PROSELYTISM
Earnest and protracted efforts were made to reclaim him but in vain. Then he was asked to set forth the Hebrew texts on which he relied, so that the calificadores could confute them. To enable him to do this he was furnished, December 23d, with a Bible, paper, ink and a goose-quill, but the latter he rejected, saying that it was forbidden by the Law of Moses, and a bronze pen (pluma de bronce) was given to him. Further conferences followed, and much patience was manifested, until he refused absolutely to speak in the audiences. The baffled tribunal appealed to the Suprema, which ordered fifty lashes; he endured them unflinchingly on June 17, 1642, and maintained his unbroken silence. This was most obstructive, for his ratification of his confessions was necessary but, when they and the evidence were read to him, he closed his ears with his fingers and refused even to listen. It was proposed to torture him, but the Suprema humanely discarded formalities and ordered the case to be closed and voted upon. The vote was taken, January 27, 1643, to relax him with confiscation, but in confirming it the Suprema ordered further efforts for his conversion. There was no haste in executing the sentence. In January, 1644, he was still persisting in silence, except that, when the inquisitors made their weekly visits, he would cry “Viva la ley de Moisen,” after which not another word could be extracted from him. At length, on June 25, 1644, he was burnt alive, maintaining to the end his unalterable constancy. The inquisitor Moscoso, in a letter to the Countess of Monterey, declared that he had never witnessed so ardent a desire for death, such perfect assurance of salvation, or such unconquerable firmness. His fate made a profound impression on his co-religionists. Some years later, Juan Pereira, a youth on trial before the Valladolid tribunal, referred to him repeatedly and declared that he had seen him after death, riding on a mule and glistening with the sweat that was on him when he was taken to the quemadero.[807]
Lope de Vera was a most undesirable convert, for his case could not fail to arouse afresh the dread of infection and to stimulate the Inquisition to increased activity. Yet such stimulus was scarce needed, for it was incessantly vigilant and was troubled withfew scruples when on the track of a suspect. An illustrative case offers itself when, in September, 1642, the tribunal of Galicia wrote to Valladolid that a prisoner on trial testified that Antonio López, in Manzaneda de Tribes, had practised Judaism, and it asked for his arrest. An Antonio López was readily found in Valladolid and was promptly thrown in prison, September 16th. He denied the accusation; no other testimony could be found against him and his trial dragged on until, February 3, 1644, there was a votein discordia. The case went to the Suprema, which ordered further inquiry to be made of the Galician tribunal, when it was discovered that the prisoner had never been in Manzaneda. This should have been conclusive but, when another vote was reached, August 13th, it was again in discordia, and the Suprema again ordered investigations which proved fruitless. A third inconclusive vote was taken in 1645, and then the Suprema ordered the arrest of a second Antonio López, a painter, who had been discovered in Sanabria. He was arrested in December, 1645, and easily proved himself to be an Old Christian of strict observance, but to no purpose, for the blundering consulta de fe voted in discordia, April 30, 1646, and the Suprema ordered him to be exposed to threatened torture. He was stripped and bound on the trestle, but his nerves did not give way and he steadily asserted his orthodoxy. The resources of the baffled tribunal were now exhausted and, on July 14th, the Suprema ordered the cases to be suspended, when the two Antonio López were released—not acquitted—after one had been in prison nearly four years, and the other had been subjected to the agony of impending torture, merely because they bore a name which chanced to be mentioned in a distant tribunal as that of a Judaizer. Not quite so hard was the case of Gaspar Rodríguez, arrested by the tribunal of Valladolid, October 4, 1648, on the strength of advices from Cuenca, and discharged October 2, 1649, because it was tardily recognized that he did not correspond with the description of the real culprit.[808]
ACTIVITY OF PERSECUTION
How slender was the evidence required when a Portuguese was concerned is seen in another case at Valladolid. When the inquisitor Pedro Múñoz made a visitation of Oviedo in 1619-20, two women testified that Lucía Núñez, a Portuguese settled in Benavente, put on clean chemises on Saturdays. When, March 5, 1620, the tribunal voted on the cases brought in by Múñoz, thiswas suspended, but the Suprema ordered the papers to be sent to it and, on August 17, 1621, it instructed the tribunal to arrest Lucía and sequestrate her property. She was accordingly brought to Valladolid, October 30, 1621, and thrown into the secret prison. On her first audience, in reply to the ordinary question whether she knew the cause of her arrest, she said that it was because she changed her linen on Fridays and Saturdays, as she did every day, for the sake of cleanliness, especially when she was suckling her children, and she did not know that she was committing any offence. It was true that she was born in Portugal, but both her parents were Castilians and Old Christians. The trial went through its regular course; nothing else could be found against her and, on March 15, 1622, the consulta de fe voted to acquit her and lift the sequestration, which was done accordingly the next day, after nearly five months of incarceration.[809]
When this kind of work was on foot throughout Spain, it is easy to realize how the unfortunate Portuguese were tracked, from one refuge to another, by the implacable vigilance of the Inquisition, with its net-work of tribunals, in constant correspondence, and its commissioners and familiars everywhere on the watch. That vigilance was kept alive by the frequent discovery of communities of Judaizers, more or less numerous, whose trials revealed the names of abundant accomplices. The tribunal of Llerena was busy, from 1635 to 1638, with the “complicidad de Badajoz,” a group of Portuguese, whom it had unearthed at Badajoz and, when the Suprema called for a list of those inculpated by the prisoners, whom it had not been able to arrest, they amounted to a hundred and fifty.[810]
In 1647, Juan del Cerro, of Ciudad Rodrigo, was a prisoner in the royal gaol of Valladolid. Apparently hoping for release, he denounced himself to the Inquisition and told a story of a congregation of Jews at Ciudad Rodrigo, which met every Friday in the house of the president, Pablo de Herrera, paymaster of the army on the Portuguese frontier, when the ceremony of scourging images of Christ and the Virgin was performed and then, during Holy week, they were burnt. Numerous arrests were made and the trials dragged on until 1651; torture was employed, parents and children, brothers and sisters testified against each other,but there were no pertinacious impenitents or negativos and none were relaxed. That Juan del Cerro’s story of the outrages on the sacred images was recognized as fictitious is evident from the suspension of ten of the cases, including those of the so-called officers of the congregation, but the tribunal secured a satisfactory number of convictions, as well as fines amounting to thirty-seven hundred ducats. Juan del Cerro made nothing by his device for, though he was not prosecuted for false-witness, when the trials were over in 1651, he was handed back to the royal court.[811]Toledo was equally active for, in an auto held the same year, it had thirty-two Judaizers in person and thirty effigies of fugitives.[812]Nearly the whole of these were Portuguese for, by this time, Castilian Judaizers were of comparatively rare occurrence. In the great Seville auto of 1660, out of eighty-one Judaizers, nearly all Portuguese, a group of thirty-seven were from Osuna and another of eight from Utrera. There were forty-seven reconciled, seven relaxed in person and twenty-seven in effigy.[813]
The numerous effigies which figure in the autos indicate those who were compromised in the confessions of the penitents, and who succeeded for a time in eluding arrest. As a rule it may be said that this was but a temporary reprieve from the all-pervading vigilance of the Inquisition. Sooner or later, it gathered them in despite change of residence and name, and all the precautions of the hunted against the hunter. This is well illustrated in the vicissitudes of a colony of Portuguese, some twenty or thirty in number, in the little town of Beas (Jaen), which throw a vivid light on the miseries of these unfortunates. They had succeeded in living there obscurely for ten years or more, supporting themselves by such industries as they could follow, when some imprudence, or the watchfulness of some neighbor, drew upon them the attention of the tribunal of Cuenca, which arrested thirteen of them. From these the names of nine others were obtained, for whom warrants of arrest were issued but, when these were sent for execution, in April, 1656, it was found that they had left Beas secretly in February, abandoning their property. Five of them were traced to Málaga; the other four were said to have gone to Pietrabuena, but there the track was lost. All were dulyprosecuted in absentia and their effigies formed part of the Seville auto of 1660.
ACTIVITY OF PERSECUTION
The party that went towards Portugal was a family group of five—Diego Rodríguez Silva, his wife Ana Enríquez, her father Antonio Enríquez Francia, and her brother and sister-in-law, Diego Enríquez and Isabel Rodríguez. They pushed through without stopping to Rioseco, where they rested four days and then, hiring a guide, they traversed the mountains of Portugal, travelling only by night. Settling in Villa Pinhel, they tried to mend their broken fortunes, Ana Enríquez by keeping a shop and Diego Rodríguez by turning his hand to whatever he could find to do—at one time we hear of him as driving a thousand sheep to Lisbon for sale. Apparently by way of precaution, they appeared spontaneously before the tribunal of Coimbra, which treated them mercifully, imposing no fines but ordering them not to leave Pinhel without permission. Misfortune pursued Diego and, in 1671, he returned to Spain, stopping at Talavera de la Reina, whence he sent for his wife and children and father-in-law, telling the rest to remain. He took the name of del Aguila for himself and de los Rios for his wife, and settled for two years in Seville, where his father-in-law died. Thence they removed to Daimiel, where the Inquisition found them at last and arrested them, February 18, 1677, some seventeen years after they had been burnt in effigy in Seville. As two or three of the Beas fugitives, who had gone to Málaga, were on trial at Toledo in 1667, it is probable that none escaped save those who remained in Portugal. Two years and a half were spent on the trials of Diego and Ana, ending with a sentence of irremissible prison and sanbenito. Ana had broken down under this wandering life of incessant vicissitudes and anxiety; she had become the victim of epilepsy, melancholia and hypochondria, when her pitiless judges sent her to prison for life in vindication of a religion of infinite love and charity.[814]
An even more pitiful illustration of the miseries endured by these unfortunates, under the implacable vigilance of the Inquisition, is afforded by the case of Isabel, wife of Francisco Palos, of Ciudad Rodrigo. In 1608, when 22 years of age, she was tried by the Valladolid tribunal. Subsequently she was tried twice, in 1621 and 1626, at Llerena, twice at Cuenca, in 1653 and 1655, and finally in 1665 at Toledo. Altogether, about eighteen yearswere spent in these trials; the last one, in which she was thrice tortured, continued until 1670, when she was in her eighty-fourth year and eluded her tormentors by dying in prison, to be burnt in effigy with her bones as adifunta.[815]
Little colonies of Portuguese, like that of Beas, were frequently discovered. Simon Múñoz of Pastrana, on trial at Toledo, in 1679, gave the names of twenty-nine accomplices residing there, nearly all of whom figured in an auto particular of December 21, 1680. They had long succeeded in eluding inquisitorial vigilance, for one of them, María Enríquez, then sixty years old, testified that she had been brought thither from Lisbon by her parents, when a little child and had always lived there.[816]A similar group of Portuguese, in the little town of Berin (Orense) were tried between 1676 and 1678, by the tribunal of Santiago, and furnished to the Madrid auto of 1680 two victims relaxed as pertinacious Jews—Baltasar López Cardoso and Feliz López his cousin. There were more than twenty of them in all, and they had long been settled there; Antonio López, one of them, said, in 1677, that he was thirty-two years old and had been born in Berin.[817]
DECAY OF JUDAISM
It was only by the most stringent caution that existence could be maintained under these conditions. Gaspar de Campos, one of the Pastrana group, gives, in his confession, some account of the devices adopted for concealment. On the Sabbath the mother and girls would sit with reels or spinning wheels before them and, if any one came in, would pretend to be at work. On fast days the servant-girl would be sent out on an errand; during her absence food would be taken out of the olla and plates and spoons would be greased, they would then go to the house of a neighbor Jewess and, when the servant followed them, she would be sent back to get her dinner, telling her that they had dined, and then the neighbor would do the same. Even in the closest family circle the utmost reserve was often practised. Children were not allowed to know anything of Judaism until of an age at which their discretion could be trusted. Parents, indeed, frequently brought up their children as Catholics, and left it to others to convert themfortuitously. Pedro Núñez Marques, tried in Madrid in 1679, testified that he had been inducted into Judaism in Villaflor (Portugal) by María Pinto, wife of Alvaro de Morales. After he returned to his father’s house, in Torre de Moncorvo, he hesitated for months to let his parents know of his conversion, At last, in 1653, he told his mother, when she approved of it and said that both she and his father, Francisco Núñez Ramos, were Jews. There were eight children of them; he knew them all to be Jews but could give no details, except as to three sisters: they all assumed each other to be so, but each one attended to his own affairs, to earn a living, and to live with the utmost precaution. As his sister Angela Núñez Marques expressed it, they all knew each other to be Portuguese; that was sufficient, and further confidences were superfluous.[818]
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 deMurcia 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 Judaismit 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 releaseand 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 thedocument 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 thecall, 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 1552and 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 thecallmight 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 hisshare 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]
The tribunal ordered all New Christians to dwell in thecalland required them, on all feasts of precept, to attend mass in the cathedral in a body, preceded by a minister of the Inquisition and in charge of an alguazil. Impoverished, dishonored and watched, the position became intolerable. A number resolved to expatriate themselves and secretly made arrangements with an English ship lying in the harbor to carry them away. The passage-money was paid and they succeeded in embarking, but rough weather detained the ship; they had not procured the necessary licences to leave Spain, they were seized and cast into prison with the members of their families. This occurred in 1688 and three years were consumed in their trials. The result was seen in the four autos held in March, May and July, 1691. For those who had been reconciled in 1679 and were now convicted of relapse there could be no pardon. A huge brasero, eighty feet square and eight feet high, with twenty-five stakes, was prepared on the sea-shore, two miles from the city, in order that the people might not be incommoded by the stench. In all thirty-seven were relaxed in person, of whom only three were pertinacious to the last and were burnt alive. Eight were relaxed in effigy, of whom four were fugitives and four were dead—three of the latter having died in prison. There were fifteen reconciliations in person and three in effigy. Finally there were twenty-four who, although among the reconciled of 1679, escaped with abjurationde leviand fines amounting to sixty-four hundred libras.[832]This shows that the little community had already begun to repair its shattered fortunes, and renders it probable that the confiscations of the relaxed and reconciled rewarded the tribunal abundantly for its labors. The lesson seems to have been sufficiently severe to serve its purpose. We hear nothing more of Judaism in Majorca; during the height of persecution elsewhere, the tribunal celebrated two autos, May 31, 1722 and July 2, 1724, in whichnine penitents appeared, but none of them were Judaizers.[833]Although the New Christians were still confined to their separate quarter, in time, as we have seen, they became thoroughly Catholic.
With the opening of the eighteenth century it looked as though the victory over Judaism had been virtually won. The War of Succession must of course have interfered with the operations of the Inquisition, but this does not suffice to explain the marked falling off in the number of Judaizers in the autos, so far as manifested by the records before me. In Catalonia, which held out long after the rest of Spain was pacified, the Inquisition was fairly re-established in 1715, after which, for three years, the Barcelona tribunal, out of a total of twenty-five cases, had but three of Jews—a mother and two daughters who had fled from Seville and had been traced to Catalonia.[834]In Córdova the records are imperfect but, as far as they go, from 1700 to 1720, they show but five cases.[835]In Toledo, during the same twenty-one years, out of a total of eighty-eight trials, only twenty-three were for Judaism.[836]
REVIVAL OF PERSECUTION
The fires of persecution, however, were only slumbering and broke out again suddenly with renewed fierceness. Possibly this may be attributable to the discovery in Madrid of an organized synagogue, composed of twenty families who, since 1707, had been accustomed to meet for their devotions and, in 1714, had elected a rabbi, whose name they sent to Leghorn for confirmation. Comparative immunity had brought recklessness and we are told that they observed the Christian fast-days with dancing and guitar-playing. Five of them were relaxed in the auto of April 7, 1720.[837]It was probably this discovery that aroused the othertribunals to renewed activity, which was abundantly rewarded, for there seems at this time to have been little concealment by Judaizers. In the Toledo auto of March 19, 1721, Sebastian Antonio de Paz,administrador del tabaco, is asserted to have married the daughter of his wife, and Francisco de Mendoza y Rodríguez his first cousin, “according to the Law of Moses.”[838]
For some years this revival of persecution raged with a virulence rivalling that of the earlier period. In a collection of sixty-four autos, held between 1721 and 1727, there were in all eight hundred and sixty-eight cases, of which eight hundred and twenty were for Judaism, nor did the tribunals err on the side of mercy. There were seventy-five relaxations in person and seventy-four in effigy, while scourging, the galleys and imprisonment were lavishly imposed.[839]The geographical distribution of the culprits is worthy of note. The kingdoms of the crown of Aragon show few traces of Judaism. Valencia contributed but twenty cases, Barcelona five, Saragossa one and Majorca none—or twenty-six in all. Among the tribunals of the crown of Castile, Logroño held no auto during these years; Santiago furnished only four cases, while Granada had two hundred and twenty-nine, Seville a hundred and sixty-seven and Córdova seventy-eight. The years 1722 and 1723 were those in which persecution was most active, the number diminishing rapidly afterwards.[840]It still, however, continued at intervals. In Córdova there were autos in 1728, 1730 and 1731, in which there were in all twenty-six cases of Judaism; then there was an interval until 1745, when only two cases occurred.[841]In Toledo, after 1726, there was no case of Judaism until1738, when there were fourteen. This seems to have exhausted the material for prosecution, for until the Toledan record ends in 1794, there was but a single subsequent case, which occurred in 1756.[842]In Madrid there were several Jews relaxed in 1732, charged with scourging and burning an image of Christ, in a house in the calle de las Infantas.[843]In Valladolid, at an auto, June 13, 1745, there was one Judaizer relaxed and four reconciled, while in Seville, July 4, although there were four Moslems there was not a single Jew.[844]At Llerena, in 1752, we hear of the relaxation of six effigies of fugitives and one of a dead woman, which must evidently have been cases of Judaism.[845]
FOREIGNERS EXCLUDED
These scattering details can make no pretension to completeness, and yet they suffice to show that Judaism at last was substantially rooted out of Spanish soil, after a continuous struggle of three centuries. How complete was this eradication is manifested by a summarized list of all cases of every kind, coming before all the tribunals, from 1780 until the suppression of the Inquisition in 1820, embracing an aggregate of over five thousand. In these forty years, the whole number of prosecutions connected with Judaism was but sixteen, and of these ten were foreigners who had evaded the laws prohibiting entrance to Jews while, of the six natives, four were prosecuted for suspicions and propositions. The latest case was at Córdova, in 1818, of Manuel Santiago Vivar for Judaizing acts—the final scene in the long tragedy which had secured uniformity of faith at the cost of so much blood and suffering.[846]
During this later period, the exclusion of foreign Jews was exercising the Holy Office much more than the detection of native ones. The savage law will be remembered by which, in 1499, Ferdinand and Isabella prohibited the return of the expelled Jews or the entrance of foreigners under pain of death and confiscation.[847]Although this law was retained on the statute-book, it probably was not enforced in all its ferocity, but the maintenance of the exclusion was inevitable when such unremitting pains were taken to exterminate Judaism. When thevisitas de navíos, or examinationof all ships arriving at Spanish ports, were organized, the keeping out of Jews was held in view as much as that of Lutheran heretics and books; if a Jew were found on board, he was to be examined; if he admitted baptism he was to be seized and his goods were to be confiscated; if unbaptized and he made no attempt to land, he was to be allowed to depart with the ship.[848]Still, the indefatigable mercantile energy of the Jews and the venality of officials, to a limited extent, neutralized these precautions. In 1656, the trial at Murcia of Enrique Pereira, whose domicile was in Lucca and who was arrested while trading at Beas, shows that there was intercourse between the Portuguese in Spain and their brethren in Italy; those of Spain would go by sea to Nice or elsewhere to enjoy freedom of worship, while Italian Jews came to Spain to trade, in spite of inquisitorial vigilance.[849]These furtive attempts, with their perils, were but tantalizing to those who looked with longing on the tempting Spanish market; licences to come were much more desirable and we have seen that, in 1634, under Olivares, they were sometimes issued. They were grudgingly recognized by the tribunals, as in the case mentioned above in 1645. More unlucky, in 1679, was Samuel de Jacob, who was thrown in prison, although he held a licence, and we are told that, although those who held licences could not be prosecuted as heretics, still, if they blasphemed or derided the faith, they could be chastised with fines, scourging or the galleys, according to the resultant scandal, while attempts to proselyte incurred capital punishment.[850]In 1689, special orders were issued to disregard an agreement which Don Pedro Ronquillo, under powers from the king, had made with an English Jew, enabling him to land at any port in Spain.[851]
FOREIGNERS EXCLUDED
Such care was exercised to avert any danger of polluting the Spanish soil by a Jewish foot that when, in 1713, by the treaty of Utrecht, Gibraltar was ceded to England, it was under the condition that no Jews or Moors should be permitted to reside there.[852]The inobservance of this by England was the subject of complaint, but it is not likely that many intruders risked the dangersthat attended an attempt of a foreign Jew to enter Spain. In January, 1697, Abraham Rodríguez, travelling from France to Portugal under the name of Antonio Mazedo, was arrested at Ledesma and brought to the tribunal of Valladolid. Two years and a half later his trial was still in progress, but, though we do not know the result, the experience was not such as to invite imitation.[853]
When, in the general relaxation of the eighteenth century, the sternness of these laws was tacitly abandoned, embarrassing precautions rendered sojourn uninviting. In 1756, Abraham Salusox, a Jew of Jerusalem, ventured to Valencia with a lion for sale. The shipmaster reported him and a familiar was deputed to accompany him day and night, on board and on shore, never to let him out of his sight or to communicate with any one. The Count of Almenara bought the lion and Salusox was permitted to be in the count’s house for a few days, until a cage was constructed for the beast, after which he re-embarked. The same course was followed in 1759, with a Jew who came with merchandise from Gibraltar; a familiar never left him till his goods were sold and he departed, while his books and papers were carefully scrutinized to see that they contained nothing prejudicial. There were others who came in 1761 and 1762, who were treated in the same fashion. Then, in 1795 a royal order was issued through the Suprema, to the effect that a Jewish subject of the Bey of Morocco would come to Valencia and remain for eight or ten days, who was not to be troubled in any way; the tribunal consequently took no notice of his coming and going.[854]
These were all the cases that search through the records of Valencia could find, from 1645 to 1800, and their paucity shows how rarely Jews braved the dangers of visiting Spain. Those who tried to do so in secret took the chances of detection. In 1781, Jacobo Pereira landed at Cadiz under a false name and concealing his faith, but he was found out, arrested and the Seville tribunal at once commenced his prosecution.[855]It is true that a royal order of April 25, 1786, permitted the entrance of Jews who bore licence from the king, but these were sparingly granted and only on special occasions. The question of greater liberality came up, in 1797,when the finance minister, Don Pedro de Varela, as a means of reviving the commerce and industry of Spain, proposed that Jews might be allowed to establish factories in Cadiz and other ports, but the Council of ministers rejected the project as contrary to the laws.[856]Apparently the discussion continued and, in 1800, the Suprema called on all the tribunals for reports as to their treatment of Jews seeking admission, and the result appears in a royal cédula of June 8, 1802, declaring in full force all laws and pragmáticas theretofore issued, and ordering the rigorous execution of the penalties therein provided, while any default in lending to the Inquisition due assistance for this holy purpose was threatened with the royal indignation.[857]
The confusion of the Napoleonic wars afforded opportunities for enterprising Jews, which were not likely to be overlooked, and Fernando VII deemed it necessary, August 16, 1816, to issue a decree renewing and confirming the cédula of 1802.[858]It was easier to publish the decree than to enforce it. The tribunal of Seville, June 12, 1819, represented to the Suprema its perplexities arising from the influx of Jews at Algeciras, Cadiz and Seville, who came to the tribunal begging for baptism. They were indigent beggars and probably fugitive criminals but, as occasionally there might be one whose object was really salvation, to deprive him of this would be a heavy burden on the conscience, and consequently the tribunal asked for instructions.[859]This resulted in an order of the inquisitor-general, July 10th, to all the tribunals, insisting on the strict enforcement of the decrees of 1786 and 1802; such Jews as obtained a royal licence were to be vigilantly watched and, if the secular officials manifested lack of zeal in coöperation, the inquisitor-general was to be notified.[860]