Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
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conversos, and where the eminent historian of Franco-Judaic life, Zosa Szajkowski, focuses too narrowly on that phenomenon, I devote considerable attention to the mercantile matrix of renegade behavior.36 By consciously placing the economic activities of returnees at the center of my interpretation I attempt to ground an understanding of the mentality of these dissidents in their mundane circumstances and interests. In this respect my study concurs with and, I believe, confirms Contreras’s conviction that the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conversos lies “close to the ground,” and is “low and pedestrian” in its horizons, and that therefore this history cannot be properly visualized by recourse to the “grandiloquent conceptions” (collective spiritual malaise, transcendent ethos, and so on) that so dominated the work of historians such as Castro.37
Significantly, my study is not concerned with the question of whether conversos were or were not Jews in essence. For that matter, the study is not concerned with the question of whether crypto-Judaism was or was not an inquisitorial invention. Most of my subjects lived at one time or another in the Sephardi Diaspora. As a consequence most of them participated in one or another facet of normative Jewish life. Generally speaking, then, my subjects’ Judaizing is not at issue.
Of course, my interest in the “low and pedestrian” is a hallmark of social history, an approach to the reconstruction of the past that locates “important” historical events in the realm of ordinary individuals. Because it is ultimately an exploration of the mentalities of ordinary conversos, the present study fits especially well within the branch (or ally) of social history that focuses on the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of experience. Cultural history, as that branch is known, encompasses various studies of identity and its formation. Among these last belong a number of microhistorical inquiries that draw extensively from inquisitorial dossiers.38 Reuven Faingold’s recent article on the inquisitorial prisoner Vicente Furtado comes immediately to mind as an example from the field of converso studies.39 Because it includes a case study in the self-construction of a typical renegade, the fifth chapter of this book is akin to Faingold’s contribution, at least with regard to the theme and documentary source I explore. However, my case study is part of a larger discussion; consequently it goes further than Faingold in relating its main subject, an inquisitorial defendant, to broader historical phenomena. More importantly, the chapter, like the work as a whole, reconstructs the viewpoints of cultural border crossers and attempts to gain insight into the psychology of these dissidents. By contrast, the work of Kaplan, Tishby, and Goldish has reconstructed the impressions of Jewish communal leaders, as well as these authorities’ disapproving reactions toward the dissidents. In turn, I examine the testimony of marginal conversos themselves to provide a portrait of the lives and minds of these renegades.40
There is yet another subfield of historical scholarship that my work may well advance. I am referring to latter-day studies on southwestern French kehillot, notably the voluminous work of Gérard Nahon, that of Anne Zink, and that of Zosa Szajkowski. Along with other students of Franco-Judaica, Nahon has amply documented the existence and legal basis of organized Jewish life in the Portuguese enclaves of early modern France. His articles, however, have focused almost exclusively on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This focus is consistent with the range of primary sources that the author has chosen to examine—in this case, French governmental material as well as Jewish communal documents. Very few of the latter documents survive that would illuminate the early and middle decades of the 1600s.41 Here, however, I focus on these very decades through the use of Spanish and Portuguese documents that Nahon has not surveyed. These sources contribute to our knowledge of a formative period in Franco-Sephardi life, chiefly by revealing a conflictive aspect in the evolution of the Judeo-Portuguese Diaspora.
True to his interest in the integrative forces that transformed Portuguese immigrants into French Jews, Nahon has, to my knowledge, never written concerning renegades, much less discussed their economic and personal links to the Iberian Peninsula. For her part, Anne Zink, who has contributed important articles describing the economic profile of converso settlements in the French southwest, has not explicated these communities’ pivotal relationship with the Iberian economies.42 Szajkowski began this project, yet in my view did not bring it to fruition, in his article “Trade Relations of Marranos in France with the Iberian Peninsula in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”43 Neither scholar has discussed cases of social dissidence or focused on the religious lives of conversos who trafficked across the Spanish border. Again, I contribute to existing scholarship by covering this relatively uncharted historical territory. In the process, I expose fissures in the surface of communal Jewish life that are invisible from Zink’s and Nahon’s more sweeping views.
As for my documentary sources, a few words are in order. Notwithstanding the emergence of novel historiographical approaches, it is clear that every historian who has recently endeavored to reconstruct the behavior of New Christians via inquisitorial dossiers has come face to face with an old methodological puzzle. In short, the question is if and how one can determine whether the testimony contained in inquisitorial procesos reflects the true thoughts and experiences of the informants. Another way to present this problem is to ask: To what degree did witnesses and defendants lie to the Inquisition in order to protect themselves and others? Did the declarants’ testimonies merely parrot the preconceptions and biases of the inquisitors? Were the declarants’ testimonies partially or thoroughly falsified?44 Alternately, did they reflect a real dialogue (albeit an uneven one) between the accusers and the accused?45
The solution I provide in this work is not definitive because it is based on a relatively small sample of inquisitorial cases. Even within that sample, the content, style, and tone of informants’ recorded declarations varied. That is why each deposition demanded a fresh assessment of its trustworthiness. Far from excluding any interpretive possibility, much of the testimony I surveyed showed traces of inquisitorial distortion, deliberate omission or prevarication on the part of the informants, as well as plentiful elements of truth.
In evaluating the reliability of informants’ depositions, I applied the following commonsensical assumptions: First, that the sincerity, and therefore the basic credibility of a given testimony are altogether separate from the plausibility of its literal content. This distinction, I believe, is critical for the proper interpretation of a decidedly religious, early modern world in which people were routinely conditioned to treat biblical miracles and other blatant impossibilities as literal truths. As an example I offer the defendant Aldonza Cardoso de Velasco. She testified in 1666 that another woman, Maria Roman, had succeeded in “binding” a man—in other words, rendering him sexually impotent—by tying the laces of his undergarments into knots, by reciting an incantation over the knots, and by stomping on the garments in ritualistic fashion. That Roman’s stratagem had no real power as magic, of course, does not mean that Cardoso was lying when she divulged her own belief in that power.46
Second, and more importantly, I have posited that an item of testimony is probably (though not necessarily) truthful if the declarant did not stand to gain any advantage in offering it to his or her questioners. Along the same lines, a declaration is believable if the declarant was aware (or was probably aware) that rendering it would harm his or her interests. It is a fact that numerous inquisitorial suspects provided basic personal data without which the inquisitors would have found it very difficult to investigate and incriminate them. These data included the suspects’ own names and aliases, places of baptism, genealogies, relationships with convicted Judaizers, and the like. Only a stubborn skeptic would argue that much of these data were inauthentic.
Third, I have posited that an item of testimony is generally trustworthy if those who recorded it had no reason to twist or falsify it in any particular way, even if some unconscious distortions occurred in the recording process. There is no consensus among scholars as to why inquisitors and declarants may have wanted to shape what is recorded in the procesos. For now, suffice it to say that I address possible motives for distortion as my discussion of the cases (and their contexts) progresses.
Fourth, and most obviously, I have posited that a given deposition is credible if reliable, external evidence supports it. Because direct documentary proof of the credibility of inquisitorial informants