Luso-converso businessmen flowed with particular venom from the pens of various commentators. One polemicist wrote to Philip IV that, “being lords of commerce and of the [customs] of all the ports … through the arrendamientos of royal rents, all [conversos] have their wealth outside of [the Habsburg Kingdoms] and the greater part of it in the provinces of your enemies … and they bleed these [Hispanic] realms continually, weakening them more every day, and making your enemies more powerful.”139 Such condemnation grossly exaggerated the power of aliens and glossed over the obvious fact that most immigrants were not merchant tycoons. It is true that foreign businessmen had attained prominence in economic life. Frenchmen and Flemings, for example, founded large trading houses in Seville. Genoese bankers, the German Fuggers, and wealthy Portuguese conversos bankrolled the Spanish state at high interest. As mentioned earlier, a few of these conversos also secured the lucrative royal contracts.140 For all their ire, however, nativist reactionaries could not erase the fact that the commercial activities of the immigrants satisfied Spanish demand that native businessmen and capitalists could not meet, be it demand for credit, administrative services, or foreign goods.
At a popular level, the attitudes of Old Christians toward converso merchants and businessmen during Spain’s century of crisis were often tinted by a host of fears about the latter’s supposed greed, deceitfulness, and general immorality. Some libelous fictions that circulated freely as late as the 1700s had obvious roots in the mythological repertoire of medieval Judeophobia,141 and had little if anything to do directly with the economic activities of seventeenth-century conversos. For example, in the 1630s a royal bureaucrat by the name of Juan de Quinones devoted a purportedly scientific treatise to the subject of Jewish male menstruation. Quinones argued not only that Jewish men and their male descendants menstruated, but that all who descended of Jews emitted a peculiar odor, that they drank Christian blood to alleviate their God-given maladies, and so on.142 Quinones’s fabulous claims were centuries old,143 yet they proved remarkably resilient despite the fact that there had been no openly professing Jews in Iberia since the 1490s.
One of the most successful propagators of mythic conversophobia was the Portuguese polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos. His Breve discurso contra a herética perfidia do Iudaismo (1622) was replete with Judeophobic folklore, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the work sold well both in Costa Mattos’s homeland and in Spain.144 The Spaniard Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s oft-cited Centinela contra Judios, which dated from the early 1670s, rehearsed the same gamut of anti-Jewish legends for a Spanish public not yet weary of reading about Jews and the evil inclinations and physical monstrosities they supposedly transmitted to their descendants.145
Given the currency of conversophobic myths in the Spain of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV, it does not seem coincidental that a major outburst of anti-converso hatred occurred in 1632, when a libel known as the Cristo de la Paciencia spread throughout Madrid. This cause célèbre centered on a group of Portuguese conversos whom local inquisitors had accused of ritually flogging an effigy of Christ in their “secret synagogue.”146 The inquest into the supposed crimes culminated in a monumental auto general de fe in which two of the accused received sentences of death, to the vocal delight of thousands of onlookers.147
The image of conversos as bloodthirsty sadists clearly had a wide and lasting appeal. Shortly after the Paciencia scandal subsided, another celebrated Judeophobic libel became the subject of a popular literary revival. The libel in question was the late medieval legend of the Holy Child of La Guardia (1492), a gory tale of Eucharist desecration and the ritual murder of a Christlike child by Spanish Jews and conversos. Among latter-day dramatizers of this story were the playwrights Jose de Cañizárez (La viva imagen de Cristo, 1641), and the undisputed bestseller of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, Lope de Vega (El niño inocente, 1640).148 For its part, the accusation that conversos relived their ancestors’ deicidal bloodlust by whipping statues of Christ resurfaced as late as 1650, in the inquisitorial process against Maria de Sierra.149
By itself, the recurrence of old defamations suggests that Judeophobic images had enormous resonance both as narrative motifs and as accusatory devices to be wielded against conversos. However, during the late 1500s and throughout the 1600s anti-converso sentiment was much more than a perpetuation of medieval hatreds; it was also a product of the specific historical circumstances in which it occurred. Seventeenth-century conversophobia was similar, often identical in form to medieval Judeophobia, yet the meanings that the latter-day bigots attached to their fantasies were not necessarily the same as those the medieval Jew-baiters attached to theirs.
Seventeenth-century Portuguese and especially Spanish conversophobia adhered closely to the essentialist ideology (or ideologies) of pureza de sangre. It is not by chance that vociferous defenders of that ideology were at the forefront of anti-converso agitation. In numerous essays, virtually all of them depicted Judeoconversos as greedy, socially ambitious parasites with a hereditary proclivity toward unproductive occupations, such as commodity trading, administration, and (ironically enough) writing. Torrejoncillo, for example, contended that many conversos did not work on the land and were drawn toward commerce and pen-wielding because they descended from the Israelite tribe of Reuben, which God had cursed in such a way that whatever its progeny planted on good soil died within a few days.150 In 1633, Juan Escobar de Corro provided what could easily pass for a “digest” of common misgivings about conversos when he wrote, “Hebraei et … eorum descendentes abjecti et infames ab omnibus reputantur. Et sunt … seditosi, cupidi, avari et perniciosi ad comunitates.…”151 Unfortunately for conversos, such pejorative evaluations were not the preserve of polemicists. Similar derogations issued from places far removed from debates concerning the purity of blood statutes. In popular literature, for instance, the collective image of conversos did not fare particularly well. Miguel de Cervantes had one of his characters in El Coloquio de los Perros exclaim the following:
It is with wonder that one can find among [conversos] one who believes in the sacred Catholic faith in a straightforward manner: their sole intent is to grasp and save money.… [A]lways earning and never spending, they…gather up the greatest quantity of money that there is in Spain…. They get it all, they hide it all, and they swallow it all. Let it be considered that they are many, and that each day they hide a little or a lot…. They steal from us with stealth [a pie quedo], and they do so with the fruits of our own inheritance, which they resell to us, becoming rich and leaving us poor…. [T]heir science is none other than stealing from us, and they practice it effortlessly.152
According to depictions such as the above, conversos despised honest, productive labor. What is more, they were physically weak and incapable of exhibiting valor; thus (among other reasons) they could never equal the honor of hidalgos—or, for that matter, that of Old Christian commoners, who enjoyed the comparable dignity of working on the land. Conversos were unworthy, the argument went, regardless of how successful they were in purchasing offices and titles, and in sporting all the external trappings of social success—fine dress, good manners, and the like.153
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