Inquisitorial Ideology at Work

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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JEMH 10,4Also available online www.brill.nl

1 Josef Vicente Del Olmo, Relacin histrica del Auto General de Fe que se celebr en Madrideste ao de 1680, in Miguel J. de Montesern, ed. Introduccin a la Inquisicin Espaola(Madrid, 1980), 688. Please note that to complete this study I have utilized two printedversions of Del Olmos relacin. The first is listed above. The second is Josef Vicente DelOlmo, Relacin histrica (Madrid, 1680). This older version includes a full text of theinquisitorial sermon allegedly delivered on the occasion of the auto, and an illustration

INQUISITORIAL IDEOLOGY AT WORK INAN AUTO DE FE, 1680: RELIGION IN THE CONTEXT

OF PROTO-RACISM

DAVID GRAIZBORDThe Arizona Center for Judaic Studies

The University of Arizona

A

The article explores inquisitorial ideology as functionaries of the Spanish Inquisition rep-resented and understood it in the late seventeenth century. My analysis focuses on theofficial account of and sermon delivered at a monumental auto de fecelebrated in Madridin 1680. I contend that in the process of demonizing Jews and Judaism, the auto artic-ulated a religious worldview with deep roots in a society not yet disenchanted bymodernity. My attempt, here, however, is also to anchor an interpretation of the autoin its unique historical contexta context of anti-Portuguese persecution in late seven-teenth-century Spainand thus to historicize more sweeping, anthropological readingsof auto ceremonies as forms of religious representation (for instance, in recent work byMaureen Flynn), while deepening interpretations of inquisitorial Judeophobia (such asthat of Marvin Lunenfeld) that emphasize the socio-political dynamics of scapegoatingrather than anti-Judaisms preponderant religious dimension.

I. I

On the thirtieth of June, 1680, Madrids Plaza Mayorwas the site of aspectacular ceremony called an auto general de fe in which 117 prisonerswere formally sentenced to suffer for their alleged crimes against theCatholic faith. Of the defendants, sixty-five received penal sentences inperson that involved lashing, incarceration, hard labor, banishment, des-titution, or a combination of these punishments. Thirty-one of the sub-

jects received their penalties in effigy because they were fugitives or hadperished. One prisoner, who also appeared in effigy, was posthumouslyreconciled to the Church. The remaining twenty-one prisoners were

sentenced to burn at the stake.1 Over half of the detainees, including

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of the site of the sermon, with apparatus. Monteserns edited version includes neither,but is otherwise identical to the 1680 document. All my citations of the relacin willreflect the pagination of Monteserns newer, visually clearer, and more widely accessi-ble text, except for the citations pertaining to the sermon, which will reflect Del Olmosoriginal text. A third edition of the Relacin, which came to my attention after the pre-sent work was completed, was published as part of the popular CD-ROM series,Siglo XXI, Coleccin Clsicos Tavera, Historia de Espaa, Serie III, vol. 8 (1998). Theonly monographic treatment ostensibly devoted to the auto is Jess M. Vegazo Palacios,El Auto General de Fe de 1680 (Mlaga, 1995). However, Vegazo Palacios devotes onlyone of five chapters to an analysis of the auto (yet another consists of excerpts from DelOlmos relacin). The rest of the work consists of historical background on the SpanishInquisition.

2 Del Olmo in Montesern, 747.3 Maureen Flynn, Mimesis of the Last Judgment: The Spanish Auto de Fe, Sixteenth

Century Journal22. 2 (1991): 281-97. Here, 294.

a majority of those who would be executed, were Christians of Jewishancestry, so-called conversos, who had been accused of Judaizing.

Joseph Vicente del Olmo (1611-1696), a lay functionary of the SpanishInquisition and Master of the Royal Chamber of the Habsburg monarch,Charles II, was the man responsible for transferring the twenty-one pris-oners sentenced to die to the custody of executioners at the conclusionof the first day of the auto de fe. Del Olmo watched as throngs of spec-tators surrounded the quemadero, a platform on which the convicts wereto be incinerated. It was, he noted, impossible for soldiers to maintainorder owning to the enormous size of the crowd. As the prisoners were

led to the platform, Del Olmo observed that those convicts who hadshown signs of repentance appeared to suffer less than those who hadrefused to acknowledge their criminality:

It was with universal admiration that a very great difference was noticed betweenthe penitent and the obdurate, as between the chosen and the reprobate. The lat-ter went with a horrible color on their countenances, with disturbed eyes [whichalmost seemed] to gush flames, and with the entire facial physiognomy [of people]of such fate, so that they seemed possessed by the devil. But the converts wentwith such humility, conformity, and spiritual cheerfulness, that it seemed that Godsgrace was almost revealed to them. One may believe that they were already inheaven, because of the many prayers and penances that the merciful had madefor their souls.2

To the modern reader in the West, it may not seem unusual that an

authoritarian regime such as the government of early modern Spainshould execute its religious criminals in public ceremonies complete withmobs of enthusiastic witnesses. At a time when various governmentshad legitimized the public torture of criminals, such excitement wascommon.3 That many of the criminals in question were alleged Judaizers

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4 Ibid.5 Marvin Lunenfeld, Pedagogy of Fear: Making the Secret-Jew Visible at the Public

Autos de Feof the Spanish Royal Inquisition, Shofar18.3 (2000): 77-92.6 I first used the term proto-racist in 1996 in a very early version of the present work.

The term has since entered scholarly discourse, though in connection to a historical con-text very different to the one I will examine here. See Benjamin Isaac, The Invention ofRacism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton and Oxford, 2004). By proto-racism I mean away of imagining human differences on the basis of pre-modern (which is to say, non-scientific and/or non-pseudoscientific) notions of race.

is itself probably unsurprising to the educated reader. InquisitorialJudeophobia, deservedly or otherwise, is nothing if not infamous. Whatis perhaps less familiar is something that Del Olmos comments artic-ulate with clarity, namely, a religious understanding of penal justice thatfocused on the spiritual solace of the convicts, and on the transcendentefficacy of prayer on these victims behalf.

The purpose of this paper is to explore aspects of the auto de feof1680, especially the sermon delivered on the occasion, as an instanceof the articulation of inquisitorial ideology at a fateful crossroads of reli-gious and ethnic persecution in early modern Spain. My reading of

inquisitorial culture will explicate that ideologys preponderantly religiousdimension with a special emphasis on the Judeophobic messages thatinquisitorial rhetoric formulated and conveyed. My reading will therebycombine and further two approaches: First, Maureen Flynns moresweeping, anthropological reading of auto ceremonies as forms of reli-gious representation, which has already shed considerable light on thereligious premises of inquisitorial ceremonies, yet not on the Judeophobiccontent of those ceremonies.4 Second, the approach of Marvin Lunenfeld,who has recently analyzed autos incisively as means of socio-politicalscapegoating of Jewish-identified subjects. Lunenfelds treatment, how-ever, pays relatively little attention to religious ideation, religious rhetoric,and their significance for an understanding of the Holy Office and its

persecutory practices.5 Here, in contrast, I will contend that the SpanishInquisitions representation of the enemies of Ibero-Catholicism in theauto of 1680 both reflected and interpreted in religious terms an inescapabletension that beset seventeenth-century Spanish society between purelyreligious and proto-racist6 explanations of Judaic deviance.

II. G B

In order to begin a discussion of an auto de fe it is helpful to delineatesome general facts concerning the persecutory culture that produced it.

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7 See Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, ), 81-86.8 Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants were also known by the deroga-

tory term marrano(s), meaning swine or, according to Carlos Carrete Parrondo, errantsallegedly from the old Castilian verb marrar. See Carretes explanation in El JudaismoEspaol y la Inquisicin (Madrid, 1992). From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, descen-dants of Portuguese converts immigrated to Spain in large numbers. New euphemismsdeveloped or simply migrated from Portugal, including hombres de la nacin (homens danaco: Men of the Nation), which in Spain became Portugueses de la Nacin.

9 This is a fact to which historical scholarship has been lamentably inattentive, in myview.

The unified Spanish Inquisition or Holy Office (Santo Oficio) was estab-lished in 1478-1483 as a result of the unification of the formerly inde-pendent Castilian and Aragonese Inquisitions. In contrast to its institutionalpredecessor and counterpart, the papal Inquisition, and although thenew body was nominally under papal control, the unified SpanishInquisition was in reality directly responsible to the Spanish crownsrather than the church, and hence an artifact of state power. Nonetheless,the Spanish Holy Office was at its core a religious institution. Its chiefofficers were canon lawyers drawn largely from the Dominican order,with subordinate lay functionaries or familiars (familiares) recruited

from the ranks of laymen, including government officials, among others.7

The Spanish Inquisition was founded as the Ibero-Christian crownsconsolidated their re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. At that time,and throughout its history, the main, stated goal of the Holy Office wasto uncover, prosecute, and punish religious heresy across Spanish realms,especially the heresy of Judaizing allegedly practiced by relapsed con-verts from Judaism and their baptized progeny. These latter groupswereand lamentably still arecalledjudeoconversos( Judeo-converts), con-versos (converts), or cristianos nuevos (in Portuguese, cristos-novos, meaningNew Christians, as distinct from cristianos viejos/cristos-velhosor OldChristians, that is to say, Christians of non-Jewish and non-Moorishancestry).8 As applied to the baptized children and other descendants

of converts, these terms are obviously inaccurate.9By the era of the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisitions targets

included alleged Protestants, increasing numbers of former Muslims andtheir descendants, Portuguese immigrants of judeoconverso origin, as wewill see, and a seemingly ever widening host of moral offenders (allegedsodomites, bigamists, blasphemers, witches, etc.). It is important tokeep in mind, however, that the Santo Oficio was devoted solely to theprosecution of wayward Christians. Professing Muslims and Jews were

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10 For example, Jews and Muslims could be tried if they were suspected of attempt-ing to lure so-called Old Christians and/or converts to Christianity to Islam or Judaism.A case in point is Yue (Yosef?) Franco, convicted in 1491 of (among other things) hav-ing induced some Christians and attracted them to his Law. Excerpts of the trialrecords from Avila appear in John Edwards, ed. and trans., The Jews in Western Europe,1400-1600 (Manchester, 1994), 104-09.

11 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (New York, 1922)3:209. The auto of 1680 brought together cases from various jurisdictions. Chief amongthem was the tribunal of Toledo. Because of its location and large size the auto had tobe approved by the king.

12 On the timing of autos, and the rationale that undergirded it, see Miguel viles,The Auto de Fe and the Social Model of Counter-Reformation Spain in Angel Alcal,ed., The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind (New York, 1983), 253.

13 Ibid., 250.

prosecuted very seldom, and then only under special circumstances. 10

As is well known, Jewsnot conversoswere expelled from Spanishdomains in 1492.

Autos de fe (Acts of Faith) took place at the discretion of inquisito-rial tribunals, usually when the latter deemed that an appropriate num-ber of cases requiring sentences had accumulated.11 All autoswere ritualsin which officers of the Inquisition recited the prisoners crimes, readthe Holy Offices verdicts, and released prisoners to lay authorities sothat the latter would carry out the sentences.12 According to Miguelviles, Spanish autos de fewere an institutional outgrowth of the sermo

generalisof the medieval (papal) Inquisition. The latter was a ceremonyof public sentencing, usually held on Sundays, in which a friar delivereda sermon in the presence of lay dignitaries, clerics, and members of thepublic at large. After the sentences were read, he administered absolutionto repentant heretics; finally, he released (or relaxed) recalcitrantprisoners to secular authorities for punishment.13 The grandiose auto gen-eralof 1680 followed this medieval model in all its basic procedures.

As ritual performances, seventeenth-century autos de fewere lengthyand decidedly theatrical. Unlike autillos (lesser autos reserved for minorreligious criminals and held at cathedrals and private venues), most autos

generalesentailed massive public processions and compulsory attendanceby members of the clergy, the religious orders, the nobility, and the

high urban classes. Depending on the size and location of an auto, mon-archs might also appear with their entourage and other royal officials.Of course, plebeian spectators were expected to participate in autosgen-erales for the sake of their own edification, chiefly as vociferous wit-nesses to the proceedings.

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14 Jos Antonio Maravall, La Cultura del Barroco (Barcelona, 1975 and 1980). See espe-cially Chapters 2 (Una cultura dirigida), 5 (Una cultura conservadora), and theAppendix (Objetivos sociopolticos del empleo de medios visuales).

15 On instability and later cultural stagnation see for instance Kamen, Spain 1469-1714,196-275, although Kamen argues that by 1690 a process of stabilization and renewal

had begun. On the perception of crisis, particularly in relation to New Christians, seefor instance Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Injurias a Cristo: Religin, poltica y antijudasmo en elsiglo XVII (Alcal de Henares, 2002), 21-36.

16 By 1700, with the accession of Philip V of Bourbon, the Holy Office could nolonger net prized suspects such as the great judeoconverso asentistas it had tried in theearly to mid-seventeenth century. Meanwhile, open calls for the reform, curtailment, orabolition of the Holy Office had become commonplace in high political circles. In 1703,the crown gained new powers of supervision over the tribunals. See for instance Peters,102-03, and Joseph Prez, Crnica de la Inquisicin en Espaa (Barcelona, 2002), 233-52.

Like most exercises in religious and political representation, the autosgeneralesof the Early Modern Period were in part responses to the his-torical conditions in which they were rooted. The auto of 1680 was notexceptional in this respect. As I will explain, a central and immediatecause of that auto was the widespread fear that Portuguese New Christianswere contaminating the socio-religious fabric of Catholic Spain. The cir-cumstance that triggered that fear was a massive immigration of Lusitanianconversosthat peaked in mid-century but whose repercussions would notbecome manifest in inquisitorial activity until the 1730s. To be sure,the auto owed its form and substance to other, less immediate histori-

cal factors as well. These included far-reaching social and economicchanges, as well as geopolitical and military disasters, that resulted inwhat Jos Antonio Maravall has called the triumph of Spanish behav-iorism or dirigismo, namely the conviction that the Spanish monarchi-cal state had an obligation to intervene in the behavior of its subjectsin order to alter it, and in so doing reintegrate an increasingly frag-mented society along rigidly hierarchical, conservative lines.14 Amongthe social and economic changes in question were the rapid and desta-bilizing growth of Madrid in the 1600s; the chronic economic, and tosome extent political instability that beset the Habsburg Empire through-out that century; and a concomitant and rather pervasive feeling at theHabsburg court that Spain was in a deep crisis.15 It is also worth not-

ing that by 1680 the political power of the Holy Office, like that ofSpain, was in decline.16 At that time, the Spanish Inquisition still financedits operations largely through the expropriation of suspects property.Not only had the number of potential inquisitorial victims among promi-nent judeoconversos dwindled by 1680, but the era of the great judeo-converso asentistasitself had passed. This meant that the inquisitors could

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17 On Olivares complex views, see Pulido Serrano, 37-51. Here the author pursuesa revisionist view of Olivares supposed philosemitism.

18 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, LAdministration de la foi: LInquisition de Tolde, XVIe-XVIIIe sicle(Madrid, 1989), 240.

19 I present merely a general periodization scheme. Cf. Dedieus more detailed approachto the same question, 347-52.

no longer count on the wealth of powerful converso families to replenishthe Holy Offices coffers. Meanwhile, the Habsburg crown had heardnumerous calls for the relaxation of inquisitorial persecution since thefirst decades of the seventeenth century. The most notable among theearliest (though largely unsuccessful) of these calls was perhaps that ofPhilip IVs Prime Minister, Olivares, who was instrumental in recruit-ing Portuguese bankers and administrators to the service of the Spanishcourt.17 By 1680 such calls had intensified and increased in number.The overall decline of Spanish power would be most evident in thereign of Charles II (1665-1700), when France political and military

might surpassed that of Spain. Hence, one may perhaps interpret themassive auto of 1680 as an attempt by inquisitors to reclaim the socialand institutional importance they had enjoyed in earlier decades. Myfocus here, however, is on Judeophobia as a central element in the artic-ulation of what was, at base, a religious ideology: the discourse of inquisi-torial justice. To understand that central element and its operationwithin that ideology, it is helpful to survey a few key facts concerningthe Holy Offices pursuit of secret Jews among conversos throughoutthe institutions long history.

Inquisitorial action againstjudeoconversosin Spain may be divided intothree main periods. The first period was by far the most destructive forthe New Christian cohort and probably for whatever crypto-Jewish cul-

ture survived within its ranks. Although extant data are scarce, we knowthat the Holy Office tried thousands of conversosand surrendered manyof them to lay authorities for execution. The Tribunal of Toledo alonecarried out 2,507 prosecutions against alleged crypto-Jews from 1483 to1530 (out of a total of 2,807 prosecutions),18 of which several hundredsresulted in executions. The second period spanned much of the six-teenth century, yet saw a dramatic shift of emphasis away from theprosecution of alleged crypto-Jews among the New Christians, and towardlesser moral criminals of Old Christian stock, as I mentioned above.The third period, which interests us here, began during the late six-teenth century and continued well into the seventeenth.19 Its catalyst

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20 On this subject, see for instance Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos enEspaa y Amrica (Madrid, 1971), 62-63, 66 and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From SpanishCourt to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish

Apologetics(New York, 1971), 8-9.21 Yerushalmi, 8-11. According to Mara Jos Pimenta Ferro Tavares, the commonly

accepted image of mass baptisms is accurate in the case of Lisbon. The implicationseems to be that this is not the case for other areas of Portugal. Id., Los Judos en Portugal(Madrid, 1992), 163-69.

22 David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora,1580-1700 (Philadelphia, 2004), 21-22, 51-53.

23 See Yerushalmi, 16.

was the immigration into Spain of large numbers of Portuguese judeo-conversosnot converts, rather baptized persons of Jewish ancestryafterthe Spanish king, Philip II, assumed the Crown of Portugal in 1580.

The Lusitanian newcomers were drawn to Spain in part becausePhilip, in a bid to stimulate the Spanish economy, decreed that theSpanish Inquisition would not prosecute them for religious offenses com-mitted in Portugal.20 It is not coincidental that the immigrant groupincluded a vast number of people who had been investigated (or werein danger of being investigated) by the Portuguese Holy Office (est. 1536).Among the refugees were several people whose Spanish-Jewish ances-

tors had tenaciously resisted conversionist pressure while in Spain, hadfled to Portugal upon the proclamation of the expulsion decree of 1492,and had been forcibly converted there in 1497, along with the rest ofLusitanian Jewry, in a series of presumably cursory baptisms, the largestof which were organized by the Portuguese crown.21 The irony of theseconversions is that they had merely stigmatized Portuguese New Christiansand their progeny as insincere Christians irrespective of their actualbeliefs and behavior. Stigma led to persecution, and persecution to thedescendants emigration, especially after the Portuguese Inquisition gath-ered momentum and Spain gained political control of Portugal itself. 22

Did the Portuguese immigrants to Spain actually practice a secretJudaism? Scholars do not agree on this question. But whatever the

answer, it is not arbitrary to suppose that a number of Luso-conversoshad not forgotten their ethnic origins and may have experienced someambivalence in their relationship(s) to the persecuting society that hadformally absorbed them.23

Once in Spain, Portuguese conversosand their Spanish-born progenyplayed a variety of roles in the Habsburg economy. Anecdotal data sug-gest that large numbers of them participated in trade, customs and taxcollection, and various administrative and financial services. Differences

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24 On the role of Luso-converso grandees, see for instance James C. Boyajian, PortugueseBankers at the Court of Spain, 1626-1650. On the crisis of the seventeenth century, see forinstance, Henry Kamen, Spain, 1469-1714: A Society of Conflict, 2nd. ed. (New York, 1991),196-257.

25 Quoted in Pulido Serrano, 98. The translation is mine.26 Anonymous author of aMemorialto Philip IV, quoted in Bernardo Lpez Belinchn,

Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judos sefardes (Alcal de Henares, 2001),306.

27 Quoted in Pulido Serrano, 98.

in economic status and occupational diversity were nonetheless exten-sive among conversos in Spain. Thus I believe it is inaccurate to char-acterize Luso-conversos as a city-bound, capitalist bourgeoisie withoutserious qualification. All the same, scholars know well that to the extentthat Luso-conversosbecame part of public consciousness in Spain, theydid so because of the activities and influence, both real and alleged, ofa few Portuguese bankers and government contractors (asentistas) onwhom the Spanish crown relied extensively, especially during the firstthree decades of Philip IVs reign (1621-1665), as the Habsburg statestruggled to curb its own chronic insolvency and meet the crushing

demands of an overextended empire.24

Educated pamphleteers and bureaucrats expressed some of the fearand loathing that Luso-conversos actual and imagined economic activi-ties in Spain tended to inspire. For instance, Cardinal Antonio Zapata,who was Spains Inquisitor General from 1627 to 1632, wrote Philip IVwith alarm that large numbers of Portuguese of the [Hebrew] Nationwho move to these [Spanish] Kingdoms from that of Portugal . . . insin-uate themselves into the administration of the Royal Treasury of YourMajesty, making themselves owners of the border-crossing points [entradas]and ports pathways . . . so as to be able to secure the undeclared earn-ings of their business.25 Another complainant argued in a shriller veinthat conversos had become Lords of [Spanish] Commerce whose sole

aim was to bleed the Habsburg Kingdoms dry, and thereby aid Spainsgeopolitical and religious enemies.26

Significantly, the Portuguese influx aroused Spanish suspicions of ram-pant Judaizing among the immigrants. As Zapata indicated in his let-ter to Philip IV, vehement presumptions of [the] Judaism of theimmigrants were cause for sleeplessness.27 Such suspicions ultimatelyresulted in the intensification of inquisitorial activity against New Christians.The concomitant enforcement of Statutes of Purity of Bloodpiecemealregulations introduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to

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28 See note 47, below.29 On Luso-converso endogamy and economic cooperation, see for instance the

articles comprising the section Redes comerciales y financieras in Jaime Contreras,Bernardo J. Garca Garca, and Ignacio Pulido, eds., Familia, religin y negocio (Madrid,2002), 343-422.

30 Lea, 2:296.

exclude people of Jewish and/or Muslim ancestry from private associ-ations, religious orders, cathedral chapters, and the likeunderscoredthe recrudescence of anti-converso persecution in Spain.28 These condi-tions betrayed a fateful evolution in the character of Iberian Judeophobiathat had begun with the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492 and theconversion of Portuguese Jews in 1496-7, but crested much later.

III. T E IJ Te S S C

By the 1550s, a time when crypto-Judaism had virtually ceased to pre-occupy the Holy Office, at least in Castile, conversoshad become cul-turally Ibericized and Christianized, and hence outwardly indistinguishablefrom their Old Christian counterparts. The same was largely true amongPortuguese cristos-novos, irrespective of their private beliefs and behav-ior, not to mention their well-known preference for endogamy.29 Personsreared as Christians who, unlike converts, had never professed norma-tive Judaism now comprised the majority of the converso population. Asa consequence, ways of identifying (or purporting to identify) secret

Jews according to their supposed religious behavior lost much plausi-bility and social appeal. An underlying Judeophobia evidently persistedamong Old Christians nonetheless. The new realities posed a percep-

tual challenge for those who harbored such bigotry: How to identifythe Jewish danger? A popular answer to this question developed rel-atively swiftly. Lingering anti-Jewish sentiment in Spain and Portugalnow found expression in an old, yet increasingly widespread notion thatNew Christians comprised a threatening nation, caste, and/or racerather than a group identifiable primarily according to religious crite-ria. Even the Holy Office itself institutionalized ethnic prejudice. Tocite but one example, inquisitors (who were themselves required by royaldecree to prove their limpiezaas of 1562),30 demanded that suspects statetheir stock and origin as a matter of course. The suspects answersdid not constitute admissible evidence of religious wrongdoing, to be

sure, and even within the Holy Office there were those who opposed

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31 Trenchant debates within the Holy Office regarding the use and application of thestatutes of limpiezaintensified in the seventeenth century. On the subject of Spanish oppo-sition to the statutes, see for instance Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A HistoricalRevision (London, 1997), 230-54.

32 Graizbord, 108. See also 121. On inquisitorial procedures of interrogation thereexists an enormous body of scholarly literature. A brief, recent treatment is Prez,307-29.

33 Cited and discussed in Pulido Serrano, 271.34 Yerushalmi, 11.

the Statutes of Purity of Blood.31 All the same, suspects who declaredthat they were New Christians did so at their peril, since the inquisi-tors thinly-veiled, working assumption was that people of Jewish ances-try were prone to Judaize.32

In Castile the number of trials of alleged crypto-Jews had diminisheddramatically after 1520, but this did not ultimately affect the overallshift to ethnic prejudicein fact, the decline is probably indicative ofthe conversosacculturation, itself a main cause of the shift. Religious per-secution and ethnic prejudice would again coincide and reinforce eachother, however. From the 1580s, when Spain gained control of Portugal,

to the end of the seventeenth century, when France eclipsed the Habsburgkingdom as Europes hegemon, the presence of Luso-converso immigrantsand their descendants in Spain complicated and magnified the socialsignificance of what we might call the ideological turn to (proto-) racism.In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, nativist Spanish reac-tions to Portuguese secessionism compounded this latter phenomenon(Spain would eventually lose the war of Portuguese Independence, in1640-1668). A fateful result of these developments was that by the mid-dle of the seventeenth century, heresy, apostasy, Judaism (real and/orimagined), political treason, mercantile occupations, economic rapa-ciousness, and most importantly, Portuguese descent, had becomevirtually synonymous in the minds of many Spanish Old Christians.

Members of the Royal Chancellery of Castile wrote to Philip IV thatthe Crown should prevent Portuguese New Christians, most of whomare of Hebrew origin, who were busy avoiding inquisitorial scrutiny,and who were helping foreign princes undermine Spain, from havingcontact with (true) Catholics lest contagion occur and the stain ofimpure blood sully noble families.33 It is not surprising that allegedPortuguese subversives, chiefly conversos, abounded in the jails of theSpanish Holy Office throughout the 1600s.34 The auto of 1680 corroboratesthese phenomena. At least sixty-three of the detainees were immigrants

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35 Vegazo Palacios, 87, notes that seventeen of the accused (13.9% of the total) werelinen merchants, five (6.9%) were tobacco stall-keepersin other words, people occu-pied in trades that were typical of Portuguese conversos in seventeenth-century Spain.Besides the estanqueros de tabaco and mercaderes de lienzos, the accused included various othersubjects, all of them rather ordinary, for instance, the caretaker or administrator of asalt warehouse (alfolinero de la sal), a cobbler, a silversmith, a market-broker (corredor delonja), a silk-worker (labrante de sedas), a cowhand, a swindler (estafador), and the like. Inaddition, three accused were spice-sellers (especieros), three were vagabonds, and threewere physicians. The relacin does not indicate the occupations of the rest. Clearly, thedays when the Inquisition could capture and display several great New Christian asen-tistas(royal contractors) at its principal autoswere gone. On the livesand persecutionof such prominent businessmen, see Bernardo Lpez Belinchn, Honra, libertad, y hacienda:Hombres de negocios y judos sefardes (Alcal de Henares, 2001).

36 However, Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 208-10, cites An authentick Narrative of theorigin, establishment and progress of the Inquisition (London, 1748), an English eyewitness inter-esting and quite detailed account of the auto. In the Relacin itself, del Olmo does notindicate how or when he was commissioned to write the work, although it is possiblethat he was instructed to produce it by his immediate superior, the head of the RoyalCommission for the Publication of the Auto.

37 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 638.38 Ibid.

from Portugal or children of Portuguese immigrants. All sixty-three wereaccused of Judaizing.35

How, then, did officers of the Inquisition articulate their mission andjustify inquisitorial activities at a time when ethnic animus became deeplyimplicatedperhaps more than everin the Holy Offices activities,values, and world-view?

IV. IJ S M V

Josef del Olmos relacin (account) of the auto of 1680, the only com-

prehensive, surviving record of the events of June 30, provides a par-tial answer to this question.36

Throughout his narrative, Del Olmo makes few references to thenature and purpose of his role as a chronicler. Yet his introductorydedication to the king leaves no doubt as to the authors main inter-est, which was (unsurprisingly) to pay tribute to the cause of Catholicorthodoxy in its struggles against Protestantism and Judaic obstinacynot against deviants of any particular ethnicity:37

Among all the children of the Church, the . . . kings of Spain always excelled intheir steadfastness and zeal. . . . [B]ecause of their vigilance [and their support ofthe Inquisition] there burned in Spain the torch of the faith, whose pure light isdue to the Catholic doctrine, and whose purpose is to purify truths by consuming

[that is, burning] errors.38

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39 Laden with inquisitorial tradition, the procession of the green cross was a mainfeature of most, if not all autos generales celebrated in Spain during the Early ModernEra. As Miguel Aviles points out, the green standard was probably an allusion to the

central symbol of the inquisitorial seal, but may also have had its iconographic roots inolder processional practices, especially those associated with Palm Sunday. Another pos-sibility is that the cross was inspired by Jesus implicit self-description as green woodor a green tree while he was on his way to Calvary (Luke, 23:31). In turn, the whitecross appears to have been a Spanish invention. However, not all inquisitorial paradesfeatured this symbol. In some cities the white cross was not used at all. viles, 257-59.

40 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 678.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.

This passage introduced a theme to which Del Olmo would returnthroughout the rest of his account, namely the idea that SpanishCatholicism sought not merely to destroy, but to correct its enemies.In other words, the Catholic vanguard, led by the crowns and theInquisition, endeavored to create a more perfect society by reducingheresy to ashes; the vanguard did not seek to physically annihilate theheretics in all cases.

The seventh chapter of the relacin reiterates this theme. The sectionbegins with the authors detailed description of the inaugural proces-sions of the green and white crosses.39 The symbol [of the green cross],

Del Olmo wrote, is consonant with the popular conception that thecolor green signifies hope.40 That was why the green cross was thoughtto assure the prisoners of [divine] forgiveness.41 Once placed in thealtar of the theater at the Plaza Mayor, he elaborated, [the cross] mayencourage the prisoners to expect . . . divine mercy to produce . . . thedignified fruit of penitence.42

To the obdurate belonged a different cross:

. . . [T]hose who abuse divine clemency, disdaining the apology which is beggedof them, are left exposed to the indignation of justice, which is armed, in vengeance,with the faith; attending to the fact that [vengeance] is represented by the candidsplendor or whiteness, a cross of this color is also taken out [in procession], sothat, placed at the site of torment [meaning the quemadero], the cause of the deathof the accused will be evident. . . .

Del Olmo continued that the white cross could well have been red, thecolor of blood. This would have conformed to its more bellicosesignification. However, he added,

it was found more appropriate that the cross should be white, so that all hope offorgiveness might not be dismayed, and so that the prisoners may understand that,

just as that which is white is ready to incorporate anything of another color, so too the cross of

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43 Ibid.44 See the discussion in Bartolom Benassar, LInquisition Espagnole, XVe-XIX Siecle(Paris,

1979), 105-41.45 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 705-06.

the faith is amenable on its part to receive the tint that their love would lend it.43 (Emphasisadded.)

Clearly, Del Olmo was loath to abandon the theme of divine leniencyeven when trying to underline the Inquisitions punitive strength. HereDel Olmos words clearly reveal that the auto, like the Inquisitorial enter-prise as a whole, was at least ostensibly designed to induce repentance.As the content of the inquisitorial sermon would confirm later on, fromthis understanding followed the notion that the Holy Office celebratedautos de feprimarily in order to effect a reconciliation between sinnersand Christ. According to the discourse of their planners, autos were

about salvation and the care of souls, and only then about burning andideological control per se.

None of this is to deny that the autos blatant display of royal andinquisitorial powerespecially the public humiliation of the prisonerswas intended to magnify the coercive power of the Inquisition. BartolomBenassar has argued convincingly that the mere threat of dishonor wasone of the Inquisitions most effective weapons in the war against socialand ideological dissent.44 However, the inquisitors will to intimidatedoes not explain why they and their lay assistants dramatized the inquisi-torial process in such a way that the themes of punishment and disciplineGods vengeancewere always coupled symbolically with the theme ofreconciliationGods mercy. For instance, if the processions had beenintended to publicize the effectiveness of punishment and nothing else,then perhaps the prisoners would not have been accompanied by fri-ars who, in Del Olmos words, ministered like angels among them,trying to reduce the obstinate and console the reduced in otherwords, trying to persuade the unrepentant and assure the repentant thattheir troubled souls would benefit a from remorseful, public acknowl-edgment of their crimes.45 The point is that the Inquisitions will todestroy heresy, discourage dissent, and isolate political, economic, andsocial scapegoats does not account for its desire to heal, console andwelcome the souls of the heretics back into the socio-religious fold ofSpanish Catholicism. In a meticulously ritualistic manner, the ceremonies

comprising the auto conveyed that the crown and the Inquisitiondid not demand mere conformity with a model of social and religious

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46 The Colegio Mayor of San Bartolom in Salamanca was, according to Kamen,233, the first institution in Spain to adopt a statute of this type (1482). Scholars of thephenomenon of limpiezafrequently cite the sentencia-estatuto of Toledo (1449), which, amongother things, excluded conversos from municipal service. Strictly speaking, however, thislegal instrument was not a statute of Purity of Blood.

47 For a general discussion of the phenomenon of limpiezastatutes see Kamen, 115-33.The most complete monographic treatment is still Albert A. Sicroff, Les controverses desstatuts de purete de sang en Espagne du XVe au XVII sicle (Paris, 1960).

behavior, but demandedand promisedlove. As I shall discuss, themain, overt function of the inquisitorial sermon of June 30 was to artic-ulate this demand and this promise.

For all the emphasis on piety, however, Del Olmos account and theprocessional drama he described also betray the fact that faith wasbut one of the criteria by which rectitude was measured in Spanishsociety. In an early section of his account, Del Olmo presents a list ofelitefamiliareswho had been designated to play prominent roles in theauto, either as witnesses or as organizers of the celebration. All of thesefamiliars were members of the nobility. With typical obsequiousness,

Del Olmo counts them among the zealous defenders of the Christianfaith. More importantly, he notes that as a condition of their appoint-ment, these great men had been obligated to provide genealogical proofthat they were not descendants of conversos. This was in accordance withSpains statutes of Purity of Blood (Limpieza de Sangre), a host of prohi-bitions enacted in various Spanish cities, provinces, institutions, andecclesiastical jurisdictions as early as 1482, and annulled as late as thenineteenth century.46 The statutes were designed to keep conversosandtheir descendants from filling several public posts, from entering pres-tigious professions and institutions (medicine, government, notarial occu-pations, the army, universities, religious orders, etc.), and from marryinginto the ranks of the Old Christians, especially the nobility.47 The theme

of clean blood would return in later chapters of the Relacin, castinga shadow over Del Olmos otherwise consistent assertions that faithcould cure any persons soul of error and malice. I now turn to theway in which the autos preacher revealed the unresolved conundrumof blood and faith.

V. T S

Father Thomas Navarro, a member of the Dominican Order and theKings official preacher, composed and delivered the sermon. At the

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48 Del Olmo, Relacin, 144. Navarro recited his lecture from the theaters main pul-pit in a voice that Del Olmo qualified as sufficiently audible (literally, intelligible)

yet the speaker could not be heard by most of the commoners at the Plaza Mayor. Afterall, no voice [was] valiant enough to hold such an invincible auditorium. Ibid.

49 In fact, it is tempting to speculate that Del Olmo was inspired by Navarros simile.50 Del Olmo, Relacin, 145-46. On the subject of autos de feas conscious representa-

tions of the end of the world, ones rooted in early modern eschatological conceptions,see Flynn. Lest the monarchical analogy extend to the Inquisitor General and not tothe Spanish king, Navarro hastened to note that God had willed the confederation ofearthly kingship and the priesthood. And indeed, he noted, Spain was fortunate that its

kings had always been like priests in their devotion to God. Del Olmo, Relacin, 148.51 Del Olmo, Relacin, 148. Here Navarro offered none other than king Ferdinand of

Aragon, the co-founder of the unified Spanish kingdom, who had authorized the firstauto de fe of the unified Spanish Inquisition and had allegedly carried firewood to thefirst brasero, as an example of royal zeal.

52 Ibid., 157. This was another well-worn theme articulated in the propagandistic rela-cionesof autos de fe. See for instance Edward Glaser, Invitation to Intolerance: A Studyof the Portuguese Sermons Preached at Autos-da-f, Hebrew Union College Annual27, 1(1956): 327-85.

ceremonial apex of the auto, the friar addressed his listeners from themain pulpit of an enormous stage that workers had erected for the occa-sion at Madrids Plaza Mayor. Surrounding him on that day was a vastaudience of commoners, inquisitors, soldiers, officers of the state, fellowchurchmen and friars, nuns, foreign dignitaries, and members of theSpanish nobility. Present among the listeners were the King, Charles II,and the Inquisitor General, Father Diego Sarmiento de Valladares.48

The sermon consisted of six main parts. The first was a salutationwhose content is reminiscent of Del Olmos own simile between the autode fe and Gods final judgment in an earlier chapter of the relacin.49

Making recourse to what was by his time an inquisitorial clich, thougha crucial one, Navarro described the autos theater as an adjusted copyof the heavenly auditorium that all souls would encounter at the endof days.50 He noted that the autos inquisitorial contingent was an earthlycounterpart of the heavenly tribunal that would assist the divinemonarch in deciding the fate of souls.51

In the second section of the sermon, Navarro introduced the the-matic axis of his argument, namely the idea of Gods long-sufferingmercy and its pivotal role in human affairs. First and foremost, Navarrounderlined that God had shown enormous generosity and affection increating the world for a sinful humanity. He also stressed Gods aston-ishing hesitance to take revenge against the faithless, who had insulted

him throughout history and continued to injure him today, in theirhomes [and] in the synagogues. . . .52 According to Navarro, God was

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53 Del Olmo, Relacin, 152.54 Ibid., 158-59. Navarro did not specifically call Muslims pagans, yet he included

them in the second group nonethelessand without explanation.55 Ibid., 158.56 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 729.57 Ibid. TheAlumbrados(Illuminated) were pietists who believed that internal inspi-

ration took precedence over adherence to established doctrine. On the history and reli-gious phenomenology of this group see for example, Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticismin Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. (Toronto, 1992).

by his very nature slow to anger; he had always pitied the sordid moralstate of humankind. Consequently, God had refrained from exactingretribution even when the Jews persecuted and crucified him. Indeed,Gods abundant love for humanity was so tolerant of sin that he hadsuffered the crucifixion as lightly as [any persons flesh] would feel theprick of a sewing needle.53

But, the orator continued, the time for a redress of injustice hadcome. Navarro called upon God to awaken from the slumber of hispatient love and reclaim his honor by striking down the three prin-cipal enemies of Christianity: Jews, pagans (including Muslims) and

heretics.54

In the following passage, Navarro proposed that the thirdgroup was by far the worst enemy of all:

. . . more than everybody else, heretics cause horrors [against God]. . . . [because]while confessing some articles of [His] faith, [they] deny others with temerity andobstinacy. . . .

. . . With good reason [God] calls this nation stubborn: because in some articles it vener-ates and believes the true God and in others believes in and venerates an idol;such that [in reality the nation] believes in none, and does not venerate the trueGod. (Emphasis added.)55

At first glance, Navarros image of a quasi-Christian class of hereticsappears to be nothing more than a tendentious allusion to Christiandissidents who deviated from the official dogmas and practices of the

Catholic Church, but who did not reject Christianity in toto. Only twoof the prisoners who appeared at the auto belonged in this categoryat least according to the relacin. The first was Marcos de Segura, whodenied the existence of purgatory.56 The second was Antonia Hernndez,an alleged alumbrada.57

On closer inspection, Navarros portrayal of heresy as a melange ofChristian and non-Christian beliefs suggests that the real targets of hiscensure were not Christian malcontents, but semi-Christianized conver-sos. The notion that New Christians practiced a debased, hybrid reli-gion was not new. As early as the fifteenth century an anonymous

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58 See David M. Gitlitz, Hybrid Conversos in the Libro Llamado el Alboraique, HispanicReview60 (Winter 1992): 1-17.

59 Del Olmo, Relacin, 160. See also Glaser, especially 328-35.60 Ibid., 166. On this theme in inquisitorial sermons see also Glaser, 327-36.61 An important and in some ways inaugural discussion of the evolution of Judeophobia,

from Augustinian toleration to high medieval Anti-Judaism, is Jeremy Cohen, TheFriars and the Jews ( Ithaca, 1982).

62 Del Olmo, Relacin, 167. See also Glaser, 338-45.

Castilian author had caricatured the religion of conversos as a corruptadmixture of Judaic, Islamic and Christian elements.58 So too, Navarrocastigated heretics for the supposed heterogeneity of their convictions.But the most telling clue to Navarros conception of the renegades ishis claim that God considered them a stubborn nation. Throughout therest of the sermon, Navarrolike his Patristic predecessorsappliedthis term exclusively to the Jews. Thus it appears that his invective wasultimately aimed at conversosof Jewish stock, and by extension, at the

Jewish nation itself, even though Jews could not be considered hereticsof Christianity at all, for obvious reasons.

Most of the preachers pejorative references to the Jews occurred inthe third section of the discourse. Here Navarro reiterated elements ofa traditional anti-Jewish polemic, the gist of which was that Jews deservedthe full force of Gods wrath because they had not recognized Jesus asthe Messiah.59 The first pillar of Navarros argument was that the OldTestament (especially the books of Daniel and First Isaiah) foretold thecoming of Jesus, predicted his cruel rejection by the Jews, and envi-sioned the Jews subsequent punishment at the hands of God. This pun-ishment entailed the Jews dispersion, their enslavement by the Romans,their misery among the nations, and the perpetuation of their blind-ness to the truth. In this view, the sorry condition and obdurate char-acter of the Jews were necessary, permanent, and ultimate evidence that

Jesus was the savior.60The second pillar of Navarros attack was a notion developed most

thoroughly by Christian polemicists during the High Middle Ages. Theyheld that the Jews were not only impervious, but were actively hostileand dangerous to Christianity.61 Even the rabbis, Navarro said, hadknown and understood the Jews failure to heed the true meaning oftheir holy scriptures. Hiding their embarrassment, the rabbis continuedto oppose Christianity through Talmudic blasphemy; at the same time,they encouraged other Jews to follow the erroneous, destructive path ofthe Talmud and of Judaism as a whole.62 Thus, the paradoxical impli-

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63 Del Olmo, Relacin, 168.64 Ibid., 170, 173.65 Ibid., 170.66 Ibid., 173.

cation of Navarros two-pillar argument was that the Jews very exis-tence both validated and subverted the Christian faith.

The fourth section began with the orator paraphrasing St. Augustineto the effect that heretics were the worst enemies of God, because theymake war disguised as friends.63 Citing a vision of St. Peter Martyr, ahero in the struggle against the Arian heresy (and the eponymous heroof the lay confraternity of familiars that assisted the Inquisition in itstasks), Navarro visualized the heretics of his own day ripping Jesus gar-ment, which symbolized Christendom. In effect, Navarro argued, hereticswere like angels of Satan because they offered the world nothing more

than a faith without faith based on absurd and capricious interpre-tations of the Holy Scriptures.64

Who were the heretics, and what were their teachings? The preacherbegan his answer by stating that all heresies were born of the refusalto recognize the pope as Gods vicar. He continued that several nefar-ious sects had come into existence only a little over 150 years agowhose members denied the popes spiritual preeminence. These sectar-ians believed that the Holy Spirit had been absent from Gods wife,the (Latin) church, and consequently that the time-honored doctrinesof the church were false.65

According to Navarro, the heretics failed to understand that the mys-tical body of Christ was like the human body, inasmuch as the head

alone could rule the limbs of both. Because they did not have a highpriest, the heretics formed a monstrous, headless bodya disorderlymultitude of competing groups that could never represent the one andonly truth, but merely spurt monstrous [doctrinal] errors. These errorsincluded such nonsense as Calvins views on predestination and thescandalously misguided belief that since Gods grace was bountiful,Christians could hasten Gods pardon by indulging in sin.66

By now it should be obvious to the reader that Navarro had restrictedhis definition of heresy to the Protestants, thereby completely ignor-ing thejudeoconversosto whom he had alluded in the second part of thediscourse.

Navarros sudden focus on Protestantism is not entirely surprising,given that the Spanish church was at the forefront of the Counter-Reformation at the time of the auto, as it had been since the opening

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67 See Jaime Contreras, The Impact of Protestantism in Spain, 1520-1600 in StephenHaliczer, ed. Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), 53.

68 See Ibid., 50-51.69 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 736.

of the Council of Trent. Jaime Contreras has explained that the anti-Protestant component of the Tridentine program formed a pivotal partof the political ideology of the Spanish state and church in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries.67 The prominence of this ideology in the ser-mon reveals that the auto of 1680 was a quintessentially Counter-Reformistevent. What is startling, however, is that Navarros section on heresydid not include a discussion of the Inquisitions suspects par excellence,the conversos, whose image Navarro had conjured in the second sectionof the speech. The puzzle is compounded by the fact that a majorityof the prisoners at the auto de fehad been convicted of crypto-Judaism.

In contrast, only two of the reosSegura and Hernndezwere accusedof holding beliefs that the inquisitorial imagination often construed asLutheran.68 Navarros total avoidance of the subject of pagans andMuslims throughout the rest of the sermon is equally unexpected, sincethese groups comprised the second of the three foremost enemies ofthe faith. Notably, one of the reos, Lazaro Fernndez, was an allegedcrypto-Muslim.69

A close analysis of the remainder of the sermon confirms the impres-sion that Navarro did not care to acknowledge pagans such asFernndez, much less describe their beliefs; yet this latter portion of thelecture also reveals that the orator had not forgotten the judeoconversosafter all. On the contrary, the implicit connection Navarro had drawn

between heresy,judeoconversos, and Judaism in the second part of his dis-course returned to cast a shadow over his explicit arguments concern-ing the nature of heresy and the benefits of repentance.

In response to the heretics intolerable notion of grace, Navarroreturned to the central question of divine kindness in the fifth sectionof his sermon. Until that point, he had directed the lecture primarilyto his orthodox listeners. Now he turned toward the prisoners andaddressed them with a climactic appeal:

So that you would know your errors, [the Holy Tribunal] has lovingly reprimandedyou with its mercy, and now attempts to healyou with the bitter collyrium of pun-ishment. . . . See that your happiness is not true happiness, but insanity, your furoris cruelty, and your certainty [is] ignorance, blindness and confusion. . . . If youshould prove irremediable, this holy tribunal will surely throw you to the fires ofhell . . . you will burn and others will be fearfully elated, you death teaching them

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70 Del Olmo, Relacin, 178-80.71 Ibid., 184.72 Ibid.,188. So lackadaisical was Navarros attitude towards infidels that the parallel

he drew was between a Catholic empire and a pagan one, notwithstanding his earlierwarning that pagans were enemies of God.

73 Ibid., 189, see also 182-86.74 Ibid., 198-99.

to fear [God]. . . . Place your eyes upon crucified Jesus, regard him incarnated,condemned like a prisoner to a thiefs death [condenado como reo a muerte de ladrn],all bloody among the thorns, all confusion in his nakedness, and all pain on thecross, [then]you will see how he is the same one that Isaiah paints in chapters 52 and 53of his prophecy, and [you will see] that the son of God, who traveled such a long

journey, spanning such distant destinations as heaven and Calvary, did so only tosave your souls . . . do not lose them!70 (Emphasis added.)

This vivid admonition was followed by the epilogue, an homage to theInquisition and the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Navarro emphasizedthat the Spanish crowns had always wielded Gods sword to decapitatethe enemies of the Christian faith, for the kings recognized that Gods

divine love always grows and is not satisfied with [mere] reverencetowards the dear faith, but obliges everyone to love the faith through educa-tion or by force (emphasis added).71 For its part, he added, the Inquisitionhad proven itself worthy of its mission by acting as Gods pious avenger.And just as Alexander the Great had reached the inaccessible peak ofthe mountains of Arnon by paying homage to the olive trees of thegoddess Minerva, the symbols of mercy, so too the Catholic kings andthe Inquisition had allowed Spain to reach astonishing prosperity byserving Mary, the mother of misericordia.72 Navarro was confident thatthe conquest and conversion of the Indies were signs of the singularfondness with which God regarded the Spanish kingdom and its zeal-ous and merciful leaders.73

A striking indication of the persuasive power of inquisitorial com-passion occurred shortly after Navarro finished speaking, when two ofthe impenitent prisoners made it known through the religiosos(the fri-ars) that they wished to abjure their sins. Both were taken underneaththe stage, where an inquisitor heard their confessions. He subsequentlyrecommended to the Inquisitor General that the two be granted clemency.Sarmiento accepted this advice, liberating [the two prisoners] fromdeath and declaring them reconciled with the church, to the spectatorsgreat delight and relief. Del Olmo suggested that everyone in the audi-ence clapped very much in the happy knowledge that [Gods] mercywas greater than his rigor.74 Whatever the spectators true motivation,

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75 This view challenges the Pauline notion that a remnant of the Jewish Peoplewould convert and become a genuine constituent of the Christian community of faith.See for instance Romans 11:1-10.

76 Del Olmo, 160.

Del Olmos impression was that the solemnity and tension of the autohad started to give way to a climate of triumphant expectation.

VI. T M S

The explicit message of the last portion of the sermon was simple: theworld-wide success of Spanish Catholicism, including its impending tri-umph over heresy at the auto de fe, was the well-deserved product ofChristian mercy. From the beginning, Navarros argument had laid thegroundwork for this optimistic finale by positing Gods inexhaustible

love, and by describing it as the sine qua non of human redemption,indeed, of the very existence of the world. The epilogue merely ver-balized what the processions had conveyed in symbolic terms, and thekings oath had reaffirmed, namely that the Inquisition and the crownwere the terrestrial agents of Gods mercy. Furthermore, the sermoncommunicated that in order to receive Gods love, one must love God.Or as Navarro put it, Gods divine love always grows and is not satisfiedwith [mere] reverence towards the dear faith, but obliges everyone to lovethe faith. . . . (Emphasis added.)

Navarros equally significant, implicitmessage centered on his under-standing of the Jews role in history. According to Navarro, the Jewsdid not, and could not accept the Christian messiah, because God had

decreed that their miserable existence would serve as evidence of thetruth of revelation. At the same time, Navarro argued that Jews wereperennially subversive of the Christian truth. In other words, the detestable

Jews never changed, and would therefore remain dangerous enemies of Christianity.75

The momentous implication of this two-sided view was that theJudaizers who appeared at the auto, and Judaizers in general, werenot really heretics at all, but were, had always been, and would alwaysremainJews, despite their ancestors conversion to Christianity.

Two inconsistencies embedded in the rhetorical structure of the ser-mon indicate that Navarro regarded conversosof Jewish descent as noth-ing more than perfidious Jews.76 First, even though the orator had let

his audience know that heretics were the ones who would be sentencedat the auto, he did not make any open or direct reference to the major-

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77 Obviously, Protestants and Catholics had no quarrel as to the basic Christologicalinterpretation of Isaiah. Specialists have produced an immense body of scholarly litera-ture on Christian, anti-Jewish polemics in the Middle Ages, including arguments con-cerning the proper interpretation of Isaiah. For an annotated, general bibliography,see http://www.icjs.org/bibliog.html#Anchor-I.

ity of Judaizers who sat a few meters from his pulpit, in the prisonersgrada. By the same token, he did not make a single, explicit mentionof the alleged problem of insincere conversion, the Inquisitions raisondtre. Instead, he intimated that heretics were a stubborn nation, andproceeded to speak at length about the obstinate Jews and their per-nicious yet necessary function in the world.

Second, in his final admonition to the reos, Navarro did not advisethem to renounce the very beliefs that he had characterized as typicalof heretics in the fourth section of his address. For instance, he did notcall upon the prisoners to recognize the primacy of the Pope; he did

not speak to them about the real presence of Jesus in the consecratedhost, about Marian devotion, about ecclesiology, or about any otherdoctrinal bone-of-contention between Catholics and Protestants. Whathe did urge the prisoners to do is recognize that Isaiahs prophecy wasa conclusive prediction of Jesus. This is precisely what Christian con-versionists had demanded ofJews throughout the Middle Ages.77

It is quite revealing of the Judeophobic mind-frame of the inquisitorthat he spent approximately one fourth of his sermon discussing the

Jews, when there were no Jews in Spain at the time of the auto (at leastno Jews who professed their religion openly, save for a handful of for-eign merchants and diplomats who enjoyed special status). Again, theduty of the Holy Office had never been to persecute Jews, but rather

to root out Christians who Judaized. Yet here was Navarro, centuriesafter the expulsion of Spanish Jews, excoriating them for the crucifixion,and calling them one of the three foremost enemies of God.

When it came to reconstructing the image ofjudeoconversosin light oftheir purportedly Jewish character, the orator proceeded with greatercircumspectionand with good reason. Had Navarro equated conversoswith Jews openly, he would have called into question the efficacy ofconversion and repentance as antidotes to error and moral corruption.He would also have challenged the value of inquisitorial (and by exten-sion divine) mercy, the supposed catalyst and guarantor of spiritualrenewal. In short, the preacher would have flagrantly challenged not

only the necessity of performing autos de fe, but the religious basis of

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78 This paragraph reworks part of a general discussion of inquisitorial views of reli-gious enlightenment in Graizbord, 116.

79 I prefer the term ethnicist, not racist, because of the latters association withmodern, pseudo-scientific notions of race. Such notions did not exist in the seventeenthcentury, although the creeping idea that blood carried immutable moral traits had madeits appearance in Spain before that time. Del Olmos prejudice was, at base, against an

ethnic group that was reputed to profess a particular religion and not against a race inthe modern sense of the word; the chimera of blood, it seems, merely allowed DelOlmo to explain his prejudice to himself and to his contemporaries.

80 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 746.81 See a parallel discussion in Graizbord, 119. The imputation of an insatiable sex-

ual appetite to Jews can be traced to early Christian writers such as John Chrysostom.See for example his homilies against the Jews, reproduced electronically in http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html. It is unfortunate that the originaltranslator of the sermons is unknown in this instance.

Inquisitorial justice as a whole, namely the Holy Offices supposed abil-ity to extinguish error and transform the souls of sinners.78

Although the preacher did not speak of Jewish blood as the sourceof Jewish perfidy, the substance of his message did lean in an essen-tialist direction: It was the Jews immutable national character thatexplained their evil. Hence Navarros use of the biblical phrase stub-born nation. Near the end of the relacin, Del Olmo articulated a morepatently ethnicist version of this view as he witnessed the last of theprisoners being burned at the stake:79

. . . [T]he means that the Holy Tribunal applies to disabuse [these prisoners] of

their errors are sacred, and the proofs that it offers to convince them are somany . . . that none of [the prisoners] can have a pretext other than their volun-tary obstinacy for not embracing the Christian religion. The inclination of blood [elempeo de la sangre] dominates the men of this nation, as does [their] arrogance in plac-ing the blindness of their elders in front of the wisdom of the Christian doctors. . . .Fomented by sensuality and greed, [this arrogance] makes their eyes blind to reason;and therefore praises must be given to the infinite clemency of God, who, in viewof such ingratitude, gives such powerful succor to some of them that they are sub-

jugated to the loving guild of our mother, the church. . . . (Emphasis added.)80

Like the preacher, Del Olmo did not entirely abandon the possibilitythat Gods benevolence could cure at least some hardened souls. Still,the impression is unavoidable that an undercurrent of (proto-)racismran through the ideological core of his relacin, and that Del Olmos

sense of ethnic difference conflicted with his avowed trust in the cura-tive power of divine mercy. The chroniclers essentialist bent was alsocompounded by a rather crass and quite ancient Judeophobia: for him,the Jews were not only implacable, but also indulgent and rapacious. 81

Del Olmos outlook engendered the same logical quandary as Navarrossermon in that it pursued two mutually exclusive interpretations of evil

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82 Graizbord, 117.83 Del Olmo in Montesern, 731.84 That is to say, released to secular authorities for execution.85 Ibid., 735.86 On this subject see for example Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Los extranjeros en la vida

espaola durante el siglo XVII y otros artculos (Seville, 1996), especially 99.

one religious and explicit, the other ethnicist or proto-racist and (inNavarros case) implicit. The first interpretation defined evil chiefly interms of ideological deviance. This view posited that impurity of faithcould only be cured by repentance under the auspices of inquisitorialmercy, the conduit and earthly guarantor of Gods grace. The secondinterpretation explained immoralityspecifically, Jewish immoralityas a natural, blood-borne attribute; according to this view, impurity ofbloodwas irreversible.82

Navarro and Del Olmo were not alone in creating and maintainingthis ideological muddle. Navarro had already revealed his societys simul-

taneous concern with purity of faith (pureza de fe) and purity of blood(limpieza de sangre) in the earlier part of the work, when he listed reli-gious orthodoxy and clean lineage as two of the merits of prominent

familiares. In his final summary of the prisoners crimes and sentences,Del Olmo revealed his preoccupation with questions of blood once again.Here, he took pains to identify the genealogical origin of the Judaizers.Often he employed euphemisms for jew that were widely accepted inhis day. For instance,

Juan de Espaa Sotomayor, born in Lucena . . . Portuguese of the nation and clothmerchant . . . was relaxed in effig y . . . .83

Gaspar de Robles . . . son of Portuguese parents of the nation . . . tobacconi st . . .38 years of age; [convicted] for being a persistent Judaizer; appeared at the autowith the insignia of those who are to be relaxed, 84 and [he was] gagged; his sen-tence was read . . . and he was released to justice and the secular arm [of the law,and] his property was confiscated.85

Needless to say, by the nation Del Olmo meant the Jewish nationincluding, in this understanding, judeoconversos. The terms Portugueseand of the Portuguese nation connoted Jewishness as well, for rea-sons related to the peculiar historical context of their occurrence, namely,the period immediately following the migrations of Portuguese conversosinto Spain, and the war of Portuguese Independence (1640-1668)that many Old Christians in that country accused conversos of havingsupported.86

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87 See I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London,1971 and 1989) 151, 169-170. Lunenfelds treatment explains how autosaccomplishedthe scapegoating of conversos.

88 See Cohen, 242-51. This point is oddly missing from Lunenfelds otherwise admirable(if limited) argument.

VII. O AUTOS R D

As Del Olmo and Navarro presented it, the auto was a religious cere-mony the purpose of which was to heal the afflicted souls of the pris-oners, and thus to rid society of the spiritual illness of heresy. As thechronicler put it, the illness had to be consumed, if necessary by phys-ically destroying its human agents, the heretics. In that sense, the autoserved to perform a kind of exorcism. Moreover, the auto fit the profileof what the anthropologist I. M. Lewis has called a shamanic seance,in that it not only served to purge social illness but to explain it. 87 Theautos protagonists instructed their audience on the nature of the illness,

and assigned blame for it. Like the cure itself, the explanation was nec-essary in order for the sick society to regain its sense of stability ina prolonged and disquieting period of rapid urbanization, financial cri-sis, war, and the unprecedented agglomeration of state authority. Inshort, the auto attempted to make sense of a changing world that hadlost much of its traditional meaning. Navarros sermon and the read-ing of crimes and sentences were the principal means by which theInquisition explained the societys malady (i.e., Jews and Protestants weretearing the fabric of Christendom apart), defined its remedy (repentanceand/or death), and prepared the audience and the prisoners for theimposition of the cure (reconciliation or relaxation).

Notably, Navarros description of the social malady allowed the eliteand the plebeian audience to imaginejudeoconversosas duplicitous preda-tors, and thus to express an intense Judeophobia that had been partand parcel of Christian religious militancy at least since the High MiddleAges.88 If Navarros references to Jewish evil stirred the emotions of res-idents of Madrid, it was partly because Christian accusations that the

Jews were brutal enemies of the truth were familiar.Furthermore, the sermon, and the auto as a whole, helped a hege-

monic Spanish State-Catholicism (a central cult in Lewis definition)fulfill one of its primary functions, namely to maintain its power by stig-matizing outsiders. In this case, the main victims of defamation werethe socially peripheral Luso-conversos, whose formal inclusion by Ibero-

Catholicism centuries earlier, and whose entry into the Spanish fray

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89 See Lewis, 149-53.90 See R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987).91 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966).92 This last sentence reworks one in Graizbord, 117.93 See Barnes-Karol, 63.

from the sixteenth century to the independence of Portugal in 1640, onlypresented Spanish Old Christians with the more difficult and unwelcomechallenge of integrating them into the social and cultural mainstream.89

Following the classic approaches of the medievalist R. I. Moore90 andthe anthropologist Mary Douglas,91 one may also assert that the autoexpressed Christian anxieties about the breaking of formerly rigid socialboundaries by the parvenujudeoconversos. In this understanding, the autosattack on conversos as a social group appears as a reactionary attemptto counter the sudden re-entry of Jews (in fact, Jewish-identified sub-

jects) into an imagined Christian mainstream by reiterating or reconfiguring

religious notions of social purity and pollution. The image of a wide-spread Judaic heresy among Portuguese conversos served to (re-)drawthe line between Old Christians and members of a mobile minoritypopulation. In a sense, the auto transformed judeoconversos into livingtaboos by warning the faithful that Portuguese New Christians (and theirSpanish brethren) were as evil as the Jews of old. Del Olmos ultimatepreoccupation with blood purity was an example of his compatriotsveritable obsession with social border-setting, but even his form of eth-nic or proto-racist prejudice sought to reimpose social distinctions bylinking infected blood (sangre infecta) to the real or imagined religiousbeliefs and practices of the conversos. As I have argued elsewhere, thepoint is that even in Iberian racism, the idea that social difference

implied religiousdifference was never far below the surface.92The autos proposed way of restoring individual and social health cen-

tered on the religious concept of misericordia. Navarro and Del Olmowere keen to portray divine mercy as the facilitator and guarantor ofeternal justice, and to depict the Inquisition and the Iberian crowns asthe agents of Gods love. In this respect, neither the orator nor thechronicler departed from early modern trends in Catholic thought. Asis well known, the idea that the Catholic Church was the legitimatemediator between God and humanity was one of the central tenets ofTridentine political philosophy.93 The notion that a royal-ecclesiasticalapparatus was the one responsible for ensuring the spiritual integrity of

society had roots in the militant era of the reconquista. Now the question

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94 Although Lunenfelds argument, 77-78, is nuanced, his interpretation does seem to

me to lean in this direction: The issue I chose to confront is . . . what I designate apedagogy of fear, that is to say, one of the ways in which the powerful turn otherhumans into scapegoats to insure the continuation of their realm. It is not clear to me,however, that persecuting conversosper se allowed the Spanish monarchy to survive, orwas even necessary to ensure that outcome, especially as both it and the French monar-chy did the opposite at timesin other words, they favored conversosin order to cap-italize on conversoseconomic activities.

95 A reworked version of this phrase appears as part of a broader discussion of inquisi-torial motives in Graizbord, 115.

remains: what was the origin of the Navarro and Del Olmos all-impor-tant concept of justice?

I believe, as Maureen Flynn does, that the answer lies in the reli-gious matrix of the auto, namely Christianity itself. Of course, a skepti-cal observer might object that religion was merely a cover for the Spanishelites political and economic domination; furthermore, that the inquisi-tors knew the auto was only a theatrical device for protecting their (class)interests, an opiate to keep the urban masses pliant and stupefied.94

From the historians point of view, it is unfortunate that no one canreally know whether the inquisitors (let alone an entire governing elite)

were or were not genuinely convinced that love was an effective wayof combating evil, or that a soul could be reprimanded with mercy andhealed with punishment, to paraphrase Navarros admonition to theprisoners. What is clear, however, is that early modern Spaniards livedin a world not yet dominated by a distinctively secular understandingof human behavior. For Del Olmo and his contemporaries, religion stillsuffusedor at least oughtto suffusethe totality of human experience.Religion, at any rate, provided the primary conceptual tools and build-ing blocks with which to fashion and describe the edifice of justice.95

One may certainly call Del Olmo, Navarro, and their fellows bonafide Christians inasmuch as they were products of a conservativeChristian cultureregardless of their private convictions or respective

levels of piety, about which the relacin is silent. It is quite plausible, Iwager, that Navarro and Del Olmo did not conceive of the auto as acoercive exercise. At least we know that they did not want to be per-ceived as endorsing coercion for its own sake. In their respective dis-courses, both men approached the auto as a religious fable in which theredeeming power of faith and penance would be confirmed. Thus, forexample, Del Olmos penchant for reading events through the rose-colored glasses of his avowed religiosity was not necessarily a piousaffectation, or a mere stylistic device to convince his readers. Del Olmo

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96 Cf. Lunenfeld, who in my view articulates correctly, but leans too heavily, on thescapegoating explanation.

97 Timothy Mitchell, Passional Culture: Emotion, Religion and Society in Southern Spain(Philadelphia, 1990), 42.

spoke in the language of the inquisitorial world-view, quite apart fromthe obvious fact that the relacin was a work of propaganda. That bothhe and Navarro pursued very similar (if internally conflicting) interpre-tations of evil suggests that their approach was not exceptional, but waswell within the mainstream of inquisitorial thinking.

Because it stemmed from a religious word-view, the ideology of theinquisitors and their allies was not a political ideology in the modernsense, just as the auto of 1680 was not an exercise in political repres-sion or socio-political scapegoating alone.96 The inquisitorial enterprisewas a product of religious priorities and understandings, and therefore

sought something beyondthe utilitarian end of social control. In a word,the Inquisition was interested in salvation, not in domination alone, orin domination per se. From this it follows that the ideological basis ofinquisitorial justice was the quintessentially Christian idea that salvationis attained though suffering penance, and that such suffering encom-passes mercy. In inquisitorial culture, the chief model of penitence was,unsurprisingly, none other than Jesus, whose sacrifice the Gospels depictas a merciful and magnanimous atonement on behalf of humanity.Navarro projected this model when he intimated an affinity betweenthe saviors sacrifice and the condition of the prisoners: the crucified

Jesus, he told the convicts, was like a prisoner, condemned to a thiefsdeath. . . . Thus the Inquisitions Orwellian insistence that the prison-

ers love their oppressor, Our Mother, the Church, meant not merelythat they should obey the church, but that they should identify withChrist and heed his example in atoning for their sins. The time-hon-ored Franciscan principle of Imitatio Christi (imitating Christ) may wellhave been one of the main sources of this insistence. After all, theSpanish branch of the Dominican orderthe same order that spear-headed the Inquisition and counted Navarro as one of its membershad propagated Imitatio since the fifteenth century, when it organizedconfraternities of penitents in the belief that public atonement (specifically,self-flagellation) was good for the souls of penitents and onlookers alike.97

Regardless of its doctrinal source, it is worthwhile considering that

in order to understand inquisitorial mentalities, one may approach theinquisitors and their allies on their own cultural terms. The presentwork has been an attempt to do that. The auto de feof 1680, then, was

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an instance of inquisitorial thinking about human behavior and humandestiny quite apart from any purely political consideration. Not that theInquisition did not have political needs and wants, or that Del Olmosrelacin and the ceremonies it depicted were not forms of propaganda,far from it. But if there is anything that the relacin suggests, it is thatthe people who undertook the inquisitorial project may well have under-stood, and certainly explained, those needs and wants in accordancewith the magical thinking that characterized their religious culture. Inthe Early Modern Period, as we have seen, essentialist notions ofJewishness were a grave complicating factor, but nonetheless part and

parcel, of that thinking.

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Documents

Inquisitorial Ideology at Work