Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities

by Unknown

The Spanish Jews, as we have seen, were treated on the arrival of the Arab conquerors not only with consideration, but with an amount of favor that was not extended to them under any other government in the world; nor was this wise liberality, as time went on, displayed only by the Moslem in Spain. At the Christian courts of Leon, of Castile, and of Catalonia, the Jews were welcomed as lenders of money and as healers of diseases, and as men skilled in many industrial arts; and they supplied what little science was required in northern Spain, while their brethren shared in the magnificent culture and extended studies of Cordova. When the rule of the Arab declined, and Alfonso el Sabio held his court at southern Seville, the learned Jews were his chosen companions. They certainly assisted him in the preparation of his great astronomical tables. They probably assisted him in his translation of the Bible.

Nor does this court favor appear to have caused any serious jealousy among Christian Spaniards. The fellow-student of Alfonso X., the trusted treasurer of Peter the Cruel, the accommodating banker of many a king and many a noble—the Jew was for some time a personage of importance rather than a refugee in the Peninsula. And during the whole of the thirteenth century, while the Jews were exposed throughout western Europe to the most dreadful and systematic persecutions, they enjoyed in Spain not only immunity, but protection, not only religious freedom, but political consideration.

Under Alfonso XI. they were particularly regarded, and even under Peter the Cruel, who, though he tortured and robbed his Hebrew treasurer, did not at any time display his natural ferocity in any form of religious persecution. Yet, as we are told that his rival and successor, Henry of Trastamara, sought popular favor by molesting the Jews, it would seem that already by the end of the fourteenth century they were becoming unpopular in Castile. But on the whole, throughout the Peninsula, from the time of James I. of Aragon, who is said to have studied ethics under a Jewish professor, to the time of John II. of Castile, who employed a Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national “Cancionero,” or ballad book, the Jews were not only distinguished, but encouraged, in literature and abstract science, as they had always been in the more practical pursuits of medicine and of commerce.

But in less than a century after the death of Alfonso X. the tide of fortune had turned. Their riches increased overmuch in a disturbed and impoverished commonwealth, and public indignation began to be displayed, rather at their un-Christian opulence than at their Jewish faith. Inquisition was made rather into their strongboxes than into their theology; and it was their debtors and their rivals, rather than any religious purists, who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, and more especially in Aragon, stirred up those popular risings against their race that led to the massacres and the wholesale conversions of 1391. The first attack that was made upon the persons and property of the Jews was in 1388, and it was no doubt provoked by the preaching of the fanatic archdeacon Hernando Martinez at Seville. But it was in nowise religious in its character, and was aimed chiefly at the acquisition and destruction of the property of the rich and prosperous Hebrews. The outbreaks which took place almost simultaneously in all parts of Spain were disapproved both by kings and councils. Special judges were sent to the disturbed cities, and a considerable amount of real protection was extended to the plundered people. No one said a word about conversion; or at least the conversion was that of ancient Pistol, the conversion of the property of the Jews into the possession of the Christians. When the Jewish quarter of Barcelona was sacked by the populace, and an immense number of Hebrews were despoiled and massacred throughout the country, John of Aragon, indolent though he was, used his utmost endeavors to check the slaughter. He punished the aggressors, and he even caused a restitution of goods to be made to such of the victims as survived.

The preaching of St. Vincent Ferrer, during the early part of the fifteenth century, was addressed largely to the Jews in Spain, but little or no religious persecution seems to have been directed against them in consequence of his harangues. On the contrary, we read of friendly conferences or public disputations between Jewish and Christian doctors in Aragon, where the Inquisition was, at least, nominally established. Such conferences could hardly be expected to convince or convert the advocates of either faith, but they tell at least of an amount of toleration on the part of the Christian authorities of the day that was certainly not to be found in Spain at the close of the century; and there is no doubt that they were followed by a very large number of conversions of the more malleable members of the Hebrew community. But it is a far cry from St. Vincent Ferrer to the uncanonized Tomas de Torquemada.

Yet, even in outward conformity to the established religion, the Jews, as time went on, found no permanent safety from persecution and plunder. John II. indeed had little of the bigot in his composition; it was Politics and not Persecution that, under his successor, engrossed the attention of clergy and laity in Castile; but, as soon as the power of Isabella was formally established, the destruction of all that was not orthodox, Catholic, and Spanish became the keynote of the domestic policy of the new government of Spain.

The earliest efforts of the Spanish Inquisition were directed, as we have seen, almost exclusively against those converted Jews, or the sons and daughters of converts, who were known by the expressive name of New Christians, a title applied also to Christianized Moslems, and which distinguished both classes from the Old Christians or Cristianos Viejos, who could boast of a pure Castilian ancestry. These New Christians, as a whole, at the end of the fifteenth century, were among the richest, the most industrious, and the most intelligent of the population, and they were regarded with considerable envy by their poorer neighbors, whose blue blood did not always bring with it either wealth or fortune. The Rules and Regulations for the guidance of the Inquisitors were therefore specially framed to include every possible act or thought that might bring the members of the classes specially aimed at within the deadly category of the Relapsed. If the “New Christian” wore a clean shirt, or spread clean table-linen on a Saturday (Art. 4), if he ate meat in Lent (7), observed any of the Jewish fasts (8-17), or sat at table with any Jew of his acquaintance (19); if he recited one of the Psalms of David without the addition of the Doxology (20), if he caused his child to be baptized under a Hebrew name (23), he was to be treated as a renegade and condemned to the flames.

With every act of his life thus at the mercy of spies and informers, his last end was not unobserved by the Dominicans and the Familiars of the Holy Office. If in the article of death he turned his weary face (31) to the wall of his chamber, he was adjudged relapsed, and all his possessions were forfeit; or if the sorrowing children of even the most unexceptionable convert had washed his dead body with warm water (32) they were to be treated as apostates and heretics, and were at least liable to suffer death by fire, after their goods had been appropriated by the Holy Office or by the Crown.

In the sentences which condemned to the stake, to confiscation, and to penances which were punishments of the severest description, we find enumerated such offenses as the avoiding the use of fat, and especially of lard; preparing amive, a kind of broth much appreciated by the Jews; or eating “Passover bread”; reading, or even possessing, a Hebrew Bible; ignorance of the Pater noster and the Creed; saying that a good Jew could be saved, and a thousand other equally harmless deeds or words.

But with the professed and avowed Jew, unpopular as he may have been with his neighbors, and exposed at times to various forms of civil and religious outrage, the Holy Office did not directly concern itself. The Hebrew, like the Moslem, was outside the pale even of Christian inquiry.