The idea of a Christian commonwealth
Cantor, Norman F.
of Spain and Portugal in the late fourteenth century----charac- teristically in the medieval world and still perhaps today--were polarized, on the one side, into a mass of artisans and small...
...They seem to prefer that the Christian com- monwealth should not have exercised its power, enterprise, and learning...
...It happened and we are its products and have to make the best of 1492's consequences...
...The inquisitorial records are fragmentary but historians estimate be- tween two and four thousand crypto-Jews were executed by the Spanish Inquisition between 1480 and 1520 and very few thereafter...
...In the Christian commonwealth Jews were not to be allocated a first-class status...
...He was, however, not trying to find a home for exiled Jews...
...The number of people actually executed by the Inquisition in its whole history down to 1700 was relatively modest...
...Saint Teresa of Commonweal he third great event of 1492, much celebrated and debated this past year, was the Columbian enterprise...
...And defendants could give the inquisitors a list of their known enemies, who were supposed to be removed from among their accusers...
...Between 1391 and 1420 there were Christian phys- ical attacks upon Jews on religious grounds, some of them spontaneous mob assaults, some organized attacks led by pop- ular church leaders such as Saint Vincent Ferrer...
...Columbus's voyages were related also to the Jewish experience in Spain...
...Where and when have men and women done better...
...After all, the in- quisitors didn't want in theory to kill anyone who sincerely con- fessed to being a crypto-Jew, accepted a punishment which could be light (public confession) or heavy (confiscation of proper- ty), and were not again convicted of being Marranos...
...Put in a positive light, the argument on behalf of the Christian commonwealth of ! 492 comes down to the following...
...It was the product of experience...
...Columbus was also trying to override Moslem commercial wealth...
...Wouldn't this lead to massacring the Native Americans...
...A prominent fifteenth-century bishop of Burgos in Castile, Pablo de Santa Maria, was a former rabbi, and his son became a bishop as well...
...We are taught in our egalitarian and multiethnic culture to anathematize this whole set of ideas and behavior patterns...
...Some of the latter advanced to important roles in the clergy...
...Spanish Christian culture aimed at the baroque which is layCommonweal...
...He too was descended from a Jewish convert family, as he indicated in his will...
...Disenchanted by rationalistic philosophy and science after 1250, the Sefardi elite were intellectually attracted to the Kabbalah which is usually defined as Jewish "mysticism," but which also involved Gnostic dualism, astrology, magic, and de- monology...
...Mind you, their blood was not as pure as the blood of old Christian families (Judah Halevi, the Spanish Jewish thinker in the early twelfth century, similarly said converts to Judaism were not equal to the old Jews...
...Yet most of the appalling loss of life among the Native Americans (19 out of 20 million in Mexico) came from disease--immune deftciency--rather than the sword and gun, although there was plenty of that terror too...
...He took with him on his first voyage an Arabic-speaking Jewish New Christian to spread the faith in the Orient...
...It was a very thick, expressive, richly cultivated, and ornately elaborated and aggressively exhibited culture...
...Conversion of the Jews was one important sign of that totalization of Christianity...
...King Ferdinand, the most determined advocate of the Inquisition, had a Jewish grandmother...
...In the later Middle Ages, Jewish converts to Christianity condemned their former faith in public disputations with rabbis...
...But that is not what 1492 was all about...
...Of course they did...
...Increasingly, the rich Jews, even the scholars among them, lost enthusiasm for traditional doctrines and observances...
...Empire was there for the taking, to serve the monarchy, the church, and the nobility...
...As for the use of the death penal- ty, that was common in the Middle Ages for the crime of heresy, used by Jews as well as Christians...
...These includ- ed great merchants, government officials, and rabbinical schol- ars...
...Again the Jews had split and were devouring each other while the Christian state and the gentile clergy urged them on...
...The state-controlled Inquisition was a way of attacking the wealth, autonomy, and self-confidence of the nobility, among whom by the sixteenth century, as a result of conversion and intermarriage, about a third was at least part ethnically Jewish...
...We are not at all dealing with a Nazi Holocaust...
...Jews were one way or the other to be brought into the church...
...There was a powerful messianic movement in the Spanish church at the end of the fifteenth century...
...Yet both North and South America are its legacy...
...The Spanish Christian com-monwealth was not the creation of murdering conquistadors--mostly underemployed petty nobility and mercenary soldier riffraff nor of slave traders...
...In 1480, Pope Sixtus IV reluctantly authorized the establishment of an Inquisition in Spain to be directly under the control of the Spanish crown...
...Another was the conversion of the peoples of the East, for which Columbus's voyages were intended to establish the basis...
...But in spite of much rustling of genealogical lists among the Spanish nobility, this was a provision usually impossible to enforce, after two or three gen- erations, what with total assimilation...
...that was central to Western civilization until 1945...
...ndeed the great majority of Jewish converts were more than sincere...
...Their separation was an impediment to the Second Coming and the end of history, a barrier to realizing eschato- logical hopes...
...Second, the Inquisition in Spain in the late fifteenth century, like the Inquisition in Southern France in the thirteenth, involved a fratricidal conflict within the Jewish 12:6 November 1992 population itself--between the Jewish converts to Christianity and those who had remained loyal to the old faith...
...The response was twofold: the idea was advanced that membership in the leadership ranks of the Iberian community demanded "purity of blood" as well as religious correctness...
...The Spain that was a Christian commonwealth in 1492 and is heavily condemned today had obvious authoritarian, intol- erant, racist, and violent characteristics...
...This was the idea of the Christian commonwealth that 1492 signifies...
...They had success in the lat- ter, and five years after Columbus's first voyage, they round- ed South Africa and opened the sea route to India, later establishing a great commercial center in the Goa which they held until very recent times...
...asn't this a conflation of religion and imperialism...
...he Spanish laity who had been jealous of the Jews because of their favorable economic and political positions were anguished to see the Jews, with their civil disabilities alleviated, now prospering even more as New Christians...
...It was, first of all, a direct outcome of the other two changes, the Moslem and Jewish ones...
...America saved the European food supply by providing the potato for human con14:6 November 1992 sumption and maize (Indian corn) as fodder for cattle...
...As these figures indicate, most of the New Christians were sincere converts or at least behaved as conventional Christians, and both the paranoid claims of some inquisitors and the myths propagated by modem Jewish historians that most Jewish converts were actually Marranos (crypto-Jews) are fanciful...
...After 1480 cler- gy from New Christian families were prominent among the in- quisitors in the first generation of the Inquisition (as they had also been, though proportionately and numerically less so, among the inquisitors in France in the early thirteenth century...
...Of course it was...
...As a result of these persecutions as well as a decline of en- thusiasm for traditional (Talmudic) Judaism, by the second quar- ter of the fifteenth century more than half of the Jewish elite and an unknown proportion of the Jewish masses--at least 100,000 people--had converted to Christianity...
...It had been shaped by centuries of thought and action...
...So Jews had to be converted...
...They would have left the Americas and its edenic green climes to the aborigines...
...The humanism of Vives and Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (the greatest gentile biblical scholar up to that time), the paint- ing of E1 Greco, the spiritual expressions of SaintsTeresa and Ignatius Loyola, the universal social compassion of Las Casas-- these were central to the Spanish Christian commonwealth...
...He offered to the Spanish crown another route to India across the Atlantic...
...Europeans had been ravaging their own environment for half a millennium so persistently that by 1500 they had deforested much of Western Europe and were running out of both wood for fuel and the game that had provided the staple of their high-protein, red-meat diet...
...they were its marginal consumers and occasional instruments, and its parasites...
...Among the Sefardim polygamy, concubinage, adultery, and wife-beating were com- mon...
...of Spain and Portugal in the late fourteenth century----charac- teristically in the medieval world and still perhaps today--were polarized, on the one side, into a mass of artisans and small shopkeepers and, on the other side, an elite of wealthy busi- nessmen, courtiers, scholars, and rabbis who married within these prominent families to form a closed caste...
...But use of torture to obtain evidence was standard procedure in all continental (civil as well as ecclesiastical) courts until the eighteenth century...
...First, it was the product of a very long development stretching back through the Middle Ages into antiquity...
...It was an old idea that history would end and Christ would return only when the church was fully triumphant in the world...
...No one would claim that the Spanish Inquisition was distinguished by sensitivity to civil liberties...
...There were two special motives involved in establishing the Spanish Inquisition...
...First, it was an instrument of centralizing royal power against the nobility, of whom the New Christian (converted Jewish) elite was an important segment...
...Fourteen ninety-two illustrates the nature of a Christian commonwealth that emerged out of the European experience in Spain as much as anywhere else...
...It is a moral thought, perhaps a spir- itual epiphany, to feel that way...
...the apostle to the Native Americans and nemesis of the reck- less conquistadors, Bartolome de Las Casas...
...Fuel was obtained in the sixteenth century by opening up coal mines, although burning of soft coal began the pollution of the European atmosphere...
...The Marranos after 1480 suffered execution ("released to the secular arm") by burning if they persisted in being loyal to Judaism or were repeatedly convicted of secretly being Jews...
...These were not its leaders and spokesmen, its thinkers and innovators...
...Secondly, the New Christians were charged with being crypto-Jews (Marranos,pigs) who were secretly practicing their religion (observing the Saturday Sabbath, for example) and were therefore the worst kind of heretics and betrayers of Christ who ought to be pursued by the religious court of the Inquisition...
...However, the Catholic pow- ers were forced, in the seventeenth century, to share the wealth of India and the African slave trade with the rising Protestant powers of Holland and England...
...It used torture to obtain evidence and it did not reveal to defendants the names of their accusers or allow the defendants to confront their accusers in open court...
...Probably half of these were strangled before being burnt...
...From among learned and aristocratic New Christian families came some of the greatest names in early sixteenth-century Spanish ecclesiastical and cul- tural history: the Erasmian humanist Juan Luis Vives...
...Not necessarily if enlightened churchmen like Las Casas could have gotten control of the conquistadors, which they didn't...
...Whether because of conviction or fear, the great ma- jority of New Christians were unquestionably apostates, and within a generation or two rarely different in their religious com- mitments from the rest of the population...
...Many today bewail this history...
...He was trying to bring all history to a conclusion...
...Rabbinical court records of the fourteenth century show a Jewish propensity to adapt the lifestyle of Moslem society...
...The Jewish community in Cor- doba and Seville in the eleventh century had also executed heretics with permission of the Moslem ruler...
...Didn't Columbus and his successors ravage the delicate ecology of the New World...
...This past had been embossed in philosophy, theology, literature, music, and art...
...The outcome of Portuguese and Spanish seafaring was the decline of the Arabic Mediterranean world by the early seventeenth century...
...The Portuguese had already tried to undermine Arab wealth and power in the Eastern Mediterranean by open- ing up a route around South Africa to India, the source of the silks, spices, and jewels that the Turks imported from East Asia and sold at great markups to the Western European nobility...
...Moslems and Arabs had to be beaten on the battlefield and bypassed and superseded com- mercially...
...The Portuguese were also trying to tap into the Arab dominance of the black African slave trade...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19
