A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3

by Henry Charles Lea

CHAPTER I.
JEWS.

AS the apostasy of the enforced converts from Judaism was the proximate cause of the establishment of the Spanish Holy Office, so they continued to be almost the exclusive object of its energies, until the similar treatment of the Moors created, in the Moriscos, a class with even greater claims on its solicitude. The rooting out of the latter, however, in the early years of the seventeenth century, was so complete that they virtually disappeared from the records of the tribunals, while the Jewish New Christians remained, and, for more than another century provided the major portion of their more serious work.

It had been easy, since 1391, to compel baptism by the alternatives of exile or death, but it had never been deemed necessary to supplement this by instruction in the new faith, or by efforts to effect a real conversion. When Ferdinand and Isabella were aroused to the fact that the Conversos were Christians only in name, terrorism was the sole method that suggested itself of accomplishing the great task of securing the desired unity of faith. So, when the expulsion of 1492, filled the land with a new multitude of neophytes, there was the same disregard of the duty of persuasion and instruction. The only utterances on the subject seem to assume that they would in some way instruct and fortify themselves in their new religion. When, in 1496, a royal pragmática forbade them for three years to farm the royal revenues, the reason alleged was that such occupation would distract them from obtaining due instruction in Christian doctrine. In 1499, the Suprema ordered that the Conversos anterior to 1492 should live scattered among Old Christians, while the recent ones should be separated from their rabbis, living by themselves in towns and strengthening their faith by punctual attendance on divine service.[666] It was not until 1500 that it bethought itself to provide that all the banished Jews who returned, claiming to be baptized, must exhibit certificates of baptism for themselves and their children; they must observe the feasts and attend mass and sermons, and all children, over six years of age, must, within six months, know the four prayers, the seven mortal sins and the confession of faith.[667] When the enforced conversion of the Moriscos created an even greater multitude of nominal Christians, there were a few equally ineffective instructions issued as to both classes, to which little attention was paid. The simplicity of belief in the adequacy of these measures was apparently grounded on faith in the effectiveness of the inquisitorial process, of which we have incidentally seen so many illustrations during the early period.

That confidence continued unabated, and the enforcement of uniformity in this fashion was followed energetically, with only such intermissions as might arise from the lack of accessible material, or from indolence in searching for it. Where there was zeal there was little scruple, as appears from a letter addressed, about 1540, by the tribunal of Llerena to all the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal. It had arrested twenty-one persons, in addition to three fugitives and two deceased, on suspicion—probably because they were on their way to Portugal—and it now asked to have all the registers of the Peninsula ransacked for evidence to justify their prosecution.[668] We have had occasion to see how slender was the proof required for this—the slightest adherence to any of the ancestral customs of Judaism, whether of religious significance or not, sufficed, and lists of these observances were carefully drawn up for the guidance of inquisitors. The more obvious, such as the avoidance of pork and lard, the removal of fat from meat, the observance of the Sabbath by changing linen, lighting lamps and abstaining from work, the killing of fowls by decollation, the keeping of stated fasts, eating meat in Lent and the like, were known of all men, and perpetual watch was kept by Old Christians on the households of Conversos, so that all such lapses were eagerly reported to the tribunals, as required by the Edicts of Faith. They furnished ample ground for suspicion, justifying arrest and trial, when inquisitorial methods insured that no lurking Judaic tendencies could escape detection.

EVIDENCE OF JUDAISM

An illustrative case was that of Elvira del Campo, tried at Toledo in 1567. She was of converso descent and was married to Alonso de Moya, a scrivener of Madridejos, who seems to have been an Old Christian. According to witnesses who had lived with her as servants, or were her near neighbors, she went to mass and confession and gave all outward sign of being a good Christian; she was kind and charitable, but she would not eat pork and, when she cooked it for the household, she handled it with a rag so as not to touch it, which she explained by saying that she had a throat-trouble which made it disagree with her, and that handling it made her hands smell. There was a little cumulative evidence about putting on clean linen on Saturdays and not working, but this was insignificant and the case rested on pork. The chief witnesses were two of her husband’s employees, Pedro de Liano and Alonso Collados, who lived in the house, and their evidence went much into detail as to their spying about the kitchen, peeping into cupboards, and watching all the details of her housekeeping. Liano testified that once he and Collados talked about her putting a leg of mutton into water to soak over night, when Collados said he thought there was some Jewish ceremony in this, and it would please him much to know it, for he would accuse her to the Inquisition, as he was on bad terms with her. Yet Collados, before the tribunal, concluded his testimony by saying that he wished her well for her good treatment of him, that he held her to be a good Christian, because she went to mass and spoke ill of no one and was very reserved, rarely leaving her home and talking with but few people.

Elvira was arrested early in July, and at first her trial was pushed with speed, as she was pregnant, but her confinement, August 31st, caused a delay of three months. She admitted not eating pork, but attributed this to medical advice, for a disease communicated to her by her husband, which she desired to conceal. Little stress was laid on the other charges and she strenuously asserted her orthodoxy. Of the twelve witnesses against her she identified six, but her effort to disable them for enmity failed, except as regarded the two most damaging ones, Collados and Diego Hernández. Of thirteen witnesses for character, consisting of ecclesiastics and neighbors, all but one—who professed ignorance—gave emphatic testimony as to her being a good Christian, attentive and regular in all religious duties, obedient to the precepts of the Church, and in no way the object of suspicion. There was evidently nothing to do but to torture her. This, as we have seen above (p. 24) was administered twice, and resulted in her stating that when she was eleven years old her mother had told her not to eat pork and to observe the Sabbath, and she knew this to be against the Christian Law—but, as her mother had died when she was eleven years old, we can not unreasonably doubt its truth. The next day a ratification was obtained in the shape that her not eating pork, changing her chemise and observing the Sabbath, were in pursuance of the Law of Moses as taught her by her mother; she had never mentioned this to anyone, for her father would have killed her and she feared her husband.

On the strength of this, in the consulta de fe, there was one fanatic who voted her relaxation, but the rest agreed upon reconciliation with its disabilities, confiscation and three years of prison and sanbenito, which were duly imposed in an auto of June 13, 1568, but, in a little more than six months, the imprisonment was commuted to spiritual penances, and she was told to go where she chose. Thus, besides the horrors of her trial, she was beggared and ruined for life, and an ineffaceable stain was cast upon her kindred and descendants. What became of the infant born in prison is not recorded, but presumably it was fortunate enough to die. Trivial as may seem the details of such a trial, they are not without importance as a sample of what was occupying the tribunals of all Spain, and they raise the interesting question whether in truth the inquisitors believed what they assumed in the public sentence, that they had been laboring to rescue Elvira from the errors and darkness of her apostasy and to save her soul. The minute points on which the fate of the accused might depend are illustrated by the insistence with which they dwell on her abstinence from pork, on her refusal to eat buttered cakes, on her use of two stewing-pots, and on the time at which she changed her chemise and baked her bread.[669]

ERADICATION OF JUDAISM

Subjected, on the one hand, to the ceaseless espionage of servants and neighbors and, on the other, to the pitiless zeal of the tribunals, even the heroic obstinacy of Judaism, which had triumphed over the countless miseries of the Dispersion, gradually succumbed to this all-pervading persecution, so ceaselessly and relentlessly applied. As generation succeeded generation, with no hope of relief, this unremitting pressure seemed gradually to be attaining its object. The prosecutions for Judaism commenced to diminish sensibly. Valencia had a large converso population and, during the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the trials averaged between thirty and forty a year. Then came the enforced baptism of the Moors, who for some time furnished a predominant contingent. The latter were temporarily released from inquisitorial jurisdiction in 1540, and, during the three years, 1541, 1542 and 1543, there was not a single trial for heresy. In 1546 they were again relieved from the Inquisition and, in the following sixteen years, until 1562, the total number of trials for heresy was but forty-eight—in fact, in the ten years between 1550 and 1560, there were but two, showing that Judaism there had almost ceased to be the object of inquisitorial activity.[670] In Toledo, which included Madrid, during the sixteen years, 1575-1590 inclusive, there were but twenty-three cases.[671] In 1565, an auto at Seville presented seventy-four penitents without one Judaizer, and there were none in a Cuenca auto of 1585 in which figured twenty-one Moriscos.[672] Even as early as 1558, when the Suprema was magnifying its services to obtain from Paul IV the grant of prebends, it admitted that for some years there had been but few Judaizers found, but it alluded vaguely to some recent discoveries of them in Murcia, who would soon be punished.[673] In fact, not long afterward, Paolo Tiepolo, the Venetian envoy, alludes to the arrest in Murcia of a large number of Jews.[674]