members of a great Spanish family, simply immersed themselves in politics, art, and literature, and appeared to have no interest in religion at all. Pedro, indeed, would scoff openly about being a fake Christian, which, he claimed, left him free to do as he wished without bothering about holy rules and regulations.24 Shortly before 1492, one Alvaro de Montalban was brought before the Inquisition for eating cheese and meat during Lent; he had thereby, significantly, broken not only a Christian fast but also Jewish law, which forbids the consumption of meat and dairy products together. He obviously felt no commitment to either faith. On this occasion, Alvaro escaped with a fine. He was not likely to feel warmly disposed to Catholicism. His parents had been killed by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism secretly; their bodies had been exhumed, their bones burned, and their property confiscated.25 Unable to retain even a tenuous link with Judaism, Alvaro was forced into a religious limbo. As an old man of seventy, he was finally imprisoned by the Inquisition for a repeated and deliberate denial of the doctrine of the afterlife. “Let me be well off down here,” he had said on more than one occasion, “since I don’t know if there is anything beyond.”26
Alvaro’s conviction meant that his son-in-law, Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), author of the tragicomic romance La Celestina, also came under suspicion. He therefore cultivated a careful facade of respectable Christianity, but in La Celestina, first published in 1499, we find a bleak secularism beneath the bawdy exuberance. There is no God; love is the supreme value, but when love dies, the world is revealed as a wasteland. At the end of the play, Pleberio laments the suicide of his daughter, who alone gave meaning to his life. “O world, world,” he concludes, “when I was young I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds.” But now
you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles … a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.27
Unable to practice the old faith, alienated by the cruelty of the Inquisition from the new, Rojas had fallen into a despair that could find no meaning, no order, and no ultimate value.
The last thing that Ferdinand and Isabella had intended was to make Jews skeptical unbelievers. But throughout our story we will find that coercion of the sort they employed is counterproductive. The attempt to force people to accept the prevailing ideology against their will or before they are ready for it often results in ideas and practices which, in the eyes of the persecuting authorities themselves, are highly undesirable. Ferdinand and Isabella were aggressive modernizers who sought to suppress all dissidence; but their inquisitorial methods led to the formation of a secret Jewish underground and to the first declarations of secularism and atheism in Europe. Later some Christians would become so disgusted by this type of religious tyranny that they too would lose faith in all revealed religion. But secularism could be just as ferocious and, during the twentieth century, the imposition of a secularist ethos in the name of progress has been an important factor in the rise of a militant fundamentalism, which has sometimes been fatal to the government concerned.
In 1492, about eighty thousand Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity had been given asylum in Portugal by King João II. It is among these Portuguese Jews and their descendants that we find the most outright and dramatic instances of atheism. Some of these Jews desperately wanted to retain their Jewish faith, yet found it either difficult or impossible to do so because they had no adequate cult. The Jews who fled to Portugal in 1492 were tougher than the Spanish conversos: they preferred to be deported rather than abjure their faith. When Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, he was compelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, to have the Jews in his domains forcibly baptized, but he compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for a generation. These Portuguese Marranos had almost fifty years to organize an underground in which a dedicated minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and tried to win others back to the old faith.28
But these Judaizing Marranos were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world. They had received a Catholic education, and their imaginations were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines. They often thought and spoke about Judaism in Christian terms: they believed, for example, that they had been “saved” by the Law of Moses rather than by Jesus, a concept that has little meaning in Judaism. They had forgotten a great deal of Jewish law, and as the years slipped by, their understanding of Judaism became still more attenuated. Sometimes their only sources of information about the faith were the polemical writings of anti-Semitic Christians. What they ended up practicing was a hybrid faith that was neither truly Jewish nor truly Christian.29 Their dilemma was not unlike that of many people in the developing world today, who have only a superficial understanding of Western culture but whose traditional way of life has been so undermined by the impact of modernity that they cannot identify with the old ways either. The Marrano Jews of Portugal experienced a similar alienation. They had been forced to assimilate to a modernized culture that did not resonate with their inner selves.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jews were permitted to leave the Iberian Peninsula. A Marrano diaspora had already formed in some of the Spanish colonies, as well as in southern France, but here Jews were still not allowed to practice their faith. However, during the seventeenth century, Judaizing Marranos migrated to such cities as Venice, Hamburg, and—later—London, where they could openly return to Judaism. Above all, the Iberian refugees from the Inquisition poured into Amsterdam, which became their new Jerusalem. The Netherlands was the most tolerant country in Europe. It was a republic, with a thriving commercial empire which, during its struggle for independence from Spain, had created a liberal identity as a contrast to Iberian values. Jews became full citizens of the republic in 1657; they were not confined to enclosed ghettoes, as they were in most European cities. The Dutch appreciated the Jews’ commercial expertise, and Jews became prominent businessmen, mingling freely with gentiles. They had a vigorous social life, an excellent educational system, and a flourishing publishing industry.
Many Jews undoubtedly came to Amsterdam for its social and economic opportunities, but a significant number were eager to return to the full practice of Judaism. This was not easy, however. The “New Jews,” who had come from Iberia, had to be reeducated in a faith about which they were largely ignorant. The rabbis had the challenging task of guiding them back, making allowances for their real difficulties without compromising the tradition. It is a tribute to them that most Jews were able to make the transition; despite some initial tension, they found that they enjoyed their return to the ancestral faith.30 A notable example was Orobio de Castro, a doctor and professor of metaphysics, who had lived in Spain as a secret Judaizer for years. He had been arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, had recanted, and taught medicine in Toulouse as a fake Christian. Finally, weary of deception and a double life, he had arrived in Amsterdam in the 1650s to become a forceful apologist for Judaism and an instructor of other returning Marranos.31
Orobio, however, described a whole class of people who found it very difficult to adjust to the laws and customs of traditional Judaism, which seemed senseless and burdensome to them. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as Orobio himself had done. But, Orobio reported impatiently, “they are full of vanity, pride and arrogance, confident that they are thoroughly learned in all subjects.”
They think they will lose credit as erudite men if they consent to learn from those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws, and so they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand.32
These Jews, living for decades in religious isolation, had been forced to rely on their own rational powers. They had had no liturgy, no communal religious life, and no experience of the ritual observance of