Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

13. Rejection and Assimilation: A Porous Purity

98 chapter 13 REJECTION AND ASSIMILATION a porous purity B y far the most infamous manifestation of the racial definition of Jews was limpieza de sangre, or blood purity. Early modern Iberia begat a unique legal and biological construct based on the supposition that religious difference “infected” the blood of the persons carrying it. As a result, a propensity to heterodoxy could be inherited from one generation to another. The royal confessor and Inquisitor General Antonio de Sotomayor put it succinctly in a 1632 memorandum: “This nation [the Jews] have this fault [heresy] so deeply buried in their entrails that some people say that it is a real infection and disease of their blood and that it is found in everyone touched by this blood, [and] that it is in a certain way for them what original sin is for everyone else.”1 The inclusion of the cautionary “some people say” suggests that there was room for disagreement over aspects of this theory. Indeed, the distinction between pure and impure blood was engulfed in controversy from the very beginning. Opposition to this belief ran from start to finish of the early modern era and was often expressed publicly. Far from being an unquestioned foundation of Spanish culture, limpieza brought into the open unresolved tensions in theology and scientific thought. Above all, it served as a means less of blocking the Rejection and Assimilation: A Porous Purity 99 absorption of conversos into Old Christian society than of functioning as a yardstick of measuring different levels of and paths to assimilation. Before documenting these assertions, a word should be said about the problem of researching and analyzing blood purity. Despite the interest of this theme, relatively little work has been done on the question of limpieza. This can be attributed in part to an obvious epistemological difficulty: how to reconstruct a social process—in this case a combination of religious and racial assimilation—that by its very nature does its best not to leave any traces. In practical terms, limpieza worked by requiring candidates for certain privileges or offices to prove their “pure blood” by providing elaborate ejecutorias. These texts reconstructed family genealogies by supplying answers to a lengthy questionnaire concerning three or so generations of both consanguineal and affinal kinsmen. Such affidavits were assembled by delegates appointed by the institutions involved, whose expenses were paid by the candidates. The delegates often traveled considerable distances—or arranged for local representatives to carry out their duties—in search of information in the places where the candidate’s families had resided. Their investigations relied more than anything else on collective memory and on the assumption that people would continue to remember the converso roots of individual families. Departing from normal practice in contemporary law courts, limpieza inquiries specifically accepted, and even privileged, the testimony of women as the persons most familiar with local gossip. They also encouraged testimony from the clergy, whose indirect knowledge of family secrets derived from the confessional. In the end, most of the surviving documentation involves successful candidates. The cases in which limpieza failed to be demonstrated left behind scant traces amid the mountains of paper produced. It is not hard to see why historians have until recently been content to study the theory of blood purity, while leaving unattended the question of its real incidence in society. Another matter is the strong ideological valence of this strand of racialist thought. As is true of many of the more controversial aspects of early modern Spanish history—particularly those having to do with the Inquisition and its vision of religious orthodoxy—a spider’s web of myth has been spun around the doctrine of limpieza. Finding one’s way amid this confusion means not only separating theory from practice. It also obliges the historian to pay special attention to signs of dissonance instead 100 Parallel Histories of assuming the existence of a massive social consensus in favor of what sometimes turned out to be a disruptive public policy. One of the principal qualifications to keep in mind is that the practice of blood purity was far from universal. Only certain institutions demanded demonstration of pure blood as a condition for membership. A rapid overview of the venues involved includes the following: Municipal governments. This is, of course, where blood purity first appeared, in the form of Toledo’s Sentence-Statute of 1449. (This law did not stick, by the...