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  • Jésuites, Morisques et Indiens: Étude comparative des méthodes d'évangélisation de la Compagnie de Jésus d'après les traités de José de Acosta (1588) et d'Ignacio de las Casas (1605-1607)
  • John W. O'M Alley, S.J.
Youssef El Alaoui . Jésuites, Morisques et Indiens: Étude comparative des méthodes d'évangélisation de la Compagnie de Jésus d'après les traités de José de Acosta (1588) et d'Ignacio de las Casas (1605-1607). Études et essais sur le Renaissance 65. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006. 678 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. map. chron. bibl. €99. ISBN: 2-7453-1353-3.

For the past dozen years books about the Jesuits have been flying off the presses, especially in France, Italy, and North America, and the interest shows no sign of abating. This new historiography has moved beyond the old cliche of shocktroops of the Counter Reformation to more evenhanded approaches based on the massive documentation that still survives. Alaoui's book, originally his Paris doctorate directed by Alain Milhou, stands in this new tradition that, while it has made more manifest the incredible scope of the Jesuits' engagement with the issues of their day, at the same time has shown how the Jesuits did have a "way of proceeding" that characterized them and that they were for the most part consistent in applying.

Alaoui compares the approaches the Jesuits adopted for evangelizing the Muslims (especially in southern Spain) and the Indians in Spanish America. He comes up with the conclusion that they were basically the same. Although unsurprising in itself, Alaoui grounds the conclusion in detail in such a way as to make his book an important study not only of the Jesuits but of the larger issue of Spanish handling of religious minorities, a complex historical problem that, like Jesuit historiography, is also moving beyond the old truisms.

Comparative studies are illuminating but hard to pull off. Alaoui is successful because he centers his study on two Jesuits — José de Acosta for America and Ignacio de las Casas for Spain — and on the treatises they wrote about evangelizing. That gives him focus. With the focus in place he then tests the norma-tive treatises against social history. Guided by the earlier scholarship of Father Francisco de Borja de Medina, Alaoui has asked many of the right questions and [End Page 950] mined the pertinent archives. A major contribution of the book is the first printed edition of las Casas's De los moriscos de España, of his Memorial ad rey Filipe III, Memorial ad supremo Consejo de la Inquisición, and Memorial al provincial de la Compañía de Jesús.

There were, according to Alaoui, two basic approaches to dealing with the Moriscos and the Indians. The first aimed at creating a tabula rasa by the eradication of all vestiges of the person's original identity, including mother tongue, and enforcing conversion through penalties or positive inducements. The objective was to create not only a religiously but also a culturally homogeneous society and empire. The other was, to use Alaoui's word, more "humanistic." It was more respectful of "the Other," more willing to adapt to it, less prone to eradicating differences unless they were clearly incompatible with Christianity or with the long-range success of the Spanish crown and empire.

The Jesuits fell into the latter category. Exhibits A and B are Acosta and las Casas — the former well-known to scholars, the latter much less so. Alaoui is persuasive in arguing that the more accommodating approach of these two men was found among the Jesuits broadly (contemporary scholarship generally supports this thesis), but it certainly did not hurt that both of them came from new Christian families. Acosta's was Jewish, las Casas's Muslim. The Jesuits' program, simple and straightforward, took all its meaning from their conviction that for everybody's good conversion to Christianity had to be sincere, could not be coerced.

What did the Jesuits do? They learned the languages, whether Arabic, Quechua, or some other Amerindian language, and they did not try, or want, to eradicate them...

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