Divided Families in Converso Spain

Divided Families in Converso Spain DIVIDED FAMILIES IN CONVERSO SPAIN by David Gitlitz David Gitlitz, Professor of Languages at the University of Rhode Island (where he has also served as Provost), is the author of La estructura lirica de fa comedia de Lope de Vega, translation-editions of major works by Lope, Calderon , and Quevedo, and numerous articles on Spanish Golden Age poetry, prose, and theater, as well as HispanoJudaic topics. He is currently preparing an extensive ethnography of Hispanic Marrano customs. 1 Jews and converts residing in the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th and early 16th centuries lived through some of the most extraordinary changes ever undergone by a single generation. Iberia in the 1480s was an agglomeration of small Christian kingdoms in the north bringing to a close an 800-year-old war of reconquest against the Muslim south. The nobility was fractious and had spent most of the preceding century in a series of civil wars. Most towns were small; the economy was rural and agrarian. Jews and Muslims and Christians lived as neighbors in an environment in which peaceful coexistence and grudging tolerance were rapidly giving way to hostility. Few Spaniards had traveled beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Ferdinand and Isabel were teenagers. By 1530, Spain was a single kingdom which controlled territory from the Americas to the Philippines, from the Low Countries to Austria and Hungary and Naples. Cities and capitalism were booming. Muslims and Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492, and there remained a racially and religiously complex community of oldChristians and new-Christians of diverse origin and beliefs. Ferdinand and Isabel's grandson Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor, and cracked jokes in German at the Spanish court. During this period, Spanish Jews and converts found the rules which governed their social, religious, economic, and physical existence changing under them with bewildering rapidity. Before the generalization of the Inquisition in 1480, Jewish and convert communities intermingled with 2 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No. 3 relative impunity. Intermarriage with old-Christians was common, as the converts sought safety or status in alliances with old-Christian nobility, and the impoverished nobility sought the infusion of capital from the converts.1 Many Jews converted for reasons. of faith; others found incentives to convert in the social, economic, and political mobility that their new-Christian status gave them.2 Converts were encouraged to assimilate wholly into the Catholic mainstream, but prior to 1480 they were not rigorously chastised for continuing to adhere to some Jewish cu5toms.3 With the establishment of the Inquisition, however, JudaiZing habits, in some cases ingrained for three generations, suddenly became mortally dangerous. When the Expulsion order took final effect in the summer of 1492, and the last wave of mass conversions occurred, there were officially no longer any Jews in Spain, and the open practice of Judaism came to a halt. The heterogeneous convert society had to seek ways to accommodate patterns of observance that mixed Catholic and Jewish beliefs and custom in every conceivable proportion. To talk of this cataclysmic change in such sweeping and abstract terms does very little to help us appreciate the human drama of trying to cope with such rampant instability. This paper looks at relationships during this period in those families divided along religious lines. Prior to the summer of 1492, 'these were families with Christian and Jewish members. After the summer of 1492, these were Christian families, some of whose members might be converts, all or some of whom continued to Judaize. For the most part the data is found in the copious records of the Inquisition of Spain, Portugal, and their dependencies. Divided families appear frequently enough to enable us to discern patterns as well as recount anecdotes. In most Iberian cities prior to the Expulsion the entire population of .Jews and conversos formed a single extended family, laced together through generations of marriage within their small communities. The fact 'Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: Mentor, 1965), pp. 28-30. 'From early in the fifteenth century a series of so-called purity of blood laws (feyes de limpieza de sangre) established a pattern which excluded converts from the power...