God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (11 page)

Spain was not the first kingdom to expel its Jews. In England, Jews were considered royal property, and it was in England that the anti-Semitic “blood libel”—the false accusation that Jews slaughtered Christian children and used their blood for ritual purposes—seems to have originated.
England expelled its Jews in 1290. France followed suit in 1306. But the Jewish population of Spain was by far the largest in Europe. Nor would expulsion stop with the Jews: in 1609, Spain began to expel large numbers of
moriscos.
(Some of them would be shunned as “Christians” in the Muslim countries to which they fled, and a number were executed as a result.)
Expulsion was not a policy invented by Spain, and it has never gone out of use. For more than a century, it was the declared policy of the U.S. government with respect to Native Americans, and a very successful one from Washington’s point of view. Greece and Turkey, by mutual agreement, expelled Turks and Greeks from their respective countries in the 1920s. As a result of the Partition, in 1947, Hindus by the millions were displaced from Pakistan, and Muslims by the millions from India. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were both sparked and fanned by policies of expulsion on all sides—ethnic cleansing, as it was then called. The reality of expulsion is that it is brutally effective and invariably swift. These qualities never lack for champions.

A number of accounts describe the scene in the Hall of the Ambassadors as the king and queen prepared to promulgate the Edict of Expulsion. The proposition was a simple one: Any Jew who converted to Christianity could stay. (Of course, living in Spain as a
converso
had its perils; there was the Inquisition to contend with.) Those Jews who did not convert would have to leave. The Jewish leaders Isaac Abravanel and Abraham Senor on three occasions sought to dissuade Ferdinand. “Please, O King, what is it that you want from your subjects?” said Abravenal, according to his own account. “Ask us anything: presents of gold and silver and whatever you want from the house of Israel that we can give to your native land.”
The story is told that Abravanel offered the king 300,000 ducats if he would reverse his decision. Tomás de Torquemada, the powerful inquisitor general, got wind of the offer and angrily confronted Ferdinand and Isabella at the Alhambra, holding a crucifix before them and saying, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highness would sell him anew for three hundred thousand.”

The exodus from Spain began. Abravenal managed to wring a single concession: the expulsion would be delayed until August 2, which in 1492 coincided with the ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar—a day that marks the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Ferdinand and Isabella were unaware of the symbolism.

It is impossible to get an accurate fix on the number of Jews who refused to be baptized and were forced to leave Spain—estimates run to more than 100,000, at the high end, and to as low as 40,000.
Certainly the trauma was immense. Most went to Portugal, which accepted them for the time being, though its own ferocious inquisition was not far away, and Jews living there would have to move on once more. Others fled north to the kingdom of Navarre, in the elbow of southwestern Europe, where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic. The rest found their way primarily to North Africa and Italy. In time, large numbers would settle within the empire of the Ottomans. Many would also venture to Iberia’s overseas colonies in Asia and America. One
converso
wrote to a Jewish friend who was embarking: “Do not grieve over your departure, for you have to drink down your death in one gulp, whereas we have to stay behind among these wicked people, receiving death from them every day.”

Poisoned Hearts

There had been inquisitions, on the medieval model, in parts of Spain during the previous two centuries. These were intermittent and mainly desultory affairs, and organizationally similar to the inquisitions in southern France and elsewhere in Europe—that is, highly decentralized. The Spanish Inquisition, as brought to life by Ferdinand and Isabella, would be different. There is no simple way to describe the society out of which it grew.

Romantic notions of
convivencia
may touch on something that once was true, but they also hide the bitter reality of divisions within divisions in a land both troubled and poor. Power was dispersed among competing jurisdictions and fractious rulers, even as the frontiers of faith shifted over time. Religious distinctions were deeply important, but distinctions based on class and status cut across them, and religious communities were themselves divided. The occasional tactical expulsion of one group or another—Christians from Muslim territories, Jews and Muslims from Christian territories—created a social regime of displaced loyalties and burning resentments.

“Religious distinctions,” “class and status,” “tactical expulsions,” “burning resentments”—the terms are bloodless in their abstraction, the abstraction further bleached of passion by the remove of half a millennium. Perhaps some perspective on the dynamic at play—how easily animosities can be stirred—may be gained from looking at a happier place: a society that is not poor but rich, one that guarantees religious freedom and individual equality in its Constitution, and one whose national mythology is pretty well summed up in those T-shirts from Córdoba: “The secret is in the mixture.”

The United States of America in the twenty-first century is about as different from late-medieval Spain as a country can be. And yet a controversy during the summer of 2010 demonstrated how little effort is required to whip up popular fervor on issues of “otherness.” The controversy involved the matter of “birthright citizenship”—that is, whether people are American citizens simply by virtue of being born in the United States, or must be deemed eligible on the basis of other characteristics—for instance, having parents of the right sort, however that may be defined, or seeming to represent the kind of person the country “wants.”

Enshrined for more than two centuries in American practice, and for a century and a half in the Fourteenth Amendment, birthright citizenship suddenly found itself under powerful attack. The spark came in the form of charges that undocumented aliens in large numbers were coming to America to bear children, and then using the children as “anchors” to keep themselves legally in the country. The charges were themselves undocumented; under existing law, such children cannot apply for residency permits on behalf of their parents until they are twenty-one. The background, of course, was the unease, heightened by economic recession, over illegal immigration per se and, more broadly, over the nation’s changing demographic and cultural character—phenomena that have kindled deep anxiety and occasional violence throughout American history. But birthright citizenship was a new target. Politicians on the right began to stoke the issue. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called birthright citizenship “a mistake.” Other legislators demanded congressional hearings to give the Fourteenth Amendment a second look.
Keith Larson, a Charlotte-based radio host, offered an analogy: “If a Catholic mom were to give birth in a synagogue, would the baby automatically be Jewish? It’s absurd.”
Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas highlighted the national-security angle. “There are people coming into this country,” he said, “who want to destroy our way of life. I talked to a retired FBI agent who said that one of the things they were looking at were terrorist cells overseas who had figured out how to game our system. And it appeared that they would have young women who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby.”

Within a matter of weeks, birthright citizenship had moved from something that people took for granted to something that, according to opinion polls, nearly half of all Americans had decided they opposed.
In January 2011, a group of state legislators unveiled a proposal to create what some described as a two-tiered system of birth certificates, one tier for babies born to citizens and legal immigrants, the other for children of illegal immigrants.
Shortly afterward, two U.S. senators proposed a constitutional amendment that would deny birthright citizenship outright to children born to illegal aliens, regardless of the consequences. As one commentator pointed out, “Without the concept of birthright citizenship, it is possible for someone to be born without having citizenship in any country at all.”

The point is not to make a facile comparison between incomparable regimes. It is simply to note that dangerous passions—about social contamination, about religious incursion—can be found anywhere. It does not take much to arouse them. Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was acutely susceptible. One source of instability was the Black Death, which ravaged Europe beginning in 1348. Within two years, Spain’s population had been reduced by a third. Medievalists sometimes joke, if that’s the word for it, that the Black Death was good for one thing: it raised the minimum wage.
That may have been true in the cities and towns of urbanized Europe, but in agrarian Spain the Black Death meant mainly . . . death. Iberia endured a degree of economic hardship it had not experienced in centuries.

Add to this the religious divisions. As a boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, I remember references in Catholic liturgy to the “blindness” of “perfidious Jews.” The references were mumbled and formulaic, but ugly and corrosive all the same. Within a few years, the Vatican would revise the liturgy somewhat, and would also formally abjure the charge of “blood guilt”—the charge that the Jewish people were to blame for the Crucifixion. Eventually, the Vatican would offer a guarded, defensive apology for the role that its teachings “may have played” in fostering anti-Semitism. But in fourteenth-century Spain, the anti-Semitic teachings of the Church were in full flower. They were distilled in the person of Ferrand Martínez, a priest in Seville, who identified Jews as the cause of economic misery and spent the 1380s carrying that message from town to town. The king of Castile tried to suppress Martínez, who responded that his work was authorized by a power higher than any earthly monarch. Martínez continued to preach.

In recent years, political writers have made note of a phenomenon they call “epistemic closure.” The term refers to the ease with which people can become caught in an information loop that offers a fully satisfying explanation of the way things are and presents no challenges to that perspective. The great practical advantage of free speech and a robust media, it has been said, lies in the way they enable a continual testing of propositions and ideas. But the Internet and social networking, which some tout as mainly a force for good, also allow people to confine themselves to a Möbius strip of the like-minded. Evangelicals and gay activists, Tea Partiers and jihadis, anarchists and Marines—any group can exist within an information membrane of its own devising, unchallenged by outside sources. The consequences for civility and public discourse are becoming all too clear.

Ferrand Martínez, a loud voice in a community of illiterates, had a closed loop to himself, and in 1391 his words incited anti-Jewish riots in Seville, Barcelona, Córdoba, and Valencia. Thousands of Jews were killed. In the aftermath, Jews were confronted by the authorities with a choice: convert to Christianity or suffer the consequences. Those who did not convert were confined to ghettos, forced to wear badges, and barred from traditional professions.
Expulsion was not yet contemplated, but 1391 was a prelude. A significant proportion of the Jews of Spain converted at that time, adding a body of
conversos
—regarded with suspicion or hostility by Christians and Jews—to an already unstable situation.
As Christians, the
conversos
could seek advancement in fields once closed to them—and they did. But the allegation that
conversos
were unreliable was never far from the surface. In the hands of people like Alfonso de Hojeda, this allegation was a powerful weapon. It was used to provoke paranoia and resentment, and led to frequent outbreaks of violence.

In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella sent a formal request to Rome for the establishment of an inquisition in Spain. Pope Sixtus IV granted the request and, in a break with precedent, allowed the secular authorities—the monarchs themselves—to have power of appointment and dismissal over the new inquisitors. Sixtus had little choice—he needed Spain’s military help against the Turks—and in any case, he had other distractions: the Sistine Chapel, the rebuilding of Rome, and the elevation of his many nephews to the cardinalate.
For two years, the Inquisition remained quiescent, but in 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella named the first inquisitors, and within a few months, as Hojeda whipped up anti-
converso
fervor, that first auto-da-fé was held in Seville. The next several years were horrific, and the pope, getting wind of events from afar, succumbed to grave second thoughts. Sixtus expressed his reservations to the king and queen in writing, and soon thereafter issued a bull in which he spelled out his concerns and laid down strict guidelines for how the Spanish Inquisition should proceed. Referring to the confiscations that routinely followed convictions, he declared that the Inquisition in Spain “has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth.” True and faithful Christians, he went on, had been wrongly sent to their deaths, “setting a pernicious example and causing disgust to many.” Henry Charles Lea would call this document “the most extraordinary bull in the history of the Inquisition.”

It was also a dead letter. The king and queen resisted. They viewed the Inquisition as a royal prerogative—indeed, as an essential underpinning of state power. In attempting to bind a patchwork of jurisdictions—each with its own customs, laws, and bureaucracies—into a unified Spanish kingdom, the monarchs had created a number of supercouncils, of which the Inquisition was one. Indeed, it was the only one whose prerogatives pushed royal power to every part of the kingdom.
The Inquisition was an essential organ of state. One historian, stepping back, sees its role in surprisingly contemporary terms. Rather than being an “icon of premodern irrationality,” the Spanish Inquisition seems “remarkably modern” and an “unheralded ancestor” once you get to know its procedures: