History of the Inquisition of Spain. Henry Charles Lea
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were the earliest and greatest sufferers, and it is necessary here to say only that in the cruel laws which marked the commencement of the fifteenth century both Moor and Jew were included in the restrictions designed to humiliate them to the utmost, to render their lives a burden, to deprive them of the means of livelihood and to diminish their usefulness to the State. These laws were too severe for strict and continuous enforcement, but they answered the purpose of inflicting an ineffaceable stigma upon their victims and of keeping up a wholesome feeling of antagonism on the part of the population at large. This was directed principally against the Jews, who were the chief objects of clerical malignity, and it will be our business to examine how this was skilfully developed, until it became the proximate cause of the introduction of the Inquisition and created for it, during its earliest and busiest years, almost the sole field of its activity. Meanwhile it may be observed that, in the closing triumph over Granada, the capitulations accorded by Ferdinand and Isabella were even more liberal to Jews and Moors than those granted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, by such monarchs as Alfonso VI, Ferdinand III, Alfonso X, and Jaime I. Unless they were deliberately designed as perfidious traps, they show how little real conscientious conviction lay behind the elaborately stimulated fanaticism which destroyed the Jews and Mudéjares.[238]
CHAPTER III.
THE JEWS AND THE CONVERSOS.
TO appreciate properly the position of the Jews in Spain, it is requisite first to understand the light in which they were regarded elsewhere throughout Christendom during the medieval period. It has already been seen that the Church held the Jew to be a being deprived, by the guilt of his ancestors, of all natural rights save that of existence. The privileges accorded to the Jews and the social equality to which they were admitted under the Carlovingians provoked the severest animadversions of the churchmen.[239] About 890, Stephen VI writes to the Archbishop of Narbonne that he has heard with mortal anxiety that these enemies of God are allowed to hold land and that Christians dealt with these dogs and even rendered service to them.[240] It is true that Alexander III maintained the ancient rule that they could repair their existing synagogues but not build new ones, and Clement III honored himself by one of the rare human utterances in their favor, prohibiting their forced conversion, their murder or wounding or spoliation, their deprivation of religious observances, the exaction of forced service unless such was customary, or the violation of their cemeteries in search of treasure, and, moreover, both of these decrees were embodied by Gregory IX in the canon law.[241] Yet these prohibitions only point out to us the manner in which popular zeal applied the principles enunciated by the Church and, when the council of Paris, in 1212, forbade, under pain of excommunication, Christian midwives to attend a Jewess in labor, it shows that they were authoritatively regarded as less entitled than beasts to human sympathy.[242]
How popular hostility was aroused and strengthened is illustrated in a letter addressed, in 1208, by Innocent III to the Count of Nevers. Although, he says, the Jews, against whom the blood of Jesus Christ cries aloud, are not to be slain, lest Christians should forget the divine law, yet are they to be scattered as wanderers over the earth, that their faces may be filled with ignominy and they may seek the name of Jesus Christ. Blasphemers of the Christian name are not to be cherished by princes, in oppression of the servants of the Lord, but are rather to be repressed with servitude, of which they rendered themselves worthy when they laid sacrilegious hands on Him, who had come to give them true freedom, and they cried that His blood should be upon them and their children. Yet when prelates and priests intervene to crush their malice, they laugh at excommunication and nobles are found who protect them. The Count of Nevers is said to be a defender of the Jews; if he does not dread the divine wrath, Innocent threatens to lay hands on him and punish his disobedience.[243] The Cistercian Cæsarius of Heisterbach, in his dialogues for the moral instruction of his fellow monks, tells several stories which illustrate the utter contempt felt for the feelings and rights of Jews, and in one of them there is an allusion to the curious popular belief that the Jews had a vile odor, which they lost in baptism—a belief prolonged, at least in Spain, until the seventeenth century was well advanced.[244] Even so enlightened a prelate as Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in 1416, reproves the sovereigns of Christendom for their liberality towards the Jews, which he can attribute only to the vile love of gain; if Jews are allowed to remain, it should be only as servants to Christians.[245] General prohibitions of maltreatment availed little when prelate and priest were busy in inflaming popular aversion and popes were found to threaten any prince hardy enough to interpose and protect the unfortunate race.
MEDIEVAL PERSECUTION
Of course under such impulsion there was scant ceremony in dealing with these outcasts in any way that religious ardor might suggest. When, in 1009, the Saracens captured Jerusalem and destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the rage and indignation of Europe assumed so threatening a form that multitudes of Jews took refuge in baptism.[246] When religious exaltation culminated in the Crusades, it seemed to those who assumed the cross a folly to redeem Palestine while leaving behind the impious race that had crucified the Lord, and everywhere, in 1096, the assembling of crusaders was the signal for Jewish massacre. It would be superfluous to recount in detail the dreary catalogue of wholesale slaughters which for centuries disgraced Europe, whenever fanaticism or the disappearance of a child gave rise to stories of the murder rite, or a blood-stained host suggested sacrilege committed on the sacrament, or some passing evil, such as an epidemic, aroused the populace to bloodshed and rapine. The medieval chronicles are full of such terrible scenes, in which cruelty and greed assumed the cloak of zeal to avenge God; and when, in rare instances, the authorities protected the defenceless, it was ascribed to unworthy motives, as in the case of Johann von Kraichbau, Bishop of Speyer, who, in 1096, not only saved some Jews but beheaded their assailants and was accused of being heavily bribed; nor did Frederic Barbarossa and Ludwig of Bavaria escape similar imputations.[247] It was safer and more profitable to combine piety and plunder as when, in April, 1182, Philip Augustus ordered all Jews to leave France by St. John’s day, confiscating their landed property and allowing them to take their personal effects. His grandson, the saintly Louis, resorted without scruple to replenishing his treasury by ransoming the Jews and the latter’s grandson, Philippe le Bel, was still more unscrupulous in 1306, when, by a concerted movement, he seized all the Jews in his dominions, stripped them of property, and banished them under pain of death. In England King John, in 1210, cast Jews into prison and tortured them for ransom, and his grandson, Edward I, followed the example of Philip Augustus so effectually that Jews were not allowed to return until the time of Cromwell.[248]
Spain remained so long isolated from the movements which agitated the rest of Christendom that the abhorrence for the Jew, taught by the Church and reduced to practice in so many ways by the people, was late in development. In the deluge of the Saracen conquest and in the fierce struggles of the early Reconquest, the antipathy so savagely expressed in the Gothic legislation seemed to pass away, possibly because there could have been but few Jews among the rude mountaineers of Galicia and Asturias. It is true that the Wisigothic laws, in the Romance version known as the Fuero Juzgo, remained nominally in force; it is also true that a law was interpolated in the Fuero, which seems to indicate a sudden recrudescence of fanaticism after a long interval of comparative toleration. It provides that if a Jew loyally embraces the faith of Christ, he shall have license to trade in all things with Christians, but if he subsequently relapses into Judaism his person and property are forfeit to the king; Jews persisting in their faith shall not consort with Christians, but may trade with each other and pay taxes to the king. Their houses and slaves and lands and orchards and vineyards, which they may have bought from Christians, even though the purchase be of old date, are declared confiscated to the king, who may bestow them on whom he pleases. If any Jew trades in violation of this law he shall become a slave of the king, with all his property. Christians shall not trade with Jews; if a noble does so, he shall forfeit three pounds of gold to the king; on transactions of more than two pounds, the excess is forfeit to the king, together with three doblas; if the offender is a commoner, he shall receive three hundred lashes.[249]
CONDITION OF SPANISH JEWS
The date of