Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) China. Religion had not yet been left behind in early modern Spain. It was able to reform itself and exploit the dawning insights of modernity to further its own reach and vision.
Early modern Spain was, therefore, part of the advance guard of modernity. But Ferdinand and Isabella had to contain all this energy. They were trying to unite kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and separate, and had to be welded together. In 1483 the monarchs had established their own Spanish Inquisition to enforce ideological conformity in their unified realm. They were creating a modern, absolute state, but did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammeled intellectual freedom. The state inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word whose Greek original meant “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone world; it was a modernizing institution, employed by the monarchs to create national unity.3 They knew very well that religion could be an explosive and revolutionary force. Protestant rulers in such countries as England were equally ruthless to their own Catholic “dissidents,” who were seen similarly as enemies of the state. We shall see that this kind of coercion was often part of the modernizing process. In Spain, the chief victims of the Inquisition were the Jews, and it is the reaction of the Jewish people to this aggressive modernity that we shall consider in this chapter. Their experience illustrates many of the ways in which people in other parts of the world would respond to modernization.
The Spanish reconquista of the old Muslim territories of al-Andalus was a catastrophe for the Jews of Iberia. In the Islamic state, the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been able to live together in relative harmony for over six hundred years. The Jews in particular had enjoyed a cultural and spiritual renaissance in Spain, and they were not subject to the pogroms that were the lot of the Jewish people in the rest of Europe.4 But as the Christian armies gradually advanced through the peninsula, conquering more and more territory from Islam, they brought their anti-Semitism with them. In 1378 and 1391, Jewish communities in both Aragon and Castile were attacked by Christians, who dragged Jews to the baptismal fonts and forced them, on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. In Aragon, the preaching of the Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) regularly inspired anti-Semitic riots; Ferrer also organized public debates between rabbis and Christians that were designed to discredit Judaism. Some Jews tried to evade persecution by voluntarily converting to Christianity. They were officially known as conversos (“converts”), though the Christians called them Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse which some of the converts adopted as a badge of pride. The rabbis warned Jews against conversion, but at first the “New Christians,” as the conversos were called, became wealthy and successful. Some became high-ranking priests, others married into the best families, and many achieved spectacular success in commerce. This brought new problems, since the “Old Christians” resented the upward mobility of the new Jewish Christians. Between 1449 and 1474, there were frequent riots against the Marranos, who were killed, had their property destroyed, or were driven out of town.5
Ferdinand and Isabella were alarmed by this development. The conversion of the Jews was not drawing their united kingdom together but instead causing fresh divisions. The monarchs were also disturbed to hear reports that some of the “New Christians” had lapsed, returned to the old faith, and lived as secret Jews. They had, it was said, formed an underground movement to entice other conversos back into the Jewish fold. Inquisitors were instructed to hunt out these closet Jews, who, it was thought, could be recognized by such practices as refusing to eat pork or to work on Saturday. Suspects were tortured until they confessed to infidelity, and gave information about other secret “Judaizers.” As a result, some 13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during the first twelve years of its existence. But in fact many of those who were thus killed or imprisoned, or had their property confiscated, were loyal Catholics who had no Judaizing tendencies at all. The experience not unnaturally made many of the conversos bitter and skeptical of their new faith.6
When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in 1492, they inherited a new and substantial Jewish population in that city-state. The situation, they decided, had got out of hand, and as a final solution to the Jewish problem, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion. Spanish Jewry was destroyed. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen, went into exile. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews all over the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jews lost their land and were forced into exile in scattered communities outside Palestine, known collectively as the Diaspora. From that time on, exile was a painful leitmotif of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 came at the end of a century that had seen the ejection of Jews from one part of Europe after another. They were deported from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Augsburg in 1439, from Bavaria in 1442, and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. Jews were expelled from Perugia (1485), Vicenza (1486), Parma (1488), Milan and Lucca (1489), and Tuscany in 1494. Gradually the Jews drifted east, establishing, as they thought, a foothold for themselves in Poland.7 Exile now seemed an endemic and inescapable part of the Jewish condition.
This was certainly the conviction of those Spanish Jews who after the expulsion took refuge in the North African and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire. They were used to Muslim society, but the loss of Spain—or Sefarad, as they called it—had inflicted a deep psychic wound. These Sephardic Jews felt that they themselves and everything else were in the wrong place.8 Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of the exile is wholly unfamiliar and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God.
The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened. They would fear annihilation and extinction. In their confusion and pain, many would do what some of the Spanish exiles did, and turn to religion. But because their lives were so utterly changed, they would have to evolve new forms of faith to make the old traditions speak to them in their radically altered circumstances.
But this would take time. In the early sixteenth century, the exiled Jews found that traditional Judaism did nothing for them. The disaster seemed unprecedented, and they found that old pieties no longer worked. Some turned to messianism. For centuries, Jews had waited for a Messiah, an anointed king of the house of David, to bring their long exile to an end and return them to the Promised Land. Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come.9 Other peoples
