The Protestant Balance for Religious Liberty

 

Historically, there have been few principled defenders of religious liberty and, in truth, there are few today. To appreciate this, it is useful to consider the various factors needed to render religious liberty as something sensible. There is a balancing act here. One needs to believe that religion is important but that, at the same time, there is a value to having a personal conscious.

The obvious threat to religious liberty has been traditional religions themselves. If you believe in capital T TRUTH and that you are in possession of it, then why should you tolerate people who are in error? Worse, what if these people are not only obstinate in their heathen and heretical beliefs, but insist on passing their errors on to their innocent children or uneducated neighbors? From this perspective, working for the Spanish Inquisition can be seen as a humanitarian gesture. Your main job is to explain to people how they are in error. The only people who are going to be tortured or killed are those obstinate heretics who refuse to admit that they are wrong and have, therefore, brought their calamity upon themselves. 

To say that religion has often been a threat to religious liberty does not mean that secularism offers any protection. Keep in mind that to desire to protect religious liberty, one needs to still assume that religious beliefs and practices are actually important. One thinks of the example of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a materialist if not an outright atheist. This did not mean that he supported religious liberty for atheists or anyone else. On the contrary, it was precisely because Hobbes rejected all religious dogma that he had no problem allowing the king of his Leviathan state to enforce whatever religion he chose. Since no religion is true, the only legitimate purpose for a religion is as a signaling device to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime. The king should make an official religion, the more ridiculous the better. The people who are willing to say that they believe this nonsense show that they understand the importance of everyone submitting themselves to the authority of one person as the only solution to the war of all against all. Those people who insist on maintaining their loyalty to some other absurdity, presumably because they actually believe it, are a threat to public order and need to be killed. For example, Charles I had to deal with English Puritans who cared about priestly vestments as well as incense and candles in church. Before long, these Puritans were also objecting to Charles’ right to tax. They then plunged the country into a civil war and chopped Charles' head off. All of this could have been avoided if Charles had been willing to properly crack down on religious dissent.

The confused association between secularism and religious liberty comes about because secularists have hijacked the term “religious liberty” in an Orwellian fashion and have used it to mean something quite different. The secularist version of religious liberty is a rigged “heads I win, tails you lose” game in which the State is not neutral regarding religion but actively secular. Religion is then banned from the public sphere to the privacy of the home. Parents may be allowed to personally be religious but with few resources to prevent their children from exercising their “religious liberty” and leaving the faith. If the metaphysics of gender ideology can be supported with public funds more easily than the metaphysics of the Trinity then you do not have religious liberty. 

In truth, religious liberty is an accidental outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation. While Luther and Calvin were not proponents of religious liberty and in fact were, in many respects, worse than their Catholic opponents, Protestantism personalized the process of salvation. Either one needed to affirm that only Jesus (and not the works of the Church) can save or be one of the Elect, chosen from before creation for salvation. If people are saved as individuals and not as members of any established church then forcing people to follow the dictates of even the “right” church is useless for actually saving souls.

The Protestant focus on individual salvation is crucial here because it allows for both components of religious liberty to simultaneously exist. Clearly, religion is important and people need to be allowed to practice the “right” kind in order to save their souls. That being said, since God has his own highly circuitous route to how people might come to believe the right things, people should be allowed to persist in their false beliefs until God, and not the State, shows them the light. To be clear, one does not have to be a Protestant, to be a friend of religious liberty. That being said, there are grounds to suspect the religious liberty bona fides of anyone who has not been influenced by Protestant thought.     

Camp Chimerical Anti-Christianity: Facing the Consequences

A few years ago, for the fast day of Tisha B'Av, I wrote a hard-hitting post, raising some uncomfortable questions about the Jewish community. As that is one of my personal favorites, I decided to follow it up for this Tisha B'Av. My purpose is not to attack anyone and, for that reason, I have avoided names. I hope that my ambiguous feelings about my camping experience rather than hatred should be clear. As is often the case with me, I am more interested in asking questions that I find myself struggling with than in offering solutions.    

When I attended Haredi summer camps, I once played a villainous Spanish Inquisitor in a play. While waving a torch, I gave a speech about Judas Iscariot as the model traitorous Jew, which included a joke reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as well. I remember watching another play in which a priest murders the prince, who started asking difficult theological questions regarding Judaism, in order to set the Jews up for a blood libel. Both performances can be seen as anti-Christian. The difference between them is that while I expressed a "rational" opposition to Christianity, the other person made a chimerical assertion. Spanish inquisitors are historical facts. The figure of Judas did play an important role in medieval Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric. Even Christians would agree with me on this. By contrast, there is no evidence of Christian priests murdering Christian children in order to frame Jews just as there is no evidence of Jews murdering Christians for their blood. Christians can hope to negotiate with someone possessing a legitimate negative impression of historical Christians. Such a person can be convinced that modern-day Christians are different and not a threat. A person with a chimerical opposition to Christianity will never be convinced that Christians are not a threat even by the evidence of his own eyes as he already believes things about them that he never had any evidence to begin with. Such a person will inevitably sink into the black hole of conspiracy theories to the point where the lack of evidence for his beliefs will simply prove to him that there is a vast cover-up.

In regards to this story of a priest murdering a Christian to cover up the fact that Christianity is false, I am reminded of Israel Yuval's argument that Christians came to believe in the blood libel because they saw Jews kill their own children during the Crusades. If Jews would kill their own children so that they do not fall into the hands of Christians, might Jewish mothers poison their children's kugel if they thought they were attracted to Christianity? If Jews hated Christianity this much, surely Jews would gladly murder Christian children. Thus, Christians had "no choice" but to kill Jews in self-defense. Similarly, it would be reasonable for impressionable Jewish children in the audience, like myself, to conclude that if priests would kill Christian children to stop them from converting to Judaism, they would gladly kill Jewish children. The logical conclusion from this would be that, if we ever found ourselves in a position of power, we should kill Christians.

Let me be clear, this play about a murderous priest was in no way exceptional in how Christianity was portrayed at this Haredi camp. One of my favorite rebbes used to tell stories with his stock villain, "Father Schmutz" (dirt). When priests were not trying to start blood libels, they kidnapped Jewish children and held them in secret monasteries to try to convert them. In case you were wondering if this was just a matter of some overzealous teachers, the head counselor of this camp used to have a radio show, "Children's Stories of Inspiration." In addition to blatantly idolatrous stories that endorsed human sacrifices to angels and a Satan capable of acting independently of God, one of his stories involved a Father Francois murdering a Christian child in order to start a blood libel. His plan was thwarted when he was forced to take hold of the hand of the dead victim, who then refused to let go.

Installing the campers with a visceral hatred of Christianity as a religion and a fear of Christians as people were part of a conscious top-down effort. I doubt the camp administration wanted us to actually go out and harm any Christians. That being said, their jobs depended on demonstrating to parents that their children were being protected from outside "negative" influences. In an exercise of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the fact that these administrators were, ever so slightly, putting every Jew on the planet in danger clearly took a back seat.

What are the consequences of this kind of education? When the Passion movie came out, I told my father that I could not call it anti-Semitic for the simple reason that its portrayal of Jews was not worse than the portrayal of Christians that I was regularly fed in camp. My father, the assistant-head counselor of that camp, agreed with me. On a more serious note, consider the role played by Islamist schools in installing a pathological hatred of Jews, directly leading to Jews dying in terrorist attacks.


      


It is clear to me that not considering the children in this video and certainly their teachers as legitimate military targets (the kids are even in uniform and practicing military maneuvers) will lead to dead Jews. The problem is that any non-Jew can respond that Jews also indoctrinate their kids to hate and I have simply too much personal experience to point-blank deny that fact. So the administrators of my camp have real Jewish blood on their hands. Their actions have made it harder to form the necessary alliances needed to fight Islamic terrorism and save Jewish lives.

Now it needs to be said, that the people I am talking about are warm wonderful people that I gained much from. These are not anyone's stereotypes of hate mongers. I loved camp and many of my fondest memories come from there.  Coincidently, the staff member who played the murderous priest later became my tenth grade English teacher at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and taught me Julius Caesar (he was even good at his job). At the time, I did not see myself as being indoctrinated to hate and I still have my doubts as to calling this hate. Everything was framed in such a positive and loving way, which may have made it all the more insidious. There was much good to my camp; that being said, beyond the fun times and spiritual growth lay a dark side that needs to be faced.

A Regional Recipe for Creating Radical Movements

Those attempting to understand what is coming out of Iran today need to appreciate the extent of which the region of Persia has served to foster militaristic messianic movements. It is actually not just Islamic movements. In terms of Jewish history, this region gave us Abu Isa in the eighth century and David Alroy in the twelfth century. In many respects Persia can be seen as the Islamic world's equivalent of medieval Provence and Italy, regions beloved by modern medievalists for their tendency to do fun things like produce heretical movements and popular revolts. In trying to wrap my head around Persian history (both in terms of my modern interests and in trying to understand the context for the Jewish messianic movements in this region) there seems to be a number of factors that parallel the Southern European situation and have helped contribute to this state of affairs. I am mainly interested in medieval Persia, but these things seem to continue to be relevant to modern Iran.

1. 
   
   The ghost of an ancient advanced culture.
   Italy and Provence were the parts of Western Europe in which the Roman Empire exercised the strongest influence. In many respects, even after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the symbols of the Roman Empire did not go away, particularly in terms of physical monuments. Besides for centralized government bureaucracy, the other thing that the Romans did better than anyone else in pre-modern history was to build. One of the things that have struck me about Ahmadinejad of Iran is the close personal connection he feels to ancient Persia. This is perfectly understandable. The papacy still claims the title of Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the ancient Roman pagan religion. Persia was certainly a culture equal to Rome. The Parthian Empire was, for the most part, more than a match for Rome militarily. Do not underestimate our Iranians; they are a very sophisticated people, just the right amount to be both intellectually and militarily dangerous.
    
2. 
   
   The absence of a strong government.
   Medieval Italy was a collection of city-states. There was no unified Italy until the nineteenth century, a galling reality for classical republicans like Machiavelli, with dreams of reconstituting the Roman republic. Provence was outside the authority of the French monarchy until the thirteenth century. Not unsurprisingly, Provence was brought into the orbit of the French monarchy due to the Albigensian Crusade, when French forces came south to eliminate members of the Gnostic Albigensian sect, branded heretics by the Church and the original targets of the Inquisition.
   Since the downfall of the Sassanids up until modern times, Iran has had periods of strong centralized rule, for example the Safavids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That being said, the dominant narrative is one of a region outside of the major centers of power. While Iran converted to Islam, it successfully resisted Arabization, maintaining a Persian culture. (The number one thing I repeat over and over again to my students is that Iranians are not Arabs. They do not speak Arabic, they speak Farsi.) Furthermore Persia managed, in the long run, to resist Arab military control. The Umayyads and later the Abbasids were never able to establish a firm control over the region. Unlike almost the entire Arab world, Persia managed to resist Ottoman control. This left Persia as a haven not just for Twelver Shiism which eventually became the dominant mode of Islam, but also numerous other brands of Shiism for Zoroastrianism, which survived the Islamic conquest. In terms of Jewish history, Persia was a major center of Karaism.
   
   

In creating radical societies, such as medieval Italy and Provence and Iran down to modern times, we are looking at two contradictory forces. While we want a history of an advanced society, with a legacy of strong government, that strong government should be lacking in the present day reality. We need to be far enough from established centers of political authority to avoid notice. This creates the sort of power vacuum that allows radical movements to flourish in the first place and not get crushed. But it is precisely these contrasting forces that allow for radicalism to work. While the lack of centralized rule on the ground allows for radicalism in practice, it is precisely this history of strong centralized government that forms the ideological basis for such radicalism. Here political history serves as the perfect State, all the more convenient for it being a non-existent State, open to be claimed by anyone willing to use it.

Between Military and Missionary Models: Islam and Christianity

Islam historically has operated within an openly military political process where the faith is spread by direct military conquest. This likely is connected to the nature of Islam and its origins. Islam, unlike Christianity, spread by direct military conquest. In the course of a single century, between 632 and 732, Islam went from tribesmen in Arabia to Muslim armies marching into France. Thus the Islamic tradition inherited a different model of spreading itself from that of Christianity. To be fair to Muslims it should be noted that, while pagans had no choice but to convert or die, Jews and Christians were protected as “people of the book,” a relationship encoded into official policy by the pact of Umar in 637. History is certainly far more complex than fanatical barbarous Muslims putting all who would not embrace their faith to the sword and meek Christians converting through rational argument. Nevertheless, there are certain differences in how Muslims and Christians conceive of spreading their religions and this has practical ramifications.

Christianity was born out of the destruction of a failed political messianic movement. (Whether or not the historical Jesus intended to lead a political movement to physically overthrow the Romans in Palestine, even from the New Testament it is clear that his followers, particularly Simon Peter, thought that they taking part in a political movement.) Christianity went through the first several centuries of its existence as a persecuted minority. It was never in a position to spread itself through military conquest and thus developed an ideology that denigrated the military model. Instead Christianity developed a missionary model of spreading the faith. Here an individual or a small group would go out to a territory dominated by unbelievers and attempt to spread the faith by argument or displays of miracles. Crucial to this model is the fact that the missionary is not backed by physical arms and is not the one in the position of physical strength. On the contrary, there is every expectation that the missionary will be harassed, persecuted and even executed for his actions.

It is within this model that the concept of martyrdom could arise. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word for “witness.” The martyr by willingly dying for his faith testifies to its truth even to non-believers. It is likely because martyrdom is the product of the missionary model that Islam never developed a concept of martyrdom in the classical sense. Yes Islamic thought, from the beginning, developed a concept of dying in battle with unbelievers in the cause of spreading the religion and those who did so could expect to be rewarded in the afterlife. What Islam never developed was a notion of dying for the cause in a situation where doing so would accomplish nothing beyond dying for dying’s sake. There is nothing in traditional Islamic Law about marching up to pagan or Christian authorities and saying “I am a Muslim,” refuse to drop a pinch of incense on an altar and willingly allow oneself to be executed or thrown to the lions. On the contrary, Islam, particularly Shi’i Islam developed a theology of dissimulation; that it could be acceptable and even laudable to lie to non-believers who would seek to kill you.

This is not to say that Christians are incapable of using armed force and military conquest to spread their beliefs nor that Muslims are incapable of trying to convince non-Muslims, through preaching, reasoned arguments and miracle claims, of the truth of Islam. Rather each of these religions developed a certain model and developed a theology around it and thus it becomes the primary go to model, regardless of the sort of pragmatic actions done on the ground in particular circumstances.

Take for example the two most prominent cases of the Christian use of armed force to spread their faith, the Crusades and the Spanish conquest of the New World. While in both these situations it cannot be denied that non-Christians were de facto led to the baptismal fonts by dint of Christian military conquest, neither case involved a specific plan of using military force as a conversion tool, drawing a direct line between Christians conquering a non-Christian area and these non-Christians accepting baptism either at the point of a sword or simply as a matter of accepting the new political reality of Christian rule. Pope Urban II, in preaching the Crusade on the fields of Clermont, did not argue for a Crusade as a means of converting Muslims. Rather his primary concerns were protecting Christians and Christian holy sites in the Holy Land. The Spanish conquest of the New World also operated, in practice according to a missionary model. Military conquest was closely followed by missionary preachers, particularly Franciscans. We are dealing once again with missionaries seeking places where the people “did not know Christ” and attempting to persuade them to accept baptism. Many of these Franciscans seem to have taken a particular tack of searching out the most isolated groups of natives and the ones most likely to bring about their martyrdom. It was certainly clear that military conquest would aid in conversion, but the scenario here is that of a military presence designed to protect the lives of missionaries and their converts.

Individual Muslims were certainly capable of writing missionary literature. The Jewish convert to Islam, Samual Ibn Abbas al-Magribi, wrote Silencing the Jews and the Christians through Rational Arguments. That being said, this is not the product of any large scale institutional thinking, plan or societal ideology. The Ismaili Shi’i, who laid the foundation for the Fatimid dynasty engaged in missionary work to prepare the groundwork for the coming Mahdi, but there is no question that once the Mahdi arrived he would triumph through military power as the underground network of believers rose up to join him and cast of the rule of the Sunni Caliphate.

Again it is critical to distinguish between a Christian or a Muslim engaging in activity that might be classified as using military force or missionary activity to spread their beliefs and the conscious decision to adopt such activities as part of a clearly laid out ideological program. Where are the medieval Islamic translation centers like Peter the Venerable’s Toledo, with Muslim scholars, with the possible help of some Jews, translating the Bible into Arabic in order to refute it or learning Latin in order to better debate Christians? Find me the Muslim Raymond Lull, crossing the Mediterranean, risking life and limb to preach the Koran to Christians? Where there Muslim children in sixteenth century North Africa, like the young St. Teresa de Avila and her brother, dreaming of crossing over to Spain to proclaim their faith and die at the hands of the Inquisition?

Inquisition Cholent

"In the records of the Inquisition, adafina [cholent] was so popular a proof of secret Judaism that one gets the impression that the inquisitors like it even more than the Jews did; and because the clerics spelled out its ingredients for the record, one is thankful to the "Holy Office" for an occasional Jewish recipe." (Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos – Split Identity and Emerging Modernity pg. 130)

Now we know the true reason for the Spanish Inquisition. They tortured former Jews so that they would give up the secret Jewish recipe for cholent, allowing the inquisitors to make it for themselves. It would be a fun project to pull out some of these recipes from the archives and make an Inquisition cholent.

The Libertarian Case Against Abortion (Part I)

Conservative professor Mike Adams views himself as a "Republican with libertarian leanings." In a recent article, he offers what he considers to be libertarian reasons to oppose abortion. According to Dr. Adams:

… abortion is fundamentally anti-choice because the decision to abort is only one choice. Whenever that choice is made a lifetime of choices are prevented. The average life is over 27,000 days long and we all make dozens of choices daily. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that each abortion results in an average net loss of at least a million choices.


I find this line of argument to be both a fundamental misunderstanding of Libertarianism and an excellent example of the sort of good intentions paved path to tyranny that libertarian thought is designed to avoid. Dr. Adams would bring in the hypothetical future choices of a fetus and grant them the legitimacy and power to stand against the direct physical choices of pregnant women. Libertarianism is the belief, as John Stuart Mill argued, that people have the legal and moral right to pursue their own good in their own way as long as they did not interfere with the liberties of others. The corollary of this is the necessity of drawing a distinction between direct physical harm and indirect nonphysical harm and willingness to, at all costs, take the latter off the table as a political issue relevant to the government. As long as the government is allowed to step in and protect people from indirect nonphysical harm it is impossible to offer a coherent consistent defense of civil liberties even in the face of the Spanish Inquisition. (The presence of Jews, Muslims, and heretics cause psychological suffering to good Catholics. Therefore the state has the right to take all possible action to remove the problem, plausibly even with the rack and stake.)

While I may disagree with Dr. Adams' argument, I do believe that there can be valid reasons for Libertarians to oppose abortion and declare themselves to be pro-life. First off, we should consider the narrow self-serving use that the modern left has put the essentially libertarian concepts of the right to privacy and the right to control one's own body. Imagine that I am sitting in my basement with one of my theoretical girlfriends and, in order to convince her to engage in certain consensual actions, I offer her a birth control pill. Let us say that my theoretical girlfriend is so excited to engage in consensual activities with me that she ignores the pill and ends up pregnant. I, therefore, offer to put my licensed degree in medieval surgery to use to perform an abortion. The modern left, through Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade, militantly supports the premise that the government cannot interfere and will come to the defense of my theoretical girlfriend and me. Now change the scenario a bit. Instead of offering my theoretical girlfriend a pill, I offer her a joint to help her get over her inhibitions. (My theoretical girlfriend comes from a fine Bais Yaakov Catholic school.) My theoretical girlfriend decides that she would like to be able to enjoy such wonderful inhibition removing herbs on a more regular basis so I offer to put my medieval surgery degree to use by removing one of her kidneys, thus allowing her to sell it on the open market and afford to be uninhibited more often. The modern left, as a whole, is not prepared to lift a finger to stop the government from arresting my theoretical girlfriend and me and sending us off to serve years in prison on charges of drug use and organ trafficking. Let us acknowledge that the conversation about a right to privacy and to control one's body does not even begin until we acknowledge the right to use any drug of choice and sell any bodily organ. The modern left should be called out on this as hypocrites and any claim on their part to privacy should be summarily scorned and dismissed.


To be continued …

(I offered a version of this argument on Clarissa’s blog and she argued that women are not allowed to sell fetuses and she did not “think anybody prohibits you from cutting out any part of your body and throwing it away …” My response was that I would be interested to see how abortion rights activists would react if the government tried to stop a woman from selling her aborted fetus say to medical science. Also, we do see mothers “selling” their fetuses when they agree to carry the fetus to term and give it up for adoption in return for financial compensation.)

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Religious Polemics and Conversion in the Middle Ages

Anastasia Keshman – St. Stephen’s Hand in the Wrong Hands: On a Little-Known Anti-Jewish Account from Medieval France

We have an account of how the hand of St. Stephen came to Besancon in France. The purpose of this account was to justify the authenticity of the relic. St. Stephen’s relics were hidden until they were supposedly discovered in Jerusalem in the fifth century. Immediately after the hand was brought to France from Rome it was placed in a reliquary. This reflects the reality of twelfth century France when the story was written rather than the early Middle Ages when the event allegedly took place.

Jewish thieves stole the relic in the time of Protadius (seventh century) because they wanted the golden reliquary. They threw the hand into the river Dubius. This is a parallel to the original martyrdom of St. Stephen who was stoned by the Jews. A miracle happened and the river split, leaving the hand unharmed. Fishermen found the relic. The people of the church came to the river and brought it back in solemn ceremony. According to the account, the joy of the people was as if St. Stephen had come down from heaven.

Jews play a prominent role but this is not an anti-Jewish polemic. Rather it is a miracle story in which Jews play an incidental role. Jews are greedy for gold and driven by the Devil. They do not see or hear the truth. That being said, there is no physical description of Jews. They are not described as stinking or as big nosed. The St. Stephen text avoids abusive language of Jews. Unlike later medieval texts, there is no violence done to the Jews. The Jews in the text are transient, coming and going. This may be a reference to Jewish merchants passing through. As is often the case in Christian miracle stories, Jews know but do not believe. Thus, even though they do not accept Christ, they have access to particular knowledge that serves the Christian cause. For example, the Jew, Judas, finds the true cross for Queen Helena. The Host desecration miracle of the later Middle Ages also serves this purpose. Jews steal the Host and torture it. The Host then bleeds as in Paolo Uccelo’s Miracle of the Profaned Host painting.

The Jew serves to demonstrate the power of the holy object and set the miracle in motion.


Luis Cortest – Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, and Alonso de Cartagena on Forced Conversion.

One way to think of the Latin fathers is a period in which doctrine was established. You have history of events which also serve to establish doctrine. Few works can rival Augustine’s City of God. One of his goals was to explain the existence of Jews. According to Augustine, the Jewish Diaspora helps Christians. Jews need to be dispersed to serve as witnesses. Augustine’s was a policy of relative tolerance. Whether this position is true it is clear that there is an alternative that is far more hostile as in the case of the Visigoths. It was official policy to engage in forced conversion in the seventh century as was the case with Sisebut in 612.

Isidore of Seville was a contemporary of Sisebut. Besides for his etymology, Isidore also dabbled in the contra Judaeos genre. In this period conversion was a collective act not something for individuals. Baptism was considered the beginning of the road to becoming a Christian. There is a demise of the pagan intellectual elite. This created a need for a new line of apologetics to go after those who were only nominally Christian.

The thirteenth century has been viewed as a time of intense anti-Semitism. Jeremy Cohen connects this to the friars. Such leading members of the Dominican order as Raymond Martini and Raymond of Penafort wanted a lasting solution. In pursuit of this they created an organized mission to the Jews and used rabbinic texts. Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa Contra Gentiles as per request by Penafort. There is no call for forced conversion in Aquinas. Jews and heathens are not to be compelled to believe because they never received this belief. Those who received it, though, ought to be compelled to keep it. According to Aquinas, Jews ought to be able to practice their rites because it helps the Christian faith. Other religions carry no such benefit. Jewish children should not be baptized against their parents’ will. This would violate the rights of their parents. Also children might be persuaded later if only they could come to Christianity through reason; this opportunity would be lost if force were used. There is also the argument from natural law; according to natural law the child is connected to his parents until it comes to the use of reason. Clearly not all of the friars followed a fanatical line in regards to Jews.

Alonso de Cartagena was a converso and son of Pablo de Burgos. Cartagena defended the sincerity of the conversos. Norman Roth sees Cartagena as one of the key figures in establishing the Inquisition. He put through the decree from the Council of Basil banning the practice of Judaism by conversos. Forced conversion was a practice to be done in mass and not to individuals. This was something Torquemada would later fail to understand.

A Different Sotomayor

Reading Yosef Yerushalmi’s From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto I find mention of a Fray Antonio de Sotomayor, who served as the confessor to King Philip IV of Spain before becoming Grand Inquisitor of Spain. This Sotomayor served as the dedicatee of a work by Don Juan de Quinones, which argued that Jewish men menstruate. (For more in this topic of Jewish men menstruating see David S. Katz’s essay “Shylock's gender: Jewish male menstruation in early modern England” in the Review of English Studies 50(1999): 440-462) Sotomayor headed the Inquisition for about a decade until 1643. Apparently he is remembered in history as being one of the more moderate members of the Spanish Inquisition at least compared to his successor Diego de Arce Reinoso.

International Medieval Congress: Day One Session Two

Dangerous Doctrines, II: Heresy trials and the Limits of Learning

Parisian Pantheism or Maurice’s Magic? A Re-Interpretation of the Condemnation of 1210 and 1215 – Thomas Gruber (Merton College, University of Oxford)

In the early thirteenth century we see a number of accusations against heresy. Robert of Courson, in the Statutes of the University of Paris of 1215, lists three groups. There are the Amalricians, followers of Amalric of Bena, who preached pantheistic creed in which there is no difference between creator and created. This group managed to grow large enough to form a sect and cause enough concern to be spied upon. There is David of Dinant, another pantheist philosopher. The third person mentioned is a Mauricii hyspani, Maurice the Spaniard. This Maurice is the twelfth century anti-Pope Gregory VIII, originally named Maurice Bourdin.
Maurice was the archbishop of Braga and close to Pope Paschalis II. Sent as an envoy to Henry V, Maurice switched to the side of the emperor, who repaid this action by making him Pope Gregory VIII. Maurice’s reign as pope did not last long. As the tide turned against the emperor, Maurice was captured, put on display and humiliated. There is an image of Maurice serving as a footstool to the pope. Later the archbishop of Toledo uses this to show the supremacy of Toledo over Braga.

What was Maurice’s doctrine? It would seem that Maurice was accused of necromancy. We have a magical text sent by John of Seville to a Pope Gregory to guard against kidney stones. This recipe represented a magic tradition that was condemned in 1215. Maurice’s name was added in order to add an element of menace to it. This would add an element to 1215 besides for Aristotelianism and pantheism.

Indians, Demons, and the Death of the Soul: Necromancy and Talismanic Magic at the University of Paris in 1277 - Matthias Heiduk (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat)

We see a condemnation of magic in Paris in 1277 besides for the more famous attacks on Aristotle by Bishop Stephen Tempier. Who were the targets? Why would people in the Middle Ages have been interested in magic and why would the Church be against it. We possess several geomancy books which start with Estimaverunt Indi. The sorts of crimes of things we see listed are Nigromancy, a term often conflated with necromancy, invocation of demons, and talismans. We do not know if magical books were at the University of Paris or if magic was being taught to the students, but we do know that they were being read in the thirteenth century. William of Auvergne mentions that he studied magic in his youth before he became Bishop. These rituals involved the veneration of demons.

‘Ruditas et brevitas intellectu illorum’: Meister Eckhart against the Inquisition - Alessandra Beccarisi (Universita del Salento)

Charges of heresy were often used for political reasons. The move against Meister Eckhart was a good example of this. The Political situation in Germany in 1325-26 played a critical role in this, particularly in regards to the papal representative, Nicholas of Strasbourg. In 1324 Pope John XXII excommunicated Ludwig of Bavaria. Dominicans had to decide where they going to side. John decided to interfere directly with the Dominicans. There were sympathizers with Ludwig in the order. Nicholas of Strasbourg visited Cologne which was a particular delicate situation. Eckhart was a Dominican closely in the public eye so he became a target. His preaching in the vernacular about poverty came to be seen as an attack on the papacy. Nicholas served as the pope’s vicar and ended up defending Eckhart. We see a shift in the Dominican order and monks friendly to the pope are put in charge. Once Eckhart is on trial at Avignon away from his enemies the charges are relaxed and the charges of heresy are dropped.

International Medieval Congress: Key Note Lectures

Heresies and Rhetorics – John H. Arnold (Birkbeck College, University of London)

In 1261, after two decades of work, Benedict of Alignan’s De Summa Trinitate et Fide Catholica in Decretalibus was completed. This book follows the program set by the Fourth Lateran Council and goes points by point to answer those who go against Catholic doctrine. This book has over two thousand chapters. Some scholars view Benedict as the last gasp of a pre-Aquinas theology. In truth, he was a much more complex figure than he is usually given credit for. He was the Abbot of his monastery and dealt with Albigensians. He traveled to the Holy Land and saw Christian defeat and Christians making deals with Saracens. Benedict may not have been a scholar but he did have direct contact with heretics, Jews and Muslims. Benedict’s work still had a few hundred years of life on it and would influence subsequent generations. He is also useful in thinking about the context of heresy.

In the last two decades the study of heresy has taken a certain turn to viewing heresy as a construction of orthodoxy. There is a tendency to see the opposition to heresy as something uniform as if every preacher was preaching from the same hymn sheet. We note shared language and shared concepts such as the heresiarch. In truth there were differences in orthodox responses. There were those who saw heresy as a single monster with many heads united in its attempt to destroy the one true church. Others argued that heresies were many as opposed to a one unified church. To assume the uniformity of orthodoxy is to hand it the power that it sought.

Benedict does not use very colorful language. He has a few moments of insult. For example, he claims that Cathars got their name from kissing the anuses of cats. He follows the structure of the creed rather than going point by point to respond to heretics. It is not framed as a polemic or as a debate. He writes out of a need to convince the unfaithful, including Jews and Muslims, but particularly to strengthen the faithful. Like Augustine, Benedict seeks to refute all heresy as a group. He even goes after pre-Christian philosophers.

Bernard of Clairvaux and Guibert of Nogent are examples of responses to heresy that are insult over substance. Inquisitor texts, such as the work of Bernard of Gui, are far more technical. The inquisitor manual is meant for other inquisitors and emphasizes the inquisitor’s knowledge of heresy. This, ironically enough, brings the heretic into the same realm as the orthodox. Unwillingly, these texts acknowledge that heretics are thinking individuals with arguments that are not easily refutable. Benedict’s work is similar.

By the thirteenth century, there is no longer an assumption of orthodox triumph. Even the quotation of orthodox interpretation of scripture does not always bring victory. As an example, we have a story where a group of Dominican priests only win when the heretics are challenged to make the sign of the cross but are miraculously unable. Benedict, himself, notes that many people are not interested in reading a book as long as his.

(Dr. Arnold is the author of Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe.)


Between Christian and Jew: Orthodoxy, Violence, and Living Together in Medieval England – Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University)

Gerald of Wales is a good place to go for almost any type of medieval stories. He has miracle stories dealing with Jews in which the Jew serves as the defeated monster. He tells the story of a Jew who doubts the miracles of a saint in Oxford, St. Frideswide. The young Jew comes to a procession of the saint with his hands tied, pretending to be crippled. If feminists like to talk about gender insubordination, this can be viewed as dogma insubordination. The youth, in the end, commits suicide. His parents try to cover up what happened, but the story gets out. The Jew is important for orthodoxy because he is a living heretic. The Jew says things that Christians can only think. To be clear, real Jews did mock Jesus and call him the hanged one, and challenged the virginity of Mary. The Jew of Unbelief, though, is a stock character to go with the other types of Jewish literary constructs.

To throw some other texts for consideration; there is Matthew Paris’ account of little Hugh of Lincoln, who is tortured in a manner similar to Christ. Hugh is important because he is one of the few martyr cults of Jewish victims that lasted more than a century and attracted royal patronage. Matthew of Paris is a story of supersessionism where the Jews are a living anachronism. John Mandeville refuses to condemn the foreign people he comes in contact with, even promiscuous, nudist, communist cannibals. John, though, does attack Jews. According to Mandeville, the Ten Lost Tribes are trapped in the mountains by Alexander. They have a prophecy that they will escape in the time of Antichrist. Jews learn Hebrew so that the Ten Lost Tribes will recognize them and not kill them along with their Christian neighbors. (For more on this legend see Andrew Gow’s Red Jews.)

Did the real life Jewish and Christian interactions go beyond the static constructions of works such as Gerald of Wales? If we look closely, anti-Semitic texts unwittingly reveal a world of interaction that goes beyond this static relationship. What other possibilities do these stories give us besides for the lachrymose narrative denounced by Salo Baron.

Christians and Jews shared urban spaces. Hugh of Lincoln is a story in which Jewish and Christian children play together and where Christians entered Jewish homes. What kinds of games did these children play? There is a line, in Paris’ account to suggest that Christians might have had pity on Jews. It should be noted that Jews were important to the economy and Christians were dependent upon them. For example, Aaron of Lincoln in the twelfth century was one of the richest people in England. Mandeville can be seen not just as a warrant for genocide but an example of Christian awareness of Jewish discontent.

Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God (Sort of): One Converso’s View of Jesus

Last year I did a series of posts on Jewish views on Jesus. Here, in an article by David Graizbord, is a view of Jesus, by an early seventeenth century converso, liable to perplex both Jews and Christians. Espiritu Santo was born a Jew in Marrakesh but converted first to Islam and then to Christianity. He was living in Spain when the Inquisition picked him up on charges of sorcery, crypto-Islam and crypto-Judaism. According to Espiritu Santo:

… the one who had come [namely, Jesus] was [a Messiah] of the tribe of Joseph; and that the messiah of the tribe of David [sic] had yet to come, and that he [the defendant] would go to heaven [if he was burned], and that when Jesus [sic] came to judge the living and the dead, the first he would absolve would be the Jews, because Christ is the son of God, and he is below the Father at [the Father’s] right hand, and that only the Father is a true God, because even though there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit, only one God shall judge – and that is the Father. The Son is [merely] a prophet [of God], as when a master sends his servant; and the old Law of Moses is written and adorned with diamonds … and it is written by the hand of God, adonai, God of Israel … and that in the Law of Jesus Christ there are many images, and that, there not being more than one true God, he did not believe in the [images], neither in the crosses, and that he [the defendant] was a Jew, of the stock of Aaron the priest, and that [earlier] when God had inspired him to turn to the holy Catholic faith, the reason that he had converted to it was that he understood that it and the Law of Moses were one; but afterwards, having recognized that they are opposed, he wished to keep the Law of Moses … because there is no more than one God, who is a pearl and a diamond that cannot be cut.
(David Graizbord “Historical Contextualization of Sephardi Apostates and Self Styled Missionaries of the Seventeenth Century.” Jewish History 19(2005): pg. 300.)

So here we have a Jew who believed that Jesus was a messiah, just not the Messiah, and that he was part of a Trinity, though an Arian Trinity. He believed that Jesus came to save people from sin just not the same sorts of sins that the inquisitors had in mind. He converted to Christianity even though he still believed in Mosaic Law and was prepared to die for that belief. So where does this Espiritu Santo fit in?

Benzion Netanyahu: Where the Middle Ages and the Middle East Collide

Erich Follath’s “Is war between Iran and Israel inevitable?” (Originally run in Der Speigel but translated for Salon) is a good example of liberal moral equivalency. Its essential premise, after hypocritically acknowledging that the two are not morally equivalent, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are very much alike and the combination of the two of them makes it likely that a major conflict in the Middle East will erupt. Forget the fact that Israel recognizes Iran as a Shiite Muslim state and desires to have peace with it. Forget the fact that Netanyahu is a secular Jew with no apocalyptic pretentions. What caught my attention in this otherwise banal article was that it refers to my area of interest, medieval Jewish history. Follath mentions Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu and his book, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. (A few years ago, during Passover, I asked my father for a deluxe Spanish Inquisition action figure set as my way of requesting this book. Once you are finished reading it you can hit people over the head with it in the hope of doing serious bodily harm.) As Follath notes:

In his more than 1,300-page opus, the key points of which he conveyed to his sons in hours of family readings, the historian argues that the Spaniards were more strongly motivated by racism than religion in their pogroms against the Jews during the Inquisition. He also argues that militant anti-Semitism is always an expression of unmotivated hatred, and that there is only one possible response to it: militant and, if necessary, preventive Jewish self-defense.

I am not sure what Follath’s background in Jewish history is or if he actually bothered to read Benzion Netanyahu for himself, but pogrom violence is certainly very different than Inquisition violence. A basic point of the senior Netanyahu’s is that the Spanish Inquisition only came about in the years after the major anti-converso riots. This is important because Netanyahu wants to argue that the Inquisition only came about after Judaizing conversos had stopped being a real issue and therefore the real purpose of the Inquisition could only have been to eliminate Christians of Jewish descent.

I am not a fan of Benzion Netanyahu’s work precisely because it speaks too much to a modern historical agenda. In Netanyahu’s case, as a man nearing his 100th birthday, this “modern” agenda is the failure of pre-war secular Jewry, particularly in Germany, to forestall the threat of Nazism, a brand of anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with religion. When discussing Benzion Netanyahu with other people I often find myself walking the exact opposite path as Follath. Benzion Netanyahu happens to be the father of a certain right wing Israeli politician of the same name, which is a good indicator of his politics. This is a right wing secular Zionist, who left Israel and became a history professor at Cornell because Israel was being run by a bunch of leftists.

Follath simply shoehorns Netanyahu into the needs of his article. Another useful of thinking of the senior Netanyahu’s politics as it plays out in his history books is that Jews should not put their trust in gentiles like Follath, however well meaning they might be, in the hope that they will protect them from the likes of those like Ahmadinejad, who wish to kill Jews simply because they are Jews.

History 112: Renaissance and Reformation (Q&A)

The new quarter has started and my new History 112 class is coming along quite remarkably. I seem to have been given a remarkably strong group of students. Following in the footsteps of Professor Louis Feldman, I am having my students email me questions before class which I then use for my lecture. As part of my effor to continue to post material from my classes in order to give those who cannot be present a chance to take part in my class I thought to post some of these questions and my responses.

1. The text mentions to different sets of writings on the subject of the renaissance, these being writing on the smaller movements associated with change due to humanism on one hand which it says are really only affecting a small portion of society and then a changeover to writing about the lives and lifestyles of the people themselves in a broader context, is there also an element where both of these topics are written about at the same time (other than our book, so is it a large element of scholarship)? Along with this, I see no real reason to split them unless dealing with a very specific region where the prior was not occurring to any significant degree, so was this change in scholarship done because of a feeling that too little was being covered or was it perhaps a feeling that effort could be better spent on the latter topic?

I would say that the most important development in historiography over the past few decades has been the “discovery” of regular people. Traditionally history has been about wealthy male elites who were either literate themselves who could pay someone to write for them. There were certain ideological reason for this, but also pragmatic ones as well; as historians we are slaves or our source material and that usually means written texts. That creates a bias in favor of those who could write. Since in pre modern times most people were illiterate this is a problem. One of the major revolutionary books in this new movement, which Davies refers to, is Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worm (It is on the recommended list for paper topics.). This book is about a miller, Menocchio, with some fairly heterodox ideas. He believed that the universe and God with it came into existence through a process of fermentation not unlike that of cheese and he denied Original Sin. This brought him in front of the Inquisition. Unfortunately for Menocchio, but fortunately for us, Menocchio seems to have had some serious difficulties in keeping his mouth shut. This resulted in the demise of poor Menocchio and several volumes of Inquisition files just waiting for a modern, scholar such as Carlo Ginzburg, to find. Thanks to the Inquisition we now know all about this relatively normal person, Menocchio, the story of his life and of his beliefs even though he was not a member of the aristocracy, a high ranking church official or some great philosopher.
As Davies indicates there is now a tension between the traditional mode of history and this new form. On the one hand we have our traditional history of kings and popes and we have this new history of millers, shopkeepers, healer women/witches etc. They are both operating within their own spheres. One of the big questions facing historians today is how to integrate these two histories; we know that our millers, shopkeepers and healer women were living on the same planet as our kings and popes. I would agree with you that these things should be put together. Considering the nature of present day scholarship it is somewhat difficult.

2. What was the people's reaction to Luther's theses? Did they encourage others to act out their frustrations with the Church as well?

Luther was certainly very popular among the common people in Germany and he even managed to gain the protection of the Elector of Saxony. This is a good example of the importance of low history as opposed to the traditional history of the elites. In many respects the really important story is not Martin Luther but the thousands of regular people who joined him and made it a movement.
Luther, left to his own devices, was not much of a revolutionary. He was just a young theologian with some mildly radical ideas. In the 95 Theses he is still very Catholic. At this point he still believed in the papacy, confessions, the full list of sacraments and even in the value of works. Hand him thousands of followers and all of a sudden you have something far more extreme than just a debate over indulgences or papal power; you have a Protestant movement.



3. Who are "the Canons" that was mentioned in Luther's document? I assumed it was the Church, but not sure.

This is a good question to ask. There are going to be terms in the reading that are going to be unfamiliar. You should not be ashamed to ask. You have every legitimate reason not to know. In thesis five Luther states: “The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.” Canon refers to the Church legal structure. For example we talk about Canon Law and Canon Lawyers. This is important because it is clear that at this point, in 1517, Luther is still committed to working within the Church structure. While he may be on the side for less power to the Pope, he assumes that power lies in the hands of the body of the Church structure; we are talking about elite officials here and not lay believers. Luther is in no way handing people a blank check to simply pursue the dictates of their own Christian consciousness.

4. I am a little confused on how both, Luther and Calvin both contributed to the development of Protestantism. … So I guess for my question, could elaborate on how the two men placed such different ideals into the same religion without creating chaos?


The truth of the matter is that there really is no such thing as a Protestant religion. Protestant is just a convenient term for Christian movements in the Western tradition that are outside of the Catholic Church. (Mormons are in their own category.) Luther and Calvin were very different so there are very good reasons to put them in their own separate categories. Since they were both operating around the same time and were both fighting the Catholic Church we tend to group them together. As we shall see the major religious groups in Europe are going to be Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist).


5. I don't understand why Luther didn't support the peasant political revolts. From what I gathered from the reading assignments, he was challenging the greed of the Church that was manifesting itself through the selling of indulgences. But I thought this kind of greed was also brewing in the ruling elite, so I don't quite understand why Luther wouldn't support a peasant revolt challenging that. My only guess is that it has something to do with Luther's prince. … Luther has been immortalized for challenging the Catholic Church and laying the egg that hatched the Protestant religion and the belief that a personal relationship with God can be attained without needing some sort of middle man. But were his sentiments really genuine? Or was he getting some extra incentive from his prince for challenging something he had banned? Why wouldn't he support a political revolt that challenged exactly the same kind of corruption, just in a different sphere of life? … I just feel like this seemingly insignificant refusal of Luther to support the peasants might be responsible for the later tendency of princes to embrace Luther's ideas.

You have hit the nail on the head. Again we see that Luther was not some revolutionary out to overturn the system. He was very much part and parcel of the established order. This is not to say that Luther was wrong for not supporting the peasants. We have to be careful and refrain from making personal judgments. One also needs to keep in mind that Luther was dependent on the Elector of Saxony. A major part of Luther’s success is that he is able to get support in all the right places. He has the political and popular support to make him untouchable. Unlike with most of the many radical preachers of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was never in a position to eliminate Luther.


6. Why did the Christian sects have to fight instead of coexisting? Faith is based on personal choice not force.

In one sense this is a very bad question as it goes outside of the historical method and judges the past by our present day standards. We think of faith as a personal choice. People in the sixteenth century did not. They had their way of thinking, we have ours. That being said this is actually a very useful question when put in the right light. We take it as obvious that faith is a matter of personal choice and that it is not particularly beneficial to have full scale wars over the nature of the Eucharist or things of that nature. Why was this not obvious to them? Keep in mind that Luther, Leo X, and John Calvin were all very smart people; they probably had higher IQs than you or I. So why did they not get it? We will be exploring this issue in future classes. One thing that I will say here is that we think the way we do in large part because Europeans managed to make such a mess out of religion during this time period. For example when the Founding Fathers were writing our Constitution one of the major things that was on the back of all of their minds was we do not want to repeat what happened in Europe here in America so let us figure out some alternatives. So it is not that we are more “enlightened” than they were; we have the benefit of being able learn from their experience.

AJS Conference Day One Session Two (Interreligious Hostility in Medieval and Early Modern Times Part I)

(In the interests of space I have divided this post up.)

Yaacov Deutsch (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
“When ropes he pulls, with rubbish he’s full:’ Anti-Christian Curses in the Medieval and Early Modern Period”

The title refers to the church bell ringer. It actual rhymes nicely in Hebrew. Church bells represented Christianity in the public sphere. This is an example of a Jewish hidden discourse, where Jews amongst themselves would curse Christians. We should not think of medieval Jews as being resigned to their situation. Jews had a highly developed discourse to mock Christianity. Jesus is referred to as a bastard. This Toldot Yeshu tradition not only rejects the gospel account it also reverses it. We see churches referred to as tiflah, unimportant or worthless. This plays on the similarity to the Hebrew word for prayer, tifilah. The church is a house of worthless prayers. We have an example of an Ashkenazic prayer, said at circumcisions, about the hoped for destruction of Christendom. The ritual of circumcision itself, therefore, takes on its own polemic and becomes a means to distinguish those who are part of the covenant and those who are not, mainly Christians. We should take the claims of Jewish converts to Christianity seriously when they talk about Jews putting anti-Christian meanings to various rituals; these claims are often supported by Jewish sources. (See Elisheva Carlebach's Divided Souls) The rise of works on Judaism by converted Jews led to a major shift as Christians became increasingly aware of this anti-Christian discourse. An example of this is Martin Luther, who dramatically changed his opinion about Jews soon after reading Toldot Yeshu and Anton Margaritha's work.

(I challenged Deutsch over Toldot Yeshu. Christians all of a sudden discovered Toldot Yeshu in the sixteenth century? Agobard of Lyon already was complaining about it in the ninth century. Deutsch’s response was that after Agobard there was not much done about Toldot Yeshu until the sixteenth century when it finally reached print. So fine I am willing to accept a rise in interest in Toldot Yeshu. It also plausible that Luther was influenced by Toldot Yeshu. I still do not buy into the notion that there is a remarkable shift in Jewish-Christian relations or that it was brought about by exposes on Judaism written by converted Jews. What is really so different here from say Nicholas Donin in the thirteenth century complaining about anti-Christian passages in the Talmud?

There was someone in the audience who went absolutely ballistic at Deutsch, accusing him of blaming Jews for Christian anti-Semitism. What Deutsch is arguing is very similar to what Israel Yuval did with ritual murder charges. Christians are reacting to a very real anti-Christian sentiment among Jews and make the logical conclusion. If Jews are willing to kill their own children in their hatred of Christianity how much more so would they be willing to kill Christian children? Yuval was also attacked for seeming to blame Jews for anti-Semitism. In fairness to both Deutsch and Yuval, neither of them are blaming Jews. What they are doing is trying to get past the model of rabid Christians out to murder Jews who are completely passive; there is a give and take here. )


Miriam Bodian (Touro College)
“The New Polemical Arguments of an Inquisition Prisoner: The Case of Isaac de Castro Tartas”

Isaac de Castro Tartes lived in quite a number of places during his short life. He was born into a converse family in seventeenth-century Spain. His family fled to France when he was a child, where he attended a Jesuit school. They then joined the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Isaac went to Dutch Brazil, but then crossed over to the Portuguese side where he was caught, apparently with a pair of tiffilin in his possession, and sent back to Portugal as a Judaizer. He was eventually burned at the stake in Lisbon. Isaac argues with his Inquisitors. He has a triumphant view of Jewish exile, even claiming, strangely enough, that Jews outnumber Christians. Despite everything that has happened to them, Jews have flourished and have become rich; Jews even bring prosperity to whatever nation they reside in. Leaving aside straight anti-Christian polemics, Isaac does not directly attack the Church or paint Christians as being beyond salvation. Isaac points out that one does not have to be Jewish in order to be saved and that one can be saved through the seven Noachide laws. These laws are based in reason and are the basis for natural law. Using his Jesuit training, Isaac confronts the charge that he is a Judaizing Christian. There is no proof that he was ever baptized; he certainly has no memory of it. Even if he was baptized he never consented to it. If his parents had him baptized they, as converses, clearly did not mean it. Anyway, he did not confirm his baptism when he became of age so it should not count. The inquisitors counter this by pointing out that amongst Jews circumcision is done to children and it makes them Jews for life. Isaac also tries to paint himself as someone following his consciousness. He is following a law given by God and has not done any specific action that can be defined as a sin in Church law. He should be free to choose from any established religion. Isaac can be seen as an example of a shift in seventeenth-century thought. He emphasizes personal autonomy and the authority of reason and natural law.

(Here is an example of a legitimate Jew ending up in the hands of the Inquisition. Most converso cases were people with little real connection to Judaism and better classified as heretical Catholics. What is interesting about Isaac is that even his defense of Judaism is rooted in Christian thinking. This is a renegade Catholic who embraced Judaism.)

(To be continued …)

General Exams IV: Orals

Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.

I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.

The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.

Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.

Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.

So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)

General Exam III: Jewish History (Part IV)

[For the final part of the exam I was given two texts to analyze. One was from Jacob Marcus’ Jew in the Medieval World and the other was from Gershon Cohen’s translation of Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition.]

Text #1: (Modena)
This text comes from Leon Modena’s autobiography, Hay’ye Yehudah; it deals with the printing of his Historia de gli riti hebraici and how he nearly ran afoul of the Inquisition over it. This text is a useful example of the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period, particularly within the context of the age of the printing press and the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Modena was someone in regular contact with Christians and engaged in friendly scholarly discussions with them. Historia was written at the behest, we believe, of Henry Wotten, the English ambassador to Venice, and was meant to be given to James I of England. In this book Modena gives an overview of Jewish laws and practices. In large respect he was responding to Johann Buxtorf the elder’s Synagoa Judaica. Modena wrote the Historia in 1616. He later, in 1635, gave this same book to a French-Christian Hebraist named Giacomo Gaffarel. Gaffarel then went and published the book on his own initiative. This created a problem for Modena in that there was material in the book that violated Catholic censorship policies. While the Historia was just a manuscript, one that was also written for a Protestants to boot, this was not a problem. Now, though, that Gaffarel had printed the book, Modena found himself to be an inadvertent promoter of “heresy.” The problem was quickly and painlessly solved. Modena explained the matter to the local inquisitor, who proved to be quite sympathetic and understanding. It turns out that even this was not necessary as Gaffarel did not publish the manuscript as is but, on his own initiative, removed the potentially objectionable material.
This story illustrates something about Catholic censorship. This whole incident happened only a few years after Galileo was put on trial for the Dialogues. Galileo’s real crime was not that he was a heliocentrist, but that he failed to adhere to the letter of the original ban on him writing on the issue and, more importantly, he managed to antagonize Pope Urban VIII. One could get away with a lot during the seventeenth century, inquisition censors or no inquisition censors, as long as one knew how to adhere to the letter of the letter of law and avoided antagonizing any of the wrong people. Publishing books was a political game and one was perfectly safe as long as they knew how to play the game. Galileo was not very adept at this game and suffered the consequences; Modena could play the game and was perfectly safe.

A word should be said here about Christian Hebraism; there are quite a few Christians in this story that are interested in Jews and Judaism and some of them are fairly knowledgeable. This had nothing to do with Christians thinking about converting to Judaism; though, as the case of Peter Spaeth illustrates, this did happen on occasion. Rather this early modern Christian Hebraism was rooted in the search for the prisca theologia, the original theology, which lay behind much of early modern thought. The premise was that humanity had fallen away from the truths of antiquity and that these sources could be recovered by a close examination of the sources. One of the major manifestations of this was the interest in “magical” texts such as the Hermetic corpus, thought to date from the time of Moses, and the Zohar. Another manifestation was a renewed emphasis on the bible and reading it outside of the shadow of the Vulgate and the medieval Catholic tradition. Protestantism was a product of this movement. Protestants in particular were interested, in this period, in forming contacts with Jews and Jewish sources because they believed that, while the Jews may have corrupted their own sources, a critical analysis, in light of Christian truths, of such material would allow one to uncover the original true “Christian” religion behind it.

This whole incident is a good illustration of how interrelated Jewish history is with the happenings within the general society. Jews in Europe did not live in a different world from Christians. The printing press, the Catholic Church’s post-Tridentine censorship, the struggle with Protestantism affected someone like Leon Modena just as it affected Galileo.

Text #2: (Ibn Daud)

This text in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition, deals with the story of the four captives. According to this story four rabbis were captured by pirates and ransomed respectively by the communities of Fostat, Qairawan and Cordova. These rabbis stayed in these given communities and set up communities. Ibn Daud uses this story to explain how it came to pass that the authority possessed by the Babylonian Gaonate passed to Spain. This story is useful, though not in its most obvious sense. The story is clearly a legend and cannot be accepted as historical fact. That being said this story is an excellent example of the telling and use of legends. As such, while this story tells us nothing of use about the origins of the Spanish Jewish community, it is very useful in understanding Ibn Daud and by extension Andalusian Jewry.

The story of the four captives serves as a convenient foundation story. It gives a clear cut, dramatic story that points to a given conclusion. It clearly fits into the overarching narrative of the Book of Tradition. The main purpose of the Book of Tradition is the defense of the rabbinic tradition, particularly in the face of Karaite critic, and the establishment of Andalusia as the center of Jewish life and Torah authority. As such the story is just too convenient to be taken at face value as a historical event.

Within the story itself there is micro narrative that is highly suspicious. We are told that that the captain wanted to violate the wife of one of the captives, R. Moses. She asks him if she would be allowed to throw herself overboard to drown; would such an action bar her from the future resurrection of the dead. R. Moses responds by quoting the verse: “I will bring them back from Bashan; I will bring them back from the depths of the sea.” The wife accepted this and drowned herself. The problem with this story is that it is lifted straight out of the Talmud. In the Talmud the story is that there are two boats sailing to Rome with Jewish captives, one with four hundred boys and another with four hundred girls. Fearing for their chastity, the girls ask the boys if they would be forfeiting their place in the future resurrection by jumping overboard. The boys reply by the same verse. The girls follow this advice and jump. The boys then follow the example themselves and also commit martyrdom. So here in the four captives story we have the same scenario, woman on a boat with her virtue threatened, with the exact same conversation and the exact same verse quoted. What is one supposed to believe; that R. Moses and his wife played out the Talmudic story, apparently unaware of the precedent, or someone lifted the story from the Talmud and used it for the four captives story.

The ending of the whole narrative is also simply too convenient and too much to type to be believed. We are told that R. Moses and R. Hanok arrive in Cordova. They go to the central synagogue and sit in the back; everyone just assumes they are simple beggars. While they are sitting there, the leading rabbi, R. Nathan the Pious, is unable to give the correct explanation in a matter of law. R. Moses and Hanok come forward, deus ex machina, and solve the problem. R. Nathan the Pious is so amazed by these two scholars that he steps down and acknowledges their authority. This is the sort of thing that only happens in legends. In real life, revolutions in authority do not happen overnight; the opposition fights with every last breath and goes to its grave kicking, screaming and denouncing the interlopers, who stole what was rightfully theirs.

General Exam III: Jewish History (Part III)

What are some of the major historiographical debates concerning the conversos of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries? Who are the historians who have participated in these debates? Explain which side you take in each debate and why.

The year 1391 saw a wave of anti-Jewish riots engulf the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. This was followed by an intensive and well organized missionary campaign, with apostate Jews such as Paul of Burgos and Joshua Halorki playing prominent roles. The highlight of this missionary campaign was a public disputation at Tortosa, hosted by the Avignon Pope, Benedict XIII. These events utterly demoralized the Jewish community. It is believed that over the course of these two decades upwards of one third of the Jewish community converted to Christianity, creating a new social group in Spain, the conversos or New Christians.

The Christian populace viewed these New Christians with suspicion and as being, in a sense, a greater threat then Jews. Medieval society possessed an elaborate system designed to keep Jews in their place. Conversos, though, as Christians did not live under the traditional strictures that bound Jews. By converting to Christianity, these conversos now could take up high government positions, marry into noble families and even to enter the Church and become priests. In response to this problem, Old Christians developed, over the course of the fifteenth century, a series of mechanisms to keep conversos down, such as a theory of racial identity and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). This can be seen most clearly in a series of ordinances passed in the city of Toledo in 1449. These ordinances placed restrictions on all those descended from converted Jews and banned them from holding certain offices. Furthermore opponents of conversos accused them of being crypto-Jews or marranos. These accusations culminated in the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, whose purpose was to root out those who practiced “Judaizing” heresies.

In 1492, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, attempted to solve the converso problem by simply expelling all Jews from their dominions. The thought was that the continued presence of a Jewish community served as a negative influence on the conversos; remove the negative influence and the conversos would submerge into the general Christian society. Clearly a reasonable assumption, the problem, though, was that since they offered Jews a choice to convert instead of leaving and even went so far as to allow those Jews who left the chance to come back, embrace Catholicism and regain their property. (An offer that many Jews took the Crown up on.) This created a whole new round of conversos, thus putting everything back to square one. The Spanish Crown had to use the Inquisition to root out Judaizers, a process that would color the Spanish cultural landscape for centuries.

A similar situation, though, as we shall see later, with important differences, played itself out in Portugal. Many of the Jews who fled Spain in 1492 went to Portugal. In 1497 King Manuel forcibly baptized them, thus creating a new converso community. After a few decades Portugal found itself in the same situation as Spain; it had this large population of former Jews and their descendents with serious questions hanging over their doxy. To solve this problem Portugal followed the Spanish lead and instituted an Inquisition of its own to root out Judaizers. And as with Spain, this process went on for centuries.

Throughout the following centuries conversos continued to leave Spain and particularly Portugal. In fact Portuguese became a byword for converso amongst Europeans. Many of these conversos joined established Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Others went to places such as France and England where, even though Jews were banned, there was no Inquisition and so as long as one did not do anything too obvious one could live in safety. Finally there were conversos who established their own Jewish communities. The most prominent of these was the Amsterdam community in Holland. Thus making themselves, once again a factor in the Jewish world.

The Jewish community in dealing with these conversos was, ironically enough, faced with the exact same problem as the Spanish Inquisition; were these conversos Jews or were they Christians? Just as there was a first act for Spain, when they had to deal with conversos alongside a Jewish community in the fifteenth century, and a second act, when they had they had to deal with conversos without a Jewish community in a post 1492 Spain, so to there are two acts in the story of how the Jewish community dealt with conversos, the fifteenth century and post 1492. Each of these two phases has to be treated separately.

The problem of the conversos has been passed down to modern academic scholarship, which has struggled where to fit conversos and to answer the basic question of to what extent were the charges against conversos true; was there at any point a significant population of conversos secretly practicing Judaism. The two major figures in this debate are Yitzchak Baer, who assumed that the conversos were, by and large practicing Jews, and Benzion Netanyahu, who argues that this was all a myth creating by their Old Christian opponents.[1]

Yitzchak Baer relied on Inquisition material and was willing to lend credence to it. For Baer, obviously, the Inquisition’s charges were hardly negative. Baer embraces the conversos. The conversos were secret Jews and as such they are part of the Jewish people and of the Jewish destiny. The funny thing about Baer is that he believed that that the Jews who converted in the aftermath of 1391 were Averroists, who did not really believe in Judaism. Once they became Christians they continued to practice their Averroist Judaism. So the Church found themselves dealing with a group of heretical Christians made up of what had once been heretical Jews.
Benzion Netanyahu, first in The Marranos of Spain and later in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, advances the revisionist claim that the conversos, were by and large, believing Christians not any different from Old Christians. Ironically enough, Netanyahu basis this undermining of a Jewish legend completely on Jewish sources. Netanyahu’s argument is that, unlike the Inquisition sources which treat conversos as Judaizers, rabbinic sources particularly once we get past the events of 1391 are almost unanimous in their negative attitude toward conversos, viewing them as Christian apostates. In fact Jews cheered the creation of the Inquisition and willingly cooperated with them, even to the point of making up charges against conversos.

An example of a case that Netanyahu puts a lot of emphasis on is that of Profiat Duran and his friend. Both Duran and the friend converted under duress during the violence of 1391. They planned to travel to the Holy Land to do penance. Later, though, the friend reneged on these plans; even though he had originally converted under duress, he had since come to sincerely believe in Christianity. Duran devotes his satirical polemic, Do Not be Like Your Forefathers, to mocking this former friend of his. Netanyahu loves this story because it illustrates how even the original generation of conversos were hardly the loyal defenders of Judaism that myth would have it.

This begs the question, why the Inquisition; if there were no Judaizing conversos, particularly once we get past the early fifteenth century, why was the Spanish Inquisition formed? Netanyahu devotes Origins of the Inquisition to answering this question. For Netanyahu the Spanish Inquisition was the product of a decades long racial campaign by Old Christians to eliminate the conversos. The claim that conversos were secretly practicing Judaism was a lie made up in order to justify murdering off conversos and maintaining the racial purity of Spain. What is really radical about this theory is that Netanyahu has effectively rewritten fifteenth century Christian anti-Judaism as very modern sounding anti Semitism. Netanyahu’s fifteenth century Spain is almost identical to early twentieth century Germany. You have a large population of highly assimilated Jews who want nothing more than to leave their heritage behind and be accepted by the general populace. They are stopped, though, by a racial anti Semitism, that sees them as a threat not because of their Jewish beliefs, they have none to speak of, but because of their racial heritage.

Netanyahu’s views remain controversial. His main supporter is Norman Roth whose Conversos, Inquisition the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a history of fifteenth century conversos, consciously told outside the context of Judaism. Roth’s conversos are Christians and part of Christian society. Outside the field of Jewish history, Netanyahu has gained the gained the support of Henry Kamen, one of the leading scholars on early modern Spain. Kamen’s discussion of the Jewish situation in his book, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision, comes straight out of Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has gained quite a number of opponents, particularly Gershon Cohen and Yosef Yerushalmi. Cohen attacked Netanyahu’s use of rabbinic sources. For example he argued that rabbis were inclined to treat conversos as gentiles simply as a matter of halachic convenience. Saying that conversos were gentiles solves a number of problems, particularly those relating to marriage and divorce. For example if a converso women were to abandon her converso husband without a divorce, and declare herself to be a Jew she could still be allowed to remarry despite never getting a divorce; since she was not living as a Jew her original marriage was never valid in the first place.

Yerushalmi, in From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth- Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, does not directly come out in defense of the conversos Jewishness. What he is particularly interested in, though, is taking the Portuguese conversos out of Netanyahu’s model. These Jews were forcibly converted and were never given any sort of choice. Moreover these Jews had already fled Spain, abandoning their homes and possessions. Also, even after their conversion, they managed to go nearly forty years without having to deal with an inquisition.[2] This allowed them to build some sort of Jewish community. It is not a coincidence that almost all of the conversos leaving Iberia and joining the Jewish community were Portuguese. For example the main subject of Yerushalmi’s book, Isaac Cardoso, and his brother, Abraham Cardoso were of Portuguese descent.

I believe that it is important to transcend the issue of whether conversos were really Jews or Christians. I agree with Netanyahu that while many of the original conversos converted to Christianity out of fear and continued to practice Judaism secretly either in their hearts or in actual practice, the later generations of conversos were distanced from the Jewish community and therefore cannot be viewed as part of it. The Jewish community did not recognize them as Jews and so therefore it would not be appropriate to talk about secret Jews. That being said I am not about to pass on the Inquisition and assume that it was simply the product of a racist conspiracy. I assume that many if not most of the people who went through the Inquisition were not good Catholics and were guilty of something. Considering that the vast majority of the people that the Spanish Inquisition focused its attention on were descended from Jews it only makes sense that there would be a Jewish influence at work and the heresy involved would have a certain Judaic flavoring to it. Of course bad Catholic does not mean good Jew or even a Jew at all. Just as bad Jew does not mean good Catholic. The problem with having rabbinic sources face off against Inquisition sources is that they are talking at cross purposes with each other and mean very different things by Jew and Christian.

The fact that you had Christians with Judaic practices or even heterodox Catholics raises an interesting question as to why this was even important. Christianity has a long history of tolerating the native practices of recently converted people and it has even been willing to wink at their heterodoxies. (What are Easter and Christmas but pagan practices that were brought into Christianity by converts?) A useful parallel is the situation in the New World. Beyond getting natives to commit to the act of baptism there was little done to eliminate their traditional pagan practices and beliefs. Native Americans were specifically exempted from the Inquisition. Even today much of the Catholicism practiced in South America is a syncretist Catholicism far removed from Orthodox Catholicism. So the question is if the Spanish and Portuguese were so willing to turn the other way and ignore the native keeping an idol in his hut why did they care if a converso lit candles in his house Friday night, taught his children Hebrew phrases or believed in the continued relevance of Mosaic Law? Just the Church tolerated the development of a syncretist Catholicism amongst Native Americans it could have fairly easily tolerated a Judaic syncretist Catholicism among Spanish Catholics of Jewish descent. Of course Muslims were in the same situation so it cannot simply be a matter of anti-Semitism.

[1] Before I continue there is something I should make very clear. There is a long heroic mythology about conversos describing them as striving to maintain their Judaism under extreme situations. This myth is exemplified in Marcus Lehmann’s novel Family y Arguilar, written during the nineteenth century. Family y Arguilar features a family of conversos secretly leading a full blown traditionally Jewish lifestyle with an underground Jewish community in seventeenth century Spain. As far as everyone is concerned these sorts of conversos are a myth. No one is trying to claim that such people actually existed.
[2] The conversos did undergo a major attack in Lisbon in 1506. This is the subject of another book by Yerushalmi.

(To be continued ...)