Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (62 page)

Almost immediately upon Torquemada's appointment, the Inquisition began issuing its findings, as the historian Benjamin Gampel put it, "that the New Christians were generally involved in Jewish rituals and obeyed precepts of the Jewish religion, and that their heretical behavior should not be tolerated."
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In towns and cities, the tribunal sessions involved open-air processions, elaborate liturgy, and the hugely popular autos-da-fe ("acts of faith") in which heretics either recanted or were put to death. Not incidentally, such displays deflected a growing hostility toward the monarchy. The Old Christian peasantry and the urban poor particularly welcomed the campaign against New Christians and the spectacle of its procedures. But now the monarchy, as chief sponsor of the tribunals, had replaced the restive populace as the main antagonist of the hated New Christians. In other words, Isabella and Ferdinand's legendary popularity was based, in part at least, on their wily use of the Inquisition.
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"When the inquisitors began operations in a district"—this summary is from Henry Kamen's
Inquisition and Society in Spain—
"they would first present their credentials to the local Church and secular authorities, and announce a Sunday or a feast day when all residents would have to go to high mass, together with their children and servants, and hear the 'edict' read. At the end of the sermon or the creed, the inquisitor or his representative would hold a crucifix in front of the congregation and ask everybody to raise their right hand, cross themselves and repeat after him a solemn oath to support the Inquisition and its ministers. He would proceed to read the edict." The edict typically included a demand that all present denounce any Christian who "keeps the Sabbath according to the Law of Moses ... using no lights from Friday evening onwards ... or [has] eaten meat in Lent...[or any] parents placing their hands on the heads of their children without making the sign of the cross ... or if they recite the psalms without the
Gloria Patri
... or if anyone on his deathbed turns to the wall to die."
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Torture was commonly used in criminal procedures in that era, and it was a method of the Inquisition, applied as a way of forcing confessions. The torturers, like the executioners, were agents of the Crown, not the Church. This distinction, which some cite to absolve the Church even today, was the ultimate fulfillment of the "two sword" theory promoted by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux three centuries before. When torture was deemed necessary, the accused of the Inquisition were suspended by their wrists with their bodies weighted
(garrucha),
had water forced down their throats (
toca
), were wrapped in ropes to be squeezed as they were tightened
(potro).
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Careful records were kept of the proceedings. Here, again from Kamen, is the partial transcript of the interrogation of one woman accused, in 1568, of refusing to eat the flesh of pigs and of refusing to do housework on Saturdays:

She was ordered to be placed on the
potro.
She said, "Senores, why will you not tell me what I have to say? Señor, put me on the ground—have I not said that I did it all?" She was told to tell it. She said, "I don't remember—take me away—I did what the witnesses say." She was told to tell in detail what the witnesses said. She said, "Señor, as I have told you, I do not know for certain. I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, release me, for I do not remember it."...She was admonished to tell the truth and the
garrotes
were ordered to be tightened. She said, "Señor, do you not see how these people are killing me? I did it—for God's sake, let me go."
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Kamen judiciously points out that the inquisitors' procedures, while no worse than those prevailing in other European tribunals, were in some ways less severe. Inquisitorial prisons could be relatively humane. Torture rarely resulted in death, or even permanent crippling. Confessions obtained under torture had to be reconfirmed by the suspect later, under "normal" conditions. For the most part, the many people put to death were found guilty of a clearly defined capital crime, heresy. Thus Jews as such were not officially targeted by the Inquisition, only those who had been baptized or were found to have encouraged the baptized to lapse into Judaism. This offense was so broadly defined, however—any Jewish "consorting" with a
converso
could be prosecuted—and so aggressively pursued that eventually the Inquisition did mount a frontal assault on Judaism itself.
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The Inquisition survived as an operating institution for three hundred years, and its methods varied widely during that long stretch of time. In its early years, when the as yet unnamed panic of the coming social and religious catastrophe we remember as the Reformation was the underlying driving force, thousands of unrepentant or relapsed heretics were burned at the stake. "Nothing, certainly," Kamen says, "can efface the horror of the first twenty holocaust years."
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He comments elsewhere, "The savagery of the onslaught against the conversos was without equal in the history of any tribunal in the western world."
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Statistics kept by contemporary observers suggest that in the first eight years alone, two thousand were burned at the stake. Thousands of others would follow in the next two decades. The vast majority of those put to death by the Spanish Inquisition during its entire three hundred years perished in that first savage paroxysm, which is why the name Torquemada lives in infamy.

Always in this story there is the cross. To a Jew, the cross's proximity, if not centrality, to each new round of violence is only a reminder of its negative meaning. To a Christian, it still must come as a shock and a source of sorrow, as if the cross had not already been fraught enough by what the Romans did with it. The cross, as we saw, featured as a sacramental object at the beginning of the inquisitorial procedures, the friar holding up the crucifix for the swearing of the informant's oath. At the other end of the process, in the climactic auto-da-fe, the cross featured as well. Repentant heretics were reconciled to the Church by being signed with the cross on the forehead, as the friar intoned, "Receive the sign of the cross, which you denied and lost through being deceived."
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The way this story keeps coming back, at its most violent moments, to the sacred symbol of the cross reminds us that religious politics are always reflected in the religious imagination. When the Renaissance in visual art came to Spain in the next century, its glories would be transformed by an almost sadistic concentration on physical torment, derived from the friar-driven cult of such torment as a source of salvation. There would never be any mistaking the aesthetic of Italy for that of Spain. The cross accomplished the sanctification of the Iberian spirit of repression. This is the meaning, for example, of the tone struck by El Greco, who, as we saw, took up residence in the Toledo villa that Samuel Halevy had built. His paintings captured the essential air of Inquisition culture. How else can his achievement be taken when he brings the embalmed flesh of the corpus into the hands, faces, throats, and fingers of his subjects, whether friars or mourners,
dons
or
donas.
All of their figures seem, in that trademark El Greco elongation, to have been racked. In burial pictures, but also in his bread-and-butter portraits of grandees and their ladies, El Greco brought the palette of death to life, laying bare the soul of Spanish Catholicism in this period. No other Spanish artist could approach his genius, and after him painters and sculptors alike took to the physical agonies of the Passion, and the torture of the crucifixion in particular, with a vivid literalness that made all prior renditions seem impressionistic. The religious imagination of the Inquisition fixed itself in the liturgical taste of the Spanish Empire, and it still jars visitors to the older churches throughout that part of the world.

Spanish mysticism would be similarly stamped by the cross. Its leading voice was the aptly named Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591), whose greatest poetry was written in a prison in, as it happens, Toledo. (He was jailed by a faction of his own religious order, the Carmelites, which rejected his efforts at reform.) His spiritual masterpiece was
The Dark Night of the Soul,
which articulated the religious meaning of negation itself. A hundred years of Spanish history—taking into account the activities of the conquistadors, the most violent hundred years in world history to that point—had prepared for the mystical conclusion that God could be present only in absence. The idea can seem to echo the mysticism of darkness found in the Kabbalah, and it is likely that John of the Cross was influenced by the powerful undercurrents of the Jewish tradition that had been running through Iberia for centuries. But as Harold Bloom explains, Kabbalah must always be distinguished from Christian, and for that matter Eastern, mysticism because it is "more a mode of intellectual speculation than a way of union with God ... a power of the mind over the universe of death."
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Saint John was confessor to the equally great Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), whose mystical "espousal" to Christ was sealed when Jesus, appearing in a vision, gave her not a ring but a nail from his cross.
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The much reproduced Bernini sculpture
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
renders the full, lips-parted sensuality of the nun's affective, as opposed to intellectual, communion with her Lord.
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It was Teresa who founded the order of Carmelites which, centuries later, would attract the converted Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, who took the religious name Teresa Blessed of the Cross because her conversion from Judaism was prompted by reading the mystic's autobiography. Edith Stein, of whom we will see more later, died at Auschwitz in 1942, and was named a saint of the Church in 1998. Partly in her memory, as we saw, the Carmelites established the controversial convent at the wall of Auschwitz, where the cross that gave this long narrative its starting point still stands.

Such history underscores the irony of the fact that Saint Teresa of Avila was herself a New Christian. In 1485, her father, as a child, was hauled before an auto-da-fe in, as it happens again, Toledo. Not long ago, I stood in the central square before the cathedral, where such an event would almost certainly have occurred. Teresa's father, with
his
father, was given the choice of repenting his relapse into Judaism or being burned at the stake. He was one of five thousand people who denounced himself and repented, to save his life.
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According to his biographer Gerald Brenan, Saint John of the Cross, too, had Jewish ancestry, but may not have known of it. Teresa did know. Brenan comments, "The knowledge of Santa Teresa's Jewish descent adds to the interest of her life and mission. It explains how a deep sense of guilt caused by her consciousness of belonging to the race of deicides, as they were called, helped to drive her against her will along the hard path of the mystic and religious reformer."
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Edith Stein was like her patron in feeling the burden of what her people "had done to Jesus." In her spiritual last will and testament, she offered her life to God "for the atonement of the unbelief of the Jewish people."
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Torquemada's determination to eradicate the Judaizing heresy led him almost immediately to regard the presence of such "unbelieving" Jews as an intolerable obstacle. The mere existence of Jews in Spain supported crypto-Jews and Judaizers, reminding New Christians of their prior commitment and inviting them to resume it. The proximity of openly observant Jews was said to influence secret Jews in their observances of forbidden cult and study of Torah—this was the rationale for the Inquisition's heretofore unauthorized attacks on Jews as such.
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In fact, this abandonment of restraint was an inevitable outcome of adopting religious purity as a widespread social goal. Despite a century of restriction and repression, numerous Jews had managed to cling to positions of importance in the economies of many towns and cities, but now they would be targeted. It was the same dynamic, though operating in reverse, by which Hitler's attack on Jews had inevitably to broaden to include those, like Edith Stein, who had renounced Judaism to become Christian. Here we see very clearly the specter of "blood" that will shape modern notions of race.

In 1490, the Inquisition crossed the line to bring charges against a Jew, one Yuce Franco.
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It will perhaps not surprise the reader to learn that the crime of which Franco was accused was the ritual crucifixion of a kidnapped Christian infant, a male child, as the tradition of the Blood Libel required. Franco and his accomplices were tried and executed in 1491. The furor that these proceedings aroused in the converso-hating, Jew-hating population of Spain prepared them for what came next. In January 1492, the Muslims in Granada, the last vestige of Moorish Iberia, were brutally overrun by the army of Ferdinand and Isabella. A cross was mounted on the highest tower of Granada's fortress-palace, the Alhambra.
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Iberia was finally free of Islam. Two months later, on the last day of March, the "Catholic Monarchs," as Ferdinand and Isabella were known, ordered the expulsion of Jews from Castile and Aragon. The descendants of Alfonso the Wise, who, with his father, had called himself the "king of the three religions," now defined the one nation they had achieved by its one religion. It was a late-medieval version of the impulse of Constantine, the final blow to
convivencia.
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