Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

5. Communities and Individuals

41 chapter 5 COMMUNITIES AND INDIVIDUALS R eligious life in virtually all circumstances incorporates personal as well as collective forms of observance. Fulfillment of spiritual obligations under conditions of vigilance and persecution usually tends to favor more individual, and less readily visible, practices. Yet at the same time, external, hostile pressures often foster greater solidarity among members of subordinate groups and wind up intensifying collective adherence to the sort of beliefs and conduct the majority hopes to prevent. This is especially true when the religious minority is also marked as different on other grounds—social, economic, ethnic, or cultural. Such was the case of the moriscos of early modern Spain. They were identified not just as descendents of Muslims and thus potential and real cryptoMuslims . They were also seen as constituting a separate group in other respects as well. In the end these differences were judged to be ineradicable as well as irreconcilable with Christianity. After this most fateful decision in their regard was made, it did not require a great conceptual leap to opt for their expulsion. Still, the Christian majority did not come to this conclusion immediately. A full century of doubt and debate preceded adoption of this radical measure . During this interval Old Christians forged an image of the moriscos as 42 Parallel Histories a social group with recognizable and in some respects unique characteristics of its own. Perhaps the most prominent feature of this image was the strong solidarity believed to prevail among the converts. Numerous early modern Spaniards repeated the cliché that despite their poverty, one rarely came across a morisco beggar. Whatever their other faults, New Christians were credited with showing enough solidarity among themselves to assure that the poorer among them did not lack for charity. Old Christians attributed the fundamental cohesiveness of morisco society to several factors. First and foremost was segregation. This involved, as has been seen, settlement patterns based on physical separation from the majority in almost all places where the moriscos lived in sizable groups. In some cases the existence of the moriscos as a community apart even found institutional expression. Thus, in the Aragonese town of Caspe in the sixteenth century, Old and New Christians governed themselves through two different municipal councils. A second factor promoting group cohesion was the relative lack of internal socioeconomic differentiation among the moriscos. In a well-known passage from a brief opposing the expulsion of 1609, the humanist Pedro de Valencia remarked that “the moriscos are for the most part ditch-diggers, reapers, gardeners, foot-couriers, muleteers, blacksmiths, and other trades which involve hard work and effort.”1 In the morisco hamlet of Benimuslem mentioned above, of the twenty villagers examined by the Inquisition whose trades were specified, eighteen were yeomen farmers, one an agricultural laborer, and one a (ritual?) butcher. And of the more than five hundred suspects the Cuenca tribunal tried as secret Muslims during the sixteenth century, not a single one had a university education. In fact, there were only two references to medical personnel among them, a “setter of broken arms and legs” and “a maker of trusses for hernias.”2 This represents a perceptible decline in status from earlier periods, when Muslims and later moriscos won widespread fame for their expertise in healing. Such was recognized even by their bitter enemy Cardinal Cisneros; when he burned numerous Arabic-language texts in post-1492 Granada, he spared a few books of medicine, a discipline “to which that race was always attached, and to great profit.”3 In the hands of the Inquisition, this fame turned to notoriety during the sixteenth century. Moriscos stood out among the best-known cases of healers whom the Holy Office tried for diabolic magic. One famous Communities and Individuals 43 example was Jerónimo Pachet, who was called to court to heal the eightyear -old Philip III after the learned Christian physicians proved unable to help. Another morisco healer even became something of a folk legend. Román Ramírez was a professional storyteller as well as surgeon who died in an Inquisitorial prison in 1599. The reputation of moriscos as healers even reached beyond Spain’s borders. When a London surgeon named George Baker published a medical tract in 1574 he included a discussion of a popular healing oil—called oleum magistrale—that he assured readers had been concocted by a morisco empiric in Spain.4 That most moriscos were...