Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
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(fol. 27V)
Engaging this spontaneous indictment of Luso-conversos, Pereira’s questioner prompted him to identify his presumed accusers by name and to explain why he had called them “Jewish pícaros.” The inquisitorial notary who assisted Inquisitor Paniagua in the case recorded Pereira’s response as follows:
In Cadiz [the defendant] begged Andrés Gómez and Manuel Díaz for alms … and [he begged] other people whom he does not remember … [yet] he remembers these two because they are very rich merchants. Andrés Gómez [is in charge of] the [Royal] Sugar Monopoly, of spice shops, and of many other things, and … Manuel Díaz is the administrator of His Majesty’s millones.100 … [I]n Seville he remembers having asked [one] Dr. Messa for alms—he is a doctor—and [Messa] did not want to give him any, so [the defendant] also called [Messa] a Jew. He also remembers having begged for alms in Madrid from Antonio Henríquez, Portuguese, who is a businessman, who is of the Nation too.… [After Henríquez refused, the defendant] told him that he [meaning Henríquez] was a Jew of the [Hebrew] nation. And the same occurred with Antonio Váez de Guzmán, who [the defendant] understands is a businessman as well. (Emphasis added, fol. 27v)
Pereira’s interlocutor was not satisfied by this response. How, he asked, did Pereira know that the merchants, the doctor, and the businessman were “Jewish” if (as the questioner put it) “all the Portuguese appear to be of the same nation”? (fol. 28r). Pereira answered,
In Portugal those who are merchants are held in low esteem; there they live mistreated [ahajados] and vituperated by the rest; and that is why they move to Castile, because [in Portugal] they are not considered well-born.… [T]his [attitude] is very common in Portugal.… And since the [aforementioned individuals] are Portuguese and they have come to live in Castile, he [the defendant] called them Jews, [although] he has not seen them do anything against our holy Catholic faith. (Emphasis added; ibid.)
It was common knowledge in Portugal, Pereira continued, that merchants disliked nobles and disparaged them (fol. 29r). Furthermore, the persons in question had probably testified against him “because they had seen him outside his homeland and impoverished” (ibid.). Here Pereira’s implication was that the supposed accusers felt superior to him because of their wealth and their relative comfort in exile. In Spain, Pereira was hinting, such men could not only amass power and property, but they could do so while feeding their bloated commoners’ egos and escaping a well-deserved popular backlash.
The final portion of the Pereira dossier records the deposition of the defendant’s brother-in-law, Antonio Páez de Santi (or Sandi), a resident of Madrid and knight of the Order of Christ. It is not necessary to rehearse the details of Páez’s testimony. Suffice it to say that the information he provided concurred fully with Pereira’s declarations. The witness confirmed his prior acquaintance with the prisoner by accurately describing Pereira’s physical appearance. Crucially, Páez verified Pereira’s statements concerning the latter’s identity, his genealogy, and the purpose of his trip to Madrid. Indeed, the witness intimated that he was expecting Pereira’s arrival in the capital at the time of the arrest (fols. 36r–37v).
It is disappointing that the Pereira dossier has no formal conclusion; rather, it ends with the narrative record of Páez’s testimony. Only one document follows that record, effectively closing out the inquisitorial file. That document is a brief letter written in the defendant’s own hand and dated December 15, 1661. In the letter Pereira acknowledges receiving some personal effects, presumably the ones that the Holy Office had confiscated at the moment of his arrest. Thus it appears that, in the end, Inquisitor Paniagua and his assistants set Pereira free. Had the inquisitors realized, on the basis of Páez’s deposition, that Pereira had been a victim of libel? Unfortunately, there is no way to answer this question with certainty because the case file does not preserve any document indicating that the process against Pereira had been or would be dismissed, much less suggesting why Pereira had been released. Similarly there is no sign that the inquisitors took any steps to prosecute Mártir et alia for offering false testimony.101
An Analysis of the Pereira Case
Regardless of how and why the proceedings against Pereira concluded, it is clear that Páez’s deposition had brought the inquest to a crossroads. On one hand, the inquisitors had heard a series of mutually supportive and fairly consistent denunciations. Lending weight to these denunciations was the fact, made evident in the course of the inquest, that Pereira barely possessed a rudimentary knowledge of Catholic dogma and did not know several prayers. To make matters worse for the defendant, three of the denouncers were socially respectable individuals whom the inquisitors could not dismiss out of hand as ignorant and conniving rabble: Diego de Castilla was a knight of Santiago, while Pedro Mártir and Anselmo de la Huerta were religiosos in good standing. Notably, Friar Huerta was an inquisitorial calificador, a theological consultant to the Holy Office who specialized in the identification of heresy. What better qualifications than Huerta’s to produce a persuasive deposition in the eyes of his colleagues?
On the other hand stood Páez’s testimony, which entirely corroborated key portions of the suspect’s deposition. Also bolstering Pereira was his own suggestion that he had successfully undergone pruebas as an aspirant to a military honor. By deposing that he had been the subject of a genealogical investigation, Pereira flaunted his confidence that he was without sangre infecta (infected blood). More importantly, he intimated that he had the means to prove his “cleanliness” and thus, implicitly, his religious orthodoxy and good character. It is true that genealogical investigations were not foolproof because some individuals (usually wealthy ones) could purchase forged certificates of limpieza de sangre in order to obtain favorable evaluations. In any case, “clean” blood did not in itself preclude heresy from the point of view of the Holy Office. Still, pruebas were potentially among Pereira’s best defensive assets since the Inquisition could easily verify the existence of those documents and thus authenticate a significant part of his testimony.102 If in fact Pereira had submitted to the scrutiny of the Order of Christ, his pruebas could at least raise some doubts as to the credibility of his accusers. At most, the pruebas could serve as ancillary evidence of his good faith, even if such records, as fallible instruments, could not prove his limpieza or his religious self-identity in a definitive way.
Was Pereira, as his detractors claimed, a dishonest converso and a crypto-Jew? Did Pereira actually dislike cristãos-novos, as he virtually boasted to his interrogators, or was he feigning prejudice in order to avoid punishment, in this case by portraying himself as a respectably Judeophobic Old Christian?
To conclude that Pereira was a converso Judaizer who sought to trick his questioners by constructing an elaborate web of lies requires us to suppose that he was a bold and resourceful master of deception. Such an image of Pereira contrasts sharply with the one his accusers drew of him. In their rendering, Pereira was extremely clumsy and volatile: He disclosed his supposed Jewishness in fits of bitterness (“I renounce the Jewish whore who gave birth to me”) or through a rather improbable naiveté (“Don’t they say [that the second Person of the Holy Trinity] was the Son?”).
It is certainly conceivable that Pereira was a rash individual who made some outrageous statements while inebriated or out of a misguided bravado when he felt cornered by a hostile clique. All the same, Pereira’s behavior as his accusers depicted it grossly overstepped the boundaries of plausibility. For example, it would have required an inordinate and therefore unlikely carelessness or stupidity on Pereira’s part to say to a group of strangers that he was entitled to live by whatever religion suited his fancy. Seventeenth-century Spain was a country in which even the mere appearance of religious infidelity was anathema; Pereira must have known this. If he did not, or was so impulsive or demented that he could not control his heretical tongue, he certainly did not have the presence of mind to manufacture a seamless screen of falsehoods, with or without assistance of his brother-in-law.
A historical reconstruction of Pereira must reject the notion that he was at once a calculating, clever rogue and a volatile fumbler who could barely disguise his “Judaism.” Pereira could not be both astute and asinine.103 Thus