Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Journal of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

Volume 38 | Issue 1 Article 1

12-31-2013

Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as

Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by
Ángel Alcalá)
Mercedes Garcia-Arenal
CSIC, CCHS, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs

Recommended Citation
Garcia-Arenal, Mercedes (2013) "Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by
Ángel Alcalá)," Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Vol. 38: Iss. 1, Article 1.
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BSPHS 38:1 (2013)

Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical

Problems (after a recent book by Ángel Alcalá)

MERCEDES GARCIA ARENAL

From the late fourteenth-century onwards, recurrent persecutions and

killings of Jews, as well as the passing of different items of restrictive legislation,
produced a series of mass conversions in Iberia. The major milestones include
well known events such as the bloody persecution unleashed in Seville in 1391 by
the notorious Ferrant Martínez, archdeacon of Écija, a process involving a series
of pogroms which, by death or conversion, drastically reduced the size of the
Jewish communities. Also famous are the preaching of the Dominican friar
Vicente Ferrer, with his incitements to anti-Jewish violence, and the Dispute
known as that of Tortosa which in 1414 produced the conversion of a great
number of Aragonese rabbis (and thus of their communities), who had been
forced to take part in the proceedings. All of these episodes took place in a
tremendously agitated political century in Iberia. They were sometimes unrelated
episodes, but teleological hindsight encourages us to see them as leading up to the
final outcome of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. When the Catholic
Monarchs made the final decision to expel Jews, however, there were very few
Jews left to expel. Instead, there were a huge number of converts to Catholicism.
The forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism was followed between 1502
and 1526 (through a series of decrees promulgated at different times in Castile
and Aragon) by the compulsory conversion of Muslims, who came to be known as
Moriscos or cristianos nuevos de moro (new Christians who were formerly
Moors). The general picture was further completed later, in the first half of the
century, when numbers of Portuguese Jews immigrated to Spain, fleeing policies
of expulsion and Inquisitorial persecution which had started later in Portugal than
in Castile or Aragon. In this way the foundations were laid for what were to
become the most significant problems in Iberian social history in the three
centuries that followed.
All together, these movements of mass conversion represented a
systematic attempt to turn the plural society, in ethno-religious terms, which had
existed in the Peninsula during the Middle Ages into a society characterized by
the imposition of one sole religion. The whole history of Early Modern Spain is
marked by this trauma, that had profound consequences not only for the converted
groups, but also for the society which had to absorb them.

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The mass conversions initiated in 1391 sparked off a true genealogical

obsession, guided by the desire to differentiate between Jews, Jewish converts and
‘natural Christians’, cristianos de natura. By 1393, for example, the king of
Aragon was writing to different towns and cities of his realm warning them of the
difficulties of distinguishing between ‘natural Christians’ and Jews, now that there
were so many conversos.1 This obsession was one of the necessary conditions for
the creation of a new institution for the control of beliefs, the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, founded in 1478. In principle it was seen as a way of watching over
the correct incorporation of these Jewish ‘New Christians’ into the Catholic realm
and, especially in the first decades of its existence, as a way of persecuting
‘Judaizers’. This genealogical obsession was also at the basis of the statutes of
limpieza de sangre or ‘cleanliness of blood’ which started to be drawn up in
Toledo in 1449 (the ‘Sentencia-Estatuto’).2 The obsessive search for limpieza de
sangre permeated and affected all Iberian societies at different levels of intensity,
including those of the Americas.3 It clearly found its main victims among
formerly Jewish and Muslim New Christians, but it also profoundly affected the
social body as a whole.
This desire to eradicate difference in the majority society was always
combined with the fear of infiltration and contamination, and the disappearance of
differences exacerbated the search for allegedly essential characteristics in those
with Jewish ancestors. The pressures, then, which made themselves felt in
mainstream society – rejection, moves towards absolute homogenization, and at
the same time diverse means of stigmatization – were extremely complex and
varied over time and in virulence, however much they were repeatedly expressed
through the same stereotypes and, above all, through the notion of the stain borne
in the blood.4 The belief that descendants of conversos could not occupy positions

1
The term contemporary historians usually prefer for this groups, conversos or judeoconversos,
appear only rarely in early modern documents. Other designations were used much more
frequently. These ranged from cristianos nuevos, ‘New Christians’– a label the former Jews and
their descendants shared with the Moriscos – to the more colloquial ‘tornadizos’, which referred
not only to those who ‘se han tornado’ (have become) Christian, but also to those who go back
(tornar/volver) to the evil of their first Error after having received Baptism. The most notorious
designation, however, was ‘marrano’, an insulting term of uncertain origin. James. S. Amelang,
Historias paralelas. Judeoconversos y moriscos en la España Moderna (Madrid: Akal, 2011), 87.
2
Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII,
(French original, 1960, Spanish translation, Madrid, 1985) is still the best introduction to the
subject.
3
Maria Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in
Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008).
4
David Nirenberg has published important work on this subject, and has pointed out the
connection between genealogical obsession and this problem of the need to differentiate: “Mass
conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth Century Spain” Past

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of power and privilege in the society of the ‘natural Christians’, and that mixed
marriages should be avoided, had profoundly significant implications for the
development of early modern Iberian society. How did that ideological
construction become hegemonic, in spite of the contemporary voices that spoke
out against it, even inside the Inquisition itself?5 To what extent was the central
issue power and to what extent were race and religion secondary or pivotal?6 We
are still in need of understanding the origins of the sort of ‘racism’ – and it is
difficult to identify it in any other way, however much it might be said that the
term ‘race’ was not coined until the nineteenth-century, or that ‘race’ is not the
same as ‘genealogy’, or that the Spanish racism of those centuries was not based
on a definition of somatic characters– the racism, then, without quotation marks,
which is the end result of the belief that the blood of the converso is not cleansed
by the grace of baptism, but is saturated forever in theological guilt by centuries
of imbibing low and corrupt doctrines.7 Historians have yet to throw enough light
on the question of how sixteenth-century Spanish society created its own concept of
race, i.e. how it transformed social classifications, cultural differences or religious
beliefs into immutable products of nature.
In sum, Christian society had to redefine itself through confrontation with,
and rejection of what it considered in religious and cultural terms to be
characteristic of the groups coming from other religions, and it did so with an
attitude of permanent polemic and re-affirmation. It was a question of creating a
society that was deeply conformist in its support of a unique and rigid model, in
an aggressively polemical and defensive attitude entrenched behind the statutes of
limpieza de sangre; and at the same time it was also a society which produced
movements of dissidence and resistance through different forms of mysticism

and Present 174 (Feb 2002): 3-41, accessible on http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content; also

“Enmity and Assimilation. Jews, Christians and Converts in Medieval Spain” Common
Knowledge, 9:1 (2003) 137-155; “Was there race before modernity? The example of ‘Jewish’
blood in late Medieval Spain”, in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon,
Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge University Press, 2011) 232-264.
5
John Edwards, “A crisis of conscience in Golden Age Spain: the Inquisition against ‘limpieza de
sangre’ ” in Crisis and change in Early Modern Spain (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993); first appeared
in Spanish in Bulletin Hispanique 88, 3-4 (1986): 321-356.
6
That race and religion are secondary as faced with the central question of power is Henry
Kamen’s argument in his Inquisition and Society in Spain in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Bloomington, Indiana: 1985). He has also argued that the blood purity statutes were not
rigorously or generally observed.
7
See also Jerome Friedman, ‘Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Racial Anti-
Semitism’ Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987) 3-29; and John Edwards, ‘The beginnings of a
scientific Theory of Race? Spain, 1450-1600’ in From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic
History and Culture, ed. Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman, (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 179-
196.

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(alumbrados, dejados, iluminados) and the defence of interior religiosity, which

were linked to movements of reform. Judeoconversos took part in this movement
of reform. The new converts constituted complex groups, in dialogue with Old
Christians and open to the transmission and translation of ideas, images, and
religious emotions. Subjected to the pressure of polemics, these groups could not
avoid defining themselves through their engagement with each other.
Inquisition, judeoconversos, limpieza de sangre, race. It would be difficult
to find a more controversial set of historical themes than these, or a group of terms
more difficult to tackle. Although the so-called ‘converso problem’ has
profoundly marked all aspects of early modern Iberian history the scholarly
attention dedicated to judeoconversos has been, for a long time, following patterns
that originate in the nineteenth-century and continue somehow until today. In the
following pages I intend firstly to reflect upon ways of interpreting the converso
question embedded in a long historiographical tradition and then point to a series
of different approaches which are the bases of other, recent scholarly work. The
long historiographical tradition that I shall be addressing either makes too much or
too little of the conversos.8 Excessive claims have been made for conversos as the
near-exclusive fount of early modern Spanish economic dynamism, literary
creativity or religious dissent. Yet other scholars have downplayed or ignored the
truly unique nature and consequences of the converso phenomenon within a
Europe increasingly accustomed to practices of spiritual dissimulation and
subterfuge. Part of the problem is that historians sometimes reproduce in their
work the same categories that were used in the sixteenth-century. We thus repeat
the discourse of the past instead of explaining it.
With this in mind I will focus on some of the issues addressed in a book,
also recent, by Angel Alcalá, Los judeoconversos en la cultura y en la sociedad
española.9 I will make use of this book as an axis which will allow me to
reconstruct the historiographical tradition previous and contemporary to Alcalá.

*** *** ***

The book I am referring to now is a compilation of articles published over
several years which have been expanded and complemented by new research. One
of the threads that weave the different parts of the book is its contribution to the
debate on the question of an essential converso identity or a collective converso

8
For a state of the art on converso and morisco historiography see James Amelang, Historias
paralelas. Judeoconversos y moriscos en la España moderna (Madrid: Akal, 2012).
9
Ángel Alcalá, Los judeoconversos en la cultura y sociedad españolas (Madrid: Trotta, 2011),
579 pages.

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identity. Again, I will focus exclusively on how this question is addressed by the
historiographical tradition to which Alcalá claims to belong and to which he
wishes to contribute with his book. An historiographical tradition in which
historiography and history are closely knited. As Américo Castro, whose oeuvre
looms large on Alcalá’s book, said "any authentic historical construction is
ultimately an expression of the life of the historian himself" (“toda auténtica
construcción histórica es, en última instancia, expresión de la vida del historiador
mismo”).10
This, indeed, is one of the issues which I would most like to explore here:
the inevitable dialectic between the past and contemporary thought, reflected in
this case in historiographical consideration of the conversos. This dialectic reveals
itself to be particularly pressing when issues of ‘identity’ are at stake. It is maybe
not indifferent for the discussion proposed in this article to turn for a moment to
Alcalá’ s own trajectory.
Ángel Alcalá was born in the province of Teruel, Spain, in 1929. As he
explains in some of the chapters of this book, his family suffered the
consequences of the Spanish Civil War, and after studying theology in Spain and
in Rome, he became a professor of Spanish literature at New York University
until his retirement. Alcalá is a knowledgeable and scholarly man, known for his
careful editing of the trial records of Fray Luis de León, the works of Juan de
Valdés and the complete works of Miguel Servet. In New York he has organized
two important conferences on the Spanish Inquisition whose proceedings were
later published in book form and edited by Alcalá himself.11 Alcalá is, then, a
scholar who was working (around the 1970s) during one of the periods in which
the Spanish Inquisition has been most intensely debated, and one in which there
was an effective renewal of focus to which he has contributed.
The book’s coherence is woven around very clear and frequently reiterated
proposals. According to Alcalá, the Inquisition was not a religious institution and
was not founded for religious motives, but was political. The vast majority of the
judeoconversos were good Christians, and some of them were even leading
figures within Christianity, such as Fray Luis de León who, like other conversos,
was accused and persecuted because he had converso ancestors rather than as a
result of his Jewish beliefs. Finally it seems to be Alcalá’s view that there is not a
single reformer or radical thinker in early modern Spain who, if his genealogy is
examined closely enough, does not turn out to be a judeoconverso. He is
particularly interested in the Alumbrados, to whom he dedicates several chapters.

10
Américo Castro, La realidad histórica de España (México DF: Porrua, 1987), 13.
11
Ángel Alcalá (ed.), The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial mind (New York, 1987) and
Judíos sefarditas conversos: la expulsión de 1492 y sus consecuencias (Valladolid, 1995).

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For him, the connection between alumbradismo and judeoconversos is self-

evident. In order to understand these proposals, but above all in order to
understand the strangely combative tone with which he writes and in which he
stands up to his dialectical ‘enemies’, it is necessary to say something about the
scholars who came before Alcalá, and the origins of the positions of those he
defines in this book as his masters, namely Américo Castro and Benzion
Netanyahu. It is necessary to consider, in other words, the ‘tradition’ to which
Alcalá belongs, and the position he therefore takes up concerning the question of
‘judeoconverso identity’.
The concept of identity which we commonly use today is a product of
nineteenth-century cultural nationalism which became extremely popular in social
and humanistic studies in around the 1950s. Cultural difference was defined in
opposition to ‘the other’ and served as a key differentiator between political
entities, becoming an eternal essence transcending all considerations of time and
place. The idea of culture as something which can be delimited and described as a
coherent whole has nonetheless been placed in doubt in recent decades, as has the
idea of the existence of a clearly defined and clearly separated ‘other’. At the
same time, historical and social sciences have studied the complexity of cultural
formations and group identities, as well as their momentary contingencies in time
and space. It is now no longer possible, for example, to deal with the cultures of
colonial powers independently of those of the lands which they colonized, nor to
study the religious practices of Spanish Jews or Muslims in isolation from those
of their Christian neighbours, or vice versa. The study of the ways in which
societies and religions construct their similarities and differences has transformed
our understanding of a whole series of cultural formations, including early
Christianity as it stood in relation to Judaism, or contemporary Europe’s
relationship to Islam. It can no longer be argued that a late fourteenth-century
judeoconverso is the same as one from the late seventeenth or eighteenth-century.
But even among those historians who admit the importance of these contingencies
of time and space, essentialist notions related to the reproduction of deeply rooted
categories will sometimes seep into the discourse. The categories created by
various sixteenth-century power groups have taken hold to such an extent that it is
difficult to revise or discard them. This is a very real problem for which there is
no easy solution, because we need categories to understand events; but those
categories can often be so narrow that they affect our understanding.
The first historians to speak of a judeoconverso identity were Marcelino
Menéndez Pelayo and José Amador de los Ríos. The former set out, in his
Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, of 1880, to show how exceptional heresy
was in the terrain of Spanish religious belief, seen as immanently Catholic and
orthodox. An important role in heresy had been played by peoples alien to

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Spaniards themselves, such as judeoconversos, who were portrayed as excessively

rigorous (having the burning zeal of the neophyte) and given to morbid and
deviant mystical tendencies like messianism; and these tendencies were branded
with the inheritance and influence of Judaism. The opposite could also be true,
however, and conversos from the late fourteenth-century to the time of Spinoza
were also portrayed as sceptical and godless. For Amador de los Ríos, author of a
monumental and extremely well documented Historia social, política y religiosa
de los judíos de España y Portugal, published in 3 volumes in 1875-76, it was the
judeoconversos themselves who were responsible for the rigorous persecution of
Jews, since before the existence of conversos there had been no persecution:
“Ninguno [cristiano viejo] manifestó durante la Edad Media aquel infatigable e
impío encono que aguzaban en la pluma de los neófitos el hierro destructor de la
muchedumbre” (No Old Christian had shown throughout the Middle Ages that
indefatigable and impious rancour which in the pen of the neophytes stirred up the
destructive iron of the mob). This was a converso identity placed firmly in the
field of polemics (the pen of the neophytes) which in turn stirred up the blind mob
against its race. Apart from judeoconverso identity, what was also evident here
was the defensive attitude of nationalistic historiography (i.e. national and
therefore Catholic historiography) when it came to the existence of the
Inquisition: the Holy Office was justified as the defender of a Catholicism under
attack, and to attack Catholicism was to attack the very essence of Spain; instead,
for those who had a sense of historical shame or even guilt, the conversos could
be blamed for the spirit and direction taken by the Holy Office. 12
With these proposals for a group identity, sketched out in the nineteenth-
century, the judeoconversos have been portrayed as either fanatics or godless
sceptics, with a divided identity which no longer knew how to be either Jewish or
Christian. In recent times these qualities have acquired a positive sheen, making
the conversos precursors of modernity and an advance guard of the
Enlightenment. If they were neither proper Jews nor proper Christians, as was
maintained in anti-converso writings of the fifteenth-century, then, some recent
studies have proposed, they must have been ‘modern’.13 However, it should be
remembered that to make a positive interpretation of old-fashioned negative
claims does not always mean that one avoids the trap of believing in a
transcendental and essentialist notion of identity. Praise of Jewishness and anti-

12
Eleazar Gutwirth, “Conversos, Historiography, and Familiar Spirits”, in Late Medieval Jewish
Identities. Iberia and Beyond, ed. Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso (New York:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010) 27-40.
13
A recent example is Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos; Split identity and
Emerging Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P. 2009).

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Semitism share the same essentialist notion of identity. Both follow the same
logic.
But let us now consider the masters claimed by Ángel Alcalá. The first of
these, Américo Castro (1885-1972), was a literary historian of extraordinary
erudition, sensitivity and imagination. One of his merits was that he gave pride of
place in historiographical debate to the issue of Islamic and Jewish influences on
Spanish culture. His brilliant analysis of the influences that affected literary
creativity in Golden Age Spain have changed our way of reading and interpreting
the texts. However, his training as a philosopher (his reliance on Dilthey) and
maybe his own personal vital trajectory led him to define ‘essences’ in a way
which has dented his reputation and current standing among historians. Castro
was very concerned with both Inquisition and limpieza de sangre as a main factor
in inhibiting intellectual activity in Early Modern Spain.14 His main idea
concerning conversos is well-known: the judeoconverso element is of first
importance in the formation of the ‘historical reality of Spain’ and there is no
important mystic, thinker or writer of the Siglo de Oro who did not have a
judeoconverso background which endowed his work with certain characteristics,
namely melancholy, anguish and fatalism, the famous ‘vivir desviviéndose’: lives
that were left unlived, or lives that were lived in anguish. Castro’s position with
respect to the judeoconversos was quite ambivalent: admiring and appreciative, he
considered them the creators of the highest achievements of intellectual
production of the Spanish Golden Age, but also saw them as responsible for a
whole series of bitter characteristics of the Hispanic essence or ‘character’. And,
like Amador de los Ríos, he traced back to the ‘Jewish character’ the spirit of
inquisition, the obsession with lineage, the inclement polemic and discrimination
against former companions. In any case, the judeoconverso issue was one of
prime importance, an inescapable element of an identity which marked the literary
production, the very thought processes, of those writers who had a certain lineage.
It is not clear, in Castro’s work, what the ‘Jewishness’ marking the work of
conversos really was, or whether features of Judaism were translated into it, or
whether it can be interpreted as the fact that the conversos thought as ‘Jews think’.
Many of Castro’s followers and disciples have opted for a converso identity which
we might call ‘positional’: the literary features seen in the works of conversos
become, in their view, an indicator of the anguish and dread of knowing oneself to
be in a position of fragility and social insecurity with respect to other Christians.
This seems to entail, at times, the concept of a unified converso voice.
Benzion Netanyahu, whose work is the subject of an extremely long and
enthusiastic chapter in Ángel Alcalá’s book, became well known mainly because
14
On this issue, see the article by Henry Kamen, “Limpieza and the Ghost of Américo Castro:
Racism as a tool of Literary Analysis”, Hispanic Review 64, 1 (1966): 19-29.

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of two books about the judeoconversos, the first of which dates back to 1966 and
was translated into Spanish in 1994 under the title Los marranos españoles según
las fuentes hebreas de la época (siglos XIV-XV):15 In this book Netanyahu used
Hebrew sources to show that the Jewish communities of Spain and the Diaspora
no longer regarded the conversos as belonging to Judaism. However, the book by
Netanyahu which had the greatest impact was his The Origins of the Inquisition in
Fifteenth-Century Spain, which appeared in English in 1995 and in Spanish four
years later as Los orígenes de la Inquisición española en el siglo XV, in a
translation by Ángel Alcalá himself, in collaboration with Ciriaco Morón. For
Netanyahu, all Inquisition proceedings were a farce, and no credibility whatsoever
can be given to Inquisitorial sources, which limit themselves to repeating the same
clichés, the same set of questions trial after trial. According to Netanyahu, by the
end of the fifteenth-century all judeoconversos had become good Christians with
no links to Judaism, and the persecution which they suffered from the Inquisition
occurred as a result of anti-Semitism. Netanyahu made use of the Marranos to
prove and exemplify an eternal form of anti-Semitism, which his book on the
Spanish Inquisition traces back to ancient Egypt and takes forward to the
Holocaust. As a consequence of this anti-Semitism, assimilation was an
unattainable illusion. His main targets are those Jews who sought to assimilate,
and he bases an argument in favour of the creation of the state of Israel on the fact
that such assimilation was and has been always made impossible by anti-
Semitism. Netanyahu considers the converso question from the point of view of
Jewish national history.
Netanyahu’s work sparked off a very heated controversy. One of the most
debated of his proposals was that connecting Early Modern Iberia directly with
Nazi Germany.16 This is not the aspect that interests me here, but the question of
the Jewish identity (or lack of it, according to Netanyahu) of the converts. A good
number of Israeli historians from the so-called ‘Jerusalem school’, such as
Yitzhak Baer, presented a more nuanced view of the complexity of the New
Christians predicament and identity.17 Other historians of this school, mainly
Haim Beinart18, wrote more radically in support of the converts’ Jewishness.
15
Benzion Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century,
According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources (New York, 2nd ed. revised and enlarged, 1973).
16
More on this debate can be found in Yoseph Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-
Semitism: the Iberian and the German Models (Nueva York, 1982) or Christiane Stallaert, Ni una
gota de sangre impura. La España inquisitorial y la Alemania nazi cara a cara, (Barcelona,
2006).
17
Baer can be considered the founder of modern scholarship on the Jews of Spain. His work was
first published in Hebrew in 1945, but it was the Spanish translation, by José Luis Lacave,
Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana (Madrid, 1981), which had a wider impact.
18
Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: the Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem, 1981).

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Beinart in particular had a very different idea than Baer of ‘judeoconverso

identity’, identified by him with ‘Jewish identity’, and he defended the notion of
the existence of crypto-Jewish converts, martyrs of Judaism and preservers of the
Jewish religion during a prolonged period of resistance and fidelity. There are of
course different interpretations of what constitutes the Jewish nation, who may or
may not be counted among its number, raising questions of ancestry and so on:
modern problems of Jewish identity cannot help but have an effect on any quest
for ‘authenticity’.
Alcalá claims that unlike the Inquisition, he follows Netanyahu in showing
that most judeoconversos were good Catholics. Good Catholics, but with a
tendency towards religious dissidence and heterodoxy, towards “modernity”. In
various specific cases considered in his book his position is fuzzy. This is
particularly true of his chapter on Miguel Servet and his allegedly judeoconverso
origins (through a remote maternal great-grandmother) in the section which he
entitles ‘The secret key to his personality?’. In this chapter Alcalá seems not to
see eye to eye with Américo Castro’s proposal, in Alcalá’s words, that “al
interpretar la vertiente progresista de la cultura española adjudicándola
particularmente a personas de casta conversa… no sólo se supuso que la familia
de Servet tenía que acarrear sangre judía, sino que en tal suposición se cifraba la
clave de la originalidad y aun de la intrepidez de Miguel” (to interpret the
progressive tendency in Spanish culture by attributing it to persons of the
converso caste in particular… not only was it supposed that the family of Servet
had to bear Jewish blood, but in this supposition was found the reason for
Miguel’s originality and even his intrepidity) (p. 468). However, a few pages later
in the same chapter (p. 520), he concludes: “Habiendo señalado a Servet, un
parcial judeoconverso, un ‘hereje perseguido’, como origen de estas ideas, es muy
probable que su ecumenismo teológico, su radicalismo intelectual y el coraje con
que exigió que se reconozca el derecho a la libertad de conciencia se deban al
influjo que en su mente y conciencia pudo tener su parcial origen judeoconverso”
(Having picked out Servet, a partial judeoconverso, a ‘persecuted heretic’, as
being the origin of these ideas, it is very likely that his theological ecumenism, his
intellectual radicalism, and the courage with which he demanded the recognition
of his right to freedom of conscience were due to the influence that his partially
judeoconverso origin may have had on his mind and conscience).
It is perfectly possible to add other cases of eminent historians,
contemporary to Alcalá who have been unable to avoid the use of categories
which sometimes went against their own premises or ideas when applied to other
objects of study. One example is Julio Caro Baroja in his book Los judíos en la
España moderna y contemporánea [The Jews in early modern and contemporary
Spain], first published in 1962 and again in 1978. The very title of this book

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represents the adoption of a position, given that this is a study of the

judeoconversos. Although Caro Baroja states in various parts of the book that
many judeoconversos were good Catholics, the fact that the title of this work
describes them as ‘Jews’ implies an acceptance of the notion of the ‘Jewish
identity’ of the conversos which is not restricted by consideration of the practice
of a religion. Like much of Alcalá’s book, that by Caro Baroja is mainly based on
Inquisitorial documents and it gives priority – and in this it also resembles
Alcalá’s book – to individual stories, to independent biographies. The biographies
given by Caro Baroja are of course different: they include many stories of
conversos who remained secret Jews, especially among those known as the
portugueses. Caro Baroja had a taste for characters who were hard to classify,
those who distanced themselves from groups or did not fit properly into them, or
into anything else, as he showed in many of his other extraordinary books. His
study of Jews also required a monumental amount of work in archives and on the
individual life stories of people difficult to squeeze into group categories. But
when he writes about individual conversos he seems to be making the fact of
somebody having Jewish ancestors part of an idea of Jewishness far outside the
singular cases he is describing. Moreover, Caro Baroja was still able to finish his
work with an extremely confusing final chapter. He begins that chapter by
explaining the personal reasons and concerns which caused him to write it. Faced
with the terrible events that took place in Europe during the Second World War,
Caro Baroja undertook his research as a kind of “examen de conciencia, en una
revisión de mis ideas y de mis sentimientos en un punto esencial para el hombre
europeo: ¿qué pensar de los judíos?” (examination of my conscience, a revision of
my ideas and my feelings about an essential point for European man: what to
think about the Jews?), and he continues by stating that it was not his wish to
write “una obra de ‘una investigación científica’ como ahora se dice. Mi
propósito, en última instancia ha sido el de escribir, más bien, un libro moral,
sobre la moral y las costumbres” (a work of ‘scientific research’, as they say now.
My aim has ultimately been to write instead a moral book, one on morals and
customs) (p.273). He also explains that his ‘initial’ sympathy for Jews was very
limited, but that his sympathy for the Inquisition was equally lacking, and he
claims that this gives him a certain objectivity. He goes from there to a description
of the ‘Jewish character’, of how that character has had its share of blame in the
persecutions of Jews, and a presentation of the consequences and influences
which ‘the Jew’ has had on the ‘Spanish character’ – all of which statements I
would go so far as to describe as very startling, if not clearly anti-Semitic. These
asseverations are even more surprising if one takes into account that they come
from a man who a few years later was to publish an illuminating study of the
myths of Spanish national character. Or one who in his magnificent book Las
formas complejas de la vida religiosa. Religión, sociedad y carácter en la España

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de los siglos XVI y XVII [The complex forms of religious life. Religion, society
and character in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain], published in the same
year of 1978, included a chapter entitled ‘Seudobiología y seudorreligión: la
“leche mamada” y el fermento’ (Pseudo-biology and pseudo-religion: “suckled
milk” and ferment) which shows, to use his own words, ‘la conexión que se
establece entre un criterio moral y un criterio biológico, o si se quiere, entre la
religión y la patología, de suerte que a las faltas morales se les impone un castigo
hereditario, físico, corporal’ (the connection which is made between a moral
criterion and a biological one, or if it is preferred, between religion and pathology,
so that moral failings are given a hereditary, physical, corporal punishment). He
was referring here to the Agotes, but also to wet-nurses of converso origin whose
milk was thought capable of Judaizing the child who drank it. This is just another
example of the difficulty for Spanish historiography when it comes to discussing
judeoconversos and Jews, of the traps historians set for themselves in establishing
transcendental identities, or of the influence of contemporary events on a
historian’s research.
Many other historians tried to qualify some of Netanyahu’s ideas. One
example of such a historian is Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, who as a result is often
treated harshly and dismissively in Alcalá’s book. However, Netanyahu was in
general terms right to point to anti-Semitism as an inherent hazard when dealing
with ‘judeoconverso identity’, and he put his finger on an important issue when he
highlighted the dangers for historians of sticking too closely to their sources. In
my opinion, the main value of Netanyahu’s work is that the controversy which it
unleashed made it necessary to embark upon a revision, a new hermeneutics of
Inquisitorial records. It brought about a change in the close reading of trial
proceedings and interrogations, and what they include or remain silent about: in
other words, the clues which they do not follow up or which are deemed to be of
no interest. It became necessary to look again at the figures of the informer, the
Inquisitors and the so-called ‘familiars’ of the Inquisition. As a result we have
come to realise that the Inquisition invested the actions and statements of its
prisoners with significance for the basis of their lineage, and that it used this
lineage to qualify and classify their crimes. Netanyahu was of course not the only
scholar to point out this fact. Eleazar Gutwirth had argued convincingly in about
1980 that historians had in fact been reproducing the categories used in their
sources, following in the footsteps of the Inquisitors themselves in the way they
accepted the definition of groups, the priorities among their activities, and the
very formulation of questions.19 The parallel between Inquisitors and historians

19
Eleazar Gutwirth, “Jewish-Converso Relations in XVth-Century Segovia,” in Proceedings of the
Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, August 16–21, 1981), ed. World Union of
Jewish Studies, 5 vols. (Jerusalem, 1982), 2, pp. 49-53.

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became particularly obvious in questions of identity, that is to say, in the search

for characteristics and classificatory hallmarks which was the ultimate aim of the
investigations of both Inquisitors and historians, with the latter following the
procedures of the former to the letter. Netanyahu was not right when he said that
the judeoconversos were all Christians, or when he claimed that all trial
proceedings were a fiction, but he was correct to assert that lineage and genealogy
constituted an essential element, a prism through which crimes were considered.
In recent decades, historians have become more sensitive to the question
of how the Inquisition’s classifications were always determined by the
defendant’s origin, independently of his or her practices or beliefs. Such origins
conditioned interrogations, investigations and assessments of guilt in behaviour
which could include anything from festive, hygienic or culinary manifestations,
which today we would describe as cultural, to simple examples of blasphemy and
other offences considered minor when they were committed by ‘natural
Christians’. The ‘heretics’ of various lineages shared, on the one hand, a whole
series of religious positions opposed to Catholicism, but these positions were
considered differently if the ‘nature’ of the prisoner differed. Thus, to give a
specific example, rejection of the cult of images, or the iconoclasm which often
went with it, was seen as a symptom of Judaism, Islamism, or Lutheranism,
depending on whether the prisoner belonged to one of those groups because of his
origins (the Flemish, French or foreigners in general were systematically
suspected of Lutheranism). All three of these groups rejected oral confession, the
cult of images, the dogma of the Holy Trinity and that of trans-substantiation, and
the existence of Purgatory. They constituted, for mainstream society, a real
hetereology, the image in negative of the orthodox ongoing discourse as
permanently re-elaborated by the institutional Church.20 The three groups which
the Inquisition classified as heretics shared a series of stereotypes in the eyes of
Old Christians: particular emphasis was placed on the idea that they were
conspiring with an external enemy to bring about the downfall of Spain, that they
indulged in free or unbridled sexual activity which placed Spain in danger not
only by undermining its most basic values, but by resulting in an excessive rate of
reproduction which could alter the balance and the percentage of those who had
‘pure blood’.
There is, at any rate, no doubt that to be obsessed with lineage like some
historians (such as Américo Castro), to invest behaviour with a meaning which
depends on the lineage of the person who carries it out, is to follow exactly the
same logic as the Inquisition.

20
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (University of Minnesota Press,
1986).

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How to avoid the traps of identity and an excessively uncritical application

of current values? Can we equate the fact of being converso with mysticism or
with alumbradismo? I would suggest to place the study of conversos within a
wider perspective, within a broader and thus richer framework, i.e. one which
takes into account similar processes taking place in Europe at the same time,
making the judeoconverso issue less specific and unique, connecting it with
different religious movements of reform, and to open new vias of study on the
much neglected question of the influence of Lutheran currents in Iberia.
As far as I know, it was John Edwards, in his well-argued article of
21
1988 , who first rejected the notion that religious dissent among converts should
automatically be attributed to an ongoing affection for Judaism, and who first
linked inquisitorial material on Judaizers with the general incidence of heresy and
scepticism across Europe. Edwards’ work provides a corrective to the long
standing view arguing that the Inquisition was not founded for religious reasons,
as was also claimed by Netanyahu and Caro Baroja. It is hardly necessary for me
to insist on this point. For at least three decades, leading historians have made
tremendous advances in defining the process known as ‘confessionalization’
which took place in Europe in the period after the Protestant Reformation and
Catholic Counter-Reformation movements. Confessionalization is the process of
formation and definition of separate religious communities, and is in turn part of
the formation process of the state. Political powers used confessionalization to lay
down territorial boundaries at the same time that they used them to impose strict
social control on their subjects. Confessionalization implied a fundamental
historical change which meant ecclesiastical and religious alterations, but also
closely linked social and political transformations. Delumeau, for example,
analysed in various fascinating books the means used by the Church to inspire
feelings of fear and guilt in believers regarding the sins and transgressions which
they had committed,22 and Adriano Posperi’s work on ‘tribunals of conscience’
revealed the role of the sacrament of confession in the imposition of discipline,
and an education in obedience and the acceptance of authority.23 These were times
and processes, then, when it is not possible to separate political institutions from
religious ones. The Inquisition was both things at the same time.

21
John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450-1500”,
Past and Present 120 (1988): 3-25. Included in J. Edwards, Religion and Society in Spain, c.1492,
(Aldershot: Variorum, 1996).
22
Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: 1971), or La peur en Occident
(XIVè-XVIIIè siècles): une cité asségée (Paris: Fayard, 1978), (El miedo en Occidente, Madrid,
Taurus, 2002); or La péché et la peur: la culpabilisation en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 1983).
23
Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Rome: Einaudi,
1996).

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It is now nearly forty years since the concept of ‘social discipline’ first
enlivened debates on the historiography of early modern Europe, and confirmed
that without social discipline there can be no confessionalization. Social discipline
was essential for confessionalization because in order to impose a hegemonic
ideology it was necessary to achieve consensus among a large part of the
community. The success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation after the Council of
Trent would have been unthinkable without social discipline. With respect to the
Inquisition, recent studies have shown that the act of informing or denouncing
reflected both the interior acceptance of discipline and a consensus among the
population subjected to such discipline.24
According to these views, the Holy Office was, without a doubt, a
formidable apparatus of discipline and social control, but it could not avoid being
instrumentalized in turn by other powers-that-be, as well as serving as a stage for
the resolution of tensions among different social groups, and not only those with
converso origins. It was, for example, used in instances of rivalry over local
power.25 If we look only at the total number of trial proceedings rather than the
harshness of sentences, we see that the Inquisition tried mainly Old Christians
whose beliefs or behaviour did not match the new dictates of Trent. The anxiety
and uneasiness with which the Inquisition inoculated subjects of the Hispanic
monarchy cannot have affected only the judeoconversos; at the same time, the
processes of ‘social discipline’ and confessionalization, the consensus created
around a particular model, must inevitably have affected judeoconversos as well.
Thus it is that we find judeoconversos (if we must insist on searching out lineages
in this way) not only among alumbrados or reformers, but also among scholars
and bureaucrats, Inquisitors and the regular clergy, and at all levels of society.26
However, we can also find numerous judeoconversos who tried to continue being
Jewish in secret and who became ‘new Jews’ when they fled to settle in Livorno
or Amsterdam.27 It is difficult to find one sole category which covers them all,
except for their lineage. It could be said that we can find individuals with a

24
Thomas Werner, Los protestantes y la Inquisición en España en tiempos de Reforma y
Contrarreforma (Leuven University Press, 2001).
25
Jaime Contreras, Sotos contra Riquelmes. Regidores, inquisidores, criptojudíos (Madrid: Anaya,
1992); and José Pardo Tomás, El médico en la palestra: Diego Mateo Zapata (1664-1775) y la
ciencia moderna en España (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla León, 2004) are both good examples of
the Inquisition used by competing elites against their rivals.
26
On the impossibility of the Inquisition of enforcing blood purity even among its own ranks, H.
Kamen, Spanish Inquisition (Yale University Press, 1998) 238, and S. Haliczer, Inquisition and
Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834 (Berkeley: University of California U.P. 1990)
121-123.
27
Yosef Kaplan, Judíos nuevos en Amsterdam: estudios sobre la historia del judaísmo sefardí en
el siglo XVII (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1996).

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judeoconverso lineage wherever we choose to look for them. As Miriam Bodian

says, we should consider the converso issue as “a changing cultural construction,
evolving over many generations and answering a variety of needs”.28
But we should remember that throughout Europe in the period after the
Reformations religious conversion occurred on a scale which can perhaps only be
compared with the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Empire, or the
conversion to Islam of the Middle East and the southern region of the
Mediterranean after the conquests of the eighth-century. In the Europe of the first
centuries of the early modern period a very large number of people were faced
with new beliefs, new religious formations and the disintegration or reformulation
of others, with new personal identities. Like the judeoconversos, many resorted to
Nicodemism, dissimulation, or to internal forms of religiosity. A whole series of
Protestant sects were forced to practise Nicodemism and internal religion in a way
which was not very different from the secret practices of those Jewish conversos
or Moriscos who continued to practise Judaism or Islam. The role of conversos in
movements of religious dissidence was conditioned less by the dissimulated
survival of crypto-Jewish beliefs (and of course even less by an inheritance of
blood) than by a forced religious Nicodemism, often in the form of a withdrawal
into interiority, directly linked to the social stigma which was produced when
stained origins were discovered. And it is this phenomenon, produced by a belief
in stained blood and its stigmatization, which is most characteristically Spanish,
and which makes events in Spain different from the processes referred to in the
rest of Europe: the process through which early modern Iberians (and historians
after them) were creating conversos: making the fact of somebody having Jewish
ancestors part of an idea of Jewishness far outside the individual.
All other phenomena belong to the Europe of the Baroque period, and go
far beyond the judeoconverso issue, even if they do include it. But although we
are limiting our focus to what happened in Spain, recent research suggests that the
climate of reform, the processes of spiritual concern and search channelled in
different ways to those laid out by the institution of the Church, disgruntlement
with or lack of trust in ecclesiastical hierarchies, intellectual scepticism and
internal exile are all forms of behaviour in which members of seventeenth-century
Spanish society took part, without there being a direct connection with their
origin. It happened regardless of whether that origin was converso or Old
Christian. As in the rest of Europe, conversions affected many aspects of the
religious life of Iberian society and certainly drove different kinds of desire for
reform. The most frequently repeated symptom of this desire is what Stefania

28
Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern
Amsterdam, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) 11.

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Pastore in a recent and highly important book29 calls ‘Paulinism’, a notion

(already used by Marcel Bataillon in his seminal Erasmo y España) which was to
prepare the ground for the reception of Erasmian and Lutheran ideas. Pastore
proposes examining the construction in Spain of a religiosity of interiority, and
the relationship between this religiosity and the conversos. Her view of the
conversos is much more complex, rich and nuanced than that found in Alcalá’s
book. Particularly refreshing is the treatment she proposes of the first alumbrados,
whom she depicts as supporters of the need for faith as illumination and of the
idea of the redundancy of the Law, to the extent that some of them defended the
existence of one sole Revelation, with Mohammed among its prophets. The
typically alumbrado rejection of rules, rituals and ceremonies was based on a
radicalism which ended up invalidating all signs of recognition or belonging. The
recent research carried out by Pastore and other, mainly Italian, historians (such as
Carlo Ginzburg, Adriano Prosperi or Massimo Firpo),30 suggests that the
judeoconverso element is no doubt important in the religious and social history of
Spain, and may also have contributed towards channelling certain religious
concerns or even acted as a catalyst for some of them; but this does not mean that
they should be seen as the only factor, or that they were the only social group to
pick up on the reforming impulse.
The arguments of Miriam Bodian follow the same line.31 Her book Dying
in the Law of Moses is based on four major Inquisition trials. Two of these men
were of Old Christian origin; all four were accused of Judaizing, declared to be
‘dogmatists’ and burned at the stake. As Bodian shows in her important study is
that in their challenge to ecclesiastical authority, the defendants drew their
arguments in part from Jewish anti-Christian polemics, but were also inspired by
Reformation and Lutheran currents which had penetrated all levels of society
within the Iberian Peninsula. Like the Lutheran reformists, these four men
stressed that the only source of religious truth was Scripture, in its literal sense.
They also drew on Protestant anticlerical rhetoric, one of them even quoting
Luther himself, while some looked towards the home-grown spirituality of
alumbradismo, with its emphasis on inner religiosity and its disapproval of
objects of worship. The behaviour of these ‘martyrs’, as they were later
designated and celebrated by the exiled Jewish community of Amsterdam,
29
Stefania Pastore, Un’eresia spagnola. Spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione
(1449-1559) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004), Spanish translation, Una herejía española,
(Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2011).
30
Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul “Beneficio de
Cristo” (Turin: 1975); Massimo Firpo, Tra alumbrados e “spirituali”. Studi su Juan de Valdés e il
valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ‘500 italiano (Florence: 1990).
31
Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses. Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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reflected the ‘aggressive and confrontational religious climate of the

Reformation’32. We can conclude by saying that a battle was being waged across
Europe —including Iberia— between those forces who wanted to define
orthodoxies and those that began by resisting; and then (like the cases covered by
Bodian) actively fought for what even then was being called freedom of
conscience, and was not in the least the monopoly of individuals of Jewish origin.
The Inquisition could not but classify them as “Judaizers”: to think or admit new
categories of “heresy” would have been too corrosive, would have undermined the
Inquisition itself.
To conclude: it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of a converso
identity in collective terms nor claim the concept of a unified converso voice. The
presence, indeed prominence, of conversos in many spheres of early modern
Spanish culture cannot be doubted. Maybe we can accept in individual cases the
suggestion that sometimes their condition as New Christians, and what this
condition entailed socially, had something to do with this prominence, and that
their family background often gave rise to individual (or singular) creative
responses. It is much more difficult and risky (to say the least) to posit that they
were united by a specific way of viewing and interpreting religion, society, and
politics.
It can be said that following in the footsteps of Américo Castro, Alcalá and
others like him made considerable contributions in their day, and that these
contributions made it possible to re-think Spanish history. The importance of their
work is there for all to see. But since then historiography has advanced in new
directions which have made the old terms of the debate no longer relevant,
because the focus has been enlarged and placed within a wider picture. The
radical and dramatic change that took place as the Middle Ages became the Early
Modern period calls for a series of new questions to be addressed. As historians
belonging to twenty-first century societies expressing in our own historiographical
endeavours a reflection on our lives, we are bound to delve in questions which
must arise out of an observation of the new boundaries Old Christians wanted to
mark between themselves and New Christians. In particular, why did a society
which fought so hard at the end of the Middle Ages to convert its minorities and
assimilate them initiate such a violent reaction when clear differentiation
disappeared, precisely because the assimilation it claimed to desire had begun to
come about? How did Hispanic Christians justify resisting that loss of difference
which they had once tried to impose? At what moment did the fear of infiltration
become more powerful than the desire for assimilation and how did it co-exist

32
Miriam Bodian, op.cit. p.xi.

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with it? These are all pressing and intensely pertinent questions, relevant when we
come to reflect on our own contemporary societies.

19