the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That period saw the intensification of inquisitorial persecution in Portugal, the flight of thousands of Portuguese New Christians into Spain, the concomitant resurgence of the Spanish Holy Office, the massive emigration of Judeoconversos from the Iberian Peninsula, and finally, the integration of hundreds if not thousands of converso refugees into the Jewish Diaspora.
My own interest in the phenomena abbreviated by the labels “dissident” and “renegade” behavior centers on five clusters of questions that existing scholarship has tended to underanalyze or neglect altogether.
First and foremost, why did converso “renegades” exist at all? Why did many conversos choose to return to Iberia? Why did many of them return to Christianity? Why did some of the returnees opt to denounce themselves and their fellows without any apparent or direct pressure from the Inquisition?14
Second, were the returnees and spontaneous informers simply idiosyncratic individuals prone to “strange” behavior? Were they mere opportunists? Were they following their religious conscience(s)?
Third, were there specific historical forces or circumstances to which the dissidents’ behavior served as a response or strategy of adaptation? If so, what were these factors?
Fourth, how typical or atypical were the so-called renegades?
Fifth, and most importantly, what did it mean to the renegades to be Jewish? What did it mean to them to be Christian? What did it mean to them to shift from one identity to the other?
The present study focuses on otherwise ordinary converso “renegades” of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to answer these questions. Here I deal primarily with a group of highly mobile Judeoconversos of Portuguese origin who traveled throughout the Iberian Peninsula but resided at least temporarily within the poorer corners of the Sephardi Diaspora, chiefly in southwestern France, as well as within the jurisdiction of the Toledan tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. (The judicial district of Toledo encompassed all of New Castile, including the towns of Alcalá, Guadalajara, Talavera, Guadalupe, Ciudad Real, Toledo, and the most populous of all Spanish cities, Madrid.) A plurality of the individuals I have studied were small- to mid-scale merchants who at one time or another had resided in southwestern France but were subsequently captured by the Inquisition while trading in Madrid, either as temporary or permanent residents of the city.
By focusing on this population I test a hypothesis that seemingly aberrant converso behaviors, chief among them returning to Iberia and reconverting to Catholicism, were not simple matters of opportunism, idiosyncratic preference, or fear of persecution, but were nonexceptional and quite logical strategies by which conversos adapted to an especially difficult historical environment. My conclusion is that, given that environment, the options of return to Iberia, reversion to Christianity, and voluntary collaboration with the Inquisition were earnest and practical choices, ones as “normal” as the option of “returning” to the ancestral culture via crypto-Judaism or by unequivocal resettlement in the Sephardi Diaspora.
Underpinning this interpretation is a recognition that the social and historical context of identity construction was pivotal in the development of renegade behaviors. One of my chief findings in this regard is that cultural border crossers were invariably confronted with the collective expectations—indeed, the vehement demands—of their host communities. A central challenge of this study, then, has been to show how renegades coped with those demands, and ultimately, how and why these individuals accommodated and at the same time failed to accommodate to the self-image, values, and social conventions of their neighbors.
My exposition follows the following outline. In the second chapter I depict the general historical conditions within which the processes of successful and unsuccessful accommodation took place. Specifically, I portray Spain’s era of economic and political crisis—the end of the Habsburgian Golden Age. Here I emphasize the profound contradiction that the era engendered between conversos’ deep involvement in the economic life of the country on one hand, and the profound fear and loathing with which Old Christians regarded New Christians—especially Portuguese conversos and their descendants—on the other. Chapter 3 reconstructs the phenomenon of return within its immediate social and economic contexts. Here I explain the manner in which Jewish religious authorities approached return as a kind of taboo. Through an analysis of selected inquisitorial dossiers, I also present a simple typology of returnees and explain these renegades’ behavior and dilemmas vis-à-vis the normative Judaism to which they and other immigrant conversos were exposed in the Sephardi Diaspora. Chapter 4 explicates the premises that guided the interrogation of inquisitorial suspects, and proceeds to construct a collective profile of renegades on the basis of inquisitorial procesos. Finally, Chapter 5 charts the religious life of a typical returnee to the point of his reconversion to Christianity. I use that case to explain two aspects. First, I argue that conformity promised renegades an end to social isolation, and hence to an apprehension of solitude and drift; second, I propose that conformity served to ameliorate the vicissitudes that accompanied the struggle for material and psychic security by rendering that struggle into a meaningful narrative. In conclusion, I explain that while many conversos understood their yearning for stability in the pious idiom of their time as a quest for spiritual redemption, and therefore as a purely religious imperative, the yearning was ultimately concerned with life on Earth, with emotional and physical well-being in the here and now, and not with the abstract validity of any theological formula or system of beliefs. Even if the longing for security was self-consciously religious, I continue, its object was the sense of stability afforded by conformity indeed by absolute faith in a body of traditional dogmas, rituals, customs, and more importantly, social relations. The goal was not philosophical or mystical truth as such.15 While I acknowledge that at least some converso renegades experienced no conflict in shifting back and forth from one religion to another, I contend that a cause of such shifting, paradoxically enough, was the equivocators’ yearning for stability. Renegades found that stability by temporarily embracing and conforming to one community of faith, and then another, as circumstances demanded it. Chapter 6 summarizes these findings and suggests some of their implications for the interpretation of early modern converso and Jewish history.
Historiography, Sources, and Methods
Studies that focus on Judeoconversos, such as this one, do not represent a unitary field of research but a somewhat eclectic subfield of various branches of scholarship. Chief among the latter are Jewish history and literature (especially Sephardi studies and the history of anti-Judaism), Spanish history and literature (especially the history of the Inquisition), Portuguese history, the history of the Netherlands, the economic history of the early modern Levant, the history of European religion(s), and the history of philosophy (especially skepticism and rationalism). The fact that the problem of conversos covers so much academic ground bears witness not only to the geographical mobility of New Christians, but also to their multifaceted cultural and social profile.
During the first half of the twentieth century, historical writing on the subject of Judeoconversos developed along two primary paths. The first path was cleared by peninsular historians who were chiefly preoccupied with identifying and evaluating the role(s) of Judeoconversos within the larger history of Christian Iberia. Historians of Sepharad cleared the second path. Unlike their Hispanist counterparts, these scholars paid close attention to converso life (especially crypto-Judaism) in the context of Jewish history as a whole, inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula.16
Among peninsular writers, Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz were perhaps the first to dwell on the existence of renegades, chiefly “professional” informers and persecutors of converso origin, and to treat the behavior
