The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (30 page)

On the day of his sentencing, again like the countless other victims of the Inquisition, the seventy-year-old Galileo donned the white shirt that marked him as a penitent, knelt in front of the assembly of inquisitor-judges, and recited the ancient and solemn formula of abjuration: “With sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the Holy Church,” he declared. “Should I know any heretic or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be.”
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Thanks to his confession and abjuration, the penances required of Galileo were among the mildest that the Inquisition was empowered to impose. The old man was ordered to recite seven penitential psalms each day for three years, and he was sentenced to “the formal prison of this Holy Office for as long as we deem necessary,” although he was permitted to return to his home in Florence and serve out his life sentence under house arrest. Copies of the inquisitorial decree against Galileo, on the order of the Holy Office, were sent “to all Inquisitors against heretical pravity, and especially the Inquisitor in Florence, who shall read the sentence in full assembly and in the presence of most of those who profess the mathematical art.”
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The trial of Galileo can be seen as nothing more than a finger in the dike of history. His writings may have remained on the Index until 1822, but even while Galileo was still living he was able to publish his final work,
Two New Sciences,
by sending the manuscript to Amsterdam, which lay far outside the ever-diminishing reach of the Inquisition. Elsewhere in Europe, waves of innovation and intellectual liberty were eroding the walls of true belief and received wisdom in every aspect of the human enterprise—arts and letters, science and technology, commerce and industry. In that sense, the Inquisition was already defunct in much of Europe and heading toward obsolescence on the day in 1634 when Galileo fell to his knees and mouthed the same words that had passed the lips of condemned men and women four hundred years earlier.

Yet the condemnation of Galileo as a heretic was far from the last gasp of the Inquisition. Remarkably, the arrest, torture, and burning of heretics was still a lively enterprise in a few other places around Europe, and nowhere more so than in the kingdom of Spain. The same monarchs who had sent Columbus on the fateful voyages that resulted in the discovery of the New World had also embraced the Inquisition as a crucial tool of state policy and imperial ambition. That ambition, as we shall see, had less to do with the war on heresy than with the purging of what Ferdinand and Isabella saw as the taint of Jewish and Muslim blood. For nearly two centuries after the day on which Galileo rose to his feet and walked out of the Palace of the Inquisition in Rome, the Spanish Inquisition remained in existence, and its long shadow is not yet gone.

PURITY OF BLOOD

Some people say that you should become Christian, but may God ruin my holiday if I advise it. The reason is that once you have become Christian, they will figure out a way to shove your face in the fire.

Interrogation of Juan de Salzedo by the Spanish
Inquisition, 1502

B
y its own admission, if also to its regret, the Inquisition enjoyed no jurisdiction over professing Jews.
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Bernard Gui, for example, railed against “treacherous Jews,” whom he suspected of seeking to “pervert Christians secretly and lead them into Jewish treachery,” but readily conceded that the Inquisition was powerless to prosecute them precisely because they were practicing Jews. While the inquisitors were free to proceed against every kind of Christian heresy, their authority over Jewish victims was limited by canon law. Thus, Gui explained to the readers and users of his handbook, the inquisitors were authorized to arrest and punish only Christians who had converted to Judaism, and Jews who had converted to Christianity but continued to practice their old faith—that is, Jews who “return to the vomit of Judaism,” according to Gui’s own hateful phrase.
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Not every inquisitor, however, was entirely scrupulous in following the rules and regulations. Now and then, a cagey or callous inquisitor succeeded in convincing a Jewish man or woman to undergo the rite of baptism, whether by the use of winning words or under the threat of torture and death, and then promptly charged the newly converted Christian with the crime of heresy. On other occasions, the local Jewish populace was ordered to fund the operations of the Inquisition, and if they failed to pay up, the inquisitors proceeded against them as fautors of heresy. To snare a Jewish victim, some inquisitors insisted that the circumcision of a Christian, or the handling of a communion wafer, or even the building of a new synagogue was a crime within its jurisdiction. “The friars acted first,” observes Joshua Trachtenberg in
The Devil and the Jews,
“and debated afterward.”
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Both kings and popes were occasionally moved to intervene when the inquisitors exceeded their writ. After one bloodthirsty Dominican inquisitor tried and burned thirteen Jewish victims at the stake in France in 1288, Philip the Fair—the same French king who later turned on the Knights Templar—stepped in to restrain the Inquisition from seizing Jewish victims who should have been tried and punished by the royal courts, at least as far as the king was concerned. By 1448, Pope Nicholas V was sufficiently aroused to issue a public reprimand to the inquisitors for such excesses and cautioned them against asserting jurisdiction over Jewish victims “except in cases of manifest heresy or anti-Catholic activity.”
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Although the inquisitors were restricted in what they could do to Jewish flesh and blood, the Inquisition arrogated to itself the right and duty to proceed against Jewish writings. As early as 1233, the books of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides were burned by the Dominican inquisitors at an auto-da-fé in Montpellier. In 1239, Pope Gregory IX issued a decree that obliged the secular authorities across Europe to seize all available Jewish manuscripts and deliver them to the Inquisition for examination. The inquisitors concluded that the Talmud itself and all Talmudic commentaries were, in fact, “perversely heretical” and thus suitable for burning. By 1248, possession of a copy of the Talmud was a crime, and Jewish books were burned by the wagonload in Paris and Rome.
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Still, some inquisitors carved out enough space within the metes and bounds of canon law to persecute the Jews with quite as much aggression and brutality as they directed toward Cathars, Templars, and witches. Ironically, the country in which the Inquisition claimed the greatest number of Jewish victims is the same one that had once served as a unique and remarkable place of refuge for Jews. The so-called Golden Age of Spain, much celebrated in Jewish tradition, was an interlude during the High Middle Ages when Christians, Jews, and Muslims seemed to be able to coexist in harmony and prosperity on the Iberian Peninsula—an accommodation known as
convivencia.
At the very moment in history when the medieval Inquisition was preparing to exterminate the Cathars across the border in Languedoc, for example, a Castilian monarch called Saint Ferdinand proudly called himself “king of the three religions.”
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Yet it was in Spain that the full weight of the Inquisition fell on Jews and Muslims rather than Christian dissidents. The Spanish inquisitors devised a new and vastly more dangerous principle of persecution, one that sought to ensure purity of blood rather than purity of belief. And the inquisitors continued to maintain and operate the machinery of persecution long after it had fallen into disrepair and disuse everywhere else in Europe. To this day, when the Inquisition is mentioned, our thoughts turn reflexively to the near-mythic phenomenon of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Spanish Inquisition did not come into formal existence until 1478. When it did, however, the inquisitors were able to tap into a vast reservoir of anti-Semitic tradition that bubbled and boiled just beneath the surface of European civilization. Indeed, the law, literature, theology, and culture of Christendom had always been tainted with a fear and hatred of Jews, starting with those passages of the New Testament in which the execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman authorities in Judea is blamed on the Jews—“Pilate said to them, ‘Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’ They all said, ‘Let him be crucified’”—and continuing through the altar paintings, miracle plays, minstrels’ songs, broadsheets, and even the graffiti of medieval Europe.
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The emblematic medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, which appeared around the time that the first inquisitors sallied forth, proposed that a Jewish man who had taunted Jesus of Nazareth on the way to his crucifixion was condemned by God to wander the earth without rest until Jesus returned at the end of days. The figure is ubiquitous in Christian art of the Middle Ages—variously appearing as
Der Ewige Jude
(the Eternal Jew) in German and
Juan Espera-en-Dios
(John Waiting-for-God) in Spanish—and he came to symbolize the hateful notion that Jews were damned by God and thus ought to be shunned by good Christians.
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Jews were slandered not only as rootless wanderers but also as heartless usurers, despoilers of communion wafers, poisoners of wells, and ritual murderers who used the blood of Christian children in their religious observances. Precisely because Jews did not recognize Jesus of Nazareth as divine, Christian true believers were taught by the book of Revelation that they worshipped in “the synagogue of Satan.” By a long and especially ugly tradition, the figure of the Antichrist who appears in Christian apocalyptic writing was expected to be the spawn of a Jewish whore and the Devil himself. The supposed theological offenses of Judaism resulted in the forfeiture of legal rights for ordinary Jews: “Because of the crime which once their fathers committed against our Lord Jesus Christ,” went the so-called Jewry Law of one German kingdom in 1268, “the Jews are deprived of the protection of their natural rights and condemned to eternal misery for their sins.”
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Jewish men and women, in fact, were seen by some Christians as not fully human or not human at all. The medieval laws against bestiality and sodomy, for example, were sometimes applied to sexual intercourse between a Christian and a Jew on the reasoning that “coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog.” Thus, an English deacon was burned alive in Oxford in 1222 on charges of bestiality because he had converted to Judaism and married a Jewish woman, and another man was burned as a sodomist in Paris because he fathered several children with a Jewish mistress. Tragically, his Jewish lover, too, was put to the flames—a horrifying but illuminating example of the dehumanization of victims that has contributed to atrocities ranging from the mass murder of the Cathars to the horrors of the Holocaust.
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So it was that Jews were subjected to all manner of misery, both official discrimination and mob violence, throughout the period during which the Inquisition was in active operation. As late as 1581, Pope Gregory XIII forbade Jews to employ Christian wet-nurses because of the slander, first endorsed by Innocent III in 1205, that Jews “make these women pour their milk into the latrines for three days [after taking Communion] before they again give suck to the children.” Jewish doctors were denounced by Christian clergy as diabolical sorcerers: “It is better to die with Christ,” they urged their parishioners in Swabia, a region in southwestern Germany, in 1657, “than to be healed by a Jew doctor with Satan.”
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Since credit was essential to the economy of medieval Europe, Jews (but not Christians) were permitted to engage in moneylending under secular law but, at the same time, condemned for the practice by the Church: “Jews shall desist from usury, blasphemy, and magic,” according to one inquisitorial decree, which classed moneylending as a crime no less heinous than “sorcery, incendiarism, homicide, sacrilege, and fornication.”
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Surely the most egregious and enduring offense against Judaism in medieval Europe was the so-called blood libel—the wholly imaginary notion that Christians were kidnapped and killed for their blood, which would supposedly be used in various diabolical rituals. The most common variant of the slander was the charge that blood was needed to make unleavened bread for the Passover meal. As early as 1096, and as late as 1891, such charges were actually brought against Jewish defendants in various places around Christendom. The blood libel was the supposed crime that sent thirteen Jews to the stake in France in 1288, as we have already noted, and provoked Philip the Fair into complaining that they should have been burned by a royal judge rather than an inquisitor. But Philip was only quibbling over the question of jurisdiction; he was perfectly willing to believe that Jews, as the sons of Satan, were capable of the vilest crimes.

“What more authentic reflection of the prevailing opinion can we hope to find,” muses rabbi and historian Joshua Trachtenberg, “than Shakespeare’s lines from
The Merchant of Venice,
‘Let me say “Amen” betimes lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.’”
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