Historical Circumstances
While there have been other inquisitions before
and after the founding of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Iberia, some
run by the Church and others by the state in collaboration with the papal
government,[1] the
most notorious of them are the two in Spain and Portugal. They were focused on tracking down,
arresting, and interrogating recently—and not so recently—converted Jews in
order to purify their kingdoms and overseas territories in Europe
and the New Worlds of the heretical practice of Judaizing.
More than that, the Holy Offices of
the Inquisition were established during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries[2]as
state-run institutions in the Catholic Kingdoms Spain and Portugal[3]
and, on behalf of a new sense of purified nationalism, sought to delve into the
secrets of the individual mind and the unconsciousness of groups to which
individuals belonged by intrinsic, “blood” origins. Inquisitors sought to
produce evidence of these private secrets in a public “act of faith” or auto-da-fé. All aspects of the inquisitorial process
were carried out in secret by means of intimidation, spies and other informers,
and torture. Everyone involved in the
process, victims and victimizers, was sworn to silence. Although almost all the individuals denounced
to the Holy Office and arrested, imprisoned, and subject to its methods of
interrogation, were either unaware of the crimes they were accused of or engaged
in complex strategies of self-concealment, they were fully aware of the
institution’s methods and powers.[4]
In my argument, I will concentrate
on the primary targets in the opening years of the Holy Office both in Spain
and Portugal and particularly in its operations in their New World colonies to
eradicate all signs of the judaizing heresy.[5] From
time to time, however, I will refer to other inquisitions, especially in the
Italian states, in order to provide a wider context in which to view the way both
the persecutors and the persecuted behaved, spoke of themselves, and affected
one another. Because of the Expulsion
from Spain in 1492 and the
forced mass conversion in Portugal
in 1496, legally there were no longer any Jews on the Iberian Peninsula and
eventually in the overseas territories (in parts of Italy ,
the Mediterranean islands, or North Africa ) or
colonies of the two Catholic monarchies.
Though the Inquisition came to be more concerned with the Lutheran
heresy in the last two centuries of its operation, and always had a subordinate
interest in seeking out and punishing clerical abuses and sexual improprieties
and perversions, its main concern—one is tempted to say, both its founding and
defining concern—was to destroy the residue of Jews and Judaism in Iberian
culture. The inquisitors on the whole
and at particular times displayed only a passing interest in Moriscos or
formerly Muslim New Christians.
The formerly Sephardic New
Christians who awaited arrest and who were taken into custody and subject to
the bizarre methods of the peculiar institution nevertheless often had an acute
awareness of what they were up against. Educated families and individuals
shared information and as far as possible prepared in advance for the
inevitable knock on the door—to engage with the officers of the Inquisition by
playing off their own supposed ignorance of its procedures and that of the
institution which sought to find a means of uncovering those truths about its
victims which they could only know by second-hand information and through
inference from a long list of suspicious signs against which they measured the
confessions taken from those victims. Through relatives, friends and
sympathetic insiders working for the Holy Office at all levels from inquisitors
or fiscals and priests or friars down to jailers and servants, New Christians
could learn the formal and informal ways by which the Inquisition worked; there
were also persons arrested and later released—whether as penitents (reconciliados)
or as cases who were suspended for various reasons—who broke the code of
silence explicitly or inadvertently.
Historically, on the one hand, while there were probably more
Crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral faith in private and, perhaps in a
quasi-open fashion in the century preceding the Expulsion, than has usually
been allowed for; and on the other, despite the return of many Sephardim who
had fled to Portugal from Castile in 1492 at the time of the union of the two
royal houses and kingdoms, Crypto-Judaism or Marranism (we shall distinguish
between the two shortly) were probably less numerous and influential than has
sometimes been asserted in the romantic vision of these phenomena. Nevertheless, so far as the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal was concerned, judaizantes
posed a major threat to Catholic hegemony and seemed to be a dangerous
(infectious or contagious) hidden reality in everyday Iberian life for many
centuries.
In that sense, the Inquisition
functioned as a quixotic institution, tilting at windmills and destroying the
lives of thousands and thousands of real people on very spurious grounds. It
created a highly contentious textual pseudo-reality from what it read in books
of anti-Judaism, ranging from the New testament through saints’ lives to rabidly
psychotic tracts of its own devising or at least influence—and it attempted to
impose on this verbal delusion (delirio) the cachet of state and
religious authority. Secrecy permitted
the lies of the Inquisition to function without proper supervision by any other
crown, civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and the process of discovery—that
is, the coercive powers of the Holy Office as a confessional agency to disclose
the judaizing heresy—proved to be a mythic event ritualized in the autos-da-fé
put on to justify and cover-up the grim realities of arbitrary imprisonment,
confiscation, humiliation and torture.
NOTES
[1] Henry Charles Lea, Histoire de
l’Inquisition au moyen âge, trans. Salomon Reinach (Paris : Robert Laffront, 2004 ; orig. French
trans 1903 ; English orig. 1888)
[2] These centuries are now designated the Early
Modern period; they were previously called Renaissance and Reformation, each of
these European and Christian phenomena overlapping with earlier and later
periods. In other words, the Spanish and
Portuguese Inquisitions are conceived in quite different circumstances than the
various medieval Holy Offices, and hence their relevance in understanding how
the scientific processes of
psychoanalysis were brought into being.
[3] Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A
History, trans. Janet Lloyd (London :
Profile Books, 2004; orig. French 2002).
In regard to Spain as a unitary kingdom, the terms ambiguous, as the
constituent smaller kingdoms and semi-autonomous regions and cities retained
different laws, traditions and attitudes towards the Jews, the Inquisition and
the nominal rulers of the state; not only does this hold true for the
extra-Iberian territories in Italy, including Sicily, and the occupied Low
Countries, but also for the overseas colonial territories in America, Africa
and Asia. Portuguese overseas
territories also experienced jurisdictional rivalry and disputes between
agencies of the Holy Office. Nevertheless,
as this essay argues, one of the modernizing features of the Inquisition was
its ability to call upon the aid and information acquired by different branches
around the world in order to compile, albeit slowly in our terms, extensive
dossiers on individuals and families already arrested or under suspicion. Just as psychoanalytical treatment can be
carried out for many years, so the officers of the Holy Office could conduct
inquiries for decades before having sufficient evidence to bring an accused
heretic to trial, the individual or family meanwhile spending long periods of
incarceration, penance and respite outside of prison. In other words, persons would have experience
life-long anxiety and terror.
[4] Henry Méchoulan, Les Juifs du silence
au siècle d’or espagnol (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).
[5] Judaizing was the technical term used by the Inquisition
both for tendencies within the Church itself to revert towards a literalism
that smacked of the Protestant Reformation and for the particular danger of
insincere or unconsciously incomplete conversion(forced and voluntary) of Jews
to Catholicism. Because the Spanish and
then even more so the Portuguese Holy Office mistrusted all these so-called conversos
or New Christians, the very fact of a Jewish ancestry made all these
neophytes suspect down to five or more generations. Whereas Sephardic Jews were
theoretically given a choice of conversion or exile in 1492, in Portugal five
years later there was no choice: all Jews were declared and baptized as
Catholics on the same day. There were,
in fact, so many New Christians in Portugal that within a generation and long
thereafter any Portuguese person travelling outside the realm was considered to
be a Crypto-Jew, and indeed the very term “Portuguese” became a synonym for
“Jew”. A sop to the forced converts by
the Portuguese king for this imposition—Jews themselves called these people anusim,
“forced ones”. In the sense of rape victims—was a period of “grace” of nearly a
generation before an inquisition was founded there. As a result, the Portuguese Holy Office came
into existence with a far larger problem than in Spain, where effectively all
real and Crypto-Jews had disappeared by the middle of the sixteenth century and
so the primary target shifted to sexual deviants and abusers within the Church,
and with greater knowledge of how the secret Jews operated both as individuals
and multi-generational families. By the
time that Portugal had been absorbed into the Spanish kingdom, many Crypto-Jews
migrated into the formal jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition for greater
security from arrest, torture and execution, just as, ironically, after Anschluss,
many Jews escaped to German cities such as Berlin for a modicum of respite from
persecution by Austrian Nazis. Safety,
however, in both instances was relative and temporary.
No comments:
Post a Comment