Techniques of Inquisition and Dissimulation
Yet one may also think in terms of another
inter-textual relationship played out in secrecy, and that is of text and
non-text. When an accused Judaizer was
asked to confess to his or her heretical beliefs and practices, the prisoner
did not honestly know what to answer since there was no real considered
understanding based on family experience or formal education to call upon. Therefore, not only in many instances was the
Jewishness (rather than Judaism)[1]
postulated as there by the inquisitors, but carefully taught and deliberately
constructed in a dialectic between the two parties during which the leading
questions were framed as a catechism in reverse—or in long periods between
ritualized question and answer sessions during which a friar would instruct the
prisoner in what was presumed to constitute the heresy of Judaizing. Sometimes,
too, those who wished to return to Judaism in an act of defiance against the
authority of the Church or in response to the humiliation of being told that
one was precisely what one didn’t know anything about turned to the only
sources available: lists posted in the entry to churches or read out in sermons
of traits to be scrutinized as signs of backsliding; study of the Vulgate Bible
including particular works of the Apocrypha that seemed to deal with
Crypto-Judaism, such as the Book of Esther; close reading of patristic works
and saints’ legends dealing with the exposure of heresy and anti-Christian
behaviour by Jews, and in due course published accounts of Inquisition trials
and autos-da-fe. Prisoners might also
share information to prepare coordinated confessions that would hopefully preclude
major charges in favour of minor and inadvertent sins of omission and
commission, thus requiring knowledge or pseudo-information sufficient to
propound credible-sounding narratives.
What was created in apparent compliance with
the pressures of the Inquisitors who intimidated, threatened and tortured was a
specific refraction of what they wished to find, not what was essentially
Jewish by Talmudic Law or age-old Sephardic traditions. Except perhaps in the very first generation
of conversion, forced or sincere, the New Christian had been so alienated from
Talmudic law and Jewish custom that there was no clear memory of the prior
identity and no means of verifying one’s self-concepts except in the documents
and oral instruction supplied by the Holy Office itself. Yet for those Judaizers who came to assert
their Jewishness in defiance of the Inquisition and were exposed as heretics in
the auto-da-fé, although the identity they came to see in themselves and
sought to display to the public when relaxed to secular society for the
spectacle of this act of faith, does not fit with halachah (law) or
recognized minhagim (custom).
Nevertheless such a pseudo- or quasi-Judaism was filled with a sincere
intensity of belief that was denied by the false construction of the
inquisitors’ own sense of what constituted judaizing. The professing pseudo- or quasi-Jew [1]at the
stake proclaimed in public a Jewishness created by and infused with Christian
misperceptions and yet it was a heretical faith—a fuzzy Judaism[2]—that
defied inquisitorial control; and which could threaten the mythical faith of
the inquisitors, their self-delusions as to who and what they were and who they
were pursuing. There are instances, in
fact, of judaizantes turning the tables on the friars sent to instruct
them in the One True Faith and of spies (familiares) sent to provoke
incriminating statements in the dungeons where arrested victims were kept; the
Jewish argument would prevail, and these familiars of the Holy Office would
seek conversion to Judaism, including often circumcision of a very crude
sort.
For the Holy Office, annihilation
of the Judaizer and his or her heresy
was consequently imperative because, by the institution’s own intrinsic logic, Secret Judaism
threatened to take the place of Christianity as a faith with such absolute
conviction that it can never be gainsaid by reason—by a textual argument or
narrative. Meanwhile, by absorbing into
itself the Church’s misreadings of Judaism, the New Jew, as it were, went to
the stake as though he or she were a true and traditional believer, but, once
the secret is exposed, with their beliefs shaped by Christian notions of faith
and salvation—by an act that could not be sustained either by a legitimizing
Catholic or Jewish text.
Returning now to the methods by
which the Inquisition hoped to expose the secret judaizing of the persons it
surrounded with the secrecy of its institutional operations, putting aside for
the moment the extraneous motives of veniality,
corruption and incompetence, we find that those methods were cogent and
rational on their own terms. That is,
the inquisitors investigated the accused Judaizers through careful, calculated
techniques of analyzing character, actions, and documents, employing a variety
of agents—the hired familiars and the voluntary informers or malsines—to
collect and record information, as well as subjecting the accused to
interrogations, instructions, and tortures.
Because the officers and familiars of the Holy Office were
psychologically dissociated from the pains and humiliations they inflicted on
their victims, they could approach their task methodically and work in an
almost modern scientific way. Like a
psychoanalyst or social scientist today, the inquisitor sought to discover in
the unintended, seemingly trivial or cumulative collection of information
patterns of meaning, clues to concealed beliefs and evidence of premeditated
schemes of deception. The inquisitors
did not, of course, think in twentieth-century psychoanalytic terms of the
unconscious and its processes of repression and censorship. Instead, they searched for deliberately
hidden truths about the accused’s inner beliefs and those culturally or
biologically induced qualities that remained as a residue of prior Jewishness
in the blood of the Judaizer or which were created by circumstances of their
upbringing and condition of existence within supposedly organized cabals of
Crypto-Jews.
The inquisitors slowly, over months
and years, decades and sometimes whole lifetimes, patiently and carefully collected, collated,
cross-referenced and analyzed the data they accumulated from denunciations,
interrogations, spies in the dungeons, notations of torture, and other sources,
such as intercepted letters passed between prisoners. They also requested archival searches in
other offices of the Inquisition both in Europe and in the New
World colonies to discover the personal, family and professional
history of the accused. As the formal
process of investigation could cover many years, with the arrested persons
either kept in custody for long periods or allowed back into the community for
shorter or longer periods, sometimes as a penitent (reconciliado) and
sometimes not, the inquisitors were able to track out over extended periods of
time the shifting statements made by individuals and groups of related persons
or by priests, civic officials, or neighbours.
By the regulation of secrecy, the
accused was never presented with the specifics of the crimes they were assumed
to be guilty of nor told the names of their accusers. The individuals therefore attempted by
various means to tell the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal what it is they
wished to hear without exposing themselves to serious consequences, to run
through possible denouncers and to explain away causes for envy or
misunderstanding, without endangering relatives, friends or neighbors to
arrest themselves, and to create an alternative explanations (counter-texts)
for supposed acts or statements that might have been denounced. Insofar as possible, family members, business
associates, and friends attempted to communicate before, during, and after
interviews with the inquisitors in order to coordinate stories and to seek out
hints as to what the process seems to be about. When possible, familiars of the
Inquistion, as well as servants in the prisons and administrative visitors were
bribed to carry messages or to lobby on the accused’s behalf.
Suspected Judaizers, during their
lengthy processes, eventually shifted their original stories and explanations
to meet with what they assumed were the specific interests of their
interrogators, and then the inquisitors, at the same time, examined these
variations and new versions both for discrepancies and clues as to concealed or
to forgotten incriminating events and oblique expressions of heresy. It was a kind of game-strategy, requiring
subtle negotiating skills and near infinite patience. Each side in the game tested and probed,
re-ordered its strategies, and patiently waited for the other to show signs
that could be interpreted in such a way as to clinch their case. For the most part, both the inquisitors and
the accused Judaizers shared Spanish and Portuguese culture and advanced
training and education. Each side worked essentially within the same discourses
and with the same discursive skills to understand the secret motives of the
other. A very high proportion of men
brought before the Holy Office were literate and educated professionals,
university-trained and experienced in public life in commerce, law, medicine
and even theology. The women, too, were
often literate and educated beyond the norms of ordinary Spanish or Portuguese
culture at the same time; and where they were indeed products of generations of
Marrano experience, these women also demonstrated a fair degree of knowledge of
non-institutionalized Jewish customs and traditions. Since these Judaizers, male and female, would
have been brought up to be wary of self-exposure or incriminating the family in
public, they had already developed a sensitivity to the kind of intimidation
used by the Inquisition.[3]
But this contest of wills was
mostly a game of cat and mouse, with the Judaizers always at a disadvantage
because of the powers at the disposal of the Holy Office to arrest, confiscate,
and torture its victims. At certain
times, the accused were able to manipulate the veniality and corruption of the
inquisitorial system, but this was relatively rare and not something to be
depended on. Unless they chose to assert
their Jewish identity, the New Christians tended to seek a means of diminishing
their guilt and accommodating to the wishes of the Inquisition and thus
avoiding the severest punishments, such as confiscation of all their wealth,
slavery on the galleys, exile to remote colonies, and burning at the stake; or
at least to prevent themselves from incriminating spouses, children, other
relatives, friends, and business associates.
But often enough, the inquisitors were sufficiently clever—in ways we shall
see—to force the accused eventually to recall, admit, and beg pardon for crimes
that were discovered only after many years of analysis, although assumed to be
there from almost the beginning of the process.
By its own lights, the Holy Office worked to rational and methodical
principles and degrees of proof, inventing to a large degree the modern
bureaucracy, with its meticulous files, managers and international connections.
Another perspective, however, is
required: that of the Jews and their Jewish mentality. In addition to the story of how the Sephardim
in Spain and Portugal were able to learn about the Inquisition and its modus
operandi and then later, when under arrest, were able to communicate with
fellow prisoner and colleagues outside, there is the history of how rabbinical
law treated issues such as apostasy and incrimination of one’s friends,
relatives and neighbours under torture or the threat of physical violence. There is a long tradition too of what Jewish
communities did and thought about the hostile world they were passing through
during the Galut or Exile and what
strategies, mechanisms and rationalizations were developed to cope with
explicit hostility and coercive seduction. At the highest intellectual levels,
new myths and theological schemes were worked out to integrate the crises of
Iberian intolerance into the mentality of the Jewish people. Moreover, since at least the pogroms of 1390,
when large numbers of Sephardim became New Christians (nuevos cristiaños) and participated in—at all levels of society, as
well as in leadership positions—Catholic civilization, there would emerge an
additional dimension to those drawing on ancient Hebraic roots and honed in
centuries of European persecution: that is, the additional dimension of the
Crypto-Jews and Marranos, individuals and families who were intimately aware of
and often professional trained in the subtleties of Catholic affective worship
and intellectual theology.
[1] For much as the Inquisitors thought they
understood Judaism, they were always wrong and were pursuing the phantom of
their own devising, and at best glimpsed a distorted version of the Jewishness
Marranos had absorbed, redesigned, and played out in games of distortion for
them. Hence the term dissimulation: for whereas simulation means to cover over one’s
real self with a mask (physical or metaphorical—or to ape someone or something
else) in order to seem like someone or something you want to be, dissimulation means to transform
yourself into a pretend being, even to suppressing, denying and becoming
unaware of what you originally were.
[2] “Fuzzy Jews” refers not too any diminution of
faith or relegation to the outer margins of Jewish history, but to the sense—as
used in mathematics—of indistinct and unsteady groups; so that these
individuals and families, and very rarely small communities, maintain their
intensity of belief and their heightened exhilaration of hiding their inner
identities, but cannot be seen to have a continuous and coherent set of beliefs
or practices from one generation to another, or even one person’s lifetime.
[3] This internalization of beliefs and perceptions self-consciously aware
of the distinction between a public persona of the self and the history of its
development and a private secretive world of experiences, emotions and
cogitations plays a key role in the development of the modern personality in a
secularized or mostly secularizing world.
While the Inquisition per se
sought to eradicate the content and structures of the hidden Judaism it thought
it could recognize as merely the old normal Jewishness the State had sought to
expel or convert en masse, it was
generating a whole new impetus towards a never-before-experienced phenomenon:
the wide-spread reality of internalized selves, with their own dynamic and
uncontrollable feelings and thoughts; and even when the Inquisitors—many of
them by the second and third generation products of this drive itself, that is,
secret members of converso families
integrated with aristocratic, highly educated families or Marranos taking
shelter in holy orders (monks, friars, inquisitors)—were partly aware of the
techniques of subterfuge evolving constantly to meet the attempts of the Holy
Office, they lacked the conceptual and institutional tools to stop the
process. As a consequence, the dysfunctional
personalities and the ineffective mechanisms of State and Church became almost
always neurotic and psychotic in our own contemporary senses. Modernity is defined by the shift from
Baroque styles of perception and articulation to anxiety-ridden minds and
communities. For which a new philosophy or science was
necessary—psychoanalysis.
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