A.D. 1500-1600.
THE JEWS IN PORTUGAL, SPAIN, AND HOLLAND.
The Jews having been publicly expelled from Portugal and Spain, it
might be thought that there was an end of their history, so far as
those two countries are concerned. So, doubtless, there would have
been, had the expulsion been a complete one. But it was notorious
that, though they had been nominally driven out, great numbers
remained, who, though they called themselves Christians, were in
reality Jews, and nothing but Jews. Miserable as was the condition of
those whose sufferings have been described in the previous chapters,
it may be doubted whether those who stayed behind were not more
wretched still. True, they had escaped the dreaded severance from
home and country; they might still dwell among the familiar scenes of
youth and manhood; they had not undergone the horrors of the outward
voyage, and the landing among barbarous and inhospitable strangers.
But there was the self-reproach and shame of a false profession
of faith; there was the necessity of complying with forms and
observances which in their heart they hated; there was the continued
dread of detection and ruin. They knew themselves to be the objects
of continual suspicion, that keen and merciless eyes were ever upon
them, and that on the slightest evidence of any open recurrence to
the worship which they still secretly rendered, the fearful scenes,
still fresh in their memory, would be renewed.
It was not long before these anticipations were fulfilled. On Easter
Day, 1506, a fierce and sanguinary outbreak occurred in Lisbon,
which illustrates only too faithfully the state of public feeling
in that day towards the New Christians—which had now become the
customary designation of the Jews. Its immediate cause was an insult
offered to a famous miraculous crucifix, which had been brought out
of the cathedral into the great square. The plague had broken out
in the town, the season was unusually dry, and the pestilence was
aggravated by the want of water. It was hoped that through the aid
of the image some help might be sent from above. On a sudden, while
the eyes of all were anxiously fixed on it, the features of the
sculptured Christ were seen to smile. The people all broke out into
expressions of admiring thankfulness, except one man, who declared
that the smile had been caused by a stream of light let in by a lamp
through the back of the figure. He was one of the New Christians,
and the hollowness of his profession had already been suspected.
The Dominicans denounced him as an apostate, and he was instantly
struck down and slain. The mob followed up this deed of violence by
attacking and slaying all the countrymen of the offender whom they
encountered. The monks incited them to further excesses, promising
(it is said by a Jewish historian) that whoever should murder a Jew
would not have to pass more than one hundred days in purgatory, let
his offences be what they might. The rabble, thus incited, assailed,
gutted, and burned the houses of all the Jews in the town; men,
women, and children were everywhere massacred; those who had fled
into the churches for sanctuary were torn from the altars, dragged
out, and burned. For three days the carnage went on unchecked.
At the end of that time King Emmanuel, who had been absent at
Abrantes, returned to Lisbon. He sent a body of troops into the town
sufficient to quell the disturbance; the ringleaders of the outbreak
were arrested and hanged; and the magistrates, who had shown their
incompetency to deal with the emergency, removed from office. Such
of the New Christians as had escaped the murderous hands of the mob
again passed under the protection of the law. Yet they could not
but have felt like men dwelling near the crater of some volcanic
mountain, which might at any moment burst forth in torrents of
burning lava, and overwhelm them utterly; and it is worthy of notice
that, although the rioters were sternly punished for their lawless
violence, no reparation was made to the Jews—not even an expression
of regret was uttered for the unprovoked and cruel wrongs they had
undergone. It is passing strange that they should have still clung to
a land so unkindly, and still more strange that those who had quitted
it for other countries, where at least life and property were secure,
should have been anxious to return to it.
Yet this did occur. When Charles V., the grandson of Ferdinand and
Isabella, succeeded in 1519 to the throne of Spain, some of the
Jewish exiles sent a deputation to him, requesting permission to
reoccupy their ancient homes, free from the perpetual and pitiless
interference of the Inquisition. In requital of this service, if
he should be inclined to render it to them, they offered no less a
sum than 800,000 crowns of gold. Charles received them favourably,
and his council advised the acceptance of their offer. But Cardinal
Ximenes, who had succeeded Torquemada as Inquisitor General,
interfered, and sternly warned Charles that he could not comply with
the request without unfaithfulness to Christ. Charles yielded, as
his grandfather had yielded to Torquemada, and the petition of the
Jews was rejected. Under the same influence he refused the Portuguese
refugees permission to continue in Holland, whither many of them had
fled. All who had not resided for six years in that country were
obliged to quit it.
In 1521 John III. succeeded Emmanuel as King of Portugal. The
latter had promised the New Christians, on their consenting to
receive baptism, that the Inquisition should not be introduced into
Portugal.[169] But some of John’s advisers persuaded him that this
promise was not binding, for two reasons—first, because the New
Christians were notoriously unfaithful to their engagements; and
secondly, because he had no power to make such an agreement without
the consent of the Pope. To the Pope therefore John appealed for
leave to set up the Holy Tribunal. But Clement VII. and his cardinals
at once refused the petition, and ordered that all the New Christians
whom John had arrested should be set at liberty. When, in 1534, Paul
III. succeeded Clement, John renewed his petition. But Paul rejected
it as resolutely as his predecessor had done, pointing out that
Emmanuel’s promises ought in honour and good faith to be respected.
John, however, was not to be discouraged. Learning that the Emperor
Charles V. was on his way homeward, after his military success at
Tunis, he resolved to avail himself of the opportunity. Charles
would be entitled by the exploits he had performed to a triumph,
at which custom allowed him to ask any favour he pleased from the
Pope. He besought Charles therefore to make the establishment
of the Inquisition in Portugal the privileged request. Charles
assented,[170] and the Pope, though sorely unwilling, was obliged
to grant it. At the same time, however, he stipulated that all
the Portuguese Jews who had been imprisoned up to that time should
be released from prison, and receive a free pardon. This condition
the king refused to comply with; and the Pope had to exercise his
personal authority, placarding the pardons on the doors of the
churches, and sending his own officers to release the prisoners. The
Inquisition, however, was set up in Portugal; and the same results
attended the measure as had followed from it elsewhere, on all other
occasions. Many of the secret Jews, foreseeing these, fled to other
lands; where, if not actually safe from persecution, they would be at
all events less liable to it.
Not many years afterwards, Jews and New Christians were to be met
with in considerable numbers in various parts of the newly discovered
regions of America, both in the countries which had been taken
possession of by Spain and those which had fallen to the share of
Portugal. In Africa also, and all over Asia, they settled—sometimes a
scattered few, sometimes in larger communities. So numerous, indeed,
were the emigrants, and so injurious to the national welfare was
their departure found to be, that repeated edicts were issued by
the kings of Portugal, forbidding it on the severest penalties. The
simple method of detaining them, by making their residence in the
country agreeable, or even endurable, to them, does not seem to have
been thought of.
In Europe their chief place of retreat was Holland. While this was
under the government of Spain, they were as sternly excluded from it
as from every other portion of his Catholic Majesty’s dominions. But
when the long struggle for independence ended in the emancipation
of the Seven United Provinces, the Spanish and Portuguese emigrants
were favourably received there. In 1590, three Portuguese Jews, the
advanced guard, so to speak, of a numerous host which was to follow,
were hospitably entertained. From Embden in 1594 came ten more, who
had borne the Portuguese names of Lopes Homen and Pereira, but who,
as soon as they had settled in the Dutch capital, resumed their
original designation of Abendana. The first synagogue was built
there, in 1598. Notwithstanding the flight, however, of so many of
the so-called New Christians from Portugal, enough of them remained
behind to form a powerful party in the capital, which more than once,
during the latter part of the century, interfered with considerable
effect in the affairs of the State.
It remains that we say somewhat more respecting those Jews who
still continued, as we have said, to reside in Spain and Portugal.
A stranger, and at the same time a more instructive, history is
not to be found in the annals of the world. Bigotry has never been
so blind, so determined, so unscrupulous, as it was in Spain under
the iron rule of the Inquisition. Arbitrary power has never been
exercised more freely, more persistently, more pitilessly, than by
Torquemada and his successors. The eyes of the Inquisition were
everywhere—spying out men’s ways, not only in their discharge of
public duties, but following them, Argus-like, into the privacy of
their family intercourse—nay, into the solitude of their closets
and bedchambers. Their ears drank in men’s secret whispers, uttered
only in the hearing of their nearest intimates—their wives or their
children. They did not hesitate to inflict the most dreadful tortures
in order to elicit the information they desired. They spared, in
the prosecution of their task, neither the weakness of womanhood,
the tenderness of infancy, nor the infirmities of age. Yet they
could not penetrate the mystery of secret Judaism. Men obtained the
highest rank in the State, and filled the most important offices,
honoured and dreaded by all men, who nevertheless belonged to this
despised and proscribed race. The blood which was supposed so to
degrade the man in whose veins it ran was owned by the greatest and
noblest of the land—the marquis, the duke, and the prince, with their
high-sounding titles and their lengthy pedigrees. Towards the end of
the eighteenth century, it is related of the celebrated Portuguese
minister, Pombal, that the king, having proposed at a meeting of
the council that all who were of Jewish descent should be obliged
thenceforth to appear in yellow caps, attended at the next council
with three yellow caps in his hand. The king having inquired the
meaning of this procedure, he replied that it was intended to carry
out the proposition the king had made. ‘One cap,’ he observed, ‘is
for your majesty, one for the Grand Inquisitor, and the third for
myself.’
Stranger still, but equally certain, is the fact that secret Jews
held posts of dignity, not in the State only, but the Church also.
There were convents full of Jewish monks and Jewish nuns. Priests
said mass at the altars, and received confessions, and pronounced
absolution, who regarded all these rites as false and impious. Nay,
secret Jews wielded the powers of the Holy Office itself. They saw
men dragged before them, and tortured and condemned them to the
stake, for holding precisely the same faith as themselves—pronounced,
it may be, the sentence with their own lips, and then went to their
homes to take part in the proscribed rites themselves. If anything
could prove more clearly than has been already proved, the folly, no
less than wickedness, of religious persecution, it would surely be
this strange and startling history.[171]
Nor ought we to quit this subject without remarking on the just and
stern retribution with which the nation has been visited that did
these things. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain was the
leading power in Europe, containing forty millions of inhabitants,
for which its rich and productive soil afforded ample subsistence.
The empire of the New World, which was, as it were, committed to her
care, poured wealth without limit into her lap. What is she now?
Abroad, her name carries little respect; she has sunk to a secondary
rank among the nations. Her voice is never heard in the settlement
of European interests. At home, her population has diminished to
little more than one-third of what it was four centuries before; her
commerce is paralysed; her government unsettled. The poverty and
ignorance of her people seem to be ever on the increase, and strife
and anarchy continually distract the land. Who can doubt that her
double sin—against the Indians of the New World, and the Jews of the
Old—has brought down this heavy judgment on her?
FOOTNOTES:
[169] In the account given at the time of their conversion (1497),
it is said that the Inquisition was not to be introduced ‘for twenty
years,’ viz., till 1517. But it is plain that there must have been
another promise for a longer period, though no record has been
preserved of it. The Pope, indeed, Paul III., plainly said as much.
[170] Charles, throughout his reign, was harsh and stern in his
dealings with the Jews. His private secretary, Solomon Maleho, who
had been an enforced convert to Christianity, afterwards returned to
his old belief, and tried to convert the Emperor to it. The latter
handed him over to the secular arm at Mantua, and he was burned at
the stake.
[171] For a vivid picture of the strange condition of society in
Spain at this period, the reader should study Miss Grace D’Aguilar’s
beautiful little tale, entitled _The Vale of Cedars_. See also some
striking details in Borrow’s _Bible in Spain_.