It was not long before these anticipations were fulfilled. On Easter Day, 1506, a fierce and sanguinary outbreak occurred in Lisbon, which illustrates only too faithfully the state of public feeling in that day towards the New Christians—which had now become the customary designation of the Jews. Its immediate cause was an insult offered to a famous miraculous crucifix, which had been brought out of the cathedral into the great square. The plague had broken out in the town, the season was unusually dry, and the pestilence was aggravated by the want of water. It was hoped that through the aid of the image some help might be sent from above. On a sudden, while the eyes of all were anxiously fixed on it, the features of the sculptured Christ were seen to smile. The people all broke out into expressions of admiring thankfulness, except one man, who declared that the smile had been caused by a stream of light let in by a lamp through the back of the figure. He was one of the New Christians, and the hollowness of his profession had already been suspected. The Dominicans denounced him as an apostate, and he was instantly struck down and slain. The mob followed up this deed of violence by attacking and slaying all the countrymen of the offender whom they encountered. The monks incited them to further excesses, promising (it is said by a Jewish historian) that whoever should murder a Jew would not have to pass more than one hundred days in purgatory, let his offences be what they might. The rabble, thus incited, assailed, gutted, and burned the houses of all the Jews in the town; men, women, and children were everywhere massacred; those who had fled into the churches for sanctuary were torn from the altars, dragged out, and burned. For three days the carnage went on unchecked. At the end of that time King Emmanuel, who had been absent at Abrantes, returned to Lisbon. He sent a body of troops into the town sufficient to quell the disturbance; the ringleaders of the outbreak were arrested and hanged; and the magistrates, who had shown their incompetency to deal with the emergency, removed from office. Such of the New Christians as had escaped the murderous hands of the mob again passed under the protection of the law. Yet they could not but have felt like men dwelling near the crater of some volcanic mountain, which might at any moment burst forth in torrents of burning lava, and overwhelm them utterly; and it is worthy of notice that, although the rioters were sternly punished for their lawless violence, no reparation was made to the Jews—not even an expression of regret was uttered for the unprovoked and cruel wrongs they had undergone. It is passing strange that they should have still clung to a land so unkindly, and still more strange that those who had quitted it for other countries, where at least life and property were secure, should have been anxious to return to it.
Yet this did occur. When Charles V., the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, succeeded in 1519 to the throne of Spain, some of the Jewish exiles sent a deputation to him, requesting permission to reoccupy their ancient homes, free from the perpetual and pitiless interference of the Inquisition. In requital of this service, if he should be inclined to render it to them, they offered no less a sum than 800,000 crowns of gold. Charles received them favourably, and his council advised the acceptance of their offer. But Cardinal Ximenes, who had succeeded Torquemada as Inquisitor General, interfered, and sternly warned Charles that he could not comply with the request without unfaithfulness to Christ. Charles yielded, as his grandfather had yielded to Torquemada, and the petition of the Jews was rejected. Under the same influence he refused the Portuguese refugees permission to continue in Holland, whither many of them had fled. All who had not resided for six years in that country were obliged to quit it.
In 1521 John III. succeeded Emmanuel as King of Portugal. The latter had promised the New Christians, on their consenting to receive baptism, that the Inquisition should not be introduced into Portugal.[169] But some of John’s advisers persuaded him that this promise was not binding, for two reasons—first, because the New Christians were notoriously unfaithful to their engagements; and secondly, because he had no power to make such an agreement without the consent of the Pope. To the Pope therefore John appealed for leave to set up the Holy Tribunal. But Clement VII. and his cardinals at once refused the petition, and ordered that all the New Christians whom John had arrested should be set at liberty. When, in 1534, Paul III. succeeded Clement, John renewed his petition. But Paul rejected it as resolutely as his predecessor had done, pointing out that Emmanuel’s promises ought in honour and good faith to be respected.
John, however, was not to be discouraged. Learning that the Emperor Charles V. was on his way homeward, after his military success at Tunis, he resolved to avail himself of the opportunity. Charles would be entitled by the exploits he had performed to a triumph, at which custom allowed him to ask any favour he pleased from the Pope. He besought Charles therefore to make the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal the privileged request. Charles assented,[170] and the Pope, though sorely unwilling, was obliged to grant it. At the same time, however, he stipulated that all the Portuguese Jews who had been imprisoned up to that time should be released from prison, and receive a free pardon. This condition the king refused to comply with; and the Pope had to exercise his personal authority, placarding the pardons on the doors of the churches, and sending his own officers to release the prisoners. The Inquisition, however, was set up in Portugal; and the same results attended the measure as had followed from it elsewhere, on all other occasions. Many of the secret Jews, foreseeing these, fled to other lands; where, if not actually safe from persecution, they would be at all events less liable to it.
Not many years afterwards, Jews and New Christians were to be met with in considerable numbers in various parts of the newly discovered regions of America, both in the countries which had been taken possession of by Spain and those which had fallen to the share of Portugal. In Africa also, and all over Asia, they settled—sometimes a scattered few, sometimes in larger communities. So numerous, indeed, were the emigrants, and so injurious to the national welfare was their departure found to be, that repeated edicts were issued by the kings of Portugal, forbidding it on the severest penalties. The simple method of detaining them, by making their residence in the country agreeable, or even endurable, to them, does not seem to have been thought of.
In Europe their chief place of retreat was Holland. While this was under the government of Spain, they were as sternly excluded from it as from every other portion of his Catholic Majesty’s dominions. But when the long struggle for independence ended in the emancipation of the Seven United Provinces, the Spanish and Portuguese emigrants were favourably received there. In 1590, three Portuguese Jews, the advanced guard, so to speak, of a numerous host which was to follow, were hospitably entertained. From Embden in 1594 came ten more, who had borne the Portuguese names of Lopes Homen and Pereira, but who, as soon as they had settled in the Dutch capital, resumed their original designation of Abendana. The first synagogue was built there, in 1598. Notwithstanding the flight, however, of so many of the so-called New Christians from Portugal, enough of them remained behind to form a powerful party in the capital, which more than once, during the latter part of the century, interfered with considerable effect in the affairs of the State.
It remains that we say somewhat more respecting those Jews who still continued, as we have said, to reside in Spain and Portugal. A stranger, and at the same time a more instructive, history is not to be found in the annals of the world. Bigotry has never been so blind, so determined, so unscrupulous, as it was in Spain under the iron rule of the Inquisition. Arbitrary power has never been exercised more freely, more persistently, more pitilessly, than by Torquemada and his successors. The eyes of the Inquisition were everywhere—spying out men’s ways, not only in their discharge of public duties, but following them, Argus-like, into the privacy of their family intercourse—nay, into the solitude of their closets and bedchambers. Their ears drank in men’s secret whispers, uttered only in the hearing of their nearest intimates—their wives or their children. They did not hesitate to inflict the most dreadful tortures in order to elicit the information they desired. They spared, in the prosecution of their task, neither the weakness of womanhood, the tenderness of infancy, nor the infirmities of age. Yet they could not penetrate the mystery of secret Judaism. Men obtained the highest rank in the State, and filled the most important offices, honoured and dreaded by all men, who nevertheless belonged to this despised and proscribed race. The blood which was supposed so to degrade the man in whose veins it ran was owned by the greatest and noblest of the land—the marquis, the duke, and the prince, with their high-sounding titles and their lengthy pedigrees. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it is related of the celebrated Portuguese minister, Pombal, that the king, having proposed at a meeting of the council that all who were of Jewish descent should be obliged thenceforth to appear in yellow caps, attended at the next council with three yellow caps in his hand. The king having inquired the meaning of this procedure, he replied that it was intended to carry out the proposition the king had made. ‘One cap,’ he observed, ‘is for your majesty, one for the Grand Inquisitor, and the third for myself.’
Stranger still, but equally certain, is the fact that secret Jews held posts of dignity, not in the State only, but the Church also. There were convents full of Jewish monks and Jewish nuns. Priests said mass at the altars, and received confessions, and pronounced absolution, who regarded all these rites as false and impious. Nay, secret Jews wielded the powers of the Holy Office itself. They saw men dragged before them, and tortured and condemned them to the stake, for holding precisely the same faith as themselves—pronounced, it may be, the sentence with their own lips, and then went to their homes to take part in the proscribed rites themselves. If anything could prove more clearly than has been already proved, the folly, no less than wickedness, of religious persecution, it would surely be this strange and startling history.[171]
Nor ought we to quit this subject without remarking on the just and stern retribution with which the nation has been visited that did these things. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain was the leading power in Europe, containing forty millions of inhabitants, for which its rich and productive soil afforded ample subsistence. The empire of the New World, which was, as it were, committed to her care, poured wealth without limit into her lap. What is she now? Abroad, her name carries little respect; she has sunk to a secondary rank among the nations. Her voice is never heard in the settlement of European interests. At home, her population has diminished to little more than one-third of what it was four centuries before; her commerce is paralysed; her government unsettled. The poverty and ignorance of her people seem to be ever on the increase, and strife and anarchy continually distract the land. Who can doubt that her double sin—against the Indians of the New World, and the Jews of the Old—has brought down this heavy judgment on her?