The Inquisition Inquisited

...Nonetheless, it is beyond the power of such documents to prove that there were no holes and corners where Judaizers attempted to keep alive the old religion...

...As Netanyahu himself notes, though, they are full of "cold-blooded assertions that the Marranos got their due...

...Yet this would imply not that the writers of the pro-Converso documents were well-informed about Judaizing among Marranos, but rather that such disputes cannot be resolved by hopelessly partial documents...

...A very large chunk of it, however, consists of an excessively detailed examination of a body of 15th-cenfury texts defending the Marranos from charges of heresy...

...Initially, the laws of Church and State afforded this large body of converts equality with the Old Christians...

...In any case, if "Secret Judaism" involved syncretism between Judaism and Christianity, or if it was most common among the uneducated, the very literary Jewish sources would not be terribly useful...

...In an earlier book, Netanyahu examined the Jewish documents on the Marranos...

...His thesis makes a good deal of sense, particularly since by the end of the 17th century they had indeed been absorbed...

...In the late 1470s, Ferdinand and Isabella yielded to anti-Converso sentiment by setting up the Spanish Inquisition to investigate charges that the converts practiced their old faith secretly...

...In 1412, Jews were denied the right to live among, or sell food to...

...The Jews, of course, welcomed the Muslim conquerors, who permitted them to resume their former role of serving as tax experts, lawyers, physicians, and the like...

...But to neutralize the towns, the most potent source of resistance to his rule, this cruel, cynical, astute, and successful monarch was willing to sacrifice a minority of Conversos...

...they sprang chiefly from social and economic rivalry between the Jews (and later the Conversos), on the one hand, and a substantial part of the urban elite plus most of the city and rural poor, on the other...

...Certain municipalities, but above all Toledo during a 1449 rebellion, shortly tried to prevent anyone of "the perverse lineage of the Jews" from holding local office...

...Converso bishops and local officials also were suddenly commonplace...

...Although largely revoked, these edicts stimulated a second wave of conversions, of perhaps equal magnitude...

...In the light of the behavior of today's assimilated Jews, it is reasonable to assume that they retained hardly anything of their ancestors' religion...

...It is true, as the author observes, that the censures of the Inquisition were equally "one-sided...

...How, asks Netanyahu, could the royal couple "draw the anti-Marranos to their side" without repealing the laws that protected convert rights and thereby undermining their authority further...

...As Castile, the most important Christian state, pushed to the south, it looked for allies, and by 1200 the Jews of Spain had crossed the Iron Curtain separating Islam and Christendom...

...or to work as blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors, clothmakers, cobblers, and physicians...

...Writers & Writing THE INQUISITION INQUISITED BY ROGER DRAPER FOR THE JEWS, as for the peoples of Africa and America, modern times were ushered in by disaster: In 1492, while Columbus sailed west, his Spanish patrons—Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile—expelled the peninsula's 1,500-year-old Jewish community, at the time the most important in the world...

...Apologias written by Conversos inevitably suffer from the suspicion that they make a case rather than present the facts...

...In his new study, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (Random, 1,384 pp., $50.00), he again argues that the Marranos were "conscious assimilationists who wished to merge with the Christian society, educate their children as fully fledged Christians, and remove themselves from anything...

...The only thing they could do was to adopt the measure demanded by all critics of the Marranos—that is, establish an inquisition...

...Moreover, by 1480 most Conversos were at least third-generation Christians...

...Jewish...

...New Christians married in droves into the noblest families of the realm...

...the private economy was beyond its scope...

...the phenomenon could not have been widespread...

...Before he and his wife had assumed their respective thrones, Aragon and Castile had passed through decades of constant turbulence...

...The laws of 1412 affected Jews, not converts...

...At this point, when the author's detailed narrative commences, the Third Estate in Castile's medieval parliament was regularly calling upon the kings to eject all Jewish officials in the tax collection apparatus, the sole government posts they were allowed to hold...

...These writings, by Conversos themselves and Old Christians, are brought on stage to substantiate the author's view that the Marranos were sincere Christians who were being absorbed into the general population...

...Yet even there, the author notes, the 1449 restrictions affected only 14 Marranos...

...Netanyahu is not alone in pointing out that friction among Conversos, Jews and Old Christians intensified just as the states of the peninsula were coalescing into their modern forms...

...Netanyahu has written a fine book that would have been more powerful had it been limited to its real subject: the origin of the Inquisition in the turmoil of 15th-century Spain...

...Not being unitary, these states accommodated a variety of "national" loyalties...

...Jewish life, writes Netanyahu, "came to rest on the same political foundations that had repeatedly sustained it in the East: an alignment of the Jewish minority with the conquerors for mutual support against the majority...

...In the more unified Spain that emerged under Ferdinand, the idea of a Jewish nation within the Hispanic one seemed an anomaly, and the Conversos, as heirs of the Jews, were tainted by their foreignness...

...Ferdinand himself "filled his court with Marranos" and consistently maintained the legal rights of those—the great majority—who escaped the clutches of the Inquisition...

...Murderous attacks on Jews became common...

...Spain had not only many Jews but also, from 1391 on, many Christians of Jewish descent...

...These Conversos, Marranos or New Christians, as they were called, had abjured Judaism, yet the anti-Semites pursued them as well...

...Christians...

...The hostility toward them, though accompanied by brutal murders, was not universal...

...These Hebrew works, by scholars like Isaac Abravanel, do contend that the converts were lost to Judaism...

...Why did the Catholic Kings seemingly abandon the monarchy's long-standing partiality to the Conversos and create this monstrosity...

...If, as he thinks, the Inquisitors' hatred makes their conclusions suspect, we should apply that caution, albeit less strongly, here as well...

...AS AN ACCOUNT of Ferdinand's motives in authorizing that great engine of destruction, Netanyahu's book is persuasive...

...Netanyahu first takes the reader on a tour of the whole course of Hispano-Jewish history...

...As this example shows, Secret Judaism must have been extremely secret...

...By itself, therefore, the urban antagonism cannot explain the Inquisition, a national effort that could attack almost any Converso and, not long thereafter, almost anyone in Spain...

...As for the Old Christian vindications, we should not assume they are fundamentally much more accurate than the Old Christian attacks...

...In 1391,awaveof violent anti-Semitic riots throughout Castile and Aragon sparked a movement of mass conversion to Christianity that, according to the author, involved 200,000 persons?a high estimate, but very large numbers were surely involved...

...Asa prefigurement of the racist "purity of the blood" nonsense that obsessed Spain for the next 200 years, the events in Toledo were significant...

...During the seventh century the Visigothic monarchs attempted to unify the kingdom by forcing the Jews, as well as their own people, to accept Catholicism...

...The Galicians and the Basques, too, saw themselves as "nations," like the Jews and (at first) the Marranos...

...Thus, writes Netanyahu, "the Old Christian population in the cities was put under constant pressure by the newcomers, whose competitive force was felt before long in the crafts, free professions and officialdom...

...In the Middle Ages, there were five Spanish sovereignties—Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre, and Granada...

...Jewish and Christian scholars have long assumed the accusations were substantially true...

...Spanish anti-Semitism and the consequent aversion to the Conversos were "not in the main determined by religious considerations," contends Netanyahu...

...But a 12th-century invasion from North Africa, led by a fanatical Islamic sect, turned the Jews against their Moorish overlords...

...But one historian, B. Netanyahu, the father of Israel's Likud Party leader, has made a career out of challenging them...

...Once again, they built their position around loyalty to the ruling elite—particularly to the kings of Castile, who courted unpopularity by protecting the Jews for a very long time...

...Hatred based in the Third Estate escalated from the middle of the 13th century, along with the political influence of the commoners...

...But the Reconquest created a Spanish national identity, and inevitably it was Christian...

...A virulent kind of anti-Semitism emerged among the natives, so when Spain was overrun (in the fifth century) by the Visigoths—a Germanic group converted to an anti-Catholic form of Christianity—the Jewish inhabitants flocked to their banner...

...In the far north, Catholic power was now reviving...

...All of which is to say that it is not the author's conclusion I doubt, but rather the need for a microscopic examination of the apologetic literature...

...Both resisted, and it was this divided Spain that fell quickly to the Arabs (711-14...

...Conversos soon made up about a third of the Castil-ian Royal Council, and several were its highest officeholders...

...In 1920, for instance, a village in Portugal was found to harbor a community of hidden Jews so isolated that they believed themselves to be the last Jews in the world...

...Jews entered Iberia, then occupied by a racially mixed populace that was becoming Latin in culture and Catholic in religion, shortly after the start of the Common Era...