false testimony.101
An Analysis of the Pereira Case
Regardless of how and why the proceedings against Pereira concluded, it is clear that Páez’s deposition had brought the inquest to a crossroads. On one hand, the inquisitors had heard a series of mutually supportive and fairly consistent denunciations. Lending weight to these denunciations was the fact, made evident in the course of the inquest, that Pereira barely possessed a rudimentary knowledge of Catholic dogma and did not know several prayers. To make matters worse for the defendant, three of the denouncers were socially respectable individuals whom the inquisitors could not dismiss out of hand as ignorant and conniving rabble: Diego de Castilla was a knight of Santiago, while Pedro Mártir and Anselmo de la Huerta were religiosos in good standing. Notably, Friar Huerta was an inquisitorial calificador, a theological consultant to the Holy Office who specialized in the identification of heresy. What better qualifications than Huerta’s to produce a persuasive deposition in the eyes of his colleagues?
On the other hand stood Páez’s testimony, which entirely corroborated key portions of the suspect’s deposition. Also bolstering Pereira was his own suggestion that he had successfully undergone pruebas as an aspirant to a military honor. By deposing that he had been the subject of a genealogical investigation, Pereira flaunted his confidence that he was without sangre infecta (infected blood). More importantly, he intimated that he had the means to prove his “cleanliness” and thus, implicitly, his religious orthodoxy and good character. It is true that genealogical investigations were not foolproof because some individuals (usually wealthy ones) could purchase forged certificates of limpieza de sangre in order to obtain favorable evaluations. In any case, “clean” blood did not in itself preclude heresy from the point of view of the Holy Office. Still, pruebas were potentially among Pereira’s best defensive assets since the Inquisition could easily verify the existence of those documents and thus authenticate a significant part of his testimony.102 If in fact Pereira had submitted to the scrutiny of the Order of Christ, his pruebas could at least raise some doubts as to the credibility of his accusers. At most, the pruebas could serve as ancillary evidence of his good faith, even if such records, as fallible instruments, could not prove his limpieza or his religious self-identity in a definitive way.
Was Pereira, as his detractors claimed, a dishonest converso and a crypto-Jew? Did Pereira actually dislike cristãos-novos, as he virtually boasted to his interrogators, or was he feigning prejudice in order to avoid punishment, in this case by portraying himself as a respectably Judeophobic Old Christian?
To conclude that Pereira was a converso Judaizer who sought to trick his questioners by constructing an elaborate web of lies requires us to suppose that he was a bold and resourceful master of deception. Such an image of Pereira contrasts sharply with the one his accusers drew of him. In their rendering, Pereira was extremely clumsy and volatile: He disclosed his supposed Jewishness in fits of bitterness (“I renounce the Jewish whore who gave birth to me”) or through a rather improbable naiveté (“Don’t they say [that the second Person of the Holy Trinity] was the Son?”).
It is certainly conceivable that Pereira was a rash individual who made some outrageous statements while inebriated or out of a misguided bravado when he felt cornered by a hostile clique. All the same, Pereira’s behavior as his accusers depicted it grossly overstepped the boundaries of plausibility. For example, it would have required an inordinate and therefore unlikely carelessness or stupidity on Pereira’s part to say to a group of strangers that he was entitled to live by whatever religion suited his fancy. Seventeenth-century Spain was a country in which even the mere appearance of religious infidelity was anathema; Pereira must have known this. If he did not, or was so impulsive or demented that he could not control his heretical tongue, he certainly did not have the presence of mind to manufacture a seamless screen of falsehoods, with or without assistance of his brother-in-law.
A historical reconstruction of Pereira must reject the notion that he was at once a calculating, clever rogue and a volatile fumbler who could barely disguise his “Judaism.” Pereira could not be both astute and asinine.103 Thus the most appropriate conclusion one can draw from the available evidence is that even if Pereira was lying about something—his identity, his past, or both—he was not the Judeophobic caricature that his detractors drew of him.104
On its face, Pereira’s relative ignorance of Catholic dogma and prayer seems to buttress the accusers’ contention that he was not a bona fide Christian. As the reader will recall, Mártir’s wager was that Pereira could not bring himself to profess Christianity in public because Pereira was secretly so perverse that he denied the Catholic faith altogether.
In reality, however, all that Pereira’s ignorance suggests is that he was not a particularly pious Christian. If Pereira had been a skillful liar and a crypto-Jew, he would probably have trained himself in the tenets and verbal formulas of Christianity, for without the ability to repeat these tenets and formulas (however insincerely) he would not have been able to conceal his heresy very well, especially not while living in the midst of an arch-Catholic society such as that of seventeenth-century Spain. (By the same token, if Pereira had wanted to establish his credibility, he probably would not have told the inquisitors that he had previously undergone a genealogical investigation if had he not actually done so: Why would Pereira have risked his future and his reputation by concocting a story that his interrogators could easily disprove?)
Leaving aside questions of plausibility, we must recognize that Pereira’s lack of religious knowledge did not necessarily prove anything other than his own ignorance. The records of the Spanish Inquisition offer plentiful examples of defendants—conversos and Old Christians alike—who were far from well versed in official Catholicism. These records also attest to the fact that many self-incriminating Judaizers had not only mastered Christian prayers, but were very familiar with Christian theology.105 The point is that a defendant’s ability or inability to recite creeds and prayers by rote did not necessarily have anything to do with his or her consciously chosen religious identity or, for that matter, with the inquisitors’ conclusions regarding that defendant’s real or alleged attitude towards Catholicism.
It may well be that Pereira told his questioners the truth about himself. Yet, given the absence of definitive proof to that effect, the riddle of his “true” religious identity and his ethnic origin remains irresolvable. What interests us here, however, is not the informants’ credibility, but the substance of their testimony as an example of anti-converso sentiment.
Through their depositions, the defendant and his denouncers voiced a gamut of derisive preconceptions about New Christians that were widespread in the Iberia of the 1600s, as Pereira’s own observations about his homeland suggest. All of the informants, including the accused, appealed first and foremost to an anti-Portuguese variant of conversophobia, itself a form of Judeophobia, in order to place blame on conversos (real or imagined) and paint themselves in the colors of innocence and righteousness.
Pedro Mártir and his comrades articulated a rather crude Judeophobia through a kind of semantic slippage. Instead of defining Pereira as a New Christian heretic, the accusers referred to him almost obsessively as el Portugués occasionally shifting to anti-Jewish epithets such as perro judio (Jewish dog). In so doing they not only (mis)used the term “Portuguese” to mean “converso” and revealed their Judeophobic intent, but they tacitly conveyed that they were not interested in denouncing heresy in the strictest sense. In fact, none of the accusers employed such designations as hereje (heretic) and judaizante at all. Instead, the informants insinuated that the person they were accusing was a full-fledged Portuguese “Jew” who had disguised himself as a Christian. The focus here was not on the suspect’s religious behavior, but on his presumed nature: In the accusers’ eyes it was as if Pereira were ultimately not a Christian who behaved as a Jew, namely a Judaizer, but a wholly foreign and unassimilable creature whose essential character was “Jewish.” It is noteworthy that
