Pedagogy of Fear: Making the Secret-Jew Visible at the Public Autos de Fe of the Spanish Royal Inquisition

Throughout the Iberian world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century an all-purpose scapegoat drawn from a few prosperous convert families was thrust by inquisitors into view during times of social stress. The tribunal's education in hatred required that ever-more-grandiose pageants be held in major cities. The issue raised by these Autos de Fe is how such a "pedagogy of fear" kept subjects of the Crown in line by evoking racial hostility with little more proof presented after secret trials than mere sentences. It was through costume, ceremony, and printed invective that defendants were men made over into society's definitive Other: the Secret-Jew.