The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (31 page)

Jews, like convicted heretics, were required to wear badges and distinctive clothing to set them apart from Christians, a law that can be found in the same canons of the Fourth Lateran Council that served as the “first sketch” of the Inquisition. The circular yellow “Jew badge” sometimes also depicted a crude drawing of the devil or a pair of diabolic horns. At various times and places, Jews were denied the right to practice law or medicine, to live outside a designated Jewish quarter, or to own land. On top of these legal disabilities—and sometimes because of them—they were targets of violence offered by casual passersby as well as organized mobs. The Jewish community in Mainz, a center of Jewish law and learning as early as the tenth century, for example, deemed it necessary to suspend the blowing of the shofar—the ram’s horn that is sounded during the observance of the High Holidays—out of fear that it would attract the attention of their Christian neighbors and provoke yet another pogrom.
¹⁴

Violence toward Jews spiked sharply during the Crusades. The Muslim overlords of the Holy Land were the designated enemy, but the Christian soldiers who took up the cross paused to wet their blades with the blood of the Jewish men, women, and children they encountered en route to Jerusalem. Since the Church taught that Jews and Muslims were both infidels, such atrocities made a certain theological sense to the crusaders. Indeed, they were taught by the priests who preached the crusades and the chaplains who accompanied them on the march to the Middle East that anyone who refused to embrace the truth as offered by the Roman Catholic church deserved to die. “Look now, we are going to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him,” went one such sermon, whose author refers to Muslims by using a biblical term. “Let us first avenge ourselves on them and exterminate them from among the nations so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered—or let them adopt our faith.”
¹⁵

Perhaps the single strangest but also most telling example of the dangers that faced medieval Jewry dates back to the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. A crowd gathered on the outskirts of a town in the Rhineland to salute a party of knights riding off to join the army of crusaders whose mission it was to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims. The expeditionary force included a miscellaneous assortment of wives, servants, and other camp followers, and one woman among them was followed down the road by her pet goose, which was apparently distressed that its mistress was leaving it behind.

To the modern observer, the scene is comical—a goose waddling after a woman who is herself hastening to keep up with a mounted knight. To the men and women in that crowd, however, the sight of the goose somehow suggested to them that God himself was expressing his enthusiasm for the whole enterprise; surely, they convinced themselves, the goose was filled with the Holy Spirit. Perhaps feeling guilty that
they
were not following the example of the heroic goose, the men in the crowd were inspired to do their own small part in the crusade. And so they set upon the infidels who were closest at hand—the Jews who lived among them. Nothing more than a glimpse of a goose at the right time and place was sufficient to spark an explosion of murderous anti-Semitic violence in medieval Europe.

Slander, discrimination, and wanton cruelty were facts of life for ordinary Jews throughout Christendom long before the invention of the Inquisition. But the older, cruder expressions of Jew hatred were brought into sharp focus and aimed directly at the Jews of Spain by the grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498) and the other agents of the Spanish Inquisition—“the darkest page in the dark record of the Jewish people,” as historian Cecil Roth wrote in the years just before the Holocaust, “one of the saddest episodes in the history of human thought.”
¹⁶

Jews had been living in Spain since at least the third century of the common era and perhaps even earlier, a fact that prompted some of them to “disclaim on this ground any conceivable responsibility for the Crucifixion.” Until the late fourteenth century, and especially during the medieval interlude when three faiths managed to coexist peacefully, the Spanish Jews were no worse off than their brethren elsewhere in medieval Europe, and sometimes they fared much better. Unlike the neighborhood set aside for the Jewish population of Venice, known as the Ghetto, and similar Jewish districts across Europe that came to be called by the same name, the Judería in Spanish cities was often a prosperous place where Jewish goldsmiths, jewelers, and other artisans and craftsmen offered their wares and Jewish poets, scholars, and theologians were able to work in comfort and security.
¹⁷

The principle of
convivencia
did not mean that Jews and Muslims were entitled to the same rights and privileges as Christian citizens of the various monarchies on the Iberian Peninsula. Muslims were generally restricted to manual labor, and Jews were largely confined to crafts, medicine, money-changing, and tax-collecting. But they were generally free to observe the rites and rituals of their respective faiths. During a time of drought in one region of Spain, for example, Christians, Jews, and Muslims were all called upon to offer their prayers for rain, and a Torah was carried to the public square for the convocation. “The good Jew and the good Muslim can, if they act correctly,” conceded one Spanish author as late as 1490, “go to heaven just like the good Christian.”
¹⁸

The old fear and loathing of Judaism, however, ran like a sewer beneath the feet of such open-minded Spaniards, and the long-simmering tensions erupted now and then into open violence. During the long hot summer of 1391, for example, Jewish communities across the Iberian Peninsula came under open attack by Christian mobs who were called into the streets by the sermons of a rabble-rousing priest named Ferrán Martínez, a man so vicious that even the king and the pope sought to silence him. A firestorm of anti-Semitic violence took some fifty thousand Jewish lives in the Jewish districts of both Spain and Portugal. To spare themselves from further Christian violence, Jews by the thousands decided to convert to the faith of their oppressors, perhaps as many as 200,000 in Aragón and Castile alone and thousands more in other places around the Iberian Peninsula. These newly minted Christians were called
conversos,
and they would shortly provide the raison d’être for the Spanish Inquisition and the greatest number of its victims.
¹⁹

The first
conversos
embraced Christianity only to save their lives, or so goes one version of the history of Spanish Jewry. According to conventional wisdom, they submitted to baptism, but they “hastened to wash off the traces of the operation as soon as they returned home.” They celebrated their weddings in church and then repeated the ceremony according to Jewish rites behind locked doors. They married only fellow
conversos
so that their children, too, would continue to be regarded as Jews under Jewish ritual law. “They were Jews in all but name,” insists Cecil Roth, “and Christians in nothing but form.”
²⁰

Such was the near-unanimous verdict of history on the
conversos
until very recently, both among scholars and by common consent in Jewish circles. They preferred to see the
conversos
as “crypto-Jews”—that is, heroic men and women who were forced to convert to Christianity under threat of torture and death, secretly practiced their original faith while pretending to be Christians, and tragically ended their lives as Jewish martyrs. Ironically, as we shall see, much the same point of view was embraced by the Spanish Inquisition, which condemned the
conversos
as insincere and opportunistic and contemptuously branded them as Marranos—“a word of obscure origin” that is often translated as “swine.” The question of whether the
conversos
were earnest Christians or crypto-Jews turned out to be a matter of life or death in the eyes of the Spanish Inquisition.
²¹

Even if the initial conversion to Christianity by a Jewish man or woman was coerced under threat of death, as it may have been in many cases, the ability to enter Christian circles also bestowed certain undeniable advantages on the
conversos
and their descendants. Like Jews elsewhere in Europe, Spanish Jewry often suffered under various indignities and disabilities—at certain times and places, they were required to make their homes within the bounds of the Judería, they were commanded to wear beards and badges and outlandish garments to mark them as Jews, they were forbidden to own land or ride on horseback or use the title
don,
and they were barred from certain professions and public offices. Once they had abandoned their old faith and submitted to baptism, by contrast, the first generation of
conversos
was relieved of these burdens and permitted to participate more fully in Spanish life.

The early
conversos
and their descendants, in fact, achieved rapid and remarkable success in the century following the anti-Semitic riots of 1391. They found new opportunities in the government, the courts, the army, the university, and even the Church; remarkably, Jewish blood ran in the veins of the Torquemada family, which provided the first grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisiton. Far from marrying only their fellow
conversos,
the newly converted Christians were able to make favorable matches in the highest circles of the Spanish aristocracy. By 1480, “barely a single aristocratic family in Aragon, from the royal house downwards, was free from some Jewish admixture or alliance,” according to Cecil Roth, and both the supreme court and the legislature of the kingdom of Aragón included men who were descended from
conversos.
²²

The good fortune of the
conversos
was distressing to members of the Christian gentry and aristocracy, who resented the new competition for positions of profit and privilege. A distinction came to be made between converts to Christianity and their descendants, who were called New Christians (
cristianos nuevos
), and Christians who had been born into the faith, now pridefully called Old Christians. The
conversos
of Jewish origin found themselves the victims of Jew hatred that came from both the mob and the gentry. Within a century after the pogroms that had prompted the first wave of conversions, both professing Jews and converted Jews would come under attack by the throne and the Inquisition, too.
*

Until then, the Inquisition had operated only fitfully in the Iberian Peninsula. Nicholas Eymerich, author of the famous handbook of the medieval Inquisition, had served as inquisitor in Aragón in the fourteenth century, but he was removed from office after the pope received complaints from the Spanish clergy that Eymerich was rather too zealous in the pursuit of heresy. Still, the Old Christians understood how the machinery of persecution designed to dispose of “heretical filth” like the Cathars and Waldensians could be repurposed for the extermination of
conversos
of Jewish origin. And they found a champion in Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican friar who served as confessor to Queen Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504) and was perhaps the single most notorious figure in the long history of the Inquisition.

Torquemada worked diligently to poison the minds of Isabella and her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragón (1452–1516), against the policy of
convivencia
that had once allowed Christians, Jews, and Muslims to live in peace on the same soil. The king and queen were both attended by Jewish doctors, and both were willing to accept money from Jewish financiers. Indeed, Isabella regarded the Jews of Castile as her personal possession and saw herself as their protector: “All the Jews in my realms are mine,” she had once decreed, “and it belongs to me to defend and aid them.” Now, however, Torquemada urged her to undertake the mission of erasing Jewish presence and influence for all times. When Isabella and Ferdinand ascended to the throne of a newly unified Spanish monarchy in 1479 as
los reyes católicos
(the Catholic monarchs), the cherished goal of a purged and purified Spain was finally within reach.
²³

A pretext for the war on Spanish Jewry was supposedly provided, if one was needed, by the amorous adventures of a young
caballero
who ventured into the Judería of Seville by night to woo an alluring Jewish woman whose faith apparently mattered less to her suitor than her beauty. He is said to have slipped into her house, silently and discreetly, and thus surprised the members of the household in a compromising scene. A celebration of some kind, attended by a mixed company of Jews and New Christians, was in progress behind closed doors. Since it was Eastertide, which usually coincides with the observance of Passover, the gathering triggered all the ugly old suspicions about the ritual practices of Judaism. Even if the knight had only stumbled upon an ordinary seder meal, as it surely was, the fact that
conversos
were in attendance at all amounted to proof that they were, in fact, crypto-Jews.

The tale was reported to Isabella, who finally resolved to do the bidding of her confessor by putting the Inquisition to the task of ridding Spain of
conversos
who were guilty of the heresy known as Judaizing, that is, secretly practicing Judaism while professing to be Christians and seeking to convince others to do the same. The Spanish ambassador in Rome was instructed to petition Pope Sixtus IV for a suitable decree, and the pope complied in 1478 by authorizing the establishment of a branch operation of the Inquisition in Spain, the so-called Tribunal of the Holy Office. Significantly, the pope delegated to the king and queen the power to appoint, remove, and replace the inquisitors, with the sole proviso that they must be priests over the age of forty. On Christmas Day in 1480, the newly appointed inquisitors arrived in Seville, and by February 6, 1481, the first
conversos
of Jewish ancestry had been arrested, tried, and convicted, the first auto-da-fé convened, and six men and women burned alive at the stake.