Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 158-17 9780812202069

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Souls in Dispute

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania David B. Ruderman, Series Editor

Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert David Stern

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Souls in Dispute Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580-1700

David L. Graizbord

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and United States Universities. Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graizbord, David L. Souls in dispute : converso identities in Iberia and the Jewish diaspora, 1580-1700 I David L. Graizbord. p. cm.-(Jewish culture and contexts) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN o-8122-3749-8 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Marranos-Spain. 2. Jews-Spain-History-17th century. 3. Jews-Spain-History-18th century. 4· Jews-Spain-Identity. 5. Spain-Ethnic relations. 6. Social integration-SpainHistory-17th century. 7. Social integration-Spain-History-18th century. I. Title. II. Series. DS135.S7G73 2003 946' .004924-dc22 2003065755

Contents

1

Introduction

2

Conversos: The Iberian Context

3

Exile and Return

4

Interrogation, Confession, and Reversion to Christianity

5

The Conversion and Reconversion of Antonio Rodriguez de Amezquita 143

6

Conclusion: On the Historical Significance of Renegades' Self-Subjugation 171 Appendix Notes

1

179 191

Glossary

235

Selected Bibliography Index

237

251

Acknowledgments

263

19

105

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Chapter 1

Introduction

On August 18, 1661, Cristobal Mendez Silveira, a thirty-eightyear-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, Mendez 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, Mendez 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, Mendez had renounced Judaism and had once again embraced Catholicism. 1 Mendez was only one of hundreds of Judeoconversos who returned to Iberian territory throughout the 16oos 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

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Chapter 1

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 !hero-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

Introduction

3

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? 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-

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Chapter 1

minant of the social position of the cristianos nuevas (cristiios-novos in Portuguese) was political and economic in nature. Like their forbears in the Iberian juderias conversos constituted a predominantly urban minority. Its members were chiefly engaged in commercial, professional, scholarly, artisanal, and other nonagricultural occupations. 9 From the 158o'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, Cura