Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain by James S. Amelang

Author:James S. Amelang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2013-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

JUDAIZING AND

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF

ORTHODOXY

IT IS TIME now to turn to those conversos who consciously rejected the path of assimilation and who opted instead for some degree of allegiance to their ancestral creed. The real extent of what the Inquisition referred to as judaizing is the single most controversial issue in the ample and growing historiography of early modern Spanish Judaism. It is obvious that the exact numbers of these crypto-Jews, or even more generally the proportion they constituted within the overall body of conversos, will never be known. (This is not unusual in early modern history; who, for example, can say with certainty how many Englishmen and women practiced Catholicism under Elizabeth I?) Still, educated guesses can be made about many aspects of their history—and few would doubt that it is an interesting history indeed.

The difficulties of charting the contours of a secret religion are compounded by the sheer impossibility of knowing which inner convictions lay behind or beyond outer practice. This is especially true of individuals whose very intention was to dissemble, to simulate one set of beliefs in order better to serve another. Rather than spin wheels endlessly about matters that by their very nature cannot be known, it would be more useful to approach religious experience as a spectrum that ordered a wide range of possibilities. At one end one finds crypto-Judaism or even open adherence to Judaism of the sort that characterized the (admittedly miniscule) body of martyrs who refused to disguise their loyalty to the faith of their fathers. At the other extreme stood full and willing adherence to Catholicism, including a normative antisemitism. In between loomed numerous niches or positions for spiritual self-fashioning. Two qualifications need to be made concerning the factors which influenced location on this spectrum. First, fundamental choice was almost always made by individuals and their families. There were, to be sure, instances in which judaizers met and even worshiped together in larger communities. But in the long run, circumstances forced crypto-Judaism, and indeed any significant deviation from Catholic orthodoxy, to reduce its scale of organization. To do otherwise inevitably meant detection. Second, high levels of instability often marked one’s position on the spectrum. Not only could individuals shift from one stance to another (and back) during their lifetimes. The general tendency to judaize was also subject to important shifts, above all as a consequence of the mass migration of Portuguese conversos to Castile beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. The much higher proportion of judaizers among the Portuguese meant a sudden injection of crypto-Judaism, which now began to thrive in places where it had been dying out.

What can be said with a fair degree of assurance is that even if most conversos the Inquisition tried in its initial stage were judaizers—and this is a reasonable if unprovable assumption—crypto-Jews seem quickly to have become a minority by the end of this phase. A plausible reconstruction of the long-term evolution of secret Judaism would place its high point during the first Inquisitorial generation of the 1480s.

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