Pereira in much more nuanced—and much more accurate—terms.
Interestingly, Pereira pursued the same anti-“Portuguese” logic as his accusers. This is highly ironic in light of the fact that Pereira was Portuguese himself. By his own account, Pereira had previously assailed five supposed Judeoconversos based on the same prejudiced view of Portuguese immigrants that had, according to him, driven Mártir and the other travelers to mistrust, curse, and assault him. Specifically, Pereira said that when he had been a resident of Cadiz, Seville, and Madrid, he had accused two merchants, a doctor, and a businessman of being “Jewish pícaros” merely because they, like himself, were Portuguese who happened to be living in Spain. The defendant even admitted that he had insulted the men although he possessed no evidence that they were Judaizers (one suspects Pereira did not even have any proof that his alleged victimizers were New Christians, let alone crypto-Jews). In short, the defendant admitted he had drawn the imaginary equation Portuguese = converso = secret Jew, to which he had fallen prey while traveling from Andalusia to Castile.
In contrast to the travelers’ portrait of Pereira, however, Pereira’s depiction of the five supposed Luso-conversos reflected a social or class bias as much as it expressed a sense of ethnic and religious opposition between Old and New Christians. The suspect explained that in insulting the alleged cristãos-novos he had upheld a popular notion that being bourgeois was tantamount to being of Jewish extraction, or at least was as reprehensible as being Jewish. Whether Pereira truly espoused this notion or had merely seized it as a convenient tool with which to level verbal abuse is not immediately relevant. What is more interesting is the mental association that Pereira claimed to have made between members of urban non-noble elites—businessmen, merchants, and professionals—on one hand, and stereotyped images of “Judaic” ignobility on the other.
Pereira’s imaginary association entailed four mutually reinforcing premises. The first premise was that a good Christian (by implication, a person of “clean” blood such as Pereira himself) could easily deduce that a given individual was a New Christian, and therefore a Jew, simply by ascertaining that the person was a merchant or businessman of some kind. The second premise was that merchants, and by extension businessmen in general, were easily identifiable by their social behavior, for example by the rudeness with which they treated honorable people. The third premise held, along the same lines, that a Portuguese merchant who acted contemptuously toward his (or presumably her) betters either had Jewish blood or was like someone who did. Conversely—and this was the fourth premise—having Jewish blood pre-disposed a person to offend the natural and proper order of society by withholding reverence where reverence was due and by embracing beliefs that were contrary to Catholicism. It is significant that Pereira did not pay any attention to the religious beliefs of his alleged libelers, as if to say that the heretical nature of Luso-conversos was well known.
To summarize, Pereira not only presented himself as a Judeophobe, but as an indigent aristocrat who resented low-born individuals (in this case, conversos) precisely because their power over him, like their material wealth, accrued not from the dignity of noble lineage but from the exercise of base commercial or professional skills. Where Mártir and the travelers had collapsed ethnic and religious categories in their testimony (“Portuguese” = “converso” = “Jew”), Pereira conflated two distinct religious classifications (“Jew” and “heretic”), an ethnic classification (“Portuguese of the Nation”), and a socioeconomic one (“businessman” and/or “merchant”).106
Judeophobia and the Place of Conversos in Peninsular Society
What does the testimony collected in the Pereira dossier tell us about the historical environment from which it sprang? What does the informants’ narrative conflation of religious, ethnic, and in Pereira’s case, socioeconomic categories reveal about the ways in which Old Christians tended to regard conversos in the seventeenth century?
Above all, the Pereira dossier bears witness to an atmosphere of suspicion that had the potential to mushroom into open animosity against Judeoconversos, particularly against those of Portuguese origin. That such hostility exploded in the face of Diego Pereira, whose outward behavior was probably beyond serious reproach, suggests the fact that at least some bigoted Spaniards (and a few Catholic foreigners like Torre and Pan y Agua) did not require any real evidence of heresy in order to “unmask” and persecute “secret Jews.” Pereira confirmed this fact when he indicated that he had not bothered to avail himself of any actual evidence of Judaizing to conclude that certain Portuguese men were contemptible “Jews.” All that the accusers’ passive bigotry required for it to turn into open abuse was a perception that its object was “Portuguese.”
The view that Portuguese immigrants and their descendants were ipso facto New Christians, and that all conversos of Lusitanian origin were secret Jews, arose in Spain in response to the Portuguese migrations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Like most sweeping, derisive generalizations, this double presumption was empirically untenable. Even so, it was not a mere product of bigoted hallucination; rather, it sprang from a small but significant kernel of historical actuality.
As several historians have noted, there is evidence that crypto-Judaism was a lingering reality among Portuguese conversos long after Spanish Judaizing had withered under the cumulative impact of Inquisitorial persecution.107 Many of the immigrants to Spain were indeed conversos, but, more importantly, it is probable that a number of them were also secret Jews.
Lusitanian crypto-Judaism, whatever its objective resemblance to normative Judaism, owed its survival to the conditions under which Jewish and converso life developed in Portugal. The scope of this study prohibits a thorough review of these conditions, yet the following important aspects are worth mentioning.
The Jews of Portugal pursued a separate social and religious existence in relative peace until 1497. In that year, King Manoel arranged for summary mass baptisms by which an overwhelming majority of them became titular Christians. Once baptized, the former Jews enjoyed legal protection from discrimination and persecution for a period of thirty-six years, in accordance with consecutive royal decrees. The explicit purpose of such protection was to permit the unhindered assimilation of all first-generation “conversos” (the children of the converts) and to avert the need to establish an Inquisition in the Spanish mold.108
Some scholars have argued that a vast majority of Luso-conversos took advantage of the long legal reprieve to acculturate into Portuguese Christian society.109 It is certainly the case that some families of cristãos-novos penetrated the upper echelons of the Portuguese nobility, the royal bureaucracy, and the financial and commercial elite of the Portuguese kingdom from 1497 until the establishment of the Lusitanian Inquisition in 1536.110 Still, it is not clear what proportion of Luso-conversos embraced Catholicism sincerely. Some data suggest the possibility that internal converso resistance to Christianization was considerable. For example, the first generations of cristãos-novos included several Spanish Jews who had successfully defied conversionist pressure in their native land, and had taken refuge in Portugal in 1492. That those tenacious refugees had not capitulated earlier, under the threat of banishment and expropriation, makes it improbable that they embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly after the sudden and utterly perfunctory mass conversion of 1497.
Perhaps the most prudent assertion one can make about the situation in Portugal prior to 1536, then, is that royal protection allowed those converts who wanted to preserve their Jewish attachments to cultivate and bequeath them in secret, while it also allowed those converts who wished to blend into the fabric of Christendom to pursue the path of assimilation in relative peace.
Sincerely Christian or not, Portuguese conversos became culturally “Ibericized” in the course of the sixteenth century, just as Spanish New Christians had before them. Externally at least, nothing distinguished New Christians from Old Christians in Portugal by the seventeenth century. Portuguese conversos were unique, however, in that their existence, unlike
