Introduction

          My paper will examine the turbulent period of the 13th to the early 16th centuries in Spain.  A period of great turmoil for the Spanish Jewish community and also for those Jews who either by force or from personal conviction had converted to the Catholic faith.  The paper is divided into three parts.  The first part will deal with the nature of Christian society in Spain, and will highlight the biblical nature of the concept of corporate personality.  The second part of the paper will deal with the persecution of the Jews leading up to the Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain.  The final part of the paper will deal with the Conversos and I will briefly touch upon the beliefs of one sub-group within Conversos.

[Part 1] Analysis of Christian Society in Spain

The Theology of Corporate Personality and Personal Extension

          After having read the book by Jose Faur entitled, In the Shadow of History, with its emphasis on the idea of the corporational view of the Church, but seeing this concept as a vestige of the Roman Empires view of corporations, I have found it necessary to explain the underlying biblical nature of this theological idea of the Church as the body of Christ.  This theological concept is found in both the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, and it was further developed by the Fathers of the Church.  I will conclude this section by showing how this benign theological concept, when it is misapplied as a political ideology becomes distorted and leads to the persecution of those who within the Church dissent from accepted orthodox teaching or to the persecution of those who are simply outside the Church. 

[a] Corporate Personality in the Hebrew Bible

          The concept of corporate personality and the associated idea of personal extension are both found in the Hebrew Bible.  The biblical view of personality is not the same as the modern view of the human person.  The scriptural texts do not support a dualistic view of man; instead, they hold that man is a single living being.  Thus his soul is not seen as something separable from his body; instead, it is seen as the animating principle of his body; and so these two co-ordinate principles, body and soul, make up a single living organism.  It is important to note that the biblical text does not limit personality to the view expressed above.  It recognizes the fact that personality can extend beyond man’s physical nature, thus when a man speaks his words are not empty; instead, they are an extension of his personality and they in some sense contain his life force.  An example of this idea of personal extension can be seen in the biblical narrative in which Isaac was tricked into giving Esau’s blessing to Jacob, once he has done this “. . . he is unable to retract his words and nullify their effect in favour of the rightful recipient; once uttered they act creatively in quasi-material fashion” [Johnson, 3].  When Isaac discovered what had happened, he was unable to revoke the blessing and in the end had to give Esau a lesser blessing.  Words in the Hebrew Bible in some sense convey the essence of what they signify.  Words are creative.

          The idea of headship, which is so prominent in Christian ecclesiology, also is found in the Hebrew Bible.  Personality is thus extended from the head of the family to the members of the family, and even to the servants of the head.  In the book of Genesis Joseph sends his steward after his brothers, who earlier had sold him into slavery,  in order to see if they had morally changed.  When the steward finally caught up with their caravan he accused them of theft and they responded by saying to the steward, “‘Why does my lord speak such words as these?  Far be it from your servants that they should do such a thing!’” [Genesis, 44:7].  Obviously the steward is not their lord, but Joseph’s brothers speak to the steward as if he were Joseph himself, they do this because the steward is acting in the person of Joseph, and is thus an extension of Joseph’s personality.  Joseph’s brothers then told the steward that if the missing cup was found in one of their bags, “‘. . . whomever of your servants it be found with let him die, and we also will be my lord’s slaves’” [Genesis, 44:9].  Of course the cup was found in Benjamin’s sack just where Joseph had ordered the steward to put it, and once found the steward said, “‘Let it be as you say:  he with whom it is found shall be my slave, and the rest of you shall be blameless’” [Genesis, 44:10].  Once again the steward speaks and acts in the person of Joseph, as Joseph’s representative he makes Joseph present by extension.  This is only one example, another occurs in the book of Judges, where Jephthah’s messengers are seen as extensions of his personality [cf. Judges, 11:12-13].  In reference to this particular pericope Aubrey R. Johnson states that the messengers “. . . as ‘extensions’ of their master’s personality are treated as actually being and not merely representing their lord” [Johnson, 6].

          In the Hebrew scriptures the concept of corporate personality deals primarily with the unity of the People of Israel.  The covenant is not made with a loose group of individuals; instead, it is made with a community, a community that can be seen as a corporate personality when viewed in relation to its connection to, and its interaction with, God.  In the biblical text there are times when Israel is spoken of in the plural form, which indicates that idea of community; but which then shifts to the singular, thus indicating that the People of Israel are seen in some sense as a corporate person.  In order to illustrate my point I will examine a particular text from the book of Numbers.  In the pericope I have chosen, Moses sends his messengers to the King of Edom with the following message, “‘Thus says your brother Israel . . .’” [Numbers, 20:14], it then recounts the suffering of the People of Israel during their time of slavery in Egypt.  This opening text speaks of Israel in the plural, as a community of individuals.  The message continues, “‘. . . You know all the adversity that has befallen us; how our fathers went down to Egypt, and we dwelt in Egypt a long time, and the Egyptians dealt harshly with us and our fathers . . .’” [Numbers 20:14b-15].  The King of Edom responded by saying, “‘You shall not pass through, lest I come out with the sword against you’” [Numbers, 20:18].  Now comes the portion of the text that emphasizes the concept of corporate personality, after constantly referring to Israel in the plural the text now shifts, and speaks of Israel in the singular.  In response to the Kings threat, “. . . the People of Israel said to him, ‘We will go up by the highway and if we drink of your water, I and my cattle, then I will pay for it, let me only pass through it on foot, nothing more’” [Numbers, 20:19].  Aubrey R. Johnson pointed out that “. . . the oscillation in thought between the conception of the social unit as an association of individuals (with the resultant use of plural forms) and as a corporate personality (with the consequent use of the singular) is unmistakable” [Johnson, 12] in these verses, and his thought in this matter is confirmed by H. Wheeler Robinson in his book on The Cross in the Old Testament.

          Dr. Robinson pointed out in his book that this same type of oscillation occurs in Psalm 22, a psalm which he says is closely related to the Song of the Servant in the book of Isaiah.  As he puts it, “At one point the psalmist clearly distinguishes himself from the rest of the worshipping congregation (verse 25); at another he speaks as a group-representative, subject to the scorn of the irreligious (verse 6); at another in terms which suggest the whole nation (verses 12, 27)” [Robinson, 78].  The Hebrew Bible’s concept of the corporate person is taken up by St. Paul in the New Testament, in that he sees all men as “a unity, present in any one of its members,” and thus in a certain sense, “. . . the whole race [is] . . .  present in Adam” [Robinson, 77].  Paul may have been basing this idea on a text in the Pesikta Rabbati which says, “‘Thine eyes did see my substance . . . and in thy book all my members were written’ (Psalm 139:17) . . . Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish said in the name of Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah, ‘When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him as a mass and he lay from one end of the earth to the other’” [Davies, 337].  In some sense all human beings are contained in Adam, and so there is a paradox of the one and the many, of the person and the community, even in the teaching of the Rabbis.

[b] Corporate Personality in the New Testament

          The concept of corporate personality is taken by St. Paul and is applied to the relationship which exists between Christ and his body the Church.  For St. Paul the vision he experienced on the road to Damascus contained the whole meaning of the Christian Mystery.  When Jesus appeared to him, he said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” [Acts, 9:4], and in this one moment St. Paul realized the depth of the connection between Christ and the Church.  The words of Christ made this quite clear, for he did not say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting My disciples?”, or “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting My servants?”; instead, he said “why are you persecuting Me?” [Acts, 9:4].  This event changed St. Paul’s life and from it he developed a deep theology of communion.  He explains this Mystery in greater detail in his epistle to the Ephesians.  In the first chapter of that letter he explains that Christ is the recapitulation of all things both in the heavens and on earth.  Christ breaks down the barrier which divides the Jews and the Gentiles, so that “in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace” [Ephesians, 2:15b], and in this way Jesus reconciles “them both in one body to God through the cross” [Ephesians, 2:16a].  St. Augustine would say much the same thing in a sermon, in which he told the members of the Church in Hippo that “. . . the Head, with all the members, is but one man” [NPNF, 1:6:399].  From these statements it becomes clear that the Church is seen as the extension of the incarnation through space and time.

          There is one other element that needs to be clarified, and that concerns Jose Faur’s statements that the individual “had no autonomous character” and that the Christian is “absorbed in the corporation” [Faur, 32]; these ideas are foreign to the New Testament and to the Fathers of the Church.  When looking at First Corinthians it becomes clear that Ullman, who happens to be the source of Faur’s comments, has misunderstood the theological concept of communion (Greek: koinonia).  St. Paul’s clearly asserts that each individual in the one body has different gifts and thus retains his individual personal characteristics.  St. Paul said, in reference to the body of Christ (i.e., the Church), that it “. . . does not consist of one member but of many.  If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part [partition implies multiplicity] of the body.  . . . If all were a single organ, where would the body be?  . . . Now you [i.e., the Corinthians] are the body of Christ and individually members of it” [1 Corinthians, 12:14-15, 19, 27].  St. Paul, unlike Ullman, distinguishes between the body of Christ (the One) and the members of Christ (the many).  There is a mystery in this teaching, in that the many are one, and at the same time, the one is many.  So the individual person who enters the body of Christ is not destroyed by his incorporation into Christ, he is affected by it, but he remains a distinct subsisting being at the same time.  In the words of L. S. Thornton, “The Messiah and his people are mutually necessary to one another.  . . . There is a certain messianic identity between him and them [but] . . . the identity is one of unity in distinction” [Thornton, 47].  This is one of the reasons why Catholic theology says that the Church, when taken as a whole, is sinless; but when viewed at the level of her members, she can be sinful.  By pointing all of this out, I am not trying to discount Ullman’s book, but simply to give a greater degree of balance to his presentation.  I do agree with him that at the political level, but not at the theological level, the idea of distinction was in many ways lost.  That is why the political concept of Christendom led to persecutions of those in the Church who held heretical opinions and at the same time to the persecution of those outside the Church (i.e., the Jews), who were seen as a threat to the political and social order.

[c] The Political Misuse of a Theological Concept

          The theological concept of corporate personality, which is benign in itself, was twisted into a political ideology, and thus promoted the concept of “Christendom”; and this idea can and did become the source of horrible crimes against the rights and dignity of the human person.  When the Church and the State became identified in Medieval Europe the doctrine of the corporate personality of the Church was misapplied to the State as well, so that when a person held opinions at variance with the teaching of the Church, they not only became a heretic but also were thought of as a traitor to the State and thus they were looked upon as a threat to civil peace.  For those outside the Church, though they were not seen as traitors, they were seen as foreign and thus were a threat to the stability of the State because they were not truly members of it.  They in a sense could be viewed as a fifth column which at any time might side with the enemies of the Christendom, most especially the Muslim Empire.  In either scenario, the Jews or the Conversos (former Jews), were going to suffer some kind of mistreatment by the State at the instigation of the Church authorities.  It is often pointed out that the Church executed no one, but it should be remembered that Church authorities turned convicted heretics over to the state for punishment and that this punishment tended to be the death penalty. 

[d] Summary

          My purpose in writing part one of the paper was to highlight a weakness in Faur’s book, a weakness based on his heavy reliance on Walter Ullman’s book, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages.  Faur appears to have used Ullman’s information without investigating the biblical origins of the concept of corporate personality.  It is not my intention to negate the value of Ullman’s book; instead, I have endeavored to provide balance to his treatment of the subject.  Many of his statements are problematic and thus needed correction.  Catholic theology, like rabbinic law, is very precise in its formulation of doctrine.  The purpose of this precision in terminology is to exclude not only completely erroneous viewpoints, but also to balance statements that may be partially true, but which also contain elements of error.  As I indicated above I am not saying that Ullman’s book has no validity, but it is apparent that he has over emphasized the political elements in the concept and has not researched the theological sources for the doctrine of corporate personality.  I hope I have been able to achieve the needed balance, so that it becomes possible to discern the real causes underlying the persecution of the Jewish community during this time period, and how the theology of the Church is not the cause of it, but was distorted and then used as a tool by both religious and secular authorities in order to achieve their own political purposes.

[Part 2] Persecution Prior to the Expulsion

Attempts to Convert the Jewish Community and growing Persecution

          With the consolidation of the Spanish state the position of the Jewish community, which had benefited somewhat during the preceding period, began to deteriorate rapidly.  In this part of the paper I will concentrate on two elements; the first deals with the theological disputations which occurred during this time, and the second concerns the legal and physical persecution of the Jewish communities in Spain.

[a] The Theological Disputations

          The first of the two major disputations which were held in Spain took place in Barcelona in the year 1263.  Though the conditions under which this disputation was held were not fair by any means, the Jewish defender did an excellent job in bringing the disputation to a stalemate.  Nahmanides was one of the greatest rabbinic scholars of his day, and he was able to easily defend the Jewish position in the debate.  The debate itself centered on whether it was possible to show that Jesus was the promised Messiah by using the Talmud.  Over twenty years before the events in Barcelona, the Church had ordered the burning of the Talmud after the Paris disputation, but now the Church had changed its attitude toward the Talmud.  A convert from Judaism, Fray Pablo Christiani, held that it was possible to prove from the Talmud that Jesus was the Messiah.  The Church held that the Talmud contained some “. . . early material uncontaminated by later Jewish opposition to Christianity” [Maccoby, 42], and that this earlier material was favorable to the doctrine of the Church.  Of course Pablo Christiani held that this earlier substratum of information needed to be drawn out of the existing interpolated text.  But though scholars admit that there are layers of material from different historical periods in the Talmud, it does not follow that the earlier layers automatically support Christian claims about the Messiah.  In the disputation Nahmanides followed the wise path of simply sticking to the texts as they are, and did not accept the idea that they had been interpolated.  Nahmanides also surprised and disarmed Pablo Christiani by occasionally accepting his interpretations of the texts, but he would then point out that the Midrash contains layers of meaning, even contradictory meanings, and that the exegete is free to choose the interpretation which seems best to him personally.  At the time of this disputation the Jewish community in Spain was still vibrant and had a very strong scholastic tradition.

          I will not go into massive detail about the content of the Barcelona disputation but will instead briefly indicate what it was supposed to discuss.  This disputation was supposed to center on three points of disagreement, the first point would deal with whether the Messiah had already come as Christians believe, or whether he had not yet come as Jews believe.  After this was dealt with the debate would move on and discuss the second point, which concerned the nature of the Messiah.  In other words whether the Messiah was divine or whether he was merely human.  The final point to be discussed concerned whether “. . . the Jews still possess the true law, or whether the Christians practice it” [Maccoby, 103].  By the end of the disputation only the first and second points had been discussed in detail, while the third point was not discussed at all.  In reading Nahmanides own account of the disputation it becomes clear to any impartial observer why the final point was not discussed, Fray Pablo Christiani was not up to the task and was quite simply out maneuvered by Nahmanides.

          I will now look at one of the debated points.  In the Nahmanides own account of the disputation, the Vikuah, he indicated that it was Fray Pablo’s intention to show from the “. . . Talmud that the Messiah about whom the prophets testified had already come” [Maccoby, 103].  In order to make his point Fray Pablo refers to the Lamentations Rabbah, and this text as it appears in Nahmanides account of the disputation states, “A certain man was ploughing and his cow lowed.  An Arab passed by and said to him, ‘Jew, Jew, untie your cow, untie your plough, untie your coulter, for the Temple has been destroyed.’  He untied his cow, he untied his plough, he untied his coulter.  The cow lowed a second time.  The Arab said to him, ‘Tie up your cow, tie up your plough, tie up your coulter, for your Messiah has been born’” [Maccoby, 110].  To this proof text given by Fray Pablo, Nahmanides replied rather bluntly, “‘I do not believe in this Aggadah’” [Maccoby, 110].  This one statement showed quite clearly that Fray Pablo had misunderstood the nature of the Midrashic literature and its authority in Judaism.  He may have been a convert from Judaism to Christianity, but in his use of texts he seemed to be using what could be termed a Christian view of how sacred texts operate.  Certainly if a Christian used a proof text from a sacred source, another Christian would not respond in that way Nahmanides did, but that is because of the dogmatic nature of Christian faith.  As Hyam Maccoby puts it, the truth found in the Haggadah is of a poetic nature, it is meant to “. . . create a mood, rather than to state a fact” [Maccoby, 44-45].  So, Fray Pablo and most of the Christian Haggadic interpreters after him proceed from a perspective that is foreign to Judaism.

          Nahmanides, for the sake of argument, then went on to explain the errors in Fray Pablo’s interpretation of this Midrash.  As he points out, the most it can (if taken literally) prove, is that the Messiah was born when the Temple was destroyed.  But Jesus was born prior to the destruction of the Temple, and so Nahmanides concludes that he cannot be the promised Messiah, at least if one bases the claim on this Midrash.  He then went on the say that, “‘The Sages did not say that the Messiah had come, but that he had been born’” [Maccoby, 111], and the two terms are not synonymous.  This is where Nahmanides’ position gets complex, for he held that the Messiah could have been born when the Temple was destroyed, and then because the Messiah was “. . . free from the punishment of Adam’” [Maccoby, 116], he could have entered the Garden of Eden until the time for him to come was manifest.

          Though it is obvious that Nahmanides won the disputation; the Jewish community in Spain did not benefit from the victory.  The purpose of this disputation like the one held in 1413-1414 at Tortosa, “. . . was not to be a debate between equals, but rather a demonstration to the recalcitrant Jews that the principal tenets of Christianity had been accurately foretold in the Talmud” [Gitlitz, 11].  The Tortosa disputation unlike the one at Barcelona did have a major adverse effect on Judaism.  Since the time of the Barcelona disputation Jewish scholarship had been in decline and many of the best minds in the Jewish community had converted to Catholicism.  Such men as Abner of Burgos; Solomon Halevi, chief rabbi of Burgos; and Joshua Halorki of Alcaniz, who took the Christian name Jeronimo de Santa Fe; these and other conversions caused a brain drain within the Spanish Jewish community.  At the Tortosa disputation Jeronimo de Santa Fe had the same role as Pablo Christiani a century and a half earlier, but unlike Fray Pablo, Jeronimo was well versed in philosophical logic and in rhetoric.  As Hyam Maccoby states when comparing the Barcelona and Tortosa disputations, “The tables had now been turned; it was now the Christians who championed reason and the Jews who championed blind faith.  . . . It was among the Christians now that intellectual confidence was to be found, based on the dominant Aristotelian and Averroist philosophy,” and “Judaism was fighting a rearguard action against a flood of Christian missionary propaganda, but even more damaging was the growing conviction that the Jews were becoming a backward enclave in a Christian society of advancing culture” [Maccoby, 87-88].  Many of the Jews who converted during this period did so because of the intellectual opportunities that were present in the larger Christian society.  At the conclusion of the Tortosa disputation, “. . . most of the religious leaders remained firm in their Jewish convictions others – including fourteen rabbis – converted, persuaded by the theological arguments or overwhelmed by the coercive atmosphere of the disputation or motivated by one of the other reasons enumerated by Halorki [Jeronimo] twenty years before” [Gitlitz, 11].  Jeronimo had listed four reasons to convert: the first was careerism, the second was the Averroistic philosophy of the time, the third was centered on the events of recent history (i.e., the suffering of the Jews and what appeared to be God’s rejection of them), and the last reason was based on the conviction that Christianity’s theological claims were true.

[b] Persecution

          Persecution during the century prior to the establishment of the inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion also adversely effected the Jewish community.  Persecution resulted in the deaths of many Jews and in the conversions, often times forced, of many others.  In the year 1378 “. . . Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez began to preach a holy war against the Jews and called for the destruction of Seville’s twenty-three synagogues” [Gitlitz, 7].  King Juan I did pass certain anti-Jewish laws but while he was alive the Jewish community was relatively safe.  When he died in 1390, and was succeed by his infant son, turmoil became inevitable.  The riots of 1391 in some sense were caused by the legal restrictions of the preceding years.  The non-Jewish middle class was anti-Jewish to begin with, so the preaching of Archdeacon Martinez inflamed the situation, and “In June of 1391 rioters swept into the Jewish quarter of Seville, burning, raping, looting, destroying fiscal records, and forcibly converting as many Jews as they could to Catholicism” [Gitlitz, 7].  The Jewish community of Seville was destroyed.  The anti-Jewish riots spread to Aragon and Valencia.  Once the riots were over the Jewish communities “tried to recuperate.  But it was very hard going” [Gitlitz, 8].  The re-established Jewish communities tended to avoid the larger cities and settled instead in smaller towns.  But the seeds of the expulsion were planted, because there were now large numbers of forced converts and their assimilation into the surrounding Christian society was not going to be easy.  The continued existence of Jewish minority communities was seen as a constant threat to the new Christians (the Conversos), and as Gitlitz points out, “Jewish policy makers agonized between principle of tolerance and exclusion” [Gitlitz, 8].  The Jewish communities themselves had to determine what course of action they would take in treating the Conversos and whether they should “apply the Maimonidean principle that forced conversion is permissible as long as the convert takes the first opportunity to revert to Judaism, usually through emigration” [Gitlitz, 8].  Ironically, one of the primary reasons for the establishment of the inquisition in Spain in 1478 was the continued interaction between the Conversos and the Jewish community.  In addition to this action the government enacted several other measures designed to limit contacts between the Conversos and the remaining Jewish communities, but since these actions were deemed to been ineffective, the Spanish crown in 1492 issued the Edict of Expulsion (cf. Faur, 38).  This act was in some sense seen by the Spanish government to be its final solution to the Jewish question.  It was believed that the Conversos would assimilate into society better if the Jews were gone.

[c] Maimonides and the Letter on Martyrdom

          Around the year 1165 Maimonides wrote a responsa to a question concerning forced conversion to Islam during a period of persecution.  The principles he established in this letter became a general rule in Judaism.  Basically Maimonides was attacking a responsa issued by an unnamed rabbi who had told the questioner that martyrdom in such a situation was the only option.  To this responsa Maimonides replied saying that, “This ‘clearheaded man’ evidently sees absolutely no difference between one who does not observe the Sabbath out of fear of the sword and one who does not observe it because he does not wish to” [Halkin, 16].  Maimonides distinguished quite reasonably between a person who was forced into doing or not doing something, and one who simply did not wish to participate in Jewish life.  His basic principle was that if a person was forced into converting and did not really wish to, but acted under duress, that this person could, “. . . confess [Islam], and not choose death.  However, he should not continue to live in the domain of that ruler” [Halkin, 30].  What Maimonides held to be central was the person’s intention, if a person in his heart remained a Jew, then that man was not doing anything sinful in outwardly conforming to the larger society by appearing to convert, but secretly keeping the Law at home.  Such a person should take advantage of the first opportunity to emigrate to a land where he can practice the Law openly again.

[d] Summary

          The situation for the Jewish community during the last one hundred years before the expulsion was to say the least extremely difficult.  It is amazing that the Jews of Spain during this time were actually able to carry on at all under the increasing pressure to convert, but in a sense the Edict of Expulsion was a sign that the Jewish community was not going to disappear even with all these pressures being placed upon it.  Thus the Spanish crown saw expulsion as the only option.  The government wanted uniformity in the newly re-united Spanish Kingdom, and the Jews were a hindrance to its view of Spain’s future.

[Part 3] The Conversos

Conversion or Expulsion

          With the Edict of Expulsion in 1492 the Jews of Spain had two options open to them, they could either leave, or they could convert.  The number of Jews believed to have been expelled from Spain is estimated at between 100,000 and 160,000; while the number who converted in 1492 is estimated at between 25,000 and 50,000.  To this latter number must be added the approximately 225,000 conversos living in Spain prior to the expulsion.  Another 5,000 to 8,000 Jews returned to Spain and converted in the decade following the expulsion (for this statistical information, cf., Gitlitz, 74-75).

[a] The Four Types of Conversos

          In his book, Secrecy and Deceit, Gitlitz identifies four different types of Conversos.  First on his list are the converts who became Christians because they accepted the claims of Christianity as true.  This type of convert can be divided into several additional sub-groups.  Members of the first sub-group are called them Conversionist zealots.  They include people like, “Pablo de Santa Maria, Pedro de la Caballeria, and Jeronimo de Santa Fe, [all of whom] were the authors of most of the learned, virulent, anti-Semitic tracts of the conversionist century” [Gitlitz, 85].  He calls the second sub-group Christian reformers.  These individuals had an idealized view of Catholicism and “were acutely disappointed by what they found to be discriminatory practices of the Church, particularly the Inquisition and the purity-of-blood laws” [Gitlitz, 85].  They hoped to reform the Church and thus to eliminate these abuses.  He identifies the last three sub-groups in this type as; Heterodox Catholics, Christian professionals (i.e., clergy), and what he calls Low-profile Christians.  This final sub-group, the Low-profile Christians, was “The preferred goal of the vast majority of Christianizing conversos” [Gitlitz, 86].  This sub-group wanted to be assimilated into the larger Christian society, so that they in a sense could disappear from view.

          The second type of Conversos were those who wanted to maintain their Jewish identity, and they can be further divided into three sub-groups.  Gitlitz calls the first sub-group Observant Judaizers, and he states that the majority of information is known about this group because it “. . . was energetically pursued by the Inquisition” [Gitlitz, 87].  These Conversos continued to observe a large number of Jewish practices, “. . . they celebrated the major events in their family’s life cycle in the Jewish fashion, they observed a number of the holidays as fully as they were able, they strove to remember or reconstruct Jewish prayers, they cherished and repeated the scraps of Hebrew passed on to them in their oral tradition, they labored to keep a kosher home, and they reassured themselves with declarations that Judaism was superior to Catholicism in every way” [Gitlitz, 87].  Gitlitz calls the second sub-group in this category the Accomadationist Judaizers and he indicates that they were much like the first sub-group only less rigorist in keeping Jewish practices.  As he says, “. . . they sometimes fasted, but rarely hosted the holiday feasts; they refrained from eating pork when they could, but did not de-vein their meat or soak it to remove the blood” [Gitlitz, 87], they looked on themselves as Jews, but they tended to assimilate into the larger Catholic culture with time.  The final sub-group in this category is called the Anti-Catholic Judaizers.  “These conversos tended to express their Jewish identity in negative attitudes toward Catholicism and its trappings” [Gitlitz, 88].  With the succeeding generations this sub-group became less important, especially as knowledge of normative Judaism waned.  But its negative attitude toward Catholicism affected the other groups in such a way that many of the things that were done because they were thought to be Jewish, were not actually Jewish practices at all, but were merely anti-Catholic practices.

          The third and fourth type of Conversos were less important than the first two groups, in that they were smaller and less influential.  The third type tended to blend Judaism and Catholicism.  This category can be divided into two sub-groups, what Gitlitz calls the Vacillators and the Syncretists.  Their names clearly indicate the positions they held, the first sub-group could not decide exactly what to do and thus they tended to move back and forth between being Catholic and being Jewish; while the second sub-group attempted to blend the two religions.  These individuals tried to practice both religions.  Thus you have a man “. . . like the Valencian converso Pedro Besant, who confessed in 1486 that every morning he prayed the Our Father and recited the articles of faith and then washed his hands and recited his Jewish prayers” [Gitlitz, 89].  These people tended in practice to be Catholic, but at the same time they identified themselves as Jews.  The final type of Conversos were what Gitlitz calls Skeptics, because they tended to reject both Judaism and Catholicism, and held to a non-religious view of life, and thus downplayed any idea of an afterlife.

[b] The crypto-Jews

          I will now briefly look at the beliefs of the second type of converts, the crypto-Jews.  It is important to note that many of their beliefs are not necessarily Jewish, but instead are a reaction against Catholicism.  In a sense the opposite of Catholicism was held by them to be Judaism, even though this is not necessarily accurate.  Central to their belief system was the affirmation that God is completely one, implicit in this idea is the denial of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of God.  As Juana de San Juan said, “Christians were blind and would go to Hell because they did not believe in a unitary God” [Gitlitz, 101].  Gitlitz points out the ironic nature of this statement saying that it reflects “. . . the Christian view of the afterlife” [Gitlitz, 101].  This is an excellent example of how the ideas of the Conversos over time became more and more influenced by Christian thought, even while they continued to identify themselves as Jewish.  The Conversos of this type tended to hold that Jesus was not divine and was not the Messiah, but strangely many of them came to identify the Anti-Christ mentioned in the New Testament with the long awaited Jewish Messiah.  To a Christian this idea is very difficult to grasp, but in a sense it does show the level of antipathy between Jews and Christians at that time.

          Judaism and Christianity hold very different beliefs about the afterlife.  Christianity is centered on the idea of heaven as the fulfillment of this life, it tends to be other worldly; while Judaism centers on the idea of keeping the Law in this life, and so it tends to be this worldly.  But the crypto-Jews almost immediately accepted a more or less Christian view of the afterlife.  They saw heaven as a reward for keeping the Law of Moses, and in some ways Moses replaced Jesus as a mediator between God and man.  The Catholic concept of saints also infiltrated into the belief system of the crypto-Jewish Conversos.  As time passed the Jewish view of Moses and the other figures from the Hebrew Bible was replaced with a Christian view of them as saints.  About a century after the expulsion, Marina de Mercado is reported to have told Catalina de Rojas that, “Moses was a kind of semi-deity who had the power to intercede with God, for she had said that ‘God through Moses had opened up twelve paths through the Red Sea and that Moses could help her (Catalina de Rojas) a great deal . . . and that Moses would save her and she should believe in him’” [Gitlitz, 116].

          The brief summary of beliefs I have given here is necessarily incomplete and as Gitlitz himself said, “Each individual crypto-Jew was idiosyncratic in his or her belief.  Each individual’s set of beliefs was perforce a product of his or her family background and childhood training, the prevailing ethos of the community, and the other crypto-Jews who may have served as models.  Only the study of an individual case can provide a compilation of what a given individual believed and did” [Gitlitz, 123].  Due to persecution by the Inquisition and the resulting clandestine nature of crypto-Jewish beliefs, it became impossible for the crypto-Jews to form a consensus in the area of doctrine and practice that would have developed if their religious beliefs had been given legal sanction.

[c] Summary

          It is amazing to see that in spite of the Inquisition and the resulting persecution of the Jews that a form of Judaism survived for centuries in Spain.  It may have been a Judaism based more on self-identity than on beliefs and practices, but it was a form of Judaism nonetheless.  In a sense these individuals did what Maimonides had spoken of, they kept alive in private their devotion to the Law of Moses, no matter how distorted it became, an expression of their attempt to be Jewish.

Conclusion

          Of course my paper has only just briefly skimmed the surface of the complex situations involved in the relationship of the Christian culture of Spain and the minority Jewish populations which had lived in the Iberian peninsula since Roman times.  The Edict of Expulsion ended more than one thousand years of Jewish life and history in that region, but even after the expulsion Jewish thought continued to affect the dominant Christian culture.  Thus this is only a chapter in an unending story, which concerns the life of the People of Israel, and their relationship to God and to their fellow human beings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited:

W. D. Davies.  Paul and Rabbinic Judaism.  (London:  SPCK, 1962).

Jose Faur.  In the Shadow of History.  (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1992).

David M. Gitlitz.  Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews.  (Philadelphia:  JPS, 1996).

Abraham Halkin (Translator).  The Epistles of Maimonides:  Crisis and Leadership.  (Philadelphia:  JPS, 1993).

Aubrey R. Johnson.  The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God.  (Cardiff:  Univ. of Wales Press, 1961).

Hyam Maccoby.  Judaism on Trial.  (London:  Associated University Presses, 1982).

H. Wheeler Robinson.  The Cross in the Old Testament.  (London:  SCM Press Ltd., 1955).

Philip Schaff (Editor).  The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.  (Peabody:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1994).

L. S. Thornton.  The Common Life in the Body of Christ.  (Westminster:  Dacre Press, 1946).

Biblical Translations:

The New American Standard Bible.  (New York:  University of Cambridge Press, 1977).

The Bible:  Revised Standard Version.  (New York:  American Bible Society, 1971).  

Judaism in Spain from the 13th to the 16th Centuries

by Steven Todd Kaster 

San Francisco State University

Jewish Studies 330:  Jews and Judaism in the Modern World

Professor Schorsch

17 May 2000

Copyright © 2000-2025 Steven Todd Kaster