The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (34 page)

The old techniques of the medieval Inquisition were still in use in Spain. The inquisitors carried the title of Inquisitor Against Heresy and Apostolic Perversity, and they traveled throughout Spain in search of heretics. When they arrived in a town, they generally commenced the proceedings by publishing a so-called Edict of Grace, which invited all heretics to come forward and confess their crimes on the promise of mild penances. As was true during the medieval Inquisition, confession alone was insufficient; the naming of names was required.
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The long history and dire reputation of the Inquisition was itself a weapon. The inquisitors relied on the terror that it inspired to extract self-denunciation and the denunciation of others. Thus, for example, the Edict of Grace that was promulgated in Toledo in 1486 succeeded in summoning forth some 2,400
conversos
of Jewish ancestry who were willing to confess to their own heresies and betray their friends, neighbors, and relations in order to escape the torture chamber and the stake, and another 2,689 Moriscos came forward to do the same in Valencia in 1568.
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“We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution,” wrote one Spanish inquisitor in 1578 in a commentary on Eymerich’s classic manual, “is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others.”
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Every palace and prison of the Spanish Inquisition, of course, was equipped with a torture chamber. According to an English account published in 1600, the place of torture was both functional and theatrical; the inquisitors first posed their questions to the victim, and then if satisfactory answers were not forthcoming, they watched as the public executioner applied the instruments to the victim’s flesh and bone. To enhance the terror, the torturer was dressed in a black linen robe, and his head was covered in a black hood with eyeholes, “this done to amaze the Patient, as if a devil came to punish his Misdeeds.”
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The transcript of the interrogation of Elvira del Campo, charged as a secret Jew and tortured by the Inquisition at Toledo in 1568 after it was observed that she refrained from eating pork and changed her undergarments on Saturday, preserves a vivid example of how even a willing victim might find it hard to please the demanding inquisitors. “Tell me what you want for I don’t know what to say,” the naked woman pleaded, and then, as the inquisitor proceeded through the prescribed degrees of torture, she struggled to come up with a satisfactory confession: “Loosen me a little that I may remember what I have to tell; I don’t know what I have done; I did not eat pork for it made me sick; I have done everything; loosen me and I will tell the truth. Lord, bear witness that they are killing me without my being able to confess!”
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The text of a typical Edict of Faith included a comprehensive and surprisingly accurate description of Jewish religious observances, and a good Christian was duty-bound to report to the Inquisition anyone who practiced them—those “who prepare on Fridays the food for Saturdays…who do not work on Friday evenings and Saturdays as on other days…who celebrate the festival of unleavened bread, eating unleavened bread and celery and bitter herbs…observe the fast of the Day of Atonement when they do not eat all day until the evening after star-rise…who slaughter poultry according to the Judaic law,” and so on.
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Once a suspect was arrested, all the standard operating procedures of the medieval Inquisition were called into use. Apologists for the Spanish Inquisition point out that its victims were theoretically entitled to an advocate during the formal proceedings, a privilege that had been unavailable to victims of the medieval Inquisition. But the role of the attorney was so circumscribed that the assistance of counsel was ineffective or even “farcical.” At first, victims was permitted to choose their own attorneys—if they could afford one and could find one willing to take the case—but the Inquisition later permitted only those attorneys who were approved in advance, “a fellow who would do only what the inquisitor wanted,” according to a prisoner of the Inquisition in 1559.
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The proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, in fact, cannot properly be called a trial at all. Rather, the inquisitors convened a series of “audiences” at which testimony was taken and evidence was presented, always behind closed doors and always with the names of witnesses withheld from the defendant. Anyone charged with the crime of heresy by the Inquisition was presumed to be guilty, and the burden of proving innocence fell wholly on the accused. During some periods of its long history, the Spanish Inquisition looked to a committee of inquisitors, priests, judges, and other experts in law and theology known as a
consulta de fé
to weigh the evidence, decide on guilt or innocence, and determine punishment. Later, however, the authority was removed to
La Suprema,
the council that oversaw the operations of the Spanish Inquisition and acted alone in deciding whether an accused heretic lived or died.
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Unlike the medieval Inquisition, which invariably condemned those whom it charged, the Spanish Inquisition was known to issue the occasional acquittal—an “absolution” in inquisitorial parlance. But since absolution implied that the accused heretic had been arrested and charged in error, the inquisitors preferred merely to suspend the proceedings rather than impugn the authority of the Inquisition by admitting that they had been wrong in the first place. Here was yet another catch in the workings of the inquisitorial machinery: an accused heretic whose trial was suspended remained at risk that the proceedings could be resumed at any moment, if and when the inquisitors were able to secure additional betrayals and denunciations from a victim of torture in another case. Thus did the victim fall into a kind of purgatory from which it was nearly impossible to escape.

The old definition of heresy—a thought-crime that consisted of believing something contrary to the dogma of the Church—was still used by the Spanish Inquisition. Thus, for example, a man named Luis de León was accused of heresy for teaching that the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament was more authoritative than the Latin translation used by the Church. But even more damning was the fact that he was distantly descended from a family of New Christians through his great-grandmother. De León was arrested along with another scholar named Garjal, also descended from a
converso
family of Jewish origin, which prompted the inquisitor to observe that both “must be intent on obscuring our Catholic faith and returning to their own law.”

Indeed, the single greatest innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime, and the inquisitorial records now included detailed genealogical data that were used to measure the quantum of Jewish blood in the veins of a New Christian. The slightest trace was sufficient to bring a man or woman to the attention of the Inquisition, to raise the presumption of guilt as a crypto-Jew, and to send the victim to the stake.
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Not every
converso
in Spain fell victim to the Inquisition. Some of the newest of the New Christians of Jewish origin enjoyed the same upward mobility that an earlier generation of converted Jews had achieved. Thus, for example, three royal secretaries in service to the Catholic Monarchs were
conversos,
and so was one of the chaplains to Queen Isabella. Among the wealthy families who financed the voyages of Columbus were
conversos
whose religion may have changed but whose role in Spanish commerce did not.
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Even the uncle of Tomás de Torquemada—Juan de Torquemada, a prince of the Church who wore the red miter of a cardinal—was reported to carry Jewish blood, although the grand inquisitor himself was held to suffer no such taint.

The ultimate irony of the Spanish Inquisition is that some of its assumptions about the Jewish identity of the
conversos
later came to be held by certain strands of modern scholarship. Just as the archives of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo preserve the testimony of a witness who insisted in 1483 that “all the
conversos
of this city were Jews,” so, too, does historian Yitzhak Baer insist that “the
conversos
and Jews were one people, united by destiny,” and Haim Beinart seconds the proposition: “[E]very converso did his best to fulfil Mosaic precepts, and one should regard as sincere the aim they
all
set themselves: to live as Jews.”
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On the same assumption, Jewish tradition has enshrined the
conversos
who were condemned by the Inquisition for the crime of “Judaizing” as authentic martyrs for the Jewish faith. Some of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition were, in fact, unwilling converts to Christianity. A few of the men and women burned alive at an auto in Córdoba on September 29, 1684, for example, were heard to cry out “Moses, Moses” as they died at the stake. And the last prosecution of a
converso
of Jewish origin on charges of heresy did not take place until 1818, more than three centuries after the Spanish Inquisition had been explicitly charged by pope and king with the task of ridding Spain of its Jewish population.
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The reality of the Spanish Inquisition and the plight of Spanish Jewry are not quite what the conventional wisdom advertises them to be. The point has been made by Benzion Netanyahu, who confesses that he undertook the study of the Spanish Inquisition as a young historian in 1944 with the sure conviction that the Marranos were “moral heroes who courageously withstood the terrors of the Inquisition and adhered to their faith under grueling tortures, frequently unto death.” In that fateful year, when the apparatus of the Holocaust was in full operation on European soil, Netanyahu saw the victims of the Spanish Inquisition in the context of Jewish martyrology: “Once again, I thought, the Jewish people, which produced the first religious martyrs in history and gave so many martyrs to the faith in the Middle Ages, demonstrated its capacity for suffering and self-sacrifice for its moral principles and religious convictions.”
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But Netanyahu came to realize that the conventional wisdom about the Marranos was wrong. “To be sure, I found evidence that some of the Marranos were indeed secret adherents of Judaism,” he writes in
The Origins of the Spanish Inquisition.
But his “idealistic conception and heroic image” of the Marranos were shattered by the documentary evidence that he gathered and studied: “[M]ost of the conversos were conscious assimilationists who wished to merge with the Christian society, educate their children as fully fledged Christians, and remove themselves from anything regarded as Jewish, especially in the field of religion.” Thanks to the willing and even ardent embrace of Christianity by most Marranos, he insists, “the number of clandestine Jews among them was rapidly dwindling to the vanishing point.”
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The crypto-Jews who actually existed—or at least the ones who came to the attention of the Inquisition—rarely practiced Judaism according to Jewish law and tradition. Rather, most of them cobbled together an “idiosyncratic” and “syncretistic” faith compounded of elements of both Judaism and Christianity in varying proportions and combinations. One
converso,
for example, confessed to the Inquisition that he recited the Paternoster on rising and then washed his hands and recited the morning prayers of Judaism, too. For some
conversos,
the only trace of Jewish practice was a lingering food taboo such as the avoidance of pork; for others, it was a prideful claim to biblical lineage, as when one
converso
reportedly altered the words of the Ave Maria to claim descent from Mary herself: “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” Flesh-and-blood
conversos,
according to David M. Gitlitz in
Secrecy and Deceit,
could be found “along the spectrum that runs from wholly Christian to wholly Jewish.”
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The
conversos
who practiced some form of Judaism were always few in number, however, and their numbers grew steadily smaller as the Inquisition continued to search out and send them to the stake. But the sparsity of real crypto-Jews never mattered to the inquisitors, who were quite content to persecute
conversos
whose only crime was the accident of a distant and long-forgotten Jewish relative. For the inquisitors, as for the Nazis in the twentieth century, blood mattered more than belief or practice. Thus did the Spanish Inquisition carry out “a holocaust of
conversos,
” many of whom went up in flames as authentic Christians falsely accused of being secret Jews.
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If most of the Marranos were, in fact, willing and earnest converts to Christianity, what explains the obsessive drive of the Spanish Inquisition to persecute and exterminate them?

One factor was the visceral anti-Semitism of Christian tradition, which was always a subtext of the inquisitorial project in Spain and prompted the inquisitors to regard Jewish blood as an ineradicable taint. Then, too, the opportunity to confiscate the wealth of accused heretics was a source of revenue for the Inquisition, both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and the
conversos
of Jewish origin provided a rich target. “The ‘converso danger,’” explains Henry Kamen, “was invented to justify the spoliation of conversos.” Above all, the Old Christians resented the rivalry of New Christians whose upward mobility in Spanish society had been so rapid and so remarkable, and they sought to remove these
arrivistes
from their positions of power and privilege by any means possible.
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