Mala Sangre: The Racial Politics of the Spanish Inquisition

In the long and sordid history of religious persecution, the Spanish Inquisition occupies a special place. An enormous Jewish community prospered in Spain during the middle ages along with Christians and Muslims, but by the end of the 14th century, large numbers of Jews were converted to Catholicism, many by force or threat of violence. Over time, these “New Christians,” or conversos, became part of the middle class and even began to gain status in the government and church hierarchies. While the effort to convert people might have been intended to lead to social unity, there were persistent doubts about the sincerity of these conversions and of the willingness of these conversos to fully embrace Christianity and to assimilate. Social tensions continued to mount, and uncertainty about the possible Jewishness or “Judaizing” of conversos eventually led to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition as an investigatory institution in 1478. Growing social instability resulted in attempts to segregate Jews from Old Christians and early Christianity and New Christians, culminating in the expulsion of all unbaptized Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. This great expulsion was more than 500 years ago, but it still resonates today and remains relevant to our understanding of modern religious and political conflicts. The mass expulsion and the treatment of the people who remained were carried out under the pretense of the promotion of social and religious unity but actually produced the opposite effect. Although it was cloaked in the formal trappings of religious dogma and sectarian purity, this was a fundamentally political conflict over familiar territory: power, influence, property, and social status.

In medieval times, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together in the lands of the Iberian peninsula. This coexistence, or convivencia, was marked by close contact between the religious groups and a degree of mutual tolerance. Historian Henry Kamen describes this as an “uneasy coexistence” that was “increasingly threatened by the advancing Christian reconquest of lands that had been Muslim since the Moorish invasions of the eighth century.” In the 14th century, this tolerance began to deteriorate. Jews were blamed for the 1348 plague that devastated Europe and were expelled from England, France and parts of Germany. According to an article by Edward Peters published in the journal Jewish History, in 1391, with antisemitism on the rise, “a number of riots broke out in different parts of Iberia, directed against Jews. As a result, about half the Jewish population of Iberia converted to Christianity.” These Jewish converts, referred to as “New Christians” or conversos, were no longer barred by law from full participation in trades and in the church, and the “Old Christians” began to see them as competitors. This developing economic competition between the conversos and Old Christians would prove to have a decisive impact on the future of the Spanish Inquisition, and the means in which it was enacted.

In the 1440s, new anti-Jewish movements began to take hold. According to Peters, “the reasons for some of this resentment against conversos as well as against unbaptized Jews may have been the success of converso individuals and families in achieving high public office and intermarrying with ‘Old Christian’ families, entering both the nobility and the church.” Ironically, the triumph of the antisemitic policies in terms of their successful conversion of non-Christians proved to be their downfall, further proving that the goals of such policies were not a monolithic Christian society, but the protection of the economic, political, and social status of the established Christian leaders of Spanish society. Tensions among Old Christians, New Christians, and Jews continued to escalate during the ensuing years.

These tensions were exacerbated by the fact that for many antisemitic Spaniards, Judaism was much more than a religion, and conversion was not enough to rid Jews of suspicion. As Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer state, “In keeping with contemporary notions of purity of blood, moreover, Spanish inquisitors also subscribed to the notion that heresy could be inherited alongside other family traits, such as eye color, stature, and the like.” The fact that hearsay was viewed as a genetic component of non-Christians formed the basis for many of the Inquisition’s most barbaric practices. As we can see these ideas especially took hold in the adoption of the “limpieza de sange” statutes that grew out of the Inquisition.

In Toledo in 1449, a new set of discriminatory laws prohibited conversos from participating in a professional corporation or holding any honorific office in the government or the church—the Sentencia-Estatuto, known as the “purity of blood statutes.” Lina Gorenstein, in her essay, “A Brief History of Iberian Antisemitism,” argues that the Sentencia-Estatuto was “a measure based on economic motives, but those responsible for this discriminating legislation used religious pretexts. They accused all the conversos of being secret Jews and, therefore, of being bad Christians. It did not matter what the conversos did: Judaism was in their blood.” Therefore, it is once again evident that the action against the conversos had less to do with religion or race than with basic competition among the bourgeoisie for access to capital and economic advantage. The Spanish view of Jews as a racial and ethnic category rather than a religious group illustrates the economic motives of the Inquisition. By asserting that Jews were inherently incapable of assimilating into Christian society the Spanish were able to justify the future steps of the Inquisition that would complete their economic attack on the status of non-Christians within Spain.

In the ensuing decades, tension among Old Christians, New Christians, and Jews continued to mount, which resulted in a great deal of political instability. Persistent questions and accusations about the sincerity of conversos and charges that they were practicing Judaism in secret, or “Judaizing,” led to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition between 1478 and 1483. The Inquisition’s activities in the 1480s and 1490s seemed to confirm suspicions about the conversos, and so, according to Edward Peters, “steps were taken to segregate Jews from both Old and New Christians as early as 1480. By March 1492, the rulers of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, came to the conclusion that segregation had not worked. They decided to take a further step, that of expelling all unbaptized Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.” This was the peak of anti-Jewish politics. The Edict of Expulsion was published on March 31, 1492, and went into effect in August. The Jews were given a choice: Convert to Christianity or leave Spain.

The Spanish Inquisition was not the first such tribunal but followed a long line of inquisitions created by the papacy to reveal and eliminate heresy within the church, but it was unusual in that it was operated under the auspices of the Spanish Crown rather than the church. According to Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer in their book, “Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics,” the papacy was initially wary of this new arrangement and feared a loss of power, but the reigning Spanish monarchs prevailed, “having insisted that a new and somewhat extraordinary institution was necessary to suppress heresy among Spain’s large and growing population of New Christians or conversos, a term that initially applied to converts from Judaism but which later also applied to the descendants of converts.” In reality, new Inquisition was developed as an economic and political tool of the Spanish monarchs, free from the oversight of the Catholic Church as a whole. The Catholic Church already took a strong hand in suppressing perceived heretical activity, and the fact that in Spain the state decided to take control of this aspect of Catholicism speaks more to the unique political situation of the nation than to any religious fervor. As we can see, the economic motives for the Spanish crown to adopt the role of protecting the church were largely related to the position of the conversos in Spanish society.

The presence of growing numbers of conversos changed Spanish society, which no longer could be divided into three basic religious groups: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. As Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer state, “the sudden appearance of ever increasing numbers of converts...fundamentally transformed the nature of Spanish society itself...conversos emerged as a large, powerful, and in many ways unclassifiable social group that did not mesh neatly with the tripartite division of Spanish society into separate ‘nations’ or ethnoreligious groups.” The conversos, and their children and grandchildren, were thus consigned to a marginalized social status even if they were devout Catholics. This illustrates that in addition to the economic triggers for the Spanish Inquisition, there were a variety of social issues that helped bring about this movement. The social upheaval caused by the rise of conversos in Spanish society, combined with the economic desire to seize wealth from non-Christian groups were clearly more influential in the establishment of the Inquisition than religious fervor. This was certainly a concept noted by those who resisted the atrocities of the Inquisition, as we can see in a closer study of these groups.

It is important to note that there was a great deal of resistance to the horrendous and indefensible actions of the Inquisition. Also vital to note is the structure that these resistance groups took. As James Buchanan Given states, “When heretics and their challengers mounted overt challenges to the Inquisitors, they seem to have usually coordinated their efforts around networks provided by other social institutions, such as the family, the village, or the lord-client relationship.” This demonstrates that there was an active and organized resistance to the horrific actions of the Inquisition and that many refused to accept the brutal nature of this conquest against minority groups. Furthermore, this quotation illustrates the economic and political rather than truly religious nature of the Inquisition. The fact that resistance was consistently organized around economic and political, rather than religious, frameworks indicates the inherent sociopolitical reasoning for the actions of the Inquisition. In addition, it is apparent that the failures of the resistance movement against the Inquisition stem from these political and economic conditions.

Despite the presence of an organized and motivated resistance to the Inquisition, there was a remarkable lack of successful confrontations by opposing forces. As Given states, one of the more striking conclusions of his research is “the relative paucity of violent challenges to the inquisitors and their work. In all, for a period covering almost 90 years, I was able to find only forty-four cases of violent resistance. Even more striking is the extreme rarity of assaults on inquisitors themselves. All told, there were only eight events in which inquisitors were physically assaulted or confronted…” This almost complete lack of violent resistance points to the economic rather than religious nature of the conflict. It appears that many Jews found surrendering their property or fleeing the country preferable to fighting a much larger and militarily superior opponent. However, the fact that these more economically motivated options were even available illustrates the false nature of the religious aspects of the Inquisition. The movement for a united Christian Spain was simply a smokescreen for the persecution of economic and political rivals, rather than being truly motivated by misguided religious principles. These complaints were echoed by both conversos and Catholics alike during this period of upheaval.

The political and economic motivations of the Spanish Inquisition were quite clear even during the time period. As E.William Monter states, “A prominent Aragonese converso complained that ‘this Inquisition was made only to steal people’s property; the queen and the Castilians created this Inquisition in order to destroy this Kingdom, although our king is a good guy (mozo) and a good Christian.’ His bewildered indignation was shared by many Aragonese Old Catholics…” Clearly, it was apparent to both those affected by the Inquisition and those who observed it that the motivations for such actions were plainly economic, rather than religious in nature. In addition, this quotation illustrates the enormous impact on the development of the Inquisition that Ferdinand and Isabella had, and how much the actions of the time period were a result of their influence and desires. Quite clearly, Ferdinand and Isabella were by far and away the most important figures in the history of the Inquisition, and it is impossible to examine this period in history without acknowledging their enormous impact. Furthermore, it is also clear that the motivations of the Inquisition were widely found, even at the time, to be based on economic and political rather than religious reasons.

Quite clearly, despite the vehement religious rhetoric of the time period, the Spanish Inquisition was designed as an attempt to seize political and economic power from Jews and conversos in Spain. This is evident in the history of the Inquisition, the rationalizations used to support it, the legal details of the policies, the scholarship on the topic, and even the viewpoints of both Jews and Christians during the time period. The unique legal, political, and religious nature of the Inquisition makes it clear that the movement was, in fact, a result of a variety of interlocking societal factors that resulted in one of the worst persecutions in history. Like so many other instances in history, what initially appears to be a simple case of excessive religious fervor actually had a variety of catalysts outside the world of religion, including economics, politics, sociological pressures, and history. The example of the Inquisition allows us to understand how religion often becomes utilized as a tool to force societal changes that are not related to religious life, and how barbaric that process often becomes.

Bibliography

Given, James Buchanan, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Gorenstein, Lina. “A Brief History of Iberian Antisemitism.” In Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, 103-110. New York: Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, 2013.

Kagan, Richard L., and Abigail Dyer. Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Monter, E. William. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Peters, Edward. “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492." Jewish History 9, no. 1 (1995): 9-34.