A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3

by Henry Charles Lea

As a matter of course, punctilious regard was paid to all Catholic observances—mass, confession and communion, feast-days and fasts. The dying were duly shriven and had the viaticum, the dead had Christian burial in the churches. Living thus scattered in small groups or isolated families, concealing their secret faith with the utmost care, and in perpetual dread of betrayal, it is not surprising that distinctive Jewish observances were gradually reduced to a minimum, and were becoming to a great degree forgotten. They had no rabbis to keep them instructed in the countless prescriptions of the Oral Law and the incidence of days of observance. Circumcision, of course, was out of the question; it was too compromising and there was no one to perform it, unless some specially zealous youth might betake himself to France or to Italy for the purpose. We hear nothing in the trials of abstinence from pork, or the removal of fat from meat, or the mortuary laying-out of the dead. There was an attempt to fast on the day of Queen Esther, when that was known, and perhaps on other days of no special note, as a spiritual exercise; we hear of washing the hands before meals and giving thanks to the God of Israel; lamps might be lighted on Friday night, but it sufficed to light one and let it burn till it went out. The Sabbath was to be kept by cessation from work, but even this was not always observed, and the changing of body-linen is rarely alluded to. Angela Núñez Marques said that Ana de Niebes and María de Murcia had taught her the Law of Moses and its ceremonies, which were to rest on the Sabbath and to observe fasts of four and twenty hours without food or drink, yet, during the twenty years of her residence in Pastrana, she had kept only fifteen Sabbaths, for fear of discovery by her husband and servants. Isabel Mendes Correa, who appeared in the Madrid auto of 1680, when sick some years before, had vowed that, if she recovered, she would rest on Saturdays and light lamps on Fridays, for she deemed her illness a punishment for neglecting the Law of Moses. In short, Judaism seems to have resolved itself into Sabbath-keeping with occasional fasting, and into hoping to be saved in the Law of Moses and denying Christ and Christian doctrine.[819]

All this increased the difficulty of detection and vexed the souls of the inquisitors, in both Spain and Portugal. An exhortation addressed to the New Christians, in 1640, in Granada, by Maestro Gabriel Rodríguez de Escabias, denounces them roundly for thus betraying their faith. So at the Lisbon auto of September 6, 1705, where the sermon was preached by Diogo da Annunciasam, Archbishop of Cranganor, he commenced by addressing the sixty-six penitents before him—“Miserable relics of Judaism! Unhappy fragments of the synagogue! Last remains of Judea! Scandal of the Catholics and detestable objects of scorn even to the Jews themselves!... You are the detestable objects of scorn to the Jews, for you are so ignorant that you cannot observe the very law under which you live”—a truly Christian welcome to repentant sinners, which was deemed worthy of perpetuation by the printing-press.[820] Yet in this duplicity, so reprehensible in inquisitorial eyes, there was promise of the final success of the work so unremittingly prosecuted for two centuries. The hammer was gradually wearing away the anvil; only the marvellous constancy of Judaism had enabled it to maintain itself under such conditions, and eventually the Portuguese Judaizers were to be incorporated in the Church as, for the most part, their Spanish brethren had been already.

CONTINUED PERSECUTION

Still, the activity of the Inquisition continued to be rewarded with abundant success, and indeed we may say that but for Judaism it would have found little to do. In the public autos of Córdova, from 1655 to 1700, out of three hundred and ninety-nine persons and effigies brought forward, three hundred and twenty-four were for Judaizing. In Toledo, from 1651 to 1700, there were eight hundred and fifty-five cases tried of every kind, trivial and important, of which five hundred and fifty-six were for the same offence. Towards the closing years of the century, there seems to be a decided falling off in the numbers, as though vigilance were becoming relaxed, or the efforts of the tribunals were being crowned with success; but, in a report of pending cases in Valladolid, made July 8, 1699, out of eighty-five, seventy-eight were Judaizers.[821] This activity however seems to be largely confined to Castile, as though the Portuguese had not found the kingdoms of Aragon attractive. Reports of cases pending in Valencia in 1694-5-6, show in all but sixteen, among which there is not a single Judaizer.[822] It is perhaps worthy of passing remark that, in the treaty of 1668, by which Spain recognized the independence of Portugal, Article 4 provides that the subjects of each power, in the territories of the other, shall enjoy the privileges and immunities granted to British subjects by the treaties of 1630 and 1667.[823] These guaranteed them against molestation for matters of conscience, so long as they gave no occasion for scandal, but, from what we have seen above, it does not appear that the Inquisition of either country paid any attention to this, nor is it likely that either government complained of infraction.

During this period, the laws restricting the emigration of the New Christians seem to have been mostly in abeyance, but when, in 1666, the false Messiah, Zabathia Tzevi, appeared in Palestine and drew a large following of misguided Jews, the Suprema took the alarm. The sea-port tribunals were warned that some of the Portuguese would seek to join him, so that if any Portuguese should come and endeavor to embark, they were to be detained under some pretext, their property was to be seized and examined and a report be sent to the Suprema. Some four months later, Barcelona forwarded the testimony taken in the case of four Portuguese thus detained, when the Suprema ordered their release and that in future, when the evidence showed that they were not fugitives or bound for some suspicious place, they should be allowed to proceed. In this same year a muleteer named Francisco Núñez Redondo was punished at Toledo as a Judaizer, and for conducting Judaizers out of the country, the two hundred lashes added, in his sentence to reconciliation and prison, being evidently the penalty for this special offence.[824] In 1672, there was another similar alarm. The Suprema informed the tribunals that many families of Portuguese were arranging to pass by way of Bayonne to France. All the roads and paths were therefore to be guarded, and all Portuguese who seemed to be seeking to leave the kingdom were to be seized with their property. Each individual was to be closely examined, his genealogy taken, his past life recorded, his destination and the motives of his journey to be stated, with all other details necessary for a thorough knowledge of his antecedents and purposes, and this information was to be forwarded to the Suprema with the opinion of the tribunal. Similar precautions were ordered at the Mediterranean sea-ports, but the object of this action was not stated.[825]

THE MALLORQUIN TRIBUNAL

Valladares, who was inquisitor-general from 1669 to 1695, seems to have taken a different view of this curiously perverse policy of preventing the emigration of disaffected apostates. August 12, 1681, he sent, to some one near the king, an anonymous memorial setting forth the invincible obstinacy of the Jews; penance and punishment left them as wicked as before, resulting in many evils, such as the engagement in noble houses of Jewish wet-nurses, who infect the children with their milk, the employment by Conversos of young children whom they pervert, the sacrilege of the sacraments administered to them, and the like. The remedy for this was the immediate exile of all who were penanced or, if they were allowed to remain, the branding of them on the forehead with the arms of the Inquisition. Valladares was probably the author of the memorial, for he makes this hideous suggestion his own, urging it with all the authority of the Inquisition, and invoking the judgement of heaven on his correspondent if he fails to lay the paper before the king. Carlos sent it to the Suprema for its opinion, and the matter went no further, but the document is not without interest as a revelation of the methods which persecutors were willing to adopt to escape from the consequences of their own acts.[826]

Although it was the Portuguese immigration which supplied the apparently inexhaustible harvest of culprits throughout the seventeenth century, there was one corner of Spain which escaped the influx and where the old Conversos continued to cherish their secret faith with little or no molestation. Allusion has more than once been made above to the Majorca catastrophe of 1691 and, as an episode of Spanish Judaism, its details deserve consideration. In the massacre of 1391, some of the Mallorquin Jews escaped to Barbary, but the majority remained. The governor, Francisco Sagariga, had been wounded in endeavoring to protect them; they were won over to conversion by the terror of death, and the promise of the authorities to give them twenty thousand libras wherewith to pay their debts,—a promise which seems never to have been fulfilled. They continued to inhabit the call, or Jewish quarter and, although the aljama came to an end in 1410, its members remained as a separate community.[827] The conversion was as superficial as was to be anticipated and though, as nominal Christians, they were not affected by the expulsion of 1492, when the Inquisition was introduced we have seen, from the numbers who came in under Edicts of Grace, that they must all have been Jews at heart for, between 1488 and 1491, there were no less than five hundred and sixty-eight reconciliations, besides those who, by special mercy, were reconciled twice. After this, for awhile the tribunal was fairly active. Between 1489, when it commenced operations, and 1535 it sentenced a hundred and sixty-four to reconciliation, ninety-nine to relaxation in person, and four hundred and sixty to relaxation in effigy, all of whom presumably were Judaizers except, in 1535, five Moriscos who were relaxed.[828] After this, persecution grew inert, relaxations disappear and reconciliations become few. So insignificant had the tribunal become that when, in 1549, the offices of fiscal and receiver fell vacant, Valdés wrote to ask what was the necessity of filling them.[829] He might well ask the question: between 1552 and 1567 the tribunal had but two reconciliations to show and, during the remainder of the century, only thirty, together with a single relaxation, and of these few culprits the majority were not Judaizers. In the seventeenth century, the record was even slenderer. Engaged, for the most part as we have seen, in unappeaseable conflicts with the ecclesiastical authorities, the duties of persecution were neglected, and heretic and apostate breathed in comparative peace. The reconciliation of María Díez, September 6, 1579, was followed by a century in which not a single Judaizer was reconciled, although, in 1675, one from Madrid was relaxed. The inhabitants of the call might well deem themselves secure, especially as the churchmen were free in their denunciations of the tribunal. In 1668 the inquisitor complained to the Suprema that the priests of the episcopal party talked of the Inquisition as a secret heresy, and that it was a den of robbers which should be abolished, all of which led to much licence of speech among the suspected persons who dwelt “in the separate barrio.”[830]

THE MALLORQUIN TRIBUNAL

From this sense of security there was a rude awakening. In 1677 or 1678 a meeting, held in a garden outside of the city, attracted the inquisitor’s attention. It was designated as a synagogue, and doubtless there was some imprudence. Secret investigation developed evidence justifying wholesale arrests, and the prison was soon crowded. The result appeared in four autos celebrated in 1679, in which there were no less than two hundred and nineteen reconciliations. There was no spirit of martyrdom; in all cases it was a first conviction, and when all confessed and begged for mercy there was no opportunity for relaxation. A noteworthy feature was the absence of prosecutions of the dead, which could have been numerous had the tribunal been disposed to take the trouble, but this is doubtless explicable by the fact that as the whole community of New Christians was involved, all its property was confiscated, and there would have been no profit in looking up ancestral heresies. The confiscations were enormous; the culprits were merchants and traders and bankers, whose houses and lands, censos and merchandise and credits were swept away. The sum realized is stated at 1,496,276 pesos, which is probably far below the real value of the assets seized. We have seen how the king was gradually shouldered out of his share of the spoils; the tribunal secured a goodly portion with which it rebuilt the palace of the Inquisition in a style so sumptuous that it passed for one of the finest in Spain, until it was demolished, in 1822, and its site converted into a public plaza.[831]