condition of conversion, provided they brought money with them, but the sovereigns finally grew fearful that the purity of the faith would be impaired and, in 1499, an explanatory edict was issued, decreeing death and confiscation for any Jew entering Spain, whether a foreigner or returning exile, even if he asked for baptism, unless beforehand he sent word that he wished to come for that purpose, when he was to be baptized at the port of entry and a notarial act was to be taken. That this savage edict was pitilessly enforced is manifested by several cases in 1500 and 1501. Moreover, all masters of Jewish slaves were ordered to send them out of the country within two months, unless they would submit to baptism.[409] Spain was too holy a land to be polluted with the presence of a Jew, even in captivity.
In the absence of trustworthy statistics, all estimates of the number of victims must be more or less a matter of guess-work and consequently they vary with the impressions or imagination of the annalist. Bernaldez informs us that Rabbi Mair wrote to Abraham Senior that the sovereigns had banished 35,000 vassals, that is, 35,000 Jewish households, and he adds that, of the ten or twelve rabbis whom he baptized on their return, a very intelligent one, named Zentollo of Vitoria, told him that there were in Castile more than 30,000 married Jews and 6000 in the kingdoms of Aragon, making 160,000 souls when the edict was issued, which is probably as nearly correct an estimate as we can find.[410] With time the figures grew. Albertino, Inquisitor of Valencia, in 1534, quotes Reuchlin as computing the number of exiles at 420,000.[411] The cautious Zurita quotes Bernaldez and adds that others put the total at 400,000, while Mariana tells us that most authors assert the number of households to have been 170,000, and some put the total at 800,000 souls; Páramo quotes the figures of 124,000 households or over 600,000 souls.[412] Isidore Loeb, after an exhaustive review of all authorities, Jewish and Christian, reaches the estimate[413]—
| Emigrants, | 165,000 |
| Baptized, | 50,000 |
| Died, | 20,000 |
| 235,000 |
and this, in view of the diminished number of Jews, as shown by the Repartimiento of 1474 (p. 125) is probably too large an estimate.
CONTEMPORARY OPINION
Whatever may have been the number, the sum of human misery was incomputable. Rabbi Joseph, whose father was one of the exiles, eloquently describes the sufferings of his race: “For some of them the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had swallowed to hide it; some of them hunger and the plague consumed and some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea; and some of them were sold for men-servants and maid-servants in Genoa and its villages and some of them were cast into the sea. … For there were among those who were cast into the isles of the sea upon Provence a Jew and his old father fainting from hunger, begging bread, for there was no one to break unto him in a strange country. And the man went and sold his son for bread to restore the soul of the old man. And it came to pass, when he returned to his old father, that he found him fallen down dead and he rent his clothes. And he returned unto the baker to take his son and the baker would not give him back and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry for his son and there was none to deliver.”[414] Penniless, friendless and despised they were cast forth into a world which had been taught that to oppress them was a service to the Redeemer.
Yet such were the convictions of the period, in the fifteenth century after Christ had died for man, that this crime against humanity met with nothing but applause among contemporaries. Men might admit that it was unwise from the point of view of statesmanship and damaging to the prosperity of the land, but this only enhanced the credit due to the sovereigns whose piety was equal to the sacrifice. When, in 1495, Alexander VI granted to them the proud title of Catholic Kings, the expulsion of the Jews was enumerated among the services to the faith entitling them to this distinction.[415] Even so liberal and cultured a thinker as Gian Pico della Mirandola, praises them for it, while he admits that even Christians were moved to pity by the calamities of the sufferers, nearly all of whom were consumed by shipwreck, pestilence and hunger, rendering the destruction equal to that inflicted by Titus and Hadrian.[416] It is true that Machiavelli, faithful to his general principles, seeks to find in Ferdinand’s participation a political rather than a religious motive, but even he characterizes the act as a pietosa crudeltà.[417] So far, indeed, was it from being a cruelty, in the eyes of the theologians of the period, that Ferdinand was held to have exercised his power mercifully, for Arnaldo Albertino proved by the canon law that he would have been fully justified in putting them all to the sword and seizing their property.[418]
The Edict of Expulsion proclaimed to the world the policy which in its continuous development did so much for the abasement of Spain. At the same time it closed the career of avowed Jews in the Spanish dominions. Henceforth we shall meet with them as apostate Christians, the occasion and the victims of the Inquisition.
CHAPTER IV.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INQUISITION.
MUCH as the Conversos had gained, from a worldly point of view, by their change of religion, their position, in one respect, as we have seen, was seriously deteriorated. As Jews they might be despoiled and humiliated, confined in narrow Jewries and restricted as to their careers and means of livelihood, but withal they enjoyed complete freedom of faith, in which they were subjected only to their own rabbis. They were outside of the Church and the Church claimed no jurisdiction over them in matters of religion, so long as they did not openly blaspheme Christianity or seek to make proselytes. As soon, however, as the convert was baptized he became a member of the Church and for any aberration from orthodoxy he was amenable to its laws. As the Inquisition had never existed in Castile and was inactive in Aragon, while the bishops, who held ordinary jurisdiction over heresy and apostasy, were too turbulent and worldly to waste thought on the exercise of their authority in such matters, the Conversos seem never to have recognized the possibility of being held to account for any secret leaning to the faith which they had ostensibly abandoned. The circumstances under which the mass of conversions was effected—threats of massacre or the wearing pressure of inhuman laws—were not such as to justify confidence in the sincerity of the neophytes, nor, when baptism was administered indiscriminately to multitudes, was there a possibility of detailed instruction in the complicated theology of their new faith. Rabbinical Judaism, moreover, so entwines itself with every detail of the believer’s daily life, and attaches so much importance to the observances which it enjoins, that it was impossible for whole communities thus suddenly Christianized, to abandon the rites and usages which, through so many generations, had become a part of existence itself. Earnest converts might have brought up their children as Christians and the grandchildren might have outgrown the old customs, but the Conversos could not be earnest converts, and the sacred traditions, handed down by father to son from the days of the Sanhedrin, were too precious to be set aside. The Anusim, as they were known to their Hebrew brethren, thus were unwilling Christians, practising what Jewish rites they dared, and it was held to be the duty of all Jews to bring them back to the true faith.[419]
JUDAISM OF CONVERSOS
As soon, therefore, as the Church had gained her new recruits she began to regard them with a pardonable degree of suspicion, although she seems to have made no effort to instruct them in her doctrines after hurriedly baptizing them by the thousand. In 1429 the council of Tortosa indignantly denounced the unspeakable cruelty of the Conversos who, with damnable negligence, permit their children to remain in servitude of the devil by omitting to have them baptized. To remedy this the Ordinaries were ordered, by the free use of ecclesiastical censures, and by calling in if necessary the secular
