Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Rafael Sabatini

of the Christian faith. He urged that not only must this be punished, but that the havoc which these Judaizers were working among the more faithful New-Christians, and the proselytizing which they went so far as to attempt among Old-Christians, must be checked.

      To carry out this urgently-required purification, he implored the Queen to establish the Inquisition.49

      There was a speciousness, and even a justice, in his arguments which must have impressed that pious lady. But her piety, intense as it was, did not carry her to the lengths required of her by her priestly counsellor. The balance of her splendid mind was singularly true. She perceived that here was matter that called for a remedy; but she perceived also the fanaticism inspiring the friar who stood before her, and realized how his fanaticism must exaggerate the evil.

      She was aware also of the extreme malevolence of which the New-Christians were the object. By their conversion they might have deflected the religious hostility of the Castilians; but the more deeply-rooted racial antagonism remained. It not only remained, but it was quickened by the envy which these New-Christians were exciting. The energy and intelligence inherent in men of their race were serving them now, as they had served them before, to their undoing. There were no offices of eminence in which New-Christians were not to be found; there were none in which they did not outnumber the Old-Christians—the pure-blooded Castilians.

      This the Queen knew, for she was herself surrounded by converts and the descendants of converts. Several of her counsellors, her three secretaries—one of whom was that chronicler, Pulgar, whose record of the situation has been quoted—and her very treasurer were all New-Christians.50

      These men Isabella knew intimately, and esteemed. Judging the New-Christians generally by those in her immediate service, she was naturally led to discount Ojeda’s imputations against them. She perceived the source of these imputations, and she must have taken into consideration the ineradicable bitterness of the popular feeling against Jews and the intensity of a prejudice which extended—as we have said—to the New-Christians to such an extent that they continued to be known as “Judios,” notwithstanding their conversion, so that often in contemporary chronicles it is difficult to determine to which class the writer is referring.

      We have said that, in spite of conversions, the racial hostility remained. The Christian attitude towards the Hebrew had not changed in the hundred years that were sped since, under the incitings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the mob had risen up and massacred them. They were the descendants of the crucifiers always.

      A vestige of this feeling lingers to this day in the peninsula. In the vocabulary of the Portuguese lower orders, and even of the indifferently educated, there is no such word as “cruel.” “Jew” is the term that has entirely usurped its functions, and as an injunction against cruelty to man or beast, “Don’t be a Jew!” (Não seja judeu!) is still the only phrase.

      No conception of what was the popular feeling at the time can be conveyed more adequately than by a translation of the passage from Bernaldez concerning the manners and customs of the Jews. Bernaldez was a priest, and therefore, to some extent, an educated man—as in the main his history bears witness—yet a piece of writing so ludicrously stupid and detestably malicious as this passage can only have emanated from a mind in which bigotry had destroyed all sense of proportion.

      The only historical value of the passage lies in the deplorable fact that undoubtedly it may be accepted as a faithful mirror of the prejudice that existed in Isabella’s day.

      It runs:

      “Just as heretics and Jews have always fled from Christian doctrines, so they have always fled from Christian customs. They are great drinkers and gluttons, who never lose the Jewish habit of eating garbage of onions and garlic fried in oil, and of meat stewed in oil, which they use instead of lard; and oil with meat is a thing that smells very badly, so that their houses and doorways stink vilely of that garbage; and they have the peculiar smell of Jews in consequence of their food and of the fact that they are not baptized. And although some have been baptized, yet the virtue of the baptism having been annulled by their credulity [i.e. their adherence to their own faith] and by their Judaizing, they stink like Jews. They will not eat pork save under compulsion. They eat meat in Lent and on the eve of feast days.... They keep the Passover and the Sabbath as best they can. They send oil to the synagogues for the lamps. Jews come to preach to them in their houses secretly—especially to the women, very secretly. They have Rabbis to slaughter their beasts and poultry. They eat unleavened bread in the Jewish season. They perform all their Jewish rites as much in secret as possible, and women as well as men seek whenever possible to avoid the sacraments of Holy Church.... They never confess truthfully, and it happened that a priest, once confessing one of these, cut a fragment of cloth from his garment, saying: ‘As you have never sinned, let me have this as a relic to heal the sick.’... Not without reason did Our Lord call them generatio prava et adultera. They do not believe that God rewards virginity and chastity, and all their endeavour is to multiply. And in the days of the strength of this heresy many monasteries were violated by their merchants and wealthy men, and many professed nuns were ravished and derided, they not believing in or fearing excommunication, but rather doing this to vituperate Jesus Christ and the Church. Commonly swindling people by many wiles and cheats, as in buying and selling, they have no conscience where Christians are concerned. Never would they undertake agriculture, ploughing or tilling or raising cattle, nor have they ever taught their children any office but that of sitting down to earn enough to eat by as little labour as possible. Many of them have raised up great estates in a few years, not being sparing of their thieving and usury, maintaining that they earn it from their enemies....”51