The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain
By Benzion Netanyahu
Random House, 1,384 pages, $40
The Greeks had a saying mega biblon, mega kakon–a big book is a big evil. Benzion Netanyahu, a former Cornell professor and patriarch of a famous Israeli family, has created a work that is certainly big, and its ostensible subject is certainly evil; but as history, it is a big failure. “The Origins of the Inquisition” suffers from three major shortcomings. First, it is misleadingly titled. Second, Netanyahu’s scholarship is tendentious and outdated, and his main thesis rests on some dubious and biased translations. Finally, rather than describing the remarkable achievements of Christian Europe’s first group of assimilated Jews, it emphasizes their setbacks.
Netanyahu’s readers must plow through 1,000 pages of background before the Spanish Inquisition is actually founded, and what he has to say about its foundation is either banal or sometimes simply erroneous. He is, for example, too sexist to recognize that its actual founder was Queen Isabella rather than her husband. His obsession with the discrimination faced by descendants of Sephardic Jews converted to Christianity, or conversos, prevents him from explaining how well the establishment of the Inquisition fit into the principal business of the Catholic kings during the 1480s, namely the conquest of Granada.
Netanyahu treats the Spanish Inquisition as the inevitable outcome of a long development, whereas in reality the royal institution created in 1480 was a brilliantly original response to short-term Castilian political needs. He fails to tell his readers that the lnquisition was controlled not by fanatical anti-Semites but exclusively by monarchs who continued to employ converted Jews in key posts; that its principal purpose was to extort money from terrorized conversos to help pay for the monarchs’ wars; or that more than half of the thousands of conversos “executed” during its early bloodthirsty period were never arrested (they burned either bones from long-dead corpses or else effigies of fugitives). The Inquisition proved so successful that it outlasted the Granadan war and even its fixation on Jewish conversos to endure until Napoleon’s time. But the Inquisition per se scarcely interests Netanyahu.
What, then, is he writing about? After excursuses through Hellenistic Egypt and 7th Century Spain, Netanyahu devotes nearly half his text to developments in mid-15th Century Spain, especially the revolt of Toledo in 1449 and the first systematic prosecution of conversos as Christian heretics that accompanied it. Here lies his real contribution–and my second major objection.
Netanyahu’s reputation rests on his pioneering exploration of rabbinic sources, which unanimously treated the conversos of 15th Century Spain as Christians rather than Jews. But what sort of Christians? Ignoring the problem that ceasing to follow the Jewish law does not automatically make a convert or his descendants into orthodox Christians, Netanyahu treats the extensive discussion about “Judaizing” among the Toledo conversos in 1449 as nothing more than fantasies invented by their enemies. He thus accepts uncritically the views of converso authors such as Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (uncle of the first Inquisitor-General), which he analyzes at great length, sometimes brilliantly, and rejects en bloc the views of their opponents, which he also analyzes relentlessly.
While Netanyahu’s approach is legitimate, he undermines the most valuable part of his investigation by frequently mistranslating such 15th Century Castilian terms as linaje or generacion, or the Latin genus, as “race,” mainly when employed by enemies of the conversos. He compounds this by often poking an italicized finger into his reader’s chest to emphasize his bogus discovery of racism among 15th Century Spaniards.
This is not the only instance of questionable scholarship. For example, in the first of 11 appendices Netanyahu estimates the converso population of Seville at 45,000, at a time when the best general estimate of the city’s total population was around 40,000–and everyone, including Netanyahu, agrees that conversos comprised a relatively small part of Seville’s population. The last appendix piles one implausibility upon another to argue that the murder of Saragossa’s first Inquisitor was a plot not by the conversos but by their enemies. Here and elsewhere, Netanyahu generally ignores much of the best recent scholarship on 15th Century Spain; for example, he seems unaware of William Phillips’ study of Enrique IV or Peggy Liss’ life of Isabella.
My final objection is that the book offers only a slight variant of the venerable “lachrymose school” of Jewish history–although Netanyahu’s Jews no longer practiced Judaism, they were still being persecuted but for “racial” rather than religious reasons. Yet persecution tells only half their story and probably the less interesting half. These Sephardic “New Christians” (the politically correct 15th Century term) represent the first known large-scale and long-term assimilation of Jews into any Christian society. Although the process included many painful adaptations, some severe backlash and even a decade of brutal persecution under the Inquisition, it ended with their general integration into Spanish society.
Netanyahu tells us the first phase of this story and tells it very well. He provides especially vivid portraits of two Spanish intellectuals from plebeian backgrounds who played indispensable roles. Ferran Martinez, a priest in Seville, created a converso community of unparalleled size through a novel style of persecution that deliberately tried to convert Jews rather than exterminate them. His campaign resulted in such massive conversions in 1391 that Spain probably contained more Sephardic New Christlans than Sephardic Jews–an unparalleled situatlon.
Almost 60 years later, Marcos Garcia de Mora, a lawyer in Toledo, first accused these “New Christians” of heresy and tried to exclude them from all public offices. But this first backlash had no lasting results. Two generations of uninterrupted assimilation had put Spain’s New Christians into such important positions within the Spanish church, the nobility and the royal government that they could defend their interests skillfully and successfully against an urban revolt manipulated by their envious enemies.
The next generation of conversos faced organized persecution as Christian heretics by the new Spanish lnquisition: a decade or terror (1480-90) followed by four or five decades of decreasing pressure. Netanyahu briefly notices Siliceo’s “purity of blood” campaign against descendants of conversos in the 1540s, at a time when the Inquisition virtually ceased punishing them. If racism did legally handicap the descendants of Spain’s Sephardic conversos, it occurred after, not before, the Inquisition terrorized them. And the very existence of such legislation indirectly testifies to the continuing importance of the conversos in Spain; not surprisingly, these laws proved ineffective.
Most descendants of the conversos survived the nightmare of the early Inquisition to become so firmly integrated into Christian Spain that no further discrimination against them was possible on religious grounds. Their descendants quietly flouted racist codes and contributed to the vibrant Catholicism of Golden Age Spain: St. Teresa of Avila was the granddaughter of a Toledan “New Christian” penanced by the Inquisition. Large-scale Jewish assimilation came at a very high price, but it did happen–for the first time in European history.
