Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World

Preface

xi Preface This book explores the careers of a handful of men who were tried by the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, who became celebrated martyrs among some of their Jewish contemporaries. It will examine what drove them to choose a path of martyrdom, and how they both improvised and drew on established patterns as they asserted and rea≈rmed their convictions. All of these men were ‘‘judaizers’’∞ —that is, baptized Christians prosecuted by the Iberian inquisitions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for secretly embracing ‘‘the Law of Moses.’’ But unlike most accused judaizers, they decided at some point after their arrest to declare their beliefs openly and defiantly before the tribunal. They almost invariably announced that they intended ‘‘to live and die in the Law of Moses’’—a formula borrowed from the pledge of pious Catholics to ‘‘live and die in the Law of Christ.’’ This was not just a statement of belief. It was also an implicit assertion of their right to determine religious truth independently, relying on revealed Scripture (in tandem with reason or divine illumination). In their challenge to ecclesiastical authority, these martyrs≤ drew in part from medieval Jewish anti-Christian polemical arguments that had been absorbed into crypto-Jewish lore. (They sometimes reinforced or refined their arguments by subversively reading Church authors.) But they also drew from Reformation currents that—contrary to popular belief—were significant in early modern Iberian society. Echoing voices that could be heard throughout Europe, they insisted that Scripture, understood in its literal sense, was the only source of religious truth. (Unlike Protestants and sectarians, of course, they rejected the New Testament.) They borrowed, too, from Protestant anticlerical rhetoric: indeed, one of them cited Martin Luther. Some of them tapped into an Iberian form of spirituality known as alumbradismo. The alumbrados, to simplify their characterization greatly, were religious seekers who stressed interiority, de-emphasized objects of worship, and aroused inquisitorial suspicions of Protestant heresy. More generally, the celebrated martyrs’ behavior reflected the aggressive and confrontational religious climate of the Reformation. One of the hallmarks of the great judaizing martyrs was their readiness (and ability) to engage the inquisitors in disputations for months or years on end. Death at the stake was inevitable. But if the martyrs rejected a compromise and chose to be burned alive (rather than being garroted first), they achieved the crowning distinction. In this book I have not tried to define what does or doesn’t constitute martyr- xii PREFACE dom. Martyrdom is a concept that eludes definition: like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, no definition can satisfactorily embrace the di√erent behaviors that have been gathered together under the rubric of martyrdom over the centuries and across cultures. I have tried only to understand what martyrdom meant to the conversos (forcibly baptized Jews and their descendants) and judaizers (most, but not all of them, drawn from the converso population) of Iberian lands, as well as to members of the ‘‘rejudaized’’ converso diaspora in early modern Europe. This episode in the history of martyrdom would merit a book if only because of the unusual nature of the evidence about it. Most historical episodes of martyrdom are preserved only in didactic, idealized, convention-bound literary forms: evidence rarely extends far beyond a set of partisan accounts written as propaganda or in commemoration. Scholars often find themselves analyzing such texts more for what they say about the authors and audiences than for what they reveal about the martyrs. The contrast is striking when we turn to evidence about the careers of the subjects of this book. The key documents for their careers are not heart-stirring martyrological accounts targeting a wide public, but inquisitorial dossiers: that is, detailed legal records of individual trials, compiled by trained and disciplined (albeit biased) o≈cials for their own use alone. These dossiers are actually much more than trial records. They include genealogical information, intercepted messages, wardens’ accounts of conversations between prisoners in the so-called ‘‘secret cells,’’ reports about the prisoners’ eating habits, and so on. It is true that the documents must be used with caution (though the view that they are inherently unreliable is no longer tenable). In particular, we must keep in mind that the interrogations, formulated as indirect speech in the third person and often paraphrased, are not strictly verbatim transcripts. But they are close to verbatim. However deeply, then, we might wish this evidence had never...