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Chapter 1

Introduction

On August 18, 1661, Cristobal Méndez Silveira, a thirty-eight-year-old merchant, deposed in Madrid before three officers of the Spanish Inquisition. He revealed that he was a Judeoconverso, or “New Christian”—namely a baptized Christian of Jewish ancestry—and a native of Seville who had been fully educated in the Roman Catholic faith. On the eve of his deposition, Méndez had been living and trading in Madrid for nearly a year. During the prior eleven years, however, he had resided in the Netherlands as a member of Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Throughout that time, he had traveled extensively in the western Jewish Diaspora, socializing and worshipping among Jews in such places as Venice, Livorno, Bourdeaux, and Bayonne. He had since returned to Spain, where Judaism had been banned for centuries. In the remainder of his deposition, Méndez provided damning information regarding 105 of his fellow conversos, several of whom were prosecuted as a result of his testimony. By the end of his depositions, Méndez had renounced Judaism and had once again embraced Catholicism.¹

Méndez was only one of hundreds of Judeoconversos who returned to Iberian territory throughout the 1600s despite the fact that they had flagrantly abandoned Christianity and were therefore in danger of being persecuted by Inquisitorial authorities in Spain and Portugal. This book is an attempt to explain the behavior of these returnees and explore their mentality on historical grounds. To begin that exploration, it is necessary to become acquainted with the cultural and historical situation of early modern Judeoconversos.

Central Dilemmas of Converso Existence

Iberian history and Jewish history intersect at various points. One fateful intersection occurs in the Early Modern Period,² when thousands of Judeoconversos³—the Christian descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—negotiated their individual and social identities amid fierce debates concerning the true and proper loyalties of New Christians. Among so-called Old Christians in Spain and Portugal, opinions varied as to the moral, religious, and social character of Judeoconversos, yet suspicions that New Christians were in fact nefarious Judaizers (secret Jews) were extremely widespread. Fear and antipathy toward conversos informed Iberian concepts of social danger from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Expressed in the allied (though not always concordant) ideologies of honor, purity of blood (pureza de sangre), and purity of faith (pureza de fe), a virulent phobia motivated attempts to stigmatize and isolate conversos throughout the very period during which many of the latter struggled to blend into the Ibero-Christian mainstream.

For many Judeoconversos who escaped to the Sephardi Diaspora, the question of their legitimate place in the world was ostensibly solved once they opted to become absorbed into Jewish milieux. Yet even when they chose to adopt the faith of their ancestors, Sephardim of converso origin developed unique responses to fellow Jews and to normative Judaism that revealed the difficulty of harmonizing a newfound Judaic heritage with an intimate knowledge of and affinity toward Iberian culture. Compounding that difficulty was the lingering question: Were Judeoconversos who stayed in the Iberian Peninsula as practicing Christians, or returned to it as penitent Christians, really Jewish? Clear halakhic dicta notwithstanding, this conundrum was never solved definitively within Sephardi kehillot. For instance, it does not appear that rabbinical authorities in the Sephardi strongholds of the Netherlands, Italy, and Northern Africa applied the talmudic principle “although he sins, he is a Jew” with systematic consistency.⁴ It is also doubtful that any consensus on this question developed at the unofficial level of popular Jewish perception, where a myriad of opinions included the diverse views of the Iberian refugees themselves. In the end, the problematic status of Judeoconversos did not disappear until the latter half of the nineteenth century. By that period, intermarriage and acculturation had rendered conversos largely (if not totally) indistinct from the Christian and Sephardi communities that surrounded them.

The central predicament of early modern Judeoconversos both inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula lay in the fact that they inhabited a cultural threshold. This threshold was at once a boundary and a crossroads between the Christian and Jewish worlds. Collectively, New Christians were neither full insiders nor full outsiders of either world, but were simultaneously part of both. Because normative views of religion construed the boundaries of the Christian and Jewish camps as rigid and impermeable, the very existence of Judeoconversos confounded traditional meanings of religious community and religious identity. Notably, the anomalous condition of Judeoconversos—I will call it cultural liminality—was socially and historically determined; it was neither inherent in physical descent from Jews, nor always dependent on the conversos’ religious beliefs and intentions.

As titular Christians, conversos partook of an Ibero-Christian culture that many of them internalized as their own. One may say that conversos actually formed an integral part of Spanish and Portuguese life. In the main, however, Old Christians denied conversos complete, unqualified membership in Ibero-Christian society. The imaginary association of New Christians with Jews and Judaism tainted even the most Hispanicized and Christianized of Judeoconversos. It also sustained such peculiar mechanisms of persecution and social exclusion as the Holy Office and the statutes of purity of blood. These mechanisms institutionalized and magnified the attritional force of popular prejudice, itself rooted in Judeophobia. As a result, conversos—believing Christians, ambivalent ones, and crypto-Jews alike—had little choice but to remain outside the social mainstream, even when they participated fully in many of its facets.⁵

If Old Christian society was largely unwilling to accept conversos as “true” Christians, diasporic kehillot welcomed converso refugees only if the latter submitted to a public self-transformation. This entailed a process of reeducation, sometimes accompanied by penitential purification.⁶ To be sure, not all of the returnees were prepared to adapt to Jewish life even after experiencing their formal incorporation into Judaism. The same was true of several of the immigrants’ immediate descendants. Although a majority of the escapees underwent a successful cultural transition, an important minority abandoned mainstream, rabbinic Judaism for a variety of mystical-messianic, rationalistic, or wholly equivocal alternatives. Some refugees remained within the Christian fold throughout their exile. Others, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, returned to Iberia, where they became penitent Catholics.

The options of heterodoxy and full-fledged dissidence proved similarly appealing to Judeoconversos who lingered in the Iberian Peninsula. While most conversos chose to blend into Christendom as quietly as possible, several notorious ones were influenced by messianic, illuminist, and Erasmian currents.⁷ Still others actualized their sense of difference through a gamut of secret, eclectic practices with real or imagined origins in Jewish ideas, rituals, and folklore.⁸

It is important to note, however, that the religious status of Judeoconversos was not the only factor that shaped their cultural profile. A key deter minant of the social position of the cristianos nuevos (cristãos-novos in Portuguese) was political and economic in nature. Like their forbears in the Iberian juderías conversos constituted a predominantly urban minority. Its members were chiefly engaged in commercial, professional, scholarly, artisanal, and other nonagricultural occupations.⁹ From the 1580’s through the second half of the seventeenth century, an influential stratum of Judeoconversos and Sephardi grandees built and operated vast mercantile networks from entrepots such as Amsterdam, Istanbul, Curaçao, and Venice.¹⁰ When it did not derive from connections to these networks, the power of converso notables in Spain and Portugal was usually the product of alliances with Old Christian elites. Such alliances often entailed service to the crown, the church, and the Old Christian nobility, and were frequently built through the painstaking circumvention of social barriers. For example, several Judeoconversos improved their lot by securing bogus certificates of pureza, by marrying their children into the Old Christian nobility, or simply by purchasing forbidden offices and titles from corrupt officials.¹¹ Yet, the basic social and political situation of these ambitious individuals remained fundamentally akin to that of the vast majority of conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere: Usually the social climbers were not labradores (unskilled manual laborers). Neither did they belong to the traditional ruling classes, especially the hereditary nobility. Indeed, Judeoconversos comprised a middle class in the simplest and most immediate sense of the term. For rich and poor conversos alike (particularly for those in the peninsula) economic and political “in-between-ness” went hand in hand with religious liminality.

New Christians reacted to the condition of liminality in a variety of ways. I have already alluded to some of the least studied of converso behaviors. Again, these included maintaining a heartfelt Christian identity in exile, and returning to the Iberian Peninsula—and to Catholicism—after professing Judaism in the Diaspora. A third reaction, perhaps the most sinister, was the choice to cooperate willfully with the Inquisition. Conversos who pursued the latter strategy usually served as semiprofessional informers after undertaking formal penance for their own actual or alleged Judaizing.

The phenomena of return to Iberia, reversion to Catholicism, and the corollary incidence of voluntary denunciation have remained largely unexplored; this despite the fact that even cursory surveys of inquisitorial history reveal the existence of what one may call religious “wafflers,” habitual returnees, spontaneous self-incriminators, and enthusiastic informers of converso origin. The relative paucity of studies on such ostensibly unconventional types is doubly puzzling given the enormous energies that scholars have expended in reconstructing the institutional history of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.

To be sure, experts on Iberian Jewry have devoted articles, book chapters, and footnotes to the problem of converso “deviants” or “renegades.” A number of scholars have written about the most notorious of medieval Jewish apostates (as distinct from informers), including anti-Jewish polemicists such as Abner of Burgos, Geronimo de Santa Fe, and the ultra-Judeophobe Alonso de Espina, whose status as a converso remains uncertain. A few scholars have contributed articles on the incidence of slander among Spanish Jews of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.¹² For their part, students of early modern Europe have been diligent in scrutinizing the personalities and intellectual careers of Uriel da Costa, Baruch (or Bento or Benedict) Spinoza, and a handful of other arch-dissidents of converso origin. However, to my knowledge no investigator has ever placed the phenomena of return to the Iberian Peninsula, reversion to Christianity, and voluntary collaboration with the Inquisition at the center of an extensive analytical venture.¹³ Aside from Yosef Kaplan, no scholar has attempted to explain these phenomena or sufficiently analyzed the fact that that their “peaks” occurred in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That period saw the intensification of inquisitorial persecution in Portugal, the flight of thousands of Portuguese New Christians into Spain, the concomitant resurgence of the Spanish Holy Office, the massive emigration of Judeoconversos from the Iberian Peninsula, and finally, the integration of hundreds if not thousands of converso refugees into the Jewish Diaspora.

My own interest in the phenomena abbreviated by the labels “dissident” and “renegade” behavior centers on five clusters of questions that existing scholarship has tended to underanalyze or neglect altogether.

First and foremost, why did converso “renegades” exist at all? Why did many conversos choose to return to Iberia? Why did many of them return to Christianity? Why did some of the returnees opt to denounce themselves and their fellows without any apparent or direct pressure from the Inquisition?¹⁴

Second, were the returnees and spontaneous informers simply idiosyncratic individuals prone to “strange” behavior? Were they mere opportunists? Were they following their religious conscience(s)?

Third, were there specific historical forces or circumstances to which the dissidents’ behavior served as a response or strategy of adaptation? If so, what were these factors?

Fourth, how typical or atypical were the so-called renegades?

Fifth, and most importantly, what did it mean to the renegades to be Jewish? What did it mean to them to be Christian? What did it mean to them to shift from one identity to the other?

The present study focuses on otherwise ordinary converso “renegades” of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to answer these questions. Here I deal primarily with a group of highly mobile Judeoconversos of Portuguese origin who traveled throughout the Iberian Peninsula but resided at least temporarily within the poorer corners of the Sephardi Diaspora, chiefly in southwestern France, as well as within the jurisdiction of the Toledan tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. (The judicial district of Toledo encompassed all of New Castile, including the towns of Alcalá, Guadalajara, Talavera, Guadalupe, Ciudad Real, Toledo, and the most populous of all Spanish cities, Madrid.) A plurality of the individuals I have studied were small- to mid-scale merchants who at one time or another had resided in southwestern France but were subsequently captured by the Inquisition while trading in Madrid, either as temporary or permanent residents of the city.

By focusing on this population I test a hypothesis that seemingly aberrant converso behaviors, chief among them returning to Iberia and reconverting to Catholicism, were not simple matters of opportunism, idiosyncratic preference, or fear of persecution, but were nonexceptional and quite logical strategies by which conversos adapted to an especially difficult historical environment. My conclusion is that, given that environment, the options of return to Iberia, reversion to Christianity, and voluntary collaboration with the Inquisition were earnest and practical choices, ones as “normal” as the option of “returning” to the ancestral culture via crypto-Judaism or by unequivocal resettlement in the Sephardi Diaspora.

Underpinning this interpretation is a recognition that the social and historical context of identity construction was pivotal in the development of renegade behaviors. One of my chief findings in this regard is that cultural border crossers were invariably confronted with the collective expectations—indeed, the vehement demands—of their host communities. A central challenge of this study, then, has been to show how renegades coped with those demands, and ultimately, how and why these individuals accommodated and at the same time failed to accommodate to the self-image, values, and social conventions of their neighbors.

My exposition follows the following outline. In the second chapter I depict the general historical conditions within which the processes of successful and unsuccessful accommodation took place. Specifically, I portray Spain’s era of economic and political crisis—the end of the Habsburgian Golden Age. Here I emphasize the profound contradiction that the era engendered between conversos’ deep involvement in the economic life of the country on one hand, and the profound fear and loathing with which Old Christians regarded New Christians—especially Portuguese conversos and their descendants—on the other. Chapter 3 reconstructs the phenomenon of return within its immediate social and economic contexts. Here I explain the manner in which Jewish religious authorities approached return as a kind of taboo. Through an analysis of selected inquisitorial dossiers, I also present a simple typology of returnees and explain these renegades’ behavior and dilemmas vis-à-vis the normative Judaism to which they and other immigrant conversos were exposed in the Sephardi Diaspora. Chapter 4 explicates the premises that guided the interrogation of inquisitorial suspects, and proceeds to construct a collective profile of renegades on the basis of inquisitorial procesos. Finally, Chapter 5 charts the religious life of a typical returnee to the point of his reconversion to Christianity. I use that case to explain two aspects. First, I argue that conformity promised renegades an end to social isolation, and hence to an apprehension of solitude and drift; second, I propose that conformity served to ameliorate the vicissitudes that accompanied the struggle for material and psychic security by rendering that struggle into a meaningful narrative. In conclusion, I explain that while many conversos understood their yearning for stability in the pious idiom of their time as a quest for spiritual redemption, and therefore as a purely religious imperative, the yearning was ultimately concerned with life on Earth, with emotional and physical well-being in the here and now, and not with the abstract validity of any theological formula or system of beliefs. Even if the longing for security was self-consciously religious, I continue, its object was the sense of stability afforded by conformity indeed by absolute faith in a body of traditional dogmas, rituals, customs, and more importantly, social relations. The goal was not philosophical or mystical truth as such.¹⁵ While I acknowledge that at least some converso renegades experienced no conflict in shifting back and forth from one religion to another, I contend that a cause of such shifting, paradoxically enough, was the equivocators’ yearning for stability. Renegades found that stability by temporarily embracing and conforming to one community of faith, and then another, as circumstances demanded it. Chapter 6 summarizes these findings and suggests some of their implications for the interpretation of early modern converso and Jewish history.

Historiography, Sources, and Methods

Studies that focus on Judeoconversos, such as this one, do not represent a unitary field of research but a somewhat eclectic subfield of various branches of scholarship. Chief among the latter are Jewish history and literature (especially Sephardi studies and the history of anti-Judaism), Spanish history and literature (especially the history of the Inquisition), Portuguese history, the history of the Netherlands, the economic history of the early modern Levant, the history of European religion(s), and the history of philosophy (especially skepticism and rationalism). The fact that the problem of conversos covers so much academic ground bears witness not only to the geographical mobility of New Christians, but also to their multifaceted cultural and social profile.

During the first half of the twentieth century, historical writing on the subject of Judeoconversos developed along two primary paths. The first path was cleared by peninsular historians who were chiefly preoccupied with identifying and evaluating the role(s) of Judeoconversos within the larger history of Christian Iberia. Historians of Sepharad cleared the second path. Unlike their Hispanist counterparts, these scholars paid close attention to converso life (especially crypto-Judaism) in the context of Jewish history as a whole, inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula.¹⁶

Among peninsular writers, Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz were perhaps the first to dwell on the existence of renegades, chiefly “professional” informers and persecutors of converso origin, and to treat the behavior of these figures as a problem of historical import. Sánchez Albornoz saw the Inquisition as an institutional by-product of a corrupt system of denunciation that, according to him, had characterized the Jewish courts of the pre-expulsion era.¹⁷ Castro concurred with his colleague on the “Jewish” origins of inquisitorial persecution, but insisted that the chief legacy of conversos, was not the corrupting “spirit of the judería.” Rather, it was a widespread sense of spiritual bifurcation or “psychic fissure.” More than other Iberians, the argument went, conversos had experienced “psychic fissure” as a profound insecurity or “disquiet.”¹⁸

On the side of Jewish history, Yitzhak Baer (following Heinrich Graetz) proposed that the mass conversions of 1391–1492 were partially the result of a crisis of leadership throughout Castilian and Aragonese kehillot. In Baer’s view, prominent Jewish renegades of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Geronimo de Santa Fe, Pablo de Santa Maria, and the like) exemplified the culmination of a larger trend whereby educated Jews who lacked the simple, affective piety of the Sephardi masses espoused a spiritually deracinated Averroism, and thus became “ripe” for defection to the Christian enemy.¹⁹ In other words, it was not social, political, or economic forces that had corroded the Jewish elite’s sense of national distinctiveness and purpose, but intellectual and moral degeneration in the form of rationalism.

As my brief characterization suggests, Castro and Sánchez Albornoz were principally interested in defining the nature of Spanish nationhood. Both men saw it as crucial to their respective historiographical missions to determine what was fundamentally and authentically Spanish. Today this preoccupation, like the divergent solutions these historians posited, may strike us as a somewhat romantic and heavy-handedly nationalist approach to history, an approach similar to that espoused by patriotic historians elsewhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. The debt of Sánchez and Castro to the German Idealist tradition of Herder (and others) is especially apparent in the two Hispanists’ immanentist conception of “the Spanish nation” as an almost primordial, historically continuous entity with a unique character and destiny. For them, what was basic to Spanishness—the volksgeist of Spaniards, as it were—gave structure to Spanish history, just as history expressed what was fundamental about the Spaniard.²⁰

Similar premises are evident in the work of Jewish scholars—including historians of the “Jerusalem School,” such as Baer—whose different perspectives on the “true” character of fifteenth-century conversos may well speak of modern nationalist preoccupations as much as these perspectives shed light on Ibero-Jewish history. According to Baer, most ordinary conversos (as distinct from the traitorous converso elite) were in actuality Jews who were consciously connected to the main body of the Jewish nation.²¹ For Benzion Netanyahu, in contrast, almost all conversos became fully absorbed into Christianity during the 1400s, so much so that Judaizing was a negligible occurrence among them. For the first historian, then, conversos served to prove Jewish resiliency in the face of gentile oppression.²² For the second, they demonstrated the tragedy of national dissolution in exile. As Yirmiyahu Yovel opines, “Both scholars … had a tacit ideological (indeed Zionist) agenda, Baer providing the modern national Jewish consciousness with heroes and martyrs, Netanyahu explaining that Jewish life in the Diaspora is fragile and prone to assimilation.”²³

From the late 1960s to the present, historians have begun to shed light on vast areas of converso life that do not fit the sweeping generalizations of earlier histories, for instance Baer’s binary model of “corrupt elites” versus “faithful folk” and Castro’s notion of collective mentality. Recent studies of inquisitorial dossiers have uncovered more confusion and disunity among the converso rank-and-file than Baer’s idealizing view could ever allow. These and other works have also challenged the relatively narrow chronological and geographical parameters of earlier treatments. For example, eminent Hispanists such as Antonio Dominguez Ortiz and Julio Caro Baroja have ventured (however briefly) beyond Iberia to survey the history of exiled conversos.²⁴ Yosef Yerushalmi, Yosef Kaplan, and Herman Prins Salomon, all students of Jewish history (although Salomon is a linguist and literary critic by training), have produced works that trace the lives of individual conversos before, during, and after they “returned” to Judaism in exile.²⁵ For their part, students of intellectual and cultural history (Gershom Scholem, Yirmiyahu Yovel, J. A. Van Praag, and Israel S. Révah, to name a few) have explored the manner in which former crypto-Jews and their descendants may have injected distinctively Hispano-Christian concerns into the mainstream of Jewish life.

The blurring of historiographical boundaries that I have sketched reflects at least three important shifts in scholarly approaches to the history of Judeoconversos that have occurred since the 1960s.

First and foremost, the tendency of earlier scholars to measure the moral worth of conversos in light of the latter’s supposed adherence to reified notions of Hispanicity and/or Jewishness has somewhat subsided; so too have egregious attempts to claim or disown conversos on behalf of given national camps. These changes should not be overstated, especially as there still exists a marked tendency among some historians to portray conversos as Jewish heroes. Yet the changes do suggest a partial repudiation of grand (national) narratives in favor of more nuanced evaluations that focus narrowly on specific conjunctures of historical factors. With latter-day approaches²⁶ has come the possibility of confronting Judeoconversos as an analytical challenge in their own right.²⁷ Today, investigators need not subordinate the study of conversos to explorations of larger and “more important” phenomena—say, the saga of Sephardim or of the Spanish Inquisition. Ironically, by concentrating on the historical particularity of Judeoconversos, scholars may also discern ways in which New Christians resembled their Jewish and Old Christian contemporaries, and thus begin to unearth lines of fundamental continuity in the collective experiences of early modern Jews, conversos, and Old Christians.

Second, a new interest in the complex inner lives of Judeoconversos has emerged. This trend has a precedent in the work of Castro, who underlined the need to take psychological factors into account when formulating histor ical explanations about conversos. In particular, the challenge of reconstructing the spiritual trajectory of converso refugees as continuous wholes has forced scholars to follow their subjects across Europe, and thus to disregard 1492, the territorial borderline of the Iberian Peninsula, and other such imaginary dividing lines between Hispanic and Jewish history. Fortunately, Castro’s successors have demonstrated greater awareness than he of the fact that the behaviors and motivations of conversos spanned a wide spectrum, and that all of these behaviors and motivations were at least partially rooted in larger historical circumstances, not in national essences, as Castro’s analysis tends to suggest. Furthermore, some historians now acknowledge as a matter of course that many conversos were, to borrow Van Praag’s phrase, “souls in dispute” (or “divided souls”) whose self-identity was never a given; indeed, this identity was often in flux.²⁸ In this regard, Yerushalmi has noted that what is surprising is not that several converso refugees stumbled along the road to Judaism, but that a large number of the exiles adapted to Jewish life without major incident.²⁹

Third, a new emphasis on social history has allowed scholars to broaden their analytical scope to include considerations of place, demography, economy, social class, and other causal factors that transcend the traditional foci of older political and intellectual histories. To cite a few examples: Yosef Kaplan, Jonathan Israel, Brian Pullan, James Boyaijan, Haim Beinart, and Julio Caro Baroja have made extensive use of communal records, state documents, inquisitorial cases, and private commercial records to compose sociological portraits of, respectively, the Amsterdam Jewish community; Sephardi enclaves and commercial networks throughout Europe and the Americas; the interaction of Venetian Jews and conversos; converso bankers; the New Christian contingent in Ciudad Real; and, finally, Castilian conversos during the reign of Philip IV.³⁰

The recent stress on social history promises to correct a traditional overemphasis on the lives and works of highly articulate thinkers and polemicists of converso origin such as Spinoza, Uriel da Costa, and Menasseh ben Israel. The closer investigators have hovered over the rich texture of life among ordinary conversos, the more their studies have revealed variations from the main patterns of converso acculturation. For instance, in his 1983 study on the Venetian Inquisition, Pullan alone unearthed dozens of instances in which otherwise unexceptional conversos failed to develop stable religious identities or were simply incapable of assuming constructive roles within their host communities. One of Pullan’s chapters focuses on people who reverted to Christianity after erratic excursions into Judaism.³¹ As early as 1943 and 1961, respectively, Cecil Roth and Israel Révah discovered similar examples of “deviance” in Lisbon and Rouen, where New Christian renegades perpetrated wide-scale denunciation against fellow conversos.³² Much more recently, Jaime Contreras depicted a veritable hornet’s nest of informers and counterinformers in his microscopic study of the converso communities of sixteenth-century Murcia and Lorca.³³ For their part, Isaiah Tishby, Yosef Kaplan, and Matt Goldish have unearthed evidence of disaffection and nonconformity among Sephardim of the seventeenth century, particularly among immigrant conversos in London, thus sharpening our view of the difficulties of collective Judaization in that corner of the converso Diaspora.³⁴ Kaplan is, to my knowledge, the only investigator to have approached the phenomenon of return to the Iberian Peninsula in his pioneering articles, “The travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Lands of Idolatry’ (1644–1724)” and “The Struggle Against Travelers to Spain and Portugal in the Western Sephardi Diaspora.”³⁵

The present study both complements and builds upon the efforts of the three last-mentioned authors by broadening and deepening their focus on ostensibly marginal conversos. Without losing sight of the entire western converso Diaspora, I shift attention to France, for which few historical studies on converso dissidents exist. Furthermore, where Tishby, Kaplan, and Goldish merely touch on the economic motivations and activities of marginal conversos, and where the eminent historian of Franco-Judaic life, Zosa Szajkowski, focuses too narrowly on that phenomenon, I devote considerable attention to the mercantile matrix of renegade behavior.³⁶ By consciously placing the economic activities of returnees at the center of my interpretation I attempt to ground an understanding of the mentality of these dissidents in their mundane circumstances and interests. In this respect my study concurs with and, I believe, confirms Contreras’s conviction that the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conversos lies “close to the ground,” and is “low and pedestrian” in its horizons, and that therefore this history cannot be properly visualized by recourse to the “grandiloquent conceptions” (collective spiritual malaise, transcendent ethos, and so on) that so dominated the work of historians such as Castro.³⁷

Significantly, my study is not concerned with the question of whether conversos were or were not Jews in essence. For that matter, the study is not concerned with the question of whether crypto-Judaism was or was not an inquisitorial invention. Most of my subjects lived at one time or another in the Sephardi Diaspora. As a consequence most of them participated in one or another facet of normative Jewish life. Generally speaking, then, my subjects’ Judaizing is not at issue.

Of course, my interest in the “low and pedestrian” is a hallmark of social history, an approach to the reconstruction of the past that locates “important” historical events in the realm of ordinary individuals. Because it is ultimately an exploration of the mentalities of ordinary conversos, the present study fits especially well within the branch (or ally) of social history that focuses on the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of experience. Cultural history, as that branch is known, encompasses various studies of identity and its formation. Among these last belong a number of microhistorical inquiries that draw extensively from inquisitorial dossiers.³⁸ Reuven Faingold’s recent article on the inquisitorial prisoner Vicente Furtado comes immediately to mind as an example from the field of converso studies.³⁹ Because it includes a case study in the self-construction of a typical renegade, the fifth chapter of this book is akin to Faingold’s contribution, at least with regard to the theme and documentary source I explore. However, my case study is part of a larger discussion; consequently it goes further than Faingold in relating its main subject, an inquisitorial defendant, to broader historical phenomena. More importantly, the chapter, like the work as a whole, reconstructs the viewpoints of cultural border crossers and attempts to gain insight into the psychology of these dissidents. By contrast, the work of Kaplan, Tishby, and Goldish has reconstructed the impressions of Jewish communal leaders, as well as these authorities’ disapproving reactions toward the dissidents. In turn, I examine the testimony of marginal conversos themselves to provide a portrait of the lives and minds of these renegades.⁴⁰

There is yet another subfield of historical scholarship that my work may well advance. I am referring to latter-day studies on southwestern French kehillot, notably the voluminous work of Gérard Nahon, that of Anne Zink, and that of Zosa Szajkowski. Along with other students of Franco-Judaica, Nahon has amply documented the existence and legal basis of organized Jewish life in the Portuguese enclaves of early modern France. His articles, however, have focused almost exclusively on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This focus is consistent with the range of primary sources that the author has chosen to examine—in this case, French governmental material as well as Jewish communal documents. Very few of the latter documents survive that would illuminate the early and middle decades of the 1600s.⁴¹ Here, however, I focus on these very decades through the use of Spanish and Portuguese documents that Nahon has not surveyed. These sources contribute to our knowledge of a formative period in Franco-Sephardi life, chiefly by revealing a conflictive aspect in the evolution of the Judeo-Portuguese Diaspora.

True to his interest in the integrative forces that transformed Portuguese immigrants into French Jews, Nahon has, to my knowledge, never written concerning renegades, much less discussed their economic and personal links to the Iberian Peninsula. For her part, Anne Zink, who has contributed important articles describing the economic profile of converso settlements in the French southwest, has not explicated these communities’ pivotal relationship with the Iberian economies.⁴² Szajkowski began this project, yet in my view did not bring it to fruition, in his article “Trade Relations of Marranos in France with the Iberian Peninsula in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”⁴³ Neither scholar has discussed cases of social dissidence or focused on the religious lives of conversos who trafficked across the Spanish border. Again, I contribute to existing scholarship by covering this relatively uncharted historical territory. In the process, I expose fissures in the surface of communal Jewish life that are invisible from Zink’s and Nahon’s more sweeping views.

As for my documentary sources, a few words are in order. Notwithstanding the emergence of novel historiographical approaches, it is clear that every historian who has recently endeavored to reconstruct the behavior of New Christians via inquisitorial dossiers has come face to face with an old methodological puzzle. In short, the question is if and how one can determine whether the testimony contained in inquisitorial procesos reflects the true thoughts and experiences of the informants. Another way to present this problem is to ask: To what degree did witnesses and defendants lie to the Inquisition in order to protect themselves and others? Did the declarants’ testimonies merely parrot the preconceptions and biases of the inquisitors? Were the declarants’ testimonies partially or thoroughly falsified?⁴⁴ Alternately, did they reflect a real dialogue (albeit an uneven one) between the accusers and the accused?⁴⁵

The solution I provide in this work is not definitive because it is based on a relatively small sample of inquisitorial cases. Even within that sample, the content, style, and tone of informants’ recorded declarations varied. That is why each deposition demanded a fresh assessment of its trustworthiness. Far from excluding any interpretive possibility, much of the testimony I surveyed showed traces of inquisitorial distortion, deliberate omission or prevarication on the part of the informants, as well as plentiful elements of truth.

In evaluating the reliability of informants’ depositions, I applied the following commonsensical assumptions: First, that the sincerity, and therefore the basic credibility of a given testimony are altogether separate from the plausibility of its literal content. This distinction, I believe, is critical for the proper interpretation of a decidedly religious, early modern world in which people were routinely conditioned to treat biblical miracles and other blatant impossibilities as literal truths. As an example I offer the defendant Aldonza Cardoso de Velasco. She testified in 1666 that another woman, Maria Roman, had succeeded in “binding” a man—in other words, rendering him sexually impotent—by tying the laces of his undergarments into knots, by reciting an incantation over the knots, and by stomping on the garments in ritualistic fashion. That Roman’s stratagem had no real power as magic, of course, does not mean that Cardoso was lying when she divulged her own belief in that power.⁴⁶

Second, and more importantly, I have posited that an item of testimony is probably (though not necessarily) truthful if the declarant did not stand to gain any advantage in offering it to his or her questioners. Along the same lines, a declaration is believable if the declarant was aware (or was probably aware) that rendering it would harm his or her interests. It is a fact that numerous inquisitorial suspects provided basic personal data without which the inquisitors would have found it very difficult to investigate and incriminate them. These data included the suspects’ own names and aliases, places of baptism, genealogies, relationships with convicted Judaizers, and the like. Only a stubborn skeptic would argue that much of these data were inauthentic.

Third, I have posited that an item of testimony is generally trustworthy if those who recorded it had no reason to twist or falsify it in any particular way, even if some unconscious distortions occurred in the recording process. There is no consensus among scholars as to why inquisitors and declarants may have wanted to shape what is recorded in the procesos. For now, suffice it to say that I address possible motives for distortion as my discussion of the cases (and their contexts) progresses.

Fourth, and most obviously, I have posited that a given deposition is credible if reliable, external evidence supports it. Because direct documentary proof of the credibility of inquisitorial informants is usually unavailable, it is often necessary to rely on circumstantial evidence. Such evidence may not yield total certitude, yet a sense of strong likelihood is attainable and can serve as the basis for sound historical interpretations. It behooves me to warn that the study of inquisitorial procesos permits neither perfect reconstructions of historical events nor airtight theories of historical causality. Given this limitation, one must still recognize that a pertinent theory or reconstruction need not be able to repel all possible objections to it in order to be operationally successful; it must simply be able to answer questions that its nearest alternatives cannot.⁴⁷

In what pertains to the problem of identity construction among Judeoconversos, I contend that a sound historical interpretation is one that focuses closely on the complexity of historical events and avoids grand, overambitious ventures; for example, trying to determine how Jewish all Judeoconversos “really” were (or were not). As I will discuss in the final chapter, my findings suggest that no sweeping generalization is desirable concerning the social and religious identities of Judeoconversos. In fact, my research indicates that the questions “How Jewish?” and “How Christian?” are based on a fundamental misconception of what religion meant to most converso renegades during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

My specific findings aside, it is clear that with the exception of works about a few educated skeptics and intellectual luminaries, scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the subject of converso renegades.⁴⁸ The theme and scope of this book are consequently new for all intents and purposes. Ironically, my main challenge has not been to unearth archival documents. Many of the records I have worked with are known to specialists, who have tended to underrate, underanalyze, or simply disregard these sources. My chief methodological task has been to configure a distinct body of material from ostensibly disparate files, and to shed a new light on their content.⁴⁹ This book constitutes an attempt to interpret the historical experiences and unconventional (though hardly uncommon) choices of ordinary Judeoconversos in a new way.

Terminology

Before embarking upon an examination of the topic at hand, it is crucial to remember that “dissidence,” not to mention being a “renegade,” is in the eye of the beholder. One can easily surmise that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jews, as well as Judaicized⁵⁰ New Christians, regarded conversos who reverted to Christianity as odious deserters. Of course, these same “deviants” were nothing less than exemplary penitents in the official estimation of the inquisitors, and probably that of orthodox Catholics in general.

For their part, Christianized conversos, who were as vulnerable to denunciation as actual crypto-Jews, concurred with the normative Jewish view that voluntary informers were ruthless and despicable turncoats. Indeed, New Christian lore produced a stereotypically insidious image of “the informer”—the malsin.⁵¹

In addition to recognizing colloquial usage, I have tried to avoid lexical monotony. Given the relative dearth of purely descriptive terms such as “border crosser,” “informer” and “returnee,” I have resorted in particular to the less impartial “renegade” (without quotation marks) for purposes of exposition. Whatever stylistic flexibility this and similar non-neutral words afford, it is obvious that they compromise an ideal objectivity: All of them imply an orthodox, thoroughly partisan perspective, be it that of early modern Jews (in the case of “renegade,” “nonconformist,” and the like) or that of Catholics (in the case of “penitent,” “conformist,” and similar terms). However, I believe the findings of this study cancel some of the bias inherent in this value-laden nomenclature. They do this by historicizing the actual or probable behaviors (rather than ideal or putative ones) represented by that same terminology.

To cite but one example: In the context of this study, the word “penitent” refers to a Judeoconverso who returned to the fold of Ibero-Christendom by performing certain actions. These actions were calculated to show repentance for past conduct and to demonstrate the actor’s renewed, heartfelt adherence to the rules and standards of orthodox Catholicism. Accordingly, one may reasonably argue that the term “penitent” connotes reunion, spiritual restoration, and the actor’s essential humility. That is to say, the term itself implies a benign and commendatory view of penitence and, by extension, of the penitent’s spiritual state during the process of his or her reentry into the Christian community of faith. This connotational meaning is obviously consistent with the official judgment of the inquisitorial functionaries who welcomed and guided errant sinners back into the bosom of the Catholic Church during the historical period in question.

Looking at the penitents through the lens of historical analysis allows a different view. In the first place, a comparative reading of inquisitorial documents reveals that not all Judeoconverso penitents exemplified humility or were motivated by a previous desire to embrace a Catholic identity. Some “penitents” feigned reconversion; others could not banish their religious doubts despite undergoing formal atonement; a few remained indifferent toward their “recovered” faith, while others—in my view, the majority—embraced it with sincerity if not always with enthusiasm. In the second place, not every converso émigré who came back to the Iberian Peninsula did so with the aim of repudiating Judaism before an inquisitorial tribunal. An important segment of my research suggests that most conversos who returned to Spain and Portugal did so for economic or personal (non-idiosyncratic) reasons: to buy and sell goods, to collect debts, to visit relatives, to seek a livelihood, to help friends in need, to satisfy a deep nostalgia, and so on.

In the end, historical analysis precludes the blanket endorsement implicit in the word “penitent,” because all relevant data indicate that penitents were not a homogeneous group. More to the point, “penitent,” like “returnee,” is a term that glosses over a wide variety of motivations and behaviors. It is this kaleidoscopic yet ultimately coherent array that now deserves our attention.