of Raquel for her, in his epic poem Jerusalén conquistada, epopeya trágica (1609) and even turned the story into a play entitled Las paces de los reyes y judía de Toledo (1617).22 Given the shared history of both kingdoms, the story of Jewish perfidy in Toledo was just as potent a myth in Portugal as in Spain. Its circulation did not depend solely upon printed works but was also realised through sermons. During a powerful sermon delivered at the public sentencing of conversos held by the Inquisition in Évora in July 1624, Fray João de Ceita tells his audience that the Jews “handed over the city of Toledo to the Muslims and later sought to do the same with the whole of Spain.” He also alludes to their supposed conspiracy in 694 CE.23 Five years later, during another auto de fe held in Évora, the preacher Manuel dos Anjos reminds the spectators of how the Jews, despite being “honoured and treated with respect” by the Christians of Toledo had “treasonably” handed over the town to a Muslim army.24 Like all myths, however, it could also, when necessary, be deployed in contexts that had little to do with the conversos. Thus, in a polemical attack upon the Duke of Braganza and his supporters printed after the Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule in 1640, the inquisitor Juan Adam de la Parra is certainly referring to the fall of Toledo when he claims that had Philip II of Spain not annexed Portugal in 1580 22

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David Nirenberg, “Deviant politics and Jewish love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo,” Jewish History, 21 (2007): 15–41; Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, Romances nuevamente sacados de historias antiguas de la cronica de España (Antwerp: Pierre Bellère, 1580), fols. 133v– 134v; Lope de Vega, Jerusalén conquistada, epopeya trágica (Madrid: Imprenta de Juan de la Cuesta, 1609) fols. 501r–506v. João de Ceita, Sermão da fee pregado em o acto, que o Sancto Tribunal de Évora fez em a mesma cidade no anno de 1624 a 14 de Julho (Évora: Lourenço Crasbeeck, 1624), fol. 19r. Manuel dos Anjos, Sermão que pregou o Bispo de Fez D. Fr. Manoel dos Anjos no auto da fee que se celebrou na praça da cidade de Evora o primeiro de Abril de 1629 na quinta dominga de Quaresma (Évora: Manoel Carvalho, 1629), fol. 22v.

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after the death in battle in Morocco of its young King Sebastião two years earlier, it “would have been inundated by Arabs if, as there was reason to fear, the Hebrew nation joined them and opened the gates.”25 The widespread fame of the story of Jewish treason in 711 CE meant that even Jewish and converso apologists were forced to mention it in order to confront it in their own works. In the sixteenth century, the story is retold by two Jewish authors who were themselves also converso refugees from the Iberian Peninsula: Joseph Ha-Cohen (1496–c.1577) in his Hebrew work “The Valley of Tears” (‫)עמק הּבכא‬, which was printed in 1550, and Samuel Usque (c.1497– c.1567) in his Portuguese work Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, printed in the Italian city of Ferrara in 1553. Although they lived in different regions – HaCohen in the Ottoman Empire and Usque in Italy – they offer the same account of the fall of Toledo, one that consciously attacked the Spanish tradition of Jewish treason. The identical nature of the accounts suggests that there existed a well-established Jewish narrative of the fall of Toledo likely to have existed in medieval Spain. In these Jewish works, the story of Jewish betrayal is, unsurprisingly, attacked as a malicious lie and a very different version of events is presented. It is claimed that the Muslims has lain in ambush and attacked suddenly, surprising the Christian inhabitants of Toledo on Palm Sunday, slaughtering many and enslaving the others. In addition to this, Ha-Cohen and Usque are careful to specify that numerous Toledan Jews also suffered the same fate during the storming of the city. From the Jewish point of view, the story of Jewish betrayal was a libel concocted by the leading Christian lords of Toledo to whom the defence of the city had been entrusted but who had fled once the fall of Toledo seemed inevitable. To cover themselves and avoid being accused of cowardice, however, these men falsely blamed the Jews for their defeat.26 In the following century, the greatest of the Jewish/converso polemicists, Isaac Cardoso, likewise attacks the myth in his famous Las excelencias de los hebreos, printed in Amsterdam in 1679. In the chapter dedicated to denouncing the “calumny” that Jews were always unfaithful to Christian rulers, Cardoso discusses the betrayal of Spain to the Muslims in 711 CE, discounting the account of Lucas de Tuy and directing his readers, instead, to trust the ac-

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Juan Adam de la Parra, Apologetico contra el tirano y rebelde Verganza, y coniurados, arzobispo de Lisboa y sus parciales, en repuesta a los doze fundamentos del Padre Mascareñas (Zaragoza: Diego Dormer, 1642), fols. 29r–29v. Joseph ha-Cohen, ʿEmeq ha-Bakha, ed. and tr. H.S. May (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) and S. Usque, Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, ed. Y.H. Yerushalmi and José V. de Pina Martins (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), vol. 1, fols. 160r–161v.

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count of Juan de Mariana “a serious and free author who wrote dispassionately on the history of Spain” before proceeding on to paraphrase Mariana’s work.27 In much the same manner as the libel of medical murder against Meir Alguadex, the libel of Jewish treachery in Toledo became an essential part of the master narrative of Spanish history, unquestioningly repeated and accepted as fact by many modern and respected historians even in the twentieth century. For the eminent medievalist Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (1893–1984) there could be no doubt that the Jews had acted as a “fifth column” – an expression coined and popularized during the Spanish Civil War with clear pejorative connotations – that undermined Christian resistance and thus facilitated the Muslim takeover of Spain.28 Even many modern Jewish historians – including the pioneering Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) and Nahum Slouschz (1872–1966) – accepted a historical narrative in which it was declared that the Jews of Visi­ gothic Spain not only welcomed the Muslims but actively worked to bring about their invasion in the hope of better treatment. The myth, as the historian Fernando Bravo López states, has enjoyed an “extraordinary vitality.”29 With such a well-established tradition to support it, it is hardly surprising that the myth of active Jewish treason in 711 CE inspired some Spaniards to consider a renewed alliance between judaizing conversos and outside Muslim forces as a menace. This menace is evoked in the anti-converso pamphlet entitled Alborayque, produced around 1465 and possibly the earliest known work of anti-converso propaganda to appear in both print and vernacular Castilian. According to its anonymous author, conversos were fleeing the Iberian Peninsula and moving to the Ottoman Empire in order to “help the Turk to shed Christian blood.”30 Nonetheless, accusations of disloyalty or treachery involving the conversos in the early modern period centred chiefly on their alleged collaboration with Spain and Portugal’s Protestant enemies in northern Europe rather than their Islamic enemies in the Mediterranean. This development took place in spite of the fact that Spanish Jewry was accused of having assisted the Muslim conquest in the eight century CE and that the sixteenth27 28 29

30

Isaac Cardoso, Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1679), 373. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, El reino de Asturias: orígenes de la nación española (Gijón: Silverio Cañada, 1989), 70–1. For an examination of the historiography see Norman Roth, “The Jews and the Muslim Conquest of Spain,” Jewish Social Studies, 37 (1976): 145–158 and more recently Fernando Bravo López, “’La traición de los judíos’. La pervivencia de un mito antijudío medieval en la historiografía española,” MEAH. Sección Hebreo, 63 (2014): 51. Anon., Alborayque, ed. Dwayne E. Carpenter (Mérida: Editorial Regional de Extremadura, 2005), 76.

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century forged letters, discussed in chapter 2, involve the Jewish community in Ottoman-ruled Constantinople. The most obvious explanation for this difference would appear to reside in the fact that concerns that the Ottomans or North African Muslims would receive help from within Spain unsurprisingly and logically enough fell upon the Moriscos for most of the sixteenth century and right up to their expulsion in 1609. The fear of an alliance between Protestants and judaizing conversos living under Spanish or Portuguese rule appears to have been largely dormant during the sixteenth century. It emerged prominently as a theme only in the seventeenth century as the result of three crucial developments between 1600 and 1620. These were, firstly, the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in 1609–1614, secondly, the increasing ability of the Dutch to project their military power and threaten Iberian territories and interests all over the world and, thirdly, the well-known presence of a large and openly Jewish Sephardic community established in Amsterdam and founded by exiled conversos. 2

The ‘Jewish Origins’ of the Reformation: Linking Conversos and Protestants

Many antisemitic propagandists in early modern Spain and Portugal came to represent the various Protestant movements as machinations inspired by Jews or Judaism in much in the same way that twentieth-century antisemitic and anti-communist propaganda combined to present communism as a Jewish ‘invention.’ This trend did not originate in Spain but rather in northern Europe where, in the polemical battles waged during the sixteenth century, the accusation of judaizing was liberally used by all religious movements, and even in disputes amongst Protestant Reformers, in their efforts to destroy the theological credibility of their opponents. The power of the accusation of judaizing lay not only in the strength of authority set by Paul’s attack on judaizing in Galatians 2:14 but also in its popular association with the despised but feared Jews. Catholic polemicists rapidly attacked the main leaders of the Reformation, including Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, by characterizing them as judaizers. Indeed, one of the main impulses behind Martin Luther’s 1523 work entitled That Jesus Christ was born a Jew was to refute Catholic claims that, like Jews, Luther denied the virginity of the Virgin Mary. In some cases, however, the accusation of judaizing led to the casting of aspersions about a reformer’s ethnicity. By way of illustration, the reformer Martin Bucer (1491–1551) was calumniously accused of being a Jew by the Dutch bishop Wilhelmus Lindanus

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(1525–1588) and of having died as a Jew by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Possevino (1533–1611), who was, somewhat ironically, himself of Jewish ancestry.31 The drawing of a link between the emergence of various Protestant movements and the Jewish conspiracy against the church began in Spain during the panic and inquisitorial repression that swept Spain between 1557 and 1562, following the discovery of groups of Spanish-born proto-Protestants in Seville and Valladolid. Many saw these early Spanish Protestants not merely as the product of a religious ideology imported from northern Europe but as the theological descendants of heretical mystics – the alumbrados – that the Inquisition prosecuted in the 1520s and 1530s. Many conversos were attracted to mysticism and they played a major role in the movement prior to its persecution, a fact that the Inquisition was well aware of. Although they were not able to establish a direct link between crypto-Judaism and alumbradismo, the fact that so many alumbrados were conversos was enough in itself.32 The prosecutor of the inquisitorial tribunal of Toledo explicitly made this rapprochement during the trial of the prominent alumbrado, and the first to be investigated, Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz. For the prosecutor, alumbradismo amounted to nothing more than a Jewish plot. Since the conversos could not hope to inculcate the ‘Law of Moses’ to the Old Christian masses whose Catholic faith was firm, they sought instead to attack and undermine Catholicism through mysticism: These new errors and heresies (…) are all intended to defend and assist the false faith in the Law of Moses and the destruction of the evangelical [Christian] Law. They do not dare to dogmatize, obviously, because the simple plebeians and rustics are already instructed [in the Catholic Faith] and the latter cannot be easily tricked and seduced to embrace and to keep the Law of Moses by the heretics and false dogmatists. For this reason, the aforesaid Alcaraz and his accomplices decided to seek to do away with the ceremonies of the evangelical [Christian] Law.33 Historians have long debated the extent to which the proto-Protestant cells discovered and destroyed by the Inquisition in the middle of the sixteenth cen31

32 33

See, for instance, G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Also: David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 246–8; Wilhelmus Lindanus, Dialogvs II. Dvbitantivs (Cologne: Maternum Cholinum, 1565), 138; Antonio Possevino, De sectariorum nostri temporis atheismis liber (Cologne: Birckmann, 1586), fol. 23v. Stefania Pastore, Una herejía española. Conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010). Stefania Pastore, Una herejía española, 174.

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tury were influenced by the alumbrados or by Protestant literature smuggled into Spain. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Inquisition considered that there existed a link between the luteranos of Seville and Valladolid and the earlier alumbrados. In a letter written by the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition and sent to Pope Paul IV on 9 September 1558, the inquisitors present the Spanish ‘Lutherans’ as an offshoot of the alumbrado movement: When these matters are pondered, it seems they had their start much further back (…). The alumbrados or dexados, natives of Guadalajara, and other places in the kingdom of Toledo, and elsewhere, were the seeds of these Lutheran heresies.34 When the Protestant cells were destroyed, the inquisitors spared no effort to highlight the supposed links between Judaism and conversos on the one hand and Luther and his doctrines on the other. Before one of the ringleaders – Agustín de Cazalla – was burned at the stake in 1559, the sentence publically proclaimed during the inquisitorial auto de fe specified that he was “a Jew, descended from Jewish converts burned [at the stake].” The power of the myth saw it gain acceptance at the highest level of society. In a private letter sent to his illegitimate daughter Margaret of Parma in May 1558, Emperor Charles V links his approval of the harsh sentences imposed upon those arrested by the Inquisition for luteranismo to their Jewish ancestry. Charles notes that “they are conversos, just as were all the inventors of those [Protestant] heresies.”35 Such sentiments were shared by the Augustinian Cristóbal de Santotis in his foreword to a 1591 edition of the Latin Scrutinium Scripturarum – the polemical anti-Jewish work of the thirteenth-century convert/Bishop Pablo de Santa María. Santotis expounds at length upon the origins of the Protestant heresies and proclaims his belief in the ‘fact’ that all heresies were the work of judaizers or “had their origins amongst the Jews.” He vilifies Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and other Reformers with the claim that they acted consistently as “protectors” of the Jews.36  Cristóbal de Santotis’s work resounded loudly amongst Iberian antisemitic propagandists. Any similarity in the criticism that Jews and Reformers directed against various tenets of Catholic dogma was seized upon as evidence not only 34 35 36

Lu Ann Homza, The Spanish Inquisition 1478–1614. An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2006), 189. Augustin Redondo, “Le discours d’exclusion des ‘déviants’ tenu par l’Inquisition à l’époque de Charles Quint,” Les problèmes de l’exclusion en Espagne (XVI e-XVII e siècles): idéologie et discours (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1983), 32. Pablo de Santa María, Scrutinium Scripturarum (Burgos: Philippum Iuntam, 1591), 79–100.

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that the Reformation and Judaism shared a similar objective, namely to destroy the Catholic Church, but that the origins of the former was rooted in the latter. Thirty years after the publication of Santotis’s edition of the Scrutinium Scripturarum, in neighbouring Portugal the polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos acknowledges him as a source in his 1622 Breve Discurso contra heretica perfidia do iudaismo and essentially offers a much more concise vernacular version of the claims made by Santotis. Mattos reminds his readers that in the past “the greatest heresiarchs were either of the Jewish race or judaized in order to better achieve their aim.” After pointing to past historical heresies and their alleged Jewish links, Mattos launches a savage attack upon “the infamous and vile Luther,” about whom “it was known that he judaized prior to persecuting the church with his heresies, just as the rest did in the past.” The Jewish ties of the Reformer Huldrych Zwingli, of the Anabaptists and of the Calvinists are supposedly demonstrated by the fact that they “preserve the Mosaic rule in marriage,” abhor the adoration of images and that many Reformers exchanged their clerical celibacy for “unworthy forbidden marriages.” Jean Calvin in particular is described as the “father of the Jews” because of the extensive correspondence of Calvin and his supporters with Jews and of the alleged similarities between Judaism and Calvinism in their understanding of the nature of the Holy Trinity.37 Likewise, the same claims are made in the report submitted to King Philip IV of Spain (III of Portugal) by the Portuguese churchmen who, in 1629, assembled in a council held in the town of Tomar specifically to consider the Jewish ‘peril’ threatening the Iberian kingdoms and to offer the monarch advice about the measures that could forestall it. Whilst most Protestant reformers are accused of being judaizers, some are explicitly identified as the descendants of Jews. These include Andreas Rudolph Bodenstein (1486–1541) and Martin Bucer (1491–1551), who is labelled as being descended “from the Jewish caste” (de casta de judíos).38 Even when authors do not explicitly present Protestantism as an offspring or offshoot of Talmudic Judaism, many of these authors draw parallels between them that make it clear that their readers are expected to view them as associated evils. Moreover, they were both presented as creations of the Devil and, as such, natural allies. In his 1599 history of the persecution of Catholics in Elizabethan England, Fray Diego de Yepes (1530–1613) implicitly draws a parallel between the Reformation and the judaizing conversos when he informs 37 38

Vicente da Costa Mattos Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, fols. 138r– 138v. B.L., Add. Ms. 28462, fol. 137v; Martin A. Cohen, The Canonization of a Myth. Portugal’s “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002), 51–2.

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his readers that “the heresy of Luther” had its origins in the same desire for disorder and dishonest gain as the judaizing heresy denounced by Saint Paul in his epistle to Titus (chapter 1, verse 11).39 In an unremarkable religious polemic seeking to disprove the theological validity of Judaism, the Spanish cleric Benito Remigio Noydens (1630–1685) is even more explicit when, in 1662, he warns his readers that the Judaism practiced by Jewish Rabbis who follow the Talmud is “masterminded” (amaestrada) by the Devil, who is “the chief culprit and the father of all heresies.” As a prime example of heretics possessed by the Devil, Noydens names Luther and his collaborator Melanchthon.40 3

The ‘Jewish Plot’ against the Portuguese Empire

Interestingly, it is not in Spain and Portugal themselves but rather in relation to their overseas colonies that the fear of a Jewish conspiracy that sought to provoke or aid a Protestant invasion found its clearest expression. To fully understand these fears, it is necessary to appreciate the changing military situation in the Atlantic world during the early seventeenth century. The rise in power of the naval forces of the Dutch Republic, especially after the end of the 1609–1621 truce with Spain, caused serious worries to the Habsburg authorities in the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires. Dutch corsairs and expeditions raided Spanish and Portuguese settlements around the globe, as far away as the Asian outposts in Malacca and Macau in 1606 and 1622 respectively. Dutch attacks did not, however, limit themselves to destructive raids against Iberian colonies or shipping. The creation of two “companies” – the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) in 1602 and the Dutch West India company (Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie) in 1621 – was designed to finance and organize oceanic expeditions, signalling a new will to break the Iberian monopoly on trade with Asia and the New World and seize lands previously conquered and colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The Groot Desseyn (“grand design”), a strategic plan elaborated in 1623, led the Dutch to focus their ambitions on the conquest of the Portuguese commercial outposts in Asia, Africa and the sugar-cane plantations in Brazil. The capture of the Brazilian port of Bahia in 1624 by a large fleet and expeditionary force proved to be an abortive first endeavour as the colony was retaken by a 39 40

Diego de Yepes, Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra y de los martirios mas insignes que en ella a auido, desde el año del Señor 1570 (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1599), 186. Benito Remigio Noydens, Visita general y espiritval colirio de los ivdios y promptvario catolico de los mas principales fundamentos de la fe y religion christiana (Madrid: Francisco Serrano de Figueroa, 1662), 52.

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combined Spanish-Portuguese fleet the following year. A second expedition that set sail for Brazil in 1629 was more successful. In February and March 1630, the Dutch forces captured the towns of Olinda and Recife in the region of Pernambuco. In spite of Portuguese resistance, the Dutch were able to consolidate their hold on Pernambuco and by 1635 had established the foundations of a South America colony - Nieuw Holland (“New Holland”) – in northeastern Brazil that survived until it was re-conquered by the Portuguese in 1654. The Dutch conquest of northeastern Brazil had important consequences not only for the conversos residing in that region but also upon the perception of the menace that they posed for the Habsburg hold over the Spanish and Portuguese empires in general. The Dutch established a system of relative religious toleration mirroring that which existed in the Netherlands and allowed Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam in search of economic opportunities to move to Recife along with other Dutch settlers. The Sephardic Jews in Recife flourished economically and culturally and the Kahal Zur Israel synagogue, the first official synagogue in the Americas, functioned between 1636 and 1654. A second Jewish congregation was established in the newly established Dutch settlement of Mauritsstad. Insofar as many of the conversos were concerned, the Dutch colony in “New Holland” thus offered the new possibility of life free from the constant threat of inquisitorial persecution and arrest. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some conversos inevitably did move to Recife and reverted to Judaism.41 Even before the Spaniards and Portuguese were made to feel to full force of Dutch naval and military might in their colonial outposts, Vicente da Costa Mattos was offering the readers of his 1622 Breve Discurso worrying tales of collusion between conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and the Dutch. Decrying “the certainty that the New Christians have been in league with the Dutch for many years,” Mattos accuses the conversos of “assisting them with the fleet that they have sent against the East Indies,” a reference to early Dutch attacks on Portuguese possessions in India and East Asia. For Mattos, the conversos of Lisbon were especially guilty of having deliberately provided expert knowledge of navigation in the Indian Ocean to the Dutch: The intrusion [of the Dutch] into those areas was due to the intervention of the same Jews who reside in Lisbon, from whom there can be no doubt that they purchased a skilled pilot of that region named João from a gen-

41

See Ronaldo Vainfas, Jerusalém Colonial. Judeus Portugueses no Brasil Holandês (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2010).

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tleman who had brought slaves from India. They sent him to Holland and it is said that he was the first to lead them to India.42 Mattos does not cite any source for this information and he appears to be echoing a rumour widely circulating in Lisbon. The anxiety that Spain and Por­tugal’s Protestant enemies were gaining secret or strategic navigational infor­mation from ‘renegade’ Spanish or Portuguese seamen, and using it to good effect in their attacks upon the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula or Iberian colonies, was certainly not baseless. Numerous unscrupulous Iberian mariners were ready to sell their skills and knowledge to the highest bidders, including the various Protestant powers in northern Europe. In a short printed memorandum addressed to King Philip I of Portugal (II of Spain) in the 1590s, for instance, the Portuguese cleric Manuel de Andrada de Castel Branco warns his sovereign to ensure that his naval forces are well provisioned and maintained since the “Lutherans” had “acquired numerous Spanish mariners and captains” from whose knowledge the English, in particular, hoped to profit at Philip’s expense. Castel Branco’s tract, despite its alarmist tone, did not see a converso motive behind the actions of such ‘renegade’ mariners and no mention was made of a Jewish or converso conspiracy in his work. It would appear that this antisemitic element fastened itself upon existing fears caused by the rise of Dutch naval power in the early seventeenth century43 Only two years after Mattos’ work was first published, however, the Dutch capture of the Brazilian port of Bahia was to push fears of converso treason to an all-new level. 4

A New Toledo in the Americas: Jewish Treason and the Fall of Bahia (1624)

In May 1624, a large Dutch fleet and expeditionary force captured the port of Salvador da Bahia, the most important city in seventeenth-century colonial Brazil. The circumstances surrounding the Dutch occupation of Bahia, although it only lasted for a year until the recapture of the town by Habsburg forces in May 1625 after a short siege, came to constitute a particularly important element in antisemitic propaganda. The town was captured after only 42 43

Vicente da Costa Mattos Breve Discurso contra a heretica perfidia do judaismo, fols. 165v– 166r. Manuel de Andrada de Castel Branco, Instrvcion que a. V. Magestad se da, para mandar fortificar el mar Oceano, y defender se de todos los contrarios Piratas, ansi Franceses, como Ingleses, en todas las nauegaciones de su Real Corona, dentro de los Tropiccos (n.p.: n.n., n.d.), fol. 17r.

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token resistance thanks, in part, to the fact that the sudden and unexpected arrival of the Dutch fleet left the residents of the town no time to prepare any effective defence. Bahia was abandoned by its panic-stricken inhabitants and only the Portuguese governor, his son, a few officials and some Jesuits remained to be captured by the Dutch. With the arrival in the Iberian Peninsula of news of this disaster and the seemingly effortless Dutch conquest, a legend with numerous parallels to that of the fall of Toledo in 711 CE rapidly emerged in which the loss of Bahia was presented in a very different light. Rather than being deserted, it was claimed that the conversos amongst the Portuguese settlers were to blame for having surrendered the town to the Dutch and collaborated with them during their short-lived occupation. The swift reconquest of Bahia was widely celebrated in the Iberian Peninsula but the shock and dismay caused by its initial fall was not forgotten. It is clear that, to many Spaniards and Portuguese, the role of treacherous judaizing conversos was the only conceivable explanation for the debacle of 1624. Many saw the fall of Bahia as history repeating itself: just as the Jews had opened the gates of Toledo and allowed the Muslims to capture it, so their descendants had betrayed Bahia and allowed the Protestant Dutch heretics to occupy it. In his account of the loss and recovery of Bahia, rapidly written and printed in 1625, the Jesuit Bartolomeu Guerreiro makes no mention of any converso treachery, straightforwardly narrating the Dutch capture of a hastily abandoned town. Guerreiro does mention the collaboration of some inhabitants with the Dutch during the brief occupation but does not single out the conversos. Instead, he states that the collaborators were individuals who “had come to an understanding with the Dutch”; opportunists whose loyalty followed “the fortunes of war” more than active collaborators.44 A similar account is provided by the Franciscan (and Brazilian) Fray Vicente do Salvador, who was a prisoner of the Dutch in Bahia. In his 1627 History of Brazil, he only refers to “some Portuguese,” who accepted to live under Dutch rule in Bahia without specifying whether they were Old Christians or conversos. In fact Vicente do Salvador does not mention the conversos but rather expends considerable time describing the aid that the Dutch received from some rebellious African slaves and Amerindians.45 In his analysis of the role ascribed to the conversos in the fall of Bahia in 1624, Eduardo d’Oliveira França, has pointed out that whilst Portuguese and 44 45

Bartolomeu Guerreiro, Jornada dos vassalos da coroa de Portugal, pera se recuperar a cidade do Salvador, na Bahya de todos os Santos, tomada pollos holandezes, a oito de Mayo de 1624. & recuperada ao primeiro de Mayo de 1625 (Lisbon: Francisco Alvarez, 1625), fol. 43v. Fray Vicente do Salvador, História do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1889), 206–249.

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Dutch authors in the years immediately following the event do not mention any converso treachery, the same does not hold for Spanish authors. It was indeed Spanish authors who emphasized the alleged converso participation in the fall of Bahia. Juan de Valencia y Guzmán, a soldier present at the recapture of the town, claims in 1626 that the Dutch were informed of the abandonment of the town by a converso named Diego López de Abrantes.46 Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (c.1589–1641) offers a more detailed account of converso treachery. This chronicler not only mentions that “some” conversos, “who seldom need much convincing to show their deceitfulness,” had decided to live under Dutch rule but he insists that their collaboration went still further and began earlier. For him a large part of the responsibility for the Dutch attack on Bahia was due to the intelligence eagerly gathered on their behalf by the treasonous conversos, who enticed the Dutch with promises of wealth: That people who are commonly named of the [Hebrew] Nation in Portugal and who are always ready to injure those of the ancient and true Christian [Nation], greatly helped and informed the Dutch about that province [of Bahia], its latitude, beaches and of the benefits that his majesty [King Philip IV of Spain] received from its produce which would greatly increase for the Dutch who [once the region was conquered] could count on the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and that of those Portuguese who did not ally with them.47 This version of events, attributing to the Jews and conversos the role of catalysts in the Dutch expedition, became the official one. In his chronicle of the early years of the reign of Philip IV of Spain, printed in 1631, the historian Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses (1585–1638) insists that the Dutch expedition was “provoked by the converted Hebrews.”48 Francisco de Brito Freire, the Portuguese author of a history of the Portuguese-Dutch conflict in Brazil printed half a century after the fall of Bahia, may well have been influenced by such Spanish accounts. Vaguely referring to an unnamed source (“it is claimed that”), Freire claims that the wary Dutch sent two disgruntled conversos exiled 46 47 48

Juan de Valencia y Guzmán, “Compendio historial de la jornada del Brasil y sucesos della,” Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España (Madrid: Academia de la Historia, 1870), vol. 55, 43–200 (see page 72). Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, Restauracion de la Ciudad del Salvador i Baìa de Todos-Sanctos en la Provincia del Brasil (Madrid: La Viuda de Alonso Martin, 1628), fols. 20r (wrongly appears as fol. 18r in the original) and 41v. Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, Primera Parte de la Historia de D. Felippe el IIII, Rey de las Españas (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1631), 437 and 440.

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from Portugal to Brazil to reconnoitre the empty town before they themselves entered into it.49 It thus seems that the Spanish sources offer a version of events in which the Jews/conversos are portrayed as active rather than passive traitors. Even if one or more conversos were indeed used by the Dutch to reconnoitre the town after it was abandoned by the vast majority of its panic-stricken population, their role in the conquest can hardly be described as an active one. Likewise the fact that some conversos chose either to remain in Bahia after its fall or to subsequently return to it and accept Dutch rule does not offer evidence of anything but a passive acquiescence of the fortunes of war and a wish to preserve their economic assets. Finally, the allegation of Tomás Tamayo de Vargas and Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses that the Dutch expedition to Bahia was masterminded by the conversos and Jews in Amsterdam through their supposed control of the Dutch West Indies Company, and thereby of the geopolitical strategy of the Dutch United Provinces, is nothing more than a caricature. The speed with which this anti-converso libel of active treachery in Brazil developed and became part of an official narrative is, nevertheless, staggering. It is clear that claims of Jewish treachery in Toledo during the Muslim invasion of Spain during the eighth century CE and centuries of prejudice relating to the supposedly innate predisposition of the Jews for treachery against Christians, had prepared many authors in early modern Spain to unquestioningly believe that Jews must be actively aiding the Dutch war effort. Beyond the historical ‘precedent’ offered by the fall of Toledo to the Muslims, the spread of the notion of active converso treachery in 1624 was fuelled by an already tense situation. In the decades before 1624, the conversos settled in the New World were already living under a cloud of suspicion. Concerns about the presence of the conversos in Brazil existed prior to the arrival of the Dutch expedition and is expressed in official correspondence between governors and the crown. In 1607, for instance, the governor-general of Brazil, Diogo Botelho, warned the crown of the commercial ties and links between the Dutch and inhabitants of the regions. Eleven years later his successor Luís de Sousa expressed his fear that a Dutch expedition would conquer Brazil with the aid of conversos and was, accordingly, ordered by the crown to carry out a census of the converso population in the colony.50 Further evidence of this pre-existing fear of the conversos in colonial Brazil can be found in denunciations to the 49 50

Francisco de Brito Freire, Nova Lusitania, historia da guerra brasilica (Lisbon: Joam Galram, 1675), 68. Eduardo d’Oliveira França, “Um problema: a traição dos cristãos novos em 1624,” Revista de História, 41 (1970), 21–71 (see pages 21–3).

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Inquisition. Five years later, a Franciscan in Pernambuco denounced three men identified as conversos for blasphemy and confided his worries that “the men of the [Hebrew] nation enjoy much freedom in these lands and live according to their desires.”51 Such pre-existing fears probably help to explain why the conversos were blamed for the fall of Bahia almost as soon as the town was retaken (and probably even before). In his celebratory play written not long after the reconquest of Bahia and entitled El Brasil Restituido, the playwright Lope de Vega (1562– 1635) was one of those who placed the blame for the fall of the town upon the conversos. The plot of the play has the conversos writing to Holland and inviting the Dutch to attack. It accounts for their treason by having the conversos complain about the many “imprisonments” and “affronts” they had suffered from the Inquisition, explicitly confessing that they thought that it would be “better to surrender to the Dutch than suffer that the Portuguese should treat us so harshly.”52 The subject of Jewish treason in Brazil (and elsewhere) was discussed by the Portuguese churchmen gathered at Tomar in 1629 and was highlighted in their efforts to convince the King of the threat that conversos represented: It cannot be doubted that they are responsible for undermining all our conquests and bringing the Dutch, who are heretics and enemies of the crown, to the Indies, and giving them the means to go to Brazil and capture the towns of Bahia and Pernambuco. Besides they help these same enemies with money to batter the coastal ports of the Iberian Peninsula.53 In 1634, Esteban Ares de Fonseca, an inquisitorial informer, began his report on the alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy against the Portuguese Empire by claiming that Bahia had fallen into the hands of the Dutch due to the assistance they received from two conversos named Nuño Alvarez Franco and Manuel Fernandez Drago, who had close links with the Jews of Amsterdam.54

51 52 53 54

Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et nouveaux-chrétiens au Brésil. Le Nordeste XVII e et XVIII e siècles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 142. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez, “Los judíos en el teatro del siglo XVII,” in Judíos en la literatura española, ed. Iacob M. Hassán, Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Cuenca: Ediciones de CastillaLa Mancha, 2001), 193–4. Martin A. Cohen, The Canonization of a Myth. Portugal’s “Jewish Problem,” 51. I have slightly adapted the translation by Cohen. Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial Relating to Damages to Spanish Interests in America Done by Jews of Holland (1634),” American Jewish Historical Society, 17 (1909): 47.

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Dutch Brazil and the Image of the Conversos

In a sermon delivered in 1630, in the wake of the sacrilege perpetrated in the church of Santa Engracia, the Carmelite Timóteo Seabra Pimentel rails against the alleged treachery of the conversos. Addressing himself to the convicted converso prisoners with words really intended for the crowd of onlookers, Pimentel capitalizes on news of the sailing of the 1630 Dutch fleet, to provoke fear of further converso treachery, this time in Portugal itself: You have disturbed and contaminated the peace [of the realm] through your malign double-dealings (…) staining the lands of Brazil and Bahia with Portuguese and Castilian blood, shed for their reconquest. Can you possibly deny that it is those of your nation, your kin and your friends who have sided with the heretical [Dutch] rebels? (…) Why can you not be calm rather than disturbing the peace of the world? It has recently been brought to my attention by a high-ranking minister of these kingdoms [of Portugal] that warning has been received from Flanders and Cape Verde of the sailing of a large Dutch fleet, bearing many men of your [Jewish] nation and customs […]. May it please God that, having already attacked Brazil, you do not bring [the Dutch] to Lisbon.55 The fear expressed by Timóteo Seabra Pimentel that the Jews would induce the Dutch to strike at Lisbon itself proved to be wrong. Brazil remained the main focus of Dutch overseas ambitions. They returned in 1630 to capture the coastal settlements of Olinda and Recife, occupying these until 1654. Following their victory, and mindful of the need to preserve the economic activity of the colony if the conquest was to be a viable one, the Dutch enticed a number of Portuguese settlers, who had fled into the hinterland, back to the city. Once more, the role of the conversos in these events was subjected to hostile scrutiny. The crucial archival research of Anita Novinsky has demonstrated that collaboration with the Dutch, both in Bahia in 1624–5 and later in Pernambuco between 1630 and 1654, was certainly not limited to conversos. Two inquiries undertaken by the local ecclesiastical authorities, in 1625 and 1635, to identify those who had chosen to remain under Dutch rule or accepted their offer to return in occupies territories after having initially fled have yielded fascinating 55

Timóteo Seabra Pimentel, Honda de David: con cinco sermones, o piedras, tiradas en defension, y alabança del santissimo sacramento del altar, contra hereges sacramentarios, y iudios baptizados en el reyno de Portugal, apostatas de nuestra Santa Fè, por la occasion del robo sacrilego, cometido en la Iglesia Parochial de Santa Engracia, en la ciudad de Lisboa (Barcelona: Estevan Liberòs, 1631), fol. 18r.

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results. The inquiry undertaken in 1625 led to the denunciation of twenty-two individuals of whom only six were identified as conversos. The results from the 1635 inquiry are even more eloquent. Of the eighty individuals denounced, eight were members of the Catholic clergy, forty-eight were Old Christians and twenty-four were identified as conversos.56 In most of these cases, the motives that led individuals – whether Old Christians or conversos – to accept Dutch rule appear to have been primarily economic. Compromise and acceptance of Protestant rule, therefore, was clearly not limited to conversos. One Jesuit in Pernambuco named Manuel de Moraes, an Old Christian, even went so far as to become an active collaborator of the Dutch in 1634 and converted to Calvinism before repenting and switching sides again. Far from being forgiven for his past treason and apostasy, Moraes was prosecuted by the Inquisition.57 Contradictory facts, however, did not stand in the way of the fantasy of a grand Jewish/converso conspiracy to destroy the Portuguese Empire through the Dutch West India Company. It is hardly surprising that cases of collaboration by Old Christians, let alone a churchman like Moraes, are not mentioned in anti-converso polemics. As the next chapter will demonstrate, claims of economic collaboration between conversos and the Dutch grew in number during the 1630s and 1640s. The subject of converso economic sabotage was always inextricably meshed with that of active military assistance to the foreign enemies of the Iberian crowns through espionage and by influencing the geopolitical strategy and foreign policy of these enemy powers. In the conspiracist narrative, spying by the conversos is entirely undertaken in a single direction: against Spain and Portugal’s interests and for the benefit of their enemies. The reality was far more complex. Conversos were often actively employed as spies and double agents by the Iberian monarchs as well as by their adversaries.58 This included colourful characters such as Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Sephardic Jew, merchant, diplomat and pirate who simultaneously managed to work as an agent and informant of the Moroccan Sultan, the Dutch rebels and the Spanish monarchy between 1608 and 1616.59 56 57 58 59

Anita Novinsky, “A Historical Bias: The New Christian Collaboration with the Dutch Invaders of Brazil (17th century),” in Proceedings of the V World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1972), vol. 2, 141–154. Ronaldo Vainfas, Traição. Um jesuíta a serviço do Brasil holandês processado pela Inquisição (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008). See Alain Hugon, Au service du Roi Catholique, « honorables ambassadeurs » et « divins espions »: représentation diplomatique et service secret dans les relations Hispano-Françaises de 1598 à 1635 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004). Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

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There is, unsurprisingly, no mention in anti-converso polemics of the spying undertaken on behalf of the Habsburg crown by conversos and Jews such as the Milanese Jew Simon Sacerdoti.60 By its very nature, espionage is, admittedly, a highly secretive activity but there did exist high-profile cases of pro-Catholic converso spies or Jewish auxiliaries. One such instance was the spying undertaken in Tudor England by Rodrigo Lopes, the Portuguese converso and royal physician of Queen Elizabeth I, who was executed in 1594 along with two of his agents when their secret correspondence with Spanish officials in Flanders came to light. Likewise, the crucial role played by Jews residing in the Spanish coastal stronghold – or presidio – of Oran in North Africa as double agents and as vital sources of information about the plans and dispositions of the garrison’s Muslim foes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is entirely overlooked.61 The intricate nature of early modern espionage did not suit the antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Obsessed with the notion of ‘Jewish treachery,’ they could only conceive of systematic converso spying against Spain and Portugal. One of the clearest and most interesting articulations of the belief in an overarching Jewish conspiracy against the Spanish Empire’s hold over the Americas can be found in the views of a Portuguese converso named Esteban Ares de Fonseca. Fonseca is in many ways a problematic character. A Portuguese converso himself, he was originally from Coimbra but was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced as a judaizer by the tribunal of Lisbon in 1621.62 Like many other conversos before him who faced a death sentence if they were prosecuted by the Inquisition a second time, Fonseca fled the Iberian Peninsula, spending time in the French ports of Bordeaux and Bayonne, where he claimed to have consorted with judaizing conversos, before sailing to Amsterdam. In Holland he formally returned to Judaism and was circumcised. Eventually, however, he rejected normative Judaism, returned to Catholicism and traveled to Spain to become an informer for the Inquisition. The inquisitorial trial of a Portuguese converso in 1645 contains testimony collected by the inquisitors from Fonseca over a decade earlier in 1633. The inquisitors asked Fonseca whether the conversos in France were spying for the enemies of the Spanish crown. His response was unequivocal: all Portuguese conversos outside of the Iberian Peninsula, without exception, sought “by any mean possible to damage and ruin the [Spanish] monarchy, which they 60 61 62

Flora Cassen, “Philip II of Spain and His Italian Jewish Spy,” Journal of Early Modern History, 21 (2017): 318–342. Beatriz Alonso Acero, Orán-Mazalquivir, 1589–1639: una sociedad española en la frontera de Berbería (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 222–248. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo no 3,070.

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perceive to be a pillar of the church.” As a consequence, it was hardly surprising that they “curried favour amongst the enemies of Spain” and acted as spies and conveyors of sensitive information, especially for the French. Fonseca assured the inquisitors that once the war began with France, the conversos in the Iberian Peninsula would provide any possible aid “by sea or land” to the French.63 The following year, 1634, Fonseca submitted a memorandum to the Habsburg crown with the straightforward title “Narrative showing the damage done to his majesty by the Jews of Holland.”64 Fonseca’s account of the Jewish participation in the Dutch attacks on Portuguese colonies is a particularly hostile one, not only does he present them as assisting the Dutch but casts them as the guiding and controlling minds behind Dutch policy. The Dutch are reduced to the role of mere pawns of the Jews, obeying the “orders” of the Jewish merchants of Amsterdam and Hamburg. Moreover, this Jewish conspiracy against the Catholic Iberian monarchy is not only waged from Amsterdam but by a nexus of secret Jewish agents operating within the Iberian colonies, as well as in Spain and Portugal themselves. He provided the names of many of these alleged spies, who were residents of Brazil, Lisbon, Seville and San Sebastian. Fonseca asserts that two conversos played the central role of ‘handlers’ in this purported network of spies: Of all these Jews, only two are in the secret with the Dutch. One is named Bento de Osorio, alias David Ossorio, the other Lope Ramirez or David Curiel. These give the orders and make the plans for plundering and destroying, thinking by this means to destroy Christianity. It is with this objective in view that they try to maintain so many spies in so many cities of Castile, Portugal, Biscay, Brazil and elsewhere.65 He also claims that the Jews of Amsterdam were organising and financing the Dutch attacks on Pernambuco in Brazil and preparing an expedition to conquer the strategically vital port of Havana in Cuba. Moreover, and logically according to Fonseca’s account, the Dutch West India Company was “governed entirely by Jews of Amsterdam, for all the rich ones give their money for the 63 64 65

Sebastián Cirac Estopañán, Registros de los documentos del Santo Oficio de Cuenca y Sigüenza. T. I, Registro general de los procesos de delitos y de los expedientes de limpieza (Cuenca: Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, 1965), 51. Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial Relating to Damages to Spanish Interests in America Done by Jews of Holland (1634),” American Jewish Historical Society, 17 (1909): 45–51. Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial,” 50.

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said company.” He even extravagantly claims that the Jews planned for the Dutch expedition to stop off at the Portuguese port of Buarcos on route to Brazil in order to land a force that would march inland, storm and plunder the city of Coimbra and free the converso prisoners held in the gaols of inquisitorial tribunal of Coimbra. At the final point of his narrative, and with a wonderful slip of the pen, Fonseca reveals his firm belief in the all-controlling actions of the Jews in his account of the Dutch conquest of a Portuguese fortress on the coast of Mauritania in 1633. By order of the said Dutch, I mean by order of the Jews of Holland, the said Dutch captured a castle of much importance (…), which is called the castle of Arguin. (…) The captain who was in the said castle now lives in Amsterdam and is named Diego de Tovar. I am told that he is a Catholic but I do not know [for sure], because when I left Holland he was still in Zealand to receive the third part of the money and land which was given to him for surrendering, all by order and contrivance of the said Jews of Amsterdam who are the cause of the injuries done to the Spanish monarchy.66 What are we to make of such an extraordinary document? That fact that Esteban Ares de Fonseca was himself a converso – his 1621 trial dossier in Lisbon describes him as three-quarters Jewish in descent – and that he had circulated in the converso/Jewish communities in Bordeaux and Amsterdam lent credence to his account of the plot for the inquisitors, who always sought information about the Sephardic conversos/Jews in northern Europe and preserved the document in their archives. Yet, as both a renegade and informer, Fonseca had good reasons to embellish, exaggerate or even invent much of the information he provided to the inquisitors despite his claim that “all this is the truth without exaggerating anything.” We can only speculate about his real motivations for writing the narrative. Was he seeking to settle scores with other members of the converso community? Was he hoping to convince the inquisitors of his sincerity as a Catholic, despite his previous apostasy in Amsterdam? Was he hoping for some financial reward in exchange for this information? Any of these scenarios is entirely possible. The only certainty is that, as Esteban Ares de Fonseca certainly knew, the inquisitors were undoubtedly receptive to such claims of a Jewish conspiracy to aid the Dutch against Spain and Portugal in which the Dutch were acting under ‘Jewish orders.’ 66

Cyrus Adler, “A Contemporary Memorial,” 50–1.

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Across the Atlantic Ocean, one of the most vociferous denouncers of the role played by Jews in Dutch-controlled Recife was the cleric Manuel Calado (1584–1654) in his 1648 O Valeroso Lucideno e o Triunfo da Liberdade. The Valeroso Lucideno is interesting because it offers evidence of the perception amongst the Portuguese settlers in Brazil that the Dutch Sephardic Jews and the Portuguese conversos were more than simple opportunists but rather were first the architects, and then the pillars, of the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco. Calado does not just express his own opinions but also reports claims made in letters sent to the Portuguese sovereign by informants and even rumours. He claims, for instance, that the arrival of the Dutch fleet off Recife in 1630 was greeted by the conversos with “great rejoicing, because they had agreed to give the Dutch West India Company a certain sum of money to pay for its costs in order to be freed from the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, which they had heard was going to establish a presence in Pernambuco.” Resorting to outraged hyperbole, Calado claims that the “prosperous and delightful” Recife had been turned into a “Sodom and Gomorrah” by the Dutch who allowed the conversos to return to the “Law of Moses” and that consequently many of them judaized and were openly circumcised.”67 After the Dutch occupation, Calado asserts that it was widely reported that all the conversos in Pernambuco, without distinction, were in reality Jews and that if some did not openly embrace Judaism and seek to be circumcised it was only because of their fear that the Portuguese might re-occupy the region. One of the principal villains of his work is Gaspar Dias Ferreira, an inhabitant of Pernambuco to whom the Dutch entrusted various responsibilities and, Calado is careful to specify, “a man partly descended from the Hebrew race.” He declares, somewhat contradictorily (given some of his other statements), that he believes it to be unlikely that conversos who refused to openly become Jews in Dutch-controlled Recife, where they had nothing the fear, should be considered as anything but “true Christians.” However, in spite of such scruples, Calado was more than willing to cast generalized aspersions about converso disloyalty.68 He highlights the treacherous role of the conversos whilst seemingly overlooking the fact that some prominent Old Christian Portuguese inhabitants of Pernambuco were just as content to accept Dutch rule. These men included individuals like João Fernandes Vieira, a close friend of Calado and, later, the leader of the Portuguese uprising against Dutch rule in Pernambuco in 1644. One may well suspect, therefore, that Calado’s anti-converso tirades are 67 68

Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e o Triunfo da Liberdade. Primera Parte (Lisbon: Paulo Craesbeeck, 1648), 9–11. Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno, 54.

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partly antisemitic but also partly inspired by a wish to scapegoat the conversos and play down any suspicion relating to the dubious loyalty of the Old Christians of Pernambuco between 1630 and 1644. Calado certainly presents the Jews and conversos of Recife as active collaborators with the Dutch. Commenting on the Pernambucan rising led by his close friend João Fernandes Vieira against the Dutch in 1644, Calado claims that Vieira dispatched a letter to the Portuguese crown. This letter presented the uprising against the Dutch occupation as the result not only of the intolerable persecutions suffered by Catholics under Calvinist rule but also because of the depredations of the Jews, who “filled Recife,” as well as the conversos inhabitants of Pernambuco “who were Jews.” Later, he claims, the Dutch in Recife were kept informed of Portuguese plans by “conversos, traitors who dwell amongst us with the disguise of friends.” Furthermore, citing information provided by a Portuguese beggar expelled from Recife, he maintains that it was the Jews who “incited” the Dutch to keep fighting when some of them lost heart and suggested that their struggle in Brazil was hopeless. Finally, when the Dutch attempted to circulate forged letters purporting to come from the Portuguese crown and bearing news that would demoralise the Portuguese, Calado claims that they did this “having been instructed to do so by the Jews.”69 6

The Dutch, the Conversos and the “Grand Conspiracy” against the Spanish Empire (1610–1650)

The fear of a Jewish conspiracy against the Spanish Empire played itself out in three separate but connected waves of anti-converso persecution with mass arrests, trials and spectacular autos de fe organized and executed by the three tribunals of the Inquisition established in Hispanic America. In Lima (Peru) it began in 1635, followed by Cartagena de Indias in 1636 and finally Mexico in 1642. From 1635 until 1649, the three tribunals prosecuted a grand total of 360 conversos, of whom 25 were condemned to be burned to death as relapsed or unrepentant heretics and 71 were condemned to death in effigy (either because they had escaped before they could be arrested or had already died). After this short but ferocious campaign, the number of arrests and condemnations of conversos in the Americas declined markedly.70

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Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno, 170–1, 302 and 352–3. See the breakdown of figures in Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española (siglos XVI–XVII) (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, 2008), 203–5.

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The inhabitants and Catholic authorities in the colonies of Spanish America – whose vast territories were divided between the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru were perfectly aware of the rise of Dutch sea power and the threat that this posed to the Spanish Empire. Again, such fears were not baseless. The damaging raids of Francis Drake and other English pirates and corsairs in the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s demonstrated the vulnerability of Spanish ports and shipping in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast. As early as 1600 a Dutch fleet under the command of Olivier van Noort raided shipping and settlements along the pacific coasts of Chile and Peru. Even after the start of the twelve years truce between the Dutch and Habsburgs in 1609, another Dutch corsair expedition under Joris van Spielbergen did the same in 1615, ranging along the coast of Peru and as far north as New Spain.71 Official attempts to limit or prevent the emigration of conversos to the New World began with a royal edit promulgated in 1508 (and re-issued numerous times afterwards), which prohibited the emigration of “the descendants of Jews and Muslims burned or reconciled [by the Inquisition], up to the fourth generation.” The policing of emigration was entrusted to the royal agency in Seville that oversaw the implementation of the monopoly on trade between Europe and the Spanish Empire (the Casa de Contratación). Accordingly, it required would-be emigrants to establish their “caste” before granting them permits. Such restrictions were nonetheless undermined by exemptions purchased by conversos from an indebted crown or illegal migration across the porous political borders separating the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Numerous conversos made their way to Peru via the Atlantic port of Buenos Aires as well as Portuguese Brazil. In the latter case, many were later able to legalize their presence in exchange for a fine. The demand for African slaves, which could only be sourced from the Portuguese outposts in western Africa, became so pressing that their presence became somewhat of an economic necessity. Although, the conversos in the Americas came to be collectively stereotyped as wealthy, in reality many of them were little more than perambulating merchants and, whilst some made a comfortable living from intercontinental trade, only a handful became as rich or influential as the slave importer ­Manuel Bautista Pérez in Peru, who came to be known in the city as the “gran capitán” of the Portuguese converso community.72 71 72

Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 62–95. Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española, 42–4; On the slave trade, Portuguese conversos and Manuel Bautista Pérez see Susie Minchin, “‘May you always care for those of your patria’. Manuel Bautista Pérez and the Portuguese new Christian community of viceregal Peru: slave trade, commerce and the Inquisition, 1617–39,”

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Inevitably, the failure to prevent converso migration to the Americas fed fears about the consequences of their presence there and these anxieties were expressed within government circles by those responsible for the administration of the Empire. As early as September 1608, in a response to a request for information about the migration of conversos outside the Iberian Peninsula, the royal official Bernardino González de Avellaneda regretted that “so many of them” moved to the Americas and, especially, to the mining town of Potosí and the region of Cartagena de Indias. He also lamented the presence of these conversos in the Americas since “I have never been of the opinion that the [Western] Indies were filled with Spaniards but rather that they are packed with Portuguese [conversos], a people who have acted as the scouts for all the invasions carried out by the enemies [of the Spanish crown].73 In 1610, the Casa de Contratación once more warned the crown about the Portuguese converso presence in the strategic port of Cartagena de Indias. In a doom-laden tone, its letter alludes to the dire prospect of a Dutch attack on the Spanish colonies that would not be limited to raiding but extend to actual territorial conquest. Such a Dutch onslaught would, the members of the Casa ­insist, inevitably benefit from converso assistance. The letter magnifies the danger by exaggerating the number of Portuguese converso merchants residing in the port and by raising the fear of collusion between rebellious African slaves and crypto-Jews: In Cartagena de Indias, and many other places [in the Americas], there is such a great multitude of Portuguese. It is to be feared that great damage will result since they are so rich and powerful and, through their swindles, they have made themselves lords of the will of governors and other [royal] ministers. In Cartagena, in particular, they have become alcaldes ordinarios, alguaciles mayores and menores as well as depositarios. (…) The Portuguese are so numerous that they outnumber the Castilians and the greater part of them is made up of conversos and impious people who hate Castile. Since they own a large number of slaves, they will seize the first opportunity to open the gates to the enemy and hand over the territory to them. Even without any outside assistance, they will outnumber the Castilians if they join forces with their slaves.74

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PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1998 and Linda Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale. The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007). A.G.S., Estado, legajo 210, exp. 1. Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española, 157.

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It is noteworthy that such anxieties, expressed in private correspondence ­generated by a governmental body, reflect the extent to which fears relating to the conversos were genuinely shared within government circles and not just held by the populace. To many Spaniards, the prospect of a major seaborne invasion of their overseas colonies by the heretical Dutch must have seemed imminent following the end of the truce and the formation of the Dutch West India Company in 1621. The Dutch established their West India Company with the explicit aim of financing expeditions to challenge the Iberian monopoly on intercontinental maritime commerce and, like the Dutch East India Company, it became the main military arm of the Dutch Republic’s attempts to conquer and colonize overseas territories, especially in the Iberian colonies. Its aims were not secret but publicly proclaimed in its founding charter, dated on 3 June 1621.75 In 1623, a large fleet under the command of Admiral Jacques l’Hermite sailed from Holland with instructions not only to attack Spanish shipping and ports along the coast of Peru but also to establish a Dutch settlement there and, along with the support of the Araucanian Amerindians of Chile, challenge Spanish sovereignty in the region. The fleet rounded Cape Horn and blockaded Callao, the port of Lima. Only the death of its admiral from disease thwarted any Dutch aims of conquests in Peru although the expedition went on to attack the Mexican port of Acapulco. The military developments in Brazil during the 1620s and 1630s, and the claims of converso treachery at Bahia in 1624, can only have contributed further to a growing sense of panic about the converso presence in Central and South America. The failure of the expedition of Jacques l’Hermite led the Dutch to re-focus their efforts to the Atlantic and the conquest of the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Africa during the 1630s. Even so, the Dutch themselves understood the conquest of Brazil as the first step of a grand strategic offensive that planned to attack Spanish Peru, conquer the silver mines in Potosí and thus deprive the Habsburg monarchy of this vital source of revenue. A small Dutch expedition under Hendrik Brouwer made landfall and built a fort in Chile in 1643 but achieved little before it sailed onwards across the Pacific. For Spaniards the threat of invasion remained real and Dutch corsairs – to whom the Spaniards referred using the slang-term pechelingues – continued to be a source of concern for the nervous authorities and inhabitants of Peru and 75

Ordonnantien ende articvlen, beraemt by de Hooghe Mogende Heeren Staten Generael, der Geunieerde Provintien, op het toe-rusten ende toe-stellen, van eene VVest-Indische Compagnie (The Hague: n.n., 1621).

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Mexico. False reports of Dutch fleets rounding Cape Horn led to full-scale mobilizations of the Spanish colonial fleets and forces in 1632 and 1649. Even the Caribbean was no longer safe during this period. In September 1628, the Dutch fleet under admirals Piet Hein and Witte de With won a resounding victory over the Spanish treasure fleet off Matanzas in Cuba, capturing a large part of that year’s consignment of silver being shipped to Spain. Their conquest of the island of Curaçao in 1634 gave them a secure base from which to raid Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and potentially launch attacks on the Mexican coast, Panama or Cartagena de Indias. Whilst the Dutch were rightly seen as the principal Protestant threat in the New World, the Spaniards were fully aware that the English also harboured ambitions in the Caribbean. Their attempts to establish a Puritan colony on Providence Island in 1631 continued for a decade until its destruction by the Spaniards in 1641.76 If the Spanish authorities in Spain and the New World had legitimate grounds to fear Dutch attacks, their fears were exacerbated by the commercial ties linking the conversos of the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula to Holland. The commercial connections of the conversos (and, subsequently, the development of the Jewish community in Dutch controlled Brazil between 1630 and 1654) fuelled the conspiracist belief that judaizing conversos settled in the south and central American colonies were an integral part of the Dutch scheme to attack and seize Spanish territories. The fear of a Jewish ‘fifth column’ working to undermine Spanish rule and aid the Dutch heretics is expressed in numerous documents preserved in the inquisitorial archives. Often these documents provide stark evidence of the inability of the Spanish authorities to prevent converso mobility and the anxiety that this caused them. In 1619, for instance, the highest secular magistrate (procurador general) in the province of La Plata (located in modern-day Argentina) petitioned the crown in favour of the establishment of an inquisitorial tribunal based in Buenos Aires, which would deal with the flow of conversos who were entering Spanish America via La Plata. Buenos Aires and La Plata fell within the jurisdiction of the distant inquisitorial tribunal of Lima in Peru, which had commissaries in the region, but the official clearly felt that the great geographical distances were hindering the effectiveness of inquisitorial action in his region. His principal argument was that only the Inquisition possessed a network of tribunals covering the empire and was equipped “with an administration sufficiently widespread to gather regular intelligence on all the pieces and intrigues [of the Portuguese converso merchant communities]. It disposes of the means of intercepting them in their comings and goings.” His plea was 76

Peter Gerhard, Pirates of New Spain, 1575–1742 (New York: Dover Maritime, 2003), 101–134.

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not successful as Buenos Aires was too small to make the establishment of a new inquisitorial tribunal economically viable.77 Even the inquisitors bemoaned the seemingly unstoppable migration of conversos throughout the empire. Resorting to the classic antisemitic metaphor, they expressed their hopes of finding “a cure for this plague which, so dispersed and spread out, has been thriving in many parts [of the viceroyalty of Peru].”78 When the inquisitorial tribunals of Mexico, Lima and Cartagena de India conducted a large number of trials of conversos in the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s, they inevitably produced evidence apparently confirming the worst fears of the inquisitors. Leading questions, the threat of torture, actual torture and long periods of imprisonment were all used to produce confessions of judaizing, whether real or not, that implicated conversos residing in the many towns of the Americas (and even Spain), doubtless matching the expectations of the inquisitors concerning the alleged conspiracy. In a letter sent to Spain in October 1635, the inquisitors of Cartagena expressed their confidence in the impending discovery of a converso conspiracy and how the confiscated property would help finance their tribunal: We promise to discover a greater conspiracy of Jews and of greater importance than that of the Inquisition of Peru because all those who are prisoners there have relations with those of this city and it is certain that they owe them over a half million [pesos]. We presume that in this city there is a synagogue of Jews and by the testimony of Diego López, a mulatto imprisoned as a witch (…) we are sure of this presumption. (…) And thus God has been served to demonstrate His miracles in the Inquisition of Peru and that of Mexico where it is said that a great conspiracy of Jews has been discovered. We promise the same and we ask of your Highness this favour [of authorising the confiscation of arrested conversos’ property] with which this Inquisition will leave behind its [present financial] misery…79 Their letter offers intriguing evidence of how rivalries between the three inquisitorial tribunals established in the Americas helped to spread the idea of a converso plot against the Spanish colonies. It is the date of the letter, however, 77 78 79

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea. Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1494–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159– 160. Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions. Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 144. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies: The Portuguese threat to the Spanish empire, 1640–50,” Colonial Latin American Review, 2 (2008): 175.

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which makes its content particularly interesting as it was written before the main wave of arrests and trials had even begun in earnest. Clearly, the inquisitors were already convinced of the existence of the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ prior to the start of their own anti-converso campaign. Once the inquisitors began to wring confessions out of suspects in Lima, Mexico and Cartagena, their “presumption” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The trials conducted in this period by the Inquisition in Cartagena de Indias, for instance, yielded alarming ‘evidence’ not just of judaizing but of an alleged Jewish-Dutch alliance in which the subversive presence of the conversos in the Americas was to be a crucial element. In his testimony, the imprisoned Duarte López Mesa, a Portuguese converso, told his interrogators that during a brief period of captivity, after the ship he was travelling on was taken by a Dutch privateer, he had met a Portuguese sailor employed by the Dutch. The man, supposedly also a converso, had confided the following information to him: He aspired to inflict as much harm [upon the empire and church] as his father had done in Lisbon and he hoped that the lords of the Dutch [West Indies] Company would soon be the rulers of the Indies and that they would leave the King of Spain as poor as a good labourer. In the first five years of its existence, the aforesaid Dutch [West Indies] Company had won its investors five and a half million [ducados], not counting the large amount of money that the [Dutch] soldiers had won through their pillaging. Accordingly, [the Dutch] have the money to pay for an army of forty thousand men to invade the Indies.80 It is of course difficult to know what to make of such a confession and the vagueness of the source, an unnamed Portuguese sailor, is highly suspicious. As was often the case in inquisitorial trials, the real beliefs and motivations of the defendant remain unclear. Was Duarte López Mesa reporting an actual conversation or was he, like so many prisoners, motivated by fear of torture and death to seek to cultivate the goodwill of the inquisitors, and therefore obtain a lighter sentence, by offering them a confession including information (whether real or not) that he undoubtedly knew they wanted to hear? What is beyond question is that the inquisitors of Cartagena became obsessed with the notion that the judaizing conversos of the port and its surrounding region were 80

Anna María Splendiani, José Enriquez Sánchez Bohórquez and Emma Cecilia Luque de Salazar, Cincuenta Años de Inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias, 1610–1660 (Santa fé de Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1997), vol. 1, 166.

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part of a secret Jewish underground movement. Seizing upon the evidence of commercial ties between the conversos in Cartagena and the Jews in Holland, they accused the former not only of clandestinely worshipping in a network of secret synagogues but also of forming a “Dutch confraternity” (Cofradía de Holanda). This confraternity was supposedly responsible for collecting a regular contribution of 300 pesos amongst its converso members, which they treacherously funnelled back to Holland to support the Dutch war effort against Spain. Once more, it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in evidence obtained under duress from terrified prisoners. Whilst it was obviously the case that the converso merchants of Cartagena maintained commercial ties with the Jews Amsterdam, the accusations of a special fund to aid Dutch attacks appear outlandish. Were public rumours misrepresenting the sums regularly sent to Europe to pay for European merchandise as treasonable contributions to the Dutch treasury?81 In some cases, the conspiracist claims made about the conversos verge on the absurd. Thus, for instance, the witness testimony against one of the conversos arrested by the Inquisition and executed in 1639 contains claims that the conversos in Peru had elaborated a “secret language” enabling them to communicate and even judaize in the presence of Old Christians: … they could communicate with each other [in the Law of Moses] by means of this language and they would speak it, even though they were [standing] in front of Old Christians, without the [Old Christians] being able to understand that they were speaking about the Law of Moses. (…) It was a secret language, spoken right in front of Old Christians who just heard normal words, not that out-of-the-ordinary language, [and with] duplicity and scheming, so that the prisoner and the rest of his ancestors and kinship could converse conspiracies and heresies.82 The accusation of treason in favour of the Dutch was publicly broadcast in the sentences read out during the auto de fe held in Lima on 23 January 1639. It features in the account of the auto written by the presbyter Fernando de Montesinos (?–1652) and printed, certainly at the behest of the Inquisition, in order to disseminate news of it not only throughout Peru but also further afield. At the beginning of his account of the auto, Montesinos uses florid language and 81 82

Anna María Splendiani Cincuenta años de inquisición en el tribunal de Cartagena de las Indias, vol. 1, 157–171. I.M. Silverblatt, “New World Christians and New World Fears in Colonial Peru,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (2000): 524–546 (see page 535).

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resorts to Greek mythology to present the almost miraculous circumstances in which the tribunal of the Inquisition “that Divine Argus of the [Christian] faith” had uncovered the “great conspiracy” (gran complicidad) of the conversos of Peru and the correspondingly “heroic feat” that the inquisitors achieved in defeating it. Concerning one of the condemned, Montesinos points out that “witnesses claimed that he boasted that he and a brother of his had invested eight thousand ducats in the fleet that the Dutch West India Company sent to Brazil [to wage war] against his majesty [King Philip IV of Spain].”83 The viceroyalty of New Spain, centred upon modern-day Mexico, was the last region of the empire in the Americas affected by the fear of a ‘great conspiracy’ against Spanish rule orchestrated by conversos of Portuguese origin. The wave of arrests took place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Iberian Union in December 1640. The Portuguese rebellion against Habsburg rule, which also involved the secession of the Portuguese settlements in Brazil as well as the islands of Madeira and the Azores, now created even more grounds for suspicion against conversos of Portuguese origin who had been residing in the American viceroyalties for decades. The surprise and shock caused by the revolt was immense. The viceroy of Peru refused to believe the initial reports of the Portuguese uprising when they arrived in Lima and the Bishop of Puebla in Mexico claimed in a letter to the King that the Spanish Empire “shook and trembled” as a consequence of the uprising.84 The Spanish crown immediate prohibited any more Portuguese (conversos or otherwise) from entering its lands but, officially at least, the Portuguese conversos who had already settled in Spain and the Spanish colonies continued to be considered loyal subjects. Nevertheless, they were made to bear the brunt of exacerbated popular antisemitism and xenophobia as well as official suspicion. In many respects, the fear of the converso presence in the Americas after 1640, the accusations levelled against the conversos and the measures such fears provoked mirror the fears caused by the Morisco presence in Spain itself, prior to the expulsion of 1609. Like the Moriscos, the Portuguese conversos in the Hispanic Americas were ordered to hand over their weapons and move

83 84

Fernando de Montesinos, Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima a 23. de enero de 1639. Al tribunal del Santo oficio de la Inquisicion, de los reynos del Peru, Chile, Paraguay, y Tucuman (Lima: Simon Chirinos, 1639). Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Castastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 463, n. 59; Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, “Crisis, reforma y rebelión en el mundo hispánico: el “caso Escalona,” 1640–1642,” in La crisis de la monarquía de Felipe IV, ed. by Geoffrey Parker (Madrid: Crítica, 2006), 255–286 (see page 259).

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inland and away from vulnerable coastal areas. In both cases, the royal edicts failed to calm fears amongst the local authorities and population.85 In Mexico, the already delicate position of Portuguese conversos after 1640 was further jeopardized by rapidly escalating anxieties at the court in Madrid that the Spanish Empire was at risk of crumbling. News of the ten-year truce concluded between the Dutch and Portuguese at The Hague in June 1641, which included pledges for joint military action against Spain and her possessions, ratcheted the fears of the colonial authorities, who now faced the combined naval forces of the Spanish Empire’s two major naval competitors. Beyond the Portuguese uprising, the Catalans had also risen in open revolt in eastern Spain in June 1640 and the powerful Duke of Medina Sidonia was arrested after a foiled plot in 1641 to make himself the ruler of an independent Andalucia in southern Spain86. Moreover, as coincidence would have it, the new viceroy of Mexico, the Duke of Escalona, appointed by Philip IV in 1640 before the Portuguese rebellion, was actually a first cousin of the ‘rebel’ King João IV of Portugal. Soon after their arrival in Mexico, the Duke of Escalona and the Bishop of Puebla (and later Archbishop of Mexico) Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (newly appointed by the crown to investigate the tenure of Escalona’s predecessor) were locked in a bitter power-struggle. Whilst the viceroy defended the loyalty of the leading Portuguese conversos in Mexico, the belligerent bishop accused him of weakness and of failing to do his duty in the aftermath of the Portuguese rebellion. Palafox highlighted the threat purportedly presented to Spanish rule in Mexico by the Portuguese revolt and the converso presence, to gain the support of both the Spanish-creole elite, who bore no love for the conversos, and the crown. His strategy was rewarded when the viceroy was placed under arrest by the crown and compelled to return to Spain in June 1642.87 Alarmist reports and false rumours linking Dutch expeditions and the Portuguese conversos abounded in Spain and the Americas after 1640. Sometimes, these were based on distorted impressions of real events. This was certainly the case with an incident involving the Count of Castelo Melhor, the commander of a Portuguese fleet blown off course on its way to attack Dutch strongholds in Brazil. Happening to be in Cartagena de Indias when news of the uprising in Lisbon arrived, the Portuguese nobleman attempted to take ad85 86 87

See footnote one. Luis Salas Almela, The Conspiracy of the Ninth Duke of Medina Sidonia (1641): An Aristocrat in the Crisis of the Spanish Empire (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2013). On the conflict between Palafox and Escalona see Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico. The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox 1600– 1659 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially 124–141.

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vantage of the element of surprise. With the forces at his disposal in the fleet, he attempted to seize the town and capture gold arriving from Peru in a daring coup de main on 29 August 1641. This daring scheme was nevertheless unsuccessful and Castelo Melhor was captured. Perhaps inevitably, the Portuguese conversos residing there were accused of participating even though there is no evidence that they were actually involved.88 When, for instance, Palafox warned the viceroy in November 1641 of the peril in which the Spanish Empire found itself following the secession of Portugal and Brazil, he claimed in the same sentence that the Portuguese had “slaughtered” 3,000 Spaniards in Brazil and had “twice attempted to revolt in the neighbourhood of Getsemani in Cartagena.” Whilst Palafox appears to be referring to the Count of Castelo Melhor’s failed attack earlier in August, he presents it more as a revolt by Portuguese converso residents. Whether this was a deliberate misrepresentation by Palafox or he was merely repeating distorted reports of the events in Cartagena that were received in Mexico is unclear but a narrative had clearly emerged accusing the conversos in Cartagena of siding with Castelo Melhor. The following year, the inquisitors of Mexico similarly refer to the “attempt” of the Portuguese in Cartagena to rebel with a vagueness of details that seemingly turns the Count of Castelo Melhor’s raid into a revolt by the Portuguese residents of the town.89 The same climate of heightened fear and xenophobia also flourished elsewhere in Central America. An accidental fire that destroyed the cathedral and large parts of the city of Panama, in February 1644, rapidly led to suspicions of arson that fell upon the small Portuguese converso community, who were rounded up and expelled the following year.90 The situation was identical further south in Peru. When a hole was discovered in the walls of a warehouse where gunpowder was stored, the inquisitors of Lima immediately endorsed the antisemitic conspiracy theory and used it to justify their anti-converso campaign in Peru. In a 1641 letter to his superiors in Madrid, one of the inquisitors ascribes the theft to a scheme by Portuguese conversos, who “had been in communication with the Dutch and were waiting for them” and he states that their intention had been to “blow up the city [of 88

89 90

For a contemporary Portuguese account see the propaganda pamphlet Jorge de Carvalho, Relação verdadeira dos successos do conde de Castel Melhor, preso na cidade de Cartagena de Indias, & hoje liure, por particular merce do ceo, & fauor del Rey dom Ioão IV nosso senhor (Lisbon: Domingos Lopes Rosa, 1642); Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies,” 177–8. Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México 1571–1700 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000), 545 and 553. Fernando Serrano Mangas, La encrucijada portuguesa: esplendor y quiebra de la unión ibérica en las Indias de Castilla, 1600–1668 (Badajoz: Diputación Provincial, 1994), 143; ­Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies,” 178–180.

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Lima].” The possibility that ordinary thieves, motivated by nothing more than the prospect of criminal gain, might have sought to steal such a valuable commodity is not even mentioned by the inquisitors.91 The following year, the viceroy of Peru urgently wrote to Spain to convey consternating rumours that a joint Dutch-Portuguese naval force was gathering in Brazil with the intention of attacking the port of Buenos Aires.92 The official correspondence also conveys unambiguous information about the conspiracist atmosphere in the Spanish Empire. In a letter sent to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain in May 1642, the inquisitors in Mexico contrast the grief (desconsuelo) with which the Spaniards greeted the news of the Portuguese uprising with the reaction of the local Portuguese, who were allegedly “happy and certainly not sad” (placenteros y nada tristes). Claiming to be reporting “public rumours in this town,” the inquisitors assert that the Por­tuguese conversos were gathering weapons and gunpowder and “openly ­subscribed to the Portuguese rebellion.” They feared an open confrontation between Spaniards and Portuguese but were nonetheless careful to note that they themselves did not “know the truth behind such rumours since it is not our duty to verify them.” The inquisitors were explicit about the role played by Bishop Palafox in stoking the fear of a Jewish-Portuguese conspiracy in Mexico. In private meetings with the bishop, the prelate had informed the ­inquisitors that the Portuguese were “far more numerous than they seem” and had warned the inquisitors that, as representatives of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, they would surely be “amongst the first to find themselves in danger” from vengeful conversos.93 Demographic anxieties appear to have played a major role in stoking the fears about the Portuguese conversos and exaggerating their threat. Research by modern historians, often using censuses carried out by the local authorities, indicate that whilst Portuguese (including non-converso) families indubitably represented the largest group of non-Spanish Europeans present in Spain’s American colonies, their numbers never exceeded ten or fifteen percent of the total European population (Spaniards included). In Cartagena, for instance, a census undertaken in 1630 of the male citizens (vecinos) indicates that there were 154 Portuguese residents out of a total of approximately 1,500. The situation is similar in other American mining and commercial cities and ports such as Buenos Aires, Tucumán, Potosí and Zacatecas. The high estimate of twentyfive percent in Buenos Aires put forward by Lafuente Machain in 1931 has since 91 92 93

Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 149. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies,” 173. Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México 1571–1700, 552–7.

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been revised downwards and appears to have been due to a confusion regarding the documentary information. In Mexico City itself, their number was almost certainly below ten percent and, as Jonathan Israel has suggested, probably closer to six or seven percent. When, in accordance with the edict promulgated in November 1641 ordering a census of the male Portuguese residents in the Spanish Americas, the male adult Portuguese citizens of Mexico City were registered by royal officials, a total of 419 individuals (out of a total European population of circa 8,000 vecinos) was counted and a mere sixteen firearms were surrendered. If nothing else, and even allowing for a degree of evasion, these figures highlight the limited nature of the threat posed by the Portuguese.94 In the remainder of the viceroyalty of New Spain, the total number of Portuguese males counted in the royal census was around 1,600.95 Further south, in Peru, Viceroy Mancera himself estimated in a letter written in 1642 that their numbers in Lima and its port Callao amounted to “around five hundred.” Although information about the population of Lima in the first half of the seventeenth century is sparse, what does exist seems to indicate that it was between 27,000 and 28,000 inhabitants in the 1630s and the estimate of 500 Portuguese in 1642 would thus only have amounted to circa 2% of the total.96 Moreover, the extensive archival research of Maria da Graça Mateus Ventura has identified 1,400 Portuguese males (not all of them conversos) in the entirety of the viceroyalty of Peru during the whole of the period extending between 1580 and 1640.97 Finally, in Panama, the roundup of Portuguese men after the great fire of 1644 revealed that, in spite of the fear of a Portuguese plot, they numbered only seventeen.98 In contrast to the documentary evidence, the number of Portuguese conversos residing in Spain and the empire was vastly and consistently exaggerated, both before and after 1640, in correspondence exchanged between municipal councils, government officials and agencies, and inquisitors. Through the use of hyperbole, the number of Portuguese residents in both American viceroyalties is presented as menacingly high even though actual numbers are rarely cited. Thus, for instance, the officials of the Casa de Contratación outlandishly 94 95 96 97 98

See Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española (siglos XVI– XVII), 246–250 and Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepots: Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 317–8. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, “Crisis, reforma y rebelión en el mundo hispánico: el “caso Escalona,” 1640–1642,” 274, n. 43. Gleydi Sullón Barreto, Extranjeros integrados: portugueses en la Lima virreinal, 1570–1680 (Madrid: CSIC, 2016), 57–8. Ventura, Maria da Graça Mateus. Portugueses no Peru ao Tempo da União Ibérica: mobilidade, cumplicidades e vivencias (Lisbon: Casa da Moeda, 2005). Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies,” 179 and 182.

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claimed, in 1610, that the Portuguese outnumbered the Spanish residents of Cartagena and, in 1636, the inquisitors of Lima relayed to the crown complaints that their city was “overwhelmed” by the “very large” number of Portuguese.99 After the Portuguese uprising, in official correspondence, Viceroy/Bishop Palafox was also exaggerating when he claimed that the Portuguese population of the strategically vital Mexican port of Veracruz actually outnumbered that of the Spaniards. Likewise, the claim that there were circa six thousand Portuguese residents in Lima appears to be derived from defamatory accusations made against Viceroy Mancera after the end of his term in office. The figure bears no relation to reality as the letter of Viceroy Mancera that is cited above proves, but it was accepted uncritically by the nineteenth-century Peruvian scholar Ricardo Palma in his influential work on the Peruvian Inquisition.100 Inflated claims about the Portuguese were made by officials hoping to stir the authorities in Madrid into action and obtain their endorsement of measures targeting the conversos. They doubtless also reflected the prevalent climate of fear gripping Spanish officialdom in the New World. In was not just in the Americas that fantasies about the demographics of the conversos struck a chord. At the height of a renewed wave of anti-Portuguese and anti-converso hysteria in Spain in the 1670s, during the minority of King Carlos II, the Spanish Council of State sent an alarmist report to the regency council warning its members that no less than sixty thousand Portuguese conversos would soon flood into Spain.101 Even though fears about the high numbers of Portuguese conversos are frequently expressed, the reality of their dispersed and limited numbers may well have been instrumental in the rise of another fantasy: that of an alliance between the Portuguese conversos merchants and the black slaves that many of them had imported from Portuguese-controlled Africa for resale in the Spanish Empire prior to 1640. The number of black slaves imported into the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru prior to 1640 can reliably be estimated in the tens of thousands and in Lima a local census reveals that they represented half of the population as early as 1614.102 Anxieties about their large numbers were supplemented by the fear that their often poor grasp of Catholicism and the persistence of African animistic beliefs would make them vulnerable to de99 100 101 102

Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 147. Ricardo Palma, Anales de la inquisición de Lima: estudio histórico (Lima: Aurelio Alfaro, 1863), 13. Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century 1665–1700 (London: Longman, 1980), 306. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History, ed. Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, Sandra Lauderdale Graham (Wilmington, Del.: S R Books, 2004), 185–6.

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monic forces, whether in the form of witchcraft or the crypto-Judaism of conversos. The Casa de Contratación in Seville was already expressing concerns about such a possibility as early as 1610. During the subsequent decades, the anxiety of an alliance between judaizing conversos and black Africans only grew. In a memorandum written in Spain around 1621, Pedro Hurtado de Alcocer warns that the conversos were serving as spies for hostile European powers in Mexico and Peru and also suggests that they were behind “the first outbreaks of rebellion, uprisings of the great number of blacks and poor who are always friendly to novelties.”103 After the Portuguese rebellion of 1640, the fear of a PortugueseAfrican revolt was unleashed in both Peru and Mexico. It was a conspiracist fantasy that even the crown itself was prepared to endorse in a letter written in February 1642, in which Philip IV advises the viceroy of Mexico to be extremely wary of the security risk presented by the presence of Portuguese conversos in the port of Veracruz: You should exercise great care regarding the Portuguese, who are numerous and the most well-armed people in the ports, richer than the natives [i.e. Spaniards/Old Christians] and more closely-knit [as a community] than the rest (…). Take care that the Portuguese rebels do not introduce via Veracruz any [secret] envoys or correspondence since [the Portuguese conversos] have a great number of slaves, who comprise a large portion of the population, and they are very close to the blacks, with whom they enjoy a great familiarity and [the blacks] in turn respect [the Portuguese conversos] and look upon them as their fathers because [the Portuguese conversos] have taken care of them and brought them over from Angola.104 In Peru, Viceroy Mancera expressed the same fears and worried that the 500 Portuguese residents in Lima could potentially be dangerous if they rallied the “other colours and breeds” in revolt. He opined that the Portuguese entertained a special relationship with the Africans, who “loved” them in return. As Stuart Schwartz has noted, the notion that most black African slaves should have been the natural allies of men who were largely responsible for their traumatic transfer from Africa to the Americas, and their miserable status and exploitation, verges on the paranoid.105 Yet it would be wrong to understand it as an 103 104 105

Cited by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, 165. Solange Alberro, Inquisición y Sociedad en México 1571–1700, 551–2. Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies,” 181–3.

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illogical reflex. It was instead a fantasy that accorded perfectly with the prevalent antisemitic conspiracy theory that presented the conversos as willing allies of any force that could threaten the stability of the Spanish monarchy and Catholic Church. The fear of a converso-African alliance was an entirely logical notion for Spaniards residing in the New World who were very much products of the Old World and whose perception of the conversos was always distorted by the antisemitic prism of the perfidia judaica. 7

Conclusion

The fear of active collusion between Protestants and conversos or between African slaves and conversos to destroy the Iberian monarchies was a myth constructed from incontrovertible facts. These were the existence of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, the economic role played by conversos dispersed throughout the Iberian empires in a commercial nexus that extended from Mexico, Brazil and Peru to Amsterdam via the Iberian Peninsula and, finally, the use that the Dutch made of converso informers to gather information about the Spanish and Portuguese empires. From these real facts, however, sprung a conspiracy theory of epic proportions that involved a secretive organised plot involving most, if not all, conversos settled in the New World. The widespread dissemination of a conspiracy theory involving secret collusion between a religious minority residing within a kingdom and its outside enemies was hardly restricted to early modern Spain or Portugal. In the era of confessionalization, analogous situations existed elsewhere in Europe. The most conspicuous parallel is, without doubt, the terror of a secret ‘Popish plot’ to destroy the Anglican Church and government in early modern England. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, English Catholics found themselves in a situation that was entirely analogous to that of the conversos. Their political loyalty was constantly questioned and they were accused of (at best) sympathy or (at worst) active collaboration with the Catholic enemies of England’s Protestant rulers, especially Spain and France. The suspicions affected not only those who openly proclaimed themselves as Catholics and refused to attend Anglican services (the “recusants”) but also came to rest upon individuals who, like the Iberian conversos, were accused of remaining inwardly Catholic whilst outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church (and who were abusively named “church Papists” by their critics). Drawing its credibility from genuine concerns about domestic security in the British Isles during the Anglo-Spanish war of 1585–1604 and the on-going conflict in Ireland as well as the limited number of actual plots (most notably the Gunpowder plot of 1605), the

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fear of a ‘Popish plot’ seeking to prompt and/or aid a foreign invasion in order to overthrow the English monarchy and ultimately destroy the Church of England rapidly escalated in the seventeenth century. Just like the conversos in the Iberian World, the danger that the English Catholics represented in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England was amplified in Protestant propaganda by exaggerated claims about their numbers as well as unsubstantiated rumours that received official endorsement. In the case of English Catholics these included claims such as that attributing the 1666 Great fire of London to a subversive “Popish frenzy” or the fictitious ‘Popish plot’ (which was to include a French invasion) that Titus Oates claimed (with initial parliament support) to have exposed in 1678.106 Regarding the conversos, officially sanctioned tales took the form of their supposedly active military collaboration with the Dutch, to which Spanish authors attributed the fall of Bahia in 1624–5 (rather than the largely passive acquiescence that appears to have characterised the reaction of the Bahian conversos) or fantasies about a ‘great plot,’ supposedly orchestrated by Portuguese converso communities established in Peru, Cartagena de Indias and Mexico to gather the support of disgruntled slaves and deliver those territories into the hands of foreign enemies. The conspiracy theories about treacherous Iberian conversos and English Catholics differ, however, in some important respects. Firstly, the isolation and perceived military vulnerability of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in the Americas bred anxieties that created conditions that were favourable for the dissemination of the notion of a secret ‘Jewish plot’ to betray the Iberian empires. Secondly, whilst the notion of converso treachery was anchored in a centuries-old tradition of Perfidia Judaica that cast Jews as innately disloyal, the anti-converso conspiracy theory also featured a specifically Iberian element which served as the historical precedent that gave it credibility in the minds of many (though by no means all) early modern Iberians: the treachery attributed to Jews of Toledo during the eight-century Muslim conquest of Spain. 106

On anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and the fear of the ‘Popish’ conspiracy in early modern England see Carol Z. Wiener, “The Beleaguered Isle. A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism,” Past & Present, 51 (1971): 27–62; Robin Clifton, “The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” Past and Present, 52 (1971): 23–55 as well as the more recent study of Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). On “Church papists” see Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993).

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Chapter 6

“Sponges That Suck Up the Wealth of Spain”: the Jewish Plot, Economic Parasitism and the Fear of Economic Decline They are sponges that the Turk and all the [Protestant] heretics use to suck up the wealth of Spain in order to wring [this wealth] in their synagogues and [use it] against her. Francisco de Quevedo, Execración de los judíos (1633)

⸪ The previous chapter has demonstrated that the conversos presented a military threat to the security of the Iberian realms and empires in the imaginary of many early modern Spaniards and Portuguese. It was claimed that they actively collaborated with the military actions of foreign powers seeking to break Spain’s hegemony in Europe, especially during the first half of the seventeenth century. The historical accusation that their Jewish ancestors had actively aided the Muslim conquest of Spain in 711 CE was clearly used to bolster this claim just as much as their links (whether real or exaggerated) with the Protestant and Muslim enemies of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This fear of conversos as a malign force, acting within the territories of the Iberian monarchies on behalf of hostile foreign powers, also extended to the economic realm. During the early modern period, and particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century, many Spaniards and Portuguese were convinced that the conversos were waging a secret economic war against their Catholic rulers. The conversos, it was argued, were orchestrating a vast conspiracy not just to enrich themselves but to take control of the economy of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in order to undermine both kingdoms by diverting the wealth generated through intercontinental trade (including the slave trade) to fund the fleets and armies of their Protestant enemies. In 1630 a short pamphlet, written in Latin and bearing the title Pro cautione christiana (“In favour of Christian caution”), appeared in Madrid. Its author was Juan Adam de la Parra, an aspiring inquisitorial official who would later distinguish himself as an active prosecutor of the inquisitorial tribunal of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_008

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Murcia and later inquisitor at the court in Madrid. The pamphlet is a polemical defence of the statutes of limpieza de sangre and an attack on any attempt to weaken the constraints that they placed upon the social advancement of conversos in Spain. Amongst the many claims made by Adam de la Parra regarding the conversos and the Jewish conspiracy allegedly threatening Spain, one stands out. Whilst discussing the negative effects of the converso presence in the Spanish Empire, Adam de la Parra alleges that the conversos seek to control trade between Spain and its empire in order to further their secret ambition to “exterminate the Christians [of Spain]” in the same manner as, Adam de la Parra argues, they had done with “our friends the Portuguese,” via their supposed control of the Portuguese Empire in Asia. For Adam de la Parra, it was clear that the occult hand of the judaizing conversos must lay behind the fact that, every year, Old Christian Portuguese left their homeland to emigrate to the colonies and were replaced in their own country by “servile and abject” black African slaves. The same fate threatened to befall Spain, Parra argues, if the conversos were permitted to exploit the allure of wealth derived from overseas commerce to entice Spaniards to abandon agriculture. Adam de la Parra concludes by darkly pondering whether one day Spain will have to recall the Old Christians in the New World to defend it from the “interior menace” of the conversos.1 Juan Adam de la Parra’s allegation that the economic opportunities created by the Spanish Empire were turned against Spain by the conversos represents an interesting coalescence of three separate concerns relating to the effects of Spain’s empire on its society and economy that deeply preoccupied early modern Spaniards. These concerns were the perceived adverse demographic effect of population loss through transatlantic emigration, the social implications of the rise of a merchant class that had grown wealthy through transatlantic commerce and, last but not least, worries about the suspect role of the conversos in imperial trade. Parra’s vision of the secret Jewish plot to control Spain’s imperial trade and destroy the Spanish ‘Old Christian’ population is perhaps the most extreme version of a conspiracy theory that appears regularly in anticonverso and anti-Jewish propaganda produced in early modern Spain or Portugal. This conspiracy theory revolved around the existence of a secret Jewish/ converso plot to control the Iberian economies and use this domination to deliberately sabotage them for the benefit of the same foreign enemies that Spanish and Portuguese troops were fighting on land and at sea. 1 Juan Adam de la Parra, Pro cautione christiana: in supremis senatibus santae inquisitionis & ordinum Ecclesia Toletana & coetibus scholarium obseruata, adversus christianorum proselytos & sabbatizantes nomine & specie christianorum (n.p.: s.n, n.d.), fols. 32r–32v.

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Juan Adam de la Parra was not alone in subscribing to such a conspiracy theory. As Spanish hegemony slowly eroded, late sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Spaniards and Portuguese were acutely aware of the economic difficulties facing the Iberian monarchies. John Elliott has noted that economic factors played a major role in their perception of imperial decline and the writings of arbitristas (“projectors,” i.e. would-be reformers) frequently claimed to identify these problems and offer putative solutions.2 Such circumstances offered fertile ground for the spread of conspiracy theories of a concerted Jewish/converso plot to undermine the Iberian economies. The anxieties generated by the involvement of conversos in the transoceanic economic activity of Spain and Portugal also built upon the long-standing medieval association of Jews with moneylending and the sin of usury to the point that it came to be presented as an innate Jewish trait. This was a preconception that was extended to the conversos after the end of the toleration of Judaism in Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497 and probably already existed before the 1490s. Nevertheless, other factors with little direct link to anti-Jewish feeling also came into play during the sixteenth century. The rise of the overseas Iberian empires led to a strong expansion of commerce and credit, as well as a spiralling inflation due in part to the massive influx of silver mined in the Spanish American colonies, all of which had important social ramifications in the Iberian Peninsula. As the recent study of Elvira Vilches has demonstrated, Spanish theologians, moralists and political economists wrote treatises that reveal how they struggled to reconcile the changing Iberian economic landscape and the rise of a credit economy with their deeply rooted notions of Christian morality and of an idealised socio-economic order.3 The land-owning aristocracy and the ecclesiastical elite, which it should not be forgotten was itself largely derived from the former, both harboured deep suspicions about the ethical nature of the wealth of merchants who were involved in (and invested in) transoceanic trade between Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies. Moreover, the mercantilist economic system imposed upon overseas trade with the colonies by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies in order to secure fiscal revenue was vulnerable to tax evasion by smugglers and unscrupulous merchants. Awareness of this only created more grounds for suspicion of wealthy conversos and their trade networks.

2 J.H. Elliott, “Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present, 74 (1977): 41–61. 3 Elvira Vilches, New World Gold. Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2010).

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The Trope of Jewish Lust of Gold and Usury beyond 1492

The notion that the conversos exhibited a congenital greed and lust for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of Old Christians represented the early modern perpetuation of a deeply entrenched medieval stereotype. The situation of Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal mirrored that in the rest of Europe although it should be stressed that the dynamic frontier environment, created as a result of Christian expansion southwards at the expense of their Muslim foes, opened numerous economic opportunities to Jews who joined Christians in the “settling” (población) of the (re)conquered towns and countryside. Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal engaged is a host of economic pursuits beyond moneylending or tax collecting. They were involved in the production of goods and foodstuffs (owning vineyards, mills and oil presses), in local commerce as well as long-distance trade, working in skilled occupations such as blacksmiths and other forms of metalwork (notably producing armour, weapons and even early guns) and as artisans. In many cases, Jews made their livelihoods by combining different activities and few could have depended upon moneylending alone.4 In spite of the diversity of their economic activities, it was trade, moneylending (and the concomitant accusation of lending at usurious rates of interest) and tax-farming that came to characterise the economic role of Jewish in the eyes of many medieval Iberian Christians. Along with protests about the employment of Jews as royal tax collectors and tax farmers, complaints by representatives of the commons about excessive Jewish usury, and attempts to pressure Christian monarchs into banning it, became a recurrent theme in the parliaments (cortes) of the various Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In Portugal, for example, the protests of urban representatives in various cortes, convened during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, led to the promulgation of laws banning usury or regulating the rate of interest charged by Jewish lenders. The sheer frequency of such protests certainly demonstrates the significant position that Jewish moneylending held amongst medieval Christian preoccupations about Jews.5 4 Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier. The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2006), 55–71; José María Monsalvo Antón, ‪Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social: el antisemitismo en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media‬ (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985), 178. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ 5 Enrique Cantera Montenegro, “La imagen del judío en la España medieval,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie III-Historia Medieval, no 11 (1998): 11–38 (especially 31–6); M.J.P. Ferro Tavares, “O cresimiento económico e o antijudaísmo no Portugal medieval,” in La Peninsula Iberica en la era de los descubrimientos 1391–1492, ed. Manuel González Jiménez, (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1997), vol. 2, 51–67.

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The figure of the usurious Jews was also translated into visual imagery in medieval Spain. One of the early thirteenth-century pier capitals of the cloister of the Cathedral of Tarragona depicts the legend of Saint Nicholas punishing a Christian who had deceitfully sworn an oath in the Saint’s name to a Jewish moneylender. According to the legend and carving in Tarragona, the irreverent and dishonest Christian was ultimately punished by Saint Peter and the Jewish moneylender was moved by this miracle to convert to Christianity. Similarly, the stereotyped figure of the hook-nosed Jewish moneylender features in both a poem and the colourful illuminations that accompany it of the thirteenthcentury Cantigas de Santa María, a compendium of poems relating miracles accomplished by the Virgin Mary and compiled at the behest of King Alfonso X of Castile.6 If the Jews were perceived to be quintessentially covetous of material wealth and devoted to money-making endeavours, then it was only logical that, in accordance with the belief in the hereditary nature of Judaism and its ‘characteristics,’ the conversos should also have been assumed to have an identical predisposition for commerce. To reinforce this point, many polemical antisemitic writers in early modern Spain and Portugal referred their readers to chapter 32 of the Old Testament book of Exodus and the ancient Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf, claiming that their converso descendants followed suit in their worship of gold. It is indeed this biblical episode that the seventeenth-century polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos choses to make his point when he seeks to explain to his readers why the Jews are “covetous” (cobiçosos).7 Likewise, Francisco de Quevedo warns Philip IV in his Execración that he should take note of Exodus 32 as a warning for the lust for gold of “that nation” was such that “when they receive wealth they worship it like idols, they forsake their God and even Moses for it.”8 Whilst firmly rooted in the anti-Jewish polemics of the medieval period, the trope of converso usury, however, also acquired a distinctly proto-racial dimension during the early modern period. After the events of 1492 and 1497, the notion that Jews had a particular predisposition for the ‘base’ employment of commerce and the ‘unchristian’ practice of usury transmuted into a racialized belief that the Jewish “blood” running through the veins of their converted descendants similarly conferred upon them a special aptitude for commerce and usury. This development actually began many decades before the expulsion of 6 Pamela A. Patton, Art of Estrangement. Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 56–7, 122–3 and 162–4. 7 Mattos, Vicente da Costa, Breve discurso contra a heretica perfidia do iudaismo (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1623), fols 24v–25r. 8 Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and Santiago Fernández Mosquera (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1996), 72.

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1492. In his Fortalitium Fidei (circa 1459–1460), Fray Alonso de Espina lists the practice of lending money at usurious rates of interest as one of the crimes of the conversos. Beyond the simple practice of usury, Espina accuses the conversos of conspiring to use moneylending as a secret weapon against Old Christians, through which they not only seek to avenge themselves but also to expiate their sins (presumably, in their ‘Jewish’ eyes, for their ‘sinful’ conversion to Christianity).9 By the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the trope of conversos as men devoted to the iniquitous acquisition of material wealth only acquired greater currency following the expulsion of Spain’s remaining Jews. Andrés Bernáldez, the curate of the town of Los Palacios near Seville who had himself baptized many Jews in 1492, labels all conversos in his chronicle as being “for the most part (…) a profiteering people, with many arts and deceits (…) with no conscience when buying from or selling to [Old] Christians.” Their devotion to material riches is matched by their innate sloth, desire to reside in towns and conscious refusal to undertake professions that require manual labour “such as ploughing or digging, or walking through the fields looking after flocks, nor did they teach such things to their offspring.” Far from being innocent, the dubious business practices of the conversos are presented as part of their deliberate revenge against Old Christians since, Bernáldez claims, they were persuaded that they were entitled to rob and deceive Gentiles, just as the Jews had plundered the Egyptians in the Book of Exodus (chapter 12, verses 35–6). Essentially, Bernáldez’s work contains nearly all the elements of the economic theme in the anti-converso conspiracy theory. The perceived economic parasitism of the conversos and their practice of usury are therefore presented as being motivated by a desire for revenge at their forced conversion. The ultimate aim of the conversos, of course, is to seize control of the wealth of Spain, to the detriment of society and the body politic.10 The notion that there existed a clear dichotomy between ‘Old Christians’ and conversos, based on an assumed collective predilection of conversos for commerce and usury and a corresponding aversion to physical labour and martial exertion caused by their ‘Jewish blood,’ is a recurring theme from Bernáldez’s chronicle to Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres’s Manifiesto universal de los males envejecidos que España padece in 1727. The subject occupies a prominent position in the veritable compendium of Iberian antisemitic folklore that is Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos. In the fifth chapter of his Centinela, Torrejoncillo includes a poem entitled Verses against 9 10

Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium Fidei (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), fol. 54v, col. A. Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos D. Fernando y Doña Isabel (Seville: Imprenta que fué de J.M. Geofrin,, 1869), vol. 1, 127–8.

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the Jews supposedly composed by the famous sixteenth-century Archbishop of Toledo Don Juan Silíceo, who was mostly famous for the controversial introduction of statutes of limpieza de sangre within the chapter of his cathedral. The stanzas that compose the poem all end with a section of the Apostle’s Creed and six of the stanzas in the poem directly allude to the alleged financial acquisitiveness of the conversos, the quasi-racial genealogical determinism that drives them to practice usury and trade to harm Old Christians and, finally, how their accumulation of wealth is used as a means to purchase offices with which they could dominate Christian society: If these individuals can make One ducado with one real, They do not take care to notice, If this was achieved by usury, Or if they sold goods through credit. They are not scrupulous in the slightest, Above all, I wish to warn you, That since they are covetous, They are fond of money, And only invoke money as:  Vnicum Dominum nostrum. Regarding Nobility, the Jew does not exert himself, To see himself reach high positions, Instead the Jews acquire it through wealth, Causing the poor man to sweat, Or employing some other wickedness. There is no one who can make him fall, Good or bad he will rise, And his rise is of such a kind, That there can be no fall during his fall, But after death,  Descendit ad inferos. Many members of that seed, You will observe with four cords, Two belts, and a pouch, Three dozen buttons, Setting up a market booth. Even though their poverty is such, In the business that they transact,

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With everyone in general, They gain credit and wealth, And no longer know how much they have,  Tertia die. I have not seen one of them lost, Or come to find himself in penury, Who does not possess, being in that condition, Money, and in great quantity, To turn his fortunes around. Thus, I ask you, Lord, How did he acquire, The property and wealth of another person? Is it true that it was lost? It is true, but he11 lived  Resurrexit Working to enrich themselves both by night and by day, They manage to make money, They buy the office of Ventiquatria,12 And then become knights, With a lineage and family name. Moreover, they do not merely want to be, Served with reverence, But rather to submit everyone, Because they see that their power, Is greater than the dominion,  Dei Patris Omnipotentis. Since they are meddlers, And cunning by nature, Thanks to their great wealth, You will then see them raised, To a very great office. He who amongst them is a judge, Or already a fiel executor,13 11 12 13

The ‘Old Christian’ whose property and wealth was taken by the ‘New Christian.’ A veinticuatro was a city councillor in some towns in Andalucía in Southern Spain, such as Seville and Córdoba. The name – twenty-four – is derived from the number of such magistrates in each town. An official inspector of weights.

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Or a lawyer, You should hold it as certain, That as a corregidor,14  Inde Venturus est. The notion that conversos never engaged in ‘honourable’ economic activities such as agriculture or artisanship gained considerable currency and it is a theme that is constantly reaffirmed in the works of antisemitic authors. In his book, Fray Torrejoncillo relates the “bitter war” (reñida guerra) waged between the “street dwellers” or “burghers” (ruanos) and the “workers” (labradores) of the town of Valladolid in northern Castile. Torrejoncillo presents it not so much as a social conflict but one between the descendants of Jews and Old Christians. The Franciscan friar appears to be referring to what was, in fact, a far less dramatic struggle: a court case that took place in 1524 at the royal appellate court (Real Chancillería) of Valladolid over the access of conversos to positions forbidden to them by statutes of limpieza de sangre. Documentary evidence suggests that the expression ruanos was deliberately used because it had pejorative connotations by associating conversos with trade.15 Moreover, the author of the Centinela certainly bristles with pride upon informing his readers that the founders of his home village of Torrejoncillo in Extremadura were Serranos (“mountain dwellers”), Vaqueros (“cowherds”), Colemeros (“beekeepers”) and Corchos (corkers, the cultivators of cork trees), occupations that had become surnames amongst the inhabitants. Although humble occupations, they proved in Torrejoncillo’s eyes that the population of the village remained “untainted” by Jews.16 This notion of an almost-magical ability of the Jews and conversos to enrich themselves by means of dishonest business practices at the expense of Old Christian Iberians is expressed not just in polemical works. It also finds its way into historical narratives. In his account of the Dutch capture of the Portuguese Brazilian colony of Pernambuco in 1634, for instance, the cleric Manuel Calado resorts to such stereotyped imagery: Some Jews came with the Dutch [from Holland] when they captured Pernambuco wearing nothing but rags. In only a few days they became rich through their dealings and tricks. When this was known by their relatives, 14 15 16

A magistrate appointed by the crown. Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la españa moderna y contemporánea (Madrid: Ediciones Arión, 1986), vol. 2, 368–370. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 15–6, 70–7 and 190.

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who resided in Holland, a great many came from there and other places in the north [of Europe] and they too all became rich and wealthy in four days through their hawking as the majority of them were Portuguese by nation and had fled from Portugal out of fear of the Holy Inquisition. Since they could speak Dutch, they acted as translators between the Dutch and Portuguese and in this way acquired [more] money.17 It is hardly surprising that an author raised to believe in the congenital greed of the conversos should have claimed that the “Jews” in Pernambuco – whom he generically presents as converso fugitives from Portugal – should have gone from rags to riches “in only a few days.” Furthermore, in two Iberian societies whose aristocratic elites valued martial prowess and feats of arms, greed and the love of material possessions were vices closely associated with cowardice. In the medieval period, both in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere in Christendom, Jews were presented as powerless and cowardly, part of their punishment for the crucifixion of Christ. The theme was readily picked up and perpetuated by anti-converso polemicists and churchmen in the early modern period. A memorandum arguing for the wholesale expulsion of conversos, written by inquisitors in Lisbon and sent to the King in September 1624, argues that their loss to the realm would hardly be felt since, amongst other reasons, “they were never valorous nor soldiers, from the death of Christ onwards, but they are given to profit and merchandise and seek new territories to exercise these skills rather than those of arms since they cannot make any profit from [warfare], and profit is what they desire.”18 2

The Converso Merchant: a Parasite Growing at the Expenses of the Host

The converso merchant was therefore, through his association with usury, moneylending and a lack of bellicose spirit, particularly marked out as a hate figure in early modern Spain and Portugal. The expression “men of commerce” (hombres de negocio in Spanish and homens de negocios in Portuguese) became another euphemism by which the conversos were generically designated by both their detractors and defenders. Indeed the association between conversos and international business became so strong that it even received royal 17 18

Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e o Triunfo da Liberdade. Primera Parte (Lisbon: Paulo Craesbeeck, 1648), 53–4. A.N.T.T., Armário Jesuítico, livro 18, maço 3, doc. 7.

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recognition. A royal letter-patent issued to conversos by King João IV of Portugal in 1648 repeatedly uses the expression “men of commerce and people of the [Hebrew] nation” (homens de negocio e gente da Nação).19 Early modern Iberian preachers and writers rivalled one another in their use of vivid metaphors seeking to present the alleged economic and social parasitism of the conversos and its supposedly deleterious effects upon the wider Spanish and Portuguese societies. The printed texts of sermons preached at various inquisitorial autos-da-fé held in seventeenth-century Portugal and Goa offer a cornucopia of such metaphors. In 1612, Estevão de Santana compared conversos to creeping ivy that slowly, almost imperceptibly, smothers the tree or wall upon which it grows before finally destroying it. Manuel da Encarnaçam, for his part, preferred to use a predatory image in 1617, referring to the conversos as “lynx-eyed in worldly affairs.”20 By far the most evocative image, however, appears to have been that of the converso merchants as a diseased spleen that imperilled the life of the other parts of the Christian body politic. Sourced from the highly popular sixteenth-century Emblematum liber (Book of Emblems) of the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), the metaphor of the converso as a diseased spleen appears in both the collection of printed Portuguese sermons by Fray João de Ceita (1625) and the Spanish Centinela contra Judíos of Francisco de Torrejoncillo (1674). Through his commercial activities, the converso is represented as sucking the lifeblood out of the rest of society and condemning it to a lingering death. For Fray Torrejoncillo, the “big Jewish merchant” (iudiote mercader) along with the converso businessmen, judges or lawyers have engorged themselves and obtained their riches from the “poor members of the body politic: the Old Christians, who take nearly nothing from the conversos.”21 The accusation that the parasitical economic activity of the conversos was deliberately operated to benefit Spain and Portugal’s enemies in northern ­Europe, and especially the Dutch, becomes a constant refrain of antisemitic polemicists, churchmen and many arbitristas in the first half of the seventeenth century. Criticism of the role of conversos in the Iberian economies involved claims that they were machinating a great conspiracy with the aid of the ­Sephardic community in Amsterdam and these allegations are formulated using vivid animalistic analogies. As early as 1608, even before the Sephardic 19 20 21

J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses (Lisbon: Teixeira, 1921), 477– 480. Edward Glaser, “Invitation to Intolerance: a study of the Portuguese sermons preached at autos-da-fé,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 27 (1956): 361–2. Francois Soyer, Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire: Francisco de Torrejoncillo and the Centinela contra Judíos (1674) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2014), 85.

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community in Amsterdam flourished, the arbitrista Pedro Avendaño Villela complained in a memorandum written for Philip III that the smuggling activities of the Portuguese converso merchants meant that they were acting as “leeches (chupasangres) bleeding our empire dry for the benefit of our enemies” and in 1633 Francisco de Quevedo uses the exact same comparison. For Quevedo, the conversos are “Jewish leeches” (sanguijuelas judías) that suck the lifeblood out of Spain and ensure that it ends up “in the power of [Spain’s] enemies and, what is even more detestable, the enemies of our holy faith.”22 The anonymous Portuguese author of another manuscript pamphlet dating from the early seventeenth century in which the conversos are accused of “the evils that Portugal suffers from” follows in the same vein. He compares the conversos to “drones (zangões) that produce nothing but consume the honey that bees have brought from far away.” The conversos are accused of aiding Portugal’s enemies and their accumulation of wealth is portrayed as the fruit of usury and “manifest thefts.” Their pernicious influence is, the author argues, “a poison rather than a source of support” for the economy of the realm.23 It is certainly an incontrovertible fact that conversos, and especially conversos of Portuguese origin, did occupy a disproportionate role in international trade and commerce in Spain and Portugal during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, there is abundant documentary evidence that they were involved (as other non-converso merchants also were) in contraband and fiscal evasion, especially at times of war when trade between the Iberian Peninsula and Protestant Holland was prohibited by the Habsburg crown.24 Through the intricate web of connections that linked them to conversos who remained in the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian empires, some members of the Sephardic community were able to establish profitable commercial networks, exporting goods from northern Europe (especially Dutch cloth) to the Iberian World in exchange for silver from the Americas or other commodities in demand. Similarly, some conversos in the Iberian Peninsula were able to amass considerable fortunes as the middlemen in this international trade network, fortunes that they then reinvested in the purchase of government monopolies or bonds (juros). Even so, the rise of the Dutch as an economic power between 1590 and 1648 can be attributed to other factors than the economic activity of conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and the Sephardic community in the Netherlands. Of 22 23 24

B.L., 1324.i.10(1), fol. 3r; Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, 80–1. J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 460–1. Bernardo José López Belinchón, “‘Sacar la sustancia al reino’. Comercio, contrabando y conversos portugueses, 1621–1640,” Hispania, 209 (2001): 1,017–1,050.

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great significance were the terms of the Twelve Years’ Truce concluded between Philip III of Spain and the Dutch in 1609. The truce was particularly unfavourable to the Iberian economy since it left the Habsburg-controlled port of Antwerp under blockade and allowed Dutch shipping to dominate the carrying trade between southern Europe and the Baltic. This was a fact recognised and commented upon by disgruntled Spanish officials and ministers, especially by those arguing against a renewal of the truce in the years prior to its expiration in 1621. In addition to the negative impact of the truce of 1609, Jonathan Israel has demonstrated that the Sephardic community did not play the crucial role that is often attributed to it by anti-converso polemicists, and later historians, in the initial rise of the Dutch Republic’s commercial dominance of international naval trade during the 1610s and 1620s. Although some exiled conversos sought refuge in Amsterdam in the final years of the sixteenth century, the creation of the Sephardic community only took place during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. In 1601, in exchange for the payment of a large sum, King Philip III of Spain granted freedom of movement to the conversos and many availed themselves of the opportunity to legally leave the Iberian Peninsula with their property before the privilege was rescinded in 1610. This flow of conversos out of the Peninsula was doubtless also encouraged by the papal grant of a general amnesty (perdão geral) to all the conversos arrested by the Inquisition in 1605. The following decade witnessed the establishment of the Sephardic community in the (from the Habsburg viewpoint) rebel city of Amsterdam that was constituted by exiled conversos who had publicly returned to Judaism. As it is well known, they not only included many conversos who had legally left the Iberian Peninsula between 1601 and 1610 but many of the fugitives who continued to flee inquisitorial persecution in the following decades. Yet, despite its growth in size, the economic impact of the Sephardic community should not be exaggerated. As Jonathan Israel has persuasively argued, their role was limited in the years between 1590 and 1620 and stagnated between 1621 and 1645 when war between Spain and Holland resumed. It was only in the years between 1645 and 1660 that their role in sustaining Dutch trade became a vital one.25 The notion of a secret economic plot to destroy Spain and Portugal only really took form in the seventeenth century once the economic impact of the Twelve Years Truce began to be felt in Spain and the existence of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam became public knowledge. For those writers who espoused antisemitic sentiments, the nuanced reality did not matter. The role played by the conversos in trade could only be rationalised as a sinister strategy 25

Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepots, 355–447.

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not only to enrich themselves but to further the Jewish plot against the Iberian monarchies. Through their enrichment, it came to be argued, the conversos sought to deprive the Iberian economies and royal treasuries of silver and gold either through illegal commercial activity (namely smuggling) or by exporting the precious currency to northern Europe in exchange for imported manufactured goods. Moreover, some authors even argued that, as an integral part of their scheme, they aimed to alter the demographic balance in the Iberian Peninsula in their favour and, ultimately, to dominate the Peninsula completely. Even though it is difficult to trace its separate development in Portugal and Spain, the conspiracy theory of the Jewish plot to undermine the early modern Iberian economies appears to have developed in Portugal before spreading to Spain. Writing at the end of the 1610s and at the start of the 1620s, the Portuguese antisemite and propagandist Vicente da Costa Mattos reserves his bitterest denunciation of the pernicious role of the conversos in the Portuguese economy to the chapter of his work in which he expounds upon the reasons why an expulsion of all judaizing conversos from Portugal and its empire would be justified by “reasons of state” (razão de estado). Amongst the foremost of these, Mattos includes their deliberate economic sabotage: By their cunning they attempt to rob the goods of all [the Old Christian Portuguese] for their own enrichment through schemes, leeching, rents and things that they have invented with this particular aim. With the aforementioned [schemes], they have occasionally fled [from the country] swollen with the property that they have stolen in this kingdom and have enriched foreigners with it.26 For Costa Mattos, the flight of capital from Portugal and Spain constitutes a particularly concerning problem: Presently, through their frauds, tricks and usury, the Hebrews are slowly gathering everything in this kingdom to its great detriment so that, when our guard is let down, they can enrich foreigners, as we can see every day in the great quantity of gold that they transfer to Flanders, France, England, Italy and many other places.27 In Vicente da Costa Mattos’s mind, however, the aim of the conversos was not simply to shamelessly enrich themselves at the expenses of the kingdom and 26 27

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso, fols. 183r–183v. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso, fol. 165v.

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transfer their wealth overseas thereby to harm the Old Christian population. He also rages against what he perceives to be a deliberate strategy by which the conversos used their wealth to establish and secure a stranglehold on tax-farming. For the Portuguese polemicist, the conversos used the wealth derived from their business ventures to set up escape routes for fellow conversos evading inquisitorial justice and, more seriously still, to deliberately weaken the finances of the Habsburg monarchy: Those of them who can do so take on large contracts [with the crown] for the [collection of] royal taxes in both this kingdom [of Portugal] and the kingdoms of Castile so that the Jews, through these, may always have a source of revenue to support those Jews who have fled there and, in this manner, they can help them all. The richer they grow through such commerce, the greater are the means at their disposal to oppress the [Old Christian] Catholics. It is a manifest error to give the administration of the collection of such taxes to such people, for nearly all revenue is dissipated for their own profit and to the loss of the natives [i.e. Old Christian Portuguese] and kingdom [of Portugal].28 Costa Mattos also warns that the conversos have purchased bonds (juros) issued by the crown and then transferred them to others so that they are creating the equivalent of an entailed estate (morgado) “off which they live like rich men from the goods of others, converting into private profit what belongs in the royal treasury.” In a note printed in the margin of this section of his work, Costa Mattos adds that “this happens a lot in Madrid and the borderlands of Castile, Aragón and Portugal.”29 The depth of resentment against the conversos in government circles increased during the 1610s and 1620s. Many members of the Habsburg government in Madrid noted the wealth of the Sephardic community in Protestant Holland and it became an almost unassailable dogma to perceive it as the direct result of illegal trade with the Iberian Peninsula and thus part of a deliberate Jewish economic plot. In 1622, the Duke del Infantado claimed in the Spanish Council of State that most of the principle merchants and traders in Holland were “Portuguese,” by which he meant Jews. Yet, only a few years before, an economic advisor in Madrid who had travelled to Amsterdam in 1614 had reported to the same council that most of the Sephardic Jews in that city were actually poor and only a dozen played any role in trade and that even the 28 29

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso, fols. 88r–88v. Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve Discurso, fol. 88r.

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richest of them could hardly be described as particularly rich.30 Later that decade, in a report submitted to the Spanish crown in 1629, the royal secretary Miguel de Ipeñarrieta complains about the adverse economic effects of “those men who claim to be vassals of your Majesty but are unworthy of your favour.” Ipeñarrieta portrays the activity of converso smugglers not just as a criminal one but as politically treasonous in nature. For the secretary, the conversos, in express violation of royal edicts, traded and had business relations with the Dutch rebels, by which they extracted the gold and silver from Spain in exchange for Dutch goods, thus enriching the Protestants and “increasing their power to sustain the war that they wage against your majesty.”31 The notion that the conversos sought to take over Spain and Portugal by increasing their population is a recurrent complaint associated with their alleged collective enrichment. It is argued that, in addition to their innate ‘Jewish cowardice,’ the conversos were deliberately avoiding military service in the Spanish and Portuguese royal armies fighting abroad as part of their malign plan. Thus, whilst many Old Christian men migrated to the empire or risked their lives to protect their Catholic faith and the honour of their monarchs, conversos would remain safely at home, free both to father large families with converso women or to ‘infect’ Old Christian bloodlines through intermarriage. During the reign of the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando, the curate Andrés Bernáldez grumbled that the neophytes “did not believe in giving reward to God by means of virginity and chastity: all their effort was to grow and multiply.”32 A century later, concerns within the hierarchy of the Portuguese church concerning the economic power of the leading conversos are similarly couched in terms of the Jewish conspiracy. The very same year that Costa Mattos’ diatribe was printed, the Portuguese Inquisitor General Fernão Martins Mascarenhas submitted an alarmist report to King Philip III (Philip IV of Spain). Without offering any concrete data to support his claims, the Inquisitor General denounces what he perceived to be a multiplying converso population and its increasing wealth in contrast to a declining ‘pure’ Old Christian population: Since these people were not permitted to leave the country and were not admitted into the religious orders [where celibacy is the norm] […] and because Old Christian males grew scarce due to their departure for the empire’s newly conquered colonies, conversos married Old Christian 30 31 32

Jonathan Israel, Empires and Entrepots, 359. Bernardo José López Belinchón, “‘Sacar la sustancia al reino’,” 1,037. Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos, vol. 1, 127–8.

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women and their progeny multiplied, until of the three Estates theirs has become the most numerous. Moreover, since they do not serve in the armed forces or in government, they thrust themselves into business and commerce, cornering all the country’s wealth.33 Two years later, the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition produced another report in which it repeated its concerns about the alleged intermingling of converso and Old Christian families, especially amongst the aristocracy and the ‘fact’ that the wealth of the conversos had “grown so plentiful” and they were “the only ones who have ready cash, contracts, merchandise and hold the greatest power in Portugal.”34 Finally, the Portuguese churchmen who gathered in the town of Tomar in 1629 to consider a joint response to forestall any move by the Habsburg crown to grant an amnesty to the Portuguese conversos used economic arguments to bolster their position. Once more, the image of covetous conversos growing in wealth and numbers whilst shirking the military duties incumbent upon all Habsburg subjects comes to the fore: This people is devoted exclusively to business and commerce and is not consumed by military activity or poverty and manual labour but rather always live in luxurious and lavish houses […] the number of these people grows more abundantly and Judaism grows with them. (…) One can judge how great the damage suffered by Portugal in this matter must be because through the hands of this people […] travel all the merchandise and nearly all the contracts and leases which are made in Portugal. Thus, in many ways, the wealth of all of Portugal, that should have been distributed among its natives, ends up in their hands.35 Fears about an exponential rise in converso demography are rarely accompanied by any precise figures. When numbers are occasionally mentioned, they tend to be grossly exaggerated to the point of absurdity. In the first half of the seventeenth century, an anonymous polemicist estimated that the converso population of Portugal grew at a rate of 20,000 “hearths” (fuegos) every three years, approximately 80,000 to 100,000 individuals if we hypothesise that the 33

34 35

Translated into English by H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon in António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory. The Portuguese Inquisition and its New Christians 1536–1765, ed. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), 131. I have made a few stylistic alterations to the translation. J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 471–2. Martin A. Cohen, The Canonization of a Myth. Portugal’s “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002), 46 and 50.

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average “hearth” included four or five individuals.36 This is a high number when it is considered that the total Portuguese population in the early seventeenth century was somewhere between one and two million inhabitants. This use of inflated figures to support anti-converso arguments is not the preserve of anonymous polemicists. In a document produced for the crown in 1624, the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition grotesquely claimed that the number of conversos in the realm had increased from 6,000 to 10,000 poor families after the general conversion of 1497 to 200,000 families – presumably around one million individuals – a little over a century later. In neighbouring Spain, the Spanish Council of State produced an alarmist report for the Spanish crown in 1671 in which it claimed that a wave of 60,000 Portuguese conversos would soon flood into Spain.37 Even allowing for intermarriage between conversos and Old Christians, these numbers are farfetched. The purpose of such rounded figures is of course obvious: to provoke panic and put pressure on the crowns of Spain and Portugal to take measures against the conversos. In many respects, these acute anxieties about a change in the demographic balance of the Iberian Peninsula closely mirror the fears about the demography of the Moriscos in Spain prior to their expulsion in 1609–1614. Fears about converso and Morisco demography were expressed in the same manner and with the same lack of statistical evidence to substantiate them. The claims about the conversos echo those of the Archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, who complained to King Philip II of Spain in 1582–3 that the high birth-rate of the Moriscos meant that they would overrun the Catholic population of Valencia since they “seize the best land in Spain, and within a few days they multiply in number and wealth.” Writing half a century before Francisco de Quevedo, Ribera uses exactly the same metaphor that Quevedo employed against the conversos, accusing the Moriscos of having “become the sponges of all the wealth in Spain,” especially precious silver and gold.38 Others, including the Archbishop of Toledo in a letter sent to the King in 1589, sought to link the failure of the Moriscos to serve in the royal army with their alleged demographic growth and economic success.39 The supposedly prolific fertility of the 36 37 38 39

B.L., Egerton 343, fols. 64r–79v. J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 471–2; Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century 1665–1700 (London: Longman, 1980), 306. Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos. Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 130–1. See the examples in F. Soyer, “Faith, culture and fear: comparing Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first-century Europe,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (2013): 399– 416 and A.G.S., Estado, legajo 165, document 349 (Archbishop of Toledo to the King, November 1589).

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Hebrews in Pharaoh’s Egypt (Book of Exodus) provided an analogy used in the early seventeenth-century against the Moriscos by Miguel de Cervantes in the exemplary story The Colloquy of the Dogs and against the conversos by an anonymous pamphleteer.40 On one occasion, these two conspiratorial lines of argument were brought together in a surprising manner. Although anti-Morisco sentiment was stoked in Spain by an exaggeration of their numbers, the Portuguese churchmen gathered in Tomar in 1629, went so far as to compare both groups and to justify an expulsion of the conversos by diminishing the significance of the Moriscos. An expulsion, they stated, was necessary “because it is clear that the Moriscos were never so numerous [in Spain] as the conversos now are in Portugal.”41 Paradoxically, antisemitic writers were not the only ones guilty of disseminating an exaggerated belief that conversos enjoyed not only an exclusive stranglehold on Portuguese commerce but that they were also solely responsible for the rise of Dutch economic power. Apologists for the conversos doubtless aided the dissemination of this idea. Those authors sought to convince the Spanish and Portuguese crowns to create favourable conditions that would entice conversos away from the Netherlands and back to the Iberian Peninsula. Correspondingly, they emphasised their commercial role as an argument. When the Old Christian Spaniard Martín de Zellorigo was commissioned by the conversos of Portugal to write an apology of the conversos and attack the procedures of the Inquisition, he rapidly focuses on their economic importance. Zellorigo’s defence, published in 1619, contains a stark warning that inquisitorial persecution of the conversos risks harming the wider economic interests of the Habsburg monarchy at a time when it needs to muster all of its financial muscle to pursue its costly European wars: It will spell the ruin of Portugal and even part of Spain. For in all of Portugal there is not a single merchant who is not of this nation. These people have their correspondents in all lands and domains of the king our lord. Those of Lisbon send kinsmen to the East Indies to establish tradingposts where they receive the exports from Portugal, which they barter for merchandise in demand back home. They have outposts in the Indian port cities of Goa and Cochin and in the interior. In Lisbon and in India nobody can handle the trade in merchandise except persons of this nation. Without them, his majesty [King Philip III of Spain] will no longer 40 41

M. de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels, translated by C.A. Jones (London: Penguin, 1972), 242–3; J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 460–1. B.L., Add. Ms. 28,462, fols. 140v–141r.

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be able to profit from his Indian possessions, and will lose the 600,000 ducats a year in duties which finance the whole enterprise: from equipping the ships to paying the wages of the seamen and soldiers.42 Zellorigo assures the monarch that the return of the conversos to Spain and Portugal would weaken the Dutch who had become “rich and strong” through the “advantages that they obtain from [the conversos]” because “it is certain that since those of this [converso] nation have gone to those [rebellious] states, their power has increased and will continue to increase.” Zellorigo is not alone in highlighting the theme of converso wealth to defend them against inquisitorial persecution. Other authors, such as the Portuguese converso merchants Duarte Gomes Solis and García de Yllán Barraza, follow a similar utilitarian line of defence, calling upon the crown to harness the wealth of the converso commercial networks to improve the financial position of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies. In economic treatises printed in Spanish during the 1620s, Duarte Solis Gomes proudly proclaims that “trade is only sustained by the merchants of the Hebrew caste (…) because the noble Old Christians do not like to be merchants, and when they are they do not have the skills of those from the Hebrew caste.”43 In a memorandum written in 1637 and sent to Philip IV, the priest Diego de Cisneros, who had lived in France and seems well informed about the converso communities of Spain’s neighbouring realm, sought to convince the crown to entice the conversos to return to Spain by arguing that this would weaken the French and Dutch of valuable “spies that penetrate the centres of trade as well as the administration of the fleets (armadas), convoys and revenues of your majesty” and who were responsible for “sucking out the core of the wealth [from the Iberian monarchies] and undermining the policies of state.”44 The polemical debate about the extent of the influence of conversos on the Iberian economies was not free from contradiction. Thus, whilst antisemitic polemicists and campaigners attacked the supposed economic power of the conversos when they wanted to stress the danger that they represented, some could simultaneously highlight their lack of economic importance when they were advocating in favour of their expulsion from the territories ruled by the 42 43

44

Translated into English by H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon in António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory. The Portuguese Inquisition and its New Christians 1536–1765, 145. Nathan Wachtel, “The ‘Marrano’ Mercantilist Theory of Duarte Gomes Solis,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 101 (2011): 164–188 (see page 183 for quotation); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2007), 123–150. B.L., Egerton 343, fols. 249r–275v.

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Iberian monarchies. Such bad faith is demonstrated by no less a person than Francisco de Castro, the Portuguese Inquisitor General, in a memorandum addressed to King Philip III of Spain (King Philip II of Portugal) in 1630. Castro highlights the adverse impact of the economic collaboration between the conversos and the Dutch and Amsterdam Jews, claiming that this and their role in the flow of money from the Iberian Peninsula to Holland serves as proof that “their declared loyalty [to the crown] is a sham.” When justifying an expulsion of the conversos, Castro seeks to reassure his monarch that “were this country to be less wealthy due to the emigration and absence of the conversos, it would be more Catholic.” Only two paragraphs later, however, the inquisitor-general tries to minimise their economic importance, asserting that it is “erroneous to think that the decline and recovery of commerce in this country is dependent respectively on the [conversos’] exodus and return. The truth is that the health of Portuguese mercantile commerce is not determined by the Hebrew people’s presence or absence.”45 3

The Merchant in the Ancien Régime: a Figure of Suspicion and Fear

In his defence of converso merchants, García de Yllán Barraza complains that the merchants were also victims of aristocratic prejudice against merchants and the belief that “being a merchant is contrary to nobility.” Yllán’s point underscores the importance of not limiting any examination of the characterisation of conversos as economic parasites, and the conspiracy theory of the economic plot against Spain and Portugal, to the legacy of religiously-motivated medieval antisemitic typecasts. Whilst the age-old antisemitic figure of the usurious and dishonest Jew was a crucial building block of the conspiracy theory, its cement was undoubtedly constituted by two other important contributory factors that were probably just as important as anti-Jewish stereotypes. The first factor is the ambivalent attitude amongst medieval and early modern Christian theologians towards the ethical and moral compatibility of Christianity with commerce and finance. The second is the suspicion aroused by any mercantile communities whose trade networks overlapped multiple political and religious boundaries. In the Iberian Peninsula, debates about the ethical nature of commerce and the dangers that the expansion of money markets presented to the spiritual 45

António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory. The Portuguese Inquisition and its New Christians 1536–1765, ed. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon, 354–374 (quotations from pages 368 and 370).

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and social wellbeing of Spain and Portugal divided both theologians and scholars.46 Profit that did not result from the fruits of manual labour or the ownership of lands was viewed with suspicion and as morally problematic in the light of biblical passages that unambiguously condemn the accumulation of material wealth for its own sake as the “root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10) or as contrary to the proper service of God (Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13). The subject is a recurrent topic in the works of Catholic preachers and moralists such as the Jesuits Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526–1611) and Francisco Arias (1533–1605).47 Accordingly, there existed a social stigma attached to participation in trade. For the humanist writer Pedro de Valencia (1555–1620), only “well-tended fields, herds and fisheries” were economically productive activities whilst any man who made a living from money invested in trade was not just “idle and useless” but actually consuming “what others have sown and nurtured,” in short a harmful parasite.48 Such attitudes towards those who made a living from commerce and credit were not confined to the Iberian world but widespread in Ancien Régime Europe. In neighbouring France, the Jesuits Claude de la Colombière (1641–1682), Vincent Houdry (1631–1729), Charles Frey de Neuville (1693–1774) and others expressed exactly the same sentiments in their sermons, demarcating the virtuous landed (and inherited) wealth of aristocrats from the “sordid profits” that merchants gained from commerce and “frauds.”49 The rise of a monetary economy in the Middle Ages and its expansion, with the emergence in the early modern period of a global capitalist trade network reliant upon credit, caused deep anxieties not just to churchmen but also to the socially conservative aristocracy of the Ancien Régime. The income of this landed aristocracy was largely tied to the ownership of entailed agricultural estates or pastoral lands and the economic exploitation of those who worked on these through rents and feudal dues. Suspicions, bred by an inability or unwillingness to perceive the workings of trade and capitalism, led many in the church and aristocracy to suspect that wealth derived from commerce could only be achieved at the expense of the existing social or economic order and 46

47 48 49

See Elvira Vilches, New World Gold. Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain and Michael Thomas D’Emic, Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalon and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysis (New York: Lexington Books, 2014). Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Flos Sanctorum, libro de las vidas de los Santos (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1616), 884 and Francisco Arias, Parte segunda del libro de la imitacion de Christo Nuestro Señor (Seville: Juan de León, 1599), 332–4. Pierre Vilar, “Les primitifs espagnols de la pensée économique – ‘Quantitativisme’ et ‘bullionisme’,” Mélanges offerts à Marcel Bataillon (Bordeaux: Féret et fils, 1962): 261–284. Bernhard Groethuysen, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France, vol. I, L’Église et la bourgeoisie (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).

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must therefore, inevitably, result in the political decline of the Iberian monarchies. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that many statutes of limpieza de sangre in the seventeenth century did not simply seek to prevent the descendants of Jews, Muslims or heretics from entering into prestigious institutions. They had a social dimension and also sought to ban candidates from social backgrounds deemed to be ‘undesirable’ or ‘unworthy.’ By way of illustration, applicants seeking admission into prestigious military orders, such as the Order of the Knights of Santiago, were not only required to prove that their ancestry was free from Jews and Muslims but also that it did not include “merchants and traders.”50 Such prejudiced aristocratic and ecclesiastical attitudes about commerce and merchants are mirrored in the figure of the merchant and proto-capitalist that appears in more popular contexts. The corrupting influence of money is vividly represented in Iberian literary productions such as El crotalón, a collection of dialogues attributed to the sixteenth-century author Cristóbal de Villalón. In El crotalón, hell is represented as populated with the souls of merchants in general and cambistas and logreros (moneychangers and moneylenders) in particular.51 In a study published in 1969, the Portuguese Marxist historian António José Saraiva (1917–1993) argued that the inquisitorial persecution of the conversos in Portugal was primarily motivated by social enmity between the aristocratic and ecclesiastical elite on one hand and the mostly converso merchant bourgeoisie on the other. For Saraiva, the danger of crypto-Judaism was a pretext maintained to combat a rising merchant-class that threatened the power and wealth of the established ruling class. Saraiva’s controversial work was influenced by a Marxist perspective in which historical events were analysed through the prism of the struggle between social classes and therefore it is reductionist in its dismissal of the complexities of converso religious identity. Nonetheless, Saraiva’s thesis has the important merit of highlighting the manner in which the fear of judaizing conversos in early modern Spain and Portugal was closely entangled with anxieties about the rise of the merchant class and the challenge that it was perceived to represent for the established social hierarchy.52 The inextricable connection between antisemitic feeling and anti-merchant resentment is plainly visible in theatrical productions, including those of 50

51 52

This was, for example, the case of the famed painter Diego Velázquez, who sought admittance to the Order of Santiago in 1658–9. See Antonio Gallego y Burín, Varia Velazquena: homenaje a Velazquez en el III centenario de su muerte 1660–1960 (Madrid: Madrid: Ministerio de Educación Nacional, 1960), vol. 2, 301–377. Elvira Vilches, New World Gold, 171–4. António José Saraiva, Inquisição e Cristãos-Novos (Porto: Editorial Inova, 1969).

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Spain’s leading seventeenth-century playwright: Lope de Vega. Although these plays are fictional works, they reflect attitudes that were prevalent in seventeenth-century Iberia. In his play El premio del bien hablar (written circa 1624 or 1625), Lope de Vega has his heroine Leonarda defend the honour of her father, a Basque merchant who had made his fortune in trade with the Americas, by claiming that his origins in the Basque country conferred a nobility upon him that was not debased by his participation in trade.53 The claim of ‘nobility’ inherent in Basque ancestry was also an implicit reference to limpieza de sangre that cannot have been lost upon the spectators of Lope’s play. There certainly existed a common belief that the inhabitants of northern Spain (Asturias and the Basque country in particular) enjoyed a high level of racial purity because they had never been ‘polluted’ by either Jews or Moors in the medieval period and had refused to allow conversos or Moriscos to settle there. In his dedication to the patron of the 1679 edition of Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos, the bookseller Marcos del Ribeiro congratulates his patron on the fact that he is a native of the Basque region of Spain “which has preserved its faith, loyalty and nobility with great integrity without allowing those who are tainted or infected by Judaism to reside there.”54 Lope de Vega makes this connection between antisemitism and social prejudice against merchants even more explicitly in his earlier play La probreza estimada (written circa 1597–1603), where he has one character insult another by accusing him of being base upon two counts: the first that he is descended from Jews and the second that his wealth is the fruit of commerce.55 These deeply rooted cultural and religious anxieties about the rise of trade and credit, were supplemented by a scarcely concealed suspicion of, and hostility towards, merchants, like the conversos, whose trade networks extended across the political boundaries of warring kingdoms. The economic policy of governments throughout Europe was dominated by a strongly mercantilist approach which led them to seek to regulate trade with the intention of preserving the revenue (especially the fiscal returns) generated within their political boundaries. In the case of Spain and Portugal, the Iberian governments instituted monopolies upon trade between the European metropoles and their overseas empires, forbidding other European merchants from trading directly with the Americas and Asia unless they did so via Seville and Lisbon. In was in 53 54 55

Comedias escogidas de frey Lope Felix de Vega Carpio juntas en colección y ordenadas, Cuaderno XI, Tomo I (Madrid: Imprenta de M. Ortega, 1828), 244. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Antonio de Zafra, 1679), unpaginated dedication. Comedias escogidas de frey Lope Felix de Vega Carpio juntas en colección y ordenadas, vol. 4, ed. by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1860), 151c–152a.

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those towns that the government agencies responsible for the managing of all aspects of trade including the enforcement of the royal monopoly on trade and the collection of customs duties – the Casa de la Contratación in Spain and the Casa da Índia in Portugal – were based. As it will become clear below, this mercantilist conception placed intercontinental trade under the strict supervision of the crown and did not sit well with the reality of global trade and the part that the conversos played in it. The overlapping trade networks of Portuguese conversos in the Iberian world, their links with Jewish communities in Holland and elsewhere in Europe and the reality of contraband and tax evasion combined to make them easy targets for generalized accusations of consciously conspiring to undermine both the economies of the Iberian empires and the revenues of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. 4

An Easy Hate Figure: the Converso Tax-Farmers and Asentistas

Predictably, antisemitic stereotypes and conservative social attitudes closely linking a static social hierarchy with religious order led members of the aristocratic and ecclesiastical elite (as well as many individuals lower down the social pyramid) to perceive sinister motives behind the developing commercial networks of the conversos. In the seventeenth century, a major development occurred that probably confirmed the worst fears of those who already believed that the conversos were waging a secret economic war against the Catholic Church and Iberian monarchies: the rise of Portuguese converso bankers and financiers in the service of King Philip IV of Spain. The kingdoms of Spain and Portugal embarked upon very different foreign policies during the early modern period. From the start of the sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century, Spain found itself simultaneously sucked into the bitter struggle to contain the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean and felt compelled to assume the role of champion in the defence of Catholicism during the maelstrom of Europe’s wars of religion. Portugal, at least until its annexation and dynastic union with Habsburg Spain in 1580, sought to avoid military entanglements in Europe and focused on the expansion of its overseas empire. After 1580 and until the 1640s the Lusitanian kingdom found itself bound in Spain’s struggle against the emerging naval power of the Dutch, which threatened the existence of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil, Africa and Asia. It is against this background of war that a number of factors united to propel a small number of Portuguese conversos to public prominence as the foremost financiers of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty during the government of Philip IV’s favourite (privado), the Count-Duke

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of Olivares, and especially between the Spanish crown’s bankruptcies of 1627 and 1647. In spite of the income derived from the silver mines in the Americas that supplemented its fiscal revenues, the Spanish monarchy found it difficult to sustain the cost of its many wars and stave off bankruptcy. To enable the Spanish monarchy to pay the salaries and supplies of its armies in Europe, its officials resorted to asientos: international payments and financing contracts that were negotiated and agreed between by the royal exchequer (contaduría mayor) and private individuals (the asentistas). Such contracts effectively offered short-term credit to the crown’s treasury. Asientos not only included a rate of interest to benefit the asentista but also additional costs including a foreign exchange commission, perquisites and a component intended to cover vellón inflation (the difference in value between Spain’s silver coinage and its debased and regularly devalued vellón copper coinage). As such, the cost of the interest of an asiento did not reflect the far lower profits that were made by an asentista. By way of illustration, the cost of an asiento concluded in 1627 amounted to 28.4% but the interest charged by the asentista only represented 8% of that sum. The remaining components (exchange commission 7.2%; perquisite 5% and vellón exchange 5.2%) accounted for the rest. Likewise, in 1642, when the military fortunes of Philip IV were at a particularly low point, the cost of raising an asiento rose to 32.7%, of which the vellón exchange accounted for a staggering 17.4%, whilst the interest remained fixed at 8%. In the light of such figures, it is easy to understand how, as will become clear below, outside observers in seventeenth-century Spain, who did not fully grasp the nature of the asientos, might have been tempted to mistakenly believe that the Spanish monarchy’s lenders were making enormous and excessive profits from the asientos.56 Despite their associated costs, the asiento contracts gave the Spanish crown the necessary flexibility to make the international payments vital to pay and equip its armed forces outside the Iberian Peninsula, and especially those serving in Flanders, at a time when inflation and the debasement of Spanish coinage would otherwise have rendered such payments extremely difficult. By the end of the reign of Philip II in 1598, the Spanish monarchy had become dependent upon high-interest loans made by Genoese bankers to finance its military commitments in the various wars against its European rivals. The accession of King Philip IV of Spain (Philip III of Portugal) in 1621 placed control of the government of the Habsburg monarchy into the hands of his favourite: 56

All of these figures are provided by James C. Boyajian in Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 166.

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the Count-Duke of Olivares. An energetic reformer, the Count-Duke endeavoured to restore the military and financial fortunes of the Spanish monarchy and impose a Spanish hegemony in European affairs in the face of strong Protestant and French challenges. Amongst his many schemes, the Count-Duke sought new ways of financing the heavy burden of debt facing the Habsburg monarchy. Seeking to free Spain from its dependency on Genoese lenders, Olivares planned to substitute the wealthy Portuguese merchants in their stead. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a number of converso merchants based in Lisbon made large fortunes through their involvement in trade with Portugal’s overseas colonies and their trade networks. Secret negotiations began in 1625 and when the Spanish monarchy declared bankruptcy in January 1627, the Portuguese merchants replaced the Genoese. In addition to constituting a new source of funding, they presented the added advantage of being subjects of the Habsburg monarchy and it was hoped that this would prevent, or at least alleviate, the flight of capital beyond the borders of Spain and Portugal. Thus, whilst the role of conversos in royal finances and the collection of taxes in both Portugal and Spain pre-dates the rise of Olivares, it is only after 1627 that they came to acquire a dominating position amongst the Spanish crown’s financiers.57 The rise of the Portuguese asentistas from wealthy merchant families based in Lisbon to the role of preeminent bankers of the Spanish monarchy and the history of their business with the crown have been charted and studied in remarkable detail by James Boyajian. The records of the Spanish royal exchequer indicate that Portuguese merchants signed asientos worth a total of 81 million ducats and fulfilled the conditions of at least 85% of their commissions between 1626 and 1650. Inevitably, especially given the magnitude of the sums involved in the asientos and the possibility of evading justice by seeking refuge amongst the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, there were cases of fraud and theft by unscrupulous Portuguese asentistas but the vast majority of contracts were honoured.58 The power and influence commanded by the most successful of the Portuguese asentistas was remarkable and visible to all. In 1637, the asentista Manuel de Cortizos de Villasante displayed his wealth in Madrid by hosting an extravagant banquet in honour of the King and Queen, which was attended not only by the royal couple but also the cream of Spanish society in the city.59 57 58 59

On the bankruptcy of 1627 and Olivares’ plans see J.H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares. The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 299–304. James C. Boyajian, The Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain 1626 -1650, 175–6. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea, 152.

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The collapse of the ‘Iberian Union’ in 1640, following a Portuguese uprising against Habsburg rule on 1 December, and the fall from power of the CountDuke of Olivares in 1643 heightened anti-Portuguese feeling in Spain and its empire. It was the Portuguese uprising that led to the downfall of the Portuguese merchant communities in Mexico even though the campaign of religious repression waged by the Inquisition in Peru and Cartagena de Indias had begun as early as 1635. In Spain itself, the Inquisitor General Antonio de Sotomayor was replaced in 1643 by Bishop Diego de Arce y Reinoso, who held the position until 1665 and oversaw the rekindling of a campaign of inquisitorial repression particularly directed against the conversos, many of whom fled from the Iberian Peninsula.60 It is worth noting that during the serious rioting that shook Seville in 1652, one of the demands of the populace was that “the Portuguese” should no longer be allowed to collect royal taxes “because [otherwise] they would kill them.”61 The downfall of the Portuguese asentistas, however, was more gradual and far less dramatic. Their position certainly became more fragile after the fall of Olivares, when the Inquisition arrested and prosecuted a number of wealthy conversos of Portuguese origin in Spain during the 1650s and 1660s. Furthermore, the commercial fortunes of many converso merchant families slowly declined after the separation of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, their loss of the lucrative slave trade between Portuguese-Africa and the Spanish-American colonies and, finally, the Spanish crown’s bankruptcy of 1647. It would nonetheless be wrong to think that they disappeared entirely as the increasingly difficult financial situation of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies meant that there still existed a need for their financial services. Some of them still continued to prosper during the later years of the reign of Philip IV and the early part of the reign of his son Carlos II. One such individual was the financier Don Manuel José Cortizos, whose services to the crown were rewarded with the grant of the title of count of Valdefuentes in 1668 and, a few years later, that of Marquis of Villaflores. His brother Sebastián, likewise, was appointed as Spain’s ambassador to Genoa in 1657.62 In neighbouring and newly independent Portugal, the situation of the con­ versos was quite the reverse, at least for a couple of decades. Engaged in a struggle to secure his kingdom’s independence in the face of Spanish opposition and 60 61 62

Elvira Pérez Ferreiro, “Crónica de un exilio forzado. La emigración clandestina de judeoconversos españoles como respuesta al incremento de la presión inquisitorial a mediados del siglo XVII,” Hispania, 217 (2004): 543–570. Anon., Diario exacto de la sublevación de alguna plebe de la parroquía de Omnium Sanctorum, vulgarmente Llamado el Barrio de la Feria, de la M.N. y M.L. ciudad de Sevilla, cometida el miércoles 22 de mayo de 1652 (Seville: Alvarez, 1841), 53–4 and 102–3. Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century 1665–1700, 305.

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eager to maximise the fiscal revenue from trade and loans made by conversos, King João IV and his advisors were more favourably disposed towards them. This stance was influenced in great part by the lobbying of the Jesuit Father and diplomat António Vieira, a tireless campaigner for inquisitorial reform. In February 1649, in the face of bitter protests from the inquisitors, the property and goods of conversos arrested by the Inquisition were exempted from confiscation in exchange for their participation in the formation of a “Company for General Commerce in Brazil” which was intended to boost trade between Portugal and its South American colony. King João IV and his government sought to use the commercial power of the wealthy converso merchants in Lisbon to their advantage much as Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares had done before 1640. However, even in Portugal the respite proved to be relatively shortlived as the privileges granted in 1649 were rescinded in 1657. Lobbying in Rome led the Papacy to decree a temporary suspension of the Inquisition’s activity in Portugal between 1674 and 1681. Ultimately, the suspension was reversed and the Inquisition was re-established as a result of pressure from within the Portuguese church and from the representatives of the three estates (the clergy, the aristocracy and the commons) that gathered for a parliament held in 1679.63 Perceived to be charging excessive interest rates and known to maintain links with Sephardic communities established in Protestant Holland, it is easy to understand how the Portuguese asentistas became a major element in the antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in the Iberian Peninsula during the first half of the seventeenth century. For conspiracy theorists writing in the 1630s and 1640s, the malignant role of the converso asentistas did not limit itself to economic exploitation or parasitism but represented a conscious and carefully plotted destruction of royal finances and consequently of the Habsburg military machine. Explicit public attacks upon the Portuguese asentistas, however, were somewhat muted during the first half of the reign of Philip IV and the government of the Count-Duke of Olivares. Given the peril that public criticism of the Habsburg monarchy’s policies would have entailed for anticonverso writers, it is not surprising that it was often limited to manuscript pamphlets and unprinted memoranda. For most authors of printed works at-

63

J. Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses, 236–330; Anita Novinsky, “Padre António Vieira, a Inquisição e os Judeus,” Novos Estudos, Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento, 29 (1991): 172–181; Ana Maria Homem Leal de Faria, “Uma «teima» do confront de poderes ao malogro da reforma do Tribunal do Santo Oficio. A suspenção da Inquisição portuguesa (1674–1681),” in Inquisição Portuguesa. Tempo, Razão e Circunstância, ed. Luis. Filipe Barreto, José Augusto Mourão, Paulo de Assunção, Ana Cristina da Costa Gomes and Jos. Eduardo Franco (Lisbon: Prefácio, 2007), 77–105.

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tacking conversos, it remained safer to level their vituperations against converso merchants generically. The inquisitorial official Adam de la Parra launches a ferocious attack upon the Portuguese conversos in his Latin opus Pro cautione christiana (“In favour of Christian caution”), illegally printed without a licence in Madrid in 1630. Although it is a treatise defending the statutes of limpieza de sangre, the work is also a condemnation of the power of the Portuguese converso merchants in Spain whom Parra attacks in the final section of his work. As the first two paragraphs of this chapter have indicated, Adam de la Parra portrays the Portuguese converso merchants as responsible for a plot of gigantic proportions that aimed to depopulate Spain of its Old Christian population and replace it with Africans. For Parra, this strategy is merely a repetition of that which the conversos had implement in Portugal. He holds the Portuguese Jews/conversos responsible for funding the voyages of exploration to Asia that had created the Portuguese Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Through these, he claims, the conversos had engineered the emigration of Old Christian Portuguese to distant lands, thus depopulating the Old Christian population of Portugal and ensuring its replacement by enslaved black Africans. Moreover, imperial expansion overseas had also resulted in the importation of luxury goods from Asia by means of which the remaining Old Christians in Portugal had become effeminate, losing their martial vigour and taste for the ‘honest’ pursuit of agricultural labour. The arrival of large numbers of Portuguese conversos following the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 thus represented, in Parra’s eyes, a major threat. Having plotted to exploit trade with the East Indies (i.e. Asia) to destroy Portugal, the conversos were conspiring to do the same to Spain by means of emigration to, and trade with, the West Indies (i.e. the Americas).64 His culprits remained the Portuguese conversos in general rather than the asentistas in particular. The fact that the leading Portuguese asentistas were all originally wealthy merchants whose fortunes were made from intercontinental oceanic trade cannot have been lost on his readers. Despite his role in the Inquisition, Adam de la Parra’s written attacks upon the Portuguese conversos, especially the influential financier Manuel Cortizos, and his criticism of the royal policy conducted by the Count-Duke of Olivares eventually provoked an official response. In 1642, the Count-Duke of Olivares ordered his imprisonment and exile from Madrid.65 The same preoccupation with possible reprisals may well have been behind Fray Diego Gavilán Vela’s 64 65

Juan Adam de la Parra, Pro cautione christiana, fols. 31v–32v. J.H. Elliott, “Nueva luz sobre la prisión de Quevedo y Adam de la Parra,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 169 (1972): 171–182.

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decision to translate the Portuguese work of Vicente da Costa Mattos into Spanish in the late 1620s rather than produce a polemic of his own.66 The most explicit attack upon the Portuguese asentistas was penned around 1633 by Francisco de Quevedo, who follows a similar conspiratorial line of attack to that adopted by his friend Juan Adam de la Parra. After pointing to their commercial contacts throughout Europe and accusing them of acting as spies for Spain’s enemies, Quevedo accuses the converso asentistas of exploiting their position in the transfer of funds to Spanish troops in the Netherlands to deliberately delay the payments. This greatly hampered Spain’s military efforts by causing the mutinies that plagued the Spanish army in Flanders: One must inevitably believe that the delays in the [payment of] salaries are ordered by the Dutch themselves and that the pernicious protests [that the conversos make when negotiating the asientos with the crown] are a clever trick of the conversos and Dutch to ensure that through delays, negotiations and fraud Your [Majesty’s] royal orders should not achieve their objectives in a timely manner.67 Moreover, for Quevedo such treason is part of the wider Jewish conspiracy against Spain. In a clear reference to the forged letters between the Jews of Spain and Constantinople that he discussed elsewhere in his Execración, Quevedo expounds upon the danger represented by the crown’s reliance upon Portuguese converso bankers since “by having become asentistas, they have achieved a greater revenge than any of the machinations plotted by the detestable rabbis in Constantinople.” For Quevedo the asentistas are nothing less than “sponges that the Turk and all the [Protestant] heretics use to absorb the wealth of Spain in order to wring [this wealth] in their synagogues and [use it] against her.” It is preferable, Quevedo argues, for the crown to return to borrowing money from the “most Christian” Genoese than from the Portuguese conversos. Even if, as Quevedo confesses, the wealth of Spain would still leave Spain and go to another land it would not, he notes sarcastically, “go to another God.”68 Given the acerbity of Quevedo’s portrayal of the Portuguese asentistas and its explicit criticism of Olivares’ policies towards the Portuguese converso bankers it is not surprising that the work was never printed.

66 67 68

Vicente da Costa Mattos, Discurso contra los iudios, tr. Fray Diego Gavilán Vela (Salamanca: Antonia Ramirez, 1631). Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, 80–1. Francisco de Quevedo, Execración contra los Judíos, 59, 79–80 and 84.

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Authors continued to attack the asentistas in the late 1630s and early 1640s but only under the cover of anonymity. In January 1640, an anonymous treatise attacking the role of the Portuguese conversos in the economy was printed in Madrid. It is widely attributed to the historian and man of letters José Pellicer de Ossau Salas y Tovar although some believe it to have been the work of Juan Adam de la Parra. The work – entitled El comercio impedido por los enemigos de esta monarquía (“Commerce hindered by the enemies of this monarchy”) – presents the Portuguese conversos as the “enemies” mentioned in the title and as the main force impeding Spain’s economic recovery. They are men who “conducted their business negotiations with a mask,” hiding their strategy of weakening Spain and using their secret economic war to fulfil their ultimate fearful ambition: to reverse the expulsion of 1492 and see synagogues openly erected in Spain and Portugal.69 In a similar vein, the anonymous author of another treatise, written at some point between 1641 and 1648 but unfinished and never disseminated, fulminates against what he describes as the close kinship and business links between the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam and the Iberian conversos. From his point of view, the logical consequence was that the income of the Spanish royal treasury served to finance the Dutch West Indies Company so that “everything here [in the Iberian Peninsula] is nothing but fraud and artifice.” The converso plot aims at nothing less than “bleeding dry the royal treasury and emptying Castile of its substance.”70 5

Conclusion

The first half of the seventeenth century marked the high point of the popularity of the conspiracy theory that the Jews and conversos were taking control of the Iberian economies in order to destroy them for the benefit of Protestant enemies. The decline of the Portuguese asentistas after 1643, together with the successful negotiation of the Spanish-Dutch peace treaty at Münster in 1648 and the Portuguese-Dutch peace treaty at The Hague in 1661, appear to have stripped the notion of a secret economic war waged by conversos of much of its substance. Allegations of economic collaboration with the Dutch were made in the later work of Francisco de Torrejoncillo (including its many eighteenthcentury reprints) and Antonio de Contreras, who plagiarized Torrejoncillo

69 70

Kimberly Lynn, Between Court and Confessional. The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 215–224. Fernando Díaz Esteban, El frustrado retorno de los judíos en el siglo XVII, 64–5.

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extensively, but they were presented more as historical evidence of converso/ Jewish perfidy than as representative of a current threat.71 The popular hatred of conversos and the fear generated by their economic role in the Iberian world nonetheless lived on in the eighteenth century, well after they had ceased to be a major preoccupation for the Inquisition and the decline of their employment by the crown as asentistas and tax farmers. In 1727, for instance, the Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres still blamed them for the parlous state of the Spanish economy, railing against what he perceived to be their “usual life” of “profit and usury” through occupations such as rentiers, merchants and other trades “of idlers.” Like so many of his Spanish and Portuguese predecessors of the previous century, Moya Torres was more than ready to perceive that these professions were purposefully selected by conversos with the specific aim of fulfilling their desire for “revenge against Christian blood.” The conversos were no longer accused of squirreling away their ill-gotten gains in Holland but rather in Islamic North Africa.72 Just as was the case in so many other aspects, the proponents of the economic element of the antisemitic conspiracy theory built their narrative upon facts. The major and highly conspicuous role played by conversos in both European and intercontinental trade as well as their links across political-religious boundaries and especially with the Sephardic communities in northern Europe are undeniably true. Early modern Iberian conspiracists perceived only conspiratorial motives behind these true facts. They created an explanatory framework for the decline of the Iberian economies that placed the blame squarely upon the Jewish plot and its covert agents: converso merchants and asentistas. It was, of course, an easy conclusion to reach for individuals who were convinced of the existence of a Jewish plot and all-to-ready to perceive its adverse consequences upon Spain military fortunes in Europe and overseas. Furthermore, it was a conspiracy theory that reduced the complex and varied causes of Spain’s economic decline to a single cause: one that could easily be put forward, as indeed it was, in propaganda produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a development will be recognised by those familiar with the rise of antisemitism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe. In many ways, events in the early modern Iberian world mirror, and it could be argued, are a precursor of, those that transpired more than two centuries later. The 71 72

Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 150; Antonio de Contreras, Mayor fiscal contra judíos, 180. Francisco Máximo de Moya Torres, Manifiesto universal de los males envejecidos que España padece, y de las causas de que nacen, y remedios que à cada uno en su clase corresponde (Madrid: Francisco Laso, n.d.), 121–2.

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emancipation of European Jewry in the nineteenth century and the cultural assimilation of many Jews removed legal restrictions placed upon them, opening new economic opportunities, just as the status of the conversos as converts or the descendants of converts also did in Spain and Portugal, thus creating the perfect conditions for the fertile imagination of antisemites to perceive a vast Jewish economic conspiracy. In both cases, there was a noticeable shift from the ‘simple’ antisemitic prejudice and resentment, based on the association of Jews with usury and moneylending which characterised the medieval period, to a more complex antisemitic worldview in which the economic activity of Jews (or conversos) is represented as a deliberate and secret strategy by which they seek to destroy either Catholic Christendom (in the early modern Iberian world) or Western nations (for the later centuries). In both cases, the conspicuous role played by a select group of rich Jewish (or supposedly Jewish in the case of the conversos) bankers with connections extending across Europe and the world and who possessed privileged access to government circles – such as the Cortizos family in seventeenth-century Madrid or the Rothschild family in later centuries – provided powerful figures of hate for polemicists. In both cases, however, antisemites placed the blame not just on those wealthy families but on all Jews (and conversos) collectively. Finally, the idea of a Jewish economic plot also fed off the exacerbated social tensions, resentments and suspicions created by an emerging capitalist system deemed to be a threat to the existing social order and alien to Christian ethical and moral values. Indeed, the Jewish economic plot featured prominently in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (protocols 2, 20 and 21), becoming an essential feature of antisemitic thought and propaganda across Europe. The fantasy that the Jews and conversos entirely controlled the early modern European commercial economy and bent it to suit their geopolitical motives was an outrageous distortion of the role that they played in reality. It is hardly surprising that such a conspiracy theory – focused as it was on the Jewish community in Holland and the role of the converso asentistas between 1627 and 1647 – spawned the belief that the Jews controlled the Dutch military through their commercial activity. Again, a similar fantasy emerged in the twentieth century. The 1940 Nazi propaganda film Die Rothschilds, directed by Erich Waschneck, presents the banker Nathan Rothschild and his family as draining the wealth of the states of continental Europe in order to use it not just to enrich themselves but also to fund the British military and, through it, secure Jewish domination of Europe. It is probably one of the major ironies of early modern Iberian history that the conversos were accused of undermining Spanish power through their excessive dedication to commercial pursuits and a lack of martial spirit, whilst the crucial role played by converso asentitas in

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facilitating Spanish military campaigns during the two decades between 1627 and 1647 was ignored. In the eyes of antisemitic propagandists, the conversos simply could do no good and this mantra held for the economy just as much as it did for any other aspect of the converso presence and activity in early modern Spain and Portugal.

Conclusion Conclusion

265

Conclusion On Sunday 30 June 1630, the Augustinian preacher Felipe Moreira stood at a pulpit and preached to a large crowd of prisoners, officials and onlookers ­during an inquisitorial auto de fe held in the Portuguese town of Évora. The number of prisoners paraded through the streets and exhibited to the crowd was exceptionally large: two hundred and forty nine in total, including one hundred and sixty-five women and eighty-four men. The atmosphere was doubtless electric. The crowds of onlookers were still reeling from news of the sacrilege committed against consecrated hosts in the Lisboan church of Santa Engracia, for which judaizing conversos were blamed. As in many other Portuguese towns, Old Christian students at the University of Évora had rioted when the news of the outrage broke out, and the town’s university was temporarily closed as a consequence of the unrest.1 Furthermore, public horror at the sacrilege committed in Lisbon was probably compounded by the dispiriting news of the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco in Brazil earlier that year. Felipe Moreira’s firebrand sermon, in which he addresses the converso prisoners directly, is a mix of vitriolic attacks upon judaizing conversos, comparing judaizers to the plague and blaming them for Portugal’s decline, whilst at the same time appealing to them to forsake their heresy and wholeheartedly embrace Catholicism: Do you want to live amongst us? Do you aspire to honours and to prestigious [social] positions with us? Well, why do you not show us that you are Christians?2 Moreira conveys a simple but powerful message. Even though he spoke to the converso prisoners, his words are obviously also intended to make an impression upon the onlookers and are deliberately accessible to all. Conversos, Moreira maintains, must literally ‘display’ and ‘perform’ their Christian identity if they wish to live amongst Catholics, earn acceptance within the community and rightfully have access to “honours and positions of prestige.” Failure to do so could only have dramatic consequences, which the preacher outlines

1 António de Oliveira, “O motim dos estudantes de Coimbra contra os cristãos-novos em 1630,” Biblos, 57 (1981): 597–627. 2 Felipe Moreira, Sermam que pregou o Padre Mestre Fr. Philippe Moreira... no auto da fe que se celebrou em Evora a 30. de Junho de [1]630 (Évora: Manoel Carualho, 1630), fol. 8r.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_009

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clearly whilst expressing his relief and thanks to God for the willingness of repentant conversos to recant their crypto-Judaism: We owe infinite thanks to the divine goodness that has moved you [conversos] to have a change of heart as well as a thousand thanks for your wise decision to embrace the light [of Catholicism] and flee from the fire [in which unrepentant heretics are burned]. If you had been burned [at the stake] it would have been because you did not do this but today it appears that you have yielded to reason (…) this is what we [in the church] want: that you should understand [the Catholic faith] and not be burned.3 The message – abandon the judaizing heresy, embrace Catholicism and do so visibly or face death by fire – could not be clearer. It was intended not just for the converso prisoners but also for the Old Christians observing the spectacular ritual that was the auto de fe. Moreira’s sermon encapsulates the principal point that this book seeks to make. For Moreira, it is not enough that the conversos accept Catholicism. Rather, our preacher makes it clear that acceptance within the community of true Catholics is conditional upon visible demonstrations of their adhesion to Catholicism. Why, Moreira asks, do these descendants of Jews refuse to conform to the norms of religious and social behaviour established by the Catholic Church and that defined the Catholic community? It is tempting to interpret the survival of the various antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in the early modern Iberian world as evidence that the figure of the Jew as a demonically inspired ‘other’ had become woven into the cultural fabric of Spain and Portugal. To a certain extent, such an interpretation is not without foundations. The figure of the evil Jew or judaizing con­ verso, plotting to overthrow the Christian faith, is still put on display in centuries-old popular celebrations and plays held every year in Spain such as the feast of the vaquilla held in honour of Saint Sebastian in the village of Fresnedillas (province of Madrid) and the mystery play performed in the streets of Elche (Valencia). Likewise, the ceremonial burning of a mannequin depicting a performer of ‘Jewish ceremonies’ during annual Carnival celebrations in the village of Villanueva de la Vera (Extremadura) appears to be linked to the burning of converso judaizers by the Inquisition. A similar phenomenon has also been observed in England where, centuries after the expulsion of 1290, memories of the Jews and of the Blood Libel accusation were far from forgotten. They continued to be evoked in literary productions such as Chaucer’s 3 Felipe Moreira, Sermam, fol. 19v.

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Canterbury Tales and mystery plays.4 Notwithstanding this, it would be far too facile to limit our understanding of the antisemitic conspiracy theories that circulated in early modern Spain and Portugal to a perception of them as ‘cultural phenomena’ or maybe even as ‘folkloric.’ 1

The Elusive Converso Enemy: a Tool to Construct a Collective Identity

To fully understand the causes of the widespread dissemination and endurance of Iberian antisemitic conspiracy theories, one must also look to a common aim amongst those men who assisted the survival of antisemitic conspiracism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Of course, as it will be clear from the preceding chapters, it is important not to overlook the particular regional, religious and historical contexts in which the polemicists who wrote or preached virulent anti-converso propaganda and the supporters of the statutes of limpieza de sangre (and often the two were actually one and the same) produced their works of propaganda. Nonetheless, these same works also embraced and promoted, explicitly or implicitly, the notion of an idealized and homogenous Catholic identity. This was a crucial characteristic of the era of ‘confessionalization,’ which linked the processes of religious identity formation and state building.5 The early modern Spanish and Portuguese crowns and churches embraced and promoted the idea that the imposition of Catholic orthodoxy was a means by which their subjects could be turned into an obedient and homogenized population. Even the Jesuit theologian Juan de Mariana, who was not an anticonverso conspiracist, considered religious unity as the “social bond” (societatis vinculum) essential to achieving social harmony.6 For many writers and propagandists in the early modern Iberian world, this identity was defined by its opposition to a clearly identified and differentiated ‘other’ that, depending on the place and time, could just as well be the excoriated figure of the judaizing converso, the Islamizing Morisco or the ‘Lutheran.’ The religious and cultural homogeneity that was to be achieved through the imposition of a strict social control and ‘discipline’ – enforced by the inquisitors – would, it was believed, create social and political unity as a corollary. In her recent analysis of the 4 Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Stephen Spector, “Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays,” Comparative Drama, 13 (1979): 3–16. 5 As described in the conclusion of chapter 1 in this book. 6 Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione (Toledo: Pedro Rodriguez, 1599), vol. 3, 421–6.

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practices of “pathological homogenization” in the processes of state building in Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Heather Rae argues that their “cultural dimension” is often neglected and that “state-builders cannot do otherwise than draw upon the prevailing cultural resources available to them as they seek to build a unified collective identity.”7 The case studies that Rae examines include the persecution of Moriscos and Jews/conversos in early modern Spain and of the Huguenots of France under Louis XIV as well as twentieth-century instances of expulsions, ethnic cleansing and genocide. She does not, however, analyse the role that conspiracism has played in the construction of collective identities. This is an unfortunate oversight as conspiracy theories and their exploitation in propaganda have featured prominently in all of these case studies. Through their power to exploit existing stereotypes about Jews and to provoke intense existential fears, conspiracy theories provide a powerful resource to those seeking to construct a collective identity. As some members of the ecclesiastical and secular elites of early modern Spain and Portugal sought to define an idealized Christian – or more precisely Catholic – community it was inevitable that they would turn their gaze towards those elements within Iberian society whose failure (whether real or perceived) to embrace normative Catholicism marked them out: the Moriscos (until their expulsion in 1609) and the conversos. The preceding chapters have made it clear that a number of Iberian preachers and churchmen proactively participated in the propagation of conspiracy theories about judaizing conversos through their sermons and printed works. Fear and hatred became driving factors in much religious and political discourse about conversos and conspiracy theories created a moral panic in which the judaizing conversos became, to use Stanley Cohen’s now classic expression, “folk devils.” In turn, the menace posed by these “folk devils” legitimized the high level of social and religious control that the crown and church sought to exercise over early modern Iberians. This control was enacted through the social and ethnic discrimination of the statutes of limpieza de sangre and the policing of religious beliefs by the tribunals of the Inquisition. It also legitimized the calls of those who were dissatisfied with the status quo and appealed for even more extreme measures such as universally applied discriminatory statutes or even mass expulsion. In an influential study entitled Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson associates the rise of mass vernacular literacy and the development of “print capitalism” (the mass 7 Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–3.

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circulation of newssheets) with the rise of modern nationalism. Literacy and cheap newssheets, Anderson argues, enabled growing numbers of individuals separated by geography to relate to each other and thus created the “imagined community” that became the modern-day nation.8 Anderson’s theory is relevant to our understanding of the exploitation of conspiracy theories to define a collective identity. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, some conspiracy theories were spread through word-of-mouth, by means of the dissemination of manuscript documents and by the circulation of manuscripts copies of documents such as the forged letters of the Jews of Spain and Constantinople. Notwithstanding this, the increasing significance of the vernacular printing press in the circulation of Iberian antisemitic conspiracy theories is certainly clear. Whilst early conspiracist texts such as the Fortalitium Fidei of Alonso de Espina were written in Latin, later works appeared in vernacular Spanish or Portuguese. The printing (and re-printing) of popular antisemitic books such as those of Costa Mattos and Torrejoncillo certainly assisted in their dissemination (as far afield as the American colonies) and it is clear from their tone and structure that these works were not written for a learned readership but for lay readers with only a limited understanding of theology. Moreover, even though the printed newssheet industry was less developed in the Iberian than in northern Europe prior to the eighteenth century, cheaply printed newsletters, chapbooks and short accounts of events (relaciones de sucesos) designed to broadcast news of events across the Iberian world did circulate. The survival rate for early modern Spanish chapbooks is unfortunately very low but what does exist seems to confirm that cheap printed texts also played a significant part in circulating the image of the plotting Jews/conversos. Between 1601 and 1623, for instance, no less than twenty-three relaciones of thirteen different autos de fe were printed in vernacular Spanish.9 As the spread of literacy still remained relatively limited in the Iberian world, printed ‘news-ballads’ appear to have bridged the divide between oral and literate cultures. None other than Spain’s foremost playwright, Lope de Vega, was the composer of a printed ballad by means of which the news of the host desecration alleged to have taken

8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 9 A. Domínguez Guzmán, “Relaciones de autos de fe impresas en el siglo XVII,” Varia bibliographica. Homenaje a José Simón Díaz (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1988): 217–30. On the low survival of early modern Iberian chapbooks see A.S. Wilkinson, “Bum Fodder and Kindling: Cheap Print in Renaissance Spain,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 90 (2013): 871–93.

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place in Madrid in 1629 was relayed to readers and listeners far from Madrid.10 Just as importantly, printed copies of sermons preached during inquisitorial autos de fe helped to spread fears about converso plots and, as it has been highlighted in the previous chapters, they were one of the major sources of information for polemicists like Costa Mattos and Torrejoncillo.11 An excellent example of the use of printed texts to promote a sense of collective identity based on a shared Catholic faith and rejection of an essentialized Jewish ‘other’ is the four-page relación of the auto de fe staged in the plaza mayor of Madrid on 21 January 1624 that, most unusually, featured only a single heretic. The man in question, Benito Ferrer, was a Catalan “vagabond” and ­impostor who fraudulently pretended to be a priest to collect alms from the faithful. Arrested for his deception by the church authorities, he seized a consecrated host during a mass held in prison, cursed at it and desecrated it by stamping upon it. Handed over to the Inquisition and condemned as a “hereje sacramentario,” Benito Ferrer was condemned to be burned at the stake. Whilst there is some confusion in the archival documentation as to whether Ferrer’s motivations for his actions were the result of crypto-Jewish beliefs or Lutheran sympathies, he is presented in the relación as a hardened judaizer. Ferrer is described as a “Hebrew, on his mother’s side” whose “evil customs, acquired through his mother’s [Jewish] milk, finally came to light” and who died unrepentantly proclaiming his faith in Judaism and “convinced of his malice.” His sacrilegious action is described as part of a demonic conspiracy, since it was motivated by a “diabolical will.” The author of the relación describes the procession, sermon and execution but, more importantly, presents a Catholic community united in their ritualized condemnation of the heretic. The procession through the streets of Madrid included inquisitors and inquisitorial officials as well as hundreds of churchmen from different religious orders. The crowd, the relación states, which included both the cream of the aristocracy and thousands of commoners, greeted the arrival of the heretic in the plaza mayor with a collective roar of “death! death!” (muera! muera!) Fortunately, the sermon preached at this auto by the Dominican Cristóbal de Torres was also printed. In his sermon, Fray Torres lays particular stress on the collective identity of the onlookers, praising the inhabitants of Madrid, whether commoners or aristocrats, as a “Christian people” and the town of Madrid itself for being the seat of a Spanish 10 11

F. Lope de Vega, Sentimientos á los agravios de Christo nuestro bien por la Nacion Hebrea dedicados al principe de España nuestro Señor: en sexta rima (n.p.: n.n., n.d.). For an analysis of these printed sermons see E. Glaser, “Invitation to Intolerance: a study of the Portuguese sermons preached at autos-da-fé,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 27 (1956): 327–385.

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monarch “por excelencia Católico” and chides the heretic for daring the commit an act of sacrilege in this “Catholic court.” According to the author of the relación, Ferrer’s execution, following his transfer from the plaza to the Puerta de Fuencarral, was witnessed by a crowd estimated (possibly with some exaggeration) by the anonymous author to number seventy thousand.12 The considerable cost and effort expended to bring about the ritualized spectacle of Benito Ferrer’s death, and then publicize it widely through a printed relación and sermon, makes it clear that the auto of 1624 was intended to disseminate a message. Angered and disgusted by the sacrilege inflicted by the feared judaizer upon the beloved body of Christ, the crowd was prompted to become both an ‘emotional community’ and an ‘imagined community,’ united by its adherence to orthodox Catholicism and rejection of the hated crypto-judaizer. Early modern Iberians reading manuscript or printed texts or listening to sermons or ballads were consistently offered a terrifying image: that of a secret Jew plotting and working tirelessly to destroy their faith and secular state. In his work on the “figure of the Jew” in 1930s Germany, Omer Bartov has studied how the construction of collective identities is accomplished “by means of defining enemies and the making of victims.” Bartov underlines the crucial point that the image of the Jew that was constructed by the Nazis represented “an elusive enemy (…)” made “insidious by dint of being both distinctly and irreversibly alien and capable of such mental and physical dissimulation that made him appear ‘just like us.’” The fantasized figure of the Jewish ‘other’, blamed for the defeat in World War I, “came to haunt people’s imagination all the more” and to represent “the entirety of Germany’s foreign foes.” Moreover, an obsession with racial purity rendered everyone suspect of potentially having Jewish ancestry and engendered an equal obsession with the need to establish a ‘pure’ racial ancestry according to the genealogical criteria set by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.13 Comparisons between the early modern Iberian World and Nazi Germany have their limits and must not be pushed to absurd lengths but the similarities are so unsettling in this case that they do invite further comment. In her polemical comparison of “inquisitorial Spain” and Nazi Germany, the Belgian anthropologist Christiane Stallaert has noted the similarity of the racialized 12

13

Relación del auto público de la Fe que se celebró en esta Corte, a domingo 21 de Enero de 1624 (Madrid, 1624); Cristóbal de Torres, Sermon predicado (por orden del Conseio Supremo de la Santa y General Inquisición) en el Auto de Fè, que celebró el Santo Tribunal de Toledo para castigar la insolencia heretical de Benito Ferrer Catalan a 21 de Enero, de 1624 (Madrid: ­Diego Flamenco, 1624). Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104–5.

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rhetoric of exclusion in early modern Spain and twentieth-century Germany. Even though there is no historical continuity or link between the two, Stallaert argues that in both cases the “ethnocentric ideal, religious in one case and racial in the other” was articulated in discriminatory measures that elevated it to the status of a “political religion” (religión política).14 As the Iberian churches and crowns sought to create a collective identity based on an adherence to normative Catholicism, antisemitic conspiracists promoted the existence of an ‘elusive enemy.’ This ‘elusive enemy,’ the secret Jew, was so ubiquitous and dangerous that its eradication legitimated the controversial statutes of racial purity, the existence of the Inquisition, and the monarchy’s claims to act as the protector of the church and its dogmas. The feared judaizing converso was the perfect “elusive enemy” in the early modern Iberian world. For some Iberian authors, the threat that this “elusive” Jewish enemy represented made conversos the greatest enemy, surpassing even the despised Moriscos and the hated ‘Lutherans.’ An unofficial hierarchy of infidels and heretics had existed in the minds of some Christian polemicists in Spain and elsewhere in Europe since the medieval period and was expressed in their rhetoric. The famous twelfth-century abbot of Cluny Peter the Venerable described the Jews as “vile blasphemers, worse than any Saracens,” to which he also added that they had become “worse than pagans and worse even than demons.” Likewise, the frequently reiterated notion of Nicholas of Cusa that the Jews not only influenced Muhammed but that “three sly Jews” corrupted the text of the Koran after his death in order to make it hostile to Christians reinforced the image of Jews as the greater threat.15 Such themes were echoed within the Iberian Peninsula. One thirteenth-century poem in praise of the Virgin Mary (Cantiga de Santa Maria number 348) describes the Jews as “worse than the moros.” Likewise, the sixteenth-century Spanish author of a fictional dialogue could ask the question “whether is it worse to be descended from Jews, Muslims or heretics” and has an imaginary respondent conclude that it is “a greater infamy to be the descendent of Jews.”16 When it came to heretics, some Iberian authors elaborated a similar hierarchy assigning first place to the judaizing conversos. In the fifteenth century, Alonso de Espina categorized 14 15

16

Christiane Stallaert, Ni una gota de sangre impura. La España inquisitorial y la Alemania nazi cara a cara (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006), quotation from page 22. Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, ed. and tr. Irven M. Resnick (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 23 and 33; Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei and Cribratio Alkorani: Translation and Analysis (Minneapolis: A.J. Banning Press, 1990), 79. Antonio Agustín, Dialogos de las armas i linages de la nobleza de España (Madrid: Juan de Zúñiga, 1734), 90–2.

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conversos as “worse heretics (peiores heretici) than the Arians and any others who have erred against the Christian faith.” Two centuries later, Francisco de Torrejoncillo presents a dialogue in which a Jew about to convert in 1492 warns a Christian that Jews/conversos will always be “the greatest and most earnest enemies of the Christians.”17 Drawing up a hierarchy of Spain and Portugal’s internal enemies, one seventeenth-century commentator went so far as to present the threat posed by the “intelligent, wise and cunning” conversos as far worse than the menace of the Moriscos, who are dismissed as merely “ignorant, rustic laborers.”18 The conspiracy theories studied in this book doubtless helped to sustain this characterization of the elusive judaizing converso as the greatest clear and present danger to early modern Iberian society. These conspiracy theories about the ‘elusive’ converso enemy were fantasies that distorted and exaggerated facts about the conversos in order to create a culture of fear. No one could deny that there were openly Jewish Sephardic communities established in countries hostile to Spain, Portugal and Catholicism and that some conversos did indeed act as informants for these hostile powers. Moreover, it was evident to any observer in early modern Spain and Portugal that conversos and Sephardic Jews were disproportionately involved in intercontinental trade, tax farming, money lending to governments and the medical professions. The conspiracy theories, however, presented a narrative in which all these facts were generalized and presented as conclusive evidence, in and of themselves, of the Jewish plot. Facts that did not fit into this narrative, or that contradicted it, were completely ignored. By way of illustration, the role played by wealthy Portuguese conversos in bankrolling the Spanish and Portuguese crowns during the 1630s and 1640s is conveniently omitted from the conspiracist narrative. The existence of converso spies serving the Habsburg monarchy or the collaboration of Old Christians with the Dutch in seventeenth-century Brazil is similarly ignored. Finally, and worst of all, forged documents were produced (the letters between the Jews of Spain and Constantinople) to bolster the credibility of the conspiracy theories by providing the ‘irrefutable proof’ of the Jewish conspiracy. The sum total of these exaggerations and forgeries was the creation of a coherent narrative in which centre stage was given to a fantastic worldwide Jewish conspiracy orchestrated by the judaizing conversos in Iberia and the Sephardic communities established outside of it. 17 18

Espina, Alonso de, Fortalitium fidei (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1494), fols. 54v–55r; Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1676), 18–9. B.L., Egerton, 344, fols. 64r–79v.

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The fear and disgust of the Jews and judaizing conversos which the conspiracist propaganda produced in Spain and Portugal sought to arouse was balanced by another objective: to inspire love of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the church. The outrage expressed in sermons and polemical literature over acts of religious sacrilege, such as those supposedly committed in Lisbon and Madrid during the early 1630s, was of course matched by an emphasis on the need for the faithful to manifest their love for the Catholic faith and the church. Preachers officiating at inquisitorial autos de fe in Spain and Portugal consistently contrast the ingratitude of the conversos with the compassion of the suffering Christ (Luke 23:34) and the loving nature of the church. The church, they always emphasize, is ever willing to embrace back into her bosom those who truly repent of their past errors and infidelity and freely accept its dogmas and sacraments.19 The conspiracist narrative consistently emphasized the equal threat posed by the Jews to Old Christians as individuals and to the church/Christianity as a whole. Individual Iberian Old Christians were encouraged to be fearful of being murdered by converso doctors or of military conquest by non-Catholic forces allied to the Jews but it was the church and the entire Christian community that was the victim of acts of religious sacrilege against the consecrated host and images or at risk of having its hierarchy infiltrated by judaizers. Francisco de Torrejoncillo, to cite but one example, explicitly tells his readers that the Jews/conversos would seek to destroy Christians, Christ and His divine Law [i.e. the Christian faith] “with rebellions and traps (…) from birth almost as if it were an original sin [of the Jews/conversos] to be an enemy of [Christians, Christ and Christianity].”20 By conflating the risks presented to both the individual and the collective, the conspiracy theories clearly sought to foster a tightening of ties between the people and the church who must band together in the face of a common and very dangerous enemy: the elusive Jew/converso. The fact that antisemitic conspiracy theories were deliberately exploited to issue emotional appeals to a collective Catholic identity must not be cynically interpreted as implying that those responsible for their dissemination, mostly churchmen, did not believe in them. On the contrary, a significant number of 19

20

For many Portuguese examples see Luís Fernando Costa Cavalheiro, “E Cristo é a única voz de todo o Mundo”: a defesa da respublica christiana nos sermões de auto-de-fé da inquisição portuguesa (1612–1640), M.A. dissertation, Universidade Federal do Paraná (Curitiba, 2015), 182–191; For a Spanish example see Fr. Francisco de Soria, Sermon predicado en la solemne octava, que la congregacion del Santo Oficio celebrò en el real convento de S. Domingo, à los desagravios de Christo ofendido en su imagen (Lisbon: Domingo Lopes Rosa, 1644). Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra Judíos, 61–2.

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early modern churchmen and aristocrats – possibly the overwhelming majority although there is no quantifiable way to be certain – believed wholeheartedly in the reality of the ‘Jewish plot’ and the menace of the judaizing conversos. Away from propaganda, the private correspondence between inquisitors and their superiors in Madrid or Lisbon and between monarchs and Popes offers revealing evidence of this. Thus, for instance, there are no grounds to doubt that King João III was sincere when he articulated his fear of the spread of crypto-Judaism in a letter to the Pope in 1545 (see chapter 3). Likewise, the Bishop of Portalegre’s unsolicited, private and urgent letter to the crown in 1584 regarding a purported Jewish plot to infiltrate the medical professions denotes an earnest belief in its authenticity (see chapter 2). The secular and ecclesiastical elite of the early modern Iberian world was just as much a cultural product of its history as the rest of the population. 2

Epilogue: the Survival of the Conspiracist Narrative after 1750

After its initial burst of anti-Jewish repression between 1480 and 1530, the inquisitorial persecution of supposedly judaizing conversos in Spain peaked in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the fear of the “secret Jews” disappeared in the eighteenth century. There was a renewed wave of trials against conversos during the 1710s and 1720s, which the historian Julio Caro Baroja (1914–1995) has described as the “final repression” waged by the Inquisition against crypto-Judaism in Spain.21 Yet even after this last inquisitorial ‘Jew-hunt’ small numbers of men and women continued to find themselves arrested and prosecuted as suspected crypto-judaizers. The inquisitorial tribunals continued to receive denunciations, and initiated investigations, against some suspected judaizers in the late eighteenth and even early nineteenth centuries. In Peru, the inquisitors initiated investigations after 1750 against various men and women who were highly unlikely to have any converso ancestry but still suspected of being secret Jews. None of these investigations led to successful trials but they were linked by a common theme: the allegation that

21

Julio Caro Baroja, Los judios en la españa moderna y contemporanea (Madrid: Ediciones Arión, 1986), vol. 3, 91–132; Rafael de Lera García, “Gran ofensiva antijudía de la Inquisición de Granada 1715–27,” Chronica nova: Revista de historia moderna de la Universidad de Granada, 17 (1989): 147–170; José Luis Buitrago González, “Serranía críptica: la última gran persecución contra judaizantes en la España del siglo XVIII,” Revista de la Inquisición, 17 (2013): 11–44.

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the suspect had desecrated an image of Christ.22 A woman who visited a shop in the town of Piura (northern Peru) in 1773 and stepped upon a crucifix that had been left on the floor of the shop was so offended by what she considered to be the irreverent treatment of such a sacred object that she forthwith denounced the shopkeeper to the Inquisition since, she claimed, “only Jews do such a thing” (solo judíos hacían esso).23 One man was prosecuted for “heretical propositions and Judaism” in Mexico as late as 1795. Back in Spain a woman in Toledo was denounced as a judaizer by her confessor in 1801 and that same year a soldier stationed in the Canary Islands who uttered an impious tirade during a mass was seriously suspected of being a judaizer.24 The decline in the power of the Inquisition in eighteenth-century Spain, and in the number of trials of conversos, did not lead to a ‘petering out’ of Spain’s early modern antisemitism, with its distinctive mix of religious and proto-racial elements, and its replacement by a new racialized antisemitism imported from northern Europe in general and France in particular. In reality, the situation is more nuanced. In the wake of the condemnation of freemasonry by the papacy in 1738, an embryonic version of the fantasy of a Jewishfreemason conspiracy against Christian Europe seems to have taken root in Spain well before it did elsewhere in Europe and certainly well before the appearance of the famous conspiratorial works of Augustin Barruel and John Robinson in the final years of the eighteenth century. In 1745, an inquisitor in Valladolid confided his fears in a letter that “the founders of freemasonry are influenced by Judaism.” Likewise, when the Spanish priest and missionary José Torrubia translated into Spanish the pastoral letter of an Italian bishop attacking freemasonry in 1752 he chose to give it the title of Centinela contra FrancsMasones, directly inspiring himself from the Centinela contra Judíos of Francisco de Torrejoncillo.25 Some freemasons arrested by the Inquisition were also suspected of Judaism. This was the case of the Italian painter Felipe Febris, put on trial in Mexico in 1785, and the Portuguese Josef Riggen, arrested in Málaga in 1791.26 The clearest and most public articulation of the perceived association of Judaism with freemasonry and political liberalism came in April 22 23 24 25 26

René Millar Carvacho, La Inquisición de Lima. Tomo III (1697–1820) (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1998), 401–6. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,649, exp. 32. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,732, exp. 37; legajo 134, exp. 17; legajo 1,820, exp. 14 and legajo 3,727, exp.13. José Torrubia, Centinela contra Francs-Masones (Madrid: Agustín de Gordejuela, 1752); ­Javier Domínguez Arribas, El enemigo judeo-masónico en la propaganda franquista (1936– 1945) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2013), 51. A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,732, exp. 8; Javier Domínguez Arribas, El enemigo ­judeo-masónico, 51–2.

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1815. In one of the last edicts of faith proclaimed by the Spanish Inquisition, Inquisitor General Francisco Javier Mier y Campillo railed against “the evil seed sown so abundantly across our land both by that immoral mob of Jews and fanatics who have desecrated it through the unfortunate freedom to write, print and publish their errors.”27 Such documented cases of the survival of anti-converso feeling and conspiracist beliefs may well have been influenced by the continued circulation and apparent popularity of anti-Jewish literature. Torrejoncillo’s Centinela contra Judíos was so popular in the eighteenth century that it underwent at least eight reprints in Spain and Portugal during the first half of the eighteenth century. It was joined by works such as Mateo de Anguiano’s La nueva Jerusalen en que la perfidia hebraica reiteró con nuevos ultrages la passion de Christo salvador del mundo (Madrid, 1709), Fray Félix Alamín’s Impugnacion contra el Talmud de los judios, al Coran de Mahoma, y contra los hereges (Madrid, 1727) and Antonio de Contreras’s Mayor Fiscal contra Judíos (Madrid, 1736). As late as 1767, and with subsequent reprints in 1777 and 1780, there appeared an account collating the medieval stories of the ritual murders of the child-saints Werner of Oberwesel in Germany and Simon of Trent in Italy with that of the “Holy Child” of La Guardia in Spain. It was produced with the explicit intention of reminding its readers of the “infernal hatred that the Jews feel towards Christians.”28 Finally, the subject and memory of host desecration and ritual number by judaizing conversos was perpetuated in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spain by a surprisingly large number of anonymous and cheaply printed ballads intended for lay readers.29 In 1780 this enduring belief in a plot against the church by secret judaizers brought about a decidedly bizarre turn of events. Between 1780 and 1782, the tribunal of Cartagena de Indias notified the Supreme Council in Madrid that it 27 28 29

Francisco Martí Gilabert, La Abolición de la Inquisición en España (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1975), 302. Manuel Martin, Historia verdadera y lastimosa del niño de Tridento y el Niño de la Guardia con el joven Bernero (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Manuel Martín, 1767). See, for instance, the following examples conserved in the British Library: El mercader de Toledo: Nuevo romance, en que se refiere un milagroso portento que sucedió en la ciudad de Toledo con un devote de la Santisima Cruz (Córdoba: Imprenta de Don Rafael Garcia Rodriguez, n.d.); Los judios de Llerena: Nueva relacion y verdadero romance en que se da cuenta de los hechos y atrocidades que egecutaron seis judios y cinco judias (Valladolid: Imprenta de Santaren, n.d.); Los quatro judios. Nueva relacion y curioso romance en que da cuenta de un maravilloso caso que ha sucedido en este presente año en un pueblo de Navarra con ­cuatro judios (Córdoba: n.n., n.d.); Curioso y nuevo romance en que se declara lo que ejecutaron siete perversos y malditos judios con unas formas consagradas (Córdoba: Luis de Ramos y Coria, n.d.); El judio de Toledo (Córdoba: Luis de Ramos y Coria, n.d.).

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had apprehended Juan Rodríguez Mejía, a priest ministering to the crew of a Spanish naval vessel, on suspicion of judaizing. The priest, however, merely turned out to be an overzealous ‘Old Christian’; an amateur Jew hunter and conspiracy theorist whose imagination saw secret Jewish and masonic plots and cabals everywhere. Suspecting that the captain of his vessel was a secret Jew, Juan Rodríguez Mejía discreetly presented himself to the captain as a stereotypical converso judaizer whose main goal was to desecrate Christian religious objects. The cunning plan backfired spectacularly when the shocked captain of the vessel placed the priest under arrest and handed him over to the inquisitors.30 The situation in Portugal differed from that in Spain since the activity of the Portuguese Inquisition focused far more consistently upon the conversos, who represented the vast majority of those prosecuted by the Holy Office in that kingdom.31 This persecution continued into the eighteenth century but came to an abrupt halt when the Marquis de Pombal, chief minister of King José, ordered the seizure and destruction of all genealogical lists of conversos. Pombal also abolished any discrimination against the conversos, by abolishing the statutes of limpieza de sangre in a series of royal decrees promulgated in 1768, 1773 and 1774. The mere usage of the expression ‘New Christian’ to refer to conversos was prohibited under pain of severe punishment. These royal decrees effectively brought an end to inquisitorial trials against suspected judaizers in the Lusophone world and, unlike in the Hispanophone world, it is difficult to find as much evidence of the continued presence of the figure of the Jew or conversos in the minds of Portuguese men and women after this period. There were, nonetheless, a handful of post-1774 instances in which the Portuguese Inquisition was called to investigate suspected judaizers. In 1780, the inquisitors of Lisbon investigated accusations against a man, seemingly an Old Christian boatman on the River Tejo, accused of publicly proclaiming in the town of Abrantes that the “Law of Moses” was superior to Christianity. As late as March 1805, a thirty-eight-year-old man named Matias José da Silva, presented himself before the inquisitors, claiming to be a converso whose parents had revealed their secret identities as judaizers to him when he was a teenager.32 The abolition of the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula in 1820–1821 brought to an end the existence of an institution that had played a pivotal role in actively promoting the myth of the converso conspiracy. Yet, the abolition 30 31 32

A.H.N., Sección Inquisición, legajo 1,623, exp. 7. See chapter 2 of G. Marcocci and J.P. Paiva, História da Inquisição Portuguesa (15361821) (Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2013.). A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processos nos. 13,329; 16,283 and 18,081.

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did not bring about a simultaneous disappearance of the statutes of limpieza de sangre, which survived well into the nineteenth century. In the case of the Spanish army, the criteria of racial purity was only suppressed in 1865 and formally abolished in 1870.33 Although a parliament held in Spain, in February 1855, outlawed religious persecution, Catholicism remained the recognized state religion and plans mooted (but never fulfilled) at a parliament in 1869 to invite Sephardic Jews to return to Spain sparked outrage in the church and amongst conservative Catholics. Concurrently, the new form of ‘scientific racism’ that emerged in northern Europe in the nineteenth century created a new strand of antisemitic propaganda. In the twentieth century, this propaganda focused its attacks on the ‘Jewish race’ and sought legitimacy in the diffusion of the conspiracist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.34 Instead of replacing the earlier early modern antisemitic conspiracy theories, the new antisemitism originating to the north of the Pyrenees merged seamlessly with that which already existed in the Iberian Peninsula. A perfect example of this can be seen in the 1890s, after the work of the French antisemite Édouard Drumont, La France Juive, was translated into Spanish in 1889. Inspired by Drumont’s opus, one of its translators, Pelegrín Casabó y Pagés, wrote and published a Spanish equivalent, unimaginatively entitled La España Judía, in 1891. Casabó merges the new narrative of a Jewish takeover through the promotion of liberal ideas and capitalism with the existing medieval and early modern strand of Iberian conspiracism. Old accusations – such as those of treachery in 711 CE and the deliberate sacrilege of sacred objects in the 1630s – are used to promote the notion of a timeless plot against both the church and the monarchy. In both Spain and Portugal, the memory of the ‘converso plot’ and of the works that popularized it certainly did not disappear in oblivion. The surviving converso community of Majorca, the Chuetas is singled out for vilification by Casabó and, just like his early modern predecessors, he insists that “the Jew is always a Jew, whether he is Christianised or not, he will always be dominated by his innate hypocrisy and his thirst for gold.” It is hardly surprising that amongst the works that Casabó cites as his references are featured the seventeenth-century polemics of Francisco de Torrejoncillo (Centinela contra Judíos) and Francisco Garau (La Fé Triunfante). He was not unique and other Spanish authors impugning the alleged ‘Jewish conspiracy’ cite Alonso de Espina and Francisco de Quevedo 33 34

Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia, Colección Legislativa de España (Madrid: Imprenta del Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia, 1870), 364–6. Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España: la imagen del judío, 1812–2002 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002).

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in addition to Torrejoncillo.35 Across the border in Portugal, the ­author of a vicious 1925 book entitled A invasão dos Judeus (“the Jewish invasion”) accuses the Jews of having taken control of the country, full-heartedly endorsing Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s Centinela as a “precautionary book” that should be read by all those concerned by the influence of Jews in Portugal. The same author also refers his readers to the polemics of Vicente da Costa Mattos when accusing the Jews of introducing homosexuality into Portuguese society.36 The late medieval and early modern antisemitic conspiracy theory, which focuses on the threat posed by the Jews to the Catholic Church and to the Iberian peoples as Christians endured into twentieth-century Spain. The perceived foreign enemies might have changed – international communism and global freemasonry replaced Protestants and Muslims – but the role assigned to the Jews in the conspiracy remained unchanged. The rhetoric and language of contamination remained similar and is entirely reminiscent of early modern polemics through its evocation of the purported dangers presented by ‘Jewish blood’ and a secret Jewish presence in Spain. Cardinal Isidro Gomá, the Archbishop of Toledo, blamed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 on the malign designs of the Jews who, alongside the freemasons, had “contaminated Spain’s soul.” Even Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whose apologists worked hard after 1945 to present him as a saviour of persecuted Jews during the Holocaust, asserted during the victory speech he delivered in May 1939 that “[we Spaniards should not] delude ourselves; the Jewish spirit that has made so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution cannot be extirpated in one day, and it flutters in many hearts.”37 It is probably fitting to conclude this book by confessing that the longevity of the ‘traditional’ Iberian antisemitic conspiracy theory can come as a surprise even to a twenty-first-century historian. During the research undertaken for this book, I had the privilege to work in the Diocesan Archive of Cuenca. The 1965 register of inquisitorial documents of the tribunal of Cuenca, composed by the archivist and canon of Cuenca Cathedral Sebastián Cirac Estopanãn (1903–1970), constitutes an invaluable resource for historians of the Inquisition. Few researchers have probably cast an eye on the introduction that the learned Cirac Estopanãn, who held a chair in Greek philology at the University of Barcelona, added to his work. It is hardly surprising that Father 35 36 37

Pelegrín Casabó y Pagés, La España judía: apuntes para la verdadera historia de los judíos en España (Barcelona: Estab. Tipog. de Francisco Bertrán, 1891), 35, n. 1; 48, 90–1 and 103; Gonzalo Alvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España, 111, 202 and 431. Jorge Martins, A República e os Judeus (Lisbon: Nova Vega, 2010), 107–118. Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of the Holocaust and the Inquisition: Israel’s Relations with Francoist Spain (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 86.

Conclusion

281

Sebastián was an unambiguous relativist and apologist for the Inquisition who states that “in truth, there have been and still are many worse things in the world.” When discussing the conversos, however, Father Sebastián unleashes a torrent of antisemitic remarks worthy of an early modern polemicist like Vicente da Costa Mattos or Francisco de Torrejoncillo. For Sebastián Cirac Estopanãn, the ‘converso problem’ afflicting early modern Spain amounted to “the corrosive evil of hypocrisy” seeking to destroy the church and monarchy “from which Spain had to defend itself” by means of the Inquisition’s campaign of repression. The ‘Jews’ – by which Father Sebastián indicates both the conversos in particular and Jews in general – are presented as entirely to blame for their predicament. Animated by their hatred of all Gentiles (odium generis humani) as well as their “religious exclusivism and racism” (exclusivismo religioso y el racismo de los judíos), they have constantly plotted against Spain and Christianity. By labelling them as “enemies of Spain” and “a nation and enemy army that has always operated within Christian Spain,” Father Sebastián follows in the footsteps of his medieval and early modern predecessors by laying the blame for a multitude of catastrophes that had afflicted Spain at the Jews and conversos’ feet. The Napoleonic invasions of 1808–1813, the numerous civil wars of the nineteenth century, the rise of the anticlerical liberales and, of course, the atrocities committed against the church by the hated “reds” during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 are thus events entirely orchestrated by the Jews and part of their wider plot. Whilst somewhat grudgingly admitting that the Jews murdered by the Nazis were “innocent victims,” Sebastián Cirac Estopanãn nonetheless minimizes the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. He ends his outburst by making the bizarre assertion that the worst persecutors of Jews had always been Jews themselves and seeks to prove this point by making the absurd (and entirely false) claim that the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, arrested and prosecuted in Israel in 1960–1962, had been of Jewish ancestry.38 As his university education and position in the diocese of Cuenca demonstrate, Sebastián Cirac Estopanãn was no lunatic or marginal figure but an esteemed member of the church. His belief in a Jewish conspiracy placed him within a wider antisemitic current in Spanish and Portuguese history that has seamlessly married the late medieval and early modern anti-Jewish/converso propaganda with later developments. 38

Dimas Peréz Ramírez, Registros de los Documentos del Santo Oficio de Cuenca y Sigüenza (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1982), vol. 1, 23–4 and 42–54.

282

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311

Cinematographic Resources

 Der Ewige Jude. Directed by Fritz Hippler: Deutsche Film Gesellschaft, 1940. Filmstrip, 62 min.



Internet Resources

David Icke’s Official Forums:  [accessed 22 July 2015]. Los Gaibor, judíos y conversos, una de las familias más influyentes e importantes de la villa de Monforte de Lemos. Siglos XV al XVIII: [accessed 16 June 2015]. Official indictment published by the Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) (Nu­rem­berg, 1946): [accessed 3 Jan­uary 2016]. Rabbi Chemor Letter to Sanhedrin a nice alternative to the Protocols: [accessed 22 July 2015]. Stormfront: Letter from a jew: [accessed 22 July 2015].

312

Index

Index

Index Acuña, Sebastian de 68, 172–173 Adam de la Parra, Juan 193, 230–232, 259–261 Afonso IV, King of Portugal 142 Ahmed, Sara 13, 35–37 Alamín, Félix de 68, 171, 277 Alcalá de Henares (University of) 165, 171 Alcocer, Pedro de 60, 189–191 Alconchel 100 Alfonso VI, King of Castile-León 63 Alfonso VIII, King of Castile 193 Alfonso X, King of Castile 107, 141, 145, 188, 234 Alguadex, Meir (Rabbi) 149–152, 155, 171, 175, 186, 192, 195 Alicante 132 Amador de los Ríos, José 60 Amrán, Rica 60 Amsterdam 21, 81, 108, 112, 194, 196, 201, 205– 206, 209–211, 220, 228, 240–244, 250, 256, 261 Anderson, Benedict 268–269 Anjos, Manuel dos 99, 193 Argaiz, Gregorio de 154 Argote de Molina, Gonzalo 153 Arias, Francisco 251 Ariz, Luis 154 Barcelona 71, 142–3, 165–166, 192, 280 Barkun, Michael 22, 24, 33, 45, 49 Barruel, Augustin 7, 40, 42, 276 Bartov, Omer 271 Benavente, Agustín de 124 Bernáldez, Andrés 235, 245 Beusterien, John 78, 185n Beuter, Antoni 61–62 Bleda, Jaime 175–176 Borromeo, Agostino 52 Bouis, Jean-Baptiste 84–85 Bourke, Joanna 27 Boyajian, James 255–256 Bravo López, Fernando 71–72, 75, 77–78, 195 Buenos Aires 119, 214, 217–218, 224 Byford, Jovan 21, 23, 28

Cabral, José 88 Calado, Manuel 212–213, 238 Carapito, Alonso Mendes 122–123 Cardoso, Isaac 112, 115, 155, 170, 194 Carlos II, King of Spain 168, 226, 257 Cartagena de Indias 80, 213–226, 229, 257, 277 Casar de Palomero 134–135 Castejón y Fonseca, Diego de 103 Castel Branco, Manuel de Andrada de 202 Castillo de Bobadilla, Jerónimo 153 Castro, Adolfo de 72 Catherine of Lancaster, Queen of Castile 151 Ceita, João de 99, 102–104, 157, 193, 240 Cervantes, Miguel de 185, 248 Céspedes y Meneses, Gonzalo de 204–205 Cirac Estopañán, Sebastián 280–281 Chabauty, Emmanuel 85–86, 88–89, 91 Charles the Bald, Holy Roman Emperor 162 Chirino, Alfonso 147–149, 152 Coimbra 74, 76, 78, 97–98, 109, 127, 135, 160–161, 167–169, 209, 211 Colmenares, Diego de Constantinople 14, 55, 64–93, 95, 108, 156–160, 171–178, 181–182, 196, 260, 269, 273 Contreras, Antonio de 261, 277 Copin-Albancelli, Paul 86 Córdoba 1, 187, 237n Corral, Pedro del 188 Correia, Gaspar 30 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 3, 50, 138 Cruz, Jerónimo de la Cubitt, Geoffrey 23, 41 Cuenca 142–143, 165, 172, 280–281 Curaçao 217 Cuzco 135–136 Dávila Padilla, Agustín 120 Desportes, Henri 85 Dexter, Flavius Lucius 62–63 Diego de Simancas (Bishop) 11, 70–71, 73, 78–79, 95, 157–158, 176–177 Dinis, King of Portugal 141 Drumont, Édouard 85, 279 Durán, Diego 119

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395602_011

313

Index Egica, King of Visigothic Spain 58, 192 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 209 England 14, 16, 19, 43, 57, 199, 209, 228–229, 243, 266 Enrique III, King of Castile Espina, Alonso de 11, 32, 34, 49, 69, 112, 147, 149–155, 177, 187, 190, 235, 269, 272–273, 279 Este, João Baptista d’ 158–159 Ethiopia 116–117 Évora 31, 74, 99, 102, 109, 113–114, 158–159, 169, 193, 265 Eymerich, Nicholas 49 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo 173 Fernando I, King of Aragón 156 Fernando II, King of Aragón 2, 51, 71, 245 Fleischhauer, Ulrich 87 France 16, 32, 40, 43, 56, 81, 84–85, 88, 108, 113, 139, 141, 162, 192, 209–210, 228, 243, 249, 251, 268, 276, 279 Franco, Francisco 280 Freire, Francisco de Brito 204 Gardiner, William 122–3 Garibay y Zamalloa, Esteban de 62, 153, 190 Génébrard, Gilbert 120 Gomá y Tomás, Isidro (Archbishop of Toledo) 280 González Dávila, Gil 154 Gregory XIII (Pope) 157 Groh, Dieter 21 Guardiola, Juan 166 Guerreiro, Bartolomeu 203 Gutiérrez de Torres, Álvaro 153 Ha-Cohen, Joseph 155, 194 Henrique, King of Portugal 109–111 Hofstadter, Richard 20–21, 25, 36 Holz, Karl 87–88, 178 Horowitz, Elliott 121 Huesca 165 Innocent III (Pope) 145–146 Innocent VIII (Pope) 45 Isabel I, Queen of Castile 1, 51, 71, 164, 245 Jaume II, King of Aragón 143 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo (Archbishop of Toledo) 187, 191

João I, King of Portugal 147 João III, King of Portugal 2, 30, 110–111, 122, 137, 275 João IV, King of Portugal 163, 222, 240, 258 José, King of Portugal 278 Juan II, King of Castile 93–94, 148, 151, 153 Justel Santamaría, Victorio 88 Kirchhof, Hans Wilhelm 176–177 Klee, Ernest 87–88 Langmuir, Gavin 121 Leonor, Queen of Aragón 147 Lima (Peru) 213, 216–222, 224–227 Lisbon 1, 5, 30, 46, 68, 74, 80, 100, 102, 109, 113, 116, 118, 122–123, 127–129, 131, 134, 138, 159–160, 167–168, 183, 201–202, 207, 209–211, 219, 222, 239, 248, 253, 256, 258, 265, 274–275, 278 Livorno 81, 113, 172 Llerena 74–75, 77, 162, 182–183 Lozano, Cristóbal 154, 192 Ludendorff, Eric 87 Madrid 66, 68, 73–74, 77, 83, 125–126, 130–132, 134, 158, 172, 176, 183, 222–223, 226, 230, 244, 256, 259, 261, 263, 266, 270, 274–275, 277 Málaga 109, 276 Manuel I, King of Portugal 1, 109, 144 Maria, Queen of Aragón 146 Mariana, Juan de 50, 63, 190, 195, 267 Mármol Carvajal, Luis del 117 Marsden, Victor 86 Martínez Silíceo, Juan (Archbishop of Toledo) 55, 66, 71–74, 236 Marvão 105 Mattos, Vicente da Costa 11, 36, 50, 68–69, 74, 79, 91, 96, 98, 100, 104, 110–111, 113–114, 118, 122, 138, 153, 158–159, 177, 180, 185, 188, 199, 201–202, 234, 243–245, 260, 269–270, 280–281 Medrano, Julián de 65–67, 70–71, 73, 78–79, 85, 91 Mendez-Silva, Rodrigo 63 Meurin, León 86 Mexico (city) 119, 213, 218–219, 225, 229, 276 Mexico (country/Spanish colony) 114, 120, 214, 217–218, 221–224, 227–228, 257, 276

314 Monforte de Lemos 134 Montesinos, Fernando de 220–221 Moreira, Felipe 31, 46, 265–266 Moya Torres, Francisco Máximo de 17, 171, 235, 262 Muslims (including Moriscos) 5, 15, 32, 45, 51–52, 58, 90, 92, 128–129, 140, 143, 145, 149, 154, 175–176, 184–185, 187–196, 203, 205, 214, 221, 247–248, 252–253, 268, 272–273, 280 Narbonne 46–47, 56–57 Nazi Ideology 19, 37, 39–40, 87–89, 178–180, 263, 271–273, 281 Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylon 61 Neumann, Franz 39 Noronha, Andrés de (Bishop) 74–80, 157 Noydens, Benito Remigio 200 Olinda 201, 207 Oran (North Africa) 81, 83, 209 Osuna 182 Ottoman Empire 21, 65, 75, 81–82, 194–196, 254 Padilla, Francisco de 62 Paim, Roque Monteiro 129–130 Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de (Bishop of Puebla) 222–224, 226 Panama 217, 223, 225 Panzán, Luis 156 Paul IV (Pope) 157, 198 Paz Pinto, Blas de 80 Pedro II, King of Portugal 106, 129–130, 167–168 Pedro de Lencastre 129 Pegas, Manuel Álvares 131 Pellicer de Ossau Salas i Tovar, José 63, 83–84, 261 Peralta, Alonso de (inquisitor) 120 Pereira Bracamonte, Domingos 169 Perkins, William 45 Peru 9, 119, 124, 132, 135, 213–214, 216–218, 220–221, 223–229, 257, 275–276 Peter the Venerable (Abbot) 57, 272 Petri, Iuliani (Julian Peréz) 62–63, 189 Philip II, King of Spain 72, 75, 80, 165, 175, 186, 193, 202, 247, 255 Philip III, King of Spain 163, 169, 241–242, 248, 250

Index Philip IV, King of Spain 82, 103, 126, 170, 199, 204, 221–222, 227, 234, 245, 249, 254–255, 257–258 Philip V, King of Spain 17, 171 Pimentel, Timóteo Seabra 11, 127–129, 207 Pinay, Maurice 89 Pineda, Juan de 61, 117 Pinheiro, Jorge 135 Pisa, Francisco 62, 190 Pius V (Pope) 157 Plasencia 75, 157, 172 Pliny the Elder 139–140 Pombal, Marquis of 278 Popper, Karl 33, 37–38, 41–44, 48–49 Porreño, Baltasar 72–73 Portalegre 75, 161, 275 Porto 141–142 Potosí 215–216, 224 Prague 54, 81 Protestants 10, 14–15, 32, 45–46, 49–50, 52, 82, 114, 122–123, 166, 184–186, 195–200, 202–203, 208, 217, 228–230, 241, 244–245, 256, 258, 260–261, 280 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 37, 40, 54, 86–87, 91, 263, 279 Quevedo, Francisco de 11, 68, 79, 81–83, 91, 104, 138, 153, 230, 234, 241, 247, 260, 279 Quintanadueñas, Antonio de 63 Raguza 81 Rapaz (village in Peru) 124 Rebello, Manuel 99 Recife 201, 207, 212–213 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de 251 Ribera, Juan de (Archbishop of Valencia) 247 Roberts, John 20, 33 Robison, John 7, 40 Roderic (King of Visigothic Spain) 187 Rodríguez, Manuel 174 Rojas, Pedro de 189 Rome 19, 81, 109–110, 139, 146, 258 Rouen 81 Rubin, Miri 121 Salamanca 112, 146, 165–166, 170, 182 Salazar, Juan de 52 Salonika 65, 81–82, 113 Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) 202–204 Salvador, Vicente do 203

315

Index San Nicolas, Pablo de 155, 171 Sandoval, Prudencio de 63, 102–103, 154 Santa Cruz de Tenerife 125 Santa María, Pablo de 151–152, 198 Santiago de Compostela 167 São João de Pesqueira 122 Saraiva, António José 246, 252 Schwartz, Stuart B. 10, 227 Schwartz-Bostunitsch, Gregor 87 Scott, James C. 122 Sebastião, King of Portugal 76, 137, 169 Segovia 151–152, 154 Sepúlveda, Lorenzo de 193 Setúbal 109, 123 Seville 74, 108, 124, 140, 165–166, 187, 197–198, 210, 214, 227, 235, 237n, 253, 257 Sicroff, Albert 71, 73 Sigüenza (University of) 165 Sorapan de Rieros, Juan 162–163 Sousa, António de 102–103 Soviet Union (Doctor’s Plot) 180–181 Spinoza, Baruch 112 Tamayo de Vargas, Tomás 63, 204–205 Tartas, Isaac de Castro 80 Tavim, José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva 162 Távora, João Mendes de 5 Terman, David 38–39 Toledo 1, 11, 55, 58–64, 66, 70–74, 79–80, 88, 93–96, 103, 107, 123, 154, 157, 161, 165, 186–195, 197–198, 202–203, 205, 229, 236, 247, 276, 280 Tomar 100, 106, 137, 160–161, 199, 206, 246, 248 Torrecilla, Martín de 155, 171

Torrejoncillo, Francisco de 11, 31–32, 34, 36, 64, 68, 79–80, 89–91, 97, 99–100, 104–105, 110–113, 120, 122, 134–135, 149, 153, 157–158, 170–171, 177, 180, 184–185, 188, 235, 238, 240, 253, 261, 269–270, 273–274, 276–277, 279–281 Torres, Cristóbal de 270–271 Torrubia, José 276 Tucumán 224 Urreta, Luis de 117 Usque, Samuel 155, 194 Valencia 51, 61, 71, 132, 143–144, 158, 165, 171, 175, 185, 247, 266 Valencia de Alcántara 77, 145–146 Valladolid 51, 112–113, 133, 165, 170, 197–198, 238, 276 Valladolid, Alfonso de 147–149 Vega, Lope de 193, 206, 253, 269 Venice 81, 113 Veracruz 226–227 Vesga, Pedro de 176 Vieira, António 105–106, 258 Vienna 81 Vila Flor 133–134, 137 Villa Viçosa 100 Villar Maldonado, Ignacio del 11, 66, 68, 71, 73, 78–79, 93, 158–159, 171–172 Witiza, King of Visigothic Spain 189 Yepes, Diego de 199 Zacatecas 224 Zaragoza 144, 147, 166