Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century (The Atlantic World)

Swimming the Christian Atlantic

The Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830

Edited by

Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington

and Wim Klooster Clark University

VOLUME 17/1

Swimming the Christian Atlantic Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century

By

Jonathan Schorsch

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: Italian and French Comedians Playing in Farces, 1670 (oil on canvas) by Verio (fl. 1670) (attr. to). Comedie Francaise, Paris, France/Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality/copyright status: Italian/out of copyright. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schorsch, Jonathan, 1963– Swimming the Christian Atlantic : Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the seventeenth century / By Jonathan Schorsch. p. cm. — (The Atlantic world, ISSN 1570-0542 ; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17040-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Church history—17th century. 2. Conversion—Christianity—History. 3. Christian converts. 4. Slaves—Religious life. 5. Montezinos, Antonio de, d. ca. 1650. I. Title. II. Series. BR440.S46 2008 909’.0971246—dc22

2008029086

ISSN 1570-0542 ISBN Set: 978 90 04 17040 7 Volume 17/1: 978 90 04 17252 4 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS VOLUME 17/1 List of Maps and Illustrations ...................................................... Acknowledgements .......................................................................

vii ix

Introduction ..................................................................................

1

Maps ..............................................................................................

19

PART ONE

Chapter One Otherness and Identity: Judeoconversos, Judaism, Afroiberians and Christianity ...................................................

25

Chapter Two The Free and Not so Free, the Christian and Not so Christian ....................................................................................

85

Chapter Three Some Incidents in Cartagena de las Indias ............................. 121 Chapter Four Masters and Slaves under the Stare of the Cross ................... 169 Chapter Five Slaves and the Downtrodden Religion of their Masters ......... 209 Chapter Six Jailed Judaizers and their Jailers’ Servants ............................... 245

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contents VOLUME 17/2

Chapter Seven Esperanza Rodriguez: A Mulata Marrana in Mexico City .... 283

PART TWO

Chapter Eight The Racial Imagination in the Writings of (Ex-)Conversos ... 337 Chapter Nine (Re)Reading the Old/New World in the 1640s: The Relación of Antonio de Montezinos ....................................................... 379 Postscript ....................................................................................... 479 Appendix An Unpublished Letter from Antonio de Montezinos ............ 505 Bibliography .................................................................................. 513 Index ............................................................................................. 541

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Figure Figure Figure

1. 2. 3. 4.

Map of Colombia ...................................................... Map of Brazil (detail): Matoim ................................. Map of Mexico .......................................................... Genealogy of Esperanza Rodriguez and the Extended Enriquez Family, from Seville to Mexico City ................................................................

20 21 22 300

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many teachers who helped educate me in the course of this project: Ramón Aizpurua, Ida Altman, Gil Anidjar, Miriam Bodian, Harm den Boer, Thomas M. Cohen, Natalie Zemon Davis, Seymour Drescher, Mercedes García-Arenal, Matt Goldish, Tobias Green, Jonathan Israel, Yosef Kaplan, Wim Klooster, Lisa Moses Leff, Julia R. Lieberman, Murdo MacLeod, Gérard Nahon, Louise Newman, Ronnie Perelis, Caterina Pizzigoni, Peter Sahlins, Benjamin Schmidt, Adam Shear, Kenneth Stow, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, José Alberto Tavim, Odette Vlessing, Michael Zeuske. Their generous input vastly improved this book and saved me from many mistakes. For their translation help with Italian I thank Francesca Bregoli and Francesca Trivellato; with Latin, Patrick Glauthier; with Baroque Spanish difficulties, Carmen Cordero, Hazel Gold and Viviana Grieco. Special thanks for various kinds of help go to several individuals. Before his untimely passing, Elias Lipiner very generously shared some of his time and expertise with me and allowed me to borrow a number of rare items from his collection. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert very kindly shared with me copies of various documents, not least of them a large cache of business letters between various New Christian merchants that he had collected from the files of the Lima Inquisition. Paul Harcourt, of Maggs Bros. Rare Books (London), tracked down for me a unique copy of Menasseh Ben Israel’s Esperança de Israel, while Breon Mitchell and Rebecca Cape, respectively, Director and Head of Reference and Public Services at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, both aided my investigation of the text. Dennis C. Landis, Susan Danforth and Lynne A. Harrell of the John Carter Brown Library, have been a perennial source of help and guidance, for which I am most grateful. As usual, the staffs of the Jewish Theological Library’s Rare Book Room and the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion helped me find and copy many items. Rebecca Rubin-Shlansky gathered materials for me at the Achivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. Carlos López waded through the Archivo General de Indias in Seville on my behalf. For several months as I was completing this project Eugenia Albina served admirably and patiently as my intrepid girl Friday research assistant.

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I extend a very sincere thanks to my editors at Brill who helped make the publication process so smooth and relatively painless, Nienke Brienen-Moolenaar and Hylke Faber. Most importantly, I want to make use of this free and relatively lasting discursive space to acknowledge my youngest child, Jacob Eliyahu Zelman, born too late for mention in my previous book. His names allude to and honor the memory of one of his grandfathers and of two great-grandfathers. May he be guided by the knowledge that his ancestors made their best efforts to live gracefully and to give the world more than they took from it. So may all of us. Jacob and my other four children—Emanuel, Michal, Gedalia and Nava—growing in every way, continue to shape me into the kind of person I should be. One needs a sturdy and black sense of humor (pun very much intended) to cope with the kinds of matters raised in the seemingly distant historical sources with which my investigations deal. My wife Gail, who soothes away the occasional nightmares I experience, which I am convinced result at least in part from my studies, remains the foundation-stone of my world. Learning may well increase heartache (Ecclesiastes 1:18), but only by opening up to the world can we realize how good it is that we are not alone (Gen. 2:18) and thus that love is indeed stronger than death (Song of Songs 8:6). New York City April 2008

INTRODUCTION

From the beginning, the natives offered resistance to the Spanish, worried that they “would corrupt and alter their ancient customs; they called [the Spanish] ‘seafoam,’ fatherless people, men without repose, who cannot stay in any one place to cultivate the land to provide themselves with food.” —Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 103 There are those who say [Panama] derives from [. . .] the Cuna Indian phrase panna mai (far away), in the hope that Spanish soldiers asking where gold was located would be told panna mai (far away) in the hope they would go “far away.” —Caesar E. Farah, An Arab’s Journey to Colonial Spanish America, 24, n. 74 The French missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat [whose travel narratives have informed countless scholars] designed sugar mills and waterworks in the slave plantations of Martinique; in the islanders’ memories, he lived on as a spook to frighten children. —Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, 139 The entire history of ethnic struggle, victory, reconciliation, fusion, everything that precedes the definitive ordering of rank of the different national elements in every great racial synthesis, is reflected in the confused genealogies of their gods, in the sagas of the gods’ struggles, victories, and reconciliations. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, 20

Despite the expansive title of this book, I seek to explore in it a few specific matters through a series of chapters that were originally independent essays but hopefully now comprise contiguous studies. First and foremost, I try to understand the way in which a trio of dominated groups within the Spanish and Portuguese empires—Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians—perceived one another and interacted with each other. A growing body of studies analyzes the vertical relations between each of these subject populations or a combination of them and the dominant socio-political elites of Spain and Portugal. Though I investigate the political, religious and social contexts in which individuals from these subaltern groups circulated in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century, I am more concerned with the less-studied horizontal relations between members of the dominated groups. This book presents not a sweeping overview of the three groups of Conversos,

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those who had recently become Christian. Rather, it entails a series of chapters on textual moments and physical sites of interaction between members of these groups. The chapters that follow present an immanent view, exploring mostly statements and sentiments of members of these groups themselves. Amerindians, in particular as seen through the eyes of Judeoconversos and Sephardic Jews (or Sephardim), feature most prominently in the book’s final and longest chapter and I confess that their role is smaller throughout the remainder of the text. Among my goals in this project, I wanted to further delineate how the racial attitudes that we associate with the dominant elite circulated as well among members of dominated populations in the sistema de castas, the caste system of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. These empires were in many respects the first European examples of what Nicholas Dirks calls “the ethnographic state.”1 It remains important to nuance certain forms of physical and ideological domination as not merely monolithic, top-down, hegemonic systems but as more diffuse circulatory patterns. Yet, while it is clear that the racial imagination flowed across sociological borders of the caste system, it is critical not to ignore the realities of societal power differentials, how they function and what they mean. Alida Metcalf ’s work on colonial go-betweens importantly shifts focus from the stereotypically dyadic relations of White Europeans with native Others to the triadic relations that depended on the mediation of third parties who were often mixtures of the other two forces and therefore to some degree foreign and bound to both.2 Though serving empire in different ways, though constituted in different ways as admixtures of the European Christian and the nonEuropean Other (and containing pluralities within each group), both Judeoconversos and Afroiberians functioned as cultural and political intermediaries, taking advantage of their status for their own benefit but also suffering accordingly. Secondly, I have been interested in ‘Black-Jewish relations’ over the longue durée and wanted to know whether the topic as a twentieth-century topos has any parallel or roots in a century that in many respects saw the rise of the globalized, multicultural world we know today. The answer appears to be both positive and negative, as I discuss briefly in Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 43–60, 125–227. 2 Alida C. Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500 –1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 2. 1

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the Post-Script, though this study explores only one moment of this trajectory. An analysis of racial discourse in the lives and writings of Judeoconversos permits a useful triangulation between its appearance and meaning among both Catholic Iberians and open Jews, just as Afroiberian statements regarding ‘Jews’ or ‘judaizers’ allows comparison with those stemming from White Iberians, giving a sense of the fluidity of discourses of Othering while delineating the differences of their usages within specific communities. In this study I aim to take what often passed for exoticism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship, to reclaim the encounter with the Other as a moment of hope, the laying out of exempla as themselves ripe with promise, however often disappointed. Fuzziness, omissions and limits notwithstanding, I take it for granted that talk of an Atlantic world makes conceptual and methodological sense, particularly with regards to the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Paradoxically, though many studies of the Atlantic world-in-formation treat its origins in and structuration through religious discourse, it is easy to forget this in the face of its eminently political identities. Yet the basic analytical ground of the Atlantic world—the populated coasts of western Europe and West Africa, the populated eastern shores of South and North America and the Caribbean islands, if not deeper into the hinterlands of the four abovementioned continents—is the fact that Catholicism and, not long after, Protestantism were made into, in the synopsis of anthropologist Webb Keane, “what Marcel Mauss would have called a ‘social fact.’ [. . .] Christianity, its ideas, institutions, social formations, political identities, hopes, desires, fears, norms, and practices, both everyday and extraordinary, exist for an [sic] remarkably large and varied number of people.”3 As is well known, though it bears repeating, the Atlantic world was to a great extent discovered, constructed and defended as a Christian space, something I seek to re-emphasize even while attending to certain groups that resisted or remade that definition. Beginning with the Spanish Reconquista, whose mentality and methods were spurred by and spurred expansionist Catholicism, the great challenge posed to Christendom by the new worlds discovered overseas and conquered comprised nothing less than the rethinking of Christianity in the face of non-Christians, defined, in motion, as non-Europeans,

3 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 29.

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people who were not White. This new stage in what Peter Van der Veer calls “the globalization of Christianity,” this combination geographic, ethnographic, theological, psychological and intellectual cataract itself marked the beginning of modern Europe, erected in opposition to the Other(s), now said to be on the other side of the cataract.4 The early colonial empires, including those of the Atlantic sphere, entailed spaces conceived and policed from the perspective of political theology. From the perspective of Judeoconversos (if not Jews as well), Amerindians and Africans, the seventeenth century Atlantic remained all too monolithically Christian. Working from Atlanticist premises, recent scholarship has sought to undo the assumptions of nationalist historiographies—English, Dutch, Spanish, Jewish/Israeli, etc. (African American?)—that tend to proffer exceptionalist theses for the nation of each historiographical tradition. Yet, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has argued, Catholic and Protestant colonizers shared the view that the New World and its inhabitants posed a satanic challenge requiring a crusade of forcible chivalric cleansing, if not extirpation.5 Barbara Fuchs also posits a shared culture of conquest among the various European colonizing powers.6 A number of other scholars have contributed to our understanding of the web of transnational and transcontinental symbologies that helped configure the polities, societies and cultures of the Atlantic. As recent scholarship has shown, despite top-down efforts at homogenization and social engineering, the polyglot world created in the wake of the overseas expansion of Europe is not just a retrojection of today’s consciousness. Indeed, the top-down efforts in certain respects resulted from this very cosmopolitanism. The medieval world that was ever so gradually dissipating was one that prized homogeneity, feared and even hated outsiders, foreigners, others. The seventeenth century, on which this book focuses, witnessed the continued playing out of the seismic confrontations and couplings erupting throughout the sixteenth century,

Peter Van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1995). 5 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 6 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Similar linkages of Old and New World conceptualizations and methods of conquest were offered by Jonathan Boyarin in an unfortunately still-unpublished book manuscript, “Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe” that I first read in 1996. 4

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an era treated by now in numerous seminal works of scholarship. It behooves us to remember, however, just how far-reaching the repercussions were in Euro-American discourse and daily life. The assumptions of caste and race (and class) were ubiquitous. They led to the fact that from 1580 to 1820 the vast majority of immigrants to the Americas arrived involuntarily. Regarding the period between 1580 and 1640, according to David Eltis, 67 percent of the immigrants were slaves, 6 percent servants (indentured servants or contract migrants) and 1 percent convicts, while between 1640 and 1700 65 percent were slaves, 18 percent servants and 2 percent convicts.7 The original inhabitants of nearly every American colony first served for the most part as a source for slaves or forced labor for the extraction of the natural resources of what had been their homelands. The caste system that created race and races was precisely a biopolitics, one invented in the late Middle Ages by an expansionist and expanding Christendom that in order to construct the community’s boundaries increasingly measured the conflated circulation of blood and money, sanctity, purity and worth; blood became “the site and marker of theological [. . .] investments.”8 It was, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, a network, constructed by communities of jurists, scientists, political authorities, theologians, clerics, writers, law enforcement experts who claim to have ‘discovered’ it in nature (though they had in fact constructed it, a confused fusing “of ‘nation’ with religion, of religion with ancestry, and of ancestry with political loyalty”). Yet, despite its intensely social and political manifestations, they paradoxically “dissimulated its impact upon the fabric of society.”9 Race was/is both real and constructed, “much more than an illusion and much less than an essence.”10

7 David Eltis, “Identity and Migration: The Atlantic in Comparative Perspective,” in The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination, ed. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 111. 8 Gil Anidjar, “Blood Works: The Fluidity of the Bio-Political c. 1449,” paper, conference on Cultural Mobility, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, May 2004 (forthcoming in the conference proceedings), 11; idem, “Lines of Blood: Limpieza de Sangre as Political Theology,” in Blood in History and Blood Histories, ed. Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio (Firenze: Sismel Edizioni il Galluzzo, 2005). 9 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49, with a quote inserted from Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 119. 10 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 40. And not, therefore, a “phantasm,” as Silverblatt has it (Modern Inquisitions, 18). Without wanting to enter into an enormous

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Nonetheless, my study will not delve into the ancient or medieval story of European attitudes and behavior toward Africa, Africans and Amerindians, all explored in a steadily growing body of literature. Neither is there space to survey the history of the Atlantic slave trade or the resulting diaspora of enslaved and liberated Africans in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere and its demographic, political, cultural faces; nor the parallel destruction of Amerindian societies and cultures and the transformations of the world of the survivors—topics investigated by increasingly numerous authors. Nor will I devote much space to the ways in which those who (were) converted to Catholicism and their descendants, including, most centrally, the Judeoconversos, were constructed as tainted, poorly-Christian or even anti-Christian race. My analysis, of course, depends on many of these studies and I will refer to them where pertinent, but they are of necessity not central. While the fixing of racial categories may have reflected merely bureaucratic imposition through the caste system, as R. Douglas Cope has argued,11 consciousness of racial difference permeated daily life and discourse high and low, print and oral, as I hope to show. Racism and racialism were not solely impositions from some monolithic governmental apparatus. For an example of the kind of racialism purveyed by Catholic preachers, seeking to bolster the orderly society desired by both Church and Crown, see Irene Silverblatt’s treatment of the Quechua sermons delivered over the course of the early seventeenth-century by Francisco de Avila and Fernando de Avendaño in and around Lima. The sermonizers explicitly and repeatedly lay out for their Amerindian audiences the significance of the different ‘races’ in the new global hierarchy: Spanish, Black and Amerindian, as well as Jews, Muslims (moros), and Turks.12 Quito’s bishop, Pena Montenegro, held that as far as intelligence and rationality went, “Peruvians (along with Mexicans and Chileans) were somewhere in the middle—distinct, on the one hand,

and dangerous topic, race/ethnicity is real, i.e., “natural,” insofar as different population groups often manifest different biological conditions: immunities to particular diseases or lack thereof, manifest specific patterns of disease (lactose intolerance, Sickle Cell Anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, etc.). Different population groups might also manifest statistically-notable somatic uniquenesses: eye shape, particularly light skin, height, etc. The problem—racism—arises from, itself entails a socio-cultural response to such axiologically meaningless natural differences. 11 R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660 –1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 12 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 101–15.

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from the more polished natives of China and Japan and, on the other, from the savages who ‘run around naked in the jungle.’ ”13 This kind of top-down racialism has received extensive coverage by scholars. What I will argue, however, is that whether they agreed or not, many ‘ordinary’ people seem to have been quite aware of racialist thinking, if not participants in it themselves. Those subject to the caste system—Mulatos, Mestizos, Judeoconversos—also wielded it for their own ends in constructing their own identities and for constructing the identities of others in defending, competing with or confronting them. The topics at hand perhaps conjure a mood as much as an analytic modality, a dark mood, informed by cruelties, brutalities, the stuff of nightmares so horrific as to make the averting of the eyes in Maimonidean negative theology seem by comparison a game of coquetry. Attack dogs such as mastiffs used against women and children, sometimes just for sport. Men, slaves, of course, hung by their testicles as a form of control and cruelty. People, including youths, burned while still alive as punishment for upholding the wrong form of religion. I think of the life story of Cataline de Erauso, even if it is part self-mythologizing, remarkable not just for its rip-roaring woman’s escape from oppressive Catholic femininity, its casual violence and globe-trotting, its confusion of gender (and sexual?) identity, but for the seeming unremarkability of it all.14 This is Cortes with the sex left in and the official, ‘state’ police action left out. Survivors and sociologists have taught us about the upside-down world of the Nazi concentration or death camps. Was the early modern Atlantic a long-term equivalent for many of its inhabitants? All this derives in part from the frontier terrain in question; frontiers ethnic, cultural and territorial, the unimagined, unintended spawn of physical movement, for Europeans (and Africans in different ways), new possibilities allowed by the distance from the centers of the old and ‘real’ world. It resulted from ports, meeting points, nodes of transit, movement, circulation, gathering. Joseph Penso de la Vega, a late-seventeenth-century writer whose family had managed to leave Spain for the Netherlands, where he lived and worked amid Amsterdam’s relatively

Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 111. Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoirs of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 13 14

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new Sephardic community, penned a typically Baroque sequence of novellas with a typically Baroque title reflective of current realities: Rumbos peligrosos, por donde navega con titulo de Novelas, la çosebrantes nave de la temeridad temiendo los peligrosos escollos de la censura surca este tempestuoso mar. This might be translated as something like: Dangerous Routes by which the Capsizing Ship of Recklessness, with the Title of Novellas, Navigates, Sails the Tempestuous Sea, Fearing the Dangerous Reefs of Censor. I am reluctant, however, to over-prioritize colonial frontiers or particular continental littorals or places frequented by ships. Ports have no monopoly on clashing, hybridity, violence. Certainly speed itself is a marker of modernity. I think of the rapidity of spreading trends. Black slaves imported as aesthetic appurtenances as far as the courts of the Hapsburgs and Sweden, by the sixteenth century; ‘judaizers’ hiding and hounded as far as São Tomé or Goa or the Philippines.15 Perhaps this too is nothing remarkable. I consider the extremity and near-constant difficulty of life for most people in and around Europe, ‘the center’: the daily lives of the peasantry, the Chmielnicki massacre of thousands of Jews, Protestants and Catholics battling furiously and eating each other’s organs in urban France (granted, an acute moment) or more routinized

15 Judaizing as a charge had a long history before the Spanish Inquisition. There is debate about whether its usage remained consistent with earlier understandings. To ‘judaize’ meant for non-Jews “to adopt the customs and manners of the Jews,” especially religious practices (Shaye J.D. Cohen, “ ‘Those Who Say They Are Jews and Are Not’: How Do You Know a Jew in Antiquity When You See One?” in Shaye J.D. Cohen and Ernest S. Frerichs [eds.], Diasporas in Antiquity [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990], 32). Though not considered a crime in the ancient world, ‘judaizing’ seems to have functioned, already soon after its neutral coinage by ancient Greeks, as a term of demarcation, identification, categorization. It served to place one in an agonistic contest between ethnicities and beliefs. Rabbi Yits˜ak Arama (1420–1494), familiar with the inquisitional mentality and its consequences, used the term to refer to “performing acts which were customary among Jews with the intention of being a Jew and returning to Judaism” (Arama, Akeidat Yits˜ak [Salonika, 1522], Deut., 262a; translation from Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: the Inquisition in Ciudad Real, Hispania Judaica, no. 3 [ Jerusalem: The Magnes Press/The Hebrew University, 1981], 24, n. 15). Historically it had not always been so easy to distinguish Jews and Christians and that was precisely the problem requiring from the medieval period on social constructions distinguishing the two (dress codes, spatial segregation, extreme ideational opposition, etc.). Scholar Karen King defines Christian orthodoxy as the delicate balance between being too Jewish and not Jewish enough. On the medieval history of the term ‘judaizing,’ see Róbert Dán, “ ‘Judaizare’—The Career of a Term,” in R. Dán and A. Pirnát (eds.), Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1982), 25–34.

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French ‘state’ violence: the drawing and quartering of thousands of smugglers (though France is hardly alone on this score). It might well be that precisely the escape from the known forms of violence and misery in the Old World led to the creation of new forms, acted out upon new Others. While a proud and patriotic scholarship of a seemingly long-distant age produced surveys of the grand narratives of discovery and conquest, a la Samuel Eliot Morrison’s chipper two-volume account, post-modern sentiments only a quarter-century later have rediscovered the pessimism of the Spanish Baroque, yielding the equally modern noir perspective of Josiah Blackmore’s study of shipwreck narratives.16 The social interactions and mutual imaginings explored within the following pages stem from the transportation of people and peoples under the coercion of governments as well as freely in search of better opportunities. That is, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “geometrical space,” a “homogeneous and isotropic spatiality” of distance and ocean, turned into, produced what he calls “anthropological space.”17 Physical movement and cultural translocation helped produce a discourse of “disruptive impulses,” in the words of Robert Harbison, characterized “by an interest in movement above all, movement which is a frank exhibition of energy and escape from classical restraint.” Shuttling between the old and the new, Harbison speculates that the Baroque may have suited the colonial scene so well because it “thrives on contradictions and flowers in those perverse enterprises which try to insert contrary motives into a prescribed format, prefiguring European genres as the medium for rambunctious native imagination. In fact the authoritarian intentions of the Baroque seldom entirely conceal its origins in anxiety and spiritual conflict.”18 My analysis contains sections that offer local histories and others that convey more global surveys and therefore almost inevitably it leaps between continents over the span of several centuries. Of necessity, I have flattened out many geographical and temporal differences,

16 Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, vol. 1: The Northern Voyages, AD 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. 2: The Southern Voyages, 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 17 Quoted in Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 18 Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1, 187; Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114, 128.

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for instance, between the Iberian peninsula and the Iberian colonies, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This may seem cavalier or methodologically unsound, but local factors notwithstanding, discourse about race and ethnicity was remarkably global and fluid. Obviously, differences can be found in, say, attitudes toward masterslave relations between Iberian metropole and colony, and demographic concentrations of slaves or New Christians created loci of particular legislative or inquisitorial concern. Yet in many ways daily life in Lima was not very dissimilar to life in the Castilian town of Cuenca, while life in villages or in the countryside was even more alike. It is telling that many of the Franciscans who went to missionize in the New World got training in the isolated rural precincts of Spain. Some Jesuits were even known to refer to the backwaters of Europe as “los Indies de por acá/the Indies here.”19 Many of the incidents of conflict between Judeoconverso masters and Afroiberian slaves bear a remarkable similarity to those that transpired in Protestant or Muslim households, at least according to Inquisition documents.20 The reason for this similarity is the almost structural, overdetermined nature of religious and caste tensions that unfold simultaneously in the private domestic and public institutional spheres. I argue that from the perspective of some kinds of relations a vertical overview reveals as much as highly local ground-level studies. I also tack back and forth between social and literary sources. The use of two methodological approaches helps prevent the kind of one-dimensional perspective that I feel results from an exclusive focus on either source type. I take the above approaches because I am interested in the confluence and mutual vexations of personal subjectivities with the objective structures of the world; of intimate experience with solid, stolid law; of the emotional life with the logic of systems. These approaches entail my methodological response to some of the interpretative challenges in doing history—defining scales and units of analysis, identifying relevant textual records, defining and treating facts

19 Carlos Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 15. He cites Adriano Prosperi, “ ‘Otras Indias’: Missionari della controriforma tra contadini e selvaggi,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura: Convegno internazionale di studi (Firenze, 26–30 giugno 1980) (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1982), 205–34. 20 See, for instance, the cases brought in James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 96–101.

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while interpreting the frames that determine their very constitution—as laid out by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt.21 Partly responsible for the homogeneity of caste and religion as factors in social interaction was the global surveillance apparatus of the Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal, encouraged by the leadership of the Catholic Church, serving the political aims of a monarchy and culture seeking uniformity. Some recent scholars emphasize the Inquisition’s existence as part of the machinery of state rather than of the church bureaucracy, though to the victims the difference may have been relatively unimportant.22 What is more important is the very nature of the Inquisitions as an institution for the policing of political-theology. In a theistic society, heresy, because it violates divine law, also violates civil law. Religious dissent is therefore both a sin and a crime. Irene Silverblatt nicely sums up the purpose the Inquisitions: “to clarify cultural blame: to specify and bring to judgment those among the [. . .] inhabitants who held contrary beliefs or engaged in life practices perceived to threaten the [. . .] state.”23 Through the lens of documents produced by the machinations of the various early modern Inquisitions, particularly those of Spain and Portugal, one can illuminate the lives and thought of New Christians of Jewish and African origin in the Iberian homelands and colonies as they interacted with one another or merely regarded one another. Inquisition trial records yield a plethora of information about how Judaism and Christianity intersected with caste to shape the interactions and mutual understandings, or misunderstandings, of Judeoconversos and Afroiberians within the orbit of the Iberian empires, and sometimes beyond. I first became inspired to search through Inquisition materials for information on these themes due to the work of Solange Alberro, who uncovered and analysed such information briefly, in the course of study about Blacks and Mulatos in Mexican Inquisition documents and in slightly modified form as part of her general exposition of the

21 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 14–16; see also ch. 2 (“Counterhistory and the Anecdote”). 22 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Irene Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” Ethnohistory 53,2 (Spring 2006): 260–1. 23 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 261.

12

introduction

Inquisition in Mexico.24 In many respects the first half of this study should be considered an expansion and adjustment of her intriguing findings. Inquisition documents, read properly, can tell us a great deal about relations between the subaltern groups of the Iberian Atlantic. As groups, Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians shared relatively similar experiences under the Catholicism imposed upon them and thus somewhat parallel subject positions in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. At the same time, the ethnically-oriented policy vision of the crown and local elites frequently arrayed these various New Christian groups against each other. Individual Judeoconversos, Afroiberians or Amerindians thus found themselves facing a range of possible stances toward one another which revolved around accepting or rejecting dominant constructions of ‘Judaism’ or ‘Judeoconversos,’ ‘Africans’ or ‘Blackness,’ ‘Indians’ or ‘primitivity.’ The chapters to follow lay out the theo-political patterning of these intergroup relations as manifested in numerous cases of day-to-day interaction and textual projection. Members of these subaltern groups wielded dominant stereotypes about Others in order to establish their own identities, in order to position themselves to best advantage, in order to assert control over the parameters of the relationships in which they found themselves with members of the other groups. It must be remembered that the stereotypes in question often were manufactured and disseminated by elites whose interest lay precisely in ensuring the marginalization and disempowering of subalterns. Hence the uniqueness of subaltern mimicry of elite prejudice, which complicated this prejudice by altering it while wielding it from the vantage point of the Others’ relatively weak subject position and which at times resisted it through a pragmatic or even empathetic recognition of mirrored suffering. Much of the following material was originally formulated in the 1990s, as part of my dissertation, which became my first book, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For methodological reasons, I decided to jettison everything pertaining to Conversos, limiting my treatment in the dissertation

24 Solange Behocaray de Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales: rechazo e integración,” in Elsa Cecilia Frost et al (eds.), El Trabajo y los Trabajadores en la Historia de México: Ponencias y comentarios presentados en la Reunión de Historiadores Mexicanos y Norteamericanos, Pátzcuaro, 12 al 15 de octubre de 1977 (Mexico City/Tucson: El Colegio de México/University of Arizona Press, 1979), 144–49; idem, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 467–72.

introduction

13

and book to open Jews. Having returned to these chapters a decade or so later, I am gratified to find that in at least some respects I was on the right track, as corroborated by various works published in the meantime by others. In particular, I see my study as a complement to the recent work done by scholars such as Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, Barbara Fuchs, Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo and Irene Silverblatt. If, on the other hand, anything here has been said already, please forgive me for repeating it. The text unfolds as follows: In chapter 1, I set out some of the religious, political and ethnic configurations that help forge the identities of Judeoconversos and Afroiberians and that lead to the complex, almost necessarily ambivalent relations between the various newly-Christian populations under discussion. Finally, I give a brief history and contextualization of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions whose paper trail informs so much of this study. Chapters 2 through 7 constitute a series of explorations of day-today ethnology, describing interactions between Judeoconversos and Afroiberians from a variety of angles. These chapters alternate between thematic analyses and microhistorical studies, but share a strong reliance on Inquisition records as source material. Chapter 2 entails a look at relations between Judeoconversos and free Afroiberians, often determined by the contradictory socio-economic and religious trajectories of members of the two groups and the tensions and hostilities that resulted. Free Afroiberians often expressed interest in becoming Catholic but, more importantly, were assimilated in ways into the Catholic organization of society, both conceptually and in practice. This included the adoption of or coming to share perceptions of Judeoconversos and (crypto-)Judaism. For their part, despite their persecution, Judeoconversos saw themselves as White and at times wielded anti-Blackness as a means of maintaining their own sense of honor. On the other hand, members of each group might recognize the parallel outsiderness they shared and evoke it in order to build common ground, a phenomenon pursued also in chapters 5, 6 and 7. In chapter 3, I offer a case study exploring the parallels and explosive contacts that unfolded between a pair of Mulatos, a Judeoconverso and the local Inquisition of Cartagena de las Indias in the 1620s and 1630s. The two Mulatos, the free Diego Lopez and the slave Rufina, discussed and spied on those they suspected of being Marranos. They were also both involved in circles of magical practitioners. Arrested by

14

introduction

the Cartagena tribunal of the Inquisition, Lopez offered denunciations of numerous Judeoconversos, particularly Blas de Paz Pinto, a fellow surgeon. The colorful events that link Rufina, Lopez and Pinto offer further evidence of how members of these different subaltern groups sought to survive and thrive despite the theo-political web that attempted to keep them in their societally-assigned places and that also often brought them into direct confrontation with one another. In chapter 4 the focus on difference narrows to a discussion of the not infrequent conflicts that arose between Judeoconverso masters and their Afroiberian slaves. Here the theo-politics of empire coalesced within numerous private domestic spheres, in a nearly structural manner that operated similarly on the Iberian peninsula or in obscure corners of the empire. Slaves seeking their freedom, to improve their servile conditions or to harm or antagonize their masters often resorted to the Inquisition as a lever, charging their masters as judaizers. Some of these denunciations stemmed from the sincere Christianity of the slave, others from the calculated manipulation of Christian values and dictates. Slaves performed unofficial surveillance for the Inquisitions, producing evidence that might prove useful should the slave or local inquisitors need it. From the vantage point of the masters, their suspect identity as New Christians or illicit and often oppositional Marranism engendered certain pressures regarding those who worked in their households. Slaves might be discouraged from things Christian, power exercised over them to minimize their distance from the masters’ subject position, yet they were greatly feared for the potential power this very distance could unleash onto the lives of the masters from church-state authorities. Chapter 5 provides a glimpse into relations of an opposite order. Here bonds of pragmatism or affection brought Afroiberian slaves and their Judeoconverso mistresses into various kinds of unity, however tenuous and tentative. Some Judeoconverso masters entrusted their slaves with knowledge of their crypto-Jewish practices, some even invited their participation in them. Some slaves also evinced strong loyalty to their masters, defending them against accusations of judaizing, serving them in the face of inquisitional persecution, aiding them in contravention of inquisitional dictates. Following on this theme, in chapter 6 I address some episodes in which Judeoconversos imprisoned by the Inquisitions and Afroiberian slaves who worked either for the Inquisitions or for the prisoners themselves collaborated to transmit messages to and from jail, subverting the

introduction

15

inquisitional drive for secret proceedings. In this context Judeoconversos and Afroiberians seem to have collaborated as subalterns resisting their common oppressor. Yet, as always, these cases reveal the ambivalence and ambiguity of motivation, desire and manipulation, the difficulty of trust that characterized both masters and slaves in their relations with one another. In chapter 7, I focus on the life of Esperanza Rodriguez, born in Seville toward the end of the sixteenth century, the daughter of a Judeoconverso father and an African slave mother. In the Judeoconverso household where she herself served as a slave, the young Rodriguez learned about crypto-Jewish beliefs and practices. She later moved to the Americas, eventually settling down in Mexico City. There, she circulated among the city’s crypto-Jews, many of them her relatives. When the inquisitional authorities cracked down on alleged Marranos in the early 1640s, Rodriguez found herself arrested, along with her three daughters. Based on the Inquisition record of her trial, among other documents, I explore Rodriguez’s experiences within the Mexico City crypto-Jewish community and the significance of her newfound religion and kin network. The riveting, troubled life of this vibrant and ambitious woman of color is set amid the context of colonial Iberian theo-politics, in order to evoke the manifold meanings ‘Jewishness’ held for many Afroiberians oppressed by the Atlantic slave system. Part Two of the book moves into more literary terrain. Chapter 8 comprises a survey of the writings of Conversos and former Conversos in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries insofar as they treat Blacks and/or Mulatos and Amerindians. I compare these (ex-)Converso mentions of the new Others within the expanding European system to similar mentions in the wider European discourse. While manifesting some subject positions distinct to the (ex-)Converso predicament, much of this literature’s view of Blacks and Amerindians shares in the racial imagination that flowed across national, ethnic borders. In chapter 9 I conduct an extended close reading of the fairly wellknown narrative of Antonio de Montezinos, which describes his purported meeting with a group of ‘Jewish Indians’ from the lost tribe of Reuben in Nueva Granada (present-day Colombia). Taking the narrative seriously as a theo-political fantasy by an (ex-)Converso, I scrutinize it in the context of ethnological and historical literature on the Amerindians of the colony, as well as compare it with theo-political ‘discovery’ narratives concerning American appearances of the Virgin Mary. Like these creole Catholic texts, Montezinos’ narrative wields the tropes of

16

introduction

the dominating conquerors, including the dominant racial imaginary, in order to subvert them and the rhetorical order of things that grounds and results from the imperial caste system. Readers are forewarned that this chapter is lengthy enough to have entailed publication on its own. I hope its obvious belonging with the other material of this book will encourage forgiveness. Some quick terminological remarks. I use the term Afroamerican in the hemispheric sense. I often use the term Afroiberian, but in truth the degree to which an individual or a particular historical collective was more African than Iberian or the specificities of being Afro-Mexican rather than Afro-Brazilian, for instance, remains needing the kind of unpacking that I don’t supply. I touch on some of these matters in chapter 1. Briefly, however clumsily, it can be assumed that the more recently individuals arrived in the Americas from Africa or the more refreshed collectives were with newly arrived slaves or the more intent or resistance/escape individuals or collectives were, the more African we can say they were, or rather, the more Congolese, Yoruban, Fon, Angolan and the like. Because I am dealing with the Iberian world, I have chosen to use the Spanish/Portuguese mulato rather than the English mulatto/mulattoes, which has a foreign ring to it. When it comes to Conversos of Jewish Descent, I follow Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s sensible and oft-quoted distinction between New Christians and Marranos.25 Those who maintained Jewish beliefs and practices—keeping in mind the wide range that these took after decades and centuries without much if any refreshment from living normative Jewish communities—comprised a subset of the New Christian population. Sometimes this subset was stronger and more numerous as a percentage of the entire New Christian population; often it was rather miniscule. While I touch on some of these issues in the first chapter, I refer readers to Yerushalmi’s still unsurpassed relevant methodological meditations.26 I am very careful to distinguish Jews from Judeoconversos. When I use the former term it never refers to Judeoconversos who are living, regardless of their inner feelings, outwardly as Catholics. When I use the term Judeoconverso it is as a synonym for New Christian, meaning there is no implication regarding religious loyalty; it is a Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981 [orig. 1971]), 11–12. 26 Yerushalmi, Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 1–42. 25

introduction

17

purely sociological category. When discussing an individual Converso or group of Conversos still loyal to Judaism, I use the terms Marrano or crypto-Jew as synonyms. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from languages other than English are my own. When I quote primary material that has been directly quoted in secondary sources, I note as much: “cited in Medina, Inquisición en Cartagena, 23” or “quoted in Baião, Inquisición em Portugal e Brasil, 85.” Inquisition sources contain all the orthographic inconsistencies of writing in an age before standardization. Within quotes I have kept this non-standardized spelling, even of proper and place names, as it appears in the original Spanish or Portuguese. When relating what is said to have occurred within such documents I use the present tense, the mode of conveying that which must remain eternally textual. I have chosen to leave all spellings and capitalization, or lack thereof, as they appear in the original. Readers are forewarned, therefore, that proper names may appear in different spellings and may not correspond to their modern manifestations. I have maintained the flavor (or lack thereof ) of the original ‘legalese’ to be found in Inquisition documents and have not ‘improved’ the language or style. Since such was the stylistic choice of the Inquisition functionaries, I thought it worth retaining. I do not try to reconstruct scenarios in ‘the real world’ that are known to us only through depositions given by numerous, often contradictory witnesses in theo-judicial chambers. For the sake of space I do not provide the original Spanish or Portuguese of Inquisition documents that I cite, unless there is some specific confusion or reason to highlight an aspect of the original formulation. For the sake of readers familiar with these languages, however, I provide the original when citing the more ornate and often obscure language of literary sources. I capitalize ethnic, caste and/or racial markers, such as Mulato, Judeoconverso, etc. However, distasteful or ridiculous they may seem to us now (though perhaps not to enough of ‘us’), these were categories constructing reality. Though the monikers originated by outsiders seeking to describe—or insult—another group, the latter often then picked up the terminology as a means of self-description. My capitalizing them aims to remind us of their status as proper nouns, where not capitalizing them—mulato, mestizo, black—strikes me as allowing them to seem natural, while also not granting them the same kind of legitimacy as terms such as French, Catholic or Jewish.

18

introduction

Earlier versions of some of the following chapters appeared in print. Material from several chapters originally appeared in “Cristãos-novos, judaísmo, negros e cristianismo nos primórdios do mundo atlântico moderno: uma visão segundo fontes inquisitoriais,” in Diálogos da conversão: missionários, índios, negros e judeus no contexto ibero-americano do período barroco, ed. Lúcia Helena Costigan (Campinas, SP [Brazil]: Unicamp, 2005), 155–84. An earlier version of chapter 8 was published as “Blacks, Jews and the Racial Imagination in the Writings of Sephardim in the Long Seventeenth Century,” Jewish History (Haifa University) 19,1 (Winter 2005): 109–35.

MAPS

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

OTHERNESS AND IDENTITY: JUDEOCONVERSOS, JUDAISM, AFROIBERIANS AND CHRISTIANITY An adequate synopsis of the diaspora of Africans outside of Africa, as well as those within Africa involved with the Portuguese, or of the diaspora of Jews expelled or fled from Spain and Portugal, plus the spread of Judeoconversos still within Iberian territories is beyond the scope of this book. In this chapter I seek merely to provide some discussion of the kinds of identity, the variety of subject positions that might have been held by Afroiberians and Judeoconversos, in order to provide some contours to the interactions between members of these groups that will constitute the bulk of the treatment in the following chapters. Even this discussion will be hardly definitive or thorough. As a good deal of our knowledge regarding these personal and collective identities derives from sources from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, in the second half of this chapter I offer some meditations on these institutions and the hermeneutical challenges of relying on their documentation. Again, I confess and apologize that I will not offer parallel thoughts on Amerindian history and identity. As Amerindians make up a far less prominent part of my study (mostly appearing in chapters 8 and 9), yet constitute an enormous and complex subject in their own right, I have chosen the easier though perhaps unjustifiable path of treating them en passant and in medias res. Identifying Afroiberian Identity The degree to which ‘identity’ stands as a central question needs to be noted at the outset. The very possibility of studying crypto-Jews, Blacks or Mulatos through documents from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries depends on the ethnic, religious and caste categories that both caused and resulted from the machinery—social, institutional and textual—that produced the documents. Often no way would exist

26

chapter one

to identify ‘Blacks,’ ‘Mulatos,’ ‘judaizers,’ or ‘descendants of Jews’ in these materials other than the fact that the individuals are throughout identified as such by lettered official functionaries themselves.1 Officials wanted to know how to categorize individuals and the groups to which they belonged because the caste system and the laws concerning blood purity determined to a great extent how Spanish and Portuguese society functioned, who was permitted to do or be certain things and who was not. The two systems—blood purity and caste—originally stood as separate taxonomies, though by the seventeenth century, perhaps slightly earlier, they began to merge. How the former, earlier peninsular system of excluding believers of problematic religions ( Judaism and Islam) morphed into the latter and slightly later colonial system of controlling and excluding members of problematic races (Africans, Amerindians, racial mixtures) is still not fully clear, though recent studies have begun delineating the process. I treat this matter where appropriate in the ensuing pages. Of course, ‘race’ itself is a constructed matter and therefore bears a history. ‘Blackness’ or ‘Jewishness’ meant different things to different people depending on time, place and other factors such as gender and class. In the limited space available, I try to attend to these variations. Without entering the complex details of the unfolding of colonial society and culture, it can be stated that while African elites in Africa might have been treated with some degree of respect and equality because they managed to wrest such from those, like the Portuguese, who sought to trade with them, the increasing numbers of Africans bought or stolen into slavery and sent to Europe and then the Americas found themselves in quite another predicament. In these locales Africans became, with rare exceptions, slaves put to the most lowly, arduous and dangerous tasks. Despite their frequent use as brute labor in mines and plantations, African slaves were needed for the skills they brought with them and for the skilled work they contributed to the building of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial societies. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall reminds us that Enslaved Africans were blacksmiths, metallurgists, toolmakers, sculptors and engravers, silversmiths and goldsmiths, tanners, shoemakers, and saddle-makers. They were designers and builders of warehouses and docks,

1 Judaizing refers to the teaching or promulgating of Jewish beliefs and/or practices, and thus carried a heavier penalty than merely maintaining such practices oneself.

otherness and identity

27

barracks and homes, public buildings, churches, canals, and dams. They were coopers, draymen, and coach drivers; breeders, groomers and trainers of horses; and cowboys skilled in cattle rearing and herding. They were hunters and fishermen, as well as pearl divers. They were ship builders, navigators, sounders, caulkers, sailmakers, ship carpenters, sailors, and rowers. They were indigo-makers, weavers and dyers of cloth, tailors and seamstresses. They were basket weavers, potters, and salt-makers. They were cooks, bakers, pastry chefs, candy-makers, street vendors, innkeepers, personal servants, housekeepers, laundresses, domestics, doctors or surgeons, and nurses. They cultivated corn, rice, garden crops, tobacco, poultry, pigs, sheep, and goats.2

By the middle of the seventeenth century, perhaps some 15 percent had escaped their slave status by one means or another to become free. Female slaves, who often served their masters romantically or sexually, whether voluntarily or not, were manumitted more readily than male slaves. Whatever ethnic or national identities these men and women may have had back home—Fon, Mandinka, Ewe, Bantu, Mozambique, among others—in their new settings they became simply Africans, but more ubiquitously, negros, Blacks to their overlords. Their generally darker skin color may or may not have served as an excuse or cover for other already traditional European denigrations of their culture, seen as primitive and barbaric, but in any case skin color quickly came to serve as a metonym for their status as natural born slaves for the ‘higher’ and lighter skinned Iberians. In the early seventeenth century the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira preached to slaves in Brazil that they should “thank God for having removed them ‘from the country where [they] and [their] ancestors lived like savages,’ ” who would “burn in Hell,” while they, now living among Christians “would go to heaven instead.”3 Slave or free, Africans and their descendants were subject to persistent and widespread dehumanization, denigration, marginalization and cruelty. The multiple and manifold Amerindian populations—the Florida, Chichimec, Aztec, Maya, Inka, Tupinamba, Arawak and so on—whose homelands the Spanish and Portuguese conquered throughout the Americas, occupied a somewhat middle ground. Though defeated and often severely persecuted, the Spanish granted

2 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 20. 3 David G. Sweet, “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’: Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th-Century Latin America,” Revista de Historia de America 86 ( July–December 1978): 105–6.

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that some possibly possessed signs of civilization. Though enslaved at first, those who survived the wars and then European diseases came to serve the Spaniards as forced laborers. Amerindians were not White, but they were not Black either, perhaps their one saving grace. At the same time, on the whole, Amerindian populations remained far less Christianized than the Afroiberians who served within the Spanish or Portuguese socio-cultural orbit. Beyond ‘pure’ Blacks and Amerindians, many of the Iberian terms denoted, as Douglas Cope reminds us, the “products of miscegenation, new kinds of people for whom new names had to be invented: mestizos (children of a Spaniard and an Amerindian), castizos (children of a Spaniard and a mestizo), zambos (children of an African and an Amerindian), and many others.”4 Mulatos can be added to the list, a term having been coined only in the late middle ages in light of increasing European contact with West and sub-Saharan Africa, along with Conversos, Marranos and ‘New’ Christians, identities resulting from the numerous conversions, forced or otherwise, of Jews from 1391 onward.5 Though this contemporary identification must be taken seriously as the governmental and, to some degree, social perspective that constructed ethno-racial identity, it also comprised something that was questioned and modified, where possible, by the individuals living ‘under’ the designated categories. Approaching this multicultural, polyglot yet strictly hierarchical Iberian Atlantic world, Stuart Hall’s discussion of hegemony is useful. He argues that the “cohesion and stability of [the] social order” is achieved “in and through (not despite) its ‘differences,’ ” and that “what matters is not simply the plurality of their internal structures, but the articulated relation between their differences.”6 So much for the top-down view. Uncovering identity as voiced by the dominated actors themselves can be difficult. A phenomenon historian Murdo MacLeod pointed out regarding Afroiberians seems eminently true regarding Judeoconversos as well. In both cases personal identity 4 Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 4; Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), chs. 4 and 8. 5 On the ‘invention’ of the Mulato, see Alencastro, Trato dos viventes, 345–53; Martínez López, “Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the ‘Race/Caste’ System,” 211–17; Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, chs. 5 and 6. 6 Stuart Hall, “Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society,” in Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society (Paris: UNESCO, 1977), 158, 162.

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was itself contradictory. On the one hand racial/ethnic categories were useful as a way to distinguish oneself from others in “lower” categories. On the other hand, one’s own racial/ethnic identity was precisely something one hid in order to avoid notice or arrest by various authorities, especially given that many activities were prohibited to members of these categories; that is, people hid their identity in order to survive.7 To some degree, therefore, racial or ethnic consciousness does not readily surface in personal or public interactions or personal correspondence, despite the increasing paper trail of the early modern period. For one thing, most Blacks and Amerindians could not write. Self-revelation was also not as casual or guaranteed as it is today. Possibly the absence is a result of the limited types of sources at our disposal. Written ‘high-culture’ sources—laws, literature, governmental decrees, correspondence between officials—provide access to certain kinds of reflection on and speculation about matters of caste, race, ethnicity, religion, morality, national characteristics and destinies, personal belonging and loyalties, but capture the subaltern perspective only indirectly, if at all. Most daily interaction, however, fell under the horizon of the written and printed discourse of the day. It is rare that personal letters contain anything, certainly anything extended, regarding questions of race and caste. Most people did not write letters in any case. Here are just a few examples, though still from the hands of Whites. In her racy memoirs (written between 1626 and 1630) of her days passing as a man, Catalina de Erauso relates that a mestiza lady wanted to marry her daughter to her, thinking that Erauso was a White Spaniard. The daughter in question was “a girl as black and ugly as the devil himself, quite the opposite of my taste, which has always run to pretty faces.”8 One New World Inquisition functionary complains by letter regarding a second, delinquent one: “Ah! sir, such are the things of the Indies! [. . .] This friar is the son of a barbero [barbarian? Berber? barber?] and a berber woman, grandson of a moor and a black woman.”9 The letters of the famous dramatist Lope de Vega (1562–1635), a friar, priest, commissioner and employee of the Holy Office of the Inquisition who appreciated a good auto de fe, show that “when sodomites and blacks

7 8 9

Personal communication; Feb. 2008. Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, 28. Letter of 1646 cited by Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 242, n. 1.

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died, no great compassion for the accused is felt.”10 The mysticallyinclined (and possibly mentally imbalanced) Dominican friar Francisco de la Cruz, living in Peru in the 1560s, relates that an angel told him to absolve those who possessed (Black) slaves.11 Cope argues that categorization by race was imposed by governing authorities through the caste system. Only when individuals got caught up in this bureaucratic machinery did they resort to knowledge of this system. Some scholars, such as Stuart Schwartz, Cope and others, argue that the newly-invented racial terms—negro, mulato, mestizo, pardo and the like—represented little more than legal-administrative attempts to create difference and identity where none existed.12 Herman Bennett notes that in both rural and urban “areas [in New Spain] with a small African population liberally dispersed, the descendants of Africans tended to blend physically and culturally, eventually acquiring identities as Indians or Spaniards but most likely as mestizos.”13 Yet a clean segmentation of political racial categorization from daily use seems artificial. The origin of racial categories in governmentally-instigated social engineering did not prevent their use for various purposes by individuals of all kinds, already in the sixteenth century and in some places even earlier. Category produced identity fairly quickly, certainly from the outside, but also from the subject positions of those within the administered categories. Constructed administrative categories eventually did produce particular collective subject positions, though, of course, individual stances varied widely. When caste or race—or the caste or race of others—arose, in subaltern conversation, behavior and actions stemming from the everyday, which was all too extraordinarily trying, they were usually matters wielded strategically, from a speaker’s assumption as “a place that can be circumscribed as proper ( propre) and

10 Kenneth Brown, “Lope de Vera (1619–1644) y Lope de Vega (1562–1635),” Fronteras e interculturalidad entre los sefardíes occidentales, ed. Paloma Díaz-Mas and Harm den Boer, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), orig. Foro Hispánico 28 (2005), 70. Brown cites Lope de Vega Carpio, Cartas completas, ed. Ángel Rosenblat (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1948), 1:91, 139–31. 11 Vidal Abril Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, Inquisición, actas, 3 vols., Corpus Hispanorum de pace, v. 29, 32–34, 35–37 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1992–97), 1:565. 12 Cope, Limits of Racial Domination; Schwartz, “Spaniards, Pardos, and the Missing Mestizos: Identities and Racial Categories in the Early Hispanic Caribbean,” New West Indian Guide 71,1&2 (1997): 5–19. 13 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 27.

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thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clientèles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research).” Often, such matters served to disarm or defeat “the ‘strong’ (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.).”14 One of the clearest indications that consciousness of caste discourse, racialist assertions and rebuttal to them circulated among the populace is the proverb entered into peninsular Spanish written discourse in different versions by the early seventeenth century: “Though we are black, we are people.”15 The second person voice explicitly marks this statement as a retort to racism made by Afroiberians themselves, enunciated enough to make it a proverb, that is, a collective sentiment, even if it was at some historical or discursive point picked up by non-Africans and in this guise ventriloquizes a hypothetical response. In a typical case, one Mulato, testifying in 1630s Cartagena de las Indias to his inquisitors, appears quite conversant with who is a quarteron (someone with a single Black grandparent), who a zamba, who a mestizo, all terms that arise unprompted in his rambling confessions and denunciations. Though it may true that such categorization arises instrumentally, in order to identify the persons in question to the authorities, it seems unlikely that such terminology would not influence choices made by individuals or shade mundane conversation between peers. The patterns of marriage for urban Afroiberians, at least in Mexico, indicate a high degree of endogamy, showing that individuals within certain categories were conscious of the choices they made, even if these might be constrained by demographic, socio-economic or linguistic conditions. Within very real constrictions, Blacks chose to enter certain kinds of marriages; they were not legally prohibited from marrying Amerindians or Mulatos or Mestizos. Indeed, their choice of partners of similar background stands out against the reality of their residence 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix. 15 Jeremy Lawrance, “Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 76, cites the following sources: Sebastián de Cobarruvias Orozco’s famous dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 1611), 562: “Aunque negros, gente somos”; Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), ed. Louis Combet (Bordeaux, 1967), 33, which offers the phrase in the period’s literary imitation of African dialect, habla de negros, making even stronger the argument that this utterance reflects the protesting voice of actual Africans: “Aunke somo negro, onbre somo, alma tenemo.”

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in neighborhoods hosting free and slave Blacks and Mulatos, Mestizos and any number of other combinations.16 Bennett, here referring to church-sanctioned marriages between people of varied African descent in New Spain, states that: even as “Angolans” formed communities with individuals from “Lamba Land,” for example, they retained their newly imposed ethnic identities. What was once simply a European-imposed label acquired meaning for individual Africans in New Spain as specific cultural experiences in the Americas—experiences that they chose and sought out—shaped their memories and the course of their lives.17

Friendship is another arena from which we might infer identification. In Inquisition testimony, slaves seem to reserve the term compadre for other slaves or free Mulatos/Mulatas. In 1660s Callao, near Lima, a Mestiza and a Black slave met at a corn-beer tavern to chew coca and ponder matters of romance, while an AfroPeruvian tavern keeper hosted a group of three Spanish creoles and another Black woman to chew coca together.18 Here, socializing over, through certain rituals crosses caste distinctions. Identity was not solely negative, but also positive. Scholars have still only begun to scratch the surface of the question of colonial subaltern identity as a subject position. What kind of identity does a negro or negra of this period have? In what ways is she ‘African’ because her mother or grandfather is cited as having been born in Guinea? What would she consider herself ? One answer, of course, is readily available from mass behavior. Many slaves sought to escape their miserable condition; runaways constituted a problem from the beginning, so much so that by 1532 the Spanish Crown created a special police force in the Indies for capturing the fugitives.19 Within the last few decades a number of scholars have begun to open up the subject of Afroiberian identity from a variety of perspectives such as

16 See, for instance, Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, chs. 1–2 and 4; Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, ch. 3. According to Lutz, who seems to have made no effort to track African ethnicities, Black slaves in Santiago de Guatemala married most frequently with free Blacks (115). 17 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 82. 18 Leo J. Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants: The Making of Race in Colonial Lima and Cuzco (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001), 453. 19 Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Negreiros portugueses na rota das Índias de Castela (1541–1556) (Lisbon: Edições Colibri/Instituto de Cultura Ibero-Atlântica, 1999), 26.

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ethnicity, religiosity, gender or organizational affiliation, in both English, French and Dutch colonies20 as well as Iberian ones.21 For the Iberian 20 A recent and important statement of the growing trend in scholarship that argues the importance of acknowledging and studying the ethnicity of the slaves brought to the Americas can be found in Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Hall deals mostly with eighteenth-century Louisiana but provides excellent coverage of other Atlantic locales and earlier periods, as well of the translatability of her methodology and conclusions to these spheres, while yet remaining wary of feeling pressure to concoct unitary global results. See also Paul E. Lovejoy, “Trans-Atlantic Transformations: The Origins and Identity of Africans in the Americas,” in The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration and Imagination, ed. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 126–46; idem, “The Muslim Factor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2002); Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005); idem, Exchanging Our Country Marks: the Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Douglas B. Chambers, “Tracing Igbo Identity into the African Diaspora,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Continuum, 2000), 55–71; idem, “‘My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18,1 (April 1997): 72–97; Walter Rucker, “Conjure, Magic, and Power: The Influence of Afro-Atlantic Religious Practices on Resistance and Rebellion,” Journal of Black Studies 32,1 (Sept. 2001): 84–103; David Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” Slavery & Abolition 21 (2000): 1–20; Kenneth Bilby, “Swearing by the Past, Swearing to the Future: Sacred Oaths, Alliances, and Treaties among the Huianese and Jamaican Maroons,” Ethnohistory 44,4 (1997): 655–689; idem, “The Kromanti Dance of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 55, nos. 1/2 (1981): 52–101; Maureen Warner-Lewis, Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother Tongue to Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996); Colin Palmer, “From Africa to the Americas: Ethnicity in the Early Black Communities of the Americas,” Journal of World History 6 (1995): 223–36; Karen Fog Olwig, “African Cultural Principles in Caribbean Slave Societies,” in Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, ed. Stephan Palmié (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 23–39; John Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 181–214; idem, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1101–1113; Richard Cullen Rath, “African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transmission” William & Mary Quarterly 50 (Oct. 1993): 700–27; Andrew Apter, “Herskovits’s Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora,” Diaspora 1:3 (1991): 235–60; Joseph E. Holloway (ed.), Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); B. Kopytof, “Religious Change among the Jamaican Maroons: The Ascendance of the Christian God within a Traditional Cosmology,” Journal of Social History 20 (1987): 463–84; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 21 Some of the works listed in the previous note also treat Iberian territories. See Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y reconstrucción de identidades entre los africanos y sus descendientes en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII (Bogota: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005); Patrick James Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Armin J. Schwegler, “Chi ma nkongo”: Lengua y ritos ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia) (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996); Colin Palmer, “From Africa to the Americas: Ethnicity in the Early Black Communities of

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world, much work also has been done on organizational developments among slaves and freed Afroiberians, such as religious confraternities or brotherhoods.22 Evidently, some slave rebellions were planned by the membership of one or another of these church-sponsored organizations. In some colonies, free men of color served in mixed-caste or special militia units for Mulatos or the like.23 Real differences also existed between the peninsular metropole and the overseas colonies in terms of availability and type of opportunities, among other factors. As some few Afroiberians rose through the social hierarchy, class also became an element of identity.24 Further nuances of identity-construction within

the Americas,” Journal of World History 6 (1995): 223–36; George Brandon, Santería from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Adriana Perez and Norma Garcia Cabrera (eds.), Abakuá: Una secta secreta: Selección de textos (Havana, 1993); Edna M. Ramos Castro, Negros do trombetas: Etnicidade e história (Belém: NAIA/Universidade Federal do Pará, 1991); María Elena Cortés Jácome, “La memoria familiar de los negros y mulatos: Siglo XVI–XVIII,” in La memoria y el olvido, segundo Simposio de Historia de las mentalidades, segunda jornada: Infames, elegidos y memoria (México, D.F.: INAH, 1985), 125–33. 22 Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities And Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (University Press of Florida, 2006); Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “Ethnic and Racial Identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830,” The Americas 56:2 (October 1999): 221–52; Ignacio Camacho Martínez, La hermandad de los mulatos de Sevilla (Seville, 1998); Mieko Nishida, “From Ethnicity to Race and Gender: Transformations of Black Lay Sodalities in Salvador, Brazil,” Journal of Social History 32,2 (Winter 1998): 329–48; Isidoro Moreno Navarro, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de historia (Seville, 1997); Joaquín Rodriguez Mateos, “De los esclavos y marginados: Dios de blancos y piedad de negros, La cofradía de los morenos de Sevilla,” in Actas II Congreso de Historia de Anadalucía, Historia Moderna (Córdoba, 1995), 569–82; Luis Gómez Acuña, “Los cofradías de negros en Lima (siglo XVII): Estado de la cuestión y análisis de caso,” Páginas 129 (October 1994): 28–39; Isabel Castro Henriques, “Formas de intervenção e de organização dos africanos em S. Tomé nos séculos XV e XVI,” in Actas do II Colóquio Internacional de História da Madeira, Funchal, Setembro 1989 (n.p.: Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico, 1990), 797–813; Patricia A. Mulvey, “Black Brothers and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 17 (1982): 253–79; idem, “Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society,” The Americas 39 (1982), 39–68; A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Black Mulatto Brotherhood in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Collective Behavior,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 54,4 (1974): 567–602; H. Sancho de Sopranis, Las cofradías de morenos en Cádiz (Madrid, 1958); Miguel Gual Camarena, “Una cofradía de negros libertos en el siglo XV, Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 5 (Zaragoza, 1952): 457–466. 23 Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), esp. ch. 1; idem, “Race and Badge: Free-Colored Soldiers in the Colonial Mexican Militia,” The Americas 56,4 (April 2000): 471–96; Herbert S. Klein, “The Colored Militia of Cuba, 1568–1868,” Caribbean Studies 6,2 (1966): 17–27. 24 Examples include: Francis A. Dutra, “A Hard-Fought Struggle for Recognition: Manuel Gonçalves Doria, First Afro-Brazilian to Become a Knight of Santiago,” The

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the Iberian world were quickly picked up and wielded by Afroiberians. Baltasar Fra Molinero offers an analysis of the way the former slave, poet and professor Juan Latino (1518–ca. 1596) distinguished himself in his writings after the Morisco insurrection in Granada from the Morisco rebels, many of whom were Black. According to Latino, his enslavement had been accidental and now he was a Christian, even if Black; the rebels’ enslavement during and in the wake of the conflict was just, a consequence of their Morisco religious heresies.25 Court records from colonial Mexico reveal further examples of such self-presentation. One free Black woman arrested in 1655 for witchcraft, Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera, protested that she “had grown up in the ‘unblemished’ house of a Spanish lieutenant and his wife” and characterized the accusations she was sure derived from another free Black woman as the fabrications of a “lying cheat” who could not be believed because she “is a negra.” In contrast, Cabrera, according to her lawyer, was “a clean-living black woman,” while Cabrera defended herself by saying that she owned slaves.26 These depictions of course bear a strong instrumental motivation, but also clarity about Spanish values and their importance. Place of birth also might bear social significance. Archival records from 1565 Cartagena de las Indias offer a portrait of one Black woman slave, Catalina, who was “apparently much detested by the [other] black slaves, though she did not have anything to do with them ‘because she is a creole [criolla] of Seville,’” according to one witness, meaning that she felt superior because she had born in the Spanish world and not in Africa like them.27

Americas 56,1 ( July 1999): 91–113; idem, “Blacks and the Search for Rewards and Status in Seventeenth-Century Brazil,” Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies 6 (1977–79): 25–35; A.C. de C.M. Saunders, “The Life and Humour of João de Sá Panasco, o Negro, Former Slave, Court Jester and Gentleman of the Portuguese Royal Household (fl. 1524–1567) in F.W. Hodcroft et al. (eds.), Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honor of P.E. Russell (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), 180–91. 25 Baltasar Fra Molinero, “Juan Latino and His Racial Difference,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 337–9; see also V.B. Spratlin, Juan Latino, Slave and Humanist (New York: Spinner Press, 1938); José Vicente Pascual, Juan Latino (Peligros, Granada: Comares, 1998); Calixto C. Masó, “Juan Latino: Gloria de España y de su raza” (PhD Dissertation: Northeastern Illinois University, 1973). 26 Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 27 Cited by Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 141. Seville is a city in Colombia as well as in Spain. The term creole here would make more sense for the former, a colonial site, but either city could be meant.

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For the most part, Portuguese and Spanish discourse fails to specify, probably due to ignorance, what behavioral or ideational characteristics Blacks or Mulatos, slave or free, retained from their African backgrounds. Most Afroiberians were not able to produce and leave the kind of paper trail that the educated and socially ascendant Latino did. Hence the increasing attraction of Inquisition trials and records for scholars of Afroiberian history, culture and religion, which afford an invaluable window. Yet, unlike the extremely familiar and welldocumented ‘judaísmo’ known by the Inquisition machinery (accurately or not), the nature and even names of the ‘pagan’ religions of the Africans remained unknown to the overwhelming majority of government and church functionaries. Occasional efforts at such understanding did spring forth, such as Naturaleza, historia sagrada y profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina y catecismo evangélico de todos etiopes (Seville, 1627), a thick description produced by P. Alonso de Sandoval, rector of the Jesuit college at Cartagena de Indias and experienced preacher to the area’s African slaves. In terms of the most basic level of self-location, one that was particularly important to Iberians, most Afroiberians who had been born in Africa could not trace their genealogy beyond their parents. Inquisition officials thus often simply assumed that Blacks were bereft of any proper lineage.28 Explicit statements of group or national awareness or allegiance by slaves or even free Afroiberians are not rare, though with some exceptions they were generally ignored by the Spanish and Portuguese (and, until recently, by many scholars), while actions often reveal them as well. According to the early seventeenth-century Jesuit Sandoval, in and around Cartagena one could find more than seventy African languages spoken.29 Regarding relations among Blacks or among slaves, hints arise here and there. In Lima, for example, but also elsewhere, confraternities were organized according to different place of origin or nation in Africa, as well as by caste, that is, freedmen or Mulatos.30 Evidence from Cartagena refers to religious chapters of various African nations in the city, such as Arara and Mina, that is, to associations organized to celebrate

Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 32. Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 421. To try to improve the conditions of slaves and enable communication with their masters, Sandoval compiled a list of individuals brought from Africa who spoke the different languages and could serve as interpreters. 30 Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 249. 28 29

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traditional African rites and festivities under the guise of Catholicism, though by law such associations were forbidden as of 1610.31 In the Inquisition testimony of a Mulato in 1630s Cartagena, we find a Black slave whom another slave paid to help kill by magical means yet another Black. The first slave did not, however; he ultimately “had not wanted to do her [ Juana] harm, being a daughter of Dominga Arara, of his own nation,” that is, Arara.32 On the other hand, according to the anonymous Description of the Viceroyalty of Peru (ca. 1615), “That which most assures the city [of Lima] that the blacks do not rise up is there being among them many nations and castes and thus nearly all are enemies one of another.”33 Though this is a report by a White it should not be discounted completely. Sometime during the same decade a slave from the Barenba nation (in present-day Gabon) responded to inquisitional querying regarding the accusations made by another slave, from Mozambique, about their mutual master, a slave dealer of Zacatecas. Whereas the Mozambican slave reported seeing their master kick, drag and whip a crucifix, among other heretical actions, the Barenba slave stated that the two slaves had never communicated because the other slave “was not of his nación or his language.”34 The same questions of class, nation or subculture can be asked about Mulatos. Should Mulatos be considered more Black than White? Is their identity that of being neither, of being a mixture? Are Mulatos (or for that matter ladino Blacks, i.e., those assimilated enough to speak Spanish or Portuguese) crypto-Africans in the way that New Christians of Jewish

Borrego Plá, Palenques en Cartagena, 24; Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 49. Cited in the next chapter. Slaves designated as arara or arda, from the area of present-day Dahomey, from the Gulf of Benin, had been transshipped through São Tomé and were probably Ewe or Fon in origin (Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 147; Borrego Plá, Palenques en Cartagena, 21). Araras bore marks of scarification, making them less attractive to Spanish purchasers and therefore cheaper. Because of their low price, but also their intelligence and clean habits such slaves were considered preferable for domestic work (Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 289–90, citing Alonso de Sandoval; Borrego Pla, Palenques de negros, 23–24). 33 Descripcion del Peru, 40. 34 Cited and translated in Robert J. Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate: Domestic Slavery and the Exigencies of Fasting for Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos 5 (2005); http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document934 .html. This document is unpaginated. Regarding what may well be the same case, Laura Lewis reports that a Black slave did not immediately believe certain accusations against his allegedly judaizing master, but said that “he would have to confirm the story by asking yet another black, who was from ‘the same land and would tell him the truth’ ” (Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 197, n. 93). 31

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descent are considered crypto-Jews?35 We know from myriad sources that Mulato slaves had higher manumission rates and as free individuals were offered more opportunities for participation and advancement by White society in Catholic, Protestant and Jewish environments, but we know precious little about their subjective perspective on their own identity before the eighteenth century. According to Lutz, Mulato slaves in Santiago de Guatemala seem to have married most frequently with other Mulato slaves, while free Mulatos chose to marry predominantly slave Mulatos, possibly indicating some degree of collective self-awareness.36 Writing of Brazil, and probably of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Stuart Schwartz argues that “unlike the colonial elite that was composed of immigrants and the white American-born children of European parents, [the mestiço and mulatto populations] had no particular attachment to Portugal, nor did they feel the pull of sentiments in conflicting directions.”37 There is no doubt truth in recording this turning of the back on the dominant culture, but I suspect such a view oversimplifies the ramifications of mixed heritage and in-betweenness. Gender, for instance, determined that the slave status of an individual followed that of the mother, while caste might follow that of the mother or father, depending on a variety of circumstances. This meant that individuals of partial African or Amerindian descent might claim a variety of statuses and that non-Spanish women might understand the opportunities and limits of racial status for themselves and their children differently than men. Throughout the empires, for a variety of social and legal reasons, such as the right to bear arms, Mulatos claimed forms of Whiteness by dint of marriage to a Spanish partner, and/or having Spanish children, descent from a Spanish parent—a Mulato born of a Spanish father was often called a White Mulato mulato blanco—or through characterological qualities: being “quiet and calm,” “not noisy and virtuous,” “well-liked and loved,”

35 Some exceptions to the general avoidance of dealing with these in-between categories: Claudio Esteva-Fabregat, “African Women, Zambos, and Mulattoes,” ch. 7 of Mestizaje in Ibero-America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995 [1987]). For the modern, non-Hispanic world, Naomi Zack, Mixed-Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); a response to Zack, Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), ch. 5. 36 Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 117, 122. 37 Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500 –1800 (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1987), 16.

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gainfully employed. Caste, particularly of the mixed sort, was often negotiated, at times through formal litigation, between the individual and a variety of authorities.38 Thus the panoply of caste categories, particularly those of intermediate or mixed status, remained more ideal than real, as the amount of mixture often made accurate categorization of others “at best a speculative art in Spanish America,” while self-identification was often situational.39 Afroiberian religiosity provides an opportunity for further contemplation of identity. Other than Ethiopian Christianity, which faced certain objections from the Catholic Church, all African religions were viewed as false or heretical, if they were even taken seriously as ‘religion.’ While this was true in a theoretical manner in the discourse of medieval theology and philosophy, such rejection became all too concrete with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. There, Catholic priests “burned ‘idol houses’ and ‘fetish objects’ in grand displays meant to demonstrate the impotence of African spirits and religious leaders,” while “the burning of African sacred objects continued in Brazil.”40 The idea of continuing revelation, of open-ended communication between ordinary individuals and other-worldly beings, increasingly suppressed in European Catholicism after the Council of Trent (1545–63), occupied a central position in African (and Amerindian) religions. With contact and conquest, African and Afroiberian attempts to maintain such an approach within Christianity faced severe condemnation and punishment. Yet, intriguingly, of the 102 people accused by the Inquisition in New Spain between 1593 and 1801 for being ‘false mystics,’ ilusos or alumbrados, some 12 percent were “of mixed, Spanish, African, and indigenous (American) ancestry.”41 In addition, Nora Jaffary and others argue that the New World Inquisitions, unlike their Old World counterparts, were “more concerned with maintaining the population’s practice of orthodox Counter-Reformation Catholicism uncorrupted by Indian and

38 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 76–7; Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, ch. 3. Hence one Mexican viceroy told his successor in 1673, according to Anthony Pagden, “behavior counted for as much as color provided that the shades were not too marked” (Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden [eds.], Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500 –1800 [Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1987], 70). 39 Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 59, 80. 40 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 110, 249, n. 22. 41 Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 4.

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African influences.”42 In some respects, however, to varying degrees, depending on time and place, the missionary project tolerated certain aspects of indigenous religiosity in Africa, Europe and the Americas to color local Christianity.43 While Afroiberians were not technically New Christians, a term invented for Judeoconversos and then applied to Moriscos and Amerindians, they were similarly “newly transplanted to the faith,” as wrote the biographer of Father Pedro Claver, missionizer to Blacks around Cartagena de Indias.44 Frederick Bowser claims that in the Americas “the African, unlike the Indian, was not granted the status of neophyte in the Faith,” though Jonathan Israel writes that in the Jesuit view Blacks, Mulatos as well as Mestizos were considered “neophytes of the Church.”45 Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiros notes that “In a Bull of October 7, 1462, Pope Pious II censured the slave trade, especially the reduction of the neophytes of Africa to slavery.”46 It is unclear whether these authors use the term ‘neophytes’ technically or figuratively. While in the Americas Blacks were forbidden to receive holy orders (along with Amerindians), Africans had not been forbidden to do so in Africa or in Portugal. No debate accompanied the training of Africans for the priesthood already from early on, while a debate festered for years regarding the ordaining of Amerindians. Some jurists, such as Juan de Solórzano Pereira, author of the most important collection of laws covering American Spanish territories, distinguished the less

Jaffary, False Mystics, 5, 100–6; Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). 43 See, for example, Thornton, Africa and Africans, 256–7; Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, 150; Asunción Lavrin, “Indian Brides of Christ: Creating New Spaces for Indigenous Women in New Spain,” Mexican Studies 15,2 (Summer 1999): 225–60. 44 Iosef Fernandez, Apostolica y penitente vida de el V.P. Pedro Claver, de la compañia de Iesus. Sacada principalmente de informaciones juridicas hechas ante el Ordinario de la Ciudad de Cartagena de Indias. A su religiosisima provincia de el Nuevo Reyno de Granada. Por el padre Iosef Fernandez de la Compañia de Iesus natural de Taraçona (Zaragoça: Diego Dormer, 1666), 222. 45 Bowser, African Slave in Colonial Peru, 28; Jonathan I. Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 66. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 49, agrees with Bowser, while Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 26, calls Africans neophytes. 46 Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiros, A Escravidão no Brasil, Ensaio HistóricoJurídico-Social. 2 vols. (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1976), 2:24. In contrast, sticking to the technical church definition, A.J.R. Russell-Wood suggested to me that Africans were not considered neophytes, as the papal bulls used the language of reconquest and the Africans, even sub-Saharans, had had the opportunity to hear the Law of Christ, unlike the American natives (personal communication, August 1998). 42

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problematic background and coming-to-Christianity of Africans and Amerindians from the more problematic ‘race/raza’ of Judeoconversos. Amerindians, in his view, should not necessarily be denied the holding of governmental office, certain professions or the nobility.47 At the same time, Judeoconversos of Cabo Verde argued, in 1627, that they should be known as Old Christians, since it was those with African blood who were ‘really’ New Christians.48 Views regarding the variety of new Christians were not at all consistent, however. By the seventeenth century, various guilds in fact excluded full Blacks, others full Blacks as well as Mulatos; soldiers of African descent had a difficult time claiming the military honors awarded them.49 Yet by the seventeenth century one finds repeated references to Blacks and Mulatos who presented themselves to inquisitional authorities as Old Christians. María Elena Martínez López offers an important discussion of the late seventeenthcentury evaluation by the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid (the Suprema) of the question of whether descendants of Amerindians and/or Africans needed to be subjected to the regime of the purity of blood laws, as well as whether they could be considered Old Christians. Basing itself on numerous sources, the Suprema accepted Amerindians as both pure of blood and Old Christians, while Afroiberians “gradually drop out of the discussion and toward the end are hardly mentioned Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 121–2. “So those who are born of clean whites cannot be called Neophytes, which means cristãos novos, nor descendants of such, but only those who in some sense descend from black people should be given this name” (translated in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 261). 49 Regarding guilds: in Santiago de Guatemala, “In the case of the cobbler’s guild, at least, nothing precluded the admittance of mulattos. Apparently, other guilds also lacked prohibitions against mulatto members” in the sixteenth century (Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003], 129); in Portugal, the Goldsmiths’ guild excluded Blacks, mulatos and Amerindians (?) at least as of 1622 (Didier Lahon, “Black African Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal During the Renaissance: Creating a New Pattern of Reality,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 278–9); in Cartagena, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a law was passed: “We prohibit under the most severe penalties that no black or pardo may exercise any mechanical art or profession, which should remain reserved for white people” (Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 449; Nina S. de Friedemann, La saga del negro: Presencia africana en Colombia [Santa Fe de Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1993], 56). On military honors: Francis A. Dutra, “A Hard-Fought Struggle for Recognition: Manuel Goncalves Doria, First Afro-Brazilian to Become a Knight of Santiago,” The Americas 56:1 ( July 1999): 91–113; idem, “Blacks and the Search for Rewards and Status in Seventeenth-Century Brazil,” Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, vol. 6 (San Diego: San Diego State University, 1977–1979), 25–35. 47 48

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at all.”50 All this yields a rather ambiguous and fluid attitude, in which concern for caste began to impede religious inclusivism.51 A more ground-level survey helps determine specifics. Like many groups of medieval Jews, most Africans came to baptism en masse, either at their departure as slaves from Africa or on arrival at a port of entry in the Americas.52 Active steps to ensure the baptism of incoming slaves to Portugal were taken only after 1514, while in 1513 the Spanish Council of the Indies, in order to supply African slaves to the New World colonies in sufficient numbers to satisfy the demand, authorized that they be sent directly from Africa without the previously required period of catechization in Spain.53 In 1620 a Portuguese resolution insist that a chaplain accompany each transatlantic slave journey in order to catechize the captive audience, though this may not have been the first such legislation.54 In any event, actual familiarity with Catholic doctrines and practices remained minimal. Strong resistance to Christianization of slaves came, not surprisingly, from those who owned slaves and plantations. A 1525 Inquisition census from the Canary Islands showed that fully 40 percent of the Black slaves over the age of 12 in the sample did not know how to cross themselves ( persignarse),

50 María Elena Martínez López, “The Spanish Concept of Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the ‘Race/Caste’ System in the Viceroyalty of New Spain,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002), 339–48; quote from 347. 51 A good summary of the early history of the Church’s attitude toward and legal consideration of Africans can be found in G. Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Los negros y la iglesia en el Perú: Siglos XVI–XVII, 2 vols. (Quito: Ediciones Afroamérica/Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano, 1997); C.R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion 1440–1770, The Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, no. 10 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, ch. 2. On Africans and Amerindians: Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 119–27. 52 James Sweet cites Sandoval on the “incorrect” magical understandings of their baptism held by many slaves (Recreating Africa, 197). 53 A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 40, 110; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra de México, 1519–1810 (México: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946), 5. 54 Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888 (New Brunswick/ London: Rutgers University Press, 1994 [1979]), 32. According to one source, slaves coming from Guinea, from the Xolofe or Mandinga nations usually had not been baptized, while those arriving from the Congo or Angola had “some manner of instruction” (Nancy E. van Deusen, “The ‘Alienated’ Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680 to 1700,” The Americas 56,1 [ July 1999]: 6, n. 21, citing Instrucción para remediar, y assegurar, quanto con la divina gracia fuere posible, que ninguno de los negros . . . carezca del sagrado Baptismo [Lima, 1628]).

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44 percent could not recite the Padre Nuestro, 83 percent could not say the Credo and 92 percent did not know the Salve.55 Therefore, in 1537 Carlos V of Castile decreed that all slaves be released each day at a certain hour for religious instruction and, in 1541, that they may not work on holidays or feast days, but should attend mass.56 Writing about Cartagena de Indias in the 1560s, Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez finds that notwithstanding the royal legislation slaves were not accustomed to attend mass “and, it seems, their masters did not force them.”57 One Dominican friar in 1570s Perú, Francisco de la Cruz, was said to have preached that when it came to the things that all Christians needed to believe in order to be saved, “those who are very uncultured and ignorant (and he gave the example of blacks and Indians), for them it would suffice to believe in order to be saved that there was a God and that the law of the Christians is the true one and to believe in the mystery of the Trinity, even if they should not perceive it, and in Jesus Christ.”58 None of this means that African slaves did not resort to Christianity for spiritual needs. To defend the honor of an accused slave woman in 1560s Cartagena, one witness reported how “last Sunday the said Catalina sent to San Francisco [Cathedral] four reales and a wax candle in order that they say a mass for her, that God should free her from that which they have raised [against her].”59 Larger questions remain, however, regarding the kind of Catholicism that Afroiberian slaves practiced; the ways they modified it, if at all; the different varieties of Afroiberian Catholicism or syncretic religiosity; who practiced what kind and why. The Spanish ideal regarding African slaves aimed at their becoming ladinos, that is, becoming fluent in the latinate language and hence

55 Luís Alberto Anaya Hernández, Judeoconversos e Inquisicion en las Islas Canarias (Las Palmas: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria/Ediciones del Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1996), 127. The author unfortunately lumps together 190 Blacks, 2 Mulatos, 123 Moriscos and 24 people of unknown origin to produce a single sample of 339. Obviously the rates for Blacks and Moriscos could differ significantly. 56 Palmer, “Religion and Magic,” 313. 57 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 147, n. 10. 58 Quoted in Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:362. Yet he also told his inquisitors that he doubted “whether it was licit to possess blacks as slaves” (ibid., 1:617). On the less than effective though persistent efforts to Christianize slaves in Brazil, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 197–202. 59 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 147, n. 10.

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culture of the Iberian motherland (ladino = Latinized).60 According to the Concilios of Mexico and Peru (1585 and 1583, respectively), in the New World territories Afroiberian slaves, even if considered ‘colored’ through only one parent, the children of Spaniards and the Chichimec were to be taught Christian doctrine in Castilian, unlike the Quechuaand Nahuatl-speaking peoples, who were indoctrinated in their own languages.61 Indoctrination in Christianity did not always come for free. In the mid-seventeenth-century Popayán province of Nueva Granada (in present-day Colombia), every Black slave between the ages of 18 and 50 who worked the sugar plantations and cattle ranches had to pay the local priest 10 1/2 reales annually.62 The Iberian ambivalence regarding bringing slaves into Catholicsm led one scholar, Luis Felipe de Alencastro, to charactize the results as bipolar slavery.63 Furthermore, according to some recent scholars taking an Africanist perspective, the cultural lives of even Christianized Afroiberian slaves remained something apart. The religions of Afroiberians in the seventeenth century, particularly in Brazil, “were not synthetic or creolized but were independent systems of thought, practiced in parallel to Catholicism,” argues James Sweet.64 Therefore, due to Afroiberian ignorance of the details of Catholic doctrine, their intentional adapting of it for their own needs and their continued involvement in the religious ways of their homeland, Afroiberians often found themselves victims of inquisitional jurisprudence. In southern Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for instance, many slaves of African origin were punished for attempting to flee to Muslim North Africa. Blasphemy, especially in response to mistreatment by their mistresses or masters, constituted one of the most prevalent of slave offenses punished by the Inquisitions, though, ironically, many of the slaves might well have blasphemed in order to beseech the Inquisition to intervene

60 On some of the complexities and history of the term, ladino, see Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 24, n. 10; Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 220, 379–80, 390–2. 61 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 54. 62 Luis Fernando Calero, Pastos, quillacingas y abades, 1535–1700, Biblioteca Banco Popular (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1991), 168. 63 Alencastro, Trato dos viventes, 186. 64 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 7. As will be seen in later chapters, some Whites even found African religious or magical approaches helpful for their own needs.

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in their case against their owner.65 “Idolatrous” practices of slaves or free Afroiberians, in many cases rituals from their homeland or some adaptation of them, often subsumed by inquisitors under the label of witchcraft, were another often-punished “heresy.”66 Though seemingly exaggerated, Herman Bennett cites Solange Alberro for the assertion that “nearly 50 percent of the [ Mexican] inquisition proceedings involved Africans and their American-born descendants.”67 Afroiberians who succeeded in wresting for themselves some autonomy made use of it to live as they saw fit. A community of runaway (cimarrón) slaves on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico was said in 1609 to “defiantly eat on Fridays, Saturdays, and holy days” and to have rejected a priest’s offer to sanction their unofficial marriages.68

65 Javier Villa-Flores, “ ‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82,3 (2002): 435–68; Palmer, “Religion and Magic.” Palmer, citing Philip Curtin and K.A. Busia, compares the blasphemous oaths uttered by slaves during beatings or mistreatment, with an Ashanti oath meant to prevent bodily harm from others and/or to secure the intervention of the central authority (ibid., 318). 66 Palmer, “Religion and Magic.” 67 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 9, 53; Solange Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 8–9, 455. Jean-Pierre Tardieu, who wrote extensively on Peru’s African population as well as on its Inquisition, tallied only 119 cases involving individuals of African descent tried by the Lima tribunal between 1571 and 1702 (Tardieu, Negros y la iglesia en el Perú, 1:566). Lima and environs hosted a relatively enormous Afroiberian component, yet this number hardly approaches 50 percent of those accused by the tribunal. For Cartagena, Blacks and Mulatos comprise 9.3 percent of those imprisoned in the seventeenth century (T. Escribano Vidal, “Los cambios estructurales en el tribunal novogranadino: Segunda mitad del siglo XVII,” in Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet [eds.], Historia de la inquisición en España y América, 3 vols. [ Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos/Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000], 1:1202). The same can be said for Brazil. Of the 1,076 people imprisoned by the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil over the course of its existence (1536–1821), only 27 men and 10 women identified as either Black or Mulato are to be found (Anita Novinsky, Inquisição: Prisioneiros de Brasil—séculos XVI–XIX [ Rio de Janeiro: Editora Expressão e Cultura, 2002], 33–5). Clearly Alberro is tallying a much wider range of “involvement” of Afroiberians. Is she including all those who were denounced or who served as witnesses? 68 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 30.

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chapter one The Converso/Sephardic Atlantic

From the Jewish perspective there existed not one but two Atlantic worlds. The orbit of the Iberian, Catholic mainland (Spain and Portugal) and colonies constituted a sphere forbidden to Jews as Jews.69 The tragic end of medieval Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, a history filled with long moments of coexistence and rich accomplishment, is well known: a 1492 royal edict ordering the expulsion from Castilian territories of all Jews who did not convert to Catholicism; the many thousands who fled to Portugal, together with the Jews already residing there, faced another royal edict in 1497 commanding the forced conversion of every Jew in Portugal, this time without the option of leaving. According to many sources, both contemporary and modern, the manner of the sudden, collective conversion in Portugal generated a community far more knowledgeable in and committed to Judaism, as least for the next few generations.70 The problem of so-called cristianos nuevos or cristãos novos, of Jews who had been forced to or chose to become Christians, that began in earnest with anti-Jewish persecutions and massacres in Spain toward the end of the fourteenth century (mainly 1391), and that had led to the re-establishment of the medieval Inquisition there in 1478 (ostensibly in order to protect the religious integrity of the New Christians), now swelled to institutionalized, national proportions and became endemic to Spanish and Portuguese existence for the next few centuries.71 Despite various institutional desires to assimilate 69 Debate exists over whether medieval attitudes toward Jews and the possibility of their converting “out of ” Jewishness can be understood through the modern lens of race. Most scholars would agree, I think, that the lines between Christian and Jew hardened after the twelfth century and again after the Reconquista. See Jonathan M. Elukin, “From Jew to Christian? Conversion and Immutability in Medieval Europe,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 171–89; Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws, and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 3–31; Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982); Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), 2:87–232. 70 This perspective may have been expressed first in writing by Benedict (alias Baruch) Spinoza, in his Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Martin D. Yaffe (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2004), 64. 71 Studies of the Jews of medieval Sepharad—a biblical toponym retroactively applied to Spain—are too numerous to mention. Also too many to list are treatments of the experience of the New Christians or Judeoconversos, of whom Marranos or cryptoJews comprise a subset, which inevitably intertwines with the story of the Sephardic

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the population of New Christians into the Catholic body politic, they faced persistent and widespread denigration, exclusion and persecution because of suspicions that, intentionally or not, they perpetuated ‘Jewish’ beliefs, practices or characteristics. In what we might call the Protestant Atlantic, on the other hand, Sephardic Jews who had fled Iberian territories not only found an increasingly tolerant welcome (not without difficulties and in the face of exclusions, at times severe) and gained previously unheard of privileges and rights as useful instruments of colonialist reasons of state. This trend seems to have reached its zenith in the Dutch colonies, where Jews constituted roughly a third of the European population. Catholic France provided an environment less xenophobic than Catholic Spain and Portugal, but its welcome of Jews in its colonies proved more complicated. Sephardim played an important role, even a dominant one, in various aspects of Atlantic and general international commerce. In family-based networks that spanned European motherlands and their colonies, Crypto-Jews and Sephardim at various times were active in trading and/or processing pepper and spices, sugar, indigo, chocolate, slaves, coral and diamonds, not to mention more mundane goods such as wool, civet cats and wine. Sephardim participated as well, insofar as they were able, in the more colorful or disturbing aspects of colonialism.72 communities beyond Iberian lands with which Conversos had family and commercial relations and into which many later reintegrated; some recent and classic surveys include: Renée Levine Melammed, A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, L’identità dissimulata: giudaizzanti iberici nell’Europa cristiana dell’eta moderna (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 2000); David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996); Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Haim Beinart (ed.), Moreshet Sepharad: the Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1992); Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, 3 vols. (Madrid: Istmo, 1986); Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en España y América (Madrid: Istmo, 1971); B. Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1966); João Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos portugueses (Lisbon: Clássica Editora, 1921). 72 Among many other sources: the economic essays in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (forthcoming); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Familia, religión y negocio: El sefardismo en las relaciones entre el mundo ibérico y los Países Bajos en la edad moderna, ed. Jaime Contreras, Bernardo J.

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Many Sephardim and Judeoconversos referred to themselves, and were referred to by others as members of O Nação, The Nation, by which they meant something like “those of Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their descendants.”73 Even so, the far-flung communities of the Sephardic diaspora—from Paramaribo to Izmir, Hamburg to Sale, Morocco—can hardly be said to constitute a nation-state, though individually and to some degree in concert they exercised varying degrees of political power, self-organization, autonomy from the nation-states in which they resided and coordinated policy-making. On the other hand, the centrality of kin network-based merchant capitalism to the basic survival, economic success and political robustness of this transcontinental Jewish archipelago, as well as its prominent intertwining with Sephardic political ruling structures, strikingly parallel the same formations in what sociologist Julia Adams calls the “familial states” of the colonial powers of western Europe.74 Judeoconversos, on the other hand, were neither a typical diasporic community, merchant or otherwise nor an organized entity. Other than a few exceptions on the peninsula in the early sixteenth century, Judeoconversos had no recognized physical public sphere, no gathering points. They comprised an ethnicity that could not really celebrate itself openly, not to mention identify explicitly in positive ways (though sometimes New Christian individuals expressed great pride in their Jewish origins). Some forms

García García, and Ignacio Pulido (Madrid: Fundación Carlos de Amberes/Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 2002); several essays in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 –1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, European Expansion & Global Interaction, Vol. 2 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 102–64; Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740), Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, 30 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); idem, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550 –1750, 3rd ed. (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998); José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, Os judeus na expansão portuguesa em Marrocos durante o século XVI: Origens e actividades duma comunidade (Braga: Edições APPACDM Distrital de Braga, 1997), 253–374; Stephen Alexander Fortune, Merchants and Jews: the Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainsville: Center for Latin American Studies/ University of Florida Press, 1984); Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978). 73 Miriam Bodian, “ ‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe.” Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 48–76. 74 Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). She discusses only Holland, England and, minimally, France, while Jews appear a single time in the index, but her arguments could easily be extended to the Iberian powers.

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of internal communal organization can be found: especially before the seventeenth century, the peninsular Judeoconverso population showed some signs of coordinated leadership; endogamous marriage was often prioritized by New Christian heads of households regardless of geography. Few of these phenomena derived from centralized authority. It is doubtful, therefore, that the Iberian Atlantic can be called Sephardic. The most basic questions of Jewish identity seem vertiginous in the early modern Iberian Atlantic world. Was a person Jewish? In what ways? When? Where? To whom? It strikes me as most appropriate that the first ‘Jew’ to walk the shores of the New World, Columbus’s translator Luís Torres, who was to greet the natives in their native Aramaic or Chaldean, was a non-Jew, a descendant of New Christians (a euphemistic name masking the violence of coerced conformity by means of magical spiritual-legal acts) whose religious loyalties remain known only to him and God. This aspect of hiddenness also points to another unique facet of the Converso diaspora. Crypto-Judaism’s unauthorized status (from the perspective of the Catholic state) and therefore clandestine organizing principles meant that in many respects it differed little between the Iberian Old and New Worlds, unlike Catholicism and American African religiosity, which both reflected novel formations influenced by the demographic and ethnographic specificities of the Americas. Despite, perhaps because of the official enforced non-existence of Judaism and Jews, the Iberian Atlantic world experienced its own persistent ‘Jewish question.’ New Christians, though ever suspected of judaizing tendencies and excluded from certain institutions and honors, were purposefully integrated into society; after all, they were now Catholics. They were thus active throughout the empire. It has been estimated that in 1593, New Christians comprised 14 percent of the population of Pernambuco.75 Seymour Liebman estimates that Conversos constituted some 10 percent of the total non-Indian population of early New Spain.76 A French traveler passing through Rio de Janeiro in 1695 calculates that three fourths of the city’s White population possessed Jewish roots, surely an exaggeration, though no fewer than 1116 New Christians were either imprisoned or denounced José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da nação: Cristãos-novos e judeus em pernambuco, 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaqium Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1989), 7. 76 Seymour B. Liebman, New World Jewry, 1493–1825: Requiem for the Forgotten (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982), 87. 75

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to the local Inquisition during the eighteenth century (the total population in 1750 stood at around 20,000).77 One historian of the northern Mexican province of Nuevo León, Eugenio del Hoyo, claims that some 68 percent of the original sixteenth-century settlers were New Christians.78 Since Jews had constituted the major commercial sector of medieval Iberian society, Judeoconversos, now freed from anti-Jewish legislation, achieved even greater mercantile domination, occupying, if not controlling, significant branches of commerce both within the empire and between it and other powers in Europe and beyond. One survey of Judeoconversos who had been tried by the Castilian Inquisition and then rehabilitated between 1535 and 1575 found 49 percent involved in commerce and 21 percent in finance.79 In the seventeenth century Judeoconversos made up some 65 to 75 percent “of the total Portuguese mercantile community while hardly totaling more than 10 percent of the population.”80 An important recent dissertation argues that New Christians comprised “the predominant European social group in Cabo Verde and Guiné” between colonization by the Portuguese and the late seventeenth century.81 Between 1580 and 1640 Portuguese New Christians flourished in the trade, licit and often illicit, linking Potosí (the silver center and hence economic engine of the Spanish Americas), Tucumán, Buenos Aires and the Río de la Plata with Europe, frequently via Brazil, frequently in partnership with Dutch interlopers and Sephardim in Amsterdam. In seventeenth-century New Spain, Portuguese New Christians established a flourishing trade network between Mexico City, Veracruz, Guadalajara, Puebla and Zacatecas, trading goods from and to places as far away as Seville, Central America, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Buenos Aires, 77 Lina Gorenstein, “Na cidade e nos estaus: Cristãos-novos do Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVII–XVIII), in Gorenstein and Carneiro, Ensaios sobre a intolerância, 100–1. 78 Cited in Stanley M. Hordes, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 76. 79 Rafael Carrasco, “Solidaridades judeoconversas y sociedad local,” in Inquisición y conversos. Conferencias pronunciadas en el III Curso de Cultura Hispano-Judía y Sefardí de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Celebrado en Toledo del 6 al 9 de septiembre de 1993 (Madrid: Asociación de Amigos del Museo Sefardí/Caja de Castilla La-Mancha, 1993), 66. 80 Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea’: The Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXII, no. 2 (December 1982), 217. 81 Emphasis added; Tobias Green, “Masters of Difference: Creolization and the Jewish Presence in Cabo Verde, 1497–1672” (PhD Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK, 2006), 28.

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the Canaries, and the Philippines. This network, dealing in both legal and contraband items such as textiles (linens, woolens, Chinese silks), cacao, slaves, collapsed with the inquisitorial persecutions of the middle of the century. Perhaps most surprising, in the same first decades of the seventeenth century, Portuguese New Christians attained a significant and much noticed position as bankers and international merchants servicing the needs of the Spanish empire. Study of the mostly familial networks of Converso/Sephardic traders has flourished, providing an increasingly clear picture of their methods, extent and success.82 Beginning in 1595, Spain outsourced the supply of its slaves to Portuguese slave traders in a mutually-beneficial arrangement that lasted, despite official interruptions, for well over a hundred years.83 Many of the slavers were New Christians.84 New Christians also occupied a solid position among the population of those who depended on slaves, whose agricultural productivity instigated slavery for many. Of those 41 sugar mills (engenhos) in Bahia and Pernambuco whose owners could be identified between 1587 and 1592, Stuart Schwartz finds 12 that belonged to New Christians.85 According to a contemporary chronicler,

82 See Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Portugueses no Peru ao tempo da união ibérica: Mobilidade, cumplicidades e vivências, 2 vols. in 3 pts. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2005); Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora; several essays in Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West; Bernardo López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocio y judíos sefardíes ([Alcalá de Henares:] Universidad de Alcalá, 2001); Maria da Graça Mateus Ventura, Negreiros Portugueses na Rota das Índias de Castela, 1541–1556 (Lisbon: 1999); Carmen Sanz Ayán, Los banqueros de Carlos II (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1988); James C. Boyajian, Portuguese bankers at the court of Spain, 1626–1650 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Though sometimes ideologically problematic—failing to distinguish between New Christians, Marranos and Jews, for instance—other Iberian studies remain extremely valuable: José Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos em Minas Gerais durante o ciclo do ouro, 1695–1755: relações com a Inglaterra, Biblioteca Pioneira de estudos brasileiros (São Paulo: Pioneira/São Bernardo do Campo, SP/Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior, 1992); idem, Os cristãos-novos e o comércio no Atlântico Meridional (com enfoque nas capitanias do sul 1530–1680), Biblioteca Pioneira de estudos brasileiros (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1978)—dedicated to “the indefatigable descendants of Israel”; Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos: los asientos portugueses (Seville: EEHA, 1977). 83 See, among other studies, Alencastro, Trato dos viventes, 77–116; Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Negreiros portugueses na rota das Índias de Castela, 1541–1556 (Lisbon: Edições Colibri/Instituto de Cultura Ibero-Atlântica, 1999); Vila Vilar, Hispanoamerica y el comercio de esclavos. 84 The best treatment remains Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Bernardini and Fiering, Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 439–70. 85 Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550– 1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 265. Anita Novinsky claims that

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among the 101 mill-plantations around Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth century, some of which employed over 100 slaves, 21 belonged to New Christians, about 20 percent of the total.86 Conversos in commerce took advantage of the fact that in order to facilitate and encourage trade the crown exempted merchants from the need to prove their purity of blood.87 Many of the commercial activities of conversos also took advantage of the limits of imperial Spanish power, perhaps even aimed to undermine it. Perhaps there is a specific Portuguese Converso ‘attitude’ at work here, a kind of counter-culture that may not have been unique to Conversos, but that they frequently exhibited. The Portuguese Judeoconversos who returned to Spain with the unification of the two countries in 1580 in order to escape the far more virulent Portuguese Inquisition were “notoriously active in the illegal export of Spanish silver to northern Europe and in evading the crown’s numerous restrictions on trade with the Spanish Indies.”88 Conversos and former Conversos spied for powers hostile to Spain and Portugal. The Portuguese friar Pantaleão d’Aveiro discovered on his journey to the Holy Land in the 1580s that the Portuguese Jews, “having formerly been Christians themselves, were the most vehement critics of and—to his horror—scoffers at Christianity in the Levant.”89 Rodrigo Pereira de Castro, a Portuguese from Zaragoza, was prosecuted by the Cartagena inquisitional tribunal sometime between 1618 and 1620 for refusing to remove his hat when passing a Corpus Christi procession.90 This contemptuous attitude no doubt entailed a weapon of the weak for those still living under Catholic domination, while “Jews” owned and operated about 60 percent of the sugar mills in Bahia (“Jewish Roots of Brazil,” in Judith Laikin Elkin and Gilbert W. Merkx [eds.], The Jewish Presence in Latin America [ Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987], 36), but her data derives in part from Inquisition records, which, as Schwartz points out, “are surely not an unbiased source in this regard.” 86 Gorenstein, “Cristãos-novos do Rio de Janeiro,” 104. 87 Ventura, Negreiros portugueses, 31. One could argue that when it came to “Jews” the Spanish crown wanted to have it both ways, a kingdom free of Jews or Judaism but advantaged by “Jewish” experience and connections in commerce, a kingdom of non-Jewish Jews. 88 Israel, European Jewry, 50; on the colonies, see idem, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 130, 38. 89 Israel, European Jewry, 21; Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 49–52. 90 The trial was eventually suspended without his being charged. José Toribio Medina, Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Cartagena de las Indias (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1899), 123. Some of the ways Portuguese tried to oppose, subvert or critique Spanish racializing of their New Christian ancestry are laid out in Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 132–6.

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helping justify actions committed at the expense of their former oppressors by those who escaped elsewhere. Such behaviors hardly belonged only to Portuguese Conversos. By the early seventeenth century, many local Muslims on the Mozambique coast did all they could to resist or subvert Portuguese efforts to control long-standing local trade arrangements. Returning Portuguese racist attitudes with sarcasm, a member of a group of Bantu watching a fidalgo strum his guitar in the 1630s exclaimed, “You see, these savages have musical instruments just like we do.”91 The cultural commuting and worldliness of many Judeoconversos and those who became open Jews stemmed from a combination of factors, not all donned voluntarily. Furthermore, not all saw cosmopolitan wordliness in a positive light. Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese community of Amsterdam Saul Levi Morteira, in a 1635 sermon on Gen. 37:14, based a lament against wealth on the ancient midrashic collection Genesis Rabbah (50:11). Marc Saperstein summarizes Morteira’s text, still in manuscript: Korah represents those whose economic security leads them to think they can sin with impunity. Haman is “the prototype of men who involve themselves in great and dangerous business affairs, crossing seas and wildernesses to fulfil their desires.” The tribes of Gad and Reuben represent yet another group: “those who, because of money, do not rest or repose; they find no respite for their feet or slumber for their eyes. Because of their business affairs they live a life of sorrow, toiling hard, running around and exhausting themselves until they bring death near.”92

Morteira’s moral qualms echo similar exhortations by Catholic Iberians. Current events led many Converso writers, like their Catholic counterparts, to hark to the biblical trope of Babylonia and its condemned tower when considering the new worlds of colonialism. Moseh Belmonte (Amsterdam; 17th–18th centuries?) critiques the new ethnographically-inspired relativism in the course of an anti-Christian poem: “The world with diverse opinions/all is Babel, all is confusions.”93 The

91 Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 137–8, 142–3; quote from 142. 92 Marc Saperstein, “The Rhetoric and Substance of Rebuke; Social and Religious Criticism in the Sermons of Æakham Saul Levi Morteira,” Studia Rosenthaliana 34,2 (2000): 144–45; the original Hebrew appears on 145, n. 28. 93 Argumentos contra los ‫ נוצרים‬en forma de verso, printed in Kenneth Brown and Harm den Boer, El barroco sefardí Abraham Gómez Silveira: Arévalo, prov. de Ávila, Castilla 1656—

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Judeoconverso and possibly crypto-Jewish Antonio Enríquez Gómez repeatedly attacks Spain and Iberian imperialism by wielding the term Babylon. The Judeoconverso and later open Jew Miguel Daniel (Levi) de Barrios writes ambiguously that “Lisbon is the greatest Babylon in the world.”94 The recognition of Babel in the feverish contemporary overseas expansion, mercantile feeding frenzy, racial confrontation and demographic earthquakes also stands behind the title of Joseph Penso de la Vega’s description, the first ever, of a stock exchange, the world’s first, in Amsterdam: Confusion of Confusions (1688).95 The stock exchange serves Vega merely as a metonym for the regnant world system of monarchic capitalism and its magical, illusory, yet utterly disruptive effects. Spinoza, in the Preface to his Theologico-Political Treatise, seems to lament the homogenization of his day: “you almost cannot recognize who anyone is—whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Heathen—unless by the outward habit and worship of his body, or because he frequents this or that Church, or, lastly, because he is addicted to this or that opinion and is accustomed to swearing in the words of some master or other. Otherwise life is the same for all.”96 This complaint comes across as somewhat amusing, as if the medieval world were hundreds of years gone, and even fails to mention the Americas and the more recent forms of European overseas colonialism, though elsewhere in the text Spinoza raises the Chinese and Japanese. It should be noted that though many Judeoconversos were merchants, even phenomenally wealthy ones, Judeoconversos could be found in all of the classes.97 They were also not by any means exempt from the Amsterdam 1741: Estudio preliminar, obras líricas, vejámenes en prosa y verso y documentación personal (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2000), 182, n. 158. 94 Epistola Al Excelentissimo Señor Don Fernando de Mascareñas, Conde de la Torre, in Sol de la vida, 84. 95 The symbol appears explicitly within the work as well (for instance, Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 205, 257). 96 Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Martin D. Yaffe (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2004), xviii–xix. 97 See, inter alia: Bella Herson, Cristãos-novos e seus descendentes na medicina brasileira (1500 –1850) (São Paulo: Editora da Universidad de São Paulo, 1996); Pilar Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal: Solidaridad y tensiones en la comunidad judeoconversa (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1994), 95–128; Bruce A. Lorence, “Professions Held by New Christians in Northern and Southern Portugal during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Tamar Alexander et al. (eds.), History and Creativity in the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Communities ( Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1994), 315–26; Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Os Judeus em Portugal no Século XV, vol. I (Lisboa: Universidade Nova de Lisboa/Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, 1982); vol. II (Lisboa: INIC, 1984), 1:261–88; Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, La clase

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kinds of collective mistreatment we usually associate with other groups. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, King Manoel of Portugal pressed possibly two thousand Jewish youths into service and sent them as forced settlers to the island of São Tomé off of the Atlantic coast of southern Africa. In the mid-seventeenth century an Italian Capuchin priest described how the Portuguese in Luanda, Angola, made enormous use of forced labor, by which he meant not African slaves but Judeoconversos banished for some (alleged) crime or other.98 What about the identity of New Christians? In a seminal article, Miriam Bodian correctly notes how until recently most analyses of Judeoconverso identity focused on religious identity, though this propensity in fact continues.99 Let us not start there. Thomas F. Glick, taking up sociological methodology, cuts through the ideological knots of these identity questions in a fresh and useful manner. “Marrano” identity, for Glick, entailed cultural commuting between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Catholic’ lifestyles, as “a way of dealing with or acting out ambivalence” regarding two religious systems, two ethnicities regarding which ‘the marrano’ felt both inside and outside. Glick is worth quoting at length: Essentialist definitions of ethnic identity are conducive ultimately to ideologized and misleading conceptions of true and false identities. Ethnicity is a collection of traits, traditions, values, and symbols that situate a group with respect to its ancestors and to other ethnic groups, and a single individual can easily partake of or draw upon more than one such collection. Thus [anthropologist] F.K. Lehman concludes, with regard to the Karen [of Burma]: “The whole business of insisting that there must be an objectively unique definition for a true ethnic category is vain. It is grounded in the romanticist tradition of associating a cultural inventory with something vaguely and mystically thought of as a unique historical experience, properly attached to racelike populations.” The point is important because the notion of “true Jew”/“false Jew” turns up too often in the historiography of crypto-Jews. It is legitimate to specify the “core” identity of a carefully defined group but not to posit a “true” or

social de los conversos en Castilla en la Edad Moderna, ed. facsímil. (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1991 [orig. 1955]). 98 Eltis, “Identity and Migration,” 122; he cites Michael Angels and Denis de Carli, “A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo in the Years 1666 and 1667,” in Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 6 vols. (London, 1744–46), 1:491–2. 99 Miriam Bodian, “ ‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 49–50.

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Though still a model and an abstraction, Glick’s approach at least leaves us with an appreciation that Marrano identity yields not ‘false’ Christians or Jews but individuals whose identity may have been rather more complex. The reason such models fail methodologically is that not all Judeoconversos were cultural commuters, in other words, not all New Christians were Marranos of Glick’s type; some indeed chose one option or neither option. Glick, like Yirmiyahu Yovel after him, tries to erect a typological understanding of Marranism that, by definition, must be false for exactly the reasons Glick lays out at the beginning of the above passage. In an attempt to escape such a conundrum, José Faur argues that, ideologically speaking, there are four types of Judeoconversos: [ T ]hose who wanted to be Christians and have nothing to do with Judaism, those who wanted to be Jewish and have nothing to do with Christianity, those who wanted to be both, and those who wanted to be neither.101

Faur offers a sociological neatness that avoids establishing and then favoring a ‘core’ essence of Marrano traits, but his schema also suffers from its own neatness. For one thing, it understands Converso identity solely in a religious manner, as Bodian complains, and does not allow for a New Christian identity that revolves around itself as ethnicity, demographic unit or subculture. In addition, it fails to appreciate that individual Judeoconversos may have felt drawn to or by more than one ideological pole or may have gone back and forth between them. Though messier and less reducible to generalization, attempts to approach Judeoconverso identity through concrete historical examples affords us another path. As mentioned, it is generally accepted by scholars, and was a widespread sentiment at the time, that the Portuguese Conversos maintained a far higher loyalty to Judaism as a result of the sudden and collective conversion of the entire Portuguese Jewish

100 Thomas F. Glick, “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” in Benjamin R. Gampel (ed.), Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74. 101 José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 41; see also idem, “Four Classes of Conversos: A Typological Study,” Revue des Etudes Juives 149 (1990): 113–24.

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population at one time. The closer one stands to 1492 and 1497 the more likely it is that self-awareness of Jewish identity will be present and meaningful among both Spanish and Portuguese Judeoconversos. This does not necessarily have to do with judaizing, but merely pride in and insistence on maintaining the meaning of ethno-religious origins and unity. Hence in 1512, a law was passed on the island of São Tomé, settled in part by possibly two thousand Jewish youths forcibly removed there by the Portuguese king, that of the four aldermen sitting on the municipal council, at least one had to be a New Christian.102 Even in-group behavior, such as insularity or endogamous marriage, do not necessarily translate into Marrano leanings, but only ethnic self-consciousness. Solange Alberro reports that among Mexican Judeoconversos, many of them originally Portuguese, 96 percent married endogamously.103 Among the New Christians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro province, finds Lina Gorenstein, some 66 percent of the marriages are with other New Christians.104 One Judeoconverso from the mid-seventeenth century attests to these tribal feelings when he testifies that “‘judaizers’ had a common style of letting themselves be known amongst” themselves. They “would ask each other about their places of birth and about their parents and grandparents, and upon knowing that they were of the nation, they would say [of each other] ‘es dos nossos’ [in Portuguese: ‘He/she is one of ours’].”105 Whether non-judaizing Conversos also behaved in this manner needs to be determined. Many scholars suggest that Judeoconversos manifested certain ideational characteristics that reflected their difficult situation. Judeoconversos, according to Inquisition and other sources, expressed great pride in their origins, their religion (the so-called Law of Moses), both because from them Christianity had sprung, even their Jewish nicknames. Many of them married only other Judeoconversos and, especially early on,

102 Robert Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: the Jews of São Tomé Island, 1492–1654,” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 76. 103 Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad, 434; she cites Stanley Hordes, “The Crypto Jewish Community of New Spain, 1620–1649” (PhD Dissertation: Tulane University, 1980), 210. Patterns related in Inquisition records from the era of peak anti-Portuguese and anti-judaizing may not reflect general marital behavior in the colony accurately. 104 Gorenstein, “Cristãos-novos do Rio de Janeiro,” 106. 105 Quoted in Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 144.

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attempted to maintain some forms of separateness. For instance, in the Castilian town of Guadalupe, Judeoconverso men “congregated apart from Old Christians both during and after mass” at the church known as St. Gregory’s Nave.106 (The women apparently did not self-segregate in this manner. This example brings up once again the likelihood that identity was inflected by gender.) Judeoconversos lamented the innocence of those martyred by the Inquisitions and the cruelty with which they were dispatched. They saw themselves as embodying all the highest virtues and traits: honor, nobility of spirit, greatness. Caught between warring religious systems and seemingly entirely antagonistic symbolic universes, Judeoconversos are said to have been prone to skepticism, doubt, disaffection, irreverance.107 They were frequently accused of disbelieving the claims of the Catholic church, its institutions and rituals, priests, saints, eating of the host, baptism and the Inquisition (as open Jews they not infrequently had difficulty with the claims of the rabbinic establishment). Even more problematic, Judeoconversos were often charged with mocking and blaspheming against all the above. In some sense, Judeoconversos are often seen as expressing modern outlooks, for instance in ‘inventing’ the picaresque novel or adopting philosophical positions of extreme rationalism. At the same time, many Conversos, intellectuals and lay people alike, saw their group as being made up of devoted Catholics who were victims of inquisitors and other Catholics who were the actual religious hypocrites. One crucial aspect of Judeoconverso identity is the peculiar position of Jews in European society, where they often found themselves between the colonizers and the colonized.108 Just as in England after

106 Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 62. 107 Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). A view of Marranism as justified, even sanctified dissimulation can be found in Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), ch. 3. 108 Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized; Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: the Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). The same is true for the first African slaves used by the Spanish in the Americas. Writing in the historical mode of recuperation of the 1960s, James Lockhart cites their contributions: “[t]hey were an organic part of the enterprise of occupying Peru from its inception,” Blacks “were for the main part the Spaniards’ willing allies . . . And this willingness is understandable. Though Negroes were subordinated to Spaniards, they were not exploited in the plantation manner; except for mining gangs, Negroes in Peru counted as individuals.” Lockhart’s assessment is quoted, in turn, by Herman Bennett, un-selfconsciously, as a still under-appreciated facet of the African origins of the western

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the Norman invasion, where Jews were used by the conquerors as tax collectors, Jews made up the majority of tax farmers in many of the kingdoms in Moslem and Christian Spain, serving the interests of the monarchy and nobility ‘against’ the internally colonized peasants. Hence after the Reconquista Jews made convenient new settlers for towns emptied of their Muslim populations.109 It was convenient and for the most part effective for medieval Christian Europe, a cluster of societies that for the most part despised, shunned and even demonized physical and cultural mobility, curiosity and multiplicity, to have Jews and later Conversos serve as commercial intermediaries.110 All this helped create the position of Conversos and Sephardim in the Atlantic world. Jonathan Israel hints at the economic uses to which Jews were often put by colonizing European countries (his examples are all from the mid-seventeenth century): At Hamburg, the rules imposed by the Senate excluded the Jews from practically every form of activity other than overseas trade [. . .] Even at Amsterdam, guild restrictions excluded Jews from most crafts and forms of shop-keeping and those crafts they were allowed to practice, such as diamond-processing, tobacco-spinning, and chocolate-making, were, generally speaking, closely connected with colonial trade.111

In light of the difficulties of attracting Europeans to settle in the newfound overseas colonies, Jews were offered rights and privileges if they would settle, for example, in early Dutch Surinam, rights and privileges which were reaffirmed by later conquerors who wanted to keep the Jews there. Conversos fulfilled similar commercial functions in the Iberian empires. From the beginning, Spain and Portugal forbade Jews and

hemisphere ( James Lockhart, Spanish Peru 1532–1560: A Colonial Society [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968]; Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 2, 199–200, n. 9). Using the tactic of ethnic diversity among subaltern populations that goes back at least to Plato, in both New Spain and Perú, Ladino Afroiberians served encomenderos as “intermediaries and supervisors over indigenous laborers’ (Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 21). 109 See, for instance, Elena Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Hampshire: Variorum, 1990). 110 Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 54–5; Anidjar, “Blood Works.” 111 Jonathan Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (1645–1657),” in Menasseh ben Israel and his World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 146.

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Conversos to emigrate to the New World.112 Yet even in the Iberian backyard of the Inquisitions the economic benefits of tolerating not only ‘New Christians’ but even Jews swayed some to seek to rein in theological zealotry for ‘reasons of state.’ So the Portuguese mercantilist Duarte Gomes Solís, himself a New Christian, urged Philip III not just to restrain persecution of New Christians but to allow professing Jews to settle in the Portuguese colonies in Asia, and have ghettos there “as they do in Rome and other parts of Italy” as a means of defeating Dutch and English commercial rivalry in the east.113

This is not to imply that Jews/Conversos were solely abject victims of Christian regimes, unwilling converts to colonialism. Where possible, they were seeking their own survival and gain like everybody else. (It needs to be kept in mind that the majority of Jews in every early modern city in both the old and new worlds was poor.) Like so many Europeans, Conversos flocked to the Americas in the hope of obtaining the privileges that in Europe remained the prerogative of the nobility. Many Conversos also fled to the Americas in order to escape the tyranny of the motherlands’ Inquisitions which hovered over them regardless of their religious orientation. It was precisely the confluence of Jewish self-interest and European colonial desires that put Jews and Conversos into often problematic situations vis-à-vis other colonized peoples. Conversos or Jews were but a minority of the actual colonialists, but carried out much of the trading. Just as lower-class Europeans found an elevated status in the Americas—as Whites living above Amerindians and Blacks—so did Judeoconversos.114 Nonetheless, the New World was not necessarily a paradise for Judeoconversos, particularly as their commercial success only attracted greater inquisitional interest. The Inquisition followed these refugee colonialists there, where ‘Jews and heretics’ were hunted out beginning in 1570 in Peru, 1571 in Mexico, and 1579 in Brazil,

112 New Christians were allowed to emigrate to the colonies of Spain and Portugal only in 1601, after “the payment of the enormous bribe of 200,000 ducats to Phillip III, [. . .] the king promising that [the prohibition on emigration] would never again be enforced. [. . .] This ‘irrevocable’ permission was canceled in 1610 [. . . and again] restored in 1629” (Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos, 4th ed. [New York: Hermon Press, 1974], 197) Oddly enough, before all this, beginning in 1548, “one of the penalties imposed by the tribunals of the mother-country upon convicted but ‘penitent’ heretics was that of deportation—generally across the Atlantic” (ibid., 283). 113 Gomes Solís, Memoires, 12, 16; cited in Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550 –1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 57. 114 Novinsky, Cristãos novos na Bahia, 59.

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as the Inquisition in Portuguese Goa (India) had begun in 1561. The few Judeoconversos who made their way to Portuguese Angola were likewise followed by an Inquisitorial visitation in 1626. The peculiar status of European Jews engendered a peculiar logic for some Jews and Conversos, since they were dependent for their privileges and often their lives on Christian rulers whose success was more and more achieved at the expense of other peoples. Jews and Conversos were, of course, expected to contribute to the attainment of this national success, but in any case it is difficult to cut the circle between the external coercion to perform any and all tasks and the internal desire to stay on the master’s good side for one’s own benefit.115 The poet and physician Yehudah ha-Levi captured beautifully the angst of this dialectic when in the twelfth century he described in a letter to Rabbi David of Narbonne the difficulty of medically treating the “giant” inhabitants of Toledo, those “hard masters.” [A]nd how can a slave please his masters other than by spending his days fulfilling their desires . . . we heal Babylon but it is beyond healing.116

The same dialectic is differently thematized, though without rationalization or even comment, in a recent description of the Barcelona scholar Abraham bar Æiyya (b. 1070): “In his work Megillat ha-Megalleh he attacked the opinions of the church fathers which were prevalent at the time. He considered the crusades as signifying the end of days and poured out his wrath against the Crusader kingdom in the Land of Israel, also opposing Islam and even more, Christianity. While in the [Catalonian] prince’s service, he wrote Æibbur ha-Meshikhah ve-haTishboret, a geometrical work for the measurement of land and its

115 The delicacy of the situation of some Jews can be glimpsed by juxtaposing two of the multiplicitous images of Jews. On the one hand, the “foreignness” of the Jews opened them up to charges from nationalists that their profits were not necessarily benefitting their host country, as the French mercantilist Montchrétien maintained in his Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (1615). The “Marranos” in France, he wrote, were “sucking wealth out of the country rather than bringing it in” (Israel, European Jewry, 56). On the other hand, the Spanish mercantilist Francisco Rétama acknowledged that Jewish economic profits benefit their protectors as well when he advised Felipe III that he could “sap the economic strength of Spain’s enemy, the Dutch Republic, by employing agents in Holland to incite feeling against the Jews and provoke their expulsion to Germany or Poland” (ibid., 57). 116 Cited in Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. from the Hebrew by Louis Schoffman, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), 1:68.

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allotment during the Reconquista.”117 Here the question is not healing Babylon, but aiding and abetting the expansion of its empire, a process to which this resister-at-heart in the heart of the state seems to offer no resistance. Though on the one hand many scholars point to widespread ‘Portuguese,’ i.e., Judeoconverso skepticism, distance, even mockery toward Catholicism, as discussed above, as will be shown in chapter 8, most Judeoconverso authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries failed to critique the colonial practices of Portugal or Spain. Insistence on tolerance concerning themselves did not necessarily translate into empathetic tolerance for victim groups. On a related note, some scholars, such as Tobias Green, argue that the groups of Judeoconversos who migrated to imperial outposts—Cabo Verde, for instance—helped forge the specific creole identities of these places.118 This is an avenue worthy of further study. When it comes to religiosity, within the Iberian world it is notoriously difficult to tell who is a secret Jew and, if so, what kind. I will not enter here into the nature of Marrano religiosity, as it is discussed by many other authors and to a certain degree it will come up in the course of the chapters to come. Judeoconversos obviously ran the gamut from sincere Catholics to sincere Marranos to sincere unbelievers. The kind of systematizing of ‘Marrano religiosity’ done by David Gitlitz, in an otherwise useful survey, deceptively erases the very extreme variability that of necessity characterized a forbidden religion.119 Many of the figures in question do not necessarily maintain an identity over time or space, despite the fact that most researchers remain mired in reproducing the racialist assumptions of Iberian antisemitism by resorting to genealogical ‘proof ’ of Jewish descent, that is, arguing from biology as much as or instead of from belief or action. That a particular New Christian bore one or more Jewish ancestors only opens up the possibility that he or she might have been instructed, in some more or less tenuous form, in Jewish law or customs, but it certainly does not guarantee such a circumstance. It is known that surviving members of the prominent Carvajal family, persecuted as judaizers in sixteenth-century Mexico, and their descendants changed their names

117 Yom Tov Assis, “The Jews in the Crown of Aragon and its Dominions,” in Haim Beinart (ed.), Moreshet Sepharad: the Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1992), 1:50. 118 Green, “Masters of Difference.” 119 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit.

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to avoid further trouble with the Inquisition, while some scholars write of members of other families with names ‘known’ to betray Converso origin who took on new names.120 Anyone caught passing as an Old Christian was punished and declared a Jew (and how many escaped notice?), though of course religiosity may have had nothing to do with their attempt to avoid their stigmatized New Christian status. Often families had openly Jewish members in the Netherlands or Italy, for instance, and Catholic members in parts of the Iberian empires. Sometimes a person might follow a combination of Christian and Jewish beliefs or practices, as did Diego de Padilla of Córdoba, of the Río de la Plata province of the Viceroyalty of Perú, tried in 1579 for believing in God, Mary, Abraham and Moses.121 María de San Juan confessed to the inquisitors of peninsular Córdoba that she “inclined to the law of the Christians, though sometimes she made fasts of the law of Moses when she was with her sisters and saw them fast; and it had been four years since she had completely departed from the said law and never perfomed any more ceremonies, because in that time she had not been with her sisters, nor had dealings with them.”122 A descendant of the prominent New York Jewish Phillips family wrote in 1894 that he heard his father, the late Isaac Phillips, say that for years after their arrival in this country the female members of the family were unable to repeat their prayers without the assistance of the Catholic rosary, by reason of the habit acquired in Portugal for the purpose of lending the appearance of Catholic form should they be surprised at their devotions.123

Many New Christians may have practiced ‘Jewish’ customs without knowing that they were such, or with only the most minimal understanding of their meaning and origin. Scholar Juan Blázquez Miguel calls this phenomenon “residual crypto-Judaism.”124 Does this make

120 See, for instance, Irma Salinas Rocha, Nostro grupo (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1970); cited by Hernández, Delirio, 71. 121 Medina, Inquisición en las provincias del Plata, 118. 122 Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisición de Córdoba (Córdoba: Publicaciones de la Excma Disputación Provincial, 1983), 138. For now I am simply taking such statements at face value, though of course there is much that is suspect about them, as I discuss below. 123 N. Taylor Phillips, “Family History of the Reverend David Mendez Machado,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 47. The American family’s Ashkenazic patriarch, Jonas Phillips, had married a Sephardic woman, Rebecca Mendez Machado. 124 Juan Blázquez Miguel, Inquisición y criptojudaismo (Madrid: Kaydeda, 1988), 149.

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these individuals judaizers? In 1593 Pernambuco, Pedro Bastardo, a mameluco, that is, a Brazilian Mestizo and/or slave-hunter, confessed to the visiting inquisitor that “he spent seven years in the bush among pagans (gentios), living by gentile customs and did not know whether he was New Christian or Old.” Accused of conducting Jewish rites, he stated that “he did not know that [a certain] ceremony was Jewish.”125 As hinted in Bastardo’s testimony, some scholars conclude that by the sixteenth century ‘vibrant’ Marranism survived only in smaller towns and rural villages, where strong family alliances countered official destructive pressures. Of course, it is possible that Bastardo simply sought to avoid charges and punishment, but this cannot be assumed. Juan de León, alias Salomón Machorro, born in Pisa, raised as a Jew in Livorno and arrested by the Mexican Inquisition as a judaizer in May 1642, told his inquisitors during the course of his trial that one Portuguese Jew he knew “had not been in Ferrara with the Jews because the Jews from there feel maliciously toward the Portuguese judaizers who go and come from Spain, and denounce them before the Bishop, because they don’t know the Law in Hebrew.”126 These examples—and many, many more could be brought—only hint at the complex variety of possible stances forged by and circumstances forging Judeoconverso religiosity. The ‘in-betweenness’ of many types of New Christians is frequently noted and bespeaks a more general cultural predicament. In the first centuries of colonization, children of mixed Spanish and Amerindian parentage were considered either Spanish or Amerindian according to which cultural norms they followed. This relative acceptance disappeared by the seventeenth century, as was true regarding Mulatos and Judeoconversos. The distrust and enmity shown toward the last category of ‘mixed-breeds’ by both ‘normative’ Christians and Jews directly parallels the definition for mulato offered by the contemporary Sebastían de Covarrubias Orozco in his famous Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española (Madrid, 1611): “One who is the son of a black woman and a white man, or the reverse: and due to being an extraordinary mixture he is compared to the nature of a mule” (my emphasis).127 Mixed-breeds,

125 José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Confissões de Pernambuco (1594–1595): Primeira visitação do Santo Ofício às partes do Brasil (Recife: UFPE, 1970), 10–11. 126 Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 267. 127 Laura Lewis shares my reading of this definition (Hall of Mirrors, 30); see also Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 132–33.

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Mestizos, were ostracized by certain Amerindian elites, as represented by figures such as Guaman Poma, just as were Luso-Africans by the Wolof, Serer and Mandinka of West Africa.128 At the same time, gender assumptions often led Spanish male elites to seek the assimilation of mestizas and mulatas as servants, tutors or wives, as auxiliaries in the reproduction and dissemination of Spanish “Christian” society.129 Though initially racial miscegenation did not seem to represent a policy issue in western Africa, by 1620, King Felipe III of united Spain and Portugal ordered that Portuguese prostitutes, formerly punished with exile to Brazil, be sent instead to Cabo Verde “with the objective of extinguishing, insofar as possible, the race of mulattos;” in other words, Whitening the population through a breeding program.130 The confused and often syncretistic nature of the religion of many of the descendants of Judeoconversos, was astutely described by the Inquisition tribunal of the Spanish city of Llerena, despite the depiction’s inherent bias: Evidence deposed in this inquisition by the prisoner Manuel de Silva, against various persons in Arroyuelos, a village in which all the inhabitants are observers of the Law of Moses, but who observe it just as badly as they observe the Law of Christ, for they know neither the rites nor the ceremonies, as there is no Jewish priest. They live only with the consciousness that they are Jews, and they do no more than declare themselves to be adherents of the Jewish religion and pray to Moses with the prayers of Our Holy Mother, which they direct to him, for they say that he is another God to whose care they commend themselves.131

128 Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 91–3; Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 205–6; Brooks, Eurafricans, xxi, 51–2. 129 Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), ch. 1 (“Gender and the Politics of Mestizaje”). 130 George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000 –1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 186. 131 Letter from the tribunal of Llerena to the Suprema, 25 July 1581; cited in Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank” in Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (eds.) in association with Charles Amiel, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (Dekalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 124. Similarly, in Holland, arriving New Christians were deemed “Roman Catholics without faith and Jews without knowledge, but wishing to be Jews” (quoted in Brooks, Eurafricans, 90). The Libro del Alborayque (ca. 1460) also harps on Judeoconverso in-betweenness (Bodian cites a passage in “Men of the Nation,” 53).

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In a society obsessed with the eradication of religious difference, with conformity to traditional and honorable mores, in-betweenness evinced an intolerable threat. Besides the problem of ignorant syncretism there exists much evidence for persistent shuttling between faiths. Giorgio Rota cites from the archives of the Venetian Inquistion the story of Giovanni or Abran Battista. Born Jewish to Portuguese parents in Salonika, he was baptized in Rome at the age of thirteen. His parents returned him to Judaism but four years later he turned Muslim in Constantinople. Some time later, in 1583, Battista showed up in Venice and presented himself to the Holy Office there, stating that he wanted to become a priest.132 The case of Daniel Gabilho or Habilho, also known as Bento Jorge Borges, serves as another example of these difficulties. Living in Recife, he began in 1641 to buy and sell slaves from Angola, among other goods. Throughout his stay in Brazil he faced judicial problems: in the beginning of 1642 he found himself condemned to the gallows for debts and other larger faults, from which he was spared by the intervention of the Recife Jewish commuity and a fine of 15,000 florins, to pay for his ten-year deportation to the island penal colony of São Tomé—a punishment never carried out; in July of the same year, again condemned, this time for blasphemy, he handed over a 4,000 florin penalty. In 1645 he returned to Lisbon, whence he embarked for Amsterdam. Here he had to make public penitence for “having abandoned the Law of God and having converted to Christianity.”133 Clearly he had been living in Brazil apart from the Jewish community, though he ultimately joined the one in Amsterdam. Was he a Jew in Brazil? a Christian in Amsterdam? He left Brazil (in 1645) nearly a decade before the Catholic Portuguese reconquered what the Protestant Dutch had occupied—when he also happened to be denounced to the Inquisition in Lisbon—though that same year the Portuguese Brazilians began their campaign to reconquer those parts dominated by the Dutch. Did he leave to pursue his religious

132 Giorgio Rota, “False Moriscos and True Renegades: Spaniards and Other Subjects of the King of Spain in the Records of the Santo Uffizio of Venice (How to Become a Renegade),” in España y el Oriente islámico entre los siglos XV y XVI (Imperio Otomano, Persia y Asia central), ed. Encarnación Sanchez García, Pablo Martín Asuero and Michele Bernardini (Istanbul: Editorial Isis, 2007), 182. 133 Günter Böhm, Los sefardies en los dominios holandeses de America del Caribe, 1630–1750 (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992), 22–3; Mello, Gente da nação, 50–1; Isaac S. Emmanuel, “Seventeenth-Century Brazilian Jewry: a Critical Review,” American Jewish Archives 14,1 (April 1962): 39.

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beliefs? Did he move because of judicial or even financial difficulties or merely fear of the Inquisition? Manoel da Costa, a Frenchman of Portuguese descent, constitutes a similar case. He told Jews that he came out as an open Jew in Holland but told Christians that he was Christian. When he spoke with Dutch individuals he said he was Calvinist, read their books and attended the Dutch Reformed churches in Paraíba, when the Dutch conquered it.134 Precisely because of such cultural commuting, the Spanish-Portuguese community in Amsterdam forbade ‘passing’ as a Christian in the Iberian Catholic ‘lands of idolatry/terras de ydolatria’ in 1644. Any Jew, who in order to do business or the like, ‘passed’ as a Christian for a time, could not, upon returning, be received by the community or be a member of a minyan, without a public apology; thereafter for four years he was not allowed to be called to the Torah, to be honored by any mitzvah in the synagogue (excepting his own family celebrations), to discharge any community function. Between 1645 and 1725, 80 persons were so punished for these transgressions.135 The existence of this policy points to the very problem under discussion, i.e., the prevalence of moving back and forth between religious, social and cultural orbits. Were those who lived as Catholics in Catholic Brazil, then as Jews in Dutch Brazil and then again as Catholics after the ouster of the Dutch—Jews or Catholics? Such cases recurred even without the exchange of ruling powers in a territory. David Graizbord’s important recent study shows that former émigré Conversos who opted not to join a Jewish community or who chose to return to Spain or even to become Catholic again were not negligible numerically or culturally.136 Given the fragmented state of the documentation, none of these questions can be answered with certainty. The more important point is that the questions are as much philosophical as epistemological. In the case of each historical figure, the researcher needs to attempt to determine just

Mello, Gente da nação, 478–9. Yosef Kaplan, “The Travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Lands of Idolatry’ (1644–1724),” in Yosef Kaplan (ed.), Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition ( Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies/The Magnes Press/The Hebrew University, 1985), 197–224. 136 David Leon Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos, 1580–1700” (PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000), for instance, 128; see now idem, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700, Jewish Culture and Contexts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 134 135

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what makes her subject Jewish or not, something that cannot always be accomplished. The assimilation of the Judeoconverso minority into the general population certainly only increased with the passing of the centuries, even if pockets of Marranism persisted. The descendants of Rabbi Salomón Ha-Leví of Burgos, who converted in 1391, becoming Pablo de Santa María, “became so widespread and so interrelated with Castilian nobility that a royal decree was issued by King Felipe III [. . .] accepting their limpieza de sangre, or purity of bloodline, and officially recognizing the Ha-Leví family as an honorable and noble family of Christian blood and faith.”137 Interests of state also motivated the assimilation of Judeoconversos. In addition, in certain periods, such as the debt-ridden reign of Felipe II, money from Conversos was accepted by the crown in return for ‘favors,’ such as the granting of titles of nobility, territory and certificates of ‘pure blood’ that allowed their Converso bearers to emigrate to the Americas. Felipe II even granted the Portuguese New Christian conquistador Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva a territory of some 700,000 square miles in the north of New Spain, which was to be completely independent, of which Carvajal would serve as governor, and permitted Carvajal to bring 100 settlers without need for certificates of limpieza de sangre. As with all of the colonial territories, Carvajal’s territory was given the title of kingdom/reino and its first governor was assigned rights to have his heir succeed him. Pragmatism, of course, generated Felipe’s beneficence: the territory granted Carvajal, already a heroic figure, entailed an isolated frontier of the empire populated by hostile Amerindians that the king wanted conquered and pacified; allegedly, Carvajal’s apotropeic service to empire was offered to Felipe for the price of two million ducats. Scholars like Anita Novinsky and Angela Maria Vieira Maia argue that in Brazil the necessities of colonial living facilitated socialization and the mitigation of discriminatory barriers between New and Old Christians.138 Maia finds endogamous New Christian marriages fairly low in the late-sixteenth century sugar-producing captaincies of Brazil: 27 marriages with Old Christians out of 55 mentioned in Bahia, 43

Cited by Hordes, End of the Earth, 109. Anita Novinsky, Cristãos-novos na Bahia, 1642–1654 (São Paulo: Pioneira/EDUSP, 1972), 65; Angela Maria Vieira Maia, À sombra do medo: Cristãos velhos e cristãos novos nas capitanias do açúcar (Rio de Janeiro: Oficina Cadernos de Poesia, 1995), 111–21. 137 138

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mixed marriages out of 69 in Pernambuco, 14 out of 26 in Itamaracá.139 Novinsky cautions us to recall that many of Brazil’s New Christians, perhaps even most of them, opposed or fought against Dutch attempts to take territory from the Portuguese in the early and mid seventeenth century.140 Lina Gorenstein cogently summarizes the assimilation of New Christians into the life of Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: [T]hey lived like [the Old Christians], dressed and conducted themselves in the same manner. They lived together with them, were godparents of their children, did business, frequented their houses. [. . . .] the New Christians had been baptized at birth and educated as Catholics. They frequented the churches, attended masses, took communion and confessed. The majority of them were christened, knew all the Catholic prayers, made the sign of the cross, kneeled and clamored for the saints.141

Yet, given the prejudices against New Christians and the pressures for keeping such an identity hidden, many Judeoconversos may not have known who else shared their background and even when they knew, their knowledge may have been purely formal. After having related a great deal of information about her own Jewish practices and those of her family, after having denounced numerous people in the course of nearly two years in an inquisition jail in Mexico in the 1640s, Beatriz Enriquez denounces yet one more individual. She claims that another New Christian, named Ysauel Duarte told her that Luis de Olivera “was of a good heart,” i.e., that he was a crypto-Jew. But, says Beatriz to the inquisitors, “even though he sold to this confessant [i.e., herself ] a black woman, named Magdalena, she [Beatriz] never has interacted nor communicated with him.”142 During her 1590 Inquisition trial in Toledo, Catalina de Moya (Quintanar, Castile) states that whether she descends “from Old Christians or New Christians she is not able to determine.”143 Sergeant of the auxiliary militia Adrião Pereira de Faria, of the state of Pará, Brazil, imprisoned on charges of witchcraft ( feitiçaria) in 1756, did not know whether he was Old Christian or New Maia, Sombra do medo, 115. Novinsky, Cristãos-novos na Bahia; see also idem, “Marranos and the Inquisition: On the Gold Route in Minas Gerais, Brazil,” in Bernardini and Fiering (eds.), Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 215–41. 141 Gorenstein, “Cristãos-novos no Rio de Janeiro,” 108–9. 142 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 22 January 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 264r. 143 Quoted in Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 127. 139 140

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Christian.144 One Conversa told her Coimbran inqusitors in 1583 that “she did not know whether her father and mother were New or Old Christians and she did not comprehend this [question] nor did it ever cross her mind to ask her mother whether she was a New Christian or an Old Christian, and in this she persisted in spite of being much admonished” by her interrogators.145 Of course, whether these protestations should be believed is another story. Discussing the late twentieth century “cultural remnant” of early modern crypto-Jews in the area of New Mexico, Stanley Hordes summarizes his findings: At one extreme are individuals who are biological descendants of the original fifteenth-century conversos, but retain neither an awareness of their ancestral faith nor any vestigial Jewish customs. The other extreme, very few in number, encompasses those who profess a retention of a consciousness of the family’s Judaism and continue to observe Jewish practices, either openly as Jews or in secret under the cover of Catholicism or Protestantism. The majority, however, fall in a middle category: those Catholics or Protestants whose families display observances suggestive of Judaism, but without any specific knowledge about why they do so.146

Though this summary in fact goes against the argument of his own book, it is one of the most concise and excellent statements in favor of the skeptical position. By our own times, the number of crypto-Jews entails “very few” individuals. Many descendants of Conversos, on the other hand, might well know of or maintain retentions of Jewish customs or beliefs but without any understanding or intention. These sociological conclusions reflect a period of over a century in which this population lived with legal freedom of religion, though of course social pressures continued, which can be more conservative than legislative decree. There is no reason to believe that during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—at least from the time when conversos were personally disconnected from a Jewish past for one or more generations (except in exceptional cases of having lived in open Jewish communities abroad), when legal and social pressure to live as Catholics ran extremely and explicitly high—the number of crypto-Jews comprised anything more

144 145

245.

146

Novinsky, Inquisição, 49. Quoted in Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” Hordes, To the End of the Earth, xvii.

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than a “very few” individuals relative to the total number of New Christians. This would certainly have been true for Spanish Judeoconversos. As Glick and others point out, those who wanted to flee Spain and could do so left in 1492. But it may even be likely that among Portuguese New Christians, Jewish practices faded away relatively quickly among the majority of the population. Though I have seen no attempt to quantify this and the necessary documentation simply may not exist, I suspect that the numbers of Portuguese New Christians who fled Iberian territories, even when they could do so, is smaller than the number of those who remained. Was this only because of the very real difficulties in obtaining permission to leave or fleeing without such permission? When such permission was granted as a matter of general policy, most Judeoconversos chose to stay. The number of those who assimilated into Jewish communities abroad is no doubt far smaller still. Anita Novinsky notes that “It is a striking fact that the number of New Christians residing in several Brazilian cities exceeded the total number of Jews living in Amsterdam when the Sephardic community there reached its height.”147 This might be because, whether they judaized or not, New Christians who sought to escape the ever-present possibility of inquisitional trouble saw Brazil as a place of relative refuge. To speak of judaizing ‘tendencies’ in extended families is to assume a transmission that by definition can never be disproved. It is obvious from many cases, however, that even in Marrano families some individuals were not included in judaizing practices or opted not to engage in them. Therefore, family connections to judaizers can never prove anything about another individual. Business connections with those later accused, arrested or sentenced for judaizing prove even less. It is not even clear that business connections with individuals in open Jewish communities proves judaizing on the part of a New Christian, as many such connections spanned religious difference. This is not the place to rehearse the dark history of Iberian Catholic anti-Judaism. A combination of religious politics and economic motivations drove those forces that opposed the assimilation of Judeoconversos into Iberian society and that argued that the Judeoconverso population was riddled with secret Jews. Ironically, the problem was of their own making. Since at least the twelfth century, inspired by an increasingly militant Christianity led by mendicant preachers, Spanish clergy and

147

Novinsky, “Marranos and the Inquisition,” 222.

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crown insisted on forcible conversions of Jews, notwithstanding papal non-recognition of such methods. The 1497 mass conversion of the entirety of Portuguese Jewry in one fell swoop by King Manoel III stands as the peak of this tragically farcical practice, which could only backfire, leading to what is called in today’s geopolitical game-playing ‘blowback.’ Having demanded loyalty to a religion many Jews neither sought nor liked, perhaps true of all of the Jews of Portugal in 1497, this same clergy and crown, each for its own reasons, quickly erected an enormous institutional machinery to prevent ‘backsliding’ from an identity most of the targeted population had no desire to maintain. Many who were not even Judeoconversos would have agreed with the imprisoned woman in 1640s Mexico who said that “these señores [inquisitors] wish to have more power than God.”148 Adding perversity to absurdity, it is the very victims of such mendacious and hypocritical religious oppression who become targeted as traitors and punished, even posthumously, with rhetoric about innate deceitful Jewish traits and labeled, as was one victim of the inquisition, “ungrateful for so much good as he has received from the hand of God, making him a Christian.”149 Hence the hypocrisy and tragic irony with which triumphalist Iberian Catholicism and imperialist Iberian expansionism of the “Golden Age/Siglo de Oro” turned around to accuse “the Jews” of arrogance and haughtiness, as in Quevedo’s work, Virtud militante contra las cuatro pestes del mundo.150 In other words, Jews/Judaism were obstacles preventing Iberians from making the world safe for Christianity (and for Iberians). The truth is neither with those who see in every New Christian of Jewish background a fervent Marrano, nor with those who imagine that there never existed such a thing as a fervent Marrano. The truth seems eminently sociological and deflating to heart-throbbing or heartrending narratives pushed for ideological reasons. As Faur and Glick argue cogently, though differently, it is impossible to generalize about

148 Jailhouse conversation reported by Ysavel de Silva, herself already arrested for judaizing, testimony of 9 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 109r. 149 The accused was Blas de Paz Pinto, treated in chapter 3; AHN Inq., leg. 1601, no. 18, fol. 40; reprinted in I¢ic Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos coloniales: Originados en el santo oficio del tribunal de la inquisición de Cartagena de Indias (Contribución a la historia de Colombia), v. 2 of De Sefarad al neosefardismo (Bogota: Tipografia Hispana, 1971), 231. 150 Cited, for instance, by Díaz-Plaja, Espíritu del Barroco, 72. It is hard not to see that era’s accusations of Jewish love of money, gold and silver, à la Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as guilt-induced projections.

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the Judeoconverso population. Much evidence confirms their abstract reasoning. The narratives at work here may have been far more private than collective. They repeatedly confirm Ellis Rivkin’s thesis that the “negotiable” religious identity of most of the New Christians shows that they were “crypto-individualists” more than anything else. To paraphrase Graizbord, many Judeoconversos “created their respective religious self-identities as a contingent basis by emplotting (or reemplotting) their individual lives as meaningful narratives.” Elsewhere, Graizbord suggests that “the notion of a perfectly hermetic, ‘real’ identity totally distinct from self-perception and self-revelation is illusory, inasmuch as selfhood is not a fixed fact entirely distinct from the subject’s point of view, namely that person’s unique and evolving perspective of life given his or her changing circumstances.”151 The problem, as with the observer effect known in quantum physics, is that the object—the identity of a particular Judeoconverso—can be known for the most part only by means of a system that seemingly determines the way the object constructs itself, thereby making knowledge of the object’s ‘true’ state nearly impossible. Despite this, too many scholars even today reiterate the inquisitorial obsession with bio-physical identity. Generalizations will not do. Only a case-by-case analysis can avoid leaping to conclusions. Yet the evidence at our disposal comes overwhelmingly from the Inquisitions themselves. What kind of evidence did they produce? Inquisition Matters The self-proclaimed Holy Office served as the “instrument for ideological regulation, [. . .] one of the tools for [the] ‘homogenization’” of Catholic society attempted by “the state, the Church, and the ruling classes,” under whose stern gaze fell Judeoconversos and Afroiberians, among others.152 Appropriately enough, the Spanish Inquisition, stood as “the only agency of government whose jurisdiction extended throughout all of the [. . .] empire.”153 The Inquisitions’ intimate concern with the Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 208, 297. Jean Pierre Dedieu, “The Archives of the Holy Office of Toledo as a Source for Historical Anthropology,” in Henningsen, Gustav and John Tedeschi (eds.) in association with C. Amiel, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 159. 153 Gustav Henningsen, “The Archives and the Historiography of the Spanish Inquisition,” in Henningsen and Tedeschi, Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, 54. 151 152

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ideational and behavioral components of its subject populations’ lives, combined with their early modern bureaucratic mode of operation, led to the creation of enormous archives of documents which record the processes and results of the Inquisitions’ essentially ethnographic surveillance. There were far more than the 44,000 or so cases now extant which had been prosecuted to some degree by the Portuguese Inquisition. The larger Spanish Inquisition generated over 150,000 cases. Inquisition documentation begins with the institution’s early modern re-establishment in Castile in 1478 (and the many local tribunals which sprouted in its wake: Seville, 1480; Cordoba, Valencia and Zaragoza, 1482; Toledo, 1483; Barcelona, 1484; Palermo, Sicily, 1487; Las Palmas, the Canary Islands, 1507; Granada, 1526, and so on). Portugal received an Inquisition of its own in 1536, though it began operating only in 1540. In 1542 the Roman Inquisition was reconstituted. A tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, India, commenced operation in 1560, having jurisdiction over all of Portugal’s Asian and East African territories. Lisbon’s tribunal dealt with colonies in and on the Atlantic: the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, Guinea, São Tomé, Angola. For various reasons Brazil never hosted its own tribunal, remaining instead under the eye of local commissioners and familiars of the Lisbon Inquisition and occasional visitations by Inquisitors sent from the homeland. In 1570 or 1571, the Spanish Inquisition opened a tribunal in Mexico City, whose jurisdiction included the Spanish colonies north of Panama, as well as the Philippines. Tribunals in Lima and Cartagena de Indias were established in 1570 and 1610, respectively. The former’s surveillance covered the viceroyalty of Peru, which included what is now Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina; the Cartagena tribunal presided over Nueva Granada, what is now Colombia and Venezuela and the islands of the Caribbean. The end of the various Inquisitions began in the early nineteenth century, but their usefulness for the purposes of this study predates this period by perhaps a century, if not more. By this time, they tended to focus on forbidden books, minor heresies within Christianity and the like. King Ferdinando and Queen Isabella of Castile re-established the Inquisition at the behest of the leadership of the Dominican order, in particular the queen’s confessor, friar Tomás de Torquemada. The initial worry was Judeoconversos who may not have been living up to their professed Christianity. The inquisitors quickly expanded their targets to include moriscos, Muslims who had likewise been for the most part forcibly converted to Catholicism during and after the Reconquista, the

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growing number of Protestants, at first foreigners and then even Spaniards, and other religious deviancies such as witchcraft, self-proclaimed mystics, transgressive priests, blasphemers, those who engaged in sex deemed sinful by the church, those who made heretical statements, and so on. Originally, the Franciscans who ran the early Inquisition in New Spain had jurisdiction over Amerindian spiritual matters, but because of their extreme harshness in seeking to eradicate indigenous religious practices, Felipe II removed this power when he ordered the establishment of an official tribunal in Mexico City in 1571. Nonetheless, Mexican inquisitors continued to interest themselves in Amerindian influences on the colony’s Catholicism. On the one hand scholars must ask themselves concerning the ostensibly objective identities that might lay ‘behind’ the inquisitional documentation. Additionally standing in need of scholarly interrogation is the production of the documentation itself. How does one approach the mass of proto-ethnographic documentation produced by the Inquisitions, so rich for scholars? Scholars are divided. Let us start with the question from the perspective of Jews/Conversos, the original targets of inquisitorial activity. On the one hand is an odd assortment of Iberian scholars, some even defenders of or apologists for the Inquisition, and Jewish historians, some of whom could be called romantic, who agree at least on the fact that the population of Judeoconversos contained many, perhaps mostly, individuals who were devoted to maintaining their Jewish religiosity. Into these groups fall researchers such as Amador de los Rios, Yitzhak Baer, Cecil Roth, Israel Salvator Révah, J. Lúcio de Azevedo, Haim Beinart (a student of Baer’s). On the other hand stand skeptics, such as Benzion Netanyahu, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Ellis Rivkin, Herman P. Salomon, Norman Roth and, perhaps most forcefully, António José Saraiva, who feel that crypto-Judaism was minimal, limited to a few times and places, and mostly generated by the Inquisitions themselves.154 Saraiva, among others, believes that the Inquisition in Portugal, at least, used the issue of alleged judaizing as a cover for a socio-economic war that sought to keep the commercial class of New Christians from intruding on the turf of the nobility (from which class practially all of the inquisitors derived), that the Inquisition’s procedures themselves created judaizers out of good or

154 Ellis Rivkin, “How Jewish Were the New Christians?” Hispania Judaica 1 (1980): 104–15.

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indifferent New Christians and that the Inquisition had an institutional interest in convincing the Crown and public of the reality, enormity and threat of rampant judaizing.155 The same could easily be said about the Spanish Inquisition.156 Scholars such as Salomon point to the abysmal lack of judicial protocol in the earliest trials by the Spanish Inqusition, which acted on little more than the denunciations it received.157 A third, mostly younger set of scholars such as Anita Novinsky accepts some conclusions from both divisions of scholars, arguing both that cryptoJudaism was real but that the Inquisitions understood and constructed it and put it to use in a particular manner for particular purposes. I would place myself in this third category. In recent years, scholars from other fields have come to appreciate and make great use of inquisitorial records in order to explore early Afroiberian history and culture. In the second half of the twentieth century perhaps the first to mine inquisition sources for information about the material and spiritual lives of Blacks in the Spanish and Portuguese empires were Solange Alberro and Colin Palmer.158 More recent studies have made important use of Inquisition sources, among them those of Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico (2003), James Sweet, Recreating Africa (2003) and Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y reconstrucción de identidades entre los africanos y sus descendientes en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII (2005).159 Works by Ruth Behar, Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, Martha Few, Laura Lewis and Irene Silverblatt, among others,

155 Saraiva, Marrano Factory, which is a translation and expansion of the 1985 edition of Saraiva’s Inquisição e cristãos-novos (1969); Alencastro, Trato dos viventes, 25. 156 A not uncommon example: In 1495, a Judeoconverso couple paid the tribunal of Toledo 2,000 maravedís to reclaim for themselves and their descendants the right to use and wear silk, gold, silver and precious stones, to possess arms and to mount horses, privileges otherwise forbidden to individuals penitenced or condemned by the Inquisition, their children and grandchildren (Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Reexamined,” 121). 157 Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 123. 158 Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). See also Palmer, “Religion and Magic in Mexican Slave Society, 1570–1650,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 311–28. 159 Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Sweet, Recreating Africa; Luz Adriana Maya Restrepo, Brujería y reconstrucción de identidades entre los africanos y sus descendientes en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII (Bogota: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005).

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have greatly contributed to our knowledge of caste women in particular through their reliance on Inquisition records.160 Interestingly (ironically?), scholars of Afroiberian studies tend to parallel the more romantic and nationalist Jewish scholars of the Inquisition, also seeking in the trial records a maximal and oppositional ‘African’ culture, also minimizing the political gamesmanship of the inquisitors. Sweet asserts, for instance, that “[t]orture and coercion were rarely a part of the equation in Inquisition cases in which Africans were named.”161 This seems to me to vastly downplay the intensity of the inquisitional reality for Afroiberians, who remained subject to the institution’s psychological terror and were frequently sentenced to harsh physical punishment or time in the galleys, even if it is true that the Inquisitions focused far more energy on judaizing New Christians. The less methodologically fraught views of scholars of Afroiberian history point up what might be very real distinctions in subject position between Judeoconversos and Afroiberians. For many of the latter group, the Inquisitions could serve as protection from masters or as an institution (at times and to varying degrees) concerned with the implementation of law regarding (mis)treatment of slaves. The vision of Jean Pierre Dedieu tempts the historian with unexamined transparency: “the documents offer us direct testimony from the ‘players’ mouths.”162 But what kind of “players” were these? To say that they had various vested interests flirts with understatement. And was the testimony really so direct? Dedieu himself notes that “the material which [the Inquisition] offers may well have been heavily biased.”163 Discerning the degree of sincerity in the acts of those who testified to and worked for the Inquisitions (even those defending themselves)

160 Ruth Behar, “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist 14 (Feb. 1987): 34–54; Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, “Quyen tal haze que tal pague”: Sociedad y prácticas mágicas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2002); idem, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada durante el siglo XVII,” Historia Critica 22 ( Jul.–Dec. 2001): 51–75; Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, 1650 –1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); idem, “Women, Religion, and Power: Gender and Resistance in Daily Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 42 (Fall 1995): 627–37; Lewis, Hall of Mirrors; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 9; idem, Modern Inquisitions. 161 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 9. 162 Dedieu, “Archives of the Holy Office of Toledo,” 164. 163 Ibid., 168.

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remains elusive. Are they being honest? Are the facts invented? Are the facts essentially true but couched to make the witness conveying them look as good as possible and everyone else as guilty as possible? That many of the witnesses and informers thought to do their Christian duty in identifying ‘unorthodox’ strangers, neighbors or relatives seems clear. It must be remembered that “the denunciation was the foundation of the trial’s organization and was obligatory, under penalty of excommunication” for the inquisitional judges.164 That is, without a denunciation there was no trial, unlike the procedure in secular jurisprudence. Were the charges of the denouncers and the inquisitions, on the other hand, mere invention? This seems as ludicrous as believing that all Inquisition charges and testimony are accurate and true. What about the defendants? Are their confessions proof of their judaizing? What is one to make of defendants who confess under torture, then recant afterward, confess when tortured again, later recant? Is it relevant that defendants accused of judaizing who refused to identify and denounce others were practically guaranteed the death sentence? Along other lines, H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon point out that already in 1735 the Portuguese Enlightened critic António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches suspected that generations of prisoners who had gone through the interrogations and confessions, though sworn to secrecy and without access to the rule book, must have rehearsed their relatives and friends about “Jewish actions” [. . .] expected in their confessions [. . .] The more Jewish prayers and practices “spontaneously” confessed and the more “accomplices” denounced, preferably close relatives, the greater one’s chance for rapid reconciliation and a light penance. Original “Jewish” rites (especially prayers cracked up to be “crypto-Judaic,” more often than not essentially non-Jewish in nature) were devised ad hoc in view of an imminent trial, learned by rote, and opportunely “confessed.” The sporadic authentically Jewish prayers (frequently in Spanish translation or in macaronic Spanish-Portuguese) and practices registered in confessions may well derive from contacts of New Christians with the Sephardic communities of Italy and, at a later Inquisitorial period, with those of Hamburg and Amsterdam and

164 Maria Cristina Corrêa de Melo, “A Organização do processo inquisitorial: alguns paralelismos com o processo comum,” Inquisição, Vol. 1: Comunicações apresentadas ao 1.0 congresso luso-brasileiro sobre inquisição realizado em Lisboa, de 17 a 20 de Fevereiro de 1987 (Lisboa: Sociedade Portuguesa de Estudos do Século XVIII/Universitária Editora, 1989), 397.

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demonstrate a strategic adoption, rather than any clandestine retention of traditions.165

Novinsky cites an eighteenth-century anecdote from the Inquisition archives: “Upon leaving prison, one New Christian encounters a friend who asks him, ‘So, how did you escape death?’ And he responds, ‘As all others do, by telling them I was a Jew.’”166 While Saraiva’s argument is hyperbolic, parallels existed beyond the world of Judeoconversos. We know that in the seventeenth century “blasphemy was taught and transmitted among Afro-Mexican slaves as a strategy to prevent bodily harm” from masters.167 Graizbord offers yet another interpretation, a more constructivist one, which I paraphrase: defendants were not “lying” per se, only fashioning their narratives “under the extreme stress of inquisitorial questioning” and therefore not in “logical and rational ways; they were neither “calculating cynic[s]” nor “spewing forth an ideal and obvious ‘truth’ ” about themselves; they were “complex [individuals] laboring under the burden of [their] circumstances who made sense of [their lives] by selecting, organizing, and molding [their] memories and wishes into a self-portrait. Again, the sheer depth and complexity of that portrait prohibits that we dismiss it as simply ‘perjury.’ ”168 In any case, this discourse still demands interpretation: why did charges take this form and not another? Why was so-and-so accused of that crime and not another? Recent statistical surveys of trials and sentences make abundantly clear the ebb and flow of persecution of particular crimes such as judaizing, witchcraft, Protestantism, and the like. Is it possible that the inquisitional machinery could be biased, predisposed to find guilt or processurally tainted when it came to alleged judaizers but not when it came to, say, African slaves suspected of blasphemy? Torture, for example, was most readily applied to suspected judaizers, 75 percent of them in late seventeenth-century Spain, according to Henry Kamen.169 It is quite possible that the inquisitional tribunals at different times and in different places indeed differed in the manner in which they assized the individual and collective human

Introduction, Saraiva, Marrano Factory, xi–xii. Novinsky, “Marranos and the Inquisition,” 225. 167 Villa-Flores, “Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain,” 450. 168 Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 298. 169 Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 189. Silverblatt thinks the statistics in Peru were comparable (Modern Inquisitions, 71). 165 166

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objects of their pursuit. That is, depending on specific local conditions and fears, Judeoconversos might well have been perceived as inherently suspicious enough to be silently declared guilty, while elsewhere the same could be said for Amerindian magical practitioners or shamans (despite the fact that the native Americans stood supposedly beyond the inquisitional jurisdiction).170 The fact that the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid (the Suprema) repeatedly castigated the tribunals of Lima and Cartagena for flawed trial procedures during their pursuit of the so-called Great Conspiracy of judaizers in the 1630s could be taken to indicate that many of these cases in one way or another had been fixed. On the other hand, the Suprema never demanded the dismissal of the responsible officials nor the closure of the clearly problematic tribunals and it insisted on the release or retrial of the prisoners in question in only a few rare cases. Ultimately, it should be kept in mind that, according to the first systematic statistical analysis of all of the cases of the Spanish Inquisition worldwide that unfolded until their conclusion, between 1540 and 1700 some 4,397 cases against judaizers occurred.171 Even knowing that the overwhelming majority of cases held between 1480 and 1540 involved judaizers, even assuming that the number of cases that were dismissed was three times this number, we would come to around 20,000 cases over the course of three centuries.172 While the psychological and physical torment of the accused and punished remains unforgivable, this number comprises, at most, a very small percentage of the total number of Conversos within the Spanish imperial orbit. For an institu170 Saraiva, J.-P. Dedieu and Salomon suspect that both Inquisitions tacitly accepted that “accusations of Judaizing brought against persons of demonstrably clean Old Christian stock were not to be entertained” (Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Reexamined,” 138). 171 Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank” in Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (eds.) in association with Charles Amiel, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (Dekalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 114. 172 According to Henry Kamen, the Toledo tribunals “may have dealt with over eight thousand cases in the period 1481–1530,” the “overwhelming majority” of which were not brought to trial. Of those tried by the Barcelona tribunal between 1488 and 1505, 99.3 percent were Judeoconversos, while those tried by the Valencia tribunal between 1484 and 1530 included a percentage of Judeoconversos totalling 91.6 (Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 57, 59). Where Kamen gets it wrong is in his polemical interpretation of the “low” numbers of those martyred —“unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed” up to 1530 (ibid., 60)—as a sign of the normalcy and beneficence of the Spanish Inquisition.

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tion as thorough and effective as the Inquisition was according to its reputation, this number is astonishingly small. If the Inquisition invented cases of judaizing at its pleasure, wouldn’t the number of cases have been far higher? The only possible explanation for the relatively small number of cases is either that the Inquisition succeeded in identifying and trying only a small percentage of actual incidents of judaizing or that actual judaizing constituted an activity of a small proportion of Judeoconversos. The latter strikes me as a more plausible and supportable conclusion. If the Inquisition reflects mass hypnosis by extreme Catholic theology, the forms it took in specific instances nonetheless require explanation, perhaps even a reading, à la Franz Fanon, of the interpretation of the inquisitional dreams (or nightmares) enscripted in flesh and blood. Pierre Chaunu, as early as 1956, foresaw such an approach to the use of inquisitorial documentation “for a global psychoanalysis of society” when noting that the inquisitions’ “probes entered between marrow and nerve into the deepest secrets of the conscious and unconscious.”173 Carlo Ginzburg suggests a cautious but optimistic approach for steering through these inquisitional documents’ dialogic structure that weaves between the inquisitors’ voices and those voices extracted and/or appropriated from the inquisited, in his thought-provoking essay, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.”174 Ultimately, in my opinion, researchers are confounded by a number of circular problems. The fact that Marranism existed cannot prove crypto-Jewishness in any particular case, yet the fact that most Judeoconversos may have been innocent of judaizing cannot prove innocence in any particular case. The same can be said for heretical African or Amerindian practices. On the one hand, it seems obvious that a case-by-case approach sensitive to the various hermeneutical and epistemological difficulties affords the most fruitful methodology, avoiding generalizations of either extreme regarding the behavior of the accused as well as the accusers. At the same time, as Rivkin and Saraiva argue cogently, the Inquisitions’ documents “must be considered, to use Rivkin’s term, structurally, in light of the entire mechanism of this

Quoted in Henningsen and Tedeschi, “Introduction,” Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, 3. 174 Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 156–67. 173

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massive system.”175 In other words, to understand any particular case, its context and details, one must possess a theory about the Inquisitions’ purpose and methods; to construct a theory of the Inquisitions’ purpose and methods, one must possess a knowledge of the workings of many particular cases, as well as of a vast documentary trail of institutional negotiations, disputes and procedures. However, and here is the final hermeneutical circle, a theory that holds the Inquisitions to have been the producers of the majority of cases of crypto-Judaism still cannot account for the possibility that any particular case might reflect authentic crypto-Judaism, while a theory positing that Marranism was real and widespread still cannot discount the possibility that in any given case the Inquisition artificially and unjustly produced the results it desired. As I will proceed to investigate cases tried by the Inquisitions, despite my admitted skepticism, I followed some very rough guidelines. If some of the following questions bore affirmative answers, I was more inclined to accept all or part of the judaizing activities alleged: Can we tell whether the charges from denouncers are run-of-the-mill, vague or mere repetitions of the items listed in the Edicts of Faith? Does the evidence present significant and concrete details that reflect specific activities or beliefs? Do despositions from multiple witnesses corroborate one another on specific details and not just general charges? At any rate, I confess that my use of Inquisition records is somewhat sly. For the most part I am not interested in the obvious surface goals of the inquisitions, the religious lives of Judeoconversos or slave or free Afroiberians. Rather, I am using this enormous body of sources mostly in order to access something seemingly irrelevant to the inquisitors themselves, something contained within the voluminous paper trail they produced but only by accident: material that touches on relations between individuals of different castes, racial attitudes held by individuals, institutional events or behavior from which one can infer racial attitudes. In a way, I am actually reading Inquisition texts against the grain. The kind of statements I draw from these sources mostly (though not always) arose in passing in the course of testimony by witnesses or comments by inquisitors, as local color, mere details, bits of conversation. Many of the methodological concerns noted above would not seem to apply; after all, caste and ethnicity was not necessarily germane to the

175 Howard Adelman, “Inquisitors and Historians and their Methods,” unpublished paper, June 1990, 30.

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inquisitors and often to the witnesses themselves in an explicit manner, fixated as they both were, from opposing directions, on a particular set of theological and theo-sociological battles. On the one hand, caste and ethnicity exist as a subterranean discourse in inquisitional records. Yet the power of this discourse comprises both less and more than might be expected by today’s scholars because in actuality caste, ethnicity and blood purity were intimately, inextricably linked for the accused, accusers and inquisitors alike.

CHAPTER TWO

THE FREE AND NOT SO FREE, THE CHRISTIAN AND NOT SO CHRISTIAN Afroiberians, Amerindians and Judeoconversos came into contact throughout the Portuguese and Spanish empires. In these next chapters I explore a multitude of interactions between Afroiberians and Judeoconversos. Tensions as well as attractions often derived from the Judaism (real or imagined) of Judeoconversos and the Christianity (authentic or feigned) of Black New Christians. Though racial attitudes came into play at times, as well as matters of class, many interactions, at least through the lens of documentation from the Inquisitions, reflected the generally opposed trajectories of Afroiberians and Judeoconversos vis-àvis Christianity. Individuals from both groups seem to have been aware of these differences, some even self-conscious about them. In the early colonial era, then, some Christian Blacks, slave and free, enhanced their Christianity by demonizing New Christians or alleged judaizers, while others found judaizing an attractive antidote to their own denigration and oppression (the latter the subject of chapters 5 and 7). Some New Christians of Jewish descent bolstered their sense of self-identity and social status through denigration of Blacks. Members of both groups, marginalized and persecuted, though differently from one another, still resorted to a hegemonic discourse through which they could construct their own identity over against another outsider group, often even when expressing positive feelings. The examples I present reflect the perceived usefulnenss of Othering discourse in certain ‘ordinary life’ situations created by the often lifethreatening institutions of Iberian religious nationalism and colonialism. This first chapter concentrates on Judeoconversos and Afroiberians who were not slaves, though, in truth, this does not mean that they were particularly free. Most of the material quoted derives from Inquisition sources, whether primary documents I was able to read or secondary sources that cite original records. I suspect that a great deal more

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material awaits discovery and, more importantly, investigation in the various Inquisitional archives. White but “Jewish” Many contestatory evocations of religious and racial loyalties between Black and Jewish New Christians came in a context brought into being by Iberian imperial expansionism. The context included the ubiquitous Inquisition, itself a result of the politics of conversion/exclusion of the converted Jews decided upon in the fifteenth century. The inquisitorial atmosphere itself inspired and exacerbated personal feelings, such as defensiveness or ethnocentrism, but to some degree these social tensions also existed as a result of the larger politics of conversion/exclusion of the Jews. Still it seems that only in rare cases did racial identity itself seems to generate the dununciations.1 The triumphal Catholicism of the Portuguese and Spanish empires wielded the power to determine which groups, which beliefs, would merit entry into the chosen circle. Many supplicants arrived, some to share in the advantages of conquest, some the very result of these conquests, proclaiming their devotion: monophysite Ethiopians, Jewish Conversos, Kongolese neophytes, converts from the East and West Indies. Franciscan theologian Gaspar de Uceda’s 1586 tract notes the tensions to arise in the metropole as a result of competition between what might be seen as ethnic groups in the contest for advancement within Iberian catholicism frequently intolerant welcome proffered by Catholicism, especially of the Iberian variety, which wittingly or not seem to pit one aspiring group against another. [I]n the primitive church there arose among the Romans this same schism which at present occurs in Spain, because those newly converted from paganism wish to be preferred over those converted from Judaism, saying that [the Jews] had been unbelieving and had crucified the Son of God, and for this should not be admitted to public offices. And contrariwise, the descendants of the circumcision [i.e., Judeoconversos] exclude those baptized from paganism, for having been idolaters.2

In this I agree with Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 68. Pérez Ferreiro, El Tratado de Uceda, 75. Thus Fray Diego of Burgos (15th cen.) was said to have stated: “It pleases me more to stem from the lineage of Jews whence 1 2

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Judeoconversos shared in the culture’s generally negative perceptions about Blacks. Rhetorically, New Christians, like the rest of the White population, valorized Whiteness. The supposedly “Jewish” formula for parting from someone consisted of a blessing for being surrounded by goodness, “May you be covered in white.”3 Blackness, then, signified something problematic, disturbing, abnormal. This attitude derived from medieval Jewish discourse, which I invoke less because of its influence as a continuity in the lives of most Conversos than because of its strong similarity to non-Jewish discourse regarding Africans and pagans. One particularly critical text about pagans for early modern Jews would have been a passage from the work of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), who presents one view of the ‘civilized’ gazing upon the ‘barbaric’. In his Guide to the Perplexed (bk. 3, ch. 51), the eminently Aristotelian Maimonides provides a parable for the reader about a ruler in his palace and all his subjects, partly within the city and partly outside, some with their back toward the king, others facing him. Maimonides proceeds to interpret his own parable. Shlomo Pines translates it as follows: Those [in the parable] who are outside the city [i.e., most distant from the ruler, God] are all human individuals who have no doctrinal belief, neither one based on speculation nor one that accepts the authority of tradition: such individuals as the furthermost Turks found in the remote North, the Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of the apes. For they have the external

stemmed our lord Jesus Christ than from the lineage of the devil whence the gentiles stem” (cited in José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 35). Similarly, one Luis García “continued to say that a New Christian was far better than an Old one, since the new one sprang from the lineage of Christ and the old ones from the Gentiles” (cited in Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972], 136). 3 A.C. de C.M. Saunders, “The Life and Humour of João de Sá Panasco, o Negro, Former Slave, Court Jester and Gentleman of the Portuguese Royal Household (fl. 1524–1567) in F.W. Hodcroft et al. (eds.), Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honor of P.E. Russell (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), 190.

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chapter two shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes.4

Like Maimonides, most Jewish thinkers distinguished between monotheists ( Jews, Christians and Muslims) and pagans without true religion. Though enmities between Jews and Christians or Jews and Muslims existed, the three monotheisms nonetheless proclaimed that they shared a higher status than all other lesser religions. General Iberian attitudes toward Blacks and Blackness remained negative. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Judeoconversos in Iberian territories wielding Blacks as a contrastive example, seeing in them a lower group accorded (in some ways) higher status. In some cases, it is merely a question of the starkly differing trajectories of Judeoconversos and Afroiberians, many of the former resenting, even avoiding Christianity, many of the latter seeking it. By the seventeenth century one finds repeated references to Afroiberians who presented themselves to inquisitional authorities as Old Christians.5 Gracea Rodrigues, a Conversa in Portugal accused by the Inquisition in 1543, sees two Black women in the street praying their rosaries to which she supposedly remarks mockingly, “Beads, beads; bunk, bunk.”6 But mutual animosity often based itself on prevailing religious and racial stereotypes, especially since Judeoconversos shared in the general discourse’s negative perceptions about the other group. Watching the 26 September 1540 Lisbon auto da fé in which the judaizer and messianic pretender Diogo de Montenegro is burned alive at the stake, one Conversa reacts with visible rage—at least according to one of her denouncers to the local Inquisition. Furthermore, testifies another neighbor, some neighbors

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and ed. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 2:618–619. 5 Martínez López, “Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the ‘Race/Caste’ System,” 339–48, offers an important discussion of the late seventeenth-century evaluation by the Supreme Council of the Inquisition of the question of whether descendants of Amerindians and/or Africans needed to be subjected to the regime of the purity of blood laws, as well as whether they could be considered Old Christians. Basing itself on numerous sources, the Suprema accepted Amerindians as both pure of blood and Old Christians, while Afroiberians “gradually drop out of the discussion and toward the end are hardly mentioned at all” (347). 6 “Contas, contas, bulraria, bulraria” (David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996], 156; Gitlitz takes this from Antonio Baião, A Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil. Subsidios para a sua historia. A inquisição no seculo XVI [Lisbon: Edição do Arquivo Historico Portugues, 1921], 143). 4

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told the accused judaizer “how a black looked with evil intention at Montenegro, and [the accused judaizer] responded that in the same way would she watch the black dragged [through the streets].”7 The “evil” look of a Black in the crowd, whether it happened or was invented by the neighbors, proves to be an effective taunt to the suspected judaizer, perhaps even because of the racial makeup of the look’s giver. In the 1550s, an older Jewish widow who converted in Italy to Christianity in order to maintain contact with her sons, who had both previously converted, nonetheless has difficulties with her new pragmatically-acquired Christianity. At one point she blasphemes publicly in church, shouting, among other things: “That mulatto bastard, he’s out of his mind, because I don’t want him for a spouse.”8 Her explanation to the Inquisition purposefully reduces the multiple meanings readily apparent in her statement: she says “she had been praying to the Madonna to deliver her from the importunities of a servant who wanted to marry her, and he was the lying bastard to whom she had referred.” But might she have been deftly insulting Christ (so frequently called a Christian’s spouse) as a Mulato, conflating anti-Christian and anti-Black feelings? Such ornate blasphemies, stemming from urban and market culture, became popular in seventeenth-century rural Galicia, for example, where people would use expressions such as “Christo bellaco y cornudo,” “Virgen, mala puta” and “el trasero de Dios.”9 One sixteenthcentury Brazilian man was denounced for swearing “by the private parts of Our Lady” or the “holy pubic hair of the Virgin Mary.”10 Perhaps similarly, a woman accused of judaizing in Mexico appeared fond of an insulting blasphemy that links Black inferiority to that of Christianity. Her denouncer relates to the inquisitors how

Baião, Inquisição em portugal e no brasil, 114, 117. Elena de’ Freschi Olivi is the woman (cited in Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550 –1670 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983], 286). 9 Gustav Henningsen, “The Eloquence of Figures: Statistics of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and Prospects for Social History,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, ed. Angel Alcalá (Boulder: Social Science Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1987), 227. Henningsen is referring to findings in Jaime Contreras, El santo oficio de la inquisición de Galicia: Poder, sociedad, y cultura (Madrid, 1982). 10 Quoted in Maia, Sombra do medo, 122. 7 8

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chapter two many times María was in the habit of speaking badly about the saints whom the Church has canonized and beatified, she not believing that there could be saints in the evangelical Law, and in particular she said of Saint Benito of Palermo, the black, that “how could a black be a saint?”11

It is clear that anti-Black attitudes could well serve Whites persecuted for allegedly believing in Judaism as a component of insults to be slung against the “Christian Empire.” Hence the particular gall in one imprisoned crypto-Jew’s comment that he regrets having come “to this awful land,” Mexico, and wishes “not to live where there are [. . .] the type of people who treat honorable men worse than blacks.”12 In this view, persecuted Jewish New Christians possess an inner “honor” or “nobility,” though their outward circumstances appear worse than those of the lowliest Black slaves, who by implication lack the “honor” that would make their fate undeserved. It must be recalled that Afroiberians outside of Africa (where some managed to achieve economic independence), for the most part, remained untouched by the commercial success that raised up and carried so many Judeoconverso merchants. Those of Judeoconverso background could also find Blackness to be consistent with or useful within their religious imaginary. María López, a resident of Castile convicted of judaizing in 1518, cried out during a session of torture by her inquisitors to the “Holy Mary of Monserrate,” that is, to the beloved Black Madonna of Montserrat.13 A Mexican judaizer sentenced in 1649, Leonor Vaez Sevilla, experienced visions after contracting the illness that eventually ended her life: Throughout the illness she showed signs of her obstinacy, taking advantage of the circumstances by saying (on an occasion when they wanted to play some music in order to cheer her up) that it had been three days that she enjoyed being regaled by Angels, in the company of her greatgrandmother Iuana Rodriguez; and not long after, when a little black girl [negrilla] was at the foot of the bed [. . .], which filled everyone with admiration, as there was no one then in the chamber.14

11 The accused is María de Zárate, Francisco Botello’s wife, charged in 1656 for judaizing (quoted in Boleslao Lewin, ed., Proceso de María de Zárate: Racismo inquisitorial [ Puebla, 1971], 99). Clearly she is ignoring or unaware of the existence of black madonnas. 12 Juan de León (aka Salomón Machorro); 1646 (quoted in Boleslao Lewin, ed., Confidencias de dos criptojudíos en la cárcel de la Inquisición [Buenos Aires, 1975], 78). 13 Quoted in Renée Levine Melammed, “María López: A Convicted Judaizer from Castile,” in Mary E. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 70 and 314, n. 73. 14 Bocanegra, Auto General, s.v. Leonor Vaez Sevilla.

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Ana de Leon Carvajal, tried by the Mexican Inquisition for judaizing and sentenced in 1649, was visited one time by a demon, who appeared in the proverbial guise, “in the figure of a little black and sat himself down with much familiarity on her bed.”15 Black demons and a black devil constituted long-standing Christian tropes, but Carvajal’s demon reminds us that, perhaps influenced by African and Amerindian religiosity, “many colonial Mexicans” viewed the devil “not so much as a horrible and frightening creature, but as a figure who in times of crisis offered solace, conversation, and the illusion of hope[, . . .] listened and responded to their problems more directly and quickly than God.”16 The same would obviously be true of lesser demonic figures. New Christians, that is, saw saints, angels and demons in the same variety of possible forms as did most Catholics. Judeoconversos could find useful the manipulation of anti-Black prejudices for their own ends. Some alleged judaizers in seventeenthcentury Brazil, in order to send one of their own to teach and missionize in Dutch-controlled Pernambuco, “a center of public Judaism,”17 concocted the following tale, related to the Inquisition by an associate of the institution, a familiar: The witness being with the governor, Matheus Lopes Franco entered and requested of him that he help him with an affront into which he had fallen, that a nephew of his, a bachelor, was going to marry a mulata prostitute, and he asked the governor if he [Bacharel] could embark for Pernambuco, in the caravels which were to leave with as much speed as possible.18

Bocanegra, Auto General, s.v. Doña Ana de Leon Carauajal. Ruth Behar, “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist 14 (Feb. 1987): 43–4. 17 Elias Lipiner, Izaque de Castro: o mancebo que veio preso do Brasil (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1992), 51. 18 Cited in Lipiner, Izaque de Castro, 50. The continuation of the testimony buttresses the accuracy of the allegations: “The governor attending to this, he [the bachelor] was taken to one of these [ships] and this witness, going after a few hours to say goodbye to the ships because he was in the infantry, and understanding that this nephew of the said Matheus Lopes went to Pernambuco to judaize, made efforts to throw him off of the ship, saying that he had no written license; and he defended himself [by saying] that he went as a prisoner by order of the governor, he [Pero Ferraz] could not get him to disembark, before there were with him two others of his nation, all protesting that this man went with the order of the governor; by which grew on the witness the understanding that the imprisonment was feigned in order that this New Christian could go to Pernambuco. And, the witness relating all this to the said governor and the suspicions that he had, the said governor responded: They fooled me like a child.” 15 16

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Whether or not the nephew was really marrying a Mulata remains unclear, although surely the governor or the Inquisition could have ascertained the veracity of the story had he so chosen. What seems clear is that such a marriage with a Mulata of ill-repute constituted enough of a disgrace to make the teller’s tale convincing and provide him an excuse to get to Pernambuco. At times a Judeoconverso might see fit to make rhetorical use of the similarity between non-Christian Blacks and Jews. In 1649, Juan de León, alias Salomón Machorro, had been a prisoner of the Mexican Inquisition for some seven years. He tried denying the accusations of his judaizing. He tried to evade inquisitional jurisdiction by claiming never to have been baptized. In short, he tried several tactics without successfully slowing or stopping the forward motion of his prosecution. Juan de León then decided to beg mercy and offer himself to the Inquisitors as a willing Christian. After he showed the requisite penitence to gain mercy and clemency, he told his judges, “they should baptize him out of his condition the way some uncivilized Black who comes from Angola is baptized,” in order “to make the holy tribunal see that he is well and firmly converted to our holy Catholic faith by one or another path, and that he wishes to live and die in it.”19 Unfortunately for León, his ploy, sincere or not, failed. In early modern Christian schemes, derived from Pauline theological ethnography, pagans such as Amerindians lived innocent of God’s revelation at Mt. Sinai, which had never reached the Americas, and were therefore blameless for maintaining ‘heretical’ practices. Depending on the specific theo-political situation, Africans might be seen as innocent pagans who never had been exposed to Christ’s message or, contrarily, as Ethiopians who had been made aware of Christianity already in ancient times but who nonetheless had degenerated into paganism. A crypto-Jew such as León could never claim the innocence of living ante legem, before the giving of the law, since Jews were privy to the Revelation and should have recognized the true and correct Christian understanding of the Jewish law. As far as the inquisitors were concerned, Jews and their descendants were imprisoned sub lege, under the law.20

19 Audience, Tuesday, 19 October 1649; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 413. 20 Laura Lewis writes that the Spanish “religious discourse that made ‘innocents’ out of Indians, thus simultaneously made blacks ‘guilty,’” but this is too general (Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 29).

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For a reason left unclear by the documentation, Manuel Nunes, a Portuguese merchant of Amsterdam, required in 1610 corroboration of his social stature. Perhaps some questions about his genealogy threatened his status in (entry into?) the ‘Portuguese nation’ in Amsterdam. Financial difficulties may have stood behind his need. So, one day that year no fewer than six other Sefardim, friends or associates acting on Nunes’ initiative, appear before a notary public.21 They declare that Manuel Nunes is the son of Fernão Rodrigues and Leonor Nunes [. . .] in Lisbon and that he is the son of a white father and mother and that neither of them have any part Morisco [blood] nor [the blood] of Blacks.22

In order to assuage his debtors and doubters, Nunes has some associates record an official statement of his ‘quality,’ which, not coincidentally, emphasizes his social and inherited ‘purity.’ But one wonders about the exact formulation. The general source of the terminology existed in the standard contemporary Portuguese discourse about ‘purity of blood.’ Perhaps the intended audience of this declaration resides in Iberian Catholic territories and worried about Nunes’ blood lines. But why bring up his lack of Black blood? The inclusion of African descent as a source of ‘impure’ blood can be found in colonial probanzas de limpieza and other investigations already toward the end of the sixteenth century.23 The terminological evocation of Nunes’ friends neglects, obviously, his Jewish blood; in other words, it specifies just which elements of the blood-purity discourse these Sephardim find useful in this Amsterdam outpost of the Iberian commercial empire and Sistema de castas.

That they were all fellow Sephardim comes across easily enough from their names: Afonso Rodrigues Cardoso, Diogo de Pina, Bento Osorio, James Lopes da Costa, Duarte Esteves de Pina and Diogo Gonçalves de Lima (E.M. Koen, W. Hamelink-Verweel, S. Hart, and W.C. Pieterse, “Notarial Records in Amsterdam Relating to the Portuguese Jews in That Town up to 1639,” Studia Rosenthaliana, running series beginning with 1,1 [1967–present]; 5,1 [ January 1971]: 124 [doc. 419]). While other notarial deeds explicitly mentioned that the declarer appeared at someone else’s behest, the same seems likely here. 22 GemeenteArchief Amsterdam, Notarial Archive 62, fol. 194v. I cite and discuss this deed in Jews and Blacks, 189–90. 23 Martínez López, “Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the ‘Race/Caste’ System,” 377–8, 381. 21

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Afroiberians stood both outside and inside respectable Catholic society; outside by dint of their color, inside due to their religion. As Catholic residents in urban spheres, whether slave or free, for the most part they lived and circulated within the ranks of the plebian population. Still, in some ways they could claim an advantage over New Christians, who were persistently suspected of religious deviance. Anti-Jewish prejudices served some Afroiberians well. In a recent essay, T.F. Earle provides an analysis of a saint’s play, Auto de São Vicente, penned by a mulato author, Afonso Álvares, in 1532. Possibly born to the aristocratic bishop of Évora and raised in his house, Álvares seems to have internalized a sincere and intense Catholicism—his four known dramatic works are all saints’ plays. Though never mentioning them by name, the Auto de São Vicente presents an extended critique of New Christians: their poor or false religiosity, their vain hopes for a national messiah who is not Christ, their inherent fraudulence in business. Álvares repeatedly names as Pharisees those who interrogate St. Vincent, a Christian missionary to pagan Spain around the fourth century, who has been arrested by the authorities.24 It is probable that Afroiberians participated in the Corpus Christi processions in Portuguese cities, which featured judangas, satiric recreations of Judaism where masked paraders conducted a live she-goat and pretended to read sacred texts, in the midst of jeering and name-calling at notorious New Christians.25 From the perspective of Afroiberian attitudes toward Jews one is struck by the paradoxical fact that Blacks and Mulatos, though severely denigrated in so many ways, often claimed a Christian identity—even, on occasions, an identity as Old Christians—that made them ‘insiders’ in a way New Christians often could not. What, in general, did ‘Jewish’ even mean to people within the Atlantic world? One could reply with a litany of prejudices that long have been treated by scholarship.

24 T.F. Earle, “Black Africans versus Jews: Religious and Racial Tension in a Portuguese Saint’s Play,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 345–60. Though Earle may well be correct in pointing out the drama’s tactful omission of calls for anti-Jewish/Converso violence or extermination, a jarring sign of the continuing binarism informing many studies of race and of the aporias that too often inhibit their authors is the final sentence that Earle affixes to this description of one Afroiberian’s participation in the dominant majority’s anti-Jewishness: “In the injustice and horror of a slave society, [Álvares] stands out as a beacon of hope.” 25 Tinhorão, Negros em Portugal, 172–173.

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One feature worth mentioning is that in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spain, the colonies and perhaps much of Europe, ‘Portuguese’ was considered a synonym for ‘Jew.’ This notion based itself on the perception, largely accurate, according to scholars such as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, that the Portuguese Conversos maintained their Judaism with much vigor and stamina. The large population of Iberian New Christian merchants in the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suffered, in addition to ethno-religious prejudice, from the Spanish dislike of sailors, with whom early merchants were closely allied, for obvious reasons.26 Iberian Christians, in particular, saw Jews everywhere and it is difficult for us to tell whether they distinguished between ‘real’ and figurative Jews. Carlos de Bayén, a Mulato tailor in Campeche, Mexico, claimed that the Portuguese merchant Antonio Fernández Ferrer sold him bad quality fabric. The tailor hid in the fabric’s folds wafers of the kind of the host, and when the Portuguese extended the fabric to measure the quantity ordered by the mulatto, who declares himself finally ready to buy it, the pieces fell to the ground. The tailor then made “many acts of admiration, saying: ‘how does Your Grace have these pieces of the host amidst the cloth?,’” hoping in this manner to terrify the merchant and obligate him, through fear of the Holy Office, to give him the fabric for nothing.27

Desecration of the host, a crime often leveled at Jews, was not something for which a merchant, especially a Portuguese, would want to become incriminated by the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico. The Mulato tailor De Bayén ingeniously played with this fear to get what he thought he deserved out of the situation. Gossip, a form of unofficial social regulation, targeted Others and circulated without regard to racial or caste divisions. Two examples will have to suffice for now. In 1541, the New Christian Catharina Fernandes (mentioned above) was denounced to the Lisbon inquisitors for having

26 James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 143–44; Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, 34. 27 Solange Behocaray de Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales: rechazo e integración,” in Elsa Cecilia Frost et al. (eds.), El Trabajo y los Trabajadores en la Historia de México: Ponencias y comentarios presentados en la Reunión de Historiadores Mexicanos y Norteamericanos, Pátzcuaro, 12 al 15 de octubre de 1977 (Mexico City/Tucson: El Colegio de México/University of Arizona Press, 1979), 153–4.

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told an Old Christian youth that he was no longer welcome in her house and that he had no right to accuse her of judaizing her Black woman or man slave.28 Pero Cardigo was denounced to the inquisitional visitor in Salvador, Brazil, for the following reason: one day in Olinda, Pernambuco, around 1591, he had been engaged in conversation in front of the Church of Our Lady of Conceição with Afonso Duarte, a Portuguese from the Island of Terceira, Diogo Martins, a Spanish mulato, Álvaro Fernandes, a local resident, and his (Pero’s) nephew. When a disagreement arose between Pero and his nephew, the former, aghast, uttered a blasphemous sware and “everyone was scandalized.”29 These men conversed and reacted as Christians among Christians, though one was a Mulato and the others Whites. (Of course, in many cases, Old and New Christians also conversed as equals, neighbors and friends.) Growing polyglot urban populations made such intermingling inevitable, as Whites, freed Afroiberians, Amerindian servants and slaves often inhabited the same neighborhoods and mixed in the streets and plazas, at the markets, at events and even in church, all of which in the course of the seventeenth century produced much alarm for the governing elites. “Broad interaction across ethnic and status lines,” in the words of Martha Few, is evident from a variety of types of archival records and readings-against-the-grain of elite sources.30 In many cases, gossip about who was “Jewish” turned into denunciations. The denouncers often claim to be acting out of Christian duty. On 14 April 1526, Maestre Juan de Leon, a surgeon in the Canary Islands, deposes as follows: having enquired of Bartolome, a black labourer, for news of Yñes Tristan, mother-in-law of Pedro de Lugo, the said Bartolome replied that he believed Juan de Vergara had given information against her to the Holy Office, because she had told the said Vergara and himself that she would pay fifty doblas yearly to be exempt from confession, as she wished to have peace in this world, for as to the next it was all nonsense. That the said Bartolome further told this deponent that the daughter of the said Yñes Tristan used to read a certain book which they called “La Bribia” [Dialect name for the Bible—L.W.] and that he has heard the said Yñes telling her daughter that the book was a good book and

Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 113. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação: Cristãoes-novos e judeus em Pernambuco, 1542–1654 (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1990), 185. 30 Martha Few, “Women, Religion, and Power: Gender and Resistance in Daily Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 42 (Fall 1995): 633. 28 29

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gave good counsel, that one day Pedro de Lugo coming in while they were reading this book said “I do not wish to see it, it is ‘La Bribia’ or some such diabolical work.” That the said Bartolome told deponent that the book was written in Hebrew, and further said that he was amazed that the said Yñes had not been arrested by the Inquisition upon the information given by Juan de Vergara, and that it was well known in Teneriffe that she was a Jewess.31

One free Mulata deposes against a family of alleged judaizers in 1630s Mexico City, claiming that she came before the inquisitors “for the discharge of her conscience and [because the matters to be discussed] had seemed bad to her.”32 In the next decade, a free Mulata of Mexico City comes to testify before the local inquisitors “for the discharge of her conscience and due to having heard the edicts of the faith which were read the Past sundays.”33 The two just-mentioned Mulatas, Mariana de Guzman and Maria de la Conçepçion, shared an experience with the extended Enriquez family of alleged judaizers. The first was asked, along with her mother and two sisters, to help for eight days with the preparations for a wedding being celebrated by an allegedly judaizing family. Though they cooked “more than a hundred birds, of this land and [also of ] Castille,” not once did they ever see one of their heads (nor any blood in the meat). Though they even asked for the heads, the family members “did not want to give them.” Obviously, if these declarations are accurate, the birds had been slaughtered according to the method of slitting the throat required by the rabbinic laws of kashrut. Another woman who helped with the wedding preparations, Sebastiana de Ortega, a slave of someone not connected to the Enriquez family, testified that the chickens

Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 40. Testimony of Mariana de Guzman, 15 December 1637; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 17r. She is testifying against members of the extended Enriquez family. 33 Testimony of Maria de la Conçepçion, also against members of the Enriquez family, for whom she washed laundry, 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 206r. When Rafaela Enriquez asked her “whether she knew of some person or Indian to whom she could give some Pesos in order to give them to her husband Gaspar Suares,” Conçepçion responded that “she was raised since infancy in a convent and did not know these bellaquerias” (ibid., fol. 207r.). The Mulata Conçepçion hints here at the opposing religious trajectories that separate alleged judaizers from “good” Christians, even if Mulatos, as well as the racial differences that distinguish her from Amerindians. 31 32

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“were brought to the kitchen decapitated with a knife.”34 “[ T ]he black women Boçales told [the Mulata Mariana de Guzman and her group] that their mistress doña Rafaela wanted them thus without the heads.” During this same period, the Mulata brought a thigh from the butcher and added it to the other meat. “A black woman named Ynes, a boçal, cook of the said house, told her that she should take the said meat [out] because her mistress did not want that it should stay and that they never eat thigh meat in their house, except for the front quarter.”35 It is doubtful that these slave women understood their mistress’ reasoning. Guzman’s suspicions grew out of her having heard a description of the Jewish practice of slaughtering and preparing animals at the auto de fe celebrated at the city’s Santo Domingo cathedral. Another Mulata who worked at the house in preparation for the wedding, Maria de la Conçepçion, who usually washed the clothes of the household, testifies that when she complained regarding the headless fowl, Blanca Enriquez told her that “they were more tasty decapitated [and] not killed in another manner.”36 Often, an Afroiberian already caught up in an inquisition’s net might attempt to turn her situation around by denouncing someone as a judaizer. On 29 July 1627, the free Mulata María Martínez testified to the Inquisition in Lima against Francisco Maldonado de Silva, an unabashed Jew who made no effort to hide his beliefs from the inquisitors.37 Martínez, originally from Portugal, was staunch enough a Chris-

Testimony of 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 209r. De Ortega says that she came to the Inquisition to depose “having heard in the edicts of faith that those were things that should not have been done.” 35 Testimony of Mariana de Guzman, 15 December 1637; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 17r.–v. 36 Testimony of 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 206v. Conçepçion also states that the Black slave Ynes told her that “Blanca Enriquez ordered her to put the cut meat in water the afternoon before in order to remove the blood.” Additionally, armed with the knowledge gained from recently having heard the Edicts of Faith read in church, Conçepçion relates, regarding many of the women in the Enriquez family, that “she noticed that they ate meat and fish cooked with oil,” instead of lard. This case can be added to many others that seem to indicate that Marranos preferred unacculturated bozal slaves precisely because they would not yet have learned to distinguish “Jewish” practices from the Christian perspective. In some ways bozales were preferred by Spaniards in general, deemed as they were to be more submissive than ladino slaves who had learned some of the ways of their masters. 37 A great deal has been written about Francisco Maldonado de Silva, whose trial and death at the stake became a cause célèbre among contemporary Jews, such as Menasseh ben Israel, who cited his martyrdom in Mikveh Yisrael. Günter Böhm devotes the entire first volume of his history of the Jews of Chile to an analysis and transcription 34

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tian to wear rosary beads around her neck. Her detailed denunciation, which can be corroborated by the testimony of other witnesses as well as Silva’s own confession, stemmed entirely from a two-hour meeting she had with the accused when he had first been brought from Chile as a prisoner of the Inquisition only the week before. Here is an excerpt: María Martínez, free mulata, born in Vega in the Kingdom of Portugal, 36 years old, detained for witchcraft at the house of the jailer where she lived. She declared against the accused [. . .], who said that [. . .] in the two hours in which the witness was with him [. . .] he said to her that he did not believe in Christ our Good, that it was idolatry and idols to adore the images, and seeing a cross that the witness had around her neck on a rosary, he said that he did not believe in it, and that Christ was [made] of wood and if he were what the Christians said, he would shine; and that the accused was from those two tribes of Israel who are preserved/protected in the terrestrial paradise awaiting the end of the world, [. . .] and that the father of the accused had left this Inquisition with a sambenito,38 because of which he left his children poor, [. . .] and that the accused was a Jew to the point of anathema, [. . .] that they would burn him, that those who would die burned would not die, rather their God would let them live eternally, and that such he had to say in this holy tribunal when they call him.39

Martínez lived at the house of the jailer, where Silva was taken en route to the secret prisons. Was Maria the jailer’s servant or mistress? María had been arrested earlier by the Inquisition, for witchcraft, and had been a prisoner already when Silva arrived.40 Why he confided in

of the trial (Historia de los judíos en Chile, vol. 1, Período colonial [Santiago: Andrés Bello, 1984]). Medina gives Silva’s case a whole chapter in his Inquisición en Chile. Surprisingly, Böhm himself refers to the mulata Maria Martinez as “a mulata slave/una mulata esclava,” though the documents clearly indicate that she has been freed: “orra,” i.e., “horra,” meaning “manumitted” ( Judíos en Chile, 86). 38 The sambenito was the cloak worn by the penitent at the auto de fe. It often had depictions specific to the type of crime the wearer allegedly committed. Punishments sometimes had the criminal wear the sambenito for years after as well. When a penitent had finished the term of such a punishment, the sambenito was to be hung at the local church, so that all could know that the person had been found guilty of the crime. 39 Böhm, Judíos en Chile, 86–7. 40 Martínez was denounced on 2 April 1625 by Antonio de Figueroa, a widow thirty three years old, whose lengthy accusation of witchcraft opened with the charge that Martínez was in love with her. Later, amid descriptions of Martínez’s various “satanic” practices, we read “that the accused [Martínez] said that it had been seven years since she had known a man, because in that time she dealt with the devil, to whom she maintained loyalty so as not to anger him, and when she spoke with him she said to him ‘my dear soul’ and many other compliments” (Medina, Inquisición en Chile, 345, n. 2). Standing in contrast to the dark depiction of her demonic ways, from the Christian

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this mixed-race stranger cannot be said.41 It is unlikely that he knew anything about her. (If she revealed anything about herself to Silva, she refrained from telling the inquisitors so.) He might have discovered enough to trust her. He might have suspected that they shared a similar fate. He might have been temporarily mentally unstable or so insistent on his religious self-vindication that he lacked discretion.42 We do not know at what point she decided to denounce him, but she knew that he was already a prisoner, just as she might already have known that it would be helpful to her own case to have others to denounce. Whether accurate or not, Martínez’s testimony as witness number five for the prosecution implies that Silva had confessed a great deal to her in that one chance encounter. Silva seems to have been unusually open about his religious propensities. Perhaps, already on the way to the Inquisition jails, he sensed that the time for secrecy had long passed, perhaps his openness entailed part of his pride in his judaizing. In a case from mid-sixteenth-century Portugal, the Inquisitors in Évora placed a Mulata named Guiomar in the cell of a New Christian woman accused of judaizing, Lucrécia Nunez, in order to ferret out and report confessions relating to her practices and beliefs.43 Both the accused woman and the Mulata informant came from the town of Trancoso. Guiomar feigned being the daughter and granddaughter of New Christians who had died in Inquisition jails. Guiomar related to her ‘handlers’ that Lucrécia disclosed to her that she was a New Christian and practicing Jewess, and said “various things in praise of the Law of Moses and [things] blasphemous and harmful to the Catholic faith.” Not satisfied with this, the jailer, who operated ostensibly at the behest of the inquisitors, instructed Guiomar to tell Lucrécia that he himself perspective, Martínez touchingly tells the woman who later denounces her “that when the devil wanted to speak with her, he gave her a fresh breeze on her back.” 41 We know from elsewhere in his trial documents that Silva owned four slaves as of the end of 1625: “a Black called Simón from the caste of Angola, more or less twenty years old, [. . .] a young Black called Francisco from the caste of Angola, more or less twelve years old, [. . .] a mulata slave called Catalina of the age of more or less fifty, [. . .] and a Black called Isabel from the caste of Angola of the age of twenty four [. . .] with a daughter at the breast of the age of a year” (cited in Böhm, Judíos en Chile, 57–8). The trial documents shed no light, however, on the nature of the relations between the servants and Silva and his wife. It is known that Silva’s father, Diego Nuñez de Silva, made his Black slave his apprentice. 42 The latter is more likely; see Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 117–52. 43 This tactic had been recommended already by the fourteenth-century trainer of inquisitors, Nicolau Eimeric (Saraiva, Marrano Factory, 45).

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was also a New Christian. She did so. The following day, Lucrécia called him and, confirming that he was a New Christian, “she blessed him” and confessed to being “a Jew and an enemy of the Christian faith, whose dogmas and principles she ridiculed.” She counselled the jailer to reveal himself as a New Christian to her husband, who was very knowledgeable in Jewish law and in whom he could trust, and that, for more security, the jailer should request that her husband sware on a set of tefilin.44 The remainder of the intriguing information extracted fraudulently from the accused Lucrécia by Guiomar and another planted informant, a cousin of the jailer, remains beyond the scope of this summary.45 Interestingly, Lucrécia seems to have revealed far more to the (White) cousin of the jailer than to (the Mulata) Guiomar. This could have been because the former’s skills as a dissembling compatriot exceeded those of the latter. Racial factors could have been involved; Lucrécia might have found it easier to confide in a White coreligionist than one of Black descent. One wants to know more about what led Guiomar to seek (?) or accept the task of informing for the Inquisition on an accused judaizer. One can certainly infer that she had little choice but to accept. She does not seem to have been a prisoner of the Inquisition herself. It is not clear whether she was a particularly devoted Christian or wanted to seem so. In this case we will have to accept few answers. Denouncing Others All in all, the motivations or pressures that forged Afroiberian denunciations of alleged judaizers did not differ significantly from those that led them to denounce other Afroiberians, or that led Judeoconversos to inform on other Judeoconversos, judaizing or not, including relatives and even family members. Judeoconversos may have denounced other Judeoconversos because they had internalized Catholicism and resented or feared judaizers, because they sought advantage over competitors,

44 Tefilin or phyllacteries, are two ritual boxes containing scrolls with portions of the Bible, which Jewish men place on their forehead and left arm during morning prayers except on sabbath and holidays. 45 See Elias Lipiner, Gonçalo Anes Bandarra e os cristãos-novos (Trancoso/Lisbon: Câmara Municipal de Trancoso/Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Judaicos, 1996), 34–40; quotes from 35 and 36.

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because they sought to get back at or harm someone, or because once already within the Inquisition’s net they feared for their own safety and wanted to ‘behave well’ and earn their own release or acquittal. Afroiberians operated from the same set of motivations.46 Inquisitional documentation evinces a general absence of Judeoconversos denouncing Afroiberians. This might indicate that the class and religious prejudices against Judeoconversos which informed White Spaniards and Portuguese drew Afroiberians into inquisitional proceedings more than anti-Black prejudices provided Judeoconversos a reason to resort to the Inquisitions. For example, Gabriel de Granada, accused of judaizing by the Inquisition in New Spain, denounced, among many others, “Elvira, a Negress who served in these prisons. She died.”47 I will explore this case further in chapter 4. Another case is the testimony of one alleged Pernambucan judaizing woman. Called back in 1602 by the inquisitors to ratify earlier testimony, she declared “that everything that she had said in the said session she had heard said to her spouse [. . .], who will say that he heard it thus said to Antônio Vaz, mulato, of whom she knows not where he lives, nor who he is, nor where he is.”48 It is impossible to verify the accuracy of this woman’s statement, and perhaps that was the point, but one way or another it seems an obscure Mulato served perfectly as a convenient evidentiary prop. Another case is fictional: the confession of Lazarillo de Tormes which convicts his mother and “stepfather,” that is, her Black lover, a Moorish stableboy.49 The charges here might stem from emotions generated by this lover: jealousy, condescension and/or anxieties regarding class and/or race. Given the probable Judeoconverso origin of this text, and the protagonist’s arguable Judeoconverso sympathies (and certainly parallels), Lazarillo’s confession presents an instance of the kinds of class

46 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 40: “[F]ree blacks threatened each other with the Inquisition.” 47 David Fergusson, “Trial of Gabriel de Granada by the Inquisition in Mexico 1642–1645: translated from the original by David Fergusson; edited with notes by Cyrus Adler,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 7 (1899); reprinted in Martin A. Cohen, ed., The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 2 vols. (Waltham, MA/New York: American Jewish Historical Society/KTAV Publishing House, 1971), 1:375. 48 The woman was Briolanja Fernandes, illegitimate daughter of Diogo Fernandes and his servant Madalena Gonçalves (cited from her trial transcript by Mello, Gente Da Nação, 159). 49 La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, ed. Alberto Blecua (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1972 [1554]), 93–4.

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and racial hostilities that might have caused a White New Christian to denounce a Black. Whether the author sympathizes with or critiques Lazarillo’s denunciation is another matter. Given the ways in which both Judeoconversos and Afroiberians faced denigration and suspicion, it is not surprising to find allegations of Jewishness and accusations of judaizing connected to other forms of racially-tinged signification in the popular imagination. Depending on the situational needs of the accuser, the descendents of Jews could be considered either overly haughty or tainted by too intimate a connection to other debased races. María de Encío of Santiago de Chile, arrested in 1579, was charged with a variety of transgressions: [Others] telling her not to whip the Indians, she said: “God lives, that even if St. Francis came down from heaven, or if St. Francis commanded me to stop whipping, I do not have to stop whipping them”; and that she performed work with the Indians and Blacks on holidays on a sugar plantation which she owned, and ate meat on Fridays and Saturdays and impeded marriages, and was married two times, and read the lines of hands, and believed in dreams and other superstitions and consulted Indian women taken to be witches.50

Part of Encío’s suspect behavior lay in the mistreatment of innocent Amerindians, powerless and vulnerable slaves, who should attract Christian mercy, not unwarranted cruelty. She also supposedly used these human instruments, who were enslaved ostensibly for their Christianization, intentionally to transgress religious and civil law. One slave in 1635 Mexico City testifies that she heard her mother told many times regarding a family of alleged judaizers that “they washed the [floors of their] house on Holy Thursday and Friday [i.e., the days leading up to Easter, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday] and whipped their blacks on said days.”51 Perhaps it is not a coincidence that both of these

Quoted in Medina, Inquisición en Chile, 202. Though Medina often quotes directly from the trial transcripts, one gets the feeling that even much of the unmarked text comes either verbatim or in close paraphrase from the manuscript sources he found in the archives, as in this passage. 51 Testimony of Thomassina de Mendoca, 21 August 1635; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 16r. She is referring to the sisters Juana and Rafaela Enriquez, whose extended family will be treated at length in chapter 4. Rafaela herself made a similar charge against Juana and her husband Simón Váez Sevilla, claiming that they frequently ordered their slaves whipped for various “childish reasons,” but only on Fridays (cited and translated in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate”). It could be that these acts of mistreatment were a cover for Friday-night rituals, though this is doubtful, or that the allegations are exaggerations meant to insinuate wrongdoing for 50

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accusations were formulated by slaves and servants. In Bahia, in 1591, the New Christian Diego Castanho was denounced for having “carnal relations with a black slave who was lying on a crucifix.”52 Here, as well, two different acts, one an outright heretical desecration of the central Christian image, the other an act of extra-marital fornication with an “unworthy” partner (many colonial men rationalized such sex as not going against Church law, a rationalization considered heretical), serve to fortify each other’s subversiveness. The last charge hints that interracial sex constituted a problem of unsuited intimacy. Many similar cases could be adduced. I will focus briefly on one involving the famous then infamous Antonio José da Silva (1705–1739), New Christian, poet, dramatist, student of canon law, lawyer. The day of his arrival in the Inquisition’s secret jails in Lisbon (8 August 1726) he related the following tale involving his widowed aunt Dona Esperança, with whom he stayed when he had been in the city already some four or five years (in other words thirteen years previously, when he was aged twelve or so).53 Being attracted to one of his aunt’s maids, he and his aunt were alone for the purpose of the confessant having an illicit affair, and procuring for vile ends a maidservant of the aforementioned aunt, whose name he dosn’t know, and his aforementioned aunt, having notice of the depraved intentions of the confessant [which he told her] so that she will help, and manage things for him with the same girl, she inducing the confessant that he should make an attempt, [saying] after all simple fornication was not a sin in the law of Moses, and the confessant responding to her that he lived in the law of Christ, in which such a base act was a sin, his aforementioned aunt says to him, that he should live in the law of Moses, which was better and larger, and in which, as had been said, simple fornication was not a sin, and for which he should hope for the salvation of his soul, [. . . .] and what his aforementioned aunt told him and taught him seeming good to the confessant, and carried away by the appetite which he had for pursuing the vile acts which he intended with the said girl, in order that remorse would not remain in his conscience, he then and there abandoned the law of Christ, our Lord, of which he the inquisitors. The cruelty of New Christian masters, real or alleged, as raised in the various incidents and citations given in this chapter does not stand out at all from the behavior of Old Christian masters, as recounted and analyzed in any number of works on Afroiberian slavery. 52 Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 21; Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 163. 53 Antonio came to Lisbon at age 8 (ca. 1713) because his mother had been summoned there from Rio de Janeiro by the Inquisition.

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already had enough information and instruction, and went over to belief in the law of Moses, hoping to save himself through it.54

Silva, soon overcome with remorse, returned to Christ’s law—or so he claimed.55 This tale stands in need of more unpacking than I can here devote to it. In any case, it is a rather cynical rendering of Judaism and its import for New Christians. It might have been so purposefully. He might have been giving the Inquisition what he thought was wanted. The statement is equally cynical about servants and projects onto them an all-too-prevalent fantasy of sexual availability. (It should be noted that here the race of the maidservant remains unmentioned; this was not Leonor, his Black slave.) Regardless, Silva was soon released after abjuring his errors of faith. This little text offers a liberal understanding of sexuality that overlapped with certain trans-racial and inter-class desires. The same reasoning played a role in condoning sex with non-White women, especially in colonies lacking normal numbers of White women. Such sex, if not interdicted by the Spanish and Portuguese authorities, certainly stood under severe social discouragement.56 Nonetheless, based 54 “Traslado do processo feito pela inquizição de Lisboa contra Antonio Jozé da Silva poeta brazileiro,” Revista Trimensal do Instituto Historico Geographico Brazileiro (Rio de Janeiro) 59,1 (1896): 9. 55 “Processo contra Antonio da Silva,” 10. 56 Originally, the Spanish king explicitly permitted intermarriage with Amerindians in a 1501 decree, instructing the governor of Santo Domingo two years later to encourage the marriage of Spanish Christians and Indians “so that both parties can communicate and teach each other and the Indians become men and women of reason” (Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America [ Boston: Little, Brown, 1967], 26). Again in 1514 the Crown permitted Spaniards to marry Amerindians (37). For political reasons, both the Spanish and Portuguese policies encouraged intermarriage with women of the indigenous nobility (37, 50). As early as 1538, however, the Spanish Crown issued commands to an expedition in Cartagena de las Indias ensuring that “no soldier slept with any Indian who was not a Christian.” The Portuguese in Brazil operated under similar orders, whether or not they followed them (25). According to Mörner, the Spanish Crown “on the whole opposed intermarriage with the African element,” mostly to prevent slaves “from obtaining freedom for their children or even for themselves, in this way” (38). The Church as well as the Crown also opposed interracial concubinage, as they did any form of concubinage (40). In any event, it seems most White settlers preferred White women, when they were available, even those of “ill repute” or lower-class status, to indigenous women (26–7, 37, 49; C.R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: 1415–1825 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 40, 99): “there is no doubt but that from the days of the Conquest, most successful Spaniards in the New World aspired to have a white wife as the legitimate female head of their household” (Boxer, Race Relations, 38). Exceptions proliferated, of course, among them the “heretical” views cited here (Alfredo Margarido, “As mulheres outras nas ilhas atlânticas e na costa ocidental africana nos séculos XV a XVII,” and Maria

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on numerous examples, it can be assumed that some European men saw no reason not to enter into relations, whether sexual or romantic, with non-Whites. Nun Frances da Costa, a New Christian residing as the royal factor among the Biafada on the West African coast in the 1590s, was denounced to the Lisbon Inquisition for allegedly boasting that “He cared more for the finger-nail of his African wife than ‘all the confessions and masses.’”57 The newly-appointed Inquisitor in Lima, Antonio Ordóñez, wrote in a worried letter to the Inquisition Council about the alarming number of priests soliciting Amerindian (and other) women in the confessional: “and what is worse is that there are some giving depositions who said to the Indian women that the sin with them was not a sin, and were with them carnally in the church.”58 The Castile-born Gaspar de la Plaza was tried in 1538 in Mexico even before the formal establishment of the Inquisition there for “assuring that it was not a sin to be with an Indian woman,” while the more explicit Andrés Monje was accused in 1544 in Mexico for saying “that it was not a sin to fornicate with an Indian woman.”59 The Lima Inquisition arrested a blacksmith, the Spanish-born Diego Hernandez, in the 1580s for “having said before many people that it was not a sin to have sex with a Black woman, nor to be in love with her, for God had commanded that man should fornicate.”60 In Spain itself such ideas also found expression. In the 24 November 1566 auto de fe in Córdoba, the mayor of Aguilar, Gil Gómez del Lagar, found himself fined 4,500 pesos and forced to make a light abjuration for saying that “it was not a sin to be in love with a mulata.”61 Apparently even some women voiced opinions of this kind. Among those punished in the Lima auto de fe of 30 November 1587 with a light abjuration and banishment from the city was “María, a Black woman born in

Helena Vilas-Boas e Alvim, “A mulher e a expansão na perspective de alguns cronistas e historiadores seus coevos,” in O rosto feminino da expans*o portuguesa: Congresso internacional realizado em Lisboa, Portugal, 21–25 de Novembro de 1994: Actas [Lisbon: Comissão para a Igualdade e para os Direitos das Mulheres, 1995], 1:357–74, 261–8). 57 Brooks, Eurafricans, 79. 58 Letter of 20 April 1599; quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:288. 59 Cited in Toro, Judíos en la Nueva España, 104, 117. 60 Quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:151. Hernandez appeared as a penitent at a public auto de fe, heard his sentence read to him, performed a light abjuration and began his two-year banishment from Lima and four-year banishment from Panamá. Were he to break the terms of his sentence, he would face double the time in the galleys at the oar and without salary. 61 Cited in Gracia Boix, Inquisición de Córdoba, 38.

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the Indies,” for holding that sex constituted a venial sin, not a mortal one.62 Such “heretical” propositions served to permit other types of relationships frowned upon under official Iberian social control. In 1570, Catalina, a slave of Juan de Jerez of Priego, said, when reprimanded by her mistress for going out with men, that “it was no sin to have relations with a man who was her boy-friend.”63 Some of these examples indicate that it was likely not only individuals desperate for human intimacy who rationalized (away) the sin of simple fornication, but those from non-Catholic backgrounds for whom such strictures seemed foreign. Was Antonio Silva’s aunt correct that Judaism did not consider “simple fornication” to be sinful? Had she taught the young Silva that “the Law of Moses is more tolerant in matters of a sexual nature”?64 I cannot recall any case of a New Christian being charged with holding or expressing any of the above “propositions” as a component of her judaizing. Still, it is true that much of Iberian Jewish thinking on sexual issues evinced “a sober realism and a pragmatic approach,” often recognizing concubinage, for instance, in preference to indiscriminate sexual affairs.65 Furthermore, writes Yom-Tov Assis, according to Jewish law, “sexual relations between mutually consenting unmarried Jews (or even if the man involved is married) are not punishable although they are condemned by the halakhists on moral grounds.”66 Alternative views of sexuality were but one of the ways in which Jews or Conversos were sometimes linked or “confused” in the Iberian imagination with other Others. It goes without saying that in the eyes of many inquisitors and proponents of “blood purity” statutes Jews and Muslims, or, more accurately, their converted descendants, occupied similar positions as disloyal Christians and citizens and as eternally potential heretics. Members of all of these groups were routinely

Quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:233. Cited in Gracia Boix, Inquisición de Córdoba, 44. She had to attend mass as a penitent. I have cited examples only from the Spanish world; for examples from the Portuguese orbit, and a brief and similar analysis, see Ronaldo Vainfas, Trópico dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e Inquisição no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1989), especially 368–372, “Fornicação, Misoginia e Preconceito Racial.” 64 Rachel Mizrahi Bromberg, A inquisição no Brasil: Um capitão-mor Judaizante (São Paulo: Centro de Estudos Judaicos da F.F.L.C.H./USP, 1984), 97. 65 Yom-Tov Assis, “Sexual Behaviour in Mediaeval Hispano-Jewish Society,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: P. Halban, 1988), 39–40. 66 Assis, “Sexual Behaviour,” 41. 62

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insulted as “dogs” by Spaniards and Portuguese.67 “Jews” were also seen as bearing a certain kinship with decidedly “primitive” peoples. Padre Mestre Gaspar dos Reis, designated by the Portuguese Inquisition in the 1640s to engage the accused judaizer Isaac de Castro in theological debate and convince him to renounce Judaism, gets nowhere with the youth, as is true of all the others appointed for the same end. With frustration the priest concludes, citing Jeremiah (13:23), that “it seemed to him that it is impossible for the Jews to repent of their errors, as it is impossible for the Black to change his skin or the leopard to change his spots, and thus he judged the youth [Isaac de Castro] obstinate and pertinacious.”68 The writer André de Resende complains about the influx of foreigners to Lisbon: Over there you will encounter the Indian, the Japanese, the Persian, the Chinese, the Turk, the Moor, the “Marrano” The Muscovite, [. . .]69

The Ethiopian Christians, for instance, failed to gain acceptance from the papacy or the Portuguese Church, which rejected them as mono-

67 A.C. de C.M. Saunders, “The Life and Humour of João de Sá Panasco, o Negro, Former Slave, Court Jester and Gentleman of the Portuguese Royal Household (fl. 1524–1567),” in F.W. Hodcroft et al., Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies on Spain and Portugal in Honor of P.E. Russell (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981), 185; Alberto Ferreiro, “Simon Magus, Dogs, and Simon Peter,” in The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1998), 45–90. 68 Cited in Lipiner, Izaque de Castro, 103. Already in the first decade of the century Fray Prudencio de Sandoval voices the same sentiment; see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and German Models, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 26 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982), 16. José de Acosta wields the trope of Jer. 13:23 in reference to barbaric peoples in general (De procuranda indorum salute (Predicación del evangelio en las Indias), ed. Francisco Mateos [Madrid: I.G. Magerit, 1952], 1.2.57–8). The increasingly “biological” tendencies of Iberian limpieza de sangre lead some (former) Converso physicians to similarly essentializing theories. The physician Juan de Huarte, of Converso origin, supports his Lamarckian understanding of how Jews pass on their medical prowess by pointing to the intrinsic nature of Blackness in “Ethiopians,” both qualities impervious to changes in climate (Examen de ingenios para las sciencias [Amsterdam: Juan de Ravestein, 1662 (orig. pub. 1575)], 230–251 [ch. 12]); see also Diego Gracia Guillén, “Judaism, Medicine, and the Inquisitorial Mind in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, ed. Angel Alcalá (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1987), 375–400; David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 5 (“Converso Doctors and Race”). 69 Cited in J. Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, 4th ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 2000), 1:215.

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physites and followers of many Old Testament practices (on which more below). The Portuguese humanist Damião de Gois asks the envoy of the Ethiopian Negus to write up the articles of faith of Ethiopian Christianity, which he translates into Latin and produces in a book pleading for religious tolerance for all manner of Christians, “Fides, Religio, Moresque Aethiopum sub Imperio Preciosi Joannis,” (1540), but the Portuguese Crown does not allow the book to circulate in Portugal. Part of the complaint against the Ethiopian rites is their closeness to Judaism and the fear that New Christians will learn to judaize from them.70 Writing against the New Christians around 1541, Francisco Machado wistfully imagines “Portugal [. . .] cleansed of heresies and of Jewish ceremonies, and of Moors and Blacks.”71 To Machado it is clear that the constant shaming and humiliation of Jesus in Portugal stems directly from the fact that “where there are Moors, Blacks, Indians, Jews, it is inevitable that each one follows his own path and sect.”72 Hence the perception or accusation of being too close or sympathetic to Blacks could also structure useful narratives regarding Conversos. In 1607, a White in Santiago de Chile denounced a Portuguese New Christian merchant named Diego López; the witness had heard someone say that López was “the son of a Jewish converso and a half mulato.”73 When the prominent merchant Manuel Bautista Peres was arrested by the Inquisition in Lima, he warned the inquisitors that many individuals might well have sought to harm him through false denunciation. One example he provided consisted of one of his mayordomos (a steward, foremen or aide), who “‘went around telling everyone that [ Pérez and his brother-in-law] were Jew-dogs’ because they threatened to have him punished for beating an African slave to death.”74 Judaizing was seen as infecting, either in potential or in fact, the beliefs and practices of Africans, Afroiberians and Amerindians. In 1702 Bahia, the missionary

Elizabeth F. Hirsch, Damião de Gois: The Life and Thought of a Portuguese Humanist (The Hague, 1967), 154. 71 My translation. The Mirror of the New Christians (Espelho de Christãos Novos) of Francisco Machado, ed. and trans. Mildred Evelyn Vieira and Frank Ephraim Talmage (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1977), 75. 72 My translation. Ibid., 323. 73 Quoted in Luis G. Martínez Villada, Diego López de Lisboa (Córdoba: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1939), 16. Medina has it differently: “son of a converso and mulato physician” (Inquisición en Chile, 367). As in other examples, it is unclear whether mulato refers to Blackness or to Jewish-Christian or New Christian-Old Christian miscegenation. 74 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 48. 70

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Francisco de Lima expressed outrage that the leader of a feast celebrated by a mulato brotherhood in honor of Our Lady of the Assumption was a colored woman named Rosa who just happened to be the mistress of the brother of the local priest. These two brothers, New Christians, protected Rosa, despite her being known for uttering various heretical propositions. Referring to the rampant African ceremonies, joined even by Whites, the Commissioner of the Inquisition, friar Rodrigo de São Pedro, saw Bahia at this time as the site of so much spiritual turbulence, if not turbidity, precisely because of the “multitude of New Christians that live in this land,” who had fostered an atmosphere of disrespect for orthodoxy and authority.75 The gatherings of an allAfrican congregation of Mina Catholics in Itaubira, Minas Gerais, Brazil, were called by those who denounced them to the Inquisition a “synagogue.”76 Here it is doubtful that anyone thought the offending Afroiberians, slave or free, were actually Jews or practicing Judaism; the name merely indicated the heretical nature of what was going on by means of a familiar lens—and this was in 1754. The West African Coast and Coastal Islands: A Special Case? In African regions confusions of the kind just discussed may have been influenced by perhaps the most persistent and aggravating appearance of ‘Jewish’ practices in Africa, from the Portuguese perspective, which took place in Ethiopia. Many followers of the monophysite Ethiopian Church observed Sabbath on Saturday, not Sunday, practiced circumcision, and ended their Lent abstention from meat or dairy products at sundown. Hence Jesuits and Catholics alike accused the Ethiopians of maintaining “a thousand ceremonies of Jewish Law,” as the French physician Charles Jacques Poncet put it in his account of his travels there from 1698 to 1700.77 In West Angola, Portuguese officials, as late as the seventeenth century, often believed that the indigenous circum-

Schwartz, “Questioning Slavery and Accepting Africa.” Sweet, Recreating Africa, 208. 77 Poncet defended Ethiopian Christianity against such charges. Cited in Ronald S. Love, “Adventures in Abyssinia: The Relation of Charles Poncet, 1698 to 1700,” Itinerario 28,3 (2004): 54. For the Jesuit view, see Donald M. Lockhart and M.G. Da Costa (eds. and trans.), The Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo (London: Hakluyt, 1984), 176–77, 180. 75 76

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cized male children and youths because they were Jews.78 It is unclear whether this meant that the African Other was being conflated with Jews as the primitive “bad” cultural self or whether the connection was historical, that “some Portuguese New Christians had reportedly taught Jewish rites and notions to blacks in ‘Guinea,’ ” a view frequently held and disseminated by those associated with the Inquisition.79 Thus, an anonymous legal opinion from around 1620 warned against letting New Christians reach Perú from Buenos Aires due to fears of their judaizing among the ‘natives’: “as experience has shown that they have done in some parts of Guiné, where they have managed to teach Judaic ceremonies and rites to the gentiles.”80 Similar allegations were raised in connection with the two thousand or so Jewish youths who had been forcibly taken by the Portuguese King Manoel I in 1493 and sent to help colonize São Tomé.81 Some European visitors had the perception that New Christian traders in western Africa were able to live as open Jews, citing, for instance, the example of Amari Ngone, the Wolof ruler of Cayor and Baol in the late sixteenth century, who permitted both “Portuguese Jews and Portuguese Christians” in his realm, but forbade them “to dispute about which religion is best,” allowing each to “live as he wishes in the religion he accepts.”82 New Christians were also accused of (re)turning to open Judaism in Morocco, which, like western Africa, comprised a marginal space in the Portuguese imperial orbit, both heavily involved in trade and political alliances with the Portuguese, yet ultimately beyond the latter’s full control. In these regions, including the Cabo Verde islands, therefore, New Christian traders faced constant

78 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 35. As will be seen in the next chapter, Angola was cited by a number of conversos charged by the Inquisitions as a site of judaizing. 79 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 129. 80 Cited in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 190; see also 260. 81 By 1506, only around 600 were said to have survived the rampant tropical diseases. The possible survival of Judaism among this intermarried group and its descendants has received much tendentious coverage. Jewish Child Slaves in São Tomé: Papers, Essays, Articles and Original Documents Related to the July 1995 Conference, ed. Moshé Liba (Wellington, NZ: New Zealand Jewish Chronicle Publications, 2003); Robert Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora: the Jews of São Tomé Island, 1492–1654,” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 73–87; idem, “Public Christians, Secret Jews: Religion and Political Conflict on São Tomé Island in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 21,4 (1990): 645–54. 82 The trader André Donelha, cited in Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 210; see also Peter Mark and Jose Da Silve Horta, “Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities on Senegal’s Petite Cote,” History in Africa 31 (2004): 233–4.

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complaints and accusations of judaizing even before the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536.83 Malyn Newitt provides one explanation for the charges of judaizing raised against various Luso-Africans (she terms them Afro-Portuguese) along the western coast of Africa: “Catholic when in a Portuguese settlement, their religious practices when at home in Africa conformed to local ideas and led to the accusation [. . .] that they were Jews.” These traders, that is, observed “local religious rites appropriate to their standing within the African community.”84 Some of the Portuguese lançados and tangomaos, that is, those traders who assimilated into the local West African societies “wore African garments and protective amulets, underwent circumcision and scarification.”85 The New Christians of São Tomé were accused of practicing “thousands of gentilic rites in opposition to our faith, like offering gifts to the Gods of the blacks, which are demons with whom they deal and talk quite naturally; without doing this they are unable to trade.”86 They were Jews by analogy as much as by practice or belief, both for having voluntarily abandoned the graces and benefits of the Church as well as for having adopted practices that shared with Judaism the status of idolatry and heresy. Hence a 1546 petition by prominent local Old Christian citizens to the Portuguese king to establish an Inquisition in the Cabo Verde islands claims that some 200 New Christian lançados of the coasts celebrated “Mosaic ceremonies,” participated in African religious ceremonies and contracted polygamous marriages.87 Another explanation for some of 83 Brooks, Eurafricans, 61; idem, Landlords and Strangers, 159, 178–9, 185–7, 221–2. On Cabo Verde, see Green, “Masters of Difference.” 84 Malyn Newitt, “Mixed Race Groups in the Early History of Portuguese Expansion,” in Studies in the Portuguese Discoveries I: Proceedings of the First Colloquium of the Centre for the Study of the Portuguese Discoveries, ed. T.F. Earle and Stephen Parkinson (Warminster: Aris & Phillips/Comissão nacional para as Comemoracões dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1992), 42. 85 Brooks, Eurafricans, 50; idem, Landlords and Strangers, 191. 86 Translated in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 260, n. 412; regarding the women of the island adapting (to) local fashion, see Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “As mulheres no quotidiano da ilha de São Tomé nos séculos XV e XVI,” in Rosto Feminino da expansão portuguesa, 1:502. Meanwhile, one Black cleric of Cabo Verde, Thome Vaz Mascarenhas, was accused in 1652 of living in a “dissolute and scandalous manner” and “having partiality and dealings with” the local New Christians (Green, “Masters of Difference,” 312, n. 182). 87 Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, 159; Green, “Masters of Difference,” 81, 86, 101, 203. According to Green, no contemporary document actually identifies “Jews” among the lançados, though with later persecution many New Christians did become lançados (“Masters of Difference,” 63, 82, 202–3). Alfredo Margarido understands the

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the allegations of judaizing resides in the economic, social and political war being waged by Old Christians, particularly merchants, against opponents, New Christians in fact or by rhetoric.88 This competition was exacerbated with the arrival of the Dutch in the seventeenth century, which generated accusations that the local New Christian merchants were in league with their Dutch Jewish kin.89 Various sources, as well as Inquisitional denunciations and trials from Cabo Verde, the Senegambian coast, and São Tomé, offer evidence—much of it admittedly circumstantial, much of it of dubious merit—for some open Judaism and crypto-Judaism in these areas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two of the coastal port towns, Portudal and Joal, were said to have hosted open communities of Sephardic traders who operated a synagogue, had books of the Jewish Bible, ritual objects, and conducted circumcisions. Still, most of the Inquisition records concern little more than run-of-the-mill immorality, religious laxity, skepticism, and doubt.90 At times it seems that scholars cannot accept the idea that

accusations of judaizing as stemming from the cultural parallels such as circumcision (“Mulheres outras,” 368). 88 Alencastre, Trato dos viventes, 25–6; Garfield, “Forgotten Fragment,” 78, 83; Green, “Masters of Difference,” 85. 89 Brooks, Eurafricans, 85, 89–90; idem, Landlords and Strangers, 221–2; Mark and Horta, “Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities,” 233–4, 245–6. An anonymous memorandum of 1612 identified 15 supposed Jews or judaizers (85). In 1629, a Portuguese expedition dispatched by the king (Spain and Portugal were united at the time) destroyed an alleged synagogue at Rufisque, some 100 miles north of the Gambia River, and arrested several “Jews” there (89–90). 90 Green, “Masters of Difference”; Mark and Horta, “Two Early SeventeenthCentury Sephardic Communities”; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, “A inquisição na Guiné, nas Ilhas de Cabo Verde e São Tomé e Príncipe,” Revista Lusófona de Ciéncia das Religiões 3,5–6 (2004), 167–8; Brooks, Eurafricans, 90, drawing on a number of earlier studies; see also 91–3; Caldeira, “Mulheres no quotidiano da ilha de São Tomé,” 491–506. As always, the hundreds of denunciations and confessions must be treated with caution. It must be kept in mind that between 1536 and 1821, only three trials for judaizing resulted in sentences (Silva, “Inquisição,” 172). The article of Mark and Horta lacks any skepticism regarding the claims of open Judaism or of judaizing found in the sources. For a similar response and modification, see Tobias Green, “Further Considerations on the Sephardim of the Petite Côte,” History in Africa 32 (2005): 165–83. Regarding the Dutch view, Wim Klooster kindly alerted me to a description of Angola and Congo (in question and answer form) that was sent from Luanda to the West India Company’s Zeeland Chamber in late 1641 or early 1642: Q: “Les Portugais lé-bas sont-ils catholiques romains ou juifs [nouveaux chrétiens]?” A: “La plupart et les principaux des habitants portugais sont de nouveaux chrétiens. Cependant, on ne sait pas s’ils sont juifs, parce qu’ils professent ouvertement la religion et la foi catholique romaine” (Louis Jadin, L’ancien Congo et l’Angola 1639–1655 d’aprés les archives romaines, portugaises, néerlandaises et espagnoles [Bruxelles, Rome: Institut Historique belge de Rome,

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New Christians were not the only ones to feel and express “brusque irreverance toward the external authority of the church,” and must make ‘Jews’ of all doubters and rebels.91 All of this does not negate the possibility that Jewish populations trickled into the area over the course of time and even spread their beliefs and practices, but firmer evidence would be nice. Indios and/or Judíos In the Americas, though not there alone, Jews and Amerindians are not infrequently conflated in thought because of perceived similarities between the two groups (superstitiousness, heretical religion, barbarity, deceitfulness, weakness, femininity), and in text, because of orthographic similarities ( judío—indio).92 Jewish history in general, as well as its manifestations on Iberian territories, served as a map on which Spaniards and Portuguese read their progress overseas, while the conditions of and encounters with foreign barbarians instructed or corroborated behavior toward domestic minorities back home. On the peninsula, Gaspar de Uceda (d. 1588), a theologian who taught at the University of Salamanca, writes against the introduction of ‘blood purity’ statutes, yet admits that “in the histories of the Indies it can be read that many Indians have idolatered after baptism, from which it follows that, discussing the recently-baptized, many of them have an inclination to infidelity, whether they be Jews, whether they be gentiles, but they have apostatized from the faith.”93 Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, who came to Mexico with the first group of Franciscans missionaries in 1975], 162). All of the region’s Judaism was allegedly extirpated by the middle of the seventeenth century with the Jews’ conversion by Spanish Capuchin missionaries. 91 The quote is from Myscofski, “Heterodoxy,” 87. The flip side is the manner in which any non-conformist behavior or belief by New Christians was ascribed to “judaizing”; on this see John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500,” Past and Present 120 (August 1988): 3–25. 92 See Judith Laikin Elkin, “Colonial Origins of Contemporary Anti-Semitism in Latin America,” The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America: New Studies on History and Literature, ed. David Sheinin and Lois Baer Barr (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 127–41. 93 Elvira Pérez Ferreiro, El Tratado de Uceda contra los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: Una reacción ante el establecimiento del estatuto de limpieza en la orden franciscana (Madrid: Aben Ezra Ediciones, 2000), 124; other examples can be found in David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 35–42, 83, 89–90, 101, 114, 124, 146, 152–55, 178, 187–88, 191–92, 259, 292.

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1524, opens his history of the land’s inhabitants with a description of the ten plagues sent by God to punish and cleanse it as God had done to ancient Egypt (though in this case the plagues include the Mexicans’ mistreatment at the hands of the Spanish itself ).94 Seventeenth-century chronicler of Nueva Granada Pedro Simón described the missionizer to the Amerindians Fray Luis Beltrán as “another Saint Vincent Ferrer,” the Dominican preacher who struck fear into the hearts of Spanish Jews during 1391, “because through his Spanish language everyone would understand him, just as, as some say, it was the Lord of languages who made it so that the Apostles, though speaking in Hebrew, all the nations of the world understood them.”95 The archbishop of Lima, Pedro de Villagómez, thought that the sliver of the Christ’s cross given by Pope Urban VIII to the Peruvian Church, and brought with immense pageantry to Lima in 1649, would defeat Amerindian “idolatry in the same way that the Ark of the Israelites had destroyed the image of the Philistine god Dagon.”96 One priest and Inquisition official in New Spain, Diego Jaymes Ricardo de Villavicencio, in charge of supervising Amerindian religiosity, went so far as to call the native religious leaders rabbis (indios rabies) in a 1692 book.97 For those preaching to the Amerindians themselves, “the Jewish experience was cast as history’s exemplar for Indian missteps and Indian misfortunes.”98 Whereas in Spain, Corpus Christi celebrations featured people dressed up as Moors and Jews, the enemies of the faith over which Christ and the Eucharist triumphed, New World Corpus Christi celebrations had Amerindians dressed in pre-conquest ceremonial garb to portray the same role.99 In the Americas, Spanish worries about ‘Jewish’ cultural and religious contamination remained strong, now attuned to the Amerindian 94 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 135. Such almost structural reasoning allows Bartolome de las Casas to complain in his 1565 Memorial to the Council of the Indies that “The government [of the Indies] is much more unjust and cruel than the rule by which Pharaoh of Egypt oppressed the Jews” (quoted in ibid., 166). 95 Pedro Simón, Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme en Las Indias Occidentales, 6 vols., Biblioteca Banco Popular, vol. 105 (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1981), 5:423–24. 96 Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, 3. 97 Martínez López, “Limpieza de Sangre and the Emergence of the ‘Race/Caste’ System,” 358. 98 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 106–7. 99 Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

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populations whose recent Christianity might be shaken as a result. Sermonizers addressing American audiences, whether mixed or solely Amerindian, often harped on anti-Jewish themes.100 Judeoconversos, meanwhile, shared in the general Iberian discourse regarding Amerindians, viewed as either primitives lacking the attributes of civilization or as noble savages, sometimes as both (discussed further in chapter 8). For now, let us turn to a few non-literary examples. When the Portuguese Converso merchant Manuel Bautista Peres was arrested by the Inquisition of Lima, his brother-in-law and associate Simão Vaz Henriques sent him a letter in prison, filled with very Christian language, assuring him that his sisters prayed for his release: “yesterday both were keeping vigil the whole day in [the chapel of ] Our Lady of Copacabana, an image recently brought by some indians.”101 While attesting to the Christian devotion of this family of Conversos (knowing, no doubt, that mail to prisoners on trial was often intercepted by the inquisitors), Vaz Henriques’ letter unintentionally credits and takes for granted the Christian faithfulness of at least some Amerindians, as well as the readiness of some Whites to worship Amerindian Catholic productions. The statue mentioned in the letter, adored still today in the church of Copacabana, a town on the shore of Lake Titcaca, in Bolivia, was made by Francisco Tito Yupanqui and his brother Felipe, descendants of Inca royalty, and brought as an offering to the then adobe church in 1583.102 On the other hand, the Portuguese merchant Diego López, active in Buenos Aires, among other Spanish American cities, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, was accused by one acquaintance of pointing and saying, when he would see a church in an Amerindian town, “ ‘that nothing [lit. “pea”] that is supposed to be a church,’ and this with much making light which seemed to show disregard/aquello que albeja debe de ser igreja, y ésto

100 For examples, see Elkin, “Imagining Idolatry”; Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 101–15. 101 Quoted in Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, Portugueses no Peru ao tempo da união ibérica: Mobilidade, cumplicidades e vivências, 2 vols. in 3 pts. (Lisbon: Imprensa NacionalCasa da Moeda, 2005), 2:36, n. 73. 102 See Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 238, n. 52, and the recent studies she cites. Also intriguing, in another letter (confiscated by the Inquisition), the same brother-in-law mentions that Peres’s son prays (in front of the Virgin), begging, “Please bring me back my taita” (quoted in Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 53). This seemingly innocent usage of the Quechua word for father hints at the youth’s assimilation of a native language, probably within the household, learned from an Amerindian servant.

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con muchos meneos que parecían de menosprecio.”103 López, it appears, would not believe that Amerindians could or should be Christians, though it is not exactly clear whether he was mocking the pretensions of backwards Amerindians or the transparent conversionary claims of the Catholic Church. Knowing Where One Stands The opposing Christianty and Judaism that informed much of the way in which Afroiberians and Judeoconversos saw one another even became on occasion the explicit content of interchanges. The Portuguese Maria Rodrigues was imprisoned in 1541 for having cursed King Dom Manuel and those who tried to force the Jews to become Christians. The high number of denunciations and arrests from 1541 stems from the fact that the previous year the Portuguese Inquisition opened its doors. Additional charges accrued against Rodrigues, such that she also judaized. On 23 March of that year, a Mulata informer denounced Rodrigues, saying that she had been telling her about the case of a Jew who was burned at the stake and did not want to die as a good Christian (likely the same Diogo de Montenegro mentioned above). Rodrigues had retorted: “And if they told you that should turn Moor [Muslim], would you?” The Mulata witness responding in the negative, Rodrigues said to her: “Well, we are the same!” Rodrigues went on to ask the witness: “After you are satiated, if they give you bread, would you eat it?” and as the witness answered in the negative, Rodrigues exclaimed: “We are the same; after we are in our law, we are not allowed to throw it away!”104 In this unpremeditated religious disputation on the street, Rodrigues made deft use of ethnic and religious sensitivities—notably drawing on shared anti-Muslim sentiment—to arouse empathy from an Afroiberian to her own and the general New Christian predicament as Others pressured to abandon their culture. The simile Rodrigues employs regarding bread and satiation asserts that religiosity does not fall under the standard scarcity model (whereby outsiders are starving for the lack of ‘our’ ‘true’ religion) but quite the Martínez Villada, Diego López, 15. López might have been playing with the expression, “no vale una arbeja/it is not worth a pea.” 104 Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 118–9; Elias Lipiner, O Sapateiro de Trancoso e o alfaiate de Setúbal (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1993), 263–4. 103

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contrary: all can be nourished within their own tradition. The degree of self-consciousness displayed regarding racial and religious status and their intersection is noteworthy. A different Black woman of Lisbon testifies against the same Maria Rodrigues, who already had been imprisoned for several months on charges of judaizing. This Black woman claims that the two are (or were) friends. According to her statement, this woman had invited Rodrigues to go see an auto da fé by the Teja riverside in Lisbon. She responsed, “God’s evil inferno for King Dom Manuel who made us Christians by force!” She further asked the witness if she would like it if she were turned white, to which she responded that yes, she would like it, Maria Rodrigues retorted: “Well, so we will turn ourselves into good Christians like you will yourself turn white!”105

This Black Christian expresses the desire to turn White as a means of convincing the Inquisitors that she sought “conversion” in a manner directly opposite the stubborn refusal of the accused judaizer. Such a desire manifests a distinct similarity to her interest in watching an auto da fé to begin with, and her later denunciation of a friend formerly but mistakenly thought to share her Christian desires, ocular and otherwise. She equates turning White with turning Christian, and equates the judaizer’s emphasis on the inability of Blacks to turn White into a denial of the potency of the universalizing Christian mission. Once again Rodrigues turned to racial and religious argumentation to try to make her Afroiberian friend understand her position. Whether Rodrigues constituted a particularly articulate Judeoconverso spokesperson is beside the point, as is the historical fact that Lisbon then hosted the largest population of Africans, slave or free, in all of Europe. Whether these are accurate depictions of Afroiberians’ reactions or not, these testimonies deftly and perhaps even inadvertently assize the contestatory group dynamics that could be so overheated in the crucible of a mass exorcism of ‘heresy.’ The differing subject positions of Afroiberians and Judeoconversos vis-à-vis the Inquisitions, a combination of their religious differences and class statuses, also surfaced on occasion. Duarte da Sá was a New Christian plantation/mill owner and member of the governing elite of Olinda, Brazil. In the early 1590s he was denounced for, among other things, having said to an allegedly decadent Black slave who 105

Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 121–2.

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had been threatened by his master with the fact that an inquisitorial visitor was present: “talk Jorge, talk, because if you have a hundred or two hundred thousand cruzados you will hold your tongue, but as you don’t have anything you can speak.”106 Sá alludes to the fact that New Christians comprised a perennial target for inquisitorial greed or pecuniary self-sustenance and therefore stayed as far away from inquisitors as possible. Afroiberians, on the other hand, with little or nothing monetarily valuable to lose, could afford to approach the Inquisition in order to right wrongs. Sá’s statement was deemed dangerous, even blasphemous, because it implied that the Inquisitions operated based on mundane economic motivations rather than holy considerations. Of course, the unfree and poor slave Jorge may well have perceived Sá’s observation, ostensibly correct when it came to inquisitorial hypocrisy, as bearing its own form of willful blindness, coming as it did from the mouth of a wealthy White, however persecuted as a subaltern in his own right. Once again, race and socio-economic status become explicitly thematized in daily conversation among subalterns.

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Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 568.

CHAPTER THREE

SOME INCIDENTS IN CARTAGENA DE LAS INDIAS In early seventeenth-century Cartagena de las Indias two men, both surgeons, came to know one another, though one was a Judeoconverso and the other a Mulato ex-slave. This inter-racial acquaintanceship, probably fairly typical for urban milieus of the time, evolved into a rather complicated relationship. Both Converso merchants and Mulatos embodied cultural miscegenation and mobility, though in different ways, and both parties in this relationship suffered as a result. Each party in this relationship found himself accused by the city’s inquisitional tribunal, a tribunal increasingly zealous to arrest the perceived threat the colony faced from multicultural witchcraft and sorcery as well as from wealthy merchants who were allegedly secret Jews. Within the space of a few years, the tribunal seized and charged the Mulato as a brujo or practitioner of improper magic and he, for one reason or another, denounced his Converso colleague as a secret Jew. One of the Mulato’s lovers, also a Mulata, had involved herself in the same circle of magical practitioners and had expended much energy gathering information about the city’s alleged crypto-Jews, sometimes in cooperation with her lover. Three interlocking cases, ordinary yet extraordinary, which left behind a documentary record whose unexpected richness allows us to further limn the fragile coexistence and differing trajectories of subaltern groups in the Spanish Indies. The port city of Cartagena served as one of the main gateways to the Spanish Indies, both physically and commercially, as the beginning of one of the land routes to the thriving city of Lima and the silver mines of Potosí. The anonymous author of the Description of the Viceroyalty of Peru, written around 1615, says that Cartagena “is better and bigger than Panama City, has very good houses of stone and very good streets, very rich churches and monasteries, stores or merchandise.”1 A 1629 description declares that the city hosts “more 1 Descripción del Peru, 121; for an English translation of the text, see “Anonymous Description of Peru (1600–1615),” in Irving A. Leonard (ed.), Colonial Travelers in Latin America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 97–117.

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than 1,500 Spanish residents.”2 Because of its commercial importance, Cartagena also attracted many non-Spanish Europeans interested in taking advantage of colonial possibilities. One of the city’s booming socio-economic features consisted of the transshipment of enslaved Africans and a dependence on African domestic slaves, which, together with the inconsistent acculturation of Amerindians, produced in the population an entire range of Mestizos, Mulatos and other “racial mixtures.” The city’s demographic variety obviously was not entirely the result of voluntary immigration. The above-quoted anonymous Descripción nodded to the polyglot nature of the city, containing as it did “many settlements [rancheríos] of Blacks,” since “here many ships arrive which the merchants of Guinea bring, loaded with Blacks.”3 According to historian Charles R. Boxer, Cartagena “was the principle depot for the Portuguese slave-traders,” a precedent established already with their first Spanish slave asiento or contract in 1595, which designated Cartagena as the port of primary entry for the Viceroyalties of New Granada and Peru because it was so well situated for the further distribution of slaves into those territories.4 With the gradual decimation of the Native American population, African slaves became increasingly important as laborers in the colonies’ mines and plantations and as servants tending to the needs of their cities’ elites.5 The anonymous seventeenth-century description of Peru continues by relating how “here [in Cartagena] arrive merchants from Peru to buy” slaves.6 The chronicler Pedro Simón, writing in the 1620s, describes how “that which most increases the volume [of the Magdalena River] is the rowing of the canoes with black slaves until the port of Honda,” far inland.7 The Cartagena customs 2 Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las islas occidentales [1629], the original manuscript transcribed by Charles Upson Clark, Smithsonian miscellaneous collections, 108 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1948), 220. 3 Descripcion del Peru, 121–2. 4 C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 337; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México: Estudio etnohistórico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), 45–6. 5 On the slave trade and economy in Spanish South America, see Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); Leslie Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502–present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Mellafe, Introducción de la esclavitud; Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 64–213. 6 Descripcion del Peru, 122. 7 Simón, Noticias historiales, 5:307.

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house reported 6,884 slaves imported between 1585 and 1590.8 Official letters detail the arrival of 4,810 slaves between May 1615 and April 1619, and over 6,000 between May 1619 and December 1620.9 These constitute only the official tallies, numbers probably far exceeded by the actual total of arriving slaves. According to the biographer of Father Pedro Claver, who devoted his life to christianizing the Blacks in and around Cartagena, In the course of every year, from ten to twelve thousand [blacks] are brought. And in [16]33, fourteen ships were seen in the port together, without any merchandise other than blacks, with 800 to 900 on each one.10

According to this estimate, the minimum total for 1633 would have surpassed 11,000 incoming slaves. Most of the slaves were sold or shipped off to other locations, but no small amount remained to serve individual or institutional masters in the immediate area. A letter of 1619 from a local Franciscan friar, Sebastián de Chumillas, estimates that “there are in [Cartagena] and its district from twelve to fourteen thousand blacks in domestic service.”11 While Africans came to Cartagena against their will, others sought out the city. Gaspar Rodrigues Nunes, the father of the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, described in one of the audiences during his Inquisition trial in Lisbon how his first cousin, Manuel Dias, urged him and others to flee Portugal with him for Cartagena, “because there everyone lived the way he wanted and one was not observed to find out how one was living.”12 Dias’ perception had a basis in reality; in 1630 Portuguese, many of them no doubt New Christians, comprised no fewer than 154 of the city’s 184 registered foreigners and made up some 10 percent of its White male citizens. Portuguese New Christian

Walter Rodney, “Portuguese Attempts at Monopoly on the Upper Guinea Coast, 1580–1650,” Journal of African History 6 (1965): 309; cited in Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 108. 9 Cited in Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:57. 10 Iosef Fernandez, Apostolica y penitente vida de el V.P. Pedro Claver, de la compañia de Iesus. Sacada principalmente de informaciones juridicas hechas ante el Ordinario de la Ciudad de Cartagena de Indias. A su religiosisima provincia de el Nuevo Reyno de Granada. Por el padre Iosef Fernandez de la Compañia de Iesus natural de Taraçona (Zaragoça: Diego Dormer, 1666), 105. 11 Quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 139. 12 Translated by H.P. Salomon, “The Portuguese Background of Menasseh Ben Israel’s Parents as Revealed through the Inquisitorial Archives at Lisbon,” Studia Rosenthaliana 17,2 ( July 1983), 113. 8

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merchants indeed dominated the commerce of the region, Nueva Granada.13 Contrary to Manuel Dias’ notions, by the seventeenth century Cartagena had become all too Spanish. In 1610 the Inquisition opened a tribunal in the city, a tribunal that ended up overseeing an enormous physical terrain. In the relatively small city itself, “where almost everybody seems to know each other,” it had become all too tempting to gather and use knowledge of other people’s lives.14 This explains the interests of two local Mulatos in observing and uncovering the private behavior of other local, mostly Portuguese, residents, whom they suspected of being Jews. Swimming in the Catholic Atlantic The alleged Marrano on whom this chapter focuses is Blas (or Bras) de Paz Pinto, a Portuguese surgeon, born in Évora in or around 1590.15 Until around the age of thirty he lived in Lisbon. He is called a licenciado in one letter between some of his commercial associates, meaning that he was university trained and passed a medical exam.16 Arriving in Cartagena from Angola in 1622, Pinto treated sick slaves in the process of being sold by Portuguese slavers. On his farm or ranch (estancia) at the edge of the city, he “dedicated himself to the cultivation of medical plants,” while also investing in “inter-regional commerce, turning himself into an indispensible partner” and intermediary of merchants from both Lima and Cartagena, including some of the most prominent, Sebastian Duarte, António Nunes Gramaxo, João Rodrigues Mesa (or Juan Rodriguez Messa) and Manuel Bautista Peres (or Baptista Pérez), all Portuguese.17 Pinto also traded in slaves, in this connection even working with slave traders of Lisbon.18 13 Vila Vilar, “Extranjeros en Cartagena,” 155, 175–76. The most comprehensive analysis of the Portuguese presence in the adjacent and perhaps most prosperous Spanish colony is Ventura, Portugueses no Peru. 14 The quote is from Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 141. 15 A list of foreigners in Cartagena, compiled in 1630, calls him forty years old (reprinted in Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:40). The list, Relación y abecedário de los estrangeros que se hallan en la ciudad de Cartagena . . ., is reprinted in ibid., 3:31–77. 16 Letter to Manuel Bautista Perez from Simon Dias Pinto, 17 April 1634, AGN Peru, Inq., Leg. 34, fol. 173r. 17 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:171, 208, 400–1. Bautista Peres and Duarte established their firm in Lima in 1627 (ibid., 1:287). 18 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:296.

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The Colombian scholar I¢ic Croitoru Rotbaum published a photo of Pinto’s house, which, according to his book’s Index of Illustrations, the author “recently identified” (at Plaza Fernández Madrid, No. 37–14).19 Pinto considers himself “quiet and pacific,” according to the official who compiled and submitted the list of the city’s foreigners in 1630, who adds a mention of the surgeon’s “useful [menesteroso] occupation,” his being “without suspicion” and the fact that he dutifully pays what he owes the government. For these reasons, and the fact that he paid 350 pesos, it was ordered that he receive a letter of naturalization.20 None of the documents relating to Pinto make clear whether or not he was married. In 1633 he sought help obtaining the certification of naturalization that had still not arrived, turning to the local prominent Portuguese merchant Antonio Nunes Gramaxo, who tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase it for 300 ducats.21 When the inquisitional tribunals of Lima and Cartagena became swept up in anti-Portuguese hysteria around 1634, Pinto fell into the latter’s hands, through the usual web of denunciations targeting outsiders (in this case Portuguese, suspected Jews, merchants, the wealthy).22 Of the 81 alleged judaizers sentenced by the Cartagena tribunal in the seventeenth century, 57 were Portuguese and 38 were merchants.23 The tribunal arrested Pinto on 22 July 1636, the same day it arrested four other Portuguese New Christians. After being reconciled to the church on his deathbed while still imprisoned by the Inquisition, in other words, once the inquisitors satisfied themselves that Pinto had died a good Christian, he was described in the report of the auto de fé at which he was posthumously displayed in state as having been “esteemed and beloved by all for being very interested in and enthusiastic for repairing altars and decorating churches.” He served as the majordomo of the confraternities of Saint Antonio and of the Immaculate Conception, yet the inquisitors could only see this as a calculating show: “to have it understood that he was a Catholic Christian, being a descendent of Hebrews.”24 Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, after p. 136. Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:41. 21 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:337, 401–2. 22 According to Spanish legislation of the colonies, Portuguese were considered foreigners (Hanke, “Portuguese in Spanish America,” 10 n. 34). 23 Álvarez Alonso, Inquisición de Cartagena, 118–9. 24 AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 1–4v., Relación del auto de fe que los señores inquisidores licenciado Don Martín de Cortázar y Azcárate y Doctor Damián Velázquez de Contreras, celebraron a 25 del mes de Marzo de 38 años, a honra y gloria de Dios y exaltación de la fe católica y extirpación 19 20

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Pinto was denounced to the Inquisition by a number of people, accused by various witnesses of hosting gatherings of Portuguese Conversos in his house, which one witness calls a synagogue.25 This same witness testifies that Pinto acknowledged that he was Jewish and that a sister of his was ‘penitenced’ by the Inquisition in Portugal. It is said that he verbally denigrated the holy images in one of the city’s churches and even spat on one of them. The rest of the accusations against Pinto come from other Portuguese New Christian merchants already imprisoned by the same tribunal as suspected judaizers: Manuel Álvarez Prieto, Juan Rodríguez Mesa and Francisco Piñero. Rodríguez Mesa says that Pinto “was a Jewish judaizer, observer of the law of Moses” and was known as such. He supposedly didn’t eat pig (tocino, bacon); kept fasts, including “the fast of the month of september,” i.e., Yom Kippur, when he would not eat “until the night emergence of the star”; kept the sabbath as a festival, for which he wore new clothes and used fresh linens and tablecoths; ate fish with scales (one of the requirements for fish to be considered kosher, the other being the presence of fins), and rice and beans (i.e., he avoided non-kosher meat).26 According to Francisco Piñero, Pinto participated with the other Portuguese in various “ceremonies and fasts” and “was held to be a man learned and capable among the Jews.”27 Based on the above information, the Cartagena tribunal imprisoned Pinto and sequestered all of his goods. One accused judaizer, Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, later claims under torture that it was Pinto who had taught him the law of Moses, beginning in 1632.28 Another, Francisco Rodríguez de Solís, states that Pinto “gave some talks [pláticas] regarding the observance of the [. . .] law.”29 It is difficult to know what to make of the charges against Pinto. Some of the detailed allegations evince familiarity with Marrano practices that go beyond the usual litany given in the edictos de fé that were de las herejías, en la ciudad de Cartagena de las Indias; reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:39. 25 The Cartagena tribunal’s summary of the charges against Pinto appear in the Relación de la causas de fé from 1636; AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 503r.–507v.; reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:438–43. 26 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 504r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:439. 27 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 504r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:439. 28 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 28r.–v., Relación de las causas de fe del santo oficio de la inquisición de Cartagena, que este año de mil y seiscientos y treinta y ocho remite a su alteza el licenciado Juan Ortiz, fiscal de dicha inquisición, reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:63–4. 29 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 32v., Relación de las causas de la fe; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:68.

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read in the churches and posted on church doors, as had been done in Cartagena in 1610 with the opening of the local tribunal.30 These details may reflect more on the knowledge of the witnesses than on Pinto, of course. Some of the purported crimes seem strange, to say the least. For instance, Rodríguez Mesa alleges that Pinto “put his hands behind him above his belt (que ponía las manos por detrás sobre la cintura), as a rite and ceremony of the law of Moses and as his own observance,” a ritual of which I have never heard nor found documentation.31 On the other hand, keeping in mind the usual inquisitional context, all of those who denounced Pinto were themselves under suspicion by the local tribunal for one reason or another. Protesting that they know nothing did not spare them in the least. One Portuguese merchant in Cartagena, Luis Gomes Barreto, tried in 1636 by the local inquisitorial tribunal, includes Pinto among the group of Portuguese merchants who got together to conduct business—they were all involved with one or another aspect of the slave trade—though he denies that any discussions of or observance of things Jewish took place.32 Barreto relates that the group met at Pinto’s ranch (estancia) around 1630, on which occasion the Archdeacon and Senior Inquisitor were among those present (making it hard to believe anything unsuitable happened).33 Another Portuguese merchant, Manuel Álvarez Prieto, arrested in April 1636, names Pinto as “his capital enemy” as the rack on which he was strapped was given a second, more excrutiating tightening. As the rack tightened, Álvarez Prieto accuses Pinto of accusing him falsely and insists that he knows nothing of any Fraternity of Holland (a nation comprising Spain’s own capital enemy; the fraternity is discussed below). Through seven turns of the rack’s wheel (his screams duly recorded by the scribe) Álvarez Prieto offers nothing more substantive, though the Inquisition surgeons confirm that both arms have been broken (by July he is dead).34 According to the tribunal’s summary, Álvarez Prieto called Pinto a Jewish judaizer, but later retracted his accusation.35 Finally, it is odd that Pinto is considered by some of his denouncers to be the group’s ‘rabbi,’ since it seems from 30 The text pertaining to Judaism is reprinted in Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 52–5. 31 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 504r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:439. Is it possible Pinto knew of some recommendation of this posture, a means of avoiding touching one’s genital area, from the Jewish pietistic or mystical tradition? 32 AHN Inq. 1620/18, fol. 265–67; reprinted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 283. 33 Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 283. 34 AHN Inq. 1620/15; reprinted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 308–12. 35 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 503v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:439.

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the documentation that others knew and practiced much more than he. Still, enough of the Portuguese Conversos confirm the gatherings at Pinto’s house that it seems likely that they indeed occurred, though whether they were social affairs or ritual events remains murky. At first Pinto claims not to know “what caste he was,” i.e., whether any of his parents or grandparents were Conversos, and he denies, through all of eight audiences, being anything other than a good Catholic. Submitting challenges to the witnesses for the prosecution, all unknown to him, the results, according to the inquisitors, yield “nothing in his favor.”36 Continuing to deny all of the charges, the inquisitors and four consultants voted to apply torture in the hope of extracting a confession corroborating the charges they take as truth.37 After two turns of the rack’s belts—or three quarters of an hour—Pinto “wished to confess the truth entirely,” stating that he has been “judaizing” for thirty years, since his time in Lisbon, where he was taught by a woman named Violante Duarte.38 He says that “he had fasted Wednesdays and Fridays of some weeks,” kept Saturday sabbaths as a festival, putting on new clothes, and avoided eating pig whenever possible.39 He names many of the group of Portuguese merchants with whom he would gather to perform rites and “to confess the fast days that they kept”: Juan Rodríguez Mesa, Francisco Rodríguez de Solís, Manuel de Fonseca, Manuel Álvarez Prieto, Manuel de Acosta, Alvaro de Silvera, Francisco Piñero, Luis Gómez Barreto, Francisco de Heredia, Antonio Rodríguez Ferrerín and Antonio de Acosta. He also denounces as judaizers Amaro Denis, already imprisoned by the Lima tribunal, and the slave traders and brothers Juan Rodríguez de Silva and Jorge de Silva. He claims that it was Álvarez Prieto, whom he met in Angola, who convinced him to keep the law of Moses, “which was the good one for saving oneself in it,” and who taught it to him again. This odd formulation could mean that Álvarez Prieto refreshed his knowledge or taught him more than he knew previously or that Pinto was merely spinning tales for the inquisitors. He implies that AHN Inq. 1620, fol. 504r.–v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:439–40. AHN Inq. 1620, fol. 505r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:440. 38 AHN Inq. 1620, fol. 505v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:441. The time of the torture session appears on fol. 506r. 39 AHN Inq. 1620, fol. 505v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:441. The weekday fasts of Marranos comprised a rather flexible system, some fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, some one day a week, others any day(s) they chose (see Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 396–7). 36 37

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Rodríguez Mesa’s house served as the main gathering place for this group, that Rodríguez Mesa would often conduct ceremonies in which scriptural passages were read and said that “the promised messiah has not come.”40 Despite being tortured, it seems Pinto gave his inquisitors only bits of information regarding others.41 Some of the details of Pinto’s confession make it appear convincing that he knew something about Marrano beliefs and practices. The confession of the fast days to one another was not an element of the edictos de fé and would not likely have been known by non-Conversos. In addition, the charges against the other sentenced Portuguese Conversos show impressive variation.42 Most of the components of Pinto’s admission were standard fare, however, and would have been known by most Iberians. Of course, just because Pinto knew these details does not mean he observed them, nor can one jump to conclusions because of the knowledge or activities of others in his sphere. It could well have been the accumulated pressure of his imprisonment and trial, and, finally, his torture, that brought forth this gush of information. He could well have learned in the Inquisition jail just which Portuguese New Christians had been arrested and, possibly, even something of the charges against them all. A Mulato in the White Atlantic The only non-Portuguese who denounced Blas de Paz Pinto seems to have been the Mulato Diego López, who had been arrested by the same tribunal for alleged crimes of his own. Almost all of our information regarding him comes from Inquisition sources. He informs his inquisitors that he is a surgeon.43 He was born in Cartagena in 1591 or 1592. As a slave he served in one of the city’s hospitals, either San Sebastián, then known also as San Juan de Dios, after the order that AHN Inq. 1620, fols. 505v.–506r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:441. The Suprema or Supreme Council of the Inquisition noted this and numerous other flaws in its review of the 1636 trial of Luis Gomes Barreto, conducted by the Cartagena tribunal (AHN Inq. 1620/9; reprinted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 275–6). 42 See, for instance, AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 1–48r., reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:39–85. 43 AHN Inq. Leg. 1620, quad. 7, no. 1, Testimonio de Los confessionas que ha hecho diego lopez cirujano presso en las carzeles secretas destes sto offio de la ynqon de cartagna de las yndias por brujo Hereje Apostata de mas sta ffe catolica (1634), fol. 2r. Lopez is treated in a study by now fairly outdated, Manuel Tejado Fernandez, Aspectos de la vida social en Cartagena de Indias durante el seiscientos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1954), esp. ch. 5. 40 41

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operated it, Espíritu Santo, founded in 1613, or San Lázaro, ordered founded in 1598. Espíritu Santo treated and housed incurables, the chronically ill and convalescent, San Lázaro received lepers and those suffering from sores/ulcers.44 López took advantage of this opportunity to enter the medical profession, which he practiced for his income once he obtained his liberty. It was not infrequent that Blacks and Mulatos acquired European medical skills through such servitude.45 Surgeons comprised a mixed lot, some considered merely bloodletters, others ‘full’ physicians. Still, all had only to obtain the license of a ‘simple’ protomédico, along with druggists and barbers. According to colonial legislation from 1605, their exam consisted of relevant questions concerning human anatomy, the variety of sores, old and new, headwounds and other serious sicknesses. If the questions were satisfactorily answered, the applicant had in addition to agree to cure the poor pro bono.46 Hence both Diego López and Blas de Paz Pinto ministered to slaves and the non-White population, though not always for similar motivations. The primary function of surgeons was to treat the blood and/or humors and to prescribe medications. Given the frequent lack of doctors, they often fulfilled the complete range of physicians’ functions.47 On 8 January 1633, López was incarcerated by the Holy Office on the testimony of nine witnesses, all women over twenty-five, who provided concrete accusations depicting him as a “heretical apostate witch [brujo].” In his first three meetings with his inquisitors he denied absolutely everything. On 7 April 1634, more than a year after having been imprisoned, López began to confess his crimes and to name accomplices.48 In the course of these confessions a number of local “Jews” make an appearance, including Pinto.

44 Jairo Solano Alonso, Salud, cultura y sociedad: Cartagena de Indias, siglos XVI y XVII (Bogota: Fondo de Publicaciones de la Universidad del Atlántico/Colección de Ciencias Sociales Rodrigo Noguera Barreneche, 1998), 71, 75–6. 45 Concerning Santiago de Guatemala, see Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 90. 46 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 70. The author does not describe the nature of her sources. 47 Solano Alonso, Salud, cultura y sociedad en Cartagena, 103–15, 119–231; Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 71. 48 Testimonio de Diego López, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 1–3r. All reproduced in Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 307–23 (Appendix 3, “Testimonio de las confesiones del mulato Diego Lopez”).

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A close friend of López’s and a lover of his beginning in 1627, if not earlier, despite his being married, was the Mulata Rufina. Rufina, a slave of Clara Núñez and her husband, Rafael Gómez, not only participated in the magical practices that claimed the involvement of a good number of the city’s women and men, but stood as the only non-White permitted to participate in a select group of White practitioners of magic (brujas), all of whom had supposedly learned their skills from a Black woman named Paula de Eguiluz. Rufina even served as a kind of aide to this famous Eguiluz.49 As Mulatos in an urban setting, López and Rufina represented and enjoyed a cultural integration, social mobility and economic opportunity that, while limited by factors of race, went far beyond the world of bozal slaves trapped amid mines or plantations.50 Diego López and Rufina had a tempestuous relationship. Imprisoned, he denounces her as one of the “enemies” whose testimony had landed him in trouble.51 She had attempted to wreak vengeance on a new lover he had taken. And in a fit of anger and jealousy when his wife delivered a baby, causing a temporary separation between the former lovers, she used her magical powers to threaten him that the baby would die shortly, which it did.52 (The married López’s lovers are listed in one of his audiences: first Juana Hortensio, then Rufina, slave of Amador Pérez, later ‘our’ Rufina, slave of Rafael Gómez, and finally Ana María of Jamaica, against whom Rufina sought vengeance.)53 Still, López and ‘our’ Rufina seemed to be constant companions. Fascinating Jews One mutual interest of Rufina and López, mostly instigated by Rufina’s determined curiosity, at least according to López’s narration, consisted of spying on the city’s suspected crypto-Jews. Rufina appears to have delighted in spreading gossip about who might be a Jew (and acting on it), telling Diego, for instance, 49 A full treatment of Eguiluz, born on the island of Santo Domingo to a Biafran mother, and her circle is offered by Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 599–615, 623–5, 629, 647–9, 704. 50 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 590–4. 51 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 3v. 52 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 32v–33r. 53 Testimonio de Diego López, AHN Inq. leg. 1620/7/1, fol. 51.

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chapter three that an old woman who is Portuguese and who lives in the street with the rest [of the Portuguese (?)], in some low houses of Juana Colón, also Portuguese, mother-in-law of Miguel de Chabes, is a Jew and communicates with the mother-in-law of Rafael Gómez, whom he nows remembers is called Beatriz López and similarly that the mother-in-law of doctor Báez was a Jewess and all three communicated in secret.54

The self-interest motivating at least part of Rufina’s curiosity can be gleaned from the appearance of the mother-in-law of her master, Rafael Gómez, and mother of her mistress, Clara Núñez, in this listing of alleged secret Jews, a miniscule portion of the detailed and colorful gossip about secret Jews (among other things) that Rufina shared with Diego. It should be recalled that even as mere Portuguese, these individuals were considered outsiders and suspect, especially as Portuguese hostility to the union of Spain and Portugal (1580–1640) grew. Other episodes of spying on her mistress and master and their local relatives suggest that her interests in the religious life of her neighbors had roots in possibilities for improving her situation. But her persistent curiosity, stemming perhaps as much from ethnological interests as from ulterior motives, led her to understand the importance of “knowing other people’s lives,” an importance encouraged by the Inquisitions and reflecting precisely the inquisitionally-sponsored confluence of ‘neutral’ ethnology and self-interested ideology.55 Rufina’s interest in discovering and uncovering the goings-on of those she thought might be Jews spread outward and enveloped Diego López in ways beyond sharing rumors. The Évora-born Blas de Paz Pinto, whom Rufina calls on one occasion, perhaps sarcastically, her or Diego’s friend, became a focal point of her interest. She told Diego that the Portuguese have a synagogue at his house and that desirous that this one [Diego] see something of what they read at the gatherings which she knew they secretly had [. . .] sometimes at night and others at midday, she went up to call the accused [Diego] [. . .] and, accompanying the accused [Diego], the said mulata went ahead and

54 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 13v.–14r.; quoted in Tejado Fernandez, Vida Social en Cartagena, 316. 55 On “knowing other people’s lives” in the inquisitional context, see Joseph H. Silverman, “On Knowing Other People’s Lives, Inquisitorially and Artistically,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (eds.), Cultural Encounters: the Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 157–75.

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entered and then came out and said to this one [Diego]: “now is a good time, go in and see what they are doing.56

From the way Rufina went into the house it would appear that she had entry, that is, that she was familiar to either Pinto himself or, more likely, a member or members of his household staff. These situations remind us of the relative freedom of mobility possessed by those who lived on the margins of respectable society. As Diana Luz Ceballo Gómez writes, “certain service slaves, for example, visit the world of the blacks, that of their own masters and that of the masters of other blacks; they enter the houses, bearing messages and orders, go to the market to shop and enter into contact with the merchants, go freely about the city.”57 Diego, finding the door closed, had to go around to the house of Martín Sánchez in front, where he remained until five in the afternoon.58 But the street windows of the Pinto house stayed shut the whole time “and the slaves of the above-mentioned [Pinto] were posted at attention in places, in order not to allow entry to anyone who came to do business with him.” Eventually, around five o’clock, Diego saw “ten men, more or less,” exit the house, among them some he knew.59 Some time around 1629, perhaps when the two were still lovers, Rufina told Diego that he should go visit Paz Pinto, who was ill and that [Diego] said to her, “what sickness does he have?” and she responded that he was like her, he was menstruating and not understanding what the said mulata had told him, he went to the house of the said Blas de Paz and, asking him about his sickness, he told him the cause and that he was bleeding, and that he [Diego] should see whether he [Blas] had some hemorrhoids or some inflamation in the rear and this one [Diego] looked at him and told him that he had no inflamation, with which he ordered this accused [Diego] to go look at the blood, which was in a silver basin and before he did the abovementioned, the said mulata Rufina had said to this accused [Diego] that the said Blas de Paz had covered his toilet with a linen on which was an image of a saint with a

56 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 14r., 17v.; quoted in Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 316, 319–20. 57 Ceballo Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 54. 58 Sánchez, seeing what López is doing, and knowing “that the accused [Diego] was a friend of the said Blas de Paz, asked him if he came to speak with his friend.” 59 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 17v.–18r.; quoted in Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 320.

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chapter three diadem and [with] the cloth of the toilet over the said image and that he would sit on it when he went.60

Given the opportunity, López says he looked at the toilet, finding exactly what Rufina had predicted. Though he claims he could not identify the particular saint, he saw that the image wore a habit of Saint Francis and was a youth. The inquisitors’ report about the auto de fé in which the late Pinto appeared speculated that “according to everyone it was understood that it was Saint Antonio, of whose confraternity [Pinto] was superintendent [majordomo].”61 In other words, Pinto’s existence was taken to be not only schizoid—a Jew pretending to be Christian, the inner life differing from the outer—but to comprise a complete and absolute self-negation, intent on destroying precisely that which it upheld, on upholding exactly that which it despised. Rufina’s description of Blas de Paz Pinto’s sickness draws on two related, often conflated traditions in Christian discourse. The first and earlier one held that Jews experienced hemorrhoids, bleeding from the anus, as a result of their denial of Christ, either permanently, or every Easter or Good Friday. The second posited that Jewish men menstruated, a theory going back at least as far as the thirteenth-century anatomist Thomas de Cantimpré and recurring among Christian thinkers into the seventeeth century, if not later.62 The former tradition was “imputed to the paradigmatic enemies of God” from late

60 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 16v.–17r.; cited in Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 318–9. 61 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 3r.–v., Relación del auto; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:39. 62 Willis Johnson, “The Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 273–95; John L. Beusterien, “Jewish Male Menstruation in SeventeenthCentury Spain,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73,3 (1999) 447–56; Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 64–5. Elliott Horowitz cites Irvin Resnick to argue that the myth first appeared in the thirteenth-century work of Jacques de Vitry, Historia orientalis (Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 194. Johnson emphasizes that “medical theorists, from Galen (130–199) to Arnold of Villanova (1240–1311), described menstrual and haemorrhoidal bleeding as interchangeable. This bleeding was part of a natural process in which the body rid itself ” of unhealthy humors (“Myth of Male Menses,” 288; see also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 107).

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antiquity through the middle ages: Judas, Arians/heretics, and Jews.”63 Continues Johnson: This idea may well have originated when the heresiarch Arius died by prolapse—the herniated extrusion of the intestines—in a public toilet in Alexandria. This death was interpreted by his contemporaries as a divine condemnation of Arius’s teachings regarding the physical body of Christ, and exegetically equated with the mysterious bursting of Judas’s belly (Acts 1:18) when he hanged himself. As symbolic betrayers of Christ, Jews were exegetically linked with Judas and Arius in many texts through the middle ages. In the twelfth century, a consolidation of Church power that led to the eventual demonization of the Jews coincided with the arrival in the West of the elaborately theorized humoral medicine of the Arabs. Numerous sources from this period reflect a rationalization and medicalization of the formerly religious symbolism of Jewish bleeding. By the thirteeth century, these traditional associations had evolved into a belief in the annual bleeding of Jews at Easter. For more than a century these two ways of understanding the Jewish flux coincided and occasionally reinforced each other. Jews were thought to suffer a disabling bloody flux from their anuses in annual commemoration of the killing of Christ.64

These theories witnessed a revival in seventeenth-century Spain and Portugal, where Old Christians wielded them against suspected cryptoJews, whose increasing invisibility heightened fears of their invidiousness. In early 1632, the Spanish court official Juan Quiñones submitted a memorandum to the Inquisitor General Antonio de Sotomayor, suggesting methods for discovering whether a New Christian was a judaizer: [. . .] every month many of them suffer a flowing of the blood from their posterior parts, as a perpetual sign of infamy and shame . . . Many authors say therefore that when Pilate said, as Saint Matthew relates, that he was innocent of the Just One’s blood, all those Jews who shouted and said let his blood be on them and their children, they and all their descendants remained with the blemish, plague, and perpetual sign so that every month they suffer a flow of blood like women . . . The sign is nothing more than making a mark (on something) so that it is different from others, so that it is not confused with them . . . and when recognition

63 Johnson, “Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” 275. On the symbolic potency of Judas, see, for example, Othlon de Saint-Emeran (11th cen.): “these things that have been said concerning Judas the traitor extend to the entire Jewish people” (David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], 62, n. 79). 64 Johnson, “Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” 275.

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chapter three is difficult from the look of the face, one should resort to the hidden signs that are on the body.65

Quiñones had composed his treatise attempting to prove the myth of Jewish male menstruation as an intervention into a particular Inquisition trial. Quiñones’s allegation accompanied a wave of similar insults against ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewish’ doctors in the course of the movement for strengthening purity of blood statutes.66 The year before, a translation of a Portuguese anti-Jewish tract announced that some “say that on holy [i.e., Good] Friday all the Jews, male and female, have that day a flux of blood, and for that reason almost all are of a palid color.”67 65 Juan de Quiñones, Memorial de Juan de Quiñones dirigido a Fray Antonio de Sotomayor, inquisidor general, sobre el caso de Francisco de Andrada, sospechoso de pertenecer a la raza judía, discutiendo sobre los medios de conocer y perseguir a ella (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, VE, box no. 16, 1632); translated in Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 3; on Quiñones and his tract, see also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 122–33. 66 Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Torquemada had convinced Ferdinand and Isabella to reinstate a 1412 statute forbidding the employment of Jewish physicians. In Mallorca, Conversos had been prohibited from practicing medicine, pharmaceutics or phlebotomy in 1488 (Antonio Contreras Mas, Los médicos judíos en la Mallorca bajomedieval: Siglos XIV–XV [Palma de Mallorca: Miquel Font Editor, 1997], 105). 67 Discurso contra los judíos traducido de lengua portuguesa en castellano por el Padre Fray Diego Gavilán Vela (Salamanca, 1631); cited in Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, 218, n. 2. This text is discussed and excerpted at length in Josette Riandère La Roche, “Du discours d’exclusion des juifs: Antijudaïsme ou antisémitisme?” in Les problèmes de l’exclusion en Espagne, XVI–XVII siècles, ed. Agustín Redondo (Paris: Sorbonne, 1983), 51–75. The original Portuguese version is Vicente da Costa Mattos, Breve discurso contra a heretica perfidia do iudaismo, continuada nos presentes apostatas de nossa sante Fe, com o que conuem a expulsao dos delinquentes nella dos Reynos de sua Magestade, co suas molheres & filhos: conforme a Escriptura sagrada, Santos Padres, Direito Ciuil, & Canonico, & muitos dos politicos (Lisbon: P. Craesbeeck, 1622); for Jewish menstruation, see 131r–v. The translator to Spanish, Gavilán Vela, was the Bishop of Lugo. According to Yerushalmi, the same accusation later appeared in Francisco de Torrejoncillo, Centinela contra judíos (Pamplona, 1691), 174 (From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 128). Franco da Piacenza, a Jewish convert to Christianity, included in his 1630 catalogue of “Jewish maladies” the charge that Jewish men and women of the lost tribe of Simeon menstruated four days a year. “In placing the menstruating male Jew in the exotic world of the lost tribes (the New World), he substantiated the charge of Jewish difference while freeing himself from the stigma of difference” (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 75). See also Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsión justificada de los moriscos españoles (1612), cited in Beusterien, Jewish Male menstruation, 451–2. Even the English member of Parliament Edward Spencer used such notions. Arguing that the Jews should only be readmitted to England if they repent for their crucifixion of Christ, he asked rhetorically: “have not all of you a bloody issue about your bodies, [. . .] and doe not the Italians say, they smell a Jew before they discerne him with their eyes?” (Edward Spencer, A Briefe Epistle to the Learned Manasseh Ben Israel. In Answer to his, Dedicated to the Parliament. September. 6 [London: John Downame, 1650], 10).

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Similar charges had been raised already in a 1604 text: “[T]he Jews suffer permanently from hemorroides and from ‘an anal flux of blood and they are called circumcized because they clean their anus with their fingers.”68 Gerónimo de la Huarta (or Gómez de Huarta; 1573–1643), personal physician of King Felipe IV (reigned 1621–1665), proposed applying purity of blood statutes in the medical profession, a field often seen as monopolized by Jews, a proposal not unconnected to his scientific opinion about “the putrid odor of the Jewish physician caused by his murder of Christ, his permanent condition of hemorrhoids, and the flux of anal blood on his bare fingers.”69 In Portugal, in particular, Old Christians were said to prefer disease or even death to treatment at the hands of a Converso doctor. In short, we have here a discourse constructing Judaism as “one of the incurable diseases,” in the early sixteenth-century words of the exiled Spanish-Jewish author Solomon ibn Verga.70 Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, by the fact that when the charges against Blas de Paz Pinto are drawn up by the tribunal, both in 1636 and when re-presented in 1651, the one regarding male menstruation heads up the list.71 It is as if the inquisitors find this “condition” the strongest proof of Pinto’s Jewishness. Rufina, an illiterate slave in Cartagena de Indias might well have picked up the rumor of Jewish flux somewhere, which would indicate that the pseudo-scientific myth had a life beyond ‘elite’ thinkers in

T. Malvenda, De Antechristo (Rome, 1604), 513; quoted in Henry Méchoulan, El honor de dios: Indios, judíos y moriscos en el siglo de oro (Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, 1981), 158. 69 David B. Ruderman, “The Community of Converso Physicians: Race, Medicine, and the Shaping of a Cultural Identity,” in David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 290; Méchoulan, Honor de dios, 138–41. Neither Méchoulan nor Yerushalmi gives the date of Huarta’s proposal, though it might stem from his Problemas filosóficos (Madrid: Iuan Goncalez, 1628), 12 and following. Physicians from other suspect minorities suffered from growing Iberian intolerance as well. By the late sixteenth century, Morisco physicians were being accused of poisoning and maiming their Old Christian patients, as often had been alleged regarding Converso doctors, and there was a growing demand that Moriscos be excluded from medical schools (Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 [ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 258). 70 Shlomo ibn Verga, Shevet Yehuda, ed. A. Shochat ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1947 [orig. 1554]), 129; cited in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 32. 71 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 503r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:438; AHN Inq. 1601/18, fols. 40–43v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 231–4. 68

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Europe.72 The notion probably did not come from a book produced in Cartagena, in any case, as the city possessed no printing press for most of its history before the nineteenth century.73 In this case, Rufina’s magico-medical knowledge would have derived from acquaintances or even her mentor Paula de Eguiluz, who might have learned of these notions about Jews from someone in the medical field. Indeed, Eguiluz, who had been arrested twice by the Cartagena Inquisition, in 1624 and 1632, was sentenced at her first trial to working in the city’s hospital, among other penalties, where she would also live.74 In fact, given the medical provenance of much of this discourse regarding Jewish male menstruation, it is just as likely that Diego López himself applied the theory to Blas de Paz Pinto on his own, perhaps even more likely, and simply blamed Rufina when standing before the inquisitors. López, after all, was trained as a surgeon and had worked in one of the city’s hospitals, a site where continental “medical” theories regarding Jewish male menstruation likely would have been discussed. Though Cartagena does not seem to have had a facility teaching medicine, it hosted one of the era’s most innovative surgeons, Pedro López de León, of Seville, for twenty four years. In 1628 he published the book he wrote while in Cartagena, Theory and Practice of Abscesses.75 Ceballos Gómez points to our Diego López as an 72 I surmise Rufina’s illiteracy from the fact that, according to Diego López, she several times asked him to spy on Paz Pinto for her by trying to determine the book from which the people in the latter’s house seemed to be praying, “since you know how to read,” i.e. she did not (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fol. 19v., see also fol. 20r.). 73 In 1777, the Inquisitors of Cartagena complained that the Edicts of the Faith needed to be copied by hand because the city’s only press had been sold by its desperately poor owner (Letter of the Inquisitors José Umeres and Juan Félix de Villegas, 11 October 1777; Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 378, n. 1). Medina’s history of printing in Cartagena thus begins only in 1809, without mention of any early modern publishing in the city ( J.T. Medina, La imprenta en cartagena de las indias 1809–1820 [Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1904]. 74 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 602, 612. According to a 1622 letter, consignment to the “general hospital” to serve the patients alongside the Capuchin brothers seems to have been the punishment meted out to four other Afroamerican practitioners of magic, because “nowhere [else] did they want to receive them” (Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 122). 75 Alonso, Salud, cultura y sociedad en Cartagena, 65–6; Pedro López de León, Pratica y teorica de las apostemas en general y particular. Questiones, y praticas de cirugia, de heridas, llagas, y otras cosas nuevas, y particulares (Sevilla: Luys Estupiñan, 1628). The idea of Jewish male menstruation does not appear in the most oft-used text of surgery, Juan Fragoso, Cirugia universal (Madrid, 1581), reprinted and expanded in several editions.

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example of an individual who is both a cultural intermediary as well as himself a bearer of several biological/cultural traditions, who even comes to learn his practice “alongside a doctor instructed in the Mediterranean tradition” of medicine.76 The local mistress of magic, Paula de Eguiluz, could be characterized similarly. Though clearly working with African and Amerindian knowledge and practices, as shown by Maya Restrepo, according to Ceballos Gómez, If at first [Eguiluz] did not know the details and twists and turns of the imaginary of European diabolical witchcraft, by the end of her first trial she will know the basics and, by the conclusion of the third she will be the greatest expert, “educating” in these matters her aquaintances [. . .] between [her] trials, but also conducting an exchange of magical recipes and love potions with other people in Cartagena [. . .] or instructing her alleged accomplices in what they should declare before the inquisitors.77

It is very likely that López and Eguiluz had come to know one another while each worked at the hospital, despite the fact that López blames Rufina for introducing him to Eguiluz’s circle of magical practitioners. Sharing this knowledge between them, or perhaps acting on his own, the interest of the ‘scientifically’-oriented López was piqued enough to spur him to take advantage of a chance to investigate its truth. Without mentioning Rufina’s mandate, López examines Paz Pinto and tells him that he has no inflamation. His bleeding comes from another cause, implicitly supporting the notion that he is menstruating due to supernatural reasons.78 Indeed, López’s diagnosis that Pinto lacked any medically-observable ailment became the basis for the first of the Inquisition’s sixteen charges against the alleged judaizer: a certain person urging another to go visit Blas de Paz, who was sick, [. . .] and examining him with care, the said person found that he had no sort of inflamation, because of which it is to be believed that the said Blas de Paz is a descendant of those who, with shouts, said “crucify

Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 55. Ceballo Gómez, Sociedad y prácticas mágicas, 465. Maya Restrepo, on the other hand, convincingly argues that Eguiluz was familiar, as were other Black or Mulata Caribbean brujas, with the magical recipes and incantations proffered in the Mediterranean/ European magical discourse attributed through the centuries in a variety of evermorphing texts to King Solomon (Brujería, 615–38). 78 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fol. 16v. 76 77

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chapter three [him], let his blood be upon us and upon our children [Matt. 27:23, 25],” and because of which blood goes over him [probably alluding to Matt. 23:35].79

These words of the inquisitors resemble the framing of this whole issue in Quiñones (and earlier authorities) suspiciously closely, down to the invocation of the verses from Matthew. It seems difficult to believe that the illiterate Rufina or even López would have been aware of such theological contexts and connections. The allusion to the Christological punishment of Jewish men for their alleged deicide comes in Latin, but the framing of the episode would appear to point right to López as the author of this charge against Pinto and its formulation. Yet it is not just the formulation of the quoted or paraphrased learned officials which should rouse curiosity. The structure of the entire investigation conducted by López and Rufina appears to be a concrete application of the hermeneutic suggestion proposed by Quiñones: “when recognition is difficult from the look of the face, one should resort to the hidden signs that are on the body.” Knowledge is Power; the Gaze of the Invisible Rufina’s hand should not be dismissed too quickly, however. Like the later fairly well-known Marie Laveaux of New Orleans, Rufina, though still a slave, reigned over a kind of fiefdom.80 Rufina held a prominent place in the quasi-African magical gatherings headed up by Paula Eguiluz. Like Marie Laveaux, Rufina, too, was highly attentive to gossip, controlling it, encouraging it, cultivating it. Both women understood that knowledge is power and put this understanding into practice. Discussing other cases in Cartagena, Ceballos Gómez calls attention to the way Blacks testify in the trials against white women and fabricate rumors against them; contrary to Indians, who have keeping quiet as a virtue, they are talkers, prone to gossip and appear with too much frequency as witnesses in the criminal trials, with their world populated by spirits and

Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 232, who reproduces all of the charges against Pinto, 231–234. 80 Ina Johanna Fandrich, The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (New York: Routledge, 2005). 79

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curses, intriguing against the rest. The slaves talk, comment and return the vox populi that certain whites are brujas.81

When Rufina tells López that Pinto’s house serves as a synagogue, Diego asks her how she knows this. She “responded that every day she hears many things about this in her house [that is, the house of her Portuguese masters Rafael Gomez and Clara Nuñez] and through this she knows.”82 According to López, Rufina had told him that one older Portuguese woman had “gone out in an auto de fe” and that Rufina’s master’s mother-in-law, also Portuguese, “was a descendent of Hebrews.”83 After detailing one episode of spying with Rufina on her master’s mother-in-law, who was supposedly abusing a small Christ on a crucifix, an accusation commonly lodged against New Christians, López informs the inquisitors that “Rufina always said with admiration that were one to touch this material it would certainly bring ruin,” an allusion to the potential harm such knowledge of others’ behavior could wreak, as well as Rufina’s seeming enjoyment of this power.84 Diego López seems to have been just as curious to know about other people’s lives and just as active in gathering information, if his confessions to the inquisitors have any truth in them. Passing the house of one Portuguese whom Rufina has told him “was a Jew when he came from Spain,” López supposedly sees him or his young son urinating on an image of the Virgin. López investigates, “in order to better satisfy myself.”85 It appears that he was even caught several times nosing into the business of others. One time, for instance, he comes across one of the men he suspects to be a judaizer sitting in the house of another suspected judaizer, reading a book. Seeing López enter, the man quickly hides the book under folds of cloth or curtain. Recalling Rufina’s allegations that this man was a Jew, López imagines that that must be some book of his Law and the said man who reads in the book having been called upstairs, [López] remained in the corridor that goes down to the patio where he had to stay until they advised him that he could come, and as he had the suspicion that he related, he took

Ceballo Gómez, Sociedad y prácticas mágicas, 299. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 15r. 83 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 15r. 84 “[S]iempre dixo la dcha Rufina con admiraçion que si tocaba en esta materia que de Ruina ha de aver” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 10r.). 85 Testimonio de Diego López, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 25r. 81 82

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chapter three the book with one hand and opened it with it and saw that the beginning of it said “Compilation of the Bible.”86

Perhaps because López was an ex-slave, perhaps because he was not White, it seems that the Portuguese whom he was surveilling either did not take the threat seriously or could do nothing about it given the necessity for him to carry out his tasks. In many instances, including this one, those being investigated make efforts to explain away things. The brother of João Rodrigues Mesa, finding López looking at the book, took the book with great speed and anger and put it under his arm, smiling with the said youth with the large nose, their voices all nervous/agitated, and J[oã]o Rodriguez Messa came out, saying that people came to other people’s houses not to conduct business but to see what was up, and [he said] this with much annoyance [. . .] and then Blas de Paz came to speak with [López] and made particular effort to ascertain whether he had seen what the said book contained.87

Pragmatically, López simply lies to him, pretending that he saw nothing, while Pinto tries to make it seem that the privacy of business accounts are what is at stake, in what can be read as a kind of patronizing effort at manipulation. It seems to have been quite clear to López at least what he had done.88 A long time after an incident in which López claims to have rebutted some anti-Christian remarks by the father of Rufina’s mistress, the man (whose name López cannot recall) asks López if he remembers their exchange; again López simply lies and says he remembers nothing.89 The Inquisition as an institution thus did not merely function as a neutral observer. As in quantum physics, the presence of an observing entity actually determined matters to some degree, fanning personal inquisitiveness, producing new opportunities, within the context of the very structure of the socio-economic hierarchy to produce a war of all against all. Again Ceballos Gómez excellently captures the way pressures led people to Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 22r.–v. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 22r.–v. 88 “y aviendole dho que no le dixo que se baxasse abaxo que no querian estos hombres que nadie viesse sus qtas en dhos libros dando Con esto a entender a este que era Libro donde estaban Armadas quentas Con lo qual aquel dia no se effetuo La Compra de las liquidas que yba a Comporar por el alboroto que se avia Caussado Con el Libro, si bien tubo effecto de alli a un mes sin volver a su cassa” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 22v.–23r.). 89 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 24v. 86 87

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unburden their emotions/grudges in gossip and slanders, among whites to stand out in order to win the favor of the king or of the officials—in order to improve one’s position, to obtain mercy or expediting—and among blacks procuring the appreciation of the masters—in order to get better work and be assigned less arduous labor, [all this] had to have created a conflictual environment.90

A case of feared witchcraft that exercised the authorities of Cartagena in 1565 serves as an excellent model for understanding the gathering of information by Rufina and the denunciations made by López. A 25-year-old Black slave woman, Guiomar, taken from Africa at the age of 10 or 12, seems to have suffocated or drowned various children of the household in which she served, as well as committing other acts of magical terrorism, in order that her master sell her. Ceballos Gómez, who studied the case of Guiomar and her accomplice, an older Black slave named Bartolomé, finds that throughout the trial Guiomar manifests “a profound hatred toward whites, justifying her acts and her accusations against other blacks by the harmful actions of the masters: the mistreatment, the excessive work to which they were subject, having to raise the masters’ children and look after their sustenance, the fact that they would have slaves or, simply, the fact that someone would not want to liberate a slave.” Other Blacks who were interrogated (many by the province’s Governor, no less) confirmed the sentiments, hoping to “improve their situation [by] giving to their masters herbs so that they would wish them well, others working sensibly so that their master would liberate a child or in order to win his appreciation.”91 Both Bartolomé and Guiomar confess their having gone out to kill “all the people of Cartagena.”92

Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 141–42. Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 131–32, but see the whole section on this episode, 125–54. All of the above motivations came into play with many forms of African magic used by slaves; on the Portuguese world, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 164–88. 92 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 135. Other slaves recognized Guiomar’s uniquely deep hatred, having heard her say things such as that she “would eat all [her master’s] blacks” (132). Sweet discusses an early eighteenth-century BrazilianPortuguese case in which a slave woman used incantations “to attack rival servants” and reads such attacks as “always more than a personal attack; it was also a strike against the master’s economic and social well-being” (Recreating Africa, 14, 171). 90 91

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chapter three The Meaning-Making of Afroiberian Magic

Similar motivations seem to have pushed Rufina and Diego López. Their participation in the local circles of brujería—López only from 1628 or so, according to his own testimony93—reflect their anti-establishment sentiments and acts of counter-hegemonic disobedience, grounded on their understanding that the law and establishment entailed a system fundamentally xenophobic and slave-based. Through a thoroughly Africanist or Afroamericanist reading of seventeenth-century Nueva Granadan culture, Luz Maya Restrepo characterizes these groups of magical practitioners, which included non-Whites of all kinds and sometimes Whites as well, as engaging in “symbolic marronage.”94 Irene Silverblatt notes how the perceived ‘political’ threat of multicultural magic in Peru increased as the seventeenth century went on; “it was said that [witches] could stop royal officers from carrying out a sentence, or even inquisitors from pursuing a case.”95 The threat may well have been perceived accurately; Michael Taussig asserts that the “leaders of the palenques or runaway slave settlements were as likely as not to be wizards and witches, according to the official texts.”96 At the same time, African knowledge, herbological or pharmacological, for instance, served as a means by which the enslaved and the “colored” could sell their expertise, mostly to White Spaniards, and thereby reaffirm their personhood and escape to some degree the condition of objectification imposed on them.97

Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 32v. Maya Restrepo, Brujería. 95 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 263. 96 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 218. 97 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 503–4; on the Portuguese world, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 134–7, 145–59. Maya Restrepo shows, for instance, how Eguiluz utilized ritual gestures, verbal and otherwise, drawn from the Yoruba-influenced traditions surrounding the spirit/diety Exu (Brujería, 647–9). White admiration of African spiritual/magical powers was widespread. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, one poor Mexican castiza (half White, half Mestizo), Marta de la Encarnación, told an acquaintence that “she had traveled ‘in spirit’ to a sinful man she knew, ‘transformed as if she were a black woman [negrita] and told the man the story of his whole life and sins, warning him that he must amend his ways’ ” (cited in Jaffary, False Mystics, 48). This woman’s subliminal desire to be Black (she herself may have had some African ancestry) likely is connected to a positive perception of the relevant African prowess. Two other accused Mexican mystics shared similar visions/fantasies (ibid., 103–4). 93 94

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Both López and Rufina participated in Eguiluz’s circle, which met on the beaches and fields of Ciénaga de los Manzanillos/Swamp of the Manzanillos (a South American tree with fruit like an apple), near the city, as well as at the house of Elena de Viloria, in the city itself. One of the major, and first, charges against this group of non-Whites mentioned in the audiences of López is the “crimes, damages [. . .] which are notorious [. . .] which they [i.e., the entire group] have caused to many important persons in this Republic.”98 Even before joining these circles, claims López, Rufina had told him with seeming pride who the local brujas and brujos were, “some [of whom] were referring to the harmful acts that they had done.”99 Many of the murders and casting of spells attributed by López to this circle relate to romantic interests, which James Sweet interprets as efforts to gain “access to members of the opposite sex” by a population suffering from “the void in human contact and affection that was created by slavery.”100 Some of the group’s crimes seem connected to less positive motivations. Eguiluz allegedly had one of her minions kill a merchant named Hernando Godo Mexia for reasons left unstated.101 Some of the acts perpetrated by Eguiluz herself and others within her circles include mockeries of or attacks on representations of Catholicism in various local churches. Charges from the 1630s as well as from her first trial in 1624 point to other classic forms of satire or rebellion, that is, acts of symbolic or real marronage.102 Supposedly finding out that Rufina disinterred a recently-buried infant girl for nefarious purposes, López accuses her of carrying out acts of horrifying audacity. She, in turn, lays all the blame on her superior in magic, Paula de Eguiluz: “who inspires us to [do it] all, as with [other] similar cases.”103 In what might be an indication of the sway Eguiluz Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 2r. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 32v. 100 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 175. The truth is that much of the magic practiced by Whites also pertained to romance and sexuality; see Behar, “Sex and Sin.” 101 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 37v. 102 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 605; for examples of “politically”-motivated attacks by members of other groups ( juntas) of magical practitioners, on domestic slaves, for example, see 556–62. Similarly, Christopher Lutz reads the frequent larcenies committed by non-Whites of Santiago de Guatemala as acts targetting the city’s Spanish elites (Santiago de Guatemala, 43). 103 “Los mios no lo son sino los de Paula que nos anima a Todas y de semejantes cassos” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 35v.). Maya Restrepo reads the frequent acts of infanticide as resistance to enslavement and the slave system, and the use of various body parts of the dead as a component of African medico-magical practice (Brujería, 697–705; see also Sweet, Recreating Africa, 67). 98 99

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holds over her followers, when in front of the inquisitors, López seems afraid or unwilling to “believe the said Paula [is behind] any evil [deed] but rather her zamba,” whom he doesn’t name.104 At one of his first gatherings with Eguiluz’s junta, López is assigned, “as a companion” a “devil named Taravira, who appeared in the figure of a man dressed like an Indian,” to whom López pledges allegiance and whom he penetrates in anal sex, later confessing to bearing a mark on his left rear thigh, made as a demonstration of his loyalty to this “devil,” in the inquisitors’ terms.105 The fact that López’s spirit guardian was Amerindian points to the increasingly mestizo nature of the magical practices wielded by these Afroamericans as time went on and as they went from being bozales to becoming part of the cultural mix of their new setting. Things Amerindian possessed enormous potency for many non-Whites of Nueva Granada as a component of their symbolic marronage, subconscious or otherwise.106 López tells the inquisitors that “when he coupled with his devil Taravira and knew him from behind 104 “no fiarsse la dha Paula de ningna negra sino de sua zamba” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 36r.). Ultimately, Eguiluz was sentenced twice by the Cartagena tribunal, the second time in 1642, in trials that produced some 405 folios of documentation (Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 506). 105 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 6r.–v., 26r. A free Black woman, Potenciana de Abreu, also of Cartagena, describes a nearly identical mark—ritual scarification? a marriage pledge? a pact of resistance?—in her own 1635 inquisition trial (AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 467v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:420). 106 The Dominican friar Francisco de la Cruz also claimed to receive visits from a demon who appeared in the guise of an Amerindian (Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:517). In the 1620s, Juan de Mañozca y Zamora, one of the founders of the Cartagena tribunal in 1610 and inquisitor at Lima from 1624–1639, complained that the viceroyalty’s many magical practitioners who were not themselves Amerindian “were immersed in the customs and knowledge of the colony’s natives” (quoted in Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 261). This cultural interchange is traced in Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” esp. 261–8; Leo J. Garofalo, “The Ethno-Economy of Food, Drink, and Stimulants: The Making of Race in Colonial Lima and Cuzco (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001), 400–67; Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 659, reads the exchange of botanical and psychopharmacological expertise between Afroamericans and Amerindians as being more reciprocal, as does Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán for Mexico (Medicina y magia: El proceso de aculturación en la estructura colonial [Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1963]). Of course, the symbolic importance of things Amerindian for non-Amerindians entailed a continuation of the more basic cultural adoption of Amerindian comestibles, including coca or the native Andean alchoholic beverages, known to the Spanish as chicha, which was drunk and even sold by Africans and Spaniards alike (Mangan, Trading Roles, 83–6). Mañozca seems to have been of New World origin himself, having graduated from the University of Mexico in 1596 before studying canon law at Salamanca (Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 114). Due to irregularities, he was eventually removed from his position as inquisitor in Lima.

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he had more pleasure with him than as if he were with a woman”107 López’s statement might allude to the kind of proclivities, repressed in upstanding Catholic society, that were allowed, even encouraged to surface at such counter-cultural fora, but also to the intentionally contrarian nature of the acts embodying efforts to challenge or overturn, in whatever manner, an unjust socio-politico-economic system. It is telling that Rufina’s spirit companion is named Rompe sanctos/Breaks Saints.108 In the words of Maya Restrepo, [T]he Africans and their descendents rapidly understood the power that being the representation and incarnation of the devil in the land of the Christians conferred on them. In this mode, the image of the black soul, demonized by the masters, was utilized by the captives as a strategic apparatus in the context of Catholic colonial society. Paradoxically, the demonization constructed by the theologians and men of science of the epoch was converted into an implicit weapon most subversive of the imperial system.109

Denouncing Injustice? The interest of Rufina and Diego López in Blas de Paz Pinto thus may have stemmed from more than the latter’s allegedly prominent role in the Cartagena crypto-Jewish community. Though a surgeon by profession, the licenciado Pinto dealt in merchandise such as slaves. Many Portuguese in the Spanish Indies engaged in trading slaves, some as a lucrative supplement to their principle occupations.110 Pinto was part of the commercial network of Manuel Bautista Peres and his partner Sebastião Duarte, of Lima, whose firm was involved in transshipping slaves, silver mining in the Andean mountains, as well as the

Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 6v. This particular spirit, Taravira, was in all other cases assigned to women (Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 569). Rufina’s accord with her demon, Huebo, includes her having to permit it/him to penetrate her anally (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 34r.). For an interpretation of these companion spirits as a reconfiguration of personal sexuality, among other aspects of personhood, independent from the slave/racial economy, see Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 564–71. On the other hand, Sweet argues that same-sex relations were both common in Central African cultures and a response to the lack of available women in many slave settings, the latter clearly not the case here (Sweet, Recreating Africa, 50–8). 108 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, 33r. 109 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 502. 110 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:138. 107

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trade route between Acapulco and Manila.111 By no means, though, can Pinto be included among the more active slave traders, such that Garcia de Proodian, who delights in listing every ‘Jew’ who held the asiento for importing Black slaves into the Spanish New World, fails to list him.112 Perhaps he picked up this sideline while in Angola, where he resided after leaving Lisbon. Scholars suggest that New Christians, who were not allowed in the Americas by law, often took a circuitous route via Guinea or Angola, finding entry in the western hemisphere through Buenos Aires or elsewhere “under the guise of bringing along slaves.”113 Jonathan Israel suggests that Portuguese New Christians served as “agents of Lisbon contractors handling the slave trade” in order “both to emigrate and make money.”114 According to Israel, “most of the leading and middling 111 Nathan Wachtel, La Foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (France: Editions du Seuil, 2001), 83; Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 122. Bautista Peres stood among the wealthiest New Christian merchants of the Americas, estimated, along with Simon Váez Sevilla of Mexico City, to possess a fortune of over 200,000 pesos (AGN Inq. 409, fol. 381; Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 98; according to Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 124, Bautista Peres’ estate was “valued at about 650,000 ducats”). Pinto traded with Bautista Peres and Duarte through two brothers of the latter, Pedro Duarte and Paolo Rodrigues (Maria da Graça A. Mateus Ventura, “Los Judeoconversos portugueses en el Perú del siglo XVII: Redes de complicidad,” Familia, religión y negocio: El sefardismo en las relaciones entre el mundo ibérico y los Países Bajos en la edad moderna, ed. Jaime Contreras, Bernardo J. García García and Ignacio Pulido [Fundación Carlos de Amberes/Fernando Villaverde Ediciones, 2002], 400), as well as directly. On the African connections of Bautista Peres and Duarte, see Green, “Masters of Difference,” 223–7, 230–1. One of the New Christians who traded slaves and other commodities with Pinto and Sebastián Duarte was Tomás Rodrigues Barassa, associate and relative of Diogo Barassa, “one of the most powerful Portuguese residents in Cacheu,” on the West African coast (ibid., 217). According to Green, Pinto was so well known in Guinée that in 1637 “4 people testified in Cacheu that they recognized his handwriting” (ibid., 226). 112 Garcia de Proodian, Los judíos en America, 73. 113 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York/ Philadelphia: Columbia University Press/Jewish Publication Society of America, 1952– 83), 15:301; Dominguez Ortiz, Judeoconversos, 136; Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 135; Green, “Masters of Difference.” The prominence of “Jewish” slavers seems to lead Maria Ventura to claim that in old Veracruz, Mexico, “one of the principle destinations of the slaving routes, there existed a river named Espanta Judios [Scare off the Jews]” (Ventura, Negreiros portugueses, 37). One wonders whether similar considerations led to the naming of the “Jew’s shoal/Baixo da Judia” off of the Cape of Good Hope mentioned in at least one Portuguese shipwreck narrative (Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, 45–6). On the other hand, these toponyms could be wielding Jews as either (1) a demonic force whose animating hostility is attached to dangerous nautical passages or (2) as a metaphor for those too cowardly to face a difficult nautical situation. 114 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 102. Elsewhere he cites a 1608 tract by the Spaniard Pedro de Avendaño Villela which claims that it was the Portuguese New Christians “who navigate the coast and rivers of Guinea to ply the trade in negros”

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Portuguese crypto-Jewish merchants of New Spain seem to have got started in trans-Atlantic commerce in this particular way.”115 A glance through the 1630 list of foreigners in Cartagena reveals that a high number of the Portuguese there came by way of Guinea or Angola, many having served in one capacity or another on slave ships.116 Portuguese New Christians testifying (under one or another form of duress) to various inquisitional authorities in the Americas often cite Angola as a place where they were introduced to judaizing practices by a family member or friend.117 For instance, the 1641 confession of Gaspar de Robles to the Inquisition in Mexico City: as an adolescent, two uncles convinced him to sail with them in the slave trade to Angola, persuading him en route to believe in the Law of Moses. In Luanda, where they lived, their proselytization continued.118 Manuel Álvarez Prieto, a slave trader living in Cartagena, confessed in 1636 to the Inquisition there that some twenty years earlier, “being in Angola,” a business associate (now deceased) “taught him the Law of Moses.” He also mentioned as judaizing mentors “a scribe of the Angola contract, about whom they told him he left for The Hague” and “some priest . . ., who is in Guinea.”119 The Portuguese Converso Garci Méndez de Dueñas left Portugal around 1590 on a slaving ship to West Africa, “in the company of a certain Ruy Méndez”—a relative?—who, he later stated, had induced him, “in the sweltering heat of Guinea, to forsake

(135–36). The fact is that many slavers, even among the Portuguese, were not Conversos. 115 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 104; see the following pages, including the many individuals who had been in/through Angola, 106–7. Here Israel’s terminology is unfortunately vague; it remains the case that credible scholarship has yet to delineate the religious loyalties of most of these slave traders. 116 Relación y abecedário de los estrangeros que se hallan en la ciudad de Cartagena, reprinted in Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:31–77. 117 Jonathan Israel cites Eva Uchmany to the effect that Angola and Guinea were places where “many Portuguese New Christians were inducted, ‘converted’ or confirmed in crypto-Judaism” (Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 106; Eva A. Uchmany, “The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in the Conquest, Colonization and Trade of Spanish America, 1521–1660,” in Bernardini and Fiering, Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 198; Toby Green, “The Role of the Portuguese Trading Posts in Guinea and Angola in the ‘Apostasy’ of Crypto-Jews in the 17th Century,” in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, eds. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt (Bristol: Bristol University Press, June 2007), 25–40. 118 Lewin, Singular Proceso de Salomón Machorro, xii–xviii. 119 Printed in Tejado Fernández, Vida social en Cartagena, 186.

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Christianity and embrace Judaism.”120 Such allegations were easy to make, of course; West Africa was far away and often those featured in the accusations were already deceased. The only substantive remarks I have seen come from a Portuguese Jesuit visiting Angola in 1593, Pero Rodrigues, who reports the existence of a Torah in Luanda and the celebration of a Passover.121 Intriguingly, counter to the Inquisitions’ view, one Conversa of Mexico City complains about the disinterest of New Christian slave traders in preserving their tradition. Rafaela Enríquez, part of an extended family of judaizers (treated at length in later chapters), is accused of criticizing certain Portuguese masters/skippers of blacks who are carrying on romances with Old Christian women, not marrying with girls of the Law [of Moses]. [Rafaela,] Inveighing [against them] that they were in a bad state and that they rendered the children that they had with their girlfriends lost, without teaching them the law, which is the goal for which observers [of the law] are married to each other.122

Though never making explicit reference to race as a motivation for surveilling or denouncing Blas de Paz Pinto, Diego López and Rufina seem to have been well aware of the centrality of race in their own lives as well as of the racial context of Paz Pinto’s activities. At one point in 1629, Rufina’s masters beat or whipped another of their slaves, a Black named Pablos, to extract a confession that Rufina on occasion left the house at night to go sleep with López. As a consequence, Rufina fled the house, not returning for five or six days and the two lovers rendezvoused at night less frequently after this incident.123 In the wake of this, claims López, Rufina came up with a magical means of “taming” her masters.124 Along more mundane lines, López also claims to have given

120 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 105, citing García de Proodian, “Appendice documental,” 287. Irene Silverblatt brings more such examples in “New Christians and New World Fears in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 3 ( July, 2000): 545, n. 71. 121 Green, “Masters of Difference,” 146. 122 Testimony of an unnamed witness; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 364r. It is unclear whether the term Capitanes de negros refers to mere masters of slaves or actual ship captains. 123 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 33v. 124 “Vino a ver a este en Compañia de Ger ma sobrina de Juo Tellez que tambien era bruja y este la dixo que aguardas mulata como no buelles a mi cassa pues tienes alla los quatroçientos pessos que te he dado pa tu libertad a que La susodcha Respondio no tengas pena que yo tengo trazado Con que amansar a mis amos Y porque lo heches dever tu lo Veras Y este La dixo pues conque y ella le Respondio Yo Te embiare una

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Rufina four hundred pesos to buy her own liberty.125 Afterwards, she tried another magical means of “being able to leave her house more freely,” through an accord with a demon named Huebo arranged for her by Eguiluz. The demon was to assume her form and take responsibility for her tasks. In addition, the demon would help her ward off the unwanted advances of a White Spaniard, Diego López Arias, which, as a slave, she could not resist without negative consequences.126 The Black slave whom Rufina paid to help her kill another Black, Juana de Hortensia, ultimately “had not wanted to do her [ Juana] harm, being a daughter of Dominga Arara, of his own nation,” that is, Arara.127 Though López leaves the fact out from his own description of one of the magical gatherings where some of the participants were turned into pigs, the gathering had been called for the purpose of “mourning an old Black who died.”128 This eulogizing function, known as a lloro, lends yet another communal tint to the group’s activities. Maya Restrepo convincingly argues that the juntas of mixed-race individuals comprised “the new spaces and social administration of the captivity.”129

[. . .] seña [?] porque Paula de Eguiluz me ha enseñado un conjuro de doña Maria de Padilla quieres oyr le Y este dixo que no Y el dia sigte su edio que la dcha Rufina le embio un Razimo de ubas a este y fue Assi que sus amos Se aquietaron” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fols. 33v.–34r.). This may or may not refer to the time Eguiluz offered to give Rufina a bit of eucharist to mix in a chocolate drink in order to tame her mistress (ibid., 47v.–48r.). 125 The inconsistency of Lopez’s claims is difficult to resolve. Did she prefer her relatively secure slave condition under “tamed” masters? Did Lopez really give her the funds as he claims? Did she prefer to spend the money on other things? For example, she is said to have paid Eguiluz six pesos to teach her the above-mentioned spell, while later she supposedly paid one Black slave of Catalina de Castro, in silver, to put certain herbs at the threshold of the house of the Black Juana de Hortensia in order to kill her (ibid., 34r., 45v.). 126 “Rufina le dixo avia hecho un conçierto Con otro diablo que le avia traydo Paula de Eguiluz llamado Huebo y era El dho Conçierto que el dho diablo avia de Tomar La figura de la dha Rufina Y en ella avia de asistir en su cassa a todos los actos pa en que fuesse llamada assi para El serviçio de La cassa Como para asistir con diego lopez Arias su amo quando La fuesse a buscar para sus torpezas Y que enpago desto avia de Comer cal La dha Rufina y dexarse conoçer carnalmte por el vaso trasero Con el dho demonio huebo y que avia venido en el dho Contrato por poder mas Libremte salir de su Cassa quando quisiesse” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 34r.). Such magical means of coping with one’s servitude as cited here are attested throughout the Americas; see Palmer, “Religion and Magic, 322–3; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 164–71. 127 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 46r. 128 The information is supplied by Rufina, the free mulata of Doña Mariana de Armas; AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 389v.–390r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:351. 129 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 35; see also 542–75. 5

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The possibility of socializing—dancing, eating, frolicking together—was not an insignificant attraction as well; López and Juana de Ortensio each mention the tables laden with food and the fried fish consumed at the gatherings.130 Regarding Blas de Paz Pinto, it is difficult to believe that Rufina and López were not aware of the racial components of his commercial activities, even if they might not have known the details. In one audience López claims a visiting Portuguese youth had told him that Pinto had come to the Indies “via the Kingdom of Angola” because various family members had been hounded and punished by the Inquisition.131 In fact, Pinto had arrived from Angola, as a surgeon on a slave ship, bringing with him several slaves of his own, who evidently died of smallpox.132 According to López, Rufina had also told him that at one point there arrived in Cartagena “an important Jew/un gran Judio,” whom Pinto and “all the Portuguese” went to visit. He had come “on a ship of slaves.”133 Beyond a merely biographical link to Angola, Pinto negotiated the sale of slaves who arrived from Guinea, among other goods.134 He served as a physician to Blacks, but perhaps mostly in connection to his trade in sick slaves as an agent of Sebastião Duarte, partner and brother-in-law of Manuel Bautista Peres, one of the most active slave traders in the region.135 From around 1628 on, it seems Pinto became more directly incorporated into the commercial network of Bautista Peres.136 Pinto probably inspected the incoming slaves to determine which were healthy enough to be sold or distributed to their Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 580. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 20v. 132 Ventura, “Judeoconversos portugueses en el Perú,” 405, n. 21; idem, Portuguese no Peru, 1:171, 3:40. 133 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 20v. 134 He sold pearls to Simon Rivero and through him (AHN Inq. 1601/8, fols. 20–21; cited in Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 148). 135 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:398–99. On Duarte, see Mellafe, Introducción de la esclavitud, 169–81. 136 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:396. On Bautista Peres’s life, career and commercial activities, see ibid., 1:347–457, 2:16–93; Wachtel, Foi du souvenir, 79–101; StudnickiGizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea, throughout; Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 122–4; Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 47–53, 132–5, 145–8, 152, 157 and elsewhere. Inquisition sources allow Studnicki-Gizbert to surmise that Bautista Peres’s residence in Lima was “a good-size manse” housing, among others, “close to two dozen adult African slaves and their children: servants, maids, cooks, liverymen, porters, and stable hands.” Besides trading in slaves, he ran a general store in town and a hacienda outside of Lima at which worked 50 slaves that he had imported (Nation upon the Ocean Sea, 77, 109, 200, n. 45). Mentions of Pinto in the business letters between Peres, Duarte and others reprinted 130 131

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owners. In 1630 he tells the authorities that his work consists of “buying sick blacks and [those who are] rejected and that curing [them] he turns them over for sale.” At this point he himself owned five slaves.137 His work with non-Whites led to other forms of relationship. One Black woman named Ysabel de Ortega came to the authorities in 1636 to pay 90 pesos of 8 reales that she owed to Pinto.138 Another alleged judaizer that Diego López denounced to the tribunal was João Rodrigues Mesa, like Pinto a principal correspondent and factor of some of the Portuguese bankers in Seville.139 Ventura, basing herself on Bautista Peres’ business letters, estimates that Bautista Peres treated his human merchandise relatively well (primarily for financial reasons?) and cites communications to Pinto in which he informs him of illnesses among the slaves in his charge, as well as of the diligence with which he cares for their well-being.140 In his own, frequent letters to Sebastião Duarte, Pinto gives detailed updates on the health of the slaves in his charge.141 None of this alters the miserable conditions of the slaves’ transshipment, which necessitated such medical care in the first place. In a letter to Duarte, Pinto celebrates Duarte’s news in a previous letter regarding the good health of Bautista Peres and his household, mentioning in passing some deaths among the slaves: “even though I feel the death of [the] blacks, certainly much less lamentable than [the death of ] others/aunque siento la mortandad de negros si bien menos lastimado que otros.” Pinto refers to the death

by Maria Mateus Ventura can be found in Portugueses no Peru, 3:138, 142, 145–6, 148, 151, 163, 166–7, 185, 294, 296, 302–3; letters to/from Pinto: 3:170–2, 179–82. 137 Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:171, 3:41. Among the items Pinto fed his sick slaves were wine, oranges, grains and sugar. These were not cheap commodities but also did not guarantee the recovery of the slaves’ health (letter of Brás de Paz Pinto to Sebastião Duarte, 13 January 1634, AGN Inq., S.O., Co. caja 30, exp. 299, fols. 251–2; Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:431 and 3:172). Rolando Mellafe draws on a Memoria de las medicinas que han llevado para los negros del capitán don Sebastián Duarte, in the Archivo Nacional de Santiago, that offers a detailed glimpse of the kinds of treatments Pinto might have used (Mellafe, Introducción de la esclavitud, 177). 138 AHN Inq. 1601/8, fol. 21; cited in Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 148. 139 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 20v.; Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers, 123. 140 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:381; see also Mellafe, Introducción de la esclavitud, 174. The biographer of Pedro Claver, on the other hand, provides a harsh depiction of the general mistreatment of the slaves in the interest of increasing profits (Fernandez, Apostolica y penitente vida de el V.P. Pedro Claver, 105–7). 141 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 1:399.

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of a slave either named Brame or from the Bran nation (or both),142 which, he writes, “I feel as my own, as sir capitan Pedro Duarte [feels] that of the black girl but they are goods that have life and I beg God for life in order to serve it [ Him?]/Siento como mio la muerte del negro brame y como del señor capitan Pedro Duarte la negrita pero son bienes que tienen vida yo la pido a Dios para servirlo.”143 Pinto’s sentiments here hover between dismissal of the value of this human merchandise—better their death than one of ‘ours’—and recognition of their kinship as mortal beings, ‘goods’ to be bought and sold but also people. The last phrase is obscure, and could mean that Pinto prays to be able to make good use of his own life, the death of these slaves presenting him a kind of momento mori, or perhaps even prays on behalf of the dead negrita that God should look out for her. Pinto would seem to have been among the city’s wealthier residents, though he claims to have arrived from Angola poor, with only two of his slaves surviving the transoceanic passage.144 Among the goods deposited in his account after his arrest, either sequestered by the Inquisition from the inventory of his house or owed to him by others, were at least eight bars of gold and three of silver; a goblet, cruet and shaker of silver; a hairband of pearls; a smelted gold cross; some avocados of minute crystal with small shields each featuring an emerald; an avocado of crystal with a gold mount; a gold cross with white stones; gold shields, each featuring nine emeralds; a lamb of smelted gold with an image of Our Lady of the Rosary and Lady Saint Ana; three gold rings; a very small gold image of Our Lady and a green cross with an emerald back; three strings of pearls.145 The Inquisition also confiscated fourteen personal slaves.146 According to the Cartagena tribunal’s tabulations, Pinto’s sequestered goods valued almost 22,000 pesos, while a 1638 letter from the tribunal’s official receiver to the Suprema cites the confiscation of 50,000 pesos from the Portuguese surgeon/merchant.147 Yet he

142 On the Branes, several groups living about the Cassamance River in West Africa (today’s Senegal and Gambia), see Sandoval, Tratado sobre la esclavitud, 107–8, 119. 143 Letter of 13 January 1634, AGN (Peru) Inq., S.O., Con., box 30, exp. 299, fol. 251r.; reprinted in Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:170. 144 Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:171, quoting the Relação e abecedário dos estrangeiros que se acharam na cidade de Cartagena. 145 AHN Inq. 1601/8, fol. 21–26v.; cited in Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 149–55. 146 Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 2:541. 147 AHN Inq. 4822/8, fol. 217; cited in Álvarez Alonso, Inquisición en Cartagena, 321; Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 230.

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clearly lived within physical proximity to the Mulata slave Rufina and the free Mulato Diego López. Did they feel they could indulge desires for revenge against someone who had helped enslave their people? A murder that López attributes to one of Paula de Eguiluz’s disciples, Maria Romero, had to do with “a Portuguese whose name he does not know because of jealousies she had regarding a mulata who lived in front of the house of the said Doña Maria Romero and the said mulata is Portuguese and has gone to and returned from Guinea.”148 Did this act evince an undertaking aimed at harming someone from a perceived higher social station? Though Rufina was allowed to participate in Eguiluz’ ‘Whites-only’ magical gatherings, both she and López seem aware of the exclusive nature of the White privilege operating here; the topic came up frequently enough, and they probably resented it. On one occasion another Mulata slave challenges how Rufina can attend if, as was rumored, Eguiluz admits “neither blacks nor mulatas” and Rufina and López offer to provide her a secret glimpse of the goings on. Similarly, a free Mulata and friend of Rufina’s, conversing with her and López, tells how she stopped being a bruja, relating how one time “my friend Rufina [a different woman] brought me in to [a gathering] and Paula says that she can’t go with me because she goes with whites and Elena de Vitoria says that she can’t admit me.”149 Interestingly enough, Rufina never went to the Cartagena Inquisition with her painstakingly-gathered information. Perhaps her store of data was to be put in use only in the event of need. However, unlike Diego López or even Paula de Eguiluz, Rufina was never bothered by the local inquisitors, despite her serving, according to López, as Eguiluz’s ‘aide.’ In his thirty-ninth audiencia (!) López recants what he has said against “a certain mulata,” who must be our Rufina, “whom he named in order to avenge himself on her and have her brought a prisoner to this Holy Office.”150 The fact that Rufina was not tried makes it highly probable that López invented many of his charges against her and that it was actually López who instigated most, if not all of the activities he attributes to her inspiration. Douglas Cope, among others, has noted the general reluctance of those from the plebian classes to inform on

148 149 150

Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 41v. See, for instance, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 29r.–v., 32r.–v. AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 420v., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:377.

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one another. Yet López also withheld his knowledge of people such as Pinto until he found himself a prisoner of the Inquisition. Spilling One’s Guts It is readily noticeable that the accusations of López against Pinto differ in quality from anything divulged by the other witnesses, all Portuguese merchants and acquaintances, if not partners of Pinto’s. From the similarities in content and wording, it seems clear that the unnamed witness whose charges are reiterated in August 1651 against a handful of Portuguese in Cartagena ( João Rodrigues Mesa, Blas de Paz Pinto, Francisco Pineiro), is none other than our Diego López.151 These charges seem to merely rehash the information López delivered years earlier. Hence it states at the end of each set of charges that they accord with those of the original trials.152 Yet these accusations—each set relating to each Converso stem from a single, if unnamed witness—bring a great amount of detail regarding Jewish practices not to be found in the Testimony of Diego López recorded for his own trial. Below I deal with whether it is possible that by 1651 López had learned enough from the Inquisition to deliver precisely what he thought his inquisitors wanted to hear or whether these charges were “polished” by one of the inquisitors. If race was not a factor, the motivations of Diego López remain obscure. In truth, specific motivations may have been of secondary importance when one was facing inquisitors and possible torture, knowing that one of the things they most wanted from you was the names of other sinners/criminals. López was supposed to be a friend of Pinto and both men were surgeons. As we have seen, the lives of López and Rufina were thoroughly intertwined with those on whom they spied, 151 AHN Inq. 1601/18, fols. 31–7, 40–4; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 223–9, 231–6. The date is given on AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 46r. The unnamed witness states that “he has been brought to this audiencia various times” (AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 43v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 234). 152 AHN Inq. 1601/18, fols. 30, 37, 46r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 223, 229, 236. The official presiding over these sessions, the prosecutor ( fiscal) of the local tribunal, the licenciado Juan Ortiz, summarizes that the accused have been “reconciled in their trials of faith which remain in the secret chamber of the Inquisition of the city of Cartagena de Indias to which I refer, Done in said secret chamber on five august one thousand six hundred and fifty and one years.” This is why these sessions are inserted with material from 1636 and thereabouts, the period of the earlier trials.

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who were mostly their social superiors. López relates that the father of Rufina’s mistress, Clara Nuñez, also a surgeon, “knows him from the time he was a slave at the hospital” as well as “after his liberty [sic].”153 López claims that he never informed on yet another surgeon, Martín Sánchez, because “at the time he was his friend and was very poor and needy.”154 López himself was fairly well off for an ex-slave. Before his arrest, according to his own testimony, he possessed a Black slave named Luisa Dominguez.155 In actuality, he owned several, since during his imprisonment four were sold at auction (along with eight mules) in order to pay off his debts, which included 2,200 pesos that he owed to Maria de Esquivel, wife of the infantry captain Diego de la Torre.156 Ceballos Gómez even cites our López as an example of the ambition and skill for economic ascent that characterizes many of the magical practitioners who found themselves in the Inquisitions’ web.157 When asked by his inquisitors why he never came forward with the information regarding Pinto, López tells them that he feared doing so while being at the same time involved with the abovementioned magical circles and conducting illicit relations with Rufina.158 López may well be telling the truth here. Perhaps López and Pinto shared a friendship, one not strong enough, obviously, to withstand the Inquisition that eventually came between them. Perhaps professional competitiveness or other more specific matters arose between them. Pinto, as was mentioned, dabbled in raising medicinal plants. His older colleague and fellow Portuguese, João Mendes Neto, a physician, treated individuals of all races with native medicines, which he describes in his Discursos Medicinales (1608).159 As has been documented in recent studies, some of the botanical and medical knowledge used by European physicians in the Americas was gleaned from Amerindians and Afroiberian slaves,

Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 24r. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 23v. This is the same Sánchez who complains that the Inquisition does not arrest judaizers such as Pinto. 155 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 30v. 156 According to Esquivel’s testimony, 1649 (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 46v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 327). He owed her the money for “escritura,” which could mean letter-writing, though he was himself literate, or for some kind of deed. 157 Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 57. 158 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 23r. 159 Alonso, Salud, cultura y sociedad en Cartagena, 251–3; Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:208–9. Neto’s work was recently published, for the first time: Juan Méndez Nieto, Discursos Medicinales (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca/Junta de Castilla y León, 1989). 153 154

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the latter often versed in African expertise, though often uncredited as sources.160 Given López’s involvement in magical circles as well as in medicine, perhaps he and Pinto discussed or shared professional knowledge. Finally, it is illuminating that Pinto faced feminizing charges from an anti-Jewish discourse that feminized Jewish men, while López seems to have been not only a womanizer but a man who enjoyed penetrating his masculine spirit companion. The two men, each from a marginalized and denigrated group, operated in different subject positions in relation to the dominant culture. Is it possible that the tensions between the psychological set of Pinto, declared ‘womanly’ as a descendant of Jews, and that of López, opting for phallic dominance of others, might have contributed to López’s willingness to inform on Pinto? López may have been goaded into action by Rufina, though he never resisted or refused, indeed, he seems to have been as intrigued as she by these investigations. It could well be that he feared her. After all, it had been she who introduced him to her ‘devil-worshipping’ magical circle. In 1627, she had allegedly killed, through magical means, the newborn daughter of López and his wife, or at least so he believed.161 Two years

160 For instance, the royal physician Luis Mercado (1525–1611) published De la facultad de los alimentos y medicamentos yndianos, no longer extant, while Pedro López de León cites Amerindian cures, the practices of Blacks and American medicinal plants (Alonso, Salud, cultura y sociedad en Cartagena, 130, 179, 200–9). Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 184–89; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 145; Jonathan Schorsch, “American Jewish Historians, Colonial Jews and Blacks, and the Limits of Wissenschaft: A Critical Review,” Jewish Social Studies 6,2 (Winter 2000): 111; James Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/ the_museum/news_and_debate/news/hans_sloanes_atlantic_world.aspx, 16; Lawrence Levine, “The Sacred World of Black Slaves: The Quest for Control, Slave Folk Belief,” in Black Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 65; Michel Laguerre, Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1987); Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Campaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 161 López testifies that one night Rufina causes a late-night ruckus outside his house, causing him and another man to go out to investigate. Coming across her, López asks what she is doing there. “That’s a good question,” she responds, “as you have not seen me in some time.” He explains that his wife just gave birth and, being the first time, he is helping. “Your Honor will be very content because he has a daughter, but before much time you will not have her,” states Rufina in a mixture of sarcasm and threat. “By your life, leave her be,” replies López. “There is no remedy, because my devil Rompe sanctos has thrown the three stones [a reference to casting lots?],” Rufina concludes the conversation and leaves. Minutes later he catches her in his arms, though this time she is flying through the air with her devil. López summarizes for the inquisitors: “Within two days, as the abovementioned transpired, the infant died” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, 33r.).

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later, he claims to have told her not to come back to his house and to have given her the money to purchase her liberty (in an effort to buy her off ?).162 López also accuses her of killing a free Mulata in whom he took an interest, and of whom Rufina became jealous, by magical means given her by Paula de Eguiluz.163 He claims to have broken off their affair in July 1631, after he became ill, though he claims that even after this Rufina and Eguiluz beat his new lover, a Mulata from Jamaica, with clubs.164 López certainly makes efforts to convince his inquisitors that his belated denunciations derive from sincere Christian piety. Even some of the witnesses who testify against him say that they “took him to be a good Christian and had seen him do works of charity.”165 He claims to attend mass at the Convent of San Augustin one time, when the father of Rufina’s mistress points with a candle toward the Christ on the altar, saying “Doesn’t this Christ have an evil face?” To which López responds, “He has nothing but a good face.” The unnamed Nuñez goes on to say, “By God, he has such a villanous face.” More explicitly defending the faith, or so he states, López retorted, “It is a great crime and sin to say this.”166 López claims to have been “scandalized” when he witnessed a Portuguese youth “gargle and spit” on an image of the Virgin and the infant Jesus in the Convent of San Augustin.167 Suspiciously, all of these declarations come minutes after a few leading questions from his inquisitors, in which they explicitly challenge him on why he held back this information until now. In addition, as discussed above, López himself mentions conversations he has had while in prison with Juana Zamba and Rufina, among others, making it likely that he is being fed certain information. It does seem that he knows too concretely the terminology that the inquisitors want to hear, for instance that so-andso is a “judaizer, observer of the Law of Moses,” that so-and-so made a “reniego ordinario” at one of the magical gatherings, or that so-and-so adopted such-and-such an individual as her magical godmother (amadrinarle) “in order that she should become a bruja.” (Of course, it is quite possible that these terms are insertions of the inquisitorial scribe, seeking

162 163 164 165 166 167

Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 33v. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, 36r.–v. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 52v. AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 420r., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:377. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 24v. Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 24r.

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to ‘clarify’ the testimony of the person deposing.) López knows that Paula de Eguiluz and her alleged disciple Juana Zamba have already been arrested by the local inquisition.168 Indeed, after investigation by the inquisitors, no fewer than eight prisoners confess to having “communicated under the doors of their cells.”169 It could thus well be that by this time López knows just what kind of things his inquisitors want to hear. The key question remains, obviously, whether he is inventing the contents of the various accusations he raises. It is hard to resist applying to López the general characterization formulated by Ceballos Gómez regarding the kinds of magical practitioners so frequently tried by the Inquisitions: “talkers, vivacious, often social climbers, capable and intelligent and astute”; “mulatos, zambos and mestizos, but above all most of them are free, for which reason they are not under the direct control of micropowers, which allows them more freedom of action; people “who fully believe that it is possible to modify destiny and the circumstances of life through extraordinary means.”170 Trials and Errors Over the course of his trial, it turns out, López met with his inquisitors an astounding 40 times.171 Despite providing a plethora of evidence against others, he denied the charges against him through the 39th audiencia. A single turn on the rack at that point prompted him to admit his life as a brujo, that is, not merely a practitioner of herbology or magic, but a practitioner of witchcraft and of the diabolical sort.172 Evidently, various witnesses were interrogated regarding the seeming epidemic of magic that plagued Cartagena and often confirmed López’s narratives of magically-caused deaths around town.173 After a three-year imprisonment, López appeared as a penitent in the auto de fé celebrated at the

168 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 44v.; AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 379v.–380r., reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:341. 169 AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 419v., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:377. 170 Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 57–8. 171 AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 418r.–422r., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2: 375–9. 172 AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 420v.–421r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:378. Ceballos Gómez explicates the societal distinctions between the types of magic (Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 61–2). 173 See the Relación de las causas de fe from 1634, AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 418r.–422r., reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:375–9.

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cathedral of Cartagena on 1 June 1636, wearing the special punitive emblem identifying him as a brujo and the required penitential habit, the sambenito, to receive a punishment of perpetual imprisonment and, on another day, two hundred lashes to be administered as he is led through the streets.174 About a month later, on 22 July, Blas de Paz Pinto was arrested by the Cartagena inquisition. Of course, like most of the alleged judaizers, his heresy consisted of believing, despite being a Christian, that Judaism, the so-called law of Moses, was better for his own salvation, perhaps even better in general, than Christianity and of acting on this belief. Beyond the Jewish practices Pinto supposedly carried out, that is, crimes of domestic cultural treason, the tribunal raised hints of crimes of political treason stemming from foreign provocation. Several of the local Portuguese merchants sentenced in 1638—Juan Rodríguez Mesa, Manuel Álvarez Prieto, Manuel de Fonseca Enríquez, Fernando Suárez and others—were accused of having contacts with Holland, as members of the so-called Fraternity of Holland.175 Fonseca Enríquez mentions seeing Pinto’s firm mentioned in the group’s logbook.176 The members of this body are said to have contributed much silver in order to fund a Dutch fleet that would come attack Pernambuco or even Cartagena itself.177 Enriqueta Vila Vilar thinks the above-mentioned fleet consisted of the one formed by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) which attacked and conquered Pernambuco in 1630.178 According to Ventura, the fleet the members of the fraternity were alleged to be supporting might have entailed one mentioned by a Portuguese captain tried by the inquisition of Toledo, a “Company which the Portuguese Jews of there [Amsterdam] raised in order to go to Pernambuco against his

AHN Inq. 1020, fol. 422r.; Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 216. AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 8r. Relación del auto, reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:43; AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 14r., 15r.–16r., 28v., Relación de las causas de fe, Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:48, 50, 64. As mentioned in the previous chapter, similar charges of New Christian alliance with the Dutch arose in “Portuguese” West Africa. 176 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 28v.–29r., Relación de las causas de fe, Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:64. Fonseca Enríquez claims that Rodríguez Mesa possessed the logbook and served as the treasurer of the group. 177 AHN Inq. 1620/11, fol. 59; cited in Tejado Fernández, Vida social en Cartagena, 181. 178 Vila Vilar, “Extranjeros en Cartagena,” 164, n. 54. 174

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Majesty and the Catholics who reside there,” a group created in 1634.179 Though the group’s purpose and history shift from prisoner to prisoner, the alleged members supposedly considered it a vehicle for getting back at Spain and imagined this with relish, if not full accuracy. Duarte López Mesa, one of the Portuguese Conversos accused in Cartagena in 1636, claims that Manuel Álvarez Prieto once described being in the Netherlands and learning the methods of the WIC: 24 powerful and wealthy directors gathered daily, with 5 Portuguese (i.e., Sephardim) joining the Dutch, English, Danes, French and other directors, sitting on a fund of 1,800,000 ducats for the purpose of making war against Spain. López Mesa himself testifies that a Portuguese youth in the Canaries told him that in the WIC’s first 5 years its directors earned enough money, not even counting what had been robbed and pillaged by Dutch soldiers, “that they would be able to set up forty thousand paid men in the Indies.”180 These statements constitute much wishful thinking. The first only loosely resembles what is known of the organizational structure of the WIC, which in fact was run by 19 directors, none of whom was ever a Sephardic Jew, though some Sephardim became prominent investors in the company. In addition, among the allegations against Pinto listed in 1651 is the following: And as a Jewish judaizer, observer of the Law of Moses, following the counsels contained in the letter of the Jews of Constantinople, [that they] wrote to those of Toledo, in which they say to profane the temples, and their images, a certain monk, from the convent of the discalced Carmelites of this city, making a profession that a certain person went to speak to the said Blas de Paz, who assisted in the hanging [of icons and art] and adorning of the church.181

While the monk’s accusation, that Pinto purposefully spat on the face of an image of Our Lady of the Conception, comes straight out of López’s testimony from 1634,182 the matter of a letter from Turkish Jews that prompts attacks on Catholic property and sacred items is totally new. It is not clear whether Pinto’s actions merely paralleled those called for in this letter or whether he was actually following its suggestions,

179 Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:298; excerpt from the confession of Captain Estevan de Ares de Fonseca in Caro Baroja, Judíos en la España, 3:362–64. 180 AHN Inq. 1020, fols. 481v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 433–4. 181 AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 41r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 232. 182 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fols. 19v.–20r.

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but in any case I have not seen any other reference to this letter in the records of the Cartagena tribunal. Somewhat surprisingly, the letter in question refers to a forged correspondence dating from the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The afflicted Toledan Jews supposedly wrote to their coreligionists in Constantinople, asking for advice. The response, from the “Chief of the Jews of Constantinople,” urges the Spanish Jews to wreak revenge through a variety of patently devious means: they should have their children become merchants, to slowly pilfer the goods of Spanish Christians, physicians, in order to take their lives, clerics and theologians, to destroy their churches from within, etc. Though not the last time the letter would be wielded by Iberian anti-semites, it had been discussed and reprinted in an antiJewish work published in Madrid in 1614.183 It seems impossible that Diego López would have been aware of the tradition regarding these letters. It must be that it was Juan Ortiz, formerly the local tribunal’s fiscal and now inquisitor, who ‘improved’ the formulation of López’s charges with such material, buttressing the case against this alleged Marrano long after his death. This might have been done as a response to the Suprema’s criticisms leveled against the local tribunal for the flaws in several of their trials from the late 1620s and 1630s, criticism that led to a new trial for Luis Gomes Barreto, begun in 1652. Already in 1645, an investigative visit was conducted, under which numerous interviews turned up a great deal of inquisitorial abuse.184 In 1648 a long list of accusations of irregularities by the Cartagena inquisitor and the fiscal Juan Ortiz, among others, were conveyed to the Suprema. Many of these transgressions revolve around favors that seemed to pass between Barreto and the inquisitor Juan de Uriarte, that is, around close relations between the commercial and religious elites, where the latter should have been above and against the former.185 (Recall that Barreto told his inquisitors during his first trial 183 Caro Baroja, Judíos en la España, 2:431–2; in Appendix 13, 3:331, Caro Baroja brings the letters’ mention by the lawyer from Alcarez, Ignacio del Villar Maldonado, Sylva responsorum iuris (Madrid, 1614). The letters were proven to be a forgery by I. Loeb, “La correspondance des juifs d’Espagne avec ceux de Constantinople,” Revue des Études Juives 15 (1887): 262–76. They are reprinted as well in Azevedo, História dos cristãos-novos, 464 (Appendix 10). The version printed in Loeb and Azevedo does not call for the physical destruction of churches or their idols. 184 Recorded in AHN Inq. 1600/16; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 486–525. 185 See AHN Inq. 1601/3/1–2; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 281–6. See also the testimony of the many witnesses interviewed during yet another visita of Inquisitor Don Pedro de Medina Rico in 1649 (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos,

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that among those hosted by Blas de Paz Pinto on his ranch were the town’s archdeacon and senior inquisitor.) The cultivation of such relations did not always help the Portuguese Converso merchants. Uriarte was accused by Don Joseph de Bolibar, knight of the Order of Santiago and bailiff of the Cartagena tribunal, of receiving the payments owed to Pinto by other Portuguese merchants of Angola or Lisbon, not giving them any receipts that they had paid and, obviously, never remitting the payments to the rightful recipient.186 It should be pointed out that nowhere does the Suprema seem to have been bothered by the fact that much of the testimony regarding the judaizing alleged against various Portuguese New Christians comes from the mouth of a former slave who confessed to brujería and whom the inquisitors themselves call a “heretic and apostate.”187 Beyond hoping to distract attention from his own misdeeds, Ortiz no doubt wished to correct the bad impression of an incompetent and morally lax tribunal by emphasizing the prescience and sagacity of its sweeping and harsh treatment of the Portuguese New Christian merchants.188 Several of the charges against Pinto from 1651 feature the

288–475). Complicity of varying sorts in slave trading also seems to have occurred. Uriarte and Ortiz were accused by Don Joseph de Bolibar, knight of the Order of Santiago and bailiff of the Cartagena tribunal, of using moneys sequestered by the Inquisition from the Portuguese Conversos to buy over 200,000 ducats of clothes and slaves from Angola and Guinea on another occasion, while on another purchasing from Angola and Guinea more than 450 slaves whom they sold in Cartagena for a profit of 60,000 pesos (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fols. 90r.–91v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 367–9; see also AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 128r.v., 165r.–166r., 187r.–191r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 402, 435–6, 456–9). Ortiz, it seems, had been a merchant before working for the Inquisition (Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 167). Another time, Uriarte, as the one in charge of the sequestered goods of João Rodrigues Mesa and Blas de Paz Pinto, ordered a girl slave of Juan Cotel to be sold at auction, though refusing to provide the required written order, as requested by both Bolibar and Andred Fernandez de Castro, the tribunal’s receiver. Cotel had owed the slave as part of his debts to either Rodrigues Mesa or Pinto, but Uriarte wanted the sale kept unofficial since Cotel also bore a debt to Uriarte’s wife (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 101r.–v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 379). 186 AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fols. 82v.–83r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 359–60. For example, it seems Pinto was to have given some strings of pearls from the merchant Miguel Fernandez Pereira to Don Francisco Rexi, a consultant to the Cartagena tribunal, “who was his lawyer and with whom he communicated this” payment, still never paid as of 1649. See also AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 113v., 154r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 390, 424 and AHN Inq. 1600/16, fols. 12r.–v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 503. 187 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 9r., Relación de las causas de fe, reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:43. 188 As had happened with the Lima tribunal as well (Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 268).

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kind of “improvements” that have been mentioned previously, mostly the addition of technical theological terms. Thus where López merely describes the gatherings at Pinto’s house, with slaves posted to keep out visitors, the new charges tack on “with which it is an evident thing that they have gatherings, of synagogues in contempt of the evangelical Law of our redeemer and savior jesus Christ and falsely in their expired, condemned and dead law of Moses.”189 Where López merely depicts the low voices, pauses and seeming sighing of lamentation that lead him to believe that prayers are being conducted in Pinto’s house, the later charges clarify that “without doubt [this] would be because they had neither temple nor King of the tribe of Judah, and because they did not santify and adore in excelsis [in the highest], as they have by custom, as obstinate and pertinacious, in their expired law.”190 It is here in the 1651 charges, more than a decade after his death, that Pinto is called “Rabbi of the said Law of Moses,” and is considered by the other “Jews” “as a man learned and expert in the Law of Moses, and that he was a teacher of its ceremonies,” is said to have observed various fasts “so that God should give them success and save their souls.”191 The torture Blas de Paz Pinto underwent on 9 February 1637 produced contusions in his toes, nerve damage and caused him to go into shock. His right foot required amputation. He asked for a confessor, to whom he confessed, as well as for the administration of all the

189 AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fol. 17v.–18r.; AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 41v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 233. 190 AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fol. 18v.–19r.; AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 42r.–v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 233. 191 AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 43r.–v.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 234. João Rodrigues Mesa is also accused of being the “doctrinizer [dotrinatisador] of the Law of Moses and its rabbi” (AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 31; reprinted in Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 223). Already the Relación de las causas de fe prepared for the 1638 auto “improved” the accusations against Pinto somewhat. Going to investigate the gatherings at Pinto’s house, Lopez claims not to have been allowed in and to have waited in the next-door house of Don Martin Felix or Feliz, who says to him, referring to the closed curtains of Pinto’s house and the men assembled therein: “i do not know how the señores of the holy office sleep nor what they do, as they do not castigate these, and the said Feliz was pondering this, saying that in that House a synagogue was conducted and the whole afternoon the said don martin feliz was muttering about this with this Prisoner” (Testimonio de Diego Lopez, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, 19r.). This Martin Felix/z appears never to have been interrogated. In the Relación de las causas de fe, the inquisitors’ summation of the charges, this individual muttering supposedly produced by the daytime gatherings becomes a seemingly general “scandal and murmuring in which it was said that they had a synagogue” (AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 20v., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:55).

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sacraments. Despite the attention of two surgeons, Pinto’s condition worsened. The inquisitors gathered with their consultants, deciding that if the prisoner should live, he go out in the next auto de fé, to be reconciled to the Church. His punishment would entail confiscation of all his goods, the wearing of the penitential habit and perpetual imprisonment. Given his state, however, the inquisitors saw fit to conduct a private ceremony of reconciliation in the jail, as Pinto himself desired. As the prisoner’s condition deteriorated, his confessor, a priest serving as an officer of the Inquisition, was sent in to console him and offer him the last rites. In a fitting if unintended irony, the inquisitors asked that the priest be accompanied by Father Pedro Claver, whose ministrations to slaves and non-Whites would eventually earn him sainthood in the nineteenth century. Pinto died on 20 February 1637, without ever leaving the Inquisition jail.192 Testifying in 1648, Gabriel de Uria Munguia, treasurer and judge of the royal court in Cartagena, recalls having heard that when Pinto died “they took him out [in the auto de fé] in state with a sambenito.”193 This would have been on 25 March 1638.194 Because he died before the formal completion of his trial, Pinto was buried in a secret location, which would be revealed to his family only after the closure of the legalities. Hence those involved in his interment were sworn to secrecy, the sacristan, the gravedigger and the Blacks who carried his body.195 Appearing at the same auto de fé as the statue of the defunct Blas de Paz Pinto was Paula de Eguiluz. She had evidently confessed to the accusations of her sorcery in her very first audiencia. She, too, was reconciled to the Church, and received as punishment the confiscation of her goods, two hundred lashes and perpetual incarceration. The causa or summation of her crimes and punishment could not be read aloud to the assembled crowd, because of the great noise into which it erupted.196 It is not clear whether the murmuring of the crowd signified 192 193

474.

AHN Inq. 1620, fols. 506r.–507r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:441–3. AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 207r., 208r.; Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 473,

194 AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 1–48r., reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3: 35–85. The Relación del auto, the first part of this report, read aloud at the auto, completely passes over the torture applied to Paz Pinto and the cause of his final and fatal illness, euphemizing the former in the standard manner as “the charitable admonition” (AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 3v., Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:39). 195 AHN Inq. 1620, fol. 507v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:443. 196 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 5r.–v., Relación del auto, reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:41.

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an outcry against a detested and feared bruja or against an unjust sentence. At any rate, the imprisoned Eguiluz continued to be a requested healer in Cartagena, receiving permission to leave the inquisition jail in order to treat patients, who included local inquisitors and the city’s bishop. On these occasions she left carried by slaves “in a sedan chair, without her penitential habit, wearing a little cloth with a gold border, and earned much money, part of which she distributed as alms between the rest of her prisoner companions.”197 We do not know how many of the city’s residents noticed the tragicomic ramifications of Spanish racial politics. In the case of the individuals treated in this chapter, we ultimately know too little about their lives to fully explain the way their physical and social coexistence in the terrain of colonial Cartagena led them to get along, to understand one another or not. While the urban sphere and its daily exigencies in many respects led people of similar classes to come together, the inquisitorial mentality and racial caste system that seeped into the consciousness of those high and low all too often generated quite contrary results. In 1675, the Rev. Elias al-Mûsili, an Arab Christian from Baghdad, visited Cartagena for forty days. With himself in mind, he described the city’s inhabitants as “Catholic, true Spaniards who love foreigners.”198

197 From a letter by visiting inspector inquisitor Pedro Medina Rico, 31 May 1649; quoted by Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 225, n. 1. Ironically, at one point in 1636 Paula de Eguiluz was called in by the Cartagena inquisitors to minister to Manuel Alvarez Prieto, whose arms had been broken by torture (Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 312–3). Taussig, basing himself on Henry Charles Lea, states that Eguiluz was initially sentenced to burning at the stake as one of the leaders of the large group of Black magical practitioners in the port of Tolú (about 65 miles south of Cartagena). After six years of imprisonment, her sentence was commuted to the punishment just described (Taussig, Shamanism, 219). 198 Farah, An Arab’s Journey to Colonial Spanish America, 19.

CHAPTER FOUR

MASTERS AND SLAVES UNDER THE STARE OF THE CROSS In this chapter I turn to relations between Afroiberian slaves and Judeoconverso masters, in particular relations insofar as they were influenced by the theo-politics of the Iberian caste system and system of blood purity. Though the mastery of Judeoconversos was not always exercised directly over the former, the sway of religious differences between members of the two groups was impacted by even more overt tensions of caste subject position. Before getting to the complex master-slave interactions documented in the households of Judeoconversos in inquisitional records, I look at the sphere of the Inquisitions themselves, where Afroiberian slaves found themselves in some ways in positions of power and cultural belonging over against imprisoned Judeoconversos. Slaves of the Inquisition Some of the Inquisition tribunals themselves served as one of the most fascinating and well-reported points of intersection between Judeoconversos and Afroiberians in the Iberian empires. For one thing, despite the fact that many Afroiberians found themselves victims of inquisitional surveillance and litigation, most of the slaves and servants of the local Inquistion bodies were also Afroiberians. Afroiberians carried out some of the Inquisitions’ ‘dirty work,’ mostly without a choice. The structure of such situations often made these slaves spectators and collaborators in the persecution of Conversos, on the one hand, and aiders and abbeters of the Converso victims, on the other (the latter to be treated in chapter 6). How might slaves come to work for the Inquisition? Those who worked for the institution on contract, as jailers, for instance, would bring to their service their personal slaves. Inquisitors themselves frequently owned personal slaves. When in 1636 the goods of the accused judaizer Manuel Alvares Prieto were sequestered by the Cartagena

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tribunal, “they brought to the house of [the señor liçenciado (attorney) Juan Ortiz, fiscal (prosecutor) of the holy Inquisition of this city] two blacks who they said belonged to said Manuel Albarez Prieto, being bozales from the Rivers [da escravos, a region of Guinea, now Benin].”1 What Ortiz did with the two slaves is unclear, though it is likely they ended up in his employ, a perk of his position. In this case, the two slaves probably served Ortiz’s personal needs rather than the institution for which he worked, though the line between the two could often be blurred. A Black slave arrested and imprisoned by the Mexico City tribunal in 1642 for having two wives was pressed into service as an assistant to the tribunal’s jailer “due to the present necessity of there being so many prisoners in the secret jails.”2 Indeed, of the 53 slaves who had belonged to the alleged marranos arrested in Mexico in 1642 and 1643, all who had not died or escaped were sold at auction or put to work by the Inquisition “warden and jail staff.”3 Such a functional arrangement was typical of the way slaves were distributed by the managerial class. The bakers of Potosí, who desired but could not generally afford the expensive advantage of slave labor, won a compromise from the authorities whereby slaves of local slaveholders who merited punishment were imprisoned in bakeries (only those run by Spaniards, of course) and forced to work.4 What might it mean to work as a slave for the Inquisition? In 1621, two Blacks acted as town criers for the Inquisition in the province of Paraguay, carrying out the public readings of announcements: “the two Blacks should announce publicly in the voice of the town crier, being

AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 61v.; Rotbaum, Documentos, 248–9. Trial and Criminal Cause against Sebastian Domingo alias Mungia black man [from the] Congo, 22 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 312r. Sebastian will be treated at length in chapter 6. 3 AHN Inq. 1737, exp. 1, leg. 3, fols. 79r.–82v.; cited in Robert J. Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate: Domestic Slavery and the Exigencies of Fasting for CryptoJews in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos 5 (2005), n. 11; http://nuevomundo.revues.org/document934.html (as an electronic source there is no pagination). 4 Mangan, Trading Roles, 98. Beyond the direct orbit of the Inquisition, in 1673 the municipal council of Bahia, Brazil, ordered the guilds participating in that year’s Corpus Christi procession to “provide Negroes who would carry [the dragon] in the processions” (cited in Appendix item 18, C.R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia, and Luanda, 1510–1800 [Madison/Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965], 181). 1 2

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present all the neighbors and residents of the royal city.”5 Afroiberian slaves often served in Inquisition jails in various capacities. As Manuel Tejado Fernandez writes, among the functionaries on whom the inquisition relied for the supervision and care of the prisoners are [. . .] the jailer, his assistant, who was sometimes one of the jailer’s own slaves, and a pantry officer. [. . . .] Even if auxiliary functionaries are not spoken of, however, we believe it not venturesome the supposition that there existed men or women in charge of the kitchen, slave women for the cleaning and night watchmen. Without doubt, as much as the jailer’s assistant, all of these or most of them would be from the “family” of the jailer or the pantry officer.6

The actual tasks done by such slaves varied widely. The Congolese slave Sebastian/Mungia, mentioned above, cleaned the prison’s cells and removed the prisoners’ bodily wastes.7 The accused judaizer Francisco Botello complained (ca. 1645) from his jail cell in Mexico City to his neighbor in prison “that the black [slave who worked for the Inquisition] put very little water in the [large earthenware] jar” in his cell when he was supposed to fill it up.8 This same Botello, however, also seems to have related to his nephew experiences of another sort. After he had been tortured in the course of his trial, he was moved to a new cell without light, where they treated him [medically] from afternoon to afternoon, and badly, and because of that he had remained without the use of his hands, [. . .] and that a Black who did not say who he was attended him, that he fed him because he could not eat.9

More removed from the quotidian are the following two cases. In 1736, two Black slaves working for the secret Inquisition jails at Lima helped retrieve the corpse of an Inquisition prisoner whose bad health forced his transfer to a hospital. Having died there, an Inquisition official stumbled across him, recognized him, and had the slaves bring him

5 Quoted in Clara E. Cohan, Los marranos en el Paraguay colonial (Asunción: Intercontinental, 1992), 182. 6 Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 276. 7 Trial and Criminal Cause against Sebastian Domingo alias Mungia black man [from the] Congo, 22 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 312r. 8 Cited in Lewin, Singular Proceso, 297. 9 Boleslao Lewin, Proceso de María de Zárate: Racismo inquisitorial (Puebla, 1971), 73.

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back to the secret jails for burial.10 Around 1577, two Santiago de Chile residents, two blacks and a morisco [descendant of Muslim conversos], who was here as a slave and sold, were commanded to take from the church the said Pero López, cleric, the blacks and morisco being persons who did not have to have respect or reverence or fear for the most Holy Sacrament, as in fact they did not have, and with violence they took from the Great Church the said Pero López and brought him to the house of Teniente and from there to the jail.11

What White Christian would drag a priest, even a deviant one, from a church to the Inquisition? Though technically Christians, a Black and Morisco, in this view, did not have to think or feel Christian. The very split between inner belief and outer action so often seized upon by the Inquisition in attacks on ‘judaizing’ New Christians was encouraged here in order to further Inquisition ends. There are also cases in which those working for the Inquisitions served what might be seen as above and beyond their routine tasks, though it is doubtful they could refuse. One Mexican Conversa sitting in jail in the 1640s relates to her inquisitors that she heard from a cleric sitting in another cell “that Catana the mestiza who serves in the said jail should feign being a prisoner, and from that which she should say and counsel to the rest [of the prisoners], that they should beg mercy, and this they did.”12 Working as a slave for an inquisitional tribunal often brought Blacks and Mulatos into the orbit of imprisoned real or alleged crypto-Jews in ways beyond that of providing service. Juliana, “a Negress (a slave),” testified in 1646 against Gabriel de Granada, among the many other witnesses who deposed against him. Granada in turn denounced, among many others, “Elvira, a Negress who served in these prisons. She died.”13 Perhaps Elvira was named as a judaizer merely in order José Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal del santo oficio de la inquisición en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico J.T. Medina, 1952 [orig. 1890]), 528, n. 13. Only three months later did the tribunal conclude its case agaist the corpse’s former inhabitant, finding him guilty of following the erroneous and heretical teachings of the Santiago Jesuit Juan Francisco de Ulloa (528–530). 11 Medina, Inquisición en Chile, 309. 12 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 13 September 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 267v. 13 David Fergusson, “Trial of Gabriel de Granada by the Inquisition in Mexico 1642–1645: translated from the original by David Fergusson; edited with notes by Cyrus Adler,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 7 (1899); reprinted in Martin A. Cohen (ed.), The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the 10

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to give the Inquisitors what they wanted, more names. Perhaps she had been a cruel jailer’s accomplice, thereby drawing the wrath of the prisoner Granada. While we may never know in this case, it illustrates the randomness and pettiness of power: a slave of African origin who happened, as an employee in an Inquisition jail, to stand over a prisoner accused of being a Jew; an impoverished quasi-Jew languishing in the Inquisition’s prison lashing out at a peon employed at the facility. In short, the jails of the Inquisitions may have been a site whose social structure generated for a Judeoconverso the kind of emotional opening to denounce an Afroiberian. Slaves helped in the construction necessary for celebration of the autos de fe, the public ceremonies at which those tried by the Inquisition were punished, for instance converting a city’s plaza into an appropriate setting for a solemn yet ‘festive’ and instructive spectacle. Slaves also participated in the spectacles in various ways. As will be seen from even the select aspects I will mention, such autos de fe constituted anything but a spontaneous outburst of religious violence: Around a precise objective were structured a successive series of programmed acts with the express goal of impressing the public sense with the emphatic example of punishment. Nothing was abandoned to improvisation, every detail that would appear, no matter how small, was conscientiously studied.14

The decision to hold a public ‘act of faith’ rested with the Inquisitors, who made use of these staged events when ‘sin’ appeared too widespread, as José Toribio Medina implies about the Limeño inquisitor Ulloa, who planned the 30 November 1587 auto de fe there because of “the accused tried [by the Inquisition] for reasons of faith, whose number then was so considerable that he [the Inquisitor] resolved to celebrate a new public auto.”15 The list of expenses for the auto de fe held on 2 February 1614 in Cartagena shows that convicts doing forced labor and slaves installed trees and raised tarps (velas) for a tent in the town square, for which

American Jewish Historical Society (Waltham, MA/New York: American Jewish Historical Society/KTAV Publishing House, 1971), 372, 375. As far as I could see, Elvira does not make another appearance in the trial record as translated by Fergusson; I did not check the original. 14 María Isabel Pérez de Colosía Rodríguez, Auto inquisitorial de 1672: El criptojudaísmo en Málaga (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1984), 39. 15 Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:232.

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they were given a lunch worth 18.5 pesos.16 Like the trees installed for the 23 January 1639 auto de fé in Lima, at which the well-known Marrano Francisco Maldonado de Silva was burned at the stake, these trees served to hold up the tent and to protect the distinguished members of the crowd from the hot summer sun. For the shade of the principal stage and the others, 22 trees were installed, each one 24 varas [a measure approximately equivalent to one yard] in height, and on these they made firm the tarps, which occupied 100 varas in length and 70 in width, tied with many threads of hemp, with their blocks, pulleys and ribs, with which the sail remained so smooth and firm, being so large, as if it were made with a frame: it came to be twenty varas from the ground, causing peaceful shade.17

The completion of the stage for this occasion was 50 days late, despite the fact that the 16 Blacks who built it worked continuously, not even resting for sacred holidays. Blacks and Mulatos made up an important part of the crowd and its activities orchestrated by the Inquisition authorities for these events. Describing the same 1614 auto de fe in Cartagena, one Inquisition official produced the following summary of the opening events: The order was given that the accompaniment of the execution of the sentences was to be at four in the afternoon until [. . .], and aside from the officials and familiars of the Inquisition, [there were] eighteen of those [slaves] who the day before had brought sticks [firewood] on horseback, and the gentlemen Inquisitors seeing that in the plaza and streets there were more than four thousand souls, Blacks, mulatos, mestizos, and Spaniards, loaded up with oranges and other fruits to throw at those being whipped, and that those who had been called for the accompaniment did not dare to go out with them [the crowd] for fear of some disgrace [i.e., having fruit thrown at them], such that at first the complement hesitated by the barbarous rabble which was waiting, they [the inquisitors] agreed that an announcement would be given with a penalty of a hundred lashes, that no one throw oranges or any other thing. No sooner had it been given, when young and old, all held back their hands, a thing which those who know the liberty of the ones and the incapacity of the

Cited in Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 92, n. 1. Montesinos, Fernando, Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima a 23. de enero de 1639. Al tribunal del Santo oficio de la inquisición de los reynos del Perú, Chile, Paraguay, y Tucuman (Lima: Pedro de Cabrera, 1639), 3 [unpaginated]. 16 17

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others took as a miracle, and thus all was executed without anyone doing anything but watch.18

The Inquisition official who wrote this summary chose to list the mob’s constituent elements in ascending order from the point of view of caste classification. Not coincidentally, from the point of view of the importance attached by the Inquisition to each group’s moral/pedagogical improvement from these spectacles, the list appears to be in descending order. The author’s impression might have been that the ‘lower classes’ threw fruit more often or readily, were more unruly, though their enthusiasm for thus disrespecting the Inquisitions’ intended scapegoats may or may not have translated, into the intended internalization of the moral lessons involved. A similar schematic can be found in a later description of the 1649 auto in Mexico City: Fervor and Christian piety without doubt abounded on this occasion, which made the men, and women, children, slaves, indians, and rude people break out in voices, and shouts, with which they professed our holy Catholic Faith, speaking from the fence, stages, carriages, and balconies with the Hebrews, and persuading them, not without tears, that they should repent, and confess.19

One gets a visceral sense from this depiction of the mob dynamics that must have made these events frenzied instantiations of communitas, extraordinary moments that temporarily forge a utopian community, in this case around sacrificial victims. As suggested in the inquisitors’ manual composed by Nicolas Eimerich, these events served as an imitation or foreshadowing of the Last Judgment.20 Describing the public whippings for those sentenced at the 23 January 1639 Cartagena auto that took place after the main event, the Presbyterian Fernando Montesinos reprinted the announcement that was made that “no one should throw mud, stone or any other thing at those penitenced.” For “Spaniards [who violate this prohibition:] banishment to Chile, for the

18 Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 91–2. According to the Portuguese humanist Damião de Goes, as well, “some of the fires for the burning of the cristãos novos in Lisbon were themselves stoked by African slaves” (the language is that of Green, “Masters of Difference,” 88). 19 Mathias de Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee, celebrado [. . .] Dominica in Albis 11. de Abril de 1649. El P. Mathias de Bocanegra de la Compañia de IESUS (Mexico: Antonio Calderon, Impressor del Secreto del S. Officio, n.d.), unpag. 20 See also Maureen Flynn, “Mimesis of the Last Judgment: The Spanish Auto de Fé,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22,2 (Summer 1991): 281–97.

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Mulato, Mestizo, Indio or Black, 100 lashes.”21 From the perspective of the New Christians punished at these spectacles, the enthusiasm of the lower classes comprised an especial insult to their sense of honor. A 1561 letter to the Portuguese king from a New Christian spokesman complains that “it was particularly the ‘rabble’ which rejoiced at the sight of the auto da fé executions,” where “all and sundry join in persecuting them.”22 Some privileged servants of the Inquisitors also participated, voluntarily or not, in the processions of the autos de fe, at least as reported from the Lima auto of 1 June 1608: “and behind went the principal mayordomo [Keeper of the Keys] captain Jara, the principal caballerizo [Keeper of the Horses] don Joseph de Castilla Altamirano, the secretaries and other servants and gentlemen of his Excellency and of the chamber, and the servant pages of the lords Inquisitors.”23 In other cases, certain privileged servants sat along with their employers or masters in what must have been considered the best seats from which to view the proceedings, regardless of whether the servants relished witnessing the events as much as their royal or ecclesiastical superiors. The following description, written by an Augustinian monk, concerns the Lima auto of 21 December 1625: On the main stage was a round dais, preeminent to the rest, covered with silk and with raised latticework, for my lords doña Mariana de Córdova and doña Brianda de Córdova, daughters of his Excellency, his governess and his servants, and behind, the servants of his Excellency.24

From the perspective of the Inquisition, the servile classes formed a necessary part of the collective confronting heresy, as can be seen by the treatment accorded to the spectating crowd in the anonymous chronicle of the 1672 auto de fe in Málaga, on the peninsula: Filled, finally, that rare map, with such perfect placement that, in the combined variety of classes that occupied it, it made compatible the difference and the consent and, its admirable body animated by the great soul of such circles, estates and hierarchies, it formed out of itself an object so immense, that seeing it, no matter how expanded the view in the

Montesinos, Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima (1639), 55 [unpag.]. Saraiva, Marrano Factory, 20, paraphrasing the letter. The Portugues style of writing the name these events differs slightly from the Spanish. 23 Quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:216. 24 Cited in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 2:21. 21 22

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breadths of the imagination, it was not possible at one time to embrace in the sphere of the eyes.25

Unrecorded went whatever ran through the minds of the servants and slaves as various Afroiberians received punishments and ‘judaizers’ burned to death for their ‘crimes.’ Two incidents from Portugal, though perhaps not fully elucidating the feelings of Afroiberian spectators, hint at the heterogeneous context in which such spectating might have occurred. Watching the 26 September 1540, Lisbon auto da fé in which the judaizer and messianic pretender Diogo de Montenegro was burned alive at the stake, Catarina Fernandes, herself already imprisoned as a judaizer, reacts with visible rage—at least according to one of her denouncers from 3 February of the following year.26 Furthermore, testifies another neighbor on 14 March 1541, some neighbors told Catarina how a Black looked with evil intention at Montenegro, and Catarina Fernandes responded that in the same way would she watch the Black dragged [through the streets?]; and the neighbors said further about Montenegro that he didn’t want to look at the cross, and Catarina Fernandes responded that God knew where each one would be [after death].27

The “evil” look of the Black in the crowd, whether it happened or was invented by Catarina’s neighbors, seems to have proven an effective taunt.28 Also in 1541 Lisbon, as discussed in chapter 2, a Black 25 Quoted in Pérez de Colosía Rodríguez, Auto inquisitorial de 1672, 156. María Isabel Pérez de Colosía Rodríguez writes that in addition “the Inquisition showed particular interest in implicating in its repressive activity the privileged classes, reflecting perfectly this collaborationism in the ceremony of the auto de fe” (Auto inquisitorial de 1672, 72). Similar ethnological statist interests appears in the celebration of festivals; see CurcioNagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City, 42–3. 26 Antonio Baião, A Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil (Lisboa, 1920 [capa] 1906 [folha de rosto]), 114; Elias Lipiner, O Sapateiro de Trancoso e o Alfaiate de Setúbal (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1993), 182: “[Q ]uando foi o auto que se fez na Ribeira, em que queimaram o [Diogo de] Montenegro, ela [Catarina] com isso se mostrava agastada.” The Inquisition forced its prisoners to watch these public acts as well, for their spiritual edification and in order to inspire fuller and more sincere confessions. 27 Baião, Inquisição, 117. 28 This narrative might be compared to an incident related in passing during a winding tale about an official of Nueva Granada about to be executed for murder in 1580s Bogotá told by a local chronicler in the 1630s, Juan Rodríguez Freile. Having mounted the scaffold, the accused, a Doctor Cortés de Mesa, recognized the executioner as “a former slave of his own whom he had himself saved from the gallows and had appointed city executioner. At the sight he turned pale and speechless, and would have collapsed but for the archbishop and a surgeon who had likewise mounted the platform.” Cortés begged the archbishop for a last favor. “‘Don’t let that negro

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woman testifies against Maria Rodrigues, already imprisoned several months for judaizing and cursing the Portuguese King for the forcible conversions of Jews. According to her statement, this Black woman had invited Maria to go see the auto, probably the same one of 26 September just discussed, by the Tejo River in Lisbon—which provides another glimpse of the social nature of the event—clearly not knowing Maria’s loyalties.29 Denouncing Slaves Contestatory dynamics generated equally tumultuous consequences in the supposedly private sphere, where Black and Mulato slaves and servants turned to the Inquisitions for protection against, leverage or revenge against, liberation from, their masters. Following David Nirenberg’s characterization of inter-minority violence in medieval Spain, such rhetorical violence “could be classified as ‘situational’ in that it sprang from specific relationships between individual [Afroiberians] and Judeoconversos, and not from ascriptive ‘religious identity,’” though the influence of the latter on the former should not be totally dismissed in the cases we will examine.30 In a study of the accused Marranos of Badajoz from the 1630s, Pilar Huerga Criado characterizes the masterslave relation as bearing more significance than the clash between Old Christians and New Christians.31 As Renée Levine Melammed notes, the “average home had numerous servants whose turnover rate as employees was considerable.”32 In Jewish homes in pre-expulsion Spain, at least, “most household servants were behead me.’ ‘Remove the negro,’ commanded the archbishop, and he was pushed off the platform” (Freile, Conquest of New Granada, 114). Clearly the setting is fraught with emotions for this man, about to killed. The shock of the starkly opposing trajectory of a former slave and the humiliation of having him in particular end Cortés’ life would have been intense enough, but it is possible that the executioner’s Blackness added to the perceived insult. The upstaged executioner’s feelings about all this are not recorded by the chronicler. 29 Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 121–122. 30 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 177. 31 Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal, 92. 32 Renée Levine Melammed, “Judaizing Women in Castille: A Look at Their Lives Before and After 1492,” in Le Beau, Bryan F. and Menachem Mor (eds.), Religion in the Age of Exploration: the Case of Spain and New Spain (Creighton University Press, 1996), 17; Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal, 91.

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not Jewish.”33 Defending themselves against accusations of judaizing, one not particularly elite family from the Spanish village of Cogolludo in the early seventeenth century identified over 30 former servants who could have acted as hostile witnesses for the inquisitorial prosecution.34 What was stated by María de Encío, arrested in Santiago de Chile in 1579, no doubt often held true: Many of the trial witnesses against her

33 Renée Levine Melammed, “Some Death and Mourning Customs of Castilian Conversas,” in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart ( Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi/the Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, 1991), 120–1. One study of Cordoba at the end of the fifteenth century shows that 54 percent of the city’s working Christian women were employed in domestic service. Of this group, 75 percent were servants, with slaves following in numerical importance. Men made up 46 percent of the servant class, traditionally considered a feminine occupation (Escobar Camacho, José Manuel, Manuel Nieto Cumplido and Jesús Padilla Gonzalez, “La mujer cordobesa en el trabajo a fines del siglo XV,” in Cristina Segura Graiño [ed.], Las mujeres en las ciudades medievales: Actas de las III jornadas de investigacion interdisciplina [Madrid: Seminario de Estudios de la Mujer/Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 1984], 157). The employment of Christian servants and the owning of Christian slaves by Jews faced increasingly restrictive legislation in medieval Castile. After the promulgation of the Siete Partidas of Alphonso X in 1261, Jews (along with Muslims and heretics) in Spain were forbidden outright to possess Christian slaves (Code IV, Title 21), though they could employ Christians as laborers, agricultural help and as guards or escorts during travel (Code VII, Title 24). In the first quarter of the fourteenth century, Castile effectively banned Jews from using Christian wet-nurses, prohibiting Christian women from nursing or rearing Jewish children (E.H. Lindo, The History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal [New York, 1848; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970], 126), legislation reiterated in 1335 by the Council of Salamanca, which buttressed the prohibition with the penalty of excommunication (ibid., 139), and in 1380 by King Juan I who decreed that Christians may not nurse the children of Jews (or Muslims), under penalty of a 600 maravedi fine (163). Among the laws passed at Briviesca in 1387, was one that forbade Jews (and Muslims) to have live-in Christian servants, under penalty of the confiscation of their goods—a third of which would go to the informer who turned them in (168). Towards the end of 1411, some members of Juan II’s council proclaimed the same ban again (193). The next year, legislation issued in the name of the king himself (but signed only by the queen, the king being still under eight years old) decreed that “No Jews or Moors are to have Christian lacqueys or domestics, or any other persons to serve them, execute their orders, perform their household work, cook their victuals, or do any thing for them on Sabbaths, as lighting fires, carrying wine or similar articles; nor have Christians to nurse their children, nor to be their herdsmen, gardeners, or shepherds” (197). Six months later, however, the King signed similar laws that made the ban on servants total, extending it to include Muslims and other non-Christians (203). Later examples are by no means lacking. The repeated issuing of such laws indicates that the problematic behavior continued. To my knowledge no law was ever passed forbidding Judeoconversos from owning slaves, a significant fact. 34 Renée Levine-Melammed, “The Conversos of Cogolludo,” Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division B, Vol. I ( Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1986), 138.

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“were her servants, and she had disputes with them and they left her house discontented.”35 Some families likely tried to avoid just this situation. Andrée Aelion Brooks writes that Converso “families were exceedingly cautious concerning the loyalties of the servants they hired, tending to choose from among their own. Providing employment to Conversos in need was also a way to fulfill the family’s commitment towards their less fortunate brethren. This becomes clear from testimony given [. . .] in Antwerp by a 75-year old Conversa refugee who had served as a wet nurse.”36 It is difficult to say whether or not this was true. In Mexico City, a neighbor of a family of alleged crypto-Jews, the Blancas de Rivera, claims that they “must be Jews or at least not good Catholics[,] because during the time they lived in the house across the street from his they never had a servant nor did anyone ever come into their house from the outside to work for them.”37 Sandoval’s testimony may have been accurate for the time he described; we know that at least one of the women in the family, María de Rivera, at some point owned an Angolan woman named Juliana and her small son Pedro, who did her cooking and sold embroidery in the streets of Mexico City. Likewise, Herman Salomon notes the accusation made by an otherwise benign employee of the Inquisition in Quintanar, Castile, against a family of Judeoconversos there. “The Moras took nobody into their employ who was not a relative,” he claims, though the fact that the family is also denounced by two unrelated former servants (with totally different last names) makes his allegation a “patent fib.”38 In other words, allegations of insularity Quoted in Medina, Inquisición en Chile, 203, n. 6. Andrée Aelion Brooks, The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi—a Jewish Leader during the Renaissance (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2002), 31. The testimony of the wetnurse, Blanca Fernandez, can be found transcribed at Watson Manuscript Library, University College, London, box CC, folders 2 and 8 of Wolf ’s papers. I was unable to get to this document myself. Brooks’s other reference, Renata Segre, “Sephardic Refugees in Ferrara: Two Notable Families,” Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 182, does not say what Brooks wants it to. 37 Testimony of the cleric Diego de Sandoval, 5 May 1642; cited and translated in Robert Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate,” unpaginated. 38 Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 134–5; the second quote is Salomon’s conclusion. A nun accused the Moras’ nieces of having said that the Moras “did not employ maidservants because maidservants tattle on their masters” (136). See the case of Anrique Dias Milão, arrested by the Lisbon tribunal in 1606, along with his household staff, which included an Old Christian servant who refused to renounce his ‘Judaism’ and was executed along with his master. Paulo de Milão, Anrique’s son, also arrested, retained a servant, António Barbosa, who was a partial Old Christian. 35 36

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in hiring might have entailed merely another means by which Old Christians accused New Christians of ‘Jewish’ clannishness. Even if such self-reliance was sought, it certainly was not always achievable and in any case likely would have been a priority only of actively judaizing families. Typical of the general urban mileau, certainly for the Americas, are the details coming out of the trial of one New Christian accused as a judaizer, Sebastian Rodriguez of Panama City. He employed a free Black woman, Juana Cassanga, also of the city, as a domestic servant. The young son of Juana Cassanga apparently also worked for Rodriguez, probably so that she could earn money and continue to keep an eye on him.39 Many of the cases discussed in these chapters show that Judeoconversos owned and hired Old Christians and non-relatives. Servile loose talk or denunciations are a trope already in Patristic literature and a mainstay of classical and medieval discourse.40 They stem from the structural determinants of a situation, often miserable, over which slaves had little or no control yet from which they often accumulated great information about the very ones who did control their situation (and them). Among those whom slaves had the most motivation to oppose, disarm or even kill were their masters and in Inquisition trial records from the Americas they frequently confess to “having intended to assassinate, and not always as magical practitioners, their masters, other whites, other slaves; having given powder or herbs or poisons and prayers/spells.”41 One former slave woman declared to her inquisitors at Cartagena, after having spoken about gatherings of magical practitioners, that she killed “her master Juan Hortensio with some colored powders that her devil Ñagá had given her, because he

Barbosa’s sister, Violante, served as the maid-servant of Beatriz Henriques Milão, Paulo’s wife (Saraiva, Marrano Factory, 140; H.P. Salomon, Portrait of a New Christian: Fernão Álvares Melo [1569–1632] [Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Centro Cultural Português, 1982], 48). 39 See the excerpted transcription of Sebastian Rodriguez’s processo in I¢ic Croitoru Rotbaum, De sefarad al neosefardismo (Contribución a la historia de Colombia) (Bogota: Editorial Kelly, 1967), 294–6. The free Blacks and Mulatos in Mexico City as well specialized in domestic service. 40 See Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 136–8; M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 108–9. So, for instance, Jerome holds that the Christian martyr Apollonius was denounced by a slave. In a fifth-century hagiography, The Life of Eupraxia, a nun who had been a slave informs on her fellow nun, the young girl Eupraxia, because of the latter’s particularly stringent and effective asceticism. 41 Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada durante el siglo XVII,” Historia Critica 22 ( Jul.–Dec. 2001): 59.

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[the master] did not want to give her freedom, they being put twice in his soup/broth, from which he died.”42 Conflict often derived from or was exacerbated by the real or imagined Marranism of Judeoconversos and the authentic or feigned Christianity of Blacks. Black and Mulato servants and slaves did not denounce their employers or masters and mistresses only of judaizing, of course, and the reasoning behind the choice of allegation remains to be deciphered in each case. For instance, a Black woman was burned in Seville on Monday, 18 August 1631, for having “accused her master of a nefarious [literally ‘unmentionable’] sin [usually refering to sodomy] with a child of his; he lost the judgment and died from the penalty, and having verified it [the accusation] being false, they carried her in a boat and burned her.”43 On the one hand it could be assumed that the charges raised by slaves are transparent, that is, generally accurate; on the other hand, one might infer certain narrative choices on the part of the denouncing servant. These ‘narrative’ choices might reflect merely the imagination of the servant in question, the particular set of possible examples to which the servant had been exposed, or the specific character and situation of the master’s household, lifestyle, etc. For instance, though Afroiberians accused one another of various crimes and heresies such as adultery, bigamy or blasphemy, I have seen no cases of one Afroiberian accusing another of judaizing, probably because the charge would not have appeared convincing; almost no Blacks and Mulatos were judaizers. As occurred in some of the cases investigated below, slaves, like other witnesses, cited as their source of knowledge about their masters’ practices the publically-read Edicts of Faith, which, beginning with the Seville Inquisition in 1481, detailed the practices and beliefs of Jews, Muslims or Lutherans for which people should be on the lookout.44 Thus on 21 August 1512, Pedro de Villarreal’s Black

AHN, Inq. 1020, fol. 337v.; reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:310; quoted in Ceballo Gómez, “Grupos sociales y prácticas mágicas,” 59, n. 17. Juana de Ortensio, the woman in question, was punished in the Cartagena auto de fe of 1633. 43 Manuel Barrios (ed.), El Tribunal de la Inquisición en Andalucía: Selección de textos y documentos (Sevilla: Editorial Castillejo, 1991), 80. Barrios takes this text from La Inquisición en memorias de cosas sucedidas en Sevilla, which he unfortunately fails to identify. 44 The portions of these standard proclamations having to do with Jewish practices are reproduced in many places, among them, in English, Lucien Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, being a Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Records of the Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute, translated from the Spanish and edited with an Introduction and Notes (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England/Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., 1926), 25–8. 42

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slave Catalina testified against María González, accused of judaizing, buttressing her deposition with the following summation: “And that it seemed to this witness that the above-mentioned was a heretical thing because she had heard it read in the things of the inquisition, which were heard by her when the lord Inquisitor Mariana was in Ciudad Real.”45 Accusations by servants could also be preposterously vague. The reported findings of two Spanish servants who worked for Portuguese families, the latter by popular reputation in the seventeenth century almost all secret Jews, serve as typical examples: the first declared how strange she found it that her mistress “washed her hands every time she attended her bodily needs [. . .] even if it were very late at night,” while the second merely suspected that the acts of her masters “would be some kind of Jew thing (será alguna judiada)” and denounced them.46 Irene Silverblatt brings the example of one slave in Lima who swore before the local Inquisitional tribunal that his Portuguese master, Jorge Paz, must be a judaizer because “whenever a Portuguese came to talk to [Paz], he would close the door.”47 Despite its problems, many within the Inquisitions’ administration might have been ideologically disposed to accept testimony from servants or slaves, a feature already of the medieval Inquisitions, as described in the fourteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor Nicolau Eimeric’s foundational text, Directorium Inquisitorum. Though denied many, if not most rights in societies from ancient Greece to renaissance Europe because of the circular reasoning that saw slaves as suited for their condition, slaves could still serve the interests of the ruling classes when convenient for the latter.48 This is precisely the motivation cited by Eimeric, who states

45 Quoted in Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: the Inquisition in Ciudad Real. Hispania Judaica, No. 3 ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press/The Hebrew University, 1981), 132, n. 103. This case, too complex to treat here, will reappear in chapter 5. It needs to be remembered that not every listener reacted the same way to official inquisition indoctrination. Some, for instance, would have agreed with Bartolomé Fernández, who heard the Edicts of the Faith read in a church in Santa Fe, Nueva Granada, and who supposedly “said that many mestizos and Indians would not even understand them and that such edicts served only to pen people in like pigs in pigpens.” He escaped the Cartagena Tribunal around 1614 with a penalty of a light abjuration of his sins/crimes (Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 99). 46 Quoted in Bernardo López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes ([Alcalá de Henares, Madrid]: Universidad de Alcalá, 2001), 220, n. 14. 47 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 132. 48 In ancient Athens, acts of impiety, such as causing damage to sacred olives or robbing a temple could be tried based on information from slaves. “It was perhaps

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that it is the terrible gravity of heresy that permits the acceptance of testimony from servants or slaves “with circumspection, as in general they bear extreme malevolence against their masters. Contrarily, it is licit to torture a servant/slave who shows himself reluctant to denounce his master.”49 John Leddy Phelan summarizes this from a progressive perspective: In matters of morality and purity of faith, the privileges of class and caste disappeared. The evidence of one man, no matter what his social background might be, was as good as another man’s. Servants could testify against employers, social inferiors against social superiors, and slaves against masters. Like most authoritarian organizations, the Holy Office was equalitarian, certainly much more so than the corporate society in which it functioned.50

In contrast, Carole Myscofski reads this quality of the Inquisitions as the “encouraging [. . .] of hostilities between social ranks and sexes.”51 Yet some officials of the Inquisitions which used servants and slaves as witnesses acknowledged the particular difficulties of accepting their testimony. The Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition, the Suprema, which “addressed itself to the question of the character of witnesses” in 1509, decreed that “witnesses who testified against their masters should be examined, and that if there was any suspicion concerning their character they should even be tortured.”52 It could be that this revision came as a consequence of excesses committed by the controversial

only in relation to religious offences that such power over their masters was granted to slaves,” (Robert Parker, “Law and Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law, ed. Michael Gagarin and David J. Cohen [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 64–5; Virginia Hunter, “Introduction: Status Distinctions in Athenian Law,” Law and Social Status in Classical Athens, ed. Virginia Hunter and Edmondson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 7–8). According to Plato’s recasting of Athenian law, slaves had the right to denounce offenses against the public, though denunciation of her own master is not specified (Glenn Raymond Morrow, Plato’s Law of Slavery in Its Relation to Greek Law [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939], 123). On the Roman Republican and empire, see Leonhard Schumacher, Servus Index: Sklavenverhör und Sklavenanzeige im republikanischen und kaiserzeitlichen Rom, Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei, 15 (Wisbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982). 49 Nicolau Eimeric and Francisco Peña, El manual de los inquisidores, Introduction, translation from Latin into French and notes by Luis Sala-Molins, translated from French by Francisco Martín (Barcelona: Muchnik Editores, 1983), 250–1. 50 John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 256. 51 Myscofski, “Heterodoxy,” 80. 52 Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 131, n. 101. The torture would ostensibly produce trustworthy evidence.

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Inquisitor of Córdoba, Diego Rodríguez Lucero, who was appointed in 1499. Among other problems that caused outrage in the populace, and which were reviewed in a 1508 commission, Lucero had arrested the Archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, a respected and admired individual (of Jewish background), who had treated the Muslims under his jurisdiction kindly, and charged him with judaizing and maintaining a synagogue in his palace “on the strength of a denunciation obtained from a servant under torture.”53 When the Portuguese king João III, under pressure from Spain and the Papacy, considered establishing the Inquisition in his country, he secretly consulted four prominent Conversos, as he worried that the Inquisition would only further drive the New Christian population to flee. The committee of New Christians suggested that negative consequences would be minimized were the new Inquisition, in contrast to that of Spain, to operate within the guidelines of Common Law, which included declaring invalid testimony from slaves and ‘vile persons.’54 The suggestion went neglected. The record of the first trial against alleged judaizer Luis Gomez Barreto (1636) was reviewed by the Suprema in Madrid, which sent the Inquisitors in Cartagena a list of the flaws found therein. Among them one finds the following: If some witness in favor of or against the accused is examined his quality must be put, and if he was a prisoner of the Holy Office and the cause and how it ended up being dispatched; and such was not done in the examination of Isabel Lopez, black slave, of Doña Gracia Pereyra sister-in-law of the accused, it being said that the witness was a prisoner for 22 months as a witch (bruja), it needed to be stated whether she came out penitenced, and this not having been done it is necessary to see her trial and to insert in [the trial] of this accused [i.e., Gomez Barreto] testimony regarding her sentence.55

These punctiliousness corrections fail to note whether this means such testimony is to be rejected, though their motivation would seem to be to provide the Inquisitors with enough information to render a decision about the witness’s “quality” and, therefore, to help produce a fair trial.

Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 30. 54 Saraiva, Marrano Factory, 35. 55 Quoted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 278–9. 53

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It should be kept in mind that false testimony itself constituted a crime punishable by the Inquisitional authorities. False denouncers could find themselves punished before or instead of the denounced master.56 A penitent punished in a 1643 Seville auto de fe had brought false testimony against a Portuguese and his wife. This former servant, it seems, had inserted a crucifix in one of several cushions that her employers had borrowed, and denounced her mistress for sitting on it.57 No mention is made of any trial of the master or mistress. At least one Black slave, a zambo (someone of mixed African and Amerindian blood) named Francisco del Rosario, found himself arrested in the 1740s by the Inquisition in Chile for “being an inventor, promoter and director of the false calumny of [being] a Jewish judaizer” against his master Juan de Loyola. His punishment included receiving 200 lashes, perpetual servitude (without salary) on the staff of the Valdivia prison, and the recitation every Friday of part of the rosary to the Most Holy Mary.58 Both of these theoretical factors—the strictures against carelessly using the testimony of slaves or servants and against providing false testimony—seemed to little curb the inquisitions’ inclination to use and accept the testimony of servants and slaves against their mistresses, even if in some few cases the inquisitors acted with caution. In the case of Sebastián Rodríguez of Panamá, a Portuguese New Christian arrested in Cartagena in 1642, the accused denied all the charges. The inquisitors, unable to reach a decision, contacted the Suprema, which finally responded in 1645 (Rodríguez sitting in jail the entire time). It was ordered that a witness from Panamá, Juana Casanga, a free Black who had worked for Rodríguez, be interrogated again. If no flaw should be found in her testimony, the accused should be tortured in order to extract a confession.59 In response to the extensive depositions of a Black slave woman to the Mexico City tribunal in the early 56 On the fates of providers of false testimony, see Geraldo Pieroni, Os excluídos do reino: A inquisição portuguesa e o degredo para o Brasil colônia (Brasília/São Paulo: Editora Universidade de Brasília/Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 2000), ch. 13. 57 Barrios, Inquisición en Andalucía, 81. This text comes from the same unidentified source mentioned above. 58 Medina, Inquisición en Chile, 625. 59 AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 91v.–92r., 122r.–v.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:130–1, 156–7. Because Cassanga was no longer in Panama City and could not be found, Rodríguez, who continued to deny everything despite being tortured, was let off with a relatively light sentence, which included a fine of 200 pesos, receiving 200 lashes and two years banishment from Cartagena as well as Madrid.

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1640s, the inquisitors state that “without another procedure that will give her complete faith, and credit, being a slave, vile person [. . .] of bad habits, [. . .] and that realistically it is possible to believe that she lies against her said masters and other persons against whom she deposes [. . .] that the said black woman [. . .] should be faced with torture,” to see whether or not she changes her testimony.60 This step was not, of course, taken with all slaves or non-Whites. Something about her character or testimony must have made the inquisitors suspicious in this case. The testimony of another of the slaves caught up in helping prisoners communicate in the jails of the Mexico City tribunal was also doubted by the inquisitors, and this Black slave man was also sent to the torture chamber. In his case, the inquisitors contented themselves in describing him with the stock phrase, “being a slave [and] vile person.”61 So too another female Black slave caught up in the same episodes.62 According to Jonathan Israel, Catholic officials at Oran, “made much of adverse reports collected from former slaves of Jews who had converted and been freed.” Thus Luis Joseph de Sotomayor y Valenzuela, in his chronicle of the 1669 expulsion of Jews from Oran, writes that it “is known from some Moors, former slaves of Jews [. . .] that they mock our true faith and utter curses when they pass by churches.”63 On 6 March 1526, in Galdar, the Canary Islands, Friar Alonso de Carmona deposed to “having heard Arias Varela say that Silvestre Gonçales had been burnt on the false testimony of a slave and others, who bore ill will to the said Silvestre, and to his father Alvaro Gonçales, and that the said slave had been told to give this information against her master.”64 60 AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 510v. The slave, Antonia de la Cruz, belonging to Thomas Nuñez de Peralta and Beatriz Enriquez, and her activities, will be treated further. It seems the inquisitors did not do more than take her to the torture chamber and show her the instruments of torture, a step recommended in the various inquisitors’ manuals. 61 Audience of Francisco de la Cruz, 19 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 528v. Though insisting that his previous declarations were accurate, Francisco, unlike Antonia, was subjected to a few turns of the rack. This got Francisco to reveal the place where his master, Simon Vaez Sevilla, had hidden money and jewels (fol. 532v.). It seems that in this case the inquisitors thought Francisco was withholding further information, not telling falsehoods. 62 Ysavel Criolla, slave of Simon Vaez, also given torture, “being a slave and vile person” (AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 539v.). 63 Jonathan I. Israel, “The Jews of Spanish North Africa, 1600–1669,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, Vol. 26 (1974/1978), 81. Israel is citing the Breve Relacion y compendioso epitome de la general Expvlsion de los Hebreos de la Iuderia de la Ciudad de Oran (n.p., n.d.), fol. 4. 64 Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 39.

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As late as 1683, a Spaniard who had fled the Spanish Inquisition for Holland and later became an open Jew, Abraham Ydaña alias Gaspar Méndez del Arroyo, complained in a letter to an Inquisition official that the Inquisition apprehended suspected judaizers “even on the mere word of a servant or slave, without knowing a thing about Judaism.”65 Masters certainly had ways to try to prevent or react to slave denunciations or the threat of making them. One cannot discount the avenues of pressure and coercion available to masters, especially in more isolated ‘plantation’ settings. One Bahian master took revenge on two of his privileged domestic slaves who testified against him (1613–1614) by ordering them to be transferred “as field hands to his sugar estate” inland, where they were quickly killed by “many whippings and bad life and labor.”66 An Inquisition trial in Covilhã, Portugal, begun in 1575, shows that in some cases slave testimony was evaluated against other social and class factors. When there existed concern with “avoiding public scandal and sustaining the social order,” the testimony of slaves might not carry. Historian E.R. Samuel remarks about this trial of Maria da Fonseca: “hearsay evidence from gentlemen was given much greater weight than direct evidence from servants against their mistresses” to the effect that “the family ate apart from their servants and did no work on Saturdays,” among other charges. Here the social pressure to acquit probably stemmed from the fact that Maria da Fonseca’s husband, Jeronimo Nunes Ramires, “seems to have had the most fashionable medical practice in the country town” and that Maria’s father had been sometime physician to Queen Catherine of Portugal. Asking his “more important patients among the local gentry” to testify on behalf of his wife, Dr. Ramires was able to secure as character witnesses “three gentlemen and nine ladies of the Old Christian nobility, three neighbors and two priests.”67

65 Quoted in B.N. Teensma, “Fragmenten Uit Het Amsterdamse Convoluut Van Abraham Idaña, Alias Gaspar Méndez del Arroyo (1623–1690),” Studia Rosenthaliana 11,2 ( July 1977): 146. 66 Cited in John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400– 1800. Second ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 177. 67 Edgar Roy Samuel, “The Curiel Family in 16th-century Portugal,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 31 (1988/1990): 125, 127.

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At Home(?) The Inquisitionally-sponsored discourse that encouraged and emphasized the centrality of “knowing other people’s lives” began at home. Not for nothing, then, does Encarnación Marín Padilla warn that “the thoroughness with which some servants laid out the details of what they saw and heard turns out to be suspect.”68 Slaves essentially performed surveillance for the Inquisitions within the homes of their owners, alert to domestic practices which deviated from Iberian Christian norms or keen to invent such deviations. Slaves did this without formal instruction by or arrangement with inquisitors (in chapter 6 I discuss cases in which slaves who worked for the Inquisition were asked to conduct surveillance within the jails). Slaves and masters, servants and employers lived in tremendous intimacy with one another, differences notwithstanding, so while the charges raised by servants or slaves may often reflect more or less than ‘the facts,’ the structure of their living situation combined with social obsessions regarding Catholic orthodoxy generated the desire and means for surveillance from ‘under the stairs.’ As expressed by Ceballos Gómez, who also discusses such phenomena, domestic slaves “see their masters eating, sleeping, dressing, loving, defecating, renouncing [the faith], raging; they hear all the conversations; they see all the visits; they know all the secrets.”69 One witness testified to the visiting inqusitor in Bahia in 1591 about how a master had “requested a candle at night from his black women [servants], and they, wanting to see through a hole what he did, saw him take [. . . .].”70 The specific charge is irrelevant. The point is that the curiosity of slaves had ample opportunity to roam over the daily life of their mistresses and masters. A servant who cooked for a family obviously stood in a position of great knowledge about that family’s eating habits, especially if they betrayed any signs of ‘deviance.’ Hence the statement of one witness testifying against a family of alleged judaizers: “and the said mulatas and a Chinese woman named Jacinta, slaves of the said doña Ana Alferez know very well other things because they

68 Encarnación Marín Padilla, Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: La ley (Madrid: n.p., 1988), 166. 69 Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, “Quyen tal haze que tal pague”: Sociedad y prácticas mágicas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2002), 298–99. 70 Abreu, Denunciaçoes da Bahia, 313.

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saw them.”71 Trying to defend himself, the accused judaizer Manuel Bautista Peres, arrested in Lima in the 1630s, urged his inquisitors “to interrogate the cooks in order to find out about the meals he and his family consumed.”72 Again, Ceballos Gómez: “The kitchen is the place of gossip and the majority of the people who work there play the role of cultural intermediaries,” acting as a “springboard between the world of the Whites and that of the others, the Indians, the Blacks, and they have interests to defend.”73 Servants and slaves clearly gossiped about their masters and discussed these matters among one another and with those outside the household. One witness testified that another person’s slave “said to him many times that his master had a room filled with silver.”74 A former servant, who stated in an English court about his former employers that “their superstitious ceremonyes they kept as secretly as they could from me and others who were not of their religion,” nonetheless provided testimony on them based on the “observations” of “Blackamoor” slaves among the “entourage [. . .] of servants, clerks, a butler, and two negresses.”75 Some servants went so far as to mock the Jewish practices of their masters, a dangerous game to play against their social superiors. The (non-Black) servant of one alleged Marrano, on his master’s becoming circumcised in London and burying the foreskin, a traditional Jewish custom, “dug it up publicly, to make jest of it with some others; which having come to the ears of the [master] he was much vexed and turned the said [servant] out of his house.”76 In 1541, a neighbor of a New Christian woman of Lisbon reported to the local inquisitors that her brother told her that a slave of their New Christian neighbor confirmed to him that his mistress ate meat at vespers of the Day of the Ascension.77 In

71 Testimony of Thomassina de Mendoca, 21 August 1635; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 16v. She is referring to the extended Enriquez family, on whom see chapter 7. 72 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 49. 73 Ceballos Gómez, Sociedad y prácticas mágicas, 389–90. 74 Testimony from Cartagena de Indias, 1643; I¢ic Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos coloniales originados en el santo oficio del tribunal de la inquisición de Cartagena de Indias (contribución a la historia de Colombia) (Bogota: Tipografia Hispana, 1971), 339. 75 Testimony again Hector Nunez and his family, London, 1591; Charles Meyers, “Lawsuits in Elizabethan Courts of Law: the Adventures of Dr. Hector Nunez, 1566–1591: a Precis,” The Journal of European Economic History 25, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 11, 157. 76 Garachico, the Canary Islands, 1665; Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 204. 77 Baião, Inquisição, 118.

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October 1591, Caterina Fernandes related to the visiting inquisitor in Salvador, Bahia, what she had heard about a neighbor’s honoring of the Jewish sabbath: Izabel Pesqueira [. . .] told her a year and a half ago in the house of her mother in Perabasu that a Black cook of Diogo Lopez Ilhoa, New Christian, told her that the said Diogo Lopes ate chicken on Saturdays.78

In these cases one gets a glimpse of the chain of personal communication, gossip and rumor that, often crossing lines of class and race, contributed to the construction of the surveillance on which the Inquisitions fed.79 Francisco de la Cruz, a Dominican friar in Peru, tells his inquisitors in 1571, in passing, while discussing some episode involving slaves, “And as blacks, insofar as they intended to lend color to their lies, they gave occasion for the truth to be known.”80 Referring to Pernambuco, where he lived, one witness reporting to the visiting inquisitor in 1601 lamented that “the land is one of little secrecy, [the colonists] being served by blacks, therefore everything is publicized.”81 This situation, universal in societies dependent on domestic slaves or servants, makes comprehensible, though no less tragically absurd, the tearful outburst of Juana Enríquez, wife of Simón Váez Sevilla, whose husband and many friends had just been arrested by the Mexican Inquisition on charges of judaizing: She retired, a prisoner of desperation, to the kitchen; there, seated on a box in which the pots and pans were kept, she addressed the Black women who serve her, crying: “look, don’t we eat stew and chickens like everybody? and if I don’t eat lard and bacon, it is because I have a sore throat.”82

Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 544. Guaman Poma complains precisely about the erasure of difference in the colonies by means of conviviality, though from the opposite class direction: “For the magistrates and priests or Spaniards and knights and the principal Indian lords, legitimate lords since the time of their ancestors, sit down to eat and entertain and talk and drink and game with riffraff, ruffians, highwaymen, robbers, liars, laborers and drunkards, Jews and Moors and lowly persons, Indian menials. And they tell these people their secrets and converse with these mestizos and mulattos and blacks. And so there are in this life many lords and ladies not worth a fig” (translated in Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 93). 80 Quoted in Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:426. 81 Filipe de Moura was the witness; cited in Mello, Gente da Nação, 147. 82 AGN Inq., vol. 398, exp. 1, Proceso contra Simón Váez Sevilla (1642), fol. 266v.; Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad, 559. Simón Váez Sevilla, the wealthiest and most wellconnected New Christian in New Spain, is said to have headed the largest group of crypto-Jews in New Spain, which met annually for the great fast of Yom Kippur at 78 79

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In the crisis provoked by the implementation of inquisitional knowledge, this woman spontaneously confessed to her own servants, not coincidentally at the very site where such knowledge might have been produced, a site for possession of which servant and mistress contested.83 This mistress confessed with the most sincere emotions, yet unable to reveal the real rationale behind her agony, a rationale the servants very likely already understood: she maintained Jewish practices. Many such denunciations could be cited.84 A slave stood as a possession of her master and her religious life was often determined against her will. Several masters accused of judaizing were charged with not permitting their slaves to be baptized.85 A variety their hacienda (Seymour B. Liebman, “The Religion and Mores of the Colonial New World Marranos,” in Anita Novinsky and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (eds.), Inquisição: Ensaios sobre mentalidade, heresias e arte: Trabalhos apresentados no I Congresso Internacional— Inquisição. Universidade de São Paulo. Maio 1987 [São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1992], 55, 59); on Váez Sevilla and his commercial and familial network, see Hordes, End of the Earth, 35–43, 52–60. This extended clan will be treated most directly in chapter 7. 83 Or, as a twentieth-century Jewish author put it, “The kitchen was the temple in which Mother was priest and Maggie Doyle [the Irish maid], Levite” (Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco [Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1996 (orig. 1937)], 136). Eva Abraham-van der Mark noted how in nineteenth-century Curaçao the kitchen where their mother may have worked stood as the borderland beyond which the illegitimate “colored” children could not enter the world of their White father and into which the mistresses of the house, “socialized into pretending complete ignorance,” dared not venture. One Sephardic woman was repeatedly told by her grandfather: “A lady should never enter the kitchen” (“Marriage and Concubinage among the Sephardic Merchant Elite of Curaçao,” in Janet Momsen [ed.], Women and change in the Caribbean [London: Indiana University Press/James Currey, 1993], 43). Even “powerless” servants and slaves could thus sometimes negotiate a modicum of power or a proprietary turf for themselves. 84 In 1528, in the Canariote town of Santo Cristobal la Laguna, “Sebastian, black slave of Alonso Rodriguez, deposes that his master cuts off all the fat from the meat before cooking it, and that on two Saturdays he put on a clean shirt; and that he does not eat pork, nor allow the inmates of his house to do so. Deponent does not know whether his master is a convert” to Christianity (Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 87; Lucien Wolf translated the texts he cites). Of the 21 witnesses who testify against doña Ysabel Alvarez de Alarcon before the Inquisition in Granada sometime prior to the 15 October 1595 Auto de fe in which she was reconciled for following certain Mosaic practices, all were women, “except one Black male slave of the accused.” He, along with the rest of the denouncers, testified to having seen his mistress “having made fasts without eating or drinking the whole day until night, and not eating bacon and fish without scales” ( Jose Maria Garcia Fuentes [ed.], La inquisición en Granada en el siglo XVI: Fuentes para su studio [Granada: Departamento de Historia Moderna de la Universidad de Granada, 1981], 480). 85 For instance Matias Rodrigues de Olivera, a fifty-one-year-old bachelor from Portugal living in Mexico, ca. late 1640s (Arnold Wiznitzer, “Crypto-Jews in Mexico during in the Seventeenth Century,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 51 [1961/2];

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of early Inquisition cases from the Canary Islands sheds light on the ways interreligious dynamics played themselves out in the homes and lives of alleged judaizers and Black slaves. That these tensions surface to such a degree reflects the early date: many of these Canariote New Christians possessed actual past connections to functioning Jewish communities, while many of the slaves can be presumed to have been thinly Christianized, if at all. One black slave testified that “her master told her that she was to be called Penda and not Beatriz,” a name that she implied struck her allegedly crypto-Jewish master as too Christian.86 This was an effort to undo the slave’s Christianity through the power of naming. Religious tensions combined with the already intimate, messy and often violent situation of a slaveholding house to create a potent brew of complications. One servant testified that his master hit another of his maidservants “for her having gone to Mass.”87 When a Black slave of Alvar Gonçáles went to hear the Easter Sermon one year, the master inquired afterward into “what he saw there, and the witness responded that he saw how the people wept because the Jews killed Christ. And that the said Aluar Gonçales said: ‘All of that is wind and all is nothing.’”88 One gets the sense that the scene is almost as novel to the slave as it is repulsive to the master, even if the slave’s summary is barbed. The plight of the Black slave Antonio Martinez, conveyed by a third party to the Inquisition on the Canary Islands, resonates with the religious tensions that might have exacerbated the already-difficult situation of slave and master: In the year 1500 Antonio Martinez, a negro, owed a certain sum of money which he was unable to pay, whereupon Luis de Niebla volunteered to pay the money on the understanding that the negro should serve him for a certain period. That during the time of his service the said negro came to this deponent and begged him to help him get free from serving the said Luis de Niebla, as life in his house was unbearable. That upon deponent endeavoring to induce him to fulfil his contract, the said negro exclaimed: “Do not compel me, Sir, to serve that man. I shall kill him or he will kill me, neither I nor my wife can bear the life reprinted in Cohen, Jewish Experience in Latin America, 1:157) or Alvaro Gonçales of La Palma, the Canaries, sentenced in 1526 (Haim Beinart, “Jews in the Canary Islands: a Re-evaluation,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25 [1973/1975], 54). 86 Canary Islands, 1520; translated in Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 22. 87 Beinart, “Jews in the Canary Islands,” 54, n. 51. 88 Quoted in Haim Beinart, “The Jews in the Canary Islands: A Re-evaluation,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25 (1973/1975): 54, n. 47.

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chapter four he leads us; he keeps my wife up until midnight on Fridays and during Lent roasting fowls, cooking meat, and other things. That deponent told the negro to come back another time, and meanwhile begged Pedro de Herbas to endeavour to reconcile the parties, but that the said Herbas returned with the negro some days later, and said that it was impossible to persuade him to fulfil his contract, as he declared that the life at Niebla’s house was unbearable, his wife being compelled to cook fowls etc. until midnight on Fridays and certain days in Lent, for the people who came to supper on those days.89

Lucien Wolf insists in a defensive footnote that the wife’s cooking as described “would have been impossible if Niebla was a Jew, as the Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday.” He misses the point that often slaves were not converted precisely so that they could attend to the family’s needs at times when family members could not cook themselves (because it involves using fire, forbidden on sabbath and other holidays). Not converting slaves, especially female ones, has a long and respected pedigree, codified in the Shulkhan Arukh (completed in 1555, first edition in Venice, 1565), the legal code that became canonical among Jews. One section explicitly forbids someone other than the master to immerse a non-Jewish maidservant for the sake of slavery, which would make the slave subject to certain minimal ritual requirements. Why? “Lest the master does not wish to immerse her for the sake of slavery, for it is preferable to him that she is a non-Jew, for she can serve his needs on the Sabbath.”90 At any rate, since this case concerns a family of alleged crypto-Jews to begin with, such halakhic scruples may not have been shared by Niebla or his family. Beatriz, a Black slave of Francisco del Castillo, from the same island as the previously-mentioned slave Antonio Martinez, provided testimony, in 1520, about a miserable slave existence in a ‘Jewish’ household, or at least one she claimed to be such. Here as well we see the religious pressures that devoted crypto-Jews might have exerted on their nonJewish slaves. After listing some of the suspicious practices in which her master and mistress engaged, The deponent further says that her employers tried to terrify her into adopting their customs, but she would not, for which reason, being frightened that she would denounce them, they put her in irons for three months, and only took them off to take her to the fair at Guadajoz.

89 90

Translated in Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 5–6. Yosef Karo, Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah, section 267:11.

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And that two or three times Castillo has made her carry a bench on her shoulders, saying “Carry the cross as Christ carried it,” and had beaten her while she did so. And that they have terrified their black slave Philippa into adopting their customs, and the said Philippa said to deponent: “You pray to Mary, and they say their Jewish prayers.” And that they frequently told her that if she would do as they did, and hold her tongue about the things she had seen, they would treat her as a daughter and clothe her well, and the said Castillo told her when putting her in irons that there was no other creed than that of Moses, and that the Messiah would come who was to save them. That one day deponent escaped and went to the church of St. Augustin, where she heard a very good sermon, and on that same day the old people also went there, and on their return deponent heard the old woman say to her husband “Did you hear the things that devil [the preacher] said?”91

The scenario Beatriz depicts intriguingly parallels the forced Christianization of Jews, though it is unclear whether this reflected the (sub)conscious displaced anger of the masters or the (sub)conscious recreation of the originary coercion by the slave in her testimony. Similar situations arose not just on the Canary Islands, of course. In 1541 in Lisbon, a woman denounced Francisco Fernandes of having pointed out a crucifix to his slave woman, saying in a double entendre that this “was a man who hanged himself/was worthless (que era um homem enforcado).”92 “The hanged one” was a traditional Jewish way of disparaging Christ and his crucifixion. Together, religious tensions and poor conditions in the household often generated denunciations to the Inquisitions of judaizing by the mistresses or masters. Slave or servant conditions were usually miserable to begin with in any family, not only physically but emotionally. The defense testimony of one eighteenth-century master in Lisbon illustrates this situation: a woman servant of his had many bad manners and vices, and carried on an affair with a black, to whom she gave entrance to the house, by day and by night, and sent word to him by means of youths belonging to the accused [. . .] having information about the said illicit affair of the said slave, [the master] censured and castigated her on many occasions; as he also censured the [nursemaid] Maria Thereza for collaborating in similar folly; but instead of making amends they did worse, for the slave, through her bad quality,

91 92

Translated in Wolf, Jews in theCanary Islands, 23. Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 121.

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chapter four was often disobedient, gave many bad retorts, treated the accused and the mistress without respect, agitating the neighborhood with her wrath, and saying she doesn’t want to be in said house, and that they should try to sell her; and in the absence of the accused and of his mother she railed and murmured about them, calling them Jews [. . . .].93

Seen from the servant’s or slave’s perspective, the almost total lack of control over her own life must have been unbearable. Her eventual denunciation in this case might have stemmed from goals more strategic than spiritual, but it is obvious that the denunciations of some servants had sincere roots. Many of the Blacks coming before the Inquisitions acted out of a desire to do their Christian duty (or at least made it appear so to the inquisitors). As aspiring Catholics they internalized the dictates of the Christianity into which they sought entry. In ways both social and ideational, many Blacks participated in the culture that created and fueled the Inquisitions. One servant who worked in the home of a family accused of judaizing testified that her co-worker, a black woman slave, “said many times and told this witness that her mistresses were some great heretics, and that she showed this witness some sheaves of grapevine shoots and [. . .] said that they must be kept in order to burn her said mistresses.”94 Ideationally, the Inquisitions even may have helped shape their world view. Many of these accusations constitute a form of resistance among Black New Christians, using the ‘judaizer’ card against the master if there arose the honest perception or even the reality of judaizing in the household, or the invention of such charges. The denunciations might also stand as an effort to demonstrate loyalty to the denouncers’ new Christian religion, to show that Catholicism’s dictates have been fully integrated into the aspiring newcomer’s psyche. They might also be honest or strategic wieldings of the claims of Christianity against the cruelty of a master who was supposed to behave in a ‘Christian’ manner.95 Cut off, most probably, from the kind

93 “Traslado do Processo feito pela Inquizição de Lisboa contra Antonio Jozé da Silva,” 246. 94 Ciudad Real, 1511; printed in Haim Beinart, Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, 4 vols. ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–1985), 2:165. 95 It should be noted that in some respects Catholic masters also bore a religious subject position antagonistic to that of their slaves. It is intriguing the degree to which some Catholic masters wielded their own sincere faith and the “interests” of Jesus, Mary and/or the saints in making sure that their slaves know their proper, submissive

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of family and communal ties their masters could claim even as cryptoJews, many slaves very much wished to enter the regnant community. According to his testimony of 1519, when Fernando, the Black slave of Alvaro Gonçales, La Palma, the Canaries, would ask his master “to allow him to become a Christian,” Gonçales “always replied: ‘Why do you wish to become a Christian, there are no Christians in your land [of origin]?’ to which deponent would answer: ‘Because I live [now] in a Christian land, and if I die [as a “pagan”] they will not bury me, but throw me into a field.’”96 Fernando’s complaint constituted more than mere rhetoric. Though most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence points to the Christian burial of blacks in the Iberian world, exceptions may not have been rare.97 The seemingly crypto-Jewish Gonçales, who supposedly attempted strenuously to avoid and defy the dominant Christianity, evidently pressured his slave to follow his path, whether or not his assumption that the slave’s pagan origin meant that he shared his master’s anti-Christian leanings was ironic or sincere. The assumption seems to have been false. It seems that on both sides of the Atlantic many Afroiberians did come to live under the umbrella of the Catholic church, became familiar with Christian tropes, institutions and dictates, and wielded them for their own ends.98 It remains unclear whether these tales reflect merely the manipulation (and thus not necessarily the acceptance) of the cultural demarcations

place in the Christian social hierarchy. See, for instance, Villa-Flores, “Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain,” 459–60. 96 Translated in Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 24. 97 In 1515, Portuguese King Dom Manuel sought to address the poor burial conditions of slaves in the Lisbon area: “We are informed that the slaves who die in this city, those brought from Guinea, as well as others, are not well buried, as they should be, in the places where they are thrown, and that they are thrown on the ground in such a manner that they remain uncovered, or completely above ground without any thing of theirs to cover them, and that the dogs eat them; and that most of these slaves are thrown in the dunghill [. . .] and likewise also in other places by the country estates of the suburbs” (Victor Ribeiro, A Santa casa da misericordia de lisboa [subsidios para a sua historia], 1498–1898 [Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1902], 183); Ed. Freire de Oliveira, Elementos para a história do município de lisboa [Lisbon, 1885], 1:509). In 1547, the cabildo of Vera Cruz, in New Spain, issued an ordinance prohibiting “masters from throwing the cadavers of slaves in the river, since the practice was a health hazard” (Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 42). In Brazil slaves’ corpses were often left to rot in shallow graves, where they might be rooted out by dogs or wild animals, or they were dumped on beaches and left to the tides (A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Brazil [ London: Macmillan, 1982], 132). 98 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, is largely about this process.

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and stereotypes involved. The authenticity of the denouncing servants’ Christianity therefore often stands as much in question as the Judaism of the denounced masters or mistresses. Nonetheless, Inquisition officials often intervened when masters were accused of failing to treat their slaves in a ‘Christian’ manner. In the case of the slave Beatriz, she had been told by the abbess of the local St. Andrew’s church “that she could not receive absolution without making this deposition.”99 Hearing this, the Inquisition notary went to the abbess, who confirmed that this Lent a negress, having a chain on her leg, came to the nunnery and told her that she had belonged to Dona Beatriz, wife of Martin Fernandez Galindo, and that for the half they had sold her to a convert whose name she could not say, and that he was a Jew, who did not allow her to pray, and he had taken away her rosary, and had beaten and ill-treated her, and that he had said many things to her like to a bad Christian.100

When, in 1673, a Black slave-boy of Alvaro Rodríguez de Acevedo in Tucumán in the Río de la Plata province “went to complain to the Bishop that his master did not teach him the prayers or allow him to go to mass,” did he complain sincerely or strategically? The young slave further informed the Bishop that another Black slave-boy sold by his master had told him that their master whipped a Christ every Sabbath at night, a more dubious though oft-repeated charge. Yet in his first inquisitional audience, Acevedo “gave satisfaction to all the questions they put to him,” and “prayed the prayers perfectly.” Indeed, the case itself seems not to have been resolved, while the gout-stricken master languished in prison for over a year.101 The presence of religious hostilities certainly exacerbated servitude. But desires to escape a servile condition contributed to the making of slave denunciations even without religious conflict. One mistress from Pernambuco, Catharine Mendes, was denounced as follows: when some mulatto soldiers returned with one of her Black women slaves who had fled, they requested some compensation for their trouble, “asking as well that she not whip her [the runaway slave], and she responded to them, aghast, ‘that even if God should come to the world I would not refrain from giving it to her.’” For obvious reasons, this kind of attitude and Translated in Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 23. Translated in Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 23. 101 José Toribio Medina, El tribunal del santo oficio de la inquisición en las provincias del Plata (Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1945), 247–8. 99

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treatment often generated retribution from slaves.102 Another Pernambucan New Christian was denounced by the mistress of a Black woman slave newly-imported from Angola (who deposed through an interpreter) for having forcibly sodomized her.103 The son of the mistress of one disgruntled Black slave woman in eighteenth-century Lisbon testified that the slave had been aided in her general rebelliousness against the family by the wet nurse also working in the household, who advised her colleague “that she should raise false testimony against the accused and all the people of the house, for thus she would see herself free to marry a black man, with whom she was involved, the black woman also saying many times, when they castigated her, that she had to go to the Holy Office and raise testimony against herself of being a witch, thus finally would she see herself free of servitude and of that house.”104 Certainly this slave was not alone in believing denunciations to the Inquisition could extricate her from her condition. It is possible that in cases like the above slaves or servants brought denunciations on the order of their current mistresses, who might have had one reason or another to seek the harm of a neighbor, competitor or enemy. As “living tools,” in the Aristotelian vocabulary, slaves were frequently used as go-betweens or emissaries of their mistresses’ will. The denunciations of these slaves or servants may also have represented their having maintained animosity against their former owners/employers or internalized the perspective of their new masters/employers. Pilar Huerga Criado comes to this conclusion from her study of the Judeoconverso community of Badajoz in the 1630s, where, she says, denouncing slaves almost always had served those they denounced in the past and now belonged to other households.105 Mistresses of Fear Regardless of the sincerity or insincerity of the denouncing servants, these cases help explain Judeoconversos’ recurring fear of Black and Mello, Gente da Nação, 25. Mello, Gente da nação, 193. 104 “Processo contra Antonio Jozé da Silva,” 246. 105 Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugala, 92–3. The same seems to have been true of the servile denunciations made against an extended family of Judeoconversos in Quintanar, Castile, in the 1570s (Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” 133). 102 103

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Mulato servants which appears in trial and other documents. The variety of precautionary measures taken by Judeoconverso masters clearly reflects this fear of the surveillance being carried out in their own homes by their underlings. After the arrest of some of their comrades in 1642 Mexico City, some New Christian women sitting at a window of one of their houses called to a passing friend, to discuss with her the important news. Entering the house, the friend was told that “they had to speak alone because the black men who carried the sedan [silla] were there.”106 Particularly when it came to their judaizing practices, masters took extra caution. In the 1590s, Luis de Carvajal’s family in Mexico was warned not to recite prayers in front of their Indian slave woman.107 When Maria de Rivera kept an ordinary fast (ayuno ordinario) with another alleged judaizer at the latter’s house, the hostess “burned two wax candles in a pantry where they were reciting prayers of the said law, and the said Doña Maria guarded the door so that no slave woman should enter.”108 Juan de León, alias Salomón Machorro, confessed in 1644 to his Mexican Inquisitors that on some Friday nights he and Gaspar Váez “used to light a torch in a bowl with oil and putting over it an empty barrel so that the Black maidservants shouldn’t see it.”109 In 1642 León/Machorro informed the inquisitors that three years earlier the Rivera family, with whom he would celebrate Yom Kippur, did not light candles for the holiday, “so that a Black woman who served them would not start to see.”110 Blanca Enriquez, “out of fear of the slave women, that they shouldn’t see it, did not dare light

106 Testimony of Ysabel de Silva, 27 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 113r. 107 Cyrus Adler, “Trial of Jorge de Almeida by the Inquisition in Mexico,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 4 (1896); reprinted in Cohen, The Jewish Experience in Latin America, 334. 108 Charges against Maria de Rivera, 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 403, exp. 3, fol. 379r. 109 Cited in Lewin, Singular Proceso de Salomón Machorro, 253. León/Machorro’s Jewish background was strong: he lived in Pisa from the age of two, moved soon after to Livorno, where he learned Judaism and regularly attended synagogue, “wearing a talit”; around 1621 he was sent to Smyrna, Turkey, to study with his uncle, Abraham Israel; altogether he spent some four years in the synagogues of Chios, Smyrna and Algiers (AGN Inquisición 416, fols. 519–20; Lewin, Singular Proceso de Salomón Machorro, 129, 132). 110 Cited in Lewin, Singular Proceso de Salomón Machorro, xxxiii.

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candles. As [Beatriz Enriquez’s] said mother [Blanca] told her, it was enough to have the said law of Moses in the heart.”111 The number of such examples, from many individuals and different locales, testifies to the reality of these fears. Asked in an audience of 12 August 1589 who else was present when the family gathered in Pánuco, Mexico City and Taxco “to communicate the things of the Law of Moses which have been declared, to celebrate Passover, keep the Sabbaths and fast on the Great Day around September,” Luis de Carvajal the younger listed, among others: “the two Black women Catalina and Clara, that Catalina was in Tasco with Felipe de Fonseca, and Clara in Huaxutla with Joanes de Urríbarri, dead, and some ever-changing Indian serving women.” Yet it seems these servants were excluded from any knowledge of the proceedings, since Carvajal tells the inquisitors that the family “hid and shied away from everyone, and ceased whenever they noticed that some people entered, lest they say ‘why are they [the masters] shying away from us?’ ”112 In the 1520s, Francisco Mendes, physician to the Portuguese king Afonso, began keeping Jewish practices with his wife and mother. The wife observed Sabbaths and they celebrated the various Jewish fasts and holidays, including Passover. They later confessed during the trial of a companion, the Old Christian High Court judge Gil Vaz Bugalho, that at Passover they received from the house of Francisco’s mother the matza or unleavened bread which “they did not cook in [their] house so that a Black [serving-]woman and others of their house would not know of it.”113 Though Blanca Enriquez, alleged leader of an extended 111 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 211r. Robert Ferry notes how in this case merely modifying the ritual sufficed when getting rid of the slaves or hiding the ritual from them proved impossible (“Don’t Drink the Chocolate”). 112 Quoted in Alfonso Toro, Los judíos en la Nueva España: Documentos del siglo xvi correspondientes al ramo de inquisición (México D.F.: Archivo General de la Nación/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982 [1932]), 256. 113 Cited in Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 106. Francisco’s mother supposedly taught Mendes and his wife a little song, then current among Portuguese New Christians, that lauded Israel and denigrated Edom (Christendom) and Ishmael (Islam), which they sang at secret gatherings of New Christians. It was said that Francisco had written letters to and received a response from Luís Dias, the self-proclaimed yet muchfollowed Messiah from Setúbal, Portugal. They had allegedly obtained the names of God written in Hebrew, which they claimed possessed great virtue, from the servant of an openly-Jewish rabbi traveling through Évora. Lipiner suggests that these names of God derived from the banner of David HaReuveni, the self-proclaimed representative of the Lost Tribes who had recently visited Portugal and stirred up messianic hopes among the Converso population. The servant belonged to Rabbi Abraão ben Zamiro

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family of crypto-Jews in Mexico City until the 1640s, prepared matzah on occasion with her daughter Beatriz, “they did not make it more than the said three times due to the wariness they had that the slave women of the house might see them.” Even so, the preparations took place only when “sent the men and women slaves to watch the [Easter] processions.”114 Not only did masters hide actions from their slaves, they also sometimes dissembled in rather extraordinary ways, considering their supposed dominant status. Ysavel de Silva, testifying against this same Beatriz Enriquez in 1643 Mexico City, relates how the latter acted out normalcy for her slaves. Once she visited her friend Beatriz, Ysavel tells her inquisitors, on a day when the latter’s husband was out of town on business. Having taken out a first chocolate [drink] for this confessant, in order to hide her fast, doña Beatriz, who was fasting that day, took the chocolate that they bring to this confessant and threw it under the platform of the dais [ porch?]. She ordered another chocolate for this confessant, saying that between the two of them they had already drank the first, with which the black women brought another calabash [drinking bowl] of chocolate.115

During the trial of Juan de León/Salomón Machorro, Catalina de Rivera testified that when Juana Enríquez and her husband Simón Váez Sevilla “made the fast of the Law of Moses, which was only that of the Great Day [Yom Kippur], [. . .] they carefully feigned a fight in order not to eat that day, and that the servants and slaves would not know that they fasted, but rather that they didn’t eat because they were angry.”116 Similarly, on one fast Blanca Enriquez, matriarch of the same extended family, “sat all day by the window, and feigned that she cried because of the absence of her husband [who was away], and with this ailment she could hide from the black women her not having eaten that

or ibn Zimor, of Safim, Morocco, a prestigious rabbi and supporter of the Portuguese against the Muslims in North Africa, who provided clandestine aid to the crypto-Jews in Portugal (242–3). 114 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 14 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 243r.–v. 115 Testimony of 29 December 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 96r.–v. 116 Testimony of 1 July 1642; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 45.

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day.”117 When members of the same extended family held a supper on the third day of their mother’s death, while abstaining from meat due to their mourning, one participant brought pig’s feet “so that it should not seem to the domestics and other mulatas and black women who were in the said house that they do not eat meat.”118 Her daughter Beatriz recalls an evening supper, possibly on a day such as Sunday, a “meat day,” when meat was traditional, when “they put meat on the table in order to entertain the serving women.”119 Juan Rodrigues Mesa, a Portuguese merchant in Cartagena, was accused in 1641 by one witness of eating neither pig nor fish without scales, “and if he did on occasion it was so that his people [i.e., domestic help] wouldn’t know that he was a Jew and observed the Law of Moses.”120 According to one witness, when Maria de Rivera and a friend fasted one time, at mid-day “they brought the slave women of the said person to eat at the table, and the said Doña Maria and the said person made as if they ate, but in truth they didn’t eat, because the said doña Maria, excusing the servants, threw the food to the cats through a window.”121 When about to die, Leonor Vaez, an alleged crypto-Jew in Mexico City, is said to have ordered a crucifix to be placed on her corpse and not to be taken off, so that “the black women and other persons will be able to see it.”122 The accused judaizer Gabriel de Granada, a young 117 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, her daughter, 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 211v. 118 Testimony of Antonio Lopez de Orduna, 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 177v. Nothing regarding the avoidance of meat appears in the Shulkhan Arukh. In fact, the eating of meat is specifically permitted once the deceased is buried (Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah, sec. 378:8–9. Perhaps because a mourner is required to refrain from celebration and even joy during the seven days of mourning (Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah, #391), the custom developed of not eating of meat, considered a pleasure. Abstaining from meat may have been a custom observed among Marranos, though Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, does not mention it. Various witnesses state that fish suppers are “a ceremony of the said law when an observer of [the law] dies” (testimony of Catalina Enriquez, Mexico City, 20 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 153r.). Orduna states explicitly that he heard said “that it is a ceremony of the said law that when a person dies who observes [the law] the relatives of the deceased do not eat any meat item for the first few days” (ibid., fol. 177r.). 119 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 24 October 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 228v. 120 AHN Inq. 1601/18, fol. 31; reprinted in Rotbaum, Documentos, 223. 121 Summary of charges against Maria de Rivera, 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 403, exp. 3, fol. 439v. 122 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez (Leonor’s aunt), 19 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 275r. Rafaela Enriquez corroborates this: “they had placed, in order to comply with the Catholics who would be able to see it, especially the slave

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teenager, told the Mexican Inquisition during his trial (1642–1645) how doña Juana Enriquez told his said uncle [Diego Correa] to change his name and call himself Don Pedro so as not to be recognized by the negroes and also to change his voice as he did sometimes.”123 Though some masters assigned their slaves intimate tasks, functions involving their religious life remained off limits. The Mexican Converso Antonio Méndez would allegedly bathe intensely in preparation for the sabbath. While on all other occasions his Black slave, Juan Angola, bathed him, for his Friday purifications he would not let his slave wash him.124 Beatriz Enriquez, also of Mexico, relates in her testimony that while it is true that after her mother’s death she sent alms to various members of her extended family by means of her Black slave Ysavel, she did not, as was alleged by a certain witness, “send her to say that they should fast [for the soul of her deceased mother, a Marrano custom], because this was not something to entrust to a negra.”125 Some masters whose practices drew notice may have promised a slave liberty if she would not betray them to the Inquisition.126 Antonia de la Cruz, slave of Simón Váez Sevilla’s brother-in-law Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, related that Váez Sevilla and his wife Juana Enriquez gathered their many slaves and told them that if they were brought into the Inquisition to testify “we were [told] to be good slaves.”127 Antonia also testifies that Váez Sevilla warned his slaves that if they gave information to the Inquisition, “his compadre, Garcia de Valdés

women, the image of a crucified saint” (testimony of 5 January 1645; ibid., 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 286v.). 123 Fergusson, “Trial of Gabriel de Granada,” 471. Granada also related how one of their Black women slaves supposedly saw his aunt, Margarita, and others flogging a crucifix, to the point where it broke, something that caused them to burn it in order to destroy the evidence (432). 124 Cited in Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 319. Robert Ferry speculates that “for observant women, the risk of appearing conspicuously idle in observance of the Sabbath and other holy days was diminished since their slaves regularly did most if not all domestic labor” (“Don’t Drink the Chocolate”), but he is wrong to think that rituals such as bathing, lighting candles or eating chicken/meat in honor of the sabbath might not threaten to raise suspicions even among slaves. As I am trying to make clear here, it is not the case that “descriptions of other ritual activities mention slaves and secrecy only occasionally.” 125 Response to the charges of various witnesses, AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 423v. 126 As the judaizer Alvar Gonçales did to his “Moorish” slave Inés once he began worrying that the Inquisition might arrest him; Las Palmas, the Canary Islands, ca. early 1520s (Beinart, “Jews in the Canary Islands,” 54). 127 Cited and translated in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.”

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Osorio, an Old Christian, would purchase them and force them to work in his sugar mill. If they remained loyal, however, they would be rewarded with emancipation.”128 More extreme reactions to the threat that slaves’ knowledge might serve the Inquisitions ensued as well. In Mexico, during the 1590s, Jorge de Almeida was accused of helping to strangle a Black woman who called her master, Christoval Gomez, a Jew, fearful of the consequences.129 More reasonable was the approach of León/Machorro to the threat posed by a slave who might denounce. A family with whom León/Machorro often celebrated Jewish occasions—the family of Blanca de Rivera—closed the doors to the street at such times, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, from his jail cell he later told Francisco Botello, in a neighboring cell (ca. 1645), there was an enemy behind closed doors, a black woman belonging to the said person, who, when her mistress beat her, she [the slave] then threatened to accuse her and all those that they had [i.e., friends and relatives], and that the said León told her [the mistress]: either sell this black woman far away from here or stop beating, for she will wring all our necks.130

Unfortunately, the imprisoned León/Machorro continued, his reveries of the beauty and purity of their former celebrations turning bitter, “as I understand, she did just this and was the cause of our destruction.”131 128 Cited in Hordes, End of the Earth, 56. Antonia will appear again at length in chapter 6. 129 Adler, “Trial of Jorge de Almeida,” 319. Almeida, or Almeyda, had lived as a Jew in Ferrara in the 1570s before returning to Spain and then leaving, with his mother and two brothers, for New Spain (Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews of New Spain [Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1970], 172–3). 130 Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 333. Another case of a slave being sold by a New Christian family in Portugal appears in the Lisbon denunciations of 1541. At least two slaves belonging to the family, including one Mulato, had told others about the family’s Jewishness. The sale of the slave came under the condition that he never return to Portugal (Baião, Inquisição, 112). Non-Converso households also faced problems generated by the behavior or gossip of slaves. The mysticallyinclined Francisco de la Cruz relates to his inquisitors (Peru, 1571) that his angel told him, because of various Blacks and Mulatos stirring up trouble with gossip about the romantic affairs of their masters and masters’ acquaintences, “that I should tell doña Elvira to throw out of her house all of the free blacks that she had in it” (Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:428). 131 Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 333. This conversation was reported to the inquisitors, along with many, many others between these two prisoners as well as other prisoners, by yet another prisoner, Gaspar Alfar. The sheer volume and detail (which often can be corroborated through other testimonies) force the conclusion that Alfar lacked morals far more than surveillance skills. On Alfar, who, among other things, feigned being a priest in Rome and Seville and went to the Indies without a

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Ignorant of why he was imprisoned in 1642, Thomas Nuñez de Peralta was able to communicate from his cell with his wife Beatriz Enriquez by means of messages carried by intermediaries. In his response to a note of hers, he assures her that “no black woman could have done this damage to him” and names instead a relative. His wife’s first impulse, then, had been to suspect one of their slaves.132 Blanca de Rivera and her daughter Ysabel, alleged judaizers sitting in the Mexico City inquisition jail in the early 1640s, tried to figure out who might have accused them, lingering on the Angolan slave Juliana.133 Francisco Botello remained in prison through 1649, when he was penitenced in that year’s auto de fe.134 In January of that year he related to his comrade in jail, León/Machorro, a dream that he had just had. He said that he had dreamed that having escaped he walked through the street eating and always found himself in a stall [at the market], and saw many people coming, and having dropped himself to the irrigation channel of the Palace he hid under the bridge, and that hearing that the people said that a sack had dropped over there he tried to escape from there and returned to find himself in the same place, and that he heard a Black who said: here is the man, and that having come to Santo Domingo [Cathedral], the people grabbed him and put him in a very dark and gloomy room, with many niches.135

Without wanting to overinterpret, it can be said that Botello fears being turned by his persecution into something lifeless and inhuman (being mistaken for a falling sack); he is trapped (he “always found

license to serve as a priest but administered all the sacraments nevertheless, see Boleslao Lewin, Confidencias de dos criptojudíos en las cárceles del Santo Oficio, México, 1645–1646 (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1975), 12–15. Elsewhere, Alfar reports that León/Machorro named the slave’s mistress, María de Rivera, as well as the slave, Juliana (cited in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate”). 132 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 220v. 133 Their conversations also were reported by Gaspar Alfar (testimony of 13 June 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396, exp. 3, fol. 570v.); see also testimony of Miguel de Almonaçir, 24 May 1642, AGN Inq. 413, no exp., fol. 25v.; cited in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” 134 Botello was again arrested, due to the denunciation of his adopted son, José Sánchez, in 1656. In the 8 October 1659 auto de fe the Inquisition burned him to death at the stake (Lewin, Proceso de María de Zárate, 31). 135 Cited in Lewin, Singular processo de Solomón Machorro, 400. Lewin transcribed a slightly different version of Botello’s dream from another manuscript source in Confidencias de dos criptojudíos, 133–4.

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himself ”) by anti-Jewish/anti-Judeoconverso prejudice in his role as a merchant; he attempts to prove that he is a good Christian (he tries to get to the cathedral); the church (hope, eternal life, light) turns into its opposite, a jail (dark, very gloomy, labyrinthine). The fearful content of the dream should come as no surprise. Neither should the role of the Black man who points out the dreamer. Whether or not one agrees with Leon/Machorro’s interpretation of Botello’s dream, in particular that the Black represents the executioner, one readily understands why the imprisoned Francisco Botello “had awakened crying.” To conclude, I am not at all sure that “slave-owning crypto-Jews controlled their domestic space well enough to allow them, with some caution, to practice [. . .] with a fair degree of security that they would not be discovered,” as Robert Ferry suggests.136 Quite the contrary. Though some masters or mistresses might have been able to or felt able to trust their slaves, or some of them, it appears that despite their subaltern status slaves often exercised disproportionate influence on their owners’ behavior. Why so many of these worries surfaced amidst the New Christians of Mexico and not elsewhere is not quite clear. It seems doubtful that only this group would be impacted by the surrounding environment’s racial-religious politics. Writing of Peru, Jean-Pierre Tardieu notes that the African servants or slaves of Judeoconversos “on occasion revealed the customs which made manifest the religious affiliation of their owners.”137 Again, I suspect that Inquisition archives hold many more such cases of servile denunciations. It is likely that the more extreme and harsher racial conditions of the American slave societies distorted, if not sundered the loyalties that slaves and servants might have internalized and upheld in Europe.138 Even if limited, the more global investigation I have tried to carry out shows that such denunciations were not so rare and that masters indeed feared them. Ultimately, mistresses and masters had no way of knowing whether slaves, even seemingly loyal ones, could be trusted under the stare of the inquisitorial gaze. 136 Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” Laura Lewis provides a list of Afromexican slaves who denounced their masters of judaizing: AGN Inq. 296, exp. 3, 1612; 316, exp. 26, 1617; 510, exp. 128, 1625; 435 (1), fs. 78, 254, 1650; 435 (2), f. 410, 1650; 458, exp. 34, 1658, 520, exp. 101, 1685 (Hall of Mirrors, 231, n. 95). These cases are all supplemental to those I have discussed here. 137 Tardieu, Negros y la iglesia en el Perú, 1:567, n. 3. 138 Huerga Criado offers this argument regarding Portugal (En la raya de Portugal, 92).

CHAPTER FIVE

SLAVES AND THE DOWNTRODDEN RELIGION OF THEIR MASTERS Various people denounced the shoemaker Alvaro Gonçales in 1524 for having “employed a negro to cast spells to discover whether the Inquisition would be established in the [Canary] islands.”1

This chapter explores further aspects of the relations between early modern Afroiberians and Judeoconversos. For the most part, it covers relations of an opposite order from those of the previous chapters, relations of mutuality, sharing and collaboration, though such siding together did not always come voluntarily to those Afroiberians who still served as slaves. The example from the Canaries cited in the above epigraph is one sign that in some ways Judeoconverso masters were open to the culture of their African slaves. I have found few other indications to the same effect, however, and use this documentational paucity to raise a caveat that such ‘collaboration,’ in both directions, should not be pushed too far. As was mentioned in preceding chapters, some Whites found African or Amerindian religious and magical practices useful or attractive. Here as well, a New Christian named Alvaro Gonçales saw fit to turn to an Afro-Canariote, whether free or slave (perhaps even his own slave), with skills in divination in order to interpret events, in this case events that might not have yet happened.2 How appropriate that a man who might well have been living an alternative life to the regnant Catholicism, one that he may have wanted to continue protecting and hiding, would seek information from another alternative knowledge system. Whether this means that Gonçales approved of or respected the African knowledge system grounding such acts of divination, whether such recourse to African divination entailed something common among Canariote Whites or whether this constituted a move of pragmatism,

Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 43. For an insightful analysis of African divination under the slave system, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 120–37. 1 2

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even desperation, on his part, remains more difficult to answer.3 The same set of questions needs to be asked regarding Afroiberians who adapted themselves to the Marranism of their mistresses. Belonging to One’s Master If the above event indeed took place, Gonçales obviously entrusted the matter regarding which he sought information—the coming of the Inquisition—to the man performing the ritual of divining. Their own slaves also were certainly at times brought into masters’ most intimate circle of trust. Such trust might stem from lack of other or better options but might also evince true feelings of comradeship. Rafaela Enriquez, accused of judaizing by the Mexico City Inquisition in the early 1640s, testifies that on the evening of a recent Fast of the Great Day (Yom Kippur), an acquaintance came over to see her. He greeted her with a typical blessing, “that she should have many such days and that God should grant this.” Enriquez responded “that they couldn’t be good because that day a black woman [slave] had died on her.”4 The mistress’s sense of loss appears real enough, though without more knowledge it is difficult to say whether it derived from bereavement over a personal blow or anxieties over the disruption and inconvenience caused by the slave’s passing. Several instances exist in which New Christians who feared they might be arrested by the Inquisition ordered their slaves to hide their valuables. When arrested by the same tribunal in June 1642, the wealthy Matias Rodrigues de Olivera entrusted his money and valuables to one of his slaves, promising him his freedom if he guard them punctiliously until Olivera should leave prison.5 Isabel de Esperanza had allegedly helped her owners Simón Váez Sevilla and Juana Enriquez hide “jewels and cash in a secret room in their house.”6 In cases such as these, the underlings’ unfree status and dependence

3 Green, “Masters of Difference,” 259–60, argues that the Sephardic Jews and New Christians of Guiné, Cabo Verde and São Tomé adapted themselves to the ways of their African surroundings, “blackening” themselves in order to survive and succeed in trade. 4 Testimony of 24 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 291r. Her acquaintance merely adjusted his blessing, “no, rather, [her days should be] like the following day, because it was that of the great fast.” 5 Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 561. 6 Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate,” n. 27.

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on the mistress makes their loyalty coincide with their self-interest. Sources do not reveal that New Christians employed their own slaves or the slaves of others in a manner any different from Old Christians. One allegedly judaizing Portuguese New Christian of 1625 Madrid who became annoyed with another begged him not to acknowledge their acquaintance, threatening to hire a slave to kill him if he did. The use or hire of slaves to perform such functions was common among Spaniards.7 In 1541 Lisbon, a man insulted a New Christian woman’s husband, whom he had previously reported to a priest for ordering ‘his Blacks’ to dig on Sunday. This new insult drew a curse from the wife, as well as a drawn knife from the slave accompanying her, ready, obviously, to defend the honor of his masters.8 Adversity or crisis could put both master and slave on the same side, could cause the temporary erasure of that which usually distinguished them.9 Loyalty to the master did not only stem from circumstances of immediate self-interest. As possessions of their masters and mistresses, slaves often had little choice but to tolerate or follow their religious paths (though as the previous chapter shows, opportunity for protest or subversion existed). Gretchen Starr-LeBeau reports, regarding late fifteenth-century Guadalupe (Castile), accusations that various New Christian masters made their servants work on Sunday.10 Though one’s place in the system that supported one’s servitude might be lowly and

7 Haim Beinart, “Legajo 2135 No 1. The Inquisition in Valladolid in the Times of the Inquisitor-General Fray Antonio de Sotomayor (1621–1643),” Mémorial I.-S. Révah: Études sur le marranisme, l’hétérodoxie juive et Spinoza, ed. Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon (Paris-Lousain: E. Peeters, 2001), 85. On the use of slaves for physical attack and murder of enemies, see Debra G. Blumenthal, “Implements of Labor, Instruments of Honor: Muslim, Eastern and Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Valencia” (Ph.D. Diss, University of Toronto, 2000), 203–217. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 56, 67–72, offers numerous examples of slaves in Mexico carrying out the colonialist orders of their Spanish masters against Amerindians. 8 Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 115. “No dia 3 [de Feb.] compareceu Jorge Gonçalves, bombardeiro, morador, na Pampulha que vindo de passeiar, e passando perto do pomar de Alonso Barreira, christão novo, vio nelle andar um negro e disseram todos que aquillo parecia mal. Porém Alonso Barreira veio a casa d’elle, acompanhado por um escravo e um Ratinho e, como elle não estives-se, perguntara á sua mulher pelo ladrão do marido, ao que esta respondeu que o seu marido era tão ladrão como quem lh’o chamava e o negro puchara então da espada para ella. Alonso Barreira tinha zanga á testemunha por ter ido dizer ao cura de Santos o Velho que ella mandava os negros cavar ao Domingo.” 9 This was often one of the results of shipwrecks (Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, 74, 92), though Blackmore does not dwell on this. 10 Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin, 65.

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miserable, it had its security, order and comforts. Doing what one was commanded to do could bring rewards. Beatriz, who belonged to the above-mentioned Alvaro Gonçales, of the Canaries, was more than likely not the only slave whose master “told her that she was never to speak of anything that she saw done in the house, and that he would reward her.”11 Blanca Enriquez, matriarch of a family of alleged judaizers arrested in 1640s Mexico City, gave out alms before she died, entrusting a slave woman to deliver them to the poor patients in the hospital of Our Lady as well as to the poor who sat in jail.12 Blanca’s daughter, Beatriz, referring to the above-mentioned hiding of jewels by Juana Enriquez’s slave(s), though with a different perspective, offers testimony that illuminates several aspects of the master-slave relationship: she knew in the prison of Picayo, that her slave Antonia told her, through a window, that she and another black woman, her companion, slaves of this confessant [Beatriz] had hidden some pearls and jewels from those that were in the said little chest, and that a black woman called lucia, slave of her sister doña Juana enriquez, had discovered them and given them away because they had not wanted to give her some earrings, and that the señores [masters?] had taken from them that which they had hidden, if indeed the said black woman Madalena said honestly to her that she had guarded some things, for when this confessant should go free, and that therefore she would not request anything.13

Beatriz’s description attests to the loyalty of some of her slaves—and raises the possibility of gendered bonding across the master-slave divide—as well as the competing interests motivating members of the servile class. Despite very real issues of status and race, it is not so clear that “in no case can servants [and slaves, we might add] be considered as members of the family,” as Pilar Huerga Criado discusses from some Old World examples.14 Robert Ferry claims that only one of the alleged judaizers arrested in Mexico in the 1640s was denounced by slaves for ‘heretical behavior,’ the slave trader Agustín de Rojas, accused by the

Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, 22. “tambien embio parte del al ospital de nuestra Señora a los pobres con una esclaba suya, Ysavel o antonia, Y tambien a los Pobres de la carceles con las mismas esclabas” (as testified in August 1642 to his inquisitors by Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, who heard it from his wife Beatriz Enriquez, daughter of Blanca Enriquez; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 59v.). 13 Response to the charges against her, 20 September 1647 (?); AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 324r. 14 Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal, 91–2. 11 12

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Mozambican Diego de Sevilla.15 The rest of the slaves, Ferry argues, never made denunciations, or at least not voluntarily. Huerga Criado comes to a similar conclusion when treating the Inquisition’s pursuit of judaizing in the New Christian community of Badajoz in the 1630s. There, slaves or servants show absolute loyalty to the mistress they presently serve, affirming the latters’ statements and denying their supposedly judaizing tendencies, while former slaves/servants often take an opposite perspective. In naming witnesses, the mistresses assume the loyalty and submissiveness (not always the same thing, of course) of their present domestic staff, naming them as defense witnesses, while identifying former staff as those who might have had reason to denounce them.16 As I have shown, while such loyalty and/or deference did help structure some master-slave relationships, it was by no means guaranteed, particularly in the harsher slave subculture environment of the Americas. An excellent sense of the emotional complexities and competing desires or interests at work within the master-slave relationship appear in two incidents related in the Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil (1618), an advertisement for Brazil written by the New Christian Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão. The author, a retired Pernambucan sugar planter of some prominence, puts the tales into the mouth of a character named Brandônio, likely an autobiographical projection. The first incident: [T]here was living in my house a little mulatto girl of tender age, who was born there and whom I loved dearly, for I had reared her. A slave of mine, with diabolic intent, spurred on to this by the girl’s having told me of a theft he had committed, gave her poison, so that in a very short time [. . . she] showed all the signs of being at death’s door. Seeing the girl in such a state, not only was I extremely sorrowful, but I had a firm suspicion that poison had brought this about and that the guilty person must have been the very slave who had, in fact, given it to her, for he had among his fellow the reputation of being a sorcerer and herbalist. Hence I had him seized, assuring him that he would live no longer than the girl did, because I knew for a certainty that he had given her the poison. I said some other things to him and even showed him what I intended to do, which was to run him through the cane press; therefore, he should try quickly to find a remedy for the evil he had done. [. . .] he undertook to cure the sick girl on condition that he might have leave to go to the woods to pick some herbs for this purpose. I consented to what he asked of me,

15 16

Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal, 92–3.

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chapter five but I had him shackled to another house slave, whom I secretly charged to note carefully the herb that was picked so that we might recognize it later. But the first slave was so crafty that, to keep from revealing it, he picked many different herbs, among which was the one he had need of, but in such a way that the slave who was shackled to him could not tell which one was the herb he was going to use. [. . .] [The girl was cured, but] I was most woefully upset because I did not know what the herb was, but I was never able to get that slave, either by threatening him or by offering him presents, to show me what it was.17

The second incident: The other case was that of a slave of little value, one of those from Angola. I have seen him pick up the most poisonous snakes and wrap them around himself. Although they bit him in many places, their bites did him no harm. [. . .] I marveled at this, and thought that it must be the work of magic words or the power of some kind of spell. But in the end I found out that it wasn’t either one. When I had won the black‘s good will by means of presents, he finally showed me some roots and another herb, telling me that whoever rubbed his joints with the juice of that root, after chewing it well in his mouth, could in all safety pick up as many snakes as he wanted to, without fear of their bites’ doing him harm, no matter how poisonous the snakes might be. I tried it myself and had experiments made, and it is still used by my slaves today.18

Many of the themes raised in previous chapters and to recur below course through these brief narratives. Unfortunately, space does not permit the full unpacking they deserve. For my purposes here I merely note the variety of relations possible with different slaves at the same time; the means, positive and negative, by which a master might try to gain the good will or cooperation of slaves; the relative degree of autonomy and agency possessed by slaves; the possibility of cooperation if not affection between master and slave, between slave and master; and the fact that often masters and slaves shared the same environment, faced the same dangers.

17 Translated in Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 157–8; for the original Portuguese, see Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, ed. José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, 3rd ed. (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1997), 119–20. 18 Translated in Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 158–59; the original Portuguese: Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 121.

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The intrusion of the Inquisition into the life of a slave’s mistress often bore consequences equally as intrusive for the slave. Slaves were called upon to come to the aid of their mistresses. When Raphaela Enriquez was arrested by the Mexico City tribunal in 1642, “speaking with her black women, the mulata who raised the baby boy went to the house of [Raphaela’s sister] Micaela and advised her regarding what had happened.”19 Juan Bautista Corvera, accused in 1564 in Guadalajara, Mexico, of being a follower of the law of Moses, attempted to flee before his imprisonment, advised to do so by various neighbors, who helped him hide in a local house. So that Corvera could escape, one neighbor, Bernardino Vázquez del Mercado, brought the fugitive his (Corvera’s) horses, saddled and with the bit prepared, with his (Corvera’s) one Black slave, already embargoed by the ecclesiastical authorities. But all to no avail, as the plot was discovered and the accomplices arrested.20 Without documentation, one can only speculate on the slave’s thoughts during all this; whether he wanted to remain with his fugitive master, to challenge the Inquisition’s embargo of his person, whether he surmised that the authorities might have charged Corvera, the master, rather than himself, the slave, with the inspiration and consequences of such a challenge. Sometimes the intrusion of the Inquisition pointed up certain ironies, as when an indicted New Christian, Felipa Rodrigues, first wife of Gaspar Rodrigues Nunes (Menasseh ben Israel’s father), cited as character witnesses for her defense two of her former maids, Maria Antunes and Antónia, because, among other things, they happened to be Old Christians.21 Since prisoners had to pay for their own imprisonment, slaves of individuals arrested by the Inquistion might end up working at the inquisition jails. Francisco de la Cruz, also known as Queretano, a Black Angolan slave of Simon Vaez Sevilla of Mexico City, wound up serving in the local tribunal’s jail, bringing food to the prisoners, including his arrested master.22 Two other slaves belonging to Vaez, Ysavelilla, a Creole, and Francisco a bozal, found themselves working in the jail 19 Testimony of Ysavel de Silva, 30 June 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 96r. 20 Toro, Judíos en la Nueva España, 170–1. 21 She had been arrested in 1591. The two former maids, Maria Antunes and Antónia, among other Old Christian character witnesses, were never questioned by the inquisitors (Salomon, “Portuguese Background,” 117; ANTT, Inq. de Lisboa, no. 2203). 22 Querétaro was the name of a commercial center north of Mexico City.

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kitchen.23 If a master was arrested by the Inquisition and could not afford to pay the expenses of her own trial, as required, confiscated goods, including slaves, would be sold to raise the necessary funds.24 This happened in the case of Francisco Maldonado de Silva, whose lack of available money caused Friar Martín de Salvatierra to counsel the sale of Silva’s goods, such as “the little Black,” one of Silva’s four slaves, probably “a little Black called Francisco from Angola of twelve years more or less.”25 Somewhat later, Silva’s wife, doña Isabel de Otáñez, petitioned the tribunal to allow her to sell two other Black slaves, who had been part of her dowry for her husband, but who had been embargoed along with his goods (even though she was not being accused of anything), so that she could raise enough money to recoup at least some portion of her dowry’s value.26 The slaves were finally sold the next November and at a greatly reduced price because of various problems, as the Inquisition notary put it: “darkies [morenaos] so worthless and with such ailments and faults, the one suffered from a leg with sciatica, the other with a bad heart and [is] a big drunkard with other flaws.”27 Whether these Afroiberians preferred being sold to new owners we do not know and it may not have made a difference to them that the decision to sell them derived not from the volition of their master, but of the Inquisition. In one case from Cartagena, mentioned in chapter 3, an Inquisition official was accused of failing to include Black slaves (among other confiscated goods) belonging to a suspect on the inventory, no doubt in order to abscond with them for his own use or profit.28 23 Testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 524r.–v. 24 See Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos 506, for instructions from 1645 Cartagena on dealing with the sequestered slaves of accused persons. 25 Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 71, 58. 26 Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 135. “[S]e le secuestraron todos sus bienes, y porque entre ellos se secuestraron los bienes que yo llevé de dote, [. . .] que los bienes que están embargados del dicho mi marido que son, en la plaza de la dicha ciudad, tres cuartos de solar y dos negros llamados Simón y Francisco, y otros bienes que constará por el embargo, para que los venda en pública almoneda rematándolos en le mayor ponedor, y de su procedido me pague y haga pagar toda la cantidad que recibió conmigo en dote [. . .].” 27 Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 271. Silva’s widow received but a fraction of the purchase price, the rest being treated as confiscated goods and used to pay for the Inquisition’s expenses in maintaining Silva in jail (138). 28 Juan de Uriarte was the official, denounced in the late 1640s by the Governor Alonso Ordoñez de Arçe Cavallero, among others. “Y despues voluio el dicho don Juan de Araoz y le dijo a este declarante que le auia dicho el dicho Francisco Piñero

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Making Their Slaves ‘Jewish’? I now consider the ways in which the persecuted religious beliefs and/or practices of Judeoconverso or crypto-Jewish masters shaped the nature of relationships with their Afroiberian slaves. The question is not merely about internal matters—how the masters and slaves interacted—but how the structure of the intersection of the domestic and external socio-religious environments constructed possibilities for slave-master relations. In 1579, the Portuguese New Christian Antonio Saldanha told the inquisitors in Venice, where he lived among the Portuguese New Christians, that three years earlier he had heard from “the Jew David Pas,” at whose house in the Ghetto Saldanha had been a frequent house guest, how “Portuguese New Christians, both in Portugal itself and in Venice, habitually judaized the slaves in their own households and gave them gentle and loving treatment.”29 One such might have been Gaspar Ribeiro, who was accused in Italy, toward the end of the sixteenth century, of “enticing his sister and some of his Christian servants to become Jewish.”30 Saldanha, an ex-Franciscan who had abandoned the cloth and now led a dissolute life and who “had never avoided Jewish company himself,” seems, as the result of a quarrel in which he had become unwillingly involved, to have then been in a mood “to unmask those Portuguese who did not live according to Christianity.”31 Whether his testimony was as accurate as it was self-serving and que quando le sequestraron los bienes tomó y ocultó el dicho Juan de Uriarte quatro o cinco barretones de oro y que tambien tenia un taleguillo de perlas pinjantes y algunas cadenas de oro y negros que no se pusieron en el ynuentario y se ocultaron” (Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 304). See also the 1643 testimony of the jailer Diego Fernandez de Amaia: “y tanbien sucedio en este tiempo sauer el dicho Francisco Rodriguez de Solis que el dicho Juan de Uriarte hauia sacado por interpuesta persona una esclaba negra de mucho valor de la almoneda de sus bienes de que fue depossitario Diego de Orozco por un precio muy corto y el dicho Francisco Rodriguez de Solis quiso pedir dicho esclabo por el [. . . .]” (ibid., 341). 29 Pullan, Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 75, n. 12. 30 Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, “The Portuguese Jews after Baptism,” in Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from Their Expulsion in 1497 through Their Dispersion, ed. Israel J. Katz and M. Mitchell Serels (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press/The American Society of Sephardic Studies, 2000), 20; she cites Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini (ed.), Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro Ebrei e Giudaizzanti (1579–1586), vol. 7 (Firenzi: Olschki, 1987), 34–41, 61 and 151. 31 Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “The Ribeiros: a Sixteenth Century Family of Conversos between two Inquisitions: Lisbon and Venice,” in Novinsky and Tucci Carneiro, eds., Inquisição, 310; Pullan, Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 104.

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purposely provocative to Christian sensitivities is thus difficult to know. The statement transmitted by Saldanha implies—as does the context of its double transmission—that such “gentle and loving” treatment constituted part of the wooing of slaves toward Judaism, a wooing encouraged by Jewish law, but also by a form of cultural defiance on the part of believers in this persecuted religion.32 Thus around the Spanish North African enclave of Oran “Jews were thought to be determined to dissuade their Moorish slaves from converting to Christianity, in which, admittedly, they had an interest but which was also a remarkable feat, since slaves of Jews, once baptised, were immediately set free.”33 The Vicar General of Oran, Fernández de Humada, complained in 1661 that “no Moor living among them ever became Christian, while those who live among Catholics ask daily for baptism.”34 Continues Jonathan Israel, this “lack of conversion among the slaves of Jews was indeed one of the most persistent allegations made by those who pressed for the expulsion of the Jews from the fronteras.” Similar allegations were made against the Sephardic Africa merchants operating from and residing in some of the port towns on the Senegambian coast. A document of 1623 recommends that slaves being sent to the Americas from Cacheu, on the West African coast, first be instructed in Christianity, “owing to the levels of Judaism in Guiné.”35 These examples refer to open Jewish communities and even there it is clear that some opposed the conversion of non-Whites to Judaism, especially the communal leadership.36

32 A similar allegation was raised by another fascinating double figure, Abraham Bendana Sarfatim, who as a Catholic polemicized harshly against Jews. In 1599 he deposed that in Pisa he had lived with some 90 other New Christians. One of these was “Simão Fernandez Sam Thome, a man thirty five years old, with a small black bear, and he doesn’t know where he was born. This one remained also in Piza with his mother-in-law, his wife, and a black woman, also Jews, and he knew them as Jews, and saw them going to the synagogues, and that the black woman was also a Jew, and he knew her as a Jew, and he knows that it is very common among Jews to buy Black men and women, and make them Jews, and he has seen in Piza some of those Black Jews, both men and women” (trial of Habraham Bendana Sarfatim, ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, livro 563 [ Reduzidos], fol. 294). I am most grateful to José Alberto Tavim for this reference. 33 Jonathan I. Israel, “The Jews of Spanish North Africa, 1600–1669,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 26 (1974/1978): 80. 34 Translated in Israel, “Jews of Spanish North Africa,” 80; the Spanish original appears on 85. 35 Green, “Masters of Difference,” 252. 36 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, chs. 7–9.

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Internal relations within a Judeoconverso household often fell under the sway of external relations between the alleged religion of the masters and that of the state. The accumulated bits of data about domestic affairs in Judeoconverso homes that lies scattered in the various inquisitional archives will be more useful as evidence than the kind of overt but general propaganda conveyed by the apologetic Pas and the antagonistic Saldanha. Claims of Judeoconversos judaizing among their slaves remain difficult to corroborate, though I will endeavor to do so to the extent possible. Jean-Pierre Tardieu, who devoted much effort to investigating the religious history of Afroiberian Peru, concludes that “The ‘followers of the law of Moses’ had no interest in converting their black servants.”37 Based on the evidence with which I am familiar, I tend to agree. That a program of winning slave souls for (crypto-)Judaism existed among Marranos can be rightfully doubted. Nonetheless, as we shall see, some Afroiberians, slave and free, came to ally themselves to differing degrees with crypto-Judaism and even to value it for a variety of reasons. In chapter 7 I discuss the handful of Afroiberians who did, indeed, adopt crypto-Judaism. Slaves were by definition possessions of their masters. Though slaves by duress, slaves of Judeoconversos or crypto-Jews often became entangled in the state of affairs both producing and produced by their masters’ alleged Jewishness—willingly or not. Servants, although not as thoroughly dependent on their masters’ will, nonetheless also lived subject to many of the same pressures from within Judeoconverso homes and from without because they served in the homes of alleged Marranos. The Jewishness or alleged Jewishness of a slave’s owners carried inescapable ramifications for a slave, even if she was not herself crypto-Jewish, both subjectively in the eyes of her Catholic peers and often objectively, through the institutional repercussions of Iberian society’s deep religious nationalism. According to one seventeenth-century denunciation given to the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil, the ‘judaizers’ of Bahia could practice their illicit rites without fear of discovery because they “live in their ranches, separated from communication, served by brute negros who don’t have anything Christian but the water of baptism.”38 This charge alleges that Judeoconversos neglected to see to the Christianization of

37 38

Tardieu, Negros y la iglesia en el Perú, 1:567, n. 3. Cited in Lipiner, Izaque de Castro, 32.

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their slaves, which will be discussed further. Perhaps one aspect of this service was protection against the intrusion of unwanted Christians, an extension of the “private police force[s], which the masters needed to maintain because the authorities were so far away,” made up of manumitted slaves, poor whites or free coloreds, who would attach themselves to plantation-owners.39 As was said of Blas de Paz Pinto, the wealthy Mexico City merchant Simón Váez Sevilla was alleged to have “[n]ight and day a slave in a sentinel’s room ( postal) guard[ing] the entryway (zaguán) of the house.”40 Some sincere crypto-Jewish masters may have baptised their slaves for the sake of appearances, but, newly arrived from Africa, their slaves often were alleged to have received little further Christian edification, whether or not they desired it.41 Diogo Nunes Henriques, who had lived in Minas Gerais for some 30 years, was arrested in Ouro Preto in 1728 and accused of practicing Judaism. One of the charges against him held that he taught his slaves to disobey Christian dogma.42 The actions of slaves and masters reflected on one another, since the former were understood to follow the commands of the latter. Thus Branca Dias stated in her defense to the Inquisition that she had in her house Old Christian serving women and that she made them eat pork fat that she made and killed all these years in her house, and the said servants kneaded the bread for her and made the beds for her, putting out only washed sheets Saturday nights, in honor and veneration of the sacred day of sunday, and sundays she wore her cleaned shirts, without ever using or doing Jewish ceremonies.43

According to the testimony of one stone mason who used to visit the house of the wealthy New Christian merchant and sugar plantation owner João Nunes Correia,

39 Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 107–8. This may be the force of the accusation that one New Christian merchant in Cabo Verde, Pedro de Bairros, “has a stronghold in his house with 100 blacks” (trans. in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 290, n. 92). 40 Cited and translated in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” 41 On Portuguese judaizers maintaining newly-imported, non-Spanish-speaking African slaves, bozales, see below. 42 Anita Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography of Marranos in the Light of New Documents,” Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from their Expulsion in 1497 through their Dispersion, ed. Israel J. Katz and M. Mitchell Serels (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 2000), 113. She cites ANTT No. 7487. 43 Quoted in Mello, Gente da nação, 119.

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going and setting in order some houses for the said João Nunes he comes across a servant, filthy drunk and covered with a cap of old flannel and that by the house [that is, by the apartment] were some panels from Flanders and that arriving there there was the said João Nunes, he tells him this and wonders greatly, saying to him that being that there is a chapel there it was not good and he would say to him that they were overlooked by the blacks.44

As comes across from other testimony regarding him, Correia was not having his engenho chapel properly maintained and it was being used for unseemly purposes given its holy nature. Master and servant stood complicit in the neglect of good Christian comportment. None of this of course proves that the slaves or servants in these cases knew anything about Jewish practices or had been indoctrinated in crypto-Judaism. In 1640s Mexico City, the slaves belonging to an extended family of alleged judaizers would confer with their masters each time they went to participate in the processions of Holy Week, which the masters seemingly did not attend. During Holy Week just past every time that the black women went up to do the processions they spoke with their mistresses who are Doña Beatriz [Enriquez and her husband] Thomas nuñez, Doña Rafaela and her daughters Ana and Blanca in the Angolan language which the said Doña Beatriz speaks very well. That which I could hear was the said black woman Antonia saying in Romance [i.e., Spanish] that the said Doña Beatriz will send her the measurement and would send her some shoes in the clothing. And she had not sent the melon in the clothing because it smelled much [and] that the little mulato would bring it. And she told them not to speak because many spies were about. And she [Antonia?] would sell them to give a reason for what would be.45

The conversations evince a certain complicity between masters and slaves, as they are discussing bringing things to imprisoned relatives or friends. (Below I discuss the matter of the shared African language.) The mistress Beatriz Enriquez warns the slaves against mistakenly informing on their owners (who are themselves seemingly absent from the festivities) while in public and even to be providing an alibi of sorts, that the slave woman Antonia should pretend to be selling the things that are actually being brought into the prison to arrested family members. It

Quoted in Mello, Gente da nação, 63. Testimony of Ysavel de Silva, 19 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 93v.–94r.; also brought in ibid 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 117v. 44 45

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should be recalled from the previous chapter, however, that this same Beatriz Enriquez would pretend to drink chocolate on days that she fasted, in order to keep up pretenses before her slaves. Such conflicting testimony raises many issues that are difficult to resolve. These might not have been the same slaves. Enriquez might have behaved differently with different slaves. The testimony of this witness might not be credible. Enriquez may have behaved inconsistently. The attitude and behavior of crypto-Jewish owners regarding a Catholic sacrament and rite such as baptism offers further evidence of the crossed theo-political vectors marking domestic situations. The behavior and life, if not always the belief, of the slave might have been significantly altered depending on the attitude of the owner toward baptism. One of those accused of judaizing by the Mexican Inquisition in 1643 was Captain Matias Rodriguez de Olivera, at the time a 51-year-old bachelor from Portugal, involved in the slave trade.46 One slave formerly in his service, an Angolan named Baltazar, testifies that Olivera never permitted him or other slaves to receive baptism, something most Judeoconversos living in the Spanish-Portuguese orbit probably did at least for appearances’ sake. Olivera supposedly argued that they had already been baptized in Angola, which was not always the case, though by law they should not have arrived in Spanish territories unbaptized. Baltazar says that he and a companion named Christoval eventually had themselves baptized at church surreptitiously, something they never revealed to their master.47 Other Judeoconversos were also accused of not allowing the baptism of their slaves, such as the above-mentioned Alvaro Gonçales of La Palma, the Canaries, sentenced in 1526. As an example of what was probably more typical behavior, Filipe de Nis (a.k.a. Solomon Marcos) bought a Black slave, Luna Maura, when he was a trader on the island of São Tomé around 1566–67, and had her baptized. The family was then living a Christian

46 On Olivera’s slave-trading, see: summary of the case against him, AGN Mexico, Inq. 409, exp. 1, fol. 206v.; Israel, Diaspora Within a Diaspora, 99. 47 Testimony of 12 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 409, exp. 1, fol. 100r.–v.; cited in Wiznitzer, “Crypto-Jews in Mexico During the Seventeenth Century,” 157. Maria de los Reyes alleges that when a 14-year-old Mulato belonging to Olivera died, as well as a Black woman two days later, their master did not have either given the last rites (testimony of 22 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 409, exp. 1, fol. 98v.). In his response to the charges, Olivera denies neglecting the slaves’ final sacraments (ibid., fol. 140v.). An inspection ordered by the inquisitors found Olivera to be circumcised (AGN Mexico, Inq. 409, exp. 1, fols. 126r.–127r.).

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life. They later moved to Venice, where in 1586 Luna Maura “admitted” to the Venician Inquisition “having lived with the family as a Jewess in Venice when they subsequently judaized outside the Ghetto, but not to having attended any synagogue there.”48 The New Christian Jorge Thomas was denounced to the inquisitor Marcos Teixeira when the latter visited the Azores between August 1575 and July 1576 because Thomas allegedly “discredited the effect of the baptism administered to a Black slave at the hour of death.”49 His doubts notwithstanding, however, the master Jorge Thomas did not forbid his slave to receive this component of the last rites. Finally, the well-known judaizing martyr Izaque de Castro claimed that a servant’s infant had been surreptitiously baptized in his stead by his family: they commanded a search [be made] from the town of Tartas [in France], where they lived, to the [nearby] place of Odon, for an infant who at the same time had been born to the mother of a maidservant of theirs, and putting the said infant in place of the accused, they baptized it in his name, without telling anyone about it other than his said father and mother who on many occasions told this to the accused.50

Castro’s story constituted part of his effort to convince his persecutors that, having never been baptized, he did not fall under inquisitional jurisdiction as a lapsed Christian. Such ulterior motives notwithstanding, the story’s scenario, real or imaginary, depicts a usage of a member of the serving class well within the hierarchical social reasoning of the times. It is not difficult to imagine that a bribe or threat would have helped persuade the servant’s family to refrain from reporting such a transgression to the authorities. While baptism left documentary evidence, circumcision left permanent and dangerous traces. Devoted crypto-Jews continued to circumcize themselves even in the absence of the trained mohel, ritual circumcizer, who would readily have been available in an open Jewish community. According to a study by Seymour B. Liebman, in “50 cases where the inquisitors ordered a physical examination of the accused to ascertain 48 Pullan, Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 75, n. 13 and 216. This, according to Pullan, stands as the “only well-authenticated case of a servant being converted to Judaism” in the records of the Venetian Inquisition (75, n. 13). 49 Célia Maria Ferreira Reis, “A visitação de Marcos Teixeira aos Açores em 1575,” Inquisição, Vol. 1: Comunicações apresentadas ao 1.0 congresso luso-brasileiro sobre inquisição realizado em Lisboa, de 17 a 20 de Fevereiro de 1987 (Lisboa: Sociedade Portuguesa de Estudos do Século XVIII/Universitária Editora, 1989), 284. 50 Cited in Lipiner, Izaque de Castro, 180.

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circumcision, it was found that 48 bore the mark of the covenant.”51 I know of no cases that reveal the circumcision of slaves in regions under the watch of the Inquisitions.52 One related case is that of the Mexican Francisco Lopez Blandón, alias Ferrasas, born in 1619, who was accused of having circumcised his illegitimate son born of his Mulata lover, Agustina de la Cruz, who herself allegedly ‘converted’ to crypto-Judaism.53 Black and Mulato slaves sometimes participated, though often in ways limited by their ambivalently-adoptive families and communities, in the crypto-Jewish life of those families and communities. Slaves might be included in the Jewish practices of their masters and mistresses whether the slaves knew it or not. In some cases even the masters might not have been aware of the real significance of the practices. In some cases it can be inferred that slaves had guessed the true significance of the tasks with which they were charged. Non-ritual functions devolved onto the slaves of Judeoconversos. One woman accused of judaizing by the Mexican Inquisition in the 1640s, Margarita de Morera, allegedly told an Old Christian that when the crypto-Jews were to gather she “dressed up a little black [boy] in colors, who with dissembling they put out on the streets, in order that he should play a tabor [a kind of drum], this being the signal by which it was understood to get together

51 Seymour B. Liebman, “The Religion and Mores of the Colonial New World Marranos,” in Anita Novinsky and Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro (eds.), Inquisição: Ensaios sobre mentalidade, heresias e arte: Trabalhos apresentados no I Congresso Internacional—Inquisição. Universidade de São Paulo. Maio 1987 (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1992), 56. As Liebman provides no more details than this, the geographic and temporal provenance of the subjects remain unclear. Even in territories where Marranos could freely practice Judaism, tension surrounded the decision to circumcize sons, especially if agreement between spouses did not exist. See, for instance, the notarial deed from Amsterdam in which testimony is given concerning Margrita Faras, who threatened to send her small son, fathered by Manuel Thomas, to Portugal “in order to have the friends of Manuel Thomas arrested by the Inquisition, because Thomas had had the child circumcised” (“Notarial Records Relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639,” Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. 17, no. 2 [ July 1983]: Nr. 2235, November 11, 1620). 52 Elias Lipiner mentioned to me one such case from Portugal, but I have never been able to identify it or verify his claim. 53 Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad, 436; Arnold Wiznitzer, “Crypto-Jews in Mexico during in the Seventeenth Century,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 51 (1961/2): 137; Bocanegra, Auto General, s.v. Francisco Lopez Blandon: “Mostrò el falso zelo que tenia de su muerta ley, circuncidando a vn hijuelo suyo avido en vna Mulata, por tenerle señalado con señal de judio, esperando que siendo de edad capaz le podria reduzir al judaismo.”

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to judaize.”54 More substantively, one servant in Ciudad Real, in 1511, testified that not only did her employers not cook anything to eat on the Jewish sabbath, but also forbade her and a black slave woman from even making a fire in the house.55 Baltazar, the former slave of Matias Rodriguez de Olivera, claims that his master “taught this declarant and his said companions to pray the four prayers through a Portuguese youth called Manuel Freile who served” Rodrigues de Oliveira. What these “four prayers” are in a Marrano context I have no idea. According to Baltazar, when the slaves’ prayers in the salon made too much noise, they were ordered to go pray in the kitchen.56 One witness who went to the Mexico City tribunal to depose voluntarily against Olivera recounts a conversation he had had with one of Olivera’s slaves. The witness had noticed various errors in the slave’s religious behavior and approached him, asking “don’t you believe that there is a God?” The said black responded to him: “what God is there? He is only in the heavens, for on earth there is none.” And the said person replied to him: “Look, he is on earth.” Said the said black, “no, no, in the heavens.” And the said black said, “what did it matter if the water of Baptism was thrown on one’s head if the heart did not conform or if one did not want it?”57

This slave of Olivera’s appears to the Catholic witness to be spouting a “Jewish” understanding of a single, incorporeal God, in opposition to the view that God was/is (partially) embodied in Christ, as well as a ‘Jewish’ critique of baptism (the same one proffered by Protestants, by the way). The witness went to Olivera to alert him to his heretical slave, whom he suggested should be denounced to the Inquisition. The unspoken implication of the witnesses’ own deposition is that the slave’s heterodox religiosity might have been influenced by that of his master. If indeed such influence existed in this case, it could have been the

54 Relacion sumaria del auto particular de fee, que el tribunal del santo oficio de la inquisition de los Reynos, y Provincias de la Nueuva España, celebró en la muy noble, y muy leal Ciudad de Mexico, a los diez y seis dias del mes de Abril, del año de mil y seiscientos y quarenta y seis. [. . .] escribela el doctor Don Pedro de Estrada y Escovedo Racionero de la Santa Iglesia Cathedral de Mexico, y de los Presos y del Real Fisco del mismo Tribunal (Mexico: Francisco Robledo, Impressor del Secreto del Santo Oficio, n.d.), 18v. 55 Haim Beinart, Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, 4 vols. ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–1985), 2:163. 56 Testimony of 12 February 1644; AGN Mexico, In. 409, exp. 1, fol. 100v. 57 AGN Mexico, Inq. 409, exp. 1, fol. 168r.

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result of mere imitation of the master’s attitudes or was there actual, explicit conversation regarding religious matters. According to Jewish law, only a slave ritually immersed in water becomes obligated in certain minimum biblical commandments. This ritual immersion, ‘for the sake of enslavement,’ in other words, to make someone ritually fit to be a slave, bore many similarities to immersion ‘for the sake of conversion,’ since the former constituted a partial step toward full conversion to Judaism. It differed in both form and result from immersion ‘for the sake of freedom.’ Immersion for the sake of slavery, obviously, took place at the acquisition of a slave, immersion for the sake of freedom at his or her manumission. Both were to be performed in a mikva, a pool of prescribed dimensions and construction, or, in the absence of a mikva, in a stream or river. According to halakhah, a slave immersed for slavery cannot be sold to a non-Jew (Shulkhan Arukh, section 267, law 11, note). See, for instance, the Shulkhan Arukh, section 267, law 3: “The slave taken from a non-Jew, one says to him, ‘is it your will to enter the group of the slaves of Israel and become one of the kosher ones or not?’; if he wishes to, one conveys to him the principles of the faith and a bit about the commandments, simple and difficult, and their punishment and reward, as one informs the convert.” Also law 267:17: “as long as he is not immersed for slavery he is legally treated as a non-Jew in all things, and after he is immersed for slavery he is a slave and is obligated in the commandments in which women are obligated.”58 Yet repeated mentions of slaves performing certain ritual commandments appear in Inquisition documents in situations where their immersion or conversion seems far-fetched for a variety of reasons and is not once mentioned in the course of the trials. In the 1511–1513 Inquisition trial of a Castilian woman accused of judaizing, María González, wife of Pedro de Villarreal, she testifies that her Black slave Catalina not only swept and cleaned the house in preparation for Sabbath, but also sometimes lit the Sabbath candles for her on Friday nights, at her command.59 Technically, she could only do this had she been ritually immersed, becoming thereby a partial Jew or beginning the path to becoming Jewish. On the one hand, González comes across as being quite fervent in her Judaism. It is likely

58 The principle that a male slave is subject to the same ritual obligations as a woman derives from BT Æagigah 4a. 59 Beinart, Records, 2:250.

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that she was familiar with living Judaism from before the expulsion. Haim Beinart reports that Judeoconversas in Ciudad Real frequently maintained the precepts involving ritual immersion after menstruation, using pools which apparently existed at several Judeoconverso houses or nearby streams.60 All this makes it possible that González might have immersed a slave on newly acquiring her. On the other hand, going so far as to immerse a maidservant in such a dangerous situation would imply an enormous devotion to Judaism (if González even knew about such requirements) and an equally large trust in someone who was not a family member. It also would have presumably created a certain closeness between mistress and maidservant. Yet only one year after her first testimony González did not seem to remember her slave’s name, calling her merely “a Black slave.”61 González was at this time aged 31, so senility should not have been a problem.62 González evidently remembered the name of her other servant, the daughter of a couple who lived with her and her spouse. Was González attempting to protect Catalina from the Inquisition? This would seem doubtful given that González “informed on a long list of Conversos.”63 The voluminous documentation of her supposed judaizing practices never mentions any ritual immersion of Catalina, making it unlikely that such ever occurred. It is possible that González did not realize that Catalina should not be performing rituals for her. On the other hand, numerous cases indicate that Marranos were willing to be flexible with ritual requirements in order to observe their religion as best as possible. González may well have thought that having Catalina light the sabbath candles would diminish or eliminate the perception that the act had any ritual purpose. One informer testifies before an Inquisition official in Potosí in the early part of the seventeenth century to having seen a Mulato servant

Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: the Inquisition in Ciudad Real, Hispania Judaica, No. 3 ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press/The Hebrew University, 1981), 278–9. 61 Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 279. 62 At the beginning of her trial, González testifies that she is thirty years old (Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 243). The Black maidservant whose name she couldn’t recall had come up a year later when González is asked who accompanied her to alleged judaizing meetings at the house of a neighbor (“Dixo que vna negra, esclaua desta confesante, y Catalina [Gonsales, donzella (see 242)], su criada, hija de Marcos Amarillo, la qual la lleuaua la rueca o vna canastilla de maçorcas para devanar e lana de orillas para desmotar, e que todo lo tornava en la noche a su casa por haser, porque como holgauan los dichos sabados, no hazia cosa ninguna” [279]). 63 Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 240. 60

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prepare meat for his master according to Jewish methods. According to halakhic principle, any Jew who is not deaf, insane or a minor may be permitted to slaughter an animal for eating, so long as the procedure is done correctly.64 As always, when discussing potential Marranos, normative Jewish law may not have been known at all. The Jewish methods of slaughter appeared in the standard Edicts of the Faith heard in churches throughout both the Spanish and Portuguese empires, so it is hard to know whether the testimony in this case conveys authenticity: travelling through the territory of Buenos Aires and taking in his company a mulato, his servant, he [the denouncer, Francisco González Pacheco] had seen that in order to roast a leg of sheep he [the mulato] removed the sciatic nerve, and laughing at the mulato and calling him a Jew, the mulato responded to him: “I am not a Jew, but I served the Portuguese Diego López de Lisboa on this said route and he always ordered me, when there was need to roast some leg of sheep or lamb, not to roast it without first removing the sciatic nerve, because he said it roasted better.”65

The sixteenth-century Portuguese High Court judge Gil Vaz Bugalho, of Évora, a devoted Marrano, on one occasion needed to have a chicken slaughtered. His wife, also a dedicated Marrano, was sick, however. An Old Christian woman took the chicken in hand, prepared to perform the deed. Bugalho, worried that the act be done according to the proper ritual, “insisted that she not kill it, that his woman slave would kill it. The slave was late, the woman insisted.” Finally, Gil Vaz gave in, as the slave never appeared. Still, he commanded the Old Christian woman to go get a well-sharpened knife, as required by halakha.66 If the evidence is to be believed, clearly his slave knew the proper procedure and the judge preferred her doing it correctly. Not infrequently, evidence arises concerning allegedly Marrano households where fresh meat was drained of blood, the eating of which

BT Æulin 2a. Autos y diligencias obrados en el Tribunal de Lima relativos al licenciado Diego López de Lisboa [1637]; cited in José Toribio Medina, El tribunal del santo oficio de la inquisición en las provincias del Plata (Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1945), 368. Covarrubias Orozco’s dictionary (Madrid, 1611) defines the term landrecilla (sciatic nerve), interestingly enough, almost exclusively by means of Jewish practice (“la cual landrecila los judíos la sacan de la pierna del carnero, y no lo comen en memoria de habérsele secado a Jacob aquel niervo, cuando luchando con el ángel le tocó en él y quedó algo cojo y tardo en el incessu, como se cuenta, Génesis, c. 32”). 66 António Borges Coelho, “Repressão Ideológica e Sexual na Inquisição de Évora entre 1533 e 1668: as Primeiras Gerações de Vítimas Cristãs-Novas,” in Novinsky and Tucci Carneiro, eds., Inquisição, 1:443. 64

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is forbidden by Jewish law (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 7:26–27, 17:10–14). Since slaves performed most, if not all of the kitchen chores, they were often alleged to carry out this process of ensuring that meat was kosher. One witness testifies that she saw that in the household of Elena de Silva, an alleged judaizer from Mexico City, “her slave, a black woman named Luyssa put the meat that they had to eat in clean water the night before.”67 Without further evidence, whether the slaves knew what they were doing remains an open question. The washing of the corpse before burial constituted a requirement of Jewish law as well as a widespread practice of New Christians attempting to maintain their Jewishness.68 Haim Beinart writes that “there is not a trial [of a Judeoconverso from Ciudad Real in Castile] in which death is mentioned that does not contain a description of the washing of the corpse by the bereaved family.”69 In some instances the family delegated the task to slaves. The famous Marrano martyr Luis de Carvajal the younger testified before his inquisitors in Mexico City on 11 August 1589 that among those present at his father’s death was “the Black Luis, who has declared that he washed his father when they buried him in the convent of Santo Domingo.”70 Though they buried him in a convent to keep up Christian appearances, the Carvajal family nonetheless had their patriarch’s corpse properly prepared for interrment according to crypto-Jewish custom. The family memoir of the Dutch Sefardi Ishac de Pinto (1671) testifies that such enforced duplicity occurred in other cases. Pinto records how his grandfather, Manuel Alvares Pinto, died in April 1635 and left instructions for his body to be temporarily interred in the Discalced [Carmelite] Monastery in Antwerp, and from there to be sent by his sons to his ancestral vault in the Augustinian Monastary of Lisbon. In secret, he ordered his sons to have him buried in a Jewish burial-ground. They considered the second order to be the one which he wanted carried out. The reason why he publicly ordered

67 Testimony of Thomassina de Mendoca, 21 August 1635; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 15v. Further examples appear below. 68 See Renée Levine Melammed, “Some Death and Mourning Customs of Castilian Conversas,” in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart ( Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi/the Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, 1991), 158. 69 Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 281. 70 Quoted in Toro, Judíos en la Nueva España, 251.

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chapter five his body to be deposited in the Monastery was to save appearances. After we were settled in Rotterdam, at my urging, they sent for his body.71

In the case of the Carvajals, the family entrusted the practice of ritual preparation to a slave, who probably had no knowledge of the nature of his task. A Conversa in 1640s Mexico City, Beatriz Enriquez, tells her inquisitors that when her niece, Leonora Vaez, passed away, two Black slave women washed her body.72 Testifying nearly a decade earlier against Beatriz’s daughter Raphaela, one witness declares that when a child of Raphaela’s had died at around the age of two and a half, she saw how they threw him on a little buffet [sideboard] and undressed him and then a mulata named Maria de la Concepçion, who lives in the same house, brought hot water and a cloth and began to wash the said boy and she washed all of him, wrapping [?] him from top to bottom [or from front to back], with the said cloth.73

Several elements of this ceremony derive from standard Jewish practice: the use of lukewarm water to wash the body and the washing of each limb downward. The details of preparing the corpse for burial do not seem to have been outlined in Jewish law—even the Shulkhan Arukh fails to discuss them—but stem from medieval folk practice and mystical texts. The fact that Marranos bathed the corpses of their deceased in fresh water distinguished this ritual from the similar washing of corpses among Angolans, who used herbal baths in order to ensure that the soul of the dead would not return to this world.74 Some Jewish sources in fact mention the use of perfumes to beautify the corpse and make it more presentable. It is possible, however, that the slaves who were asked to carry 71 H.P. Salomon, “The ‘De Pinto’ Manuscript: a 17th century Marrano Family History,” Studia Rosenthaliana 9,1 ( January 1975): 23; the Portuguese original appears on 51. 72 Testimony of 19 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 275r. 73 Testimony of Maria de Cuniga, 25 February 1633; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 7r. A different witness testifies that it was the child of Elena and Gomes de Silva who died and that Juana Enriquez, Rafaela’s sister, mandated for the process some “clean water” (ibid., fol. 15r). Another Mulata who was present, Geronima Ramirez, commented on the meticulous process, “What for were they washing him if the earth was to eat him?” (ibid., fol. 10v.). Responding to the same question from another woman at the scene, Raphaela’s sister, Juana Enriquez, said that this was the custom for all those who die, “in order that their flesh be tightened/se les aPretasen las carnes” (ibid., 12v.). I confess to not understanding this explanation. 74 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 193.

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out the ritual by their Marrano masters thought at the time that they were performing an act equivalent to the Angolan herbal corpse bath, or even that the Marrano masters knew of this Angolan custom and thought that therefore the slaves would not suspect that this was a Jewish custom. One wonders why this ritual bathing was assigned so often to slaves (another case is discussed below). It could be that these actions were seen as domestic chores or repulsive ones, suitable mostly for the help. In everyday life, it was frequently a slave who bathed the master or mistress. Among open Jews, the ritual preparation of the corpse, in contrast, was perceived as a great honor performed for the deceased, and might even be done by family members. At any rate, only pious individuals are to participate in this ritual practice, assuredly not unconverted slaves. Not all Judaizing masters withheld knowledge of their Judaism from their slaves, rather they entrusted it with them and sought their inclusion in its practices. Unlike with some of the resistant slaves cited in the previous chapter, participation in the crypto-Jewish master’s culture sometimes also came from the volition of the slave, whatever the mixture of motives. From seventeenth-century Mexico, Solange Alberro cites “the mulato slave Juan, who serves the wandering hawker Francisco Blandón [the same previously-mentioned Blandón accused of circumcizing his mulato lover’s son; who] knew how to prepare the foods of his master according to the precepts of the Jewish religion, behavior which reveals an atmosphere of trust and complicity between the two.”75 Ignes de Faria, who frequented the house of the Portuguese High Court judge Gil Vaz Bugalho (mentioned above), testified to the Inquisition in 1538 about the far-reaching Jewish commitments of the family, which included observance of the dietary precepts of the “Old Law” and Jewish, or, rather, crypto-Jewish holidays and fasts. Bugalho even initiated a project of translating the Bible into Portuguese, for which he sought and received the help of New Christians who knew Hebrew and Aramaic. Ignes de Faria relates to the Inquisitors how she once heard Bugalho’s daughter, decked out in her Sabbath finery—gold chains and a fur throw—explain to the Black slave Maria “that Saturday was her Sunday.”76 Sometimes it was not even the masters who transmitted Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 146. This assumes that said trust and complicity was not merely a product of the Inquisition trial itself. 76 Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 193; Baião, Inquisição em Portugal e no Brasil, 106. Perhaps the daughter had a special relationship with this particular slave, as another 75

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Judaism, but others. Maria de la Cruz of Mexico, a 16-year-old slave of Old Christian masters, apparently acquired her knowledge of Jewish practices from other slaves who themselves belonged to crypto-Jews.77 All things considered, it is extremely difficult to prove that cryptoJewish masters “judaized” to their Afroiberian slaves. It seems much more likely that slaves who indeed participated in crypto-Jewish customs did so unaware of their significance. No doubt exceptions existed (see chapter 7). I now turn to an exploration of the case of one Judeoconverso household on which a relatively large amount of data remains, enough to further delineate some of the relationships between mistresses and slaves that have been raised. Slaves in/and the Judeoconverso Family: Exploring the Construction of Social Boundaries through Ritual in Bahia For a variety of reasons, the Portuguese Inquisition never opened a branch in Brazil. Still, the New Christian population of the colony generated its share of complaints and worries, legitimate or otherwise. A growing litany of religious complaints of various kinds led the Lisbon Inquisition to send, between 1591 and 1595, official inquisitional investigators to the Captaincies of Bahia, Pernambuco, Itamaracá and Paraíba in order to ascertain better the actual conditions in the territory. In this section I offer a brief microhistorical study of the Antunes family and their slaves. The extended Antunes clan owned a number of engenhos, that is, sugar mills and lands. The patriarch and his wife, both New Christians, owned an estate they called Matoim, which was also the name of the closest Bahian town. Their homestead, as well as those belonging to their children, sat on the banks of the Matoim River or on some of the islands that dotted its opening into the Bay of All Saints, the bay after which the Captaincy was named.78 The banks

denouncer, this one anonymous, testifies to having seen “that the judge’s wife ordered cut the throat of a duck because they don’t eat meat from a butcher [which would not have been slaughtered in a kosher manner], even though they would put it [meat from the butcher] on the table in order to let the servants understand that they, the masters, also ate it [butcher’s meat]” (Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 199). 77 Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews of New Spain (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1970), 250. 78 On New Christians among Bahia’s planter class, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 265–6, 274–5.

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of the bay all around comprised the area known as the Recôncavo. The unfortunately meager source material derives mostly from the testimony given independently to the visiting Inquisitor Heitor Furtado de Mendonça by a number of the members of this family, as well as by unrelated neighbors. The testimony refers to various slaves, as will be seen. Though they are not always specified as being of African origin, this should be presumed, as the region around the city of Salvador, on the northeastern corner of the bay, was emptied of its Amerindian inhabitants fairly quickly after the city’s founding in the middle of the sixteenth century.79 It is precisely around this time, with the increasing success of Brazilian sugar after 1580, that the importation of African slaves jumped precipitously. In 1572, the slaves on two Jesuit plantations (engenhos), one in Bahia, the other in neighboring Sergipe, comprised 5.3 and 6.3 percent Africans, respectively. By 1591, Africans—Angolas, Congos, Mocanguas and Anziquos (all from Central Africa)—made up 26 percent of the slave population of the plantation in Sergipe. Meanwhile, one private farm ( fazenda) in Bahia claimed a 70 percent African slave population by 1585.80 Yet according to Sweet, contemporary observers estimated that during the 1580s Bahia possessed some 3,000 slaves from Africa, compared with over 8,000 Christianized Amerindian slaves.81 Given the growing influx of new African slaves, it is doubtful that more than a small minority of the slaves of African origin belonging to the Antunes family had been born in Brazil, if any. One oft-mentioned crypto-Jewish custom was to pour out water from vases and pitchers at the death of a family member. The Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh Dexah 339:5, mentions pouring out “all the water contained in vessels in the vicinity of the deceased,” and various sources provide superstitious explanations, such as “the fear that the angel of death would stir up the water and either clean his knife in it or drip a drop of blood in it.”82 The latter explanation appears already in the Spanish Ye˜iel b. Asher’s Turei Zahav, Yoreh Dexah (339:4) and in the later fourteenth-century anonymous compilation Sefer Kol Bo, along with the Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 82. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 22–3. On the lives and conditions of slaves on the Recôncavo sugar plantations, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 132–59, 346–412. 81 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 23. Another modern scholar estimates that Salvador and environs had some 4,000 Blacks at the beginning of the seventeenth century (cited in Pieroni, Excluídos do reino, 268). 82 Levine Melammed, “Some Death and Mourning Customs,” 157. 79

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notion that the water is spilled out in order to make the death known to the community. A New Christian from Matoim, Lianor, voluntarily confesses to the visiting Inquisitor in the Recôncavo, the lands surrounding the Bay of All Saints, on 1 February 1592. She says that in the 18 years of her marriage many occasions led her “to throw out of the house and to order thrown out all the water of the pots and vases which were in the house [. . .] when someone died on her such as a son or daughter or slaves.”83 Other members of the family seem to have performed this rite as well. The same day on which Lianor talks to the visiting Inquisitor, her sister Isabel Antunes, also a resident of Matoim, makes a similar confession: “it was four years ago that a young slave boy died on her ranch [ fazenda] and she ordered the mother of the said slave to throw out all the water of the house.”84 Forty three-year-old Beatris Antunes, Lianor’s sister, confesses the previous day, 31 January, to having performed or ordered done the same act only for relatives, such as “a son or daughter, brother or sister or father.”85 Also on 31 January, Lianor’s neice, Custódia, daughter of her sister Beatriz Antunes and Sebastião de Faria, confesses. Stating that she is 23, she relates that two years earlier, at the death of a male slave, she emptied out the water from the vessels in the house, as her mother had taught her. According to Custódia, her mother had said that doing so “was good for the relatives of the deceased who remain alive.” Custódia’s grandmother, Ana Rodrigues, also taught her this practice. Custódia claims not to have known that this was a Jewish practice. In response to the visiting inquisitor’s questions she insists that her mother never taught her the Law of Moses or its ceremonies and was a good Christian; she instructed Custódia in the above custom “innocently.” Neither does Custódia recall Rodrigues ever mentioning that this was a Jewish ceremony.86 On 6 February, yet another person from Matoim appears for confession

83 J. Capistrano de Abreu (ed.), Primeira Visitação do Santo Oficio as Partes do Brasil: Confissões da Bahia, 1591–92 (Rio de Janeiro, 1935), 138. 84 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 141. 85 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 132. Beatris and her husband, Bastiam de Faria (an Old Christian), employed a Mulato, Fernão Luis, as a teacher of their children ( J. Capistrano de Abreu (ed.), Primeira Visitação do Santo Oficio as Partes do Brasil: Denunciações da Bahia, 1591–1593 [São Paulo: Homenagem de Paulo Prado, 1925], 465). 86 Ronaldo Vainfas (ed.), Confissões da Bahia: Santo ofício da inquisição de Lisboa (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 271–3. This is a more recent edition of Abreu’s compilation.

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in the Recôncavo, the half-Christian Lucas dEscovar, similarly stating that “it was more or less three years that, some slaves having died on him in his house, he spilled out and ordered spilled out all the water of the pots which were in the house and that this he did three or four times at the deaths of three or four slaves without knowing that it was a Jewish ceremony but only had seen his said mother [ Violante Antunes, daughter of Heitor Antunes and Anna Rõiz or Rodrigues] doing the same.”87 Finally, appearing on 11 February, the last day of the 30-day grace period for voluntary confessions, dona Ana Alcoforada, another niece of Lianor’s, confesses to doing the same thing on diverse occasions for “seven or eight slaves.”88 According to halakha, one did not mourn at the death of one’s slave. Nonetheless, the often close connections between master and slave might override such technicalities. The Mishna (Berakhot 2:7), redacted in the 2nd century CE, relates the tale of how Rabbi Gamliel mourned on the death of his beloved slave Tabi. Though chastised for this, he responds that “my slave Tabi is not like other slaves; he is kosher,” meaning, presumably, that he had become Jewish Of course, most of the New Christians cannot be assumed to have been familiar with halakhic norms. In previous chapters I have brought examples of masters who expressed sadness or loss at the death of a slave, but this is not necessarily the same as mourning, and certainly does not imply the performance of ritualized acts of mourning. In the case of various members of the Antunes family, a ritual act was performed not only at the death of an immediate relative but also for slaves (though ritual acts do not necessarily indicate feelings of sadness or loss). For “a son or daughter or slaves,” as Lianor herself put it, without distinguishing between the categories of relationship. In fact, five of the six confessants that 1 February 1592, share ties of either blood or matrimony, as do others who appear shortly before and after. Nuno Fernandes, Lianor’s brother or half-brother, even returns for a second, more detailed confession on 9 February.89 Perhaps the various family members come together from Matoim for the express 87 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 156. Violante’s daughter Isabel had confessed on 1 February 1592, stating that she had followed her aunts and grandmother in emptying out the water once when her a daughter of hers died. She also taught a slave woman to do the same. All this she did “without having a bad intention in her heart” (Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 294–6). 88 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 173. 89 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 166.

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purpose of confessing. Coincidence or another motive having no relation to the inquisitor’s presence might have drawn them all to him at this moment. They might have come to clear their conscience of these authentic shards of Judaism of which they understood little or nothing. Or they could have appeared to attempt some pre-emptive damagecontrol (and draw lighter sentences) by making limited confessions pre-arranged between them. Lianor’s niece Ana Alcoforado (granddaughter of Ana Rodrigues and Heitor Antunes) may not have been aware of it, but her own husband Nicolao Faleiro de Vasconcelos (or Vascongocellos) had in fact come before the visiting Inquisitor already in July of 1591, on the first day of the 30-day grace period in which the people of Salvador and one league around might confess to the visiting inquisitor Mendonça. In his audience, Vasconcelos reports that on two occasions his wife Ana told him to empty the water from the containers in the house outdoors at the death of one of their slaves, though he only complied the second time. Vasconcelos also testifies that not only has Ana never done anything that made him suspect any negative intentions against Catholicism, but that her aunt Lianor, as well as the rest of Lianor’s siblings, are all good Christians. Vasconcelos, an Old Christian (though married to a descendant of New Christians), declares that he discovered that emptying out the water as a ritual act entails a Jewish practice from the Edicts of Faith posted on the church doors only the day before. Had he known this, he says, he never would have consented to the practice.90 On 20 August 1591, Maria Pinheira, another resident of Salvador, denounces this same practice of Dona Lianor’s in terms nearly identical to Lianor’s own confessions.91 The day after Vasconcelos’ appearance before the visiting inquisitor, several other Old Christians denounce Lionor and Beatriz Antunes and their mother Ana Rodrigues for calling themselves “Maccabees,” for preparing food in “the Jewish manner,” for eating at a low table as a sign of mourning, for blessing the children “in the Jewish manner,” among other supposed signs of judaizing. The family’s matriarch, Ana Rodrigues or Roiz, in particular, is mentioned by numerous confessants as a vocal judaizer, openly rejecting and badmouthing Catholic icons

90 Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 51–4. The visiting inquisitor does not believe Vasconcelos’ claim of ignorance. 91 Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 379.

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and rituals.92 Several witnesses declare that when her husband Heitor Antunes died, Ana Roiz buried him in virgin soil, according to the Jewish custom.93 Antunes also came in for passionate denunciation as a judaizer by various witnesses.94 Ana Rodrigues had been married to the merchant Heitor Antunes, who had arrived in Brazil in 1557. According to a document presented by the colony’s governor, Mem de Sá, with whom Antunes seems to have been close—the two arrived in Brazil on the same ship—Antunes was a knight of the king’s house.95 In 1559 and 1560 Antunes seems to have acted as one of the collectors of the tithe on sugar in Bahia.96 The couple, Antunes and Rodrigues, bought their plantation and mill, Matoim—Heitor Antunes’ ownership is mentioned in a document from 1571—and gave birth to seven children, all of whom married Old Christians except the youngest, Nuno Fernandes.97 Elias Lipiner cites a contemporary historian, Gabriel Soares de Sousa, describing the importance of the estates of both father and sons along the Matoim River.98 Antunes is said (by Vasconcelos and others) to have been reputed to have possessed another, more dangerous pedigree than his connection with Mem de Sá and the Portuguese knighthood, descent from the Maccabees, the illustrious second-century BCE family that fought successfully against Judea’s hellenistic governors.99 Many Judeoconversos sought to counter denigration by Iberian Catholics by pointing to descent from the ancient Israelites, the Davidic royal house, a particular tribe or the Maccabees, by identifying with the oppressed Israelites in Egypt or Queen Esther.100 Gaspar Fernandes, who worked with the husband of Lianor’s

92 See Elias Lipiner, Os judaizantes nas capitanias de cima: Estudos sobre os cristãos-novos do Brasil nos séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Editôra Brasiliense, 1969), 125–6. A few additional details of the Antunes family saga are brought in Ronaldo Vainfas and Angelo A.F. Assis, “A esnoga da Bahia: Cristãos-novos e criptojudaísmo no Brasil quinhentista,” in Os judeus no Brasil: Inquisição, imigração e identidade, ed. Keila Grinberg (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005), 45–64. 93 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 126–7. 94 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 128–9. 95 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 122. 96 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 123. 97 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 141, n. 40, 122–3. 98 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 133. 99 Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 53. 100 Bodian, “Men of the Nation,” 62–3. Though knowledge and celebration of Hanuka was extremely rare among Marranos (Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 376–7), another Portuguese New Christian and possible Marrano, Miguel da Silveira (1576–1636?),

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sister, was another of the Old Christian confessants who mentions the Maccabean descent of the Antunes family. He claims recalling that he heard that once when the elderly Ana Rodrigues was ill, some of her daughters brought a crucifix to her bed as part of their efforts to heal her and she shouted at them to get rid of it. We have here yet another attestation either of religious syncretism or of divergent attitudes within a single family toward the family’s religiosity, as Lipiner also concludes. Indeed, one of the daughters retorted to their mother by reminding her of their Old Christian spouses: “Listen mother to what you say [. . .] we are married to men who are gentlemen [ fidalgos] and leaders of the land!”101 This statement bore especial truth in regard to Sebastião or Bastião de Faria, who had married Beatriz Antunes. He had become a wealthy and powerful landowner in the Captaincy, to whom the Jesuit fathers sold slaves, and who earned a street in his name in the nearby city of Salvador.102 On the other hand, Nuno Fernandes, the one child of Antunes and Rodrigues who married a New Christian, was allegedly seen by some of his Black women slaves striking a crucifix that he kept under his bed.103 Even Faria’s wealth and heroic military exploits could not overcome the murmuring of Old Christians against his marriage to the daughter of ‘the Jew’ Heitor Antunes and the frequent visits of New Christian merchants and sugar purchasers to his homestead.104 On the same day in 1592 that so many younger members of her family confess to the visiting inquisitor, Ana Rodrigues, aged eighty or so, does likewise. She relates that she frequently blessed her grandchildren with the blessing that “the blessing of God and I should cover you” while placing her hands on their heads. When a son had passed away, some thirty five years earlier, she threw all of the water out of the house, as she had learned, “because they cleaned the sword of the blood that was on it.” That is, Rodrigues references the precise reason given in the Shulkhan Arukh, though she can not or will not explain the meaning of this statement to the inquisitor.105 It should be noted that even the explanation regarding the angel and the sword appeared in at least some of the Edicts of the Faith and therefore does not prove composed a long panegyric devoted to the family’s exemplary ancient exploits, El Macabeo: Poema heroico (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1638). 101 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 125, where he brings the quote as well. 102 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 133. 103 Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 257, 313. 104 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 134. 105 Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 282, 284.

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that Rodrigues knew the significance of what she was doing or had learned the significance from older relatives.106 She claims that “she did not know that [these things] were Jewish, because they were taught her by an Old Christian godmother of hers, Inês Rodrigues, midwife, widow, whose husband was a carpenter, who is now already dead, and at the time she was very old and lived in front of the confessant in the said Interior, in Portugal, who taught this to her, saying it is good, and because of this she [Ana] did it.”107 It seems likely that Ana Rodrigues’s pinning the blame on a deceased Old Christian was a wily and common tactic, giving the inquisitor some formalistic answer whose senselessness essentially mocked the goal of his investigation. It appears that many of the confessants to the visiting inquisitor attribute their lapsed religiosity to time in the Brazilian backlands, something Carole Myscofski reads as “admittance of the act but rejection of guilt.”108 Rodrigues and these other confessants drew on the very real dissipation of Catholic influence away from the urban centers in both the Old and New Worlds. Whether or not Rodrigues really understood the significance of her actions remains impossible to prove, though it is plausible that she did. Whether she had passed on to her children anything more than notunderstood or unconscious behaviors is also doubtful. Gracia de Siqueira, who declared herself to be a friend of Beatriz Antunes, Ana’s daughter, denounced her friend because some 17 years earlier, when Gracia had been living on Beatriz’s sugar mill, the latter came to her house one day and “told this denouncer that she didn’t eat rabbit and gave her a rabbit that had been killed when the Blacks had caught a few in the forest and she said that she would bring it to the house of this denouncer so that she could eat it and this the denouncer did.”109 Rabbit is not kosher. Further, this incident shows the kind of interchanges of goods and services between slaves and masters that characterized the unequal but communal life of such a plantation. Many of those who denounce Ana Rois state that “public reputation” or “public rumor” circulated that she practiced Jewish rites. Six denouncers, mostly residents of Salvador, testify that a synagogue

106 See the text cited in Pieroni, Excluídos do reino, 100. As the text of the Edicts of the Faith changed with changing inquisitorial knowledge, a historical study of them remains an important desideratum. 107 Vainfas, Confessões da Bahia, 283. 108 Myscofski, “Heterodoxy,” 87. 109 Confession of 7 September 1591, Abreu, Denunçiações da Bahia, 493.

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existed on Matoim, and four of them, Manoel Bras, Diogo Dias, Anna Vaz and Ines de Barros even locate it in the house of Heitor Antunes.110 In the words of Dias: from the time of his youth he heard always said in this city [Salvador] in public voice and rumor commonly said by the mouths of all as a thing certain and true that in Matoim in this captaincy the former Heitor Antunes New Christian merchant, who was master of a mill/plantation on the said Matoim [ River], had in his house a synagogue and Tora and that in his house New Christians gathered and judaized and kept the Jewish law.111

Ines de Barros says that the synagogue stood in “a separate cottage in which on certain days [Heitor Antunes] and other New Christians gathered.”112 Did Lianor or others of her family know about these denunciations? (Were the rumors so much in the atmosphere that the family members had no need to know of specific denunciations?) Did denunciations such as these prompt the ‘spontaneous’ confessions of the Antunes family members in an attempt, as Lipiner suspects, to preserve their ownership of their estate?113 Their ‘voluntary’ confessions failed. Lianor and Beatriz were both shipped to Lisbon and condemned to burning. Because of the nobility their father had been granted, the sentences of the two sisters were commuted to the confiscation of their goods. Penitenced, they returned to Brazil, where Beatriz died in 1597 and Lianor in 1644, aged eighty.114 The elderly Ana Roiz was imprisoned in 1593 and, despite the many efforts of Sebastião de Faria and Anrique Minz Teles, died in the Inquisition’s jails while still in Brazil. She left the world “outside of the guild and Union of the Holy Mother Church,” according to the 1604 sentence, which ordered an effigy of her to be made, shipped to Lisbon and burned there in an auto da fe.115 In addition, only a year and a half before the rash of confessions (mid-1590), the young daughter of one of Lianor’s female slaves died and Lianor provided a cloth to use as a shroud, “commanding that Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 315, 392, 420–1, 475, 492–3, 537. Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 475, see also 395. 112 Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 537. 113 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 123. So-called spontaneous or voluntary confessions were those people conveyed without a summons from the inquisitors. Given the intense pressures to avoid incrimination, such confessions really were neither. 114 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 142, n. 53. 115 Lipiner, Judaizantes, 137. 110 111

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they enshroud her in it like this whole, not tearing it or throwing any of it away.” Though she does not say so, Lianor must have learned this from her mother as well, who taught her also that “it was not good to sew on the shroud of the dead with a needle and thread with which sewing is done in the house and also [. .] that it was not good to throw [away] a branch or a piece of shroud in which one will enshroud a dead person.”116 The significance of these practices appears unclear. Levine Melammed, who cites examples of Castilian Judeoconversas donating material for shrouds or even sewing them on their own, makes no reference to the notions mentioned by dona Lianor.117 But the shroud for the dead had apparently become the focus of special importance in Judaism. According to the thirteenth-century Nachmanides, in an advance of manners, the Tannaitic Rabban Gamliel (1st century CE) introduced “the custom of covering the whole dead person with a piece of linen,” previous to which cadavers had been buried uncovered.118 Drawing on the kabbalistic masterpiece, the Zohar, an Ashkenazic collection printed specifically for members of burial societies, Rabbi Aharon Bere˜ya’s canonical Maxavar Yabbok (Mantua, 1626), states that a dead man “will first be completely covered by a shroud of white swaddling and then wrapped in his prayer shawl,” indicating “the extreme importance given to clothing the dead.”119 Similar emphasis on the integrity of the wrapping appears among accused judaizers in Iberian territories. Manuel Galindo, for example, a resident in Évora, Portugal, was accused in the sixteenth century of preparing deceased New Christians for burial in “the Jewish manner,” which included “wrapping them in a cloth of new linen.”120 Seymour Liebman generalizes this practice, writing that among crypto-Jews “the cadaver was [. . .] dressed in a shroud of new, pure linen” and that “people sought assurance that the linen was made by Jews [sic].”121 Perhaps the notions of Lianor and her mother

Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 141. Levine Melammed, “Some Death and Mourning Customs,” 159. 118 Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 82; Nachmanides, Torat ha-Adam (Warsaw, 1876), 46; BT Mo’ed Katan 27, 10b. 119 Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok, 112. 120 Borges Coelho, “Repressão ideológica e sexual na inquisição de Évora,” 444. 121 Liebman, “Religion and Mores of the Colonial New World Marranos,” 62; on the importance of linen, see Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 282–283. 116 117

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Ana Roiz were merely superstitious extensions of the desire to give honor to the dead. The practices involving not throwing away pieces of the shroud and not sewing the shroud with needles used in the house, I suspect, relate to another dimension of Jewish conceptions of death and the dead: ritual impurity. According to halakha, utensils that have been in contact with a dead body become impure, taking on the impurity of the dead.122 Bringing a needle and thread back into the everyday realm of the household—into life—would risk symbolically bringing back the impurity of the dead; carelessly throwing away a piece of shroud could make impure an entire room or house. Here the emphasis on maintaining the integrity of the shroud had less to do with keeping it whole than with ensuring that impurity does not spread. Of course these New Christians may not have even known the significance of their acts, which nonetheless admit no alternative explanation known to me. Clearly these women in Brazil included their slaves in the circle of those intimate enough to warrant the performance of these rites of mourning, which their mothers had taught them.123 (Lianor’s mother’s other daughter, Beatriz, on the other hand, seemed less inclined to

122 Lev. 10:1–24; Num. 10:2; Rashi on BT Pesa˜im 14b, 17a; Maimonides, Avot, Hilkhot Tumat ha-Met. 123 Abreu, Confissões da Bahia, 139. As do Isabel Antunes and Lianor’s niece Ana Alcoforada, Lianor asserts that she did not know that this, among other acts to which she confessed, was a Jewish ritual, a fact she claims to have learned only with the recent publication of the Edict of Faith by the same visiting inquisitor (Sunday, 12 January). Her mother, Ana Rõiz, she insists, had in turn learned the custom from Inês Rodrigues, Ana’s neighbor (and godmother/comadre?), an Old Christian in the interior of Portugal, who failed to mention that this was a Jewish ceremony. As mentioned, Beatriz gives the same story (Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 276). Lianor also confesses to other “Jewish” practices: not eating meat for eight days after the death of a daughter (not a traditional practice; the official initial mourning period is seven days), ordering the throwing out of the hind quarters of calves (which contain the forbidden sciatic nerve), not eating lamprey (though she would eat other fish that lacked scales), covering the blood poured out from a chicken killed by her slave with sawdust. Beatriz likewise confesses to not eating meat for eight days after a relative’s death, to throwing out the hind quarters of calves, to not eating lamprey, among other Jewish acts. She repeatedly uses the term “nojo,” when describing the reason that certain things were avoided, that is nausea, disgust, loathing (Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 275–76). With seemingly touching sincerity Lianor tells the inquisitor that when she discovered from the Edict of Faith the Jewish nature of these acts, she, “seeing that she was of the Nation [of Portuguese Jews, i.e., a descendant of Judeoconversos] and that she had done these things innocently, became very sad, seeing that it might be considered that she was a Jewess” (Vainfas, Confissões da Bahia, 139). The inquisitor finds all this rather hard to believe, ordering Lianor not to leave the city without his permission.

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include her slaves in her circle of family.) These slaves even received a ‘proper’ and ‘respectful’ burial, not necessarily a given for slaves of this period (as mentioned in the previous chapter), though one could say that Lianor’s inclusiveness stems as much from impersonal “superstitious” motivations (fear of the consequences of improper burial) as affection. Nicolao Faleiro as well as Maria Pinheira base their denunciations of Lianor on what they had heard from Balthesar Diaz de Zambujo, who had previously worked for Lianor and her husband. Nicolao does admit “that he does not know whether he was in his right mind (se estava elle em seu sizo), however he knows that he took him [the slave] for a liar and that he appeared in order to raise false testimonies.”124 Finally, on 26 August 1592, the inquisitor Mendonça calls the alreadyimprisoned Francisca da Costa to testify. Her deposition includes the following statements: There was a year in which she was at the house of Anrique Monis married with Dona Lianor New Christian and in this time that she was at his house Isabel, a Brazilian Black, and Maria, a Black from Guinea, slaves of the said Anrique Monis, told her that his said wife Dona Lianor and her sisters and mother were Jewesses and that Friday afternoons they all gathered and entered a house that was a pantry and did not come out of it until the following Saturday and that they were in it celebrating [. . .] and that they did not know what they did and that they always did this before the Holy Inquisition came to Brazil and that after the Inquisition entered they did not see them do this any more [. . .] and that when this denouncer was at [Dona Lianor’s] house the Holy Inquisition was already here and she did not see them do such, but, and she took care in this, it seeming to her bad that the whole year that she was in her house the said Dona Lianor never on any Sunday or holiday ordered her slaves to church, and likewise the said slave women told her that the said Dona Lianor and her sisters and mother commanded the water to be spilled from the pots and rooms of the house when someone died in the house, the Black women were ladinas.125

If the slaves Isabel and Maria indeed told the visiting Francisca da Costa that their mistresses were Jewish, was it in complaint? Had they intended to denounce them in the manner that Francisca da Costa had when she informed the Inquisition? This denouncer’s narrative rambles, as do many of the confessional narratives produced for the 124 125

Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 244. Abreu, Denunciações da Bahia, 561.

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Inquisitions, but its end, emphasizing, seemingly out of the blue, that these Black slaves spoke Portuguese (were ladinas), makes sense: they were already to some degree Christianized and therefore Lianor’s neglect of their religion (at best) and judaizing (at worst) became that much more criminal. A slave’s ability to perform tasks in proper Jewish fashion according to instructions should not be confused with consciously adopting such practices herself. One needs to know whether a slave understood that a practice was (crypto-) Jewish and participated nonetheless. Such cases existed, but proving them requires solid evidence, which is too often lacking. In chapter 7 I turn to a handful of such cases of conscious ‘Jewishness’ on the part of Afroiberians, whether merely rhetorical or in practice.

CHAPTER SIX

JAILED JUDAIZERS AND THEIR JAILERS’ SERVANTS One of the phenomena frequently reported by—and extremely worrisome to—inquisitional authorities was the way Afroiberian slaves helped imprisoned judaizers. The jails of two local Inquisitions, Mexico City and Lima, generated many accounts of such perceived collaborative subversion of Inquisition operations. Given that the Inquisition’s operations, including its trial proceedings and prisons, were supposed to be secret, the conveyance by servile messengers of information and goods back and forth between prisoners and the outside world posed an enormous threat. The records provide us detailed and colorful views of the delicate, tenuous, clandestine yet known cooperation between hounded Judeoconversos and slaves, whether belonging to them or even to their inquisitional persecutors. The interactions between Judeoconverso prisoners, their friends and relatives outside, and Afroiberian slaves were fraught with dangers of all sorts, and not only from the inquisitional authorities. Neither party seemed certain that it could trust the other. The incidents and activities discussed here reveal the ambivalence and ambiguity of motivation, desire and manipulation on both sides. Slaves who worked for the Inquisition or for municipal officials had the ability to come and go as they pleased within the jails and among those imprisoned within them. In one trial from 1630s Cartagena de las Indias, we hear of the slave of the alcaide ( jailor) who “had offered to Juana de Hortensia to bring her to sleep with” a prisoner in his cell.1 Some jailers helped certain prisoners in various ways, for a bribe or as a kindness. Some slaves did likewise for the same reasons. In addition, slaves might not necessarily have felt the same loyalty to the Inquisition held by jailers, who were direct employees of the institution, and 1 Testimonio de Diego López, AHN Inq. 1620/7/1, fol. 16r. Another jailer’s slave who was tried by the Inquisition was Juan, a slave from Mozambique, who served Gaspar de los Reyes Plata, the alcaide for the Mexico City tribunal. In 1601 he testifies in the second Inquisition trial of Diego Díaz Nieto against the accused, for whom he had carried messages and other items. See Uchmany, Vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo, 207–10; José Toribio Medina, Historia del tribunal del santo oficio de la inquisición en México (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1905), 124.

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may have been prone to greater sympathy with its victims. A jailhouse conversation between two prisoners reported by another prisoner in 1642 Mexico City alludes to the perceptions held regarding those who staffed the prisons. From their cells, two women of the Rivera family of alleged judaizers discuss asking the jailer for a favor, even if they have to promise him “a shirt, and underwear, or a jewel.” Ysabel de Rivera says that this will be “impossible,” that, among other things, the jailer “is always angry.” Another of the Rivera women replies that “it was much better to negotiate with the black man or the black woman,” i.e., the slaves employed in the prisons. But their mother Blanca replies, “they are negros, and do not have to do favors/no han de hacer cossa buena.”2 On the one hand there is the feeling that the Black slaves are better to deal with, because they are more pliable or willing to respond to requests. The older mother, a marginally poor woman whose father had been involved with the slave trade (see below), is not so sure, whether due to racism or to a more sanguine vision of the minimal leeway slaves have within the slave system or to an understanding that slaves might have no reason to do Whites kindnesses. The quotidian interactions between imprisoned Judeoconversos and slaves were many-sided. On the one hand, it is clear that prisoners were permitted to continue their lifestyle if they were financially able, so that their slaves continued to serve them while in jail. At the same time, this situation made the ordinary dependence of the masters on their slaves somewhat more desperate. Both aspects can be seen in the following anecdote related by Beatriz Enriquez to her inquisitors in 1646 Mexico City, after already having sat imprisoned since 1642: at night while they gave the signal in this house this confessant [Beatriz] spoke through the window of her cell with a black named Antonia who was her slave who put herself in the corridor in front in order to speak to her giving her salt and no more and requesting her to bring some fruit and shoelaces [?] which the black woman sent her among the clean clothes that she washed for her and that the speaking to her took place between three or four times and on one of these [occasions] this confessant asked her regarding her brother Diego rrodriguez and Juan Duarte, and she said to the said black woman that she should tell them on behalf of this confessant that they should confess the truth and she did not bring her a Response other than by means of signals at midday from the corridor

2 Testimony of Gaspar Alfar, 21 May 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 563r.–v.

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[when] she said that the parent of her master who was Ju[li]o [?] duarte had thrown her out and had not wanted to Respond.3

In this case, Enriquez’s slave Antonia did what her mistress asked of her, though even so she could not overcome an obstacle like the fear or self-interest of relatives on the outside. The willingness or cooperation of slaves could not be guaranteed, however, especially if their owners sat in limbo. Beatriz’s sisters, Rafaela and Micaela, also imprisoned, are among a group of women conversing together at one point. One asks after a relative on the outside, to which another replies that she doesn’t know because “the mulata had given birth and her black woman had not overcome it because she had fled.”4 The help of slaves touched on more than just delivering news or messages. After Luis Gomez Barreto had been subject to torture in the course of his first trial by the Cartagena tribunal (1636), the inquisitors “sent one of his slaves to serve and assist him.” The jailer “had a little black [boy] brought of up to fourteen or fifteen years old by his looks called manuel of the angola nation slave of the said Luis Gomez Barreto [. . .] in order to serve his said master.”5 One wonders at the feelings produced in the broken master and the involuntarily helpful slave by such a situation, which for the latter may have differed from their previous relationship only in that now the master also lived without control over his own life. While the local inquisitors in Cartagena may have here revealed a human sympathy for the victim of their administration, Inquisition officials in Madrid responded with anger. When the members of the Suprema reviewed the trial, they pounced on this action, communicating to the local inquisitors their explicit fears: A person of his household is not given to the accused to assist him because of the disadvantage that he might bring him some paper, or message to the defendant, but rather [he should be given] another person concerning whom this suspicion won’t be had; and that which could have been done in the impediment of the accused was to give him for a companion one

Testimony of 9 August 1646; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 288r. Testimony of Ysavel de Silva, 6 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 102v. 5 Quoted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 271. Among the foods sent to the imprisoned Barreto by his relatives were Kola nuts (Maria Cristina Navarrete, “Cotidianidad y cultura material de los negros de Cartagena en el siglo XVII,” America Negra 7 [1994], 78). Did Barreto, a slave trader, develop a fondness for this tropical West African food while doing business in Africa or does this merely indicate the extent of trans-Atlantic commerce in African edibles. 3 4

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chapter six of the prisoners in the secret jails at that time who is not [involved] in [Gomez Barreto’s] conspiracy nor [is] Portuguese at any rate whoever is put in his company should have taken an oath of secrecy, and if he came from outside to ask him whether he carried from there, whether he brought some message or notice for some prisoner of said jail, and such was not done with the slave of this accused [. . .] and if in effect the slave entered, neither the time he was [in with Gomez Barreto] nor when he left is said.6

It turns out that in this case, as is revealed in his second trial (1652), Gomez Barreto’s social status had given him a certain degree of friendship with the inquisitors who ended up trying him in his first trial as well as with the jailer of the Inquisition’s secret jails in Cartagena.7 The efforts of Gomez Barreto’s wife, Barbara Pereira, to find someone who would bring food and other items to him in jail during his first trial reveal much. Pereira turned to her (their?) Black slave, Sebastian Bran, but probably only because at the time of her husband’s imprisonment he was married to a Black woman slave, Isabel, who happened to belong to and work for the jailer. Pereira requested the couple’s aid, but, she told the inquisitors, to no avail. Bran, her slave, refused, saying “that the jailer alone entered where her said husband was imprisoned.”8 Nonetheless, Bran remained in their service through at least 1643, according to the testimony of the new jailer, Diego Fernandez de Amaia.9 Further, Amaia told the inquisitors, Bran had indeed brought food for Gomez Barreto many times, a fact that was widely known. Frequently said black of the house of the said Luis Gomez arrived at the house of the said jailer and brought under his cape, hides a large totuma [a hard-

Quoted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 280. For example, the food for the wedding of the daughter of the Inquisition notary don Juan de Uriarte was prepared in the house of Gomez Barreto and his wife, Barbara Pereira, a fact not unconnected with the friendship Barbara Pereira maintained with Uriarte’s wife Antonia (see Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 330). “El señor Inq-or argos era muy amigo y que tambien tenia alguna amistad llana conel señor Inq-or D. Damian de velazques = y en la misma manera tubo amistad con el señor Inq-or Don Ma-n de cortazar y conel señor Inq-or Agustin de Ugarte sarabia” (quoted in Croitoru Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 283). Elsewhere Gomez Barreto states that on occasions when he spent time at the ranch of Blas de Paz Pinto, the inquisitor Argos was present, among many others, and that when visiting the ranch of a woman named Maria de Soto, Argos also came, along with the inquisitor Domingo Velez de Asas and Diego Fernandez de Amaya, warden of the secret jails (ibid., 283–284). The Governor, Alonso de Arçe Cavallero, was married to Barbara Pereira’s niece (Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 339). 8 Quoted in Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 330. 9 Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 339. 6 7

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shelled squash] which is a kind of pot and within it they brought stew and other things to eat to the said Luis Gomez Barreto this witness knows this because this witness saw him many times bringing the said totuma and being with it in the house of the said jailer and seeing him/it enter the kitchen and because one day he went up to said black and lifted his cape and saw that inside the said totuma he brought a stew of cooked chicken covered with a plate and over it some kind of chopped [meat?] or jigote [fig?] covered with another plate and that this was a known thing among all the [Inquisition] ministers [. . .] and the slave women of the said jailer [. . .] the one called Isavel and the other Lucreçia [. . .] and another called Mariquilla.10

Francisco de la Cruz, slave of the imprisoned Mexican Judeoconverso Simon Vaez Sevilla, was given two reales by his master’s cellmate Gaspar Alfar in order to buy him “a booklet (cartilla, for letter-writing?) at the counters (mesillas),” that is, from one of the vendors at the open market, which Cruz did. Despite the fact that Cruz himself was incarcerated at the time, for crimes of his own, as a slave whose labor could be claimed by the Inquisition he was given the kind of mobility prisoners who had been free citizens lacked. Another prisoner gave him a peso to buy him two tins of sweets (caxetas de conserba).11 Slaves did more than take care of the physical necessities of the imprisoned, whether they were their masters or not. The above Francisco de la Cruz, hearing many of the prisoners in the Mexico City tribunal’s jail talking with one another, warns them “to be quiet because people were around.”12 Francisco, also known as Queretano, does not know his own age but surmises that he is older than twenty five and considers himself “more ladino than bozal.”13 It is clear, then, that prisoners frequently communicated with one another and with the outside world, often by means of slaves. The communications touched on a great variety of topics, not least of all inquisitorial matters pertinent to the prisoners’ trials and efforts to get word to or have word from loved ones on the outside. Francisco de Leon Xaramillo, a 28-year-old Portuguese “circumcised judaizer,” was

Croitoru Rotbaum, Documentos, 339. Testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 526r., 528r. As mentioned previously, Vaez Sevilla was one of the most powerful merchants and wealthiest New Christians in the Americas; see, among other sources, Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “Simón Váez Sevilla,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 9 (1987): 67–93; a longer version appears in Michael (Tel Aviv) 8 (1983): 114–61. 12 Testimony of 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 527r. 13 Ibid., fol. 527v. 10

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accused of passing messages out of the Mexico City Inquisition jail. He supposedly communicated with his mother, Isabel Nuñez, notifying her regarding his case and that of his father, Duarte Leon Xaramillo, his brothers and sisters—all also incarcerated. Xaramillo communicated by means of one of the Black slaves who worked in the jail, sending out through him tins of food with messages secreted inside to his mother, whom the slave knew. The slave evidently did not dare deliver the message, but sold the goods for 6 reales. The inquisitors take this opportunity in the summary of the case to warn the jailers about the need for “caution and vigilance” concerning what can happen with those of the “perverse nation” of Judeoconversos.14 Duarte Leon wrote to his wife Ysabel Nuñez by means of a Black slave, or so Rafaela Enriquez claims Nuñez told her. Rafaela also says that Blanca and Margarita de Rivera told her that they had messages from Ysabel Nuñez, brought to them by the same slave. These messages were brought to Tomás Tremiño de Sobremonte, all at the cost of much money.15 In Lima, one of Manuel Bautista Peres’s domestic slaves, Antonio, carried at least one message to him in his jail cell in 1635 or 1636. Peres also managed to send messages out, with the “connivance of tribunal employees and the help of slaves” or his own servants.16 Simon Vaez Sevilla, sitting in the Inquisition jail in Mexico City and knowing that the Inquisition had confiscated his property, had to ask his slave Francisco for information concerning the most basic matters of his own life: “how was his house and hacienda, and who lived in it?”17 In addition, Vaez asks about news that might affect his trial and those of others, “if the fleet had come and if a new Viceregent had come and if it was said that a pardon had arrived [so] that they would be released from the jail” and whether the inquisition had arrested many people.18 Switching his visits to nighttime for more privacy, Francisco tells the inquisitors that Vaez “always asked him about his wife and

14 RELACION DEL TERCERO AUTO PARTICULAR DE FEE [. . .] à los treinta del mes de Março de 1648. años (Mexico: Iuan Ruyz, 1648), 22. 15 Testimony of Raphaela Enriquez, 3 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 281v. 16 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 244, n. 121. 17 Testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 524v. 18 Ibid., fols. 525r.–v. Francisco makes it clear that he would visit Vaez’s cell while the jailer was eating his meals.

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son and about the fleet and pardon.”19 Vaez also asks after “Gasparillo the black, and after the other black called Juan Francisco and he told him that Gasparillo had died in the hospital and Juan Francisco was in the house of Don Garcia.”20 It would appear that Vaez inquired out of affection, but whether Francisco placed these queries before those regarding Vaez’s wife and son, which follow immediately, because he remembered them in this order or because this was the order in which Vaez raised them cannot be determined. Ysavel Criolla claims that this same Francisco told her that Juana Enriquez wanted her to tell another prisoner, Simon Lopez, “that if he had a hacienda in Cacatecas that he should watch out for it.”21 Beatriz Enriquez relates another such episode: one morning putting into a basket the bread that this confessant [Beatriz] and the other people had for eating francisco queretano the black emptied the bread into the said cell in the presence of Juan gomez assistant of the Jailer and between the bread there came [out] a written note which the said thomas nuñez de Peralta [Beatriz’s husband] took and he read that it came written in portuguese with couplets and verses asking them how they were and how it goes for them without knowing whose the paper could be, and then the black passed the corridor that was in front of the cell in which this confessant was and he asked this confessant whether she had taken the paper and this one answered that yes, and she asked the black who [illegible] said paper and without responding to her he went.22

Some of these communications imply assigning to slaves an enormous amount of knowledge and trust. Simón Váez asks Cruz “if the Señores [of the Inquisition] had found the money that he had hidden.”23 In some cases the masters act as if the slaves represent blank machines of transmission. The imprisoned friend of Simón Váez, for instance, supposedly tells the Black Ysavel Criolla, slave of Vaez, “that she should tell Juanica that he [Simon Vaez] was suffering for her.”24 This message to Juana Enriquez, Vaez’s wife, also a prisoner in the same jail, Ibid., fol. 526r. Ibid., fol. 525r. 21 Testimony of 22 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 548r. 22 Testimony of 9 August 1646; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 288r.–v. 23 Testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 19 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 532v. Francisco tells him that they hadn’t but under torture he later reveals the location. 24 Testimony of Antonia de la Cruz, 21 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 520v. 19 20

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resonates with unarticulated emotion. The friend even uses an intimate diminutive—Juanica—for the name of the wife of the love-starved husband in whose name he sends the message. There is no room here for squeamishness in the face of the slave woman who hears and is to transmit the message, who already knows so much about her master. To get a sense of the exigencies of cases like these, I will now focus on one situation, about which a rather copious amount of testimony came forth. The septegenarian Black slave Sebastián Domingo, alias Munguía, of the Congo nation, worked in the Mexico City Inquisition’s secret jails during the 1640s.25 Born in Congo territory, he was at first a slave to one Luis de Mesquita, a factory manager (obrajero) in the province of Tlaxcala.26 In the summer of 1642 he acted as a messenger between Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, accused of judaizing, and his wife Beatriz Enriquez, the latter one of the five daughters of Blanca Enriquez, an elder who was said to be a leader of the Mexican crypto-Jewish community; Peralta was also the brother-in-law of Simón Váez Sevilla. Most of the Enriquez family was arrested and tried by the Mexico City tribunal. Here we see how the suspicion bred by the inquisitional process bled into relations between Whites and members of the servile class, on whom the former became even more dependent when incapacitated by incarceration. The tale of the transmission of messages is recounted by several of the individuals involved, giving us a sense of their differing perspectives. Peralta’s version comes in his audiencia of 20 August 1642: it was two months more or less that this confessant being very afflicted in his cell there came to him a black called Sebastian who helps the jailer, and through the grille of the cell he told him that his wife [. . .] tells him that he should help him [. . .], and this confessant answered him that he should tell her that he was very sad, and melancholic, and that she should write a note as he said in order to certify whether the message that the said black brought was authentic, asking him [Sebastian] if he had seen his said wife he said that yes and that she gave him the said message, and one, or two days later the said black returned and brought to this

25 “[D]e edad al parecer de sesenta años, negro, esclavo, de nación congo guineo” (cited in García, Documentos ineditos, 216). This might be the same slave referred to by Gabriel de Granada in his audience of 5 November 1643, when he related that “he also heard his said mother say that by means of this same negro slave [of the alcaide] Luis Perez Roldan used to communicate with his wife Isabel Nuñez” (Fergusson, “Trial of Gabriel de Granada,” 61). Some of the documents have his name as Mungia. 26 Summary of the trial against him (AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 343v.).

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confessant a small paper two fingers wide, and a handsbreadth long saying to him that his said wife had given his message, and she had given him [Sebastian] the said paper which this confessant remembers that [someone] wrote to him [Peralta] that a Thomas Rodriguez de Peralta understood that [someone] had done the damage to him [i.e., denounced him] because he had to name him when they had sequestered his goods, and that if this confessant was Free God would liberate him, that the Virgin our lady made this confessant see that the letter[ing] of this [. . .] note was not his wife’s, and he was frightened, [. . .] he was suspicious [about] from whom the note could be and in particular [because?] the said black filled an inkwell (of which he made a presentation) with a quill, and a half sheet of white paper telling him [Peralta] that his said wife sent it to him so that he respond on it, to that which she had sent to him, and he recalled that the day the said black gave him the first message that he requested a point [?] telling him that his wife asked for it, and this confessant gave it to him, and sent it and in conformity with that which he [Peralta] said wrote [illegible; this?] confessant in a notebook [quartilla] of a half sheet to his said wife notifying her that he was very plagued, and that he neither recognized nor know who the said Thomas Rodriguez de Peralta was, and that she should declare more, and notify him [illegible] everything she knew, and that he was dazed by the Justice discovering whom could be the said Man, and that she should write it in her own Hand because he did not recognize that of the said paper, and the said black brought it, and this confessant remained with the mentioned inkwell, and Quill, and he tore up the paper that he had received = And that in three, or four days the said black returned, and brought him another paper in a notebook saying to him that his said wife sent it to him in which she notified him to be certain that they imprisoned him due to the said Thomas Rodriguez de Peralta, and that he should calm himself and secure his health, and [put his] hope in God that he will leave with Honor as he had been born with it, and the said black also brought him another half sheet of paper, and this confessant warned him that this second paper was of the same lettering as the First, and not by the hand of his wife with which his suspicion grew without knowing who could have written it which [note] he ripped up like the First, and he responded to it with the said black, and that he had had three audiences, and had declared in them his Homeland [Patria], Parents, and grandmother, and had complained about Dona Maria de Rivera, and about francisco nieto discrediting them as enemies, and that she should endeavor to find out whether Pedro duarte had done him some damage [i.e., had denounced him] he being a blonde youth of thirty five years old more or less, a merchant who goes and comes to/from Spain because he was his enemy, and a man of evil tongue and he [Peralta] remembers that he wrote in the said paper to his said wife that she should be [illegible; certain?] that this confessant will bring up testimony neither against her nor against her sisters nor against anybody and that she should go speak to the Sir Inquisitor Don francisco de Ara and commend his [Peralta’s]

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chapter six trial to him because he seemed to him benevolent and inclined to do well by him and also it was good to gain as a friend the secretary Eugenio de Saravia and had not given other reasons that she should write having so many days = And within a few days said black returned, and brought to this confessant, another, third paper of the same lettering as the two mentioned in which they wrote him consoling him and giving him [to understand] that of the charge that they made against him in the audiences he would deduce who had done him evil, and this confessant seeing that it was not the lettering of his wife remained more confused, and with greater suspicions and fears than before, and on a piece of paper that remained with him from the half sheet this confessant wrote saying that he had received the letter that had come with the purple silk, and that it had not reached their hands, another that said having written to him before that one which one this confessant wrote thusly due to the suspicion that he had that the said papers were not from his wife, and that for this [letter] the bearer would go relating it through the said black, who would convey what was going on around here, neither did he ever have a response, nor did this confessant go back and write more, nor did he receive more messages, and those mentioned and the said papers the said black gave them to him when the assistant [spouse?] of the jailer entered to remove the crockery, or to clean the said cells and when he gave the said inkwell and quill the said black said to him that the jailer should not see it and thus he had hidden it under a beam that it was about twelve days more or less that the said black bringing him a light at night this confessant asked him whether he knew anything regarding his said wife, and how she was, he responded that she was well, and in her house, which he had not believed because a few days before in this part [of the jail] he heard some sighs and complaints in front of his cell and has presumed that she was a prisoner, and in particular because this confessant having given his clothes for washing to the black woman who enters with the jailer when it was returned clean, he recognized that it had been exchanged with that of his wife, because she brought him a high [collared?] shirt that he had left among others in his house, and some knittings [made] with needles that his said wife used with which it was certified that she was a prisoner in this holy office, and that he requested and beseeched by the love of God she be treated with mercy and piety for [her] being a very shy woman, and sick and he believes that she will have natural shame with the result of confessing her sins and those of this confessant, but as he desires that our Lord has opened the eyes of her understanding to tell the truth, and save her soul he intends to jointly save that of his wife and thus declares and confesses that even with her he has never done any fast of the said Law of Moses [. . . .] and that when he received the messages, and papers, inkwell and quill from the said black, and responded to them orally, and in writing he didn’t understand what he did [. . .] for if he had understood he would not have done it [. . .] if he erred in this he begs pardon for not knowing that he committed a sin in doing it. and that having written in the last paper

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that was in the purple silk he said it because the last paper they wrote him came wrapped and tied with a strand of purple silk, and that the last time that the said black spoke to this confessant saying how his wife was fine and in her house he promised that he would bring him another paper if this confessant gave him a shirt, and this confessant gave it to him [. . .] even though it [the paper] was not given nor did he return to speak more.27

Peralta’s confusion regarding the messages stemmed from the fact that when Beatriz begged Gaspar Vaez to write Peralta, the latter had the slave do so, “in the letter of the black man [ fue de letra de negro], this confessant and the black woman Antonia dictating.” In other words, Sebastian/Munguia was supposedly literate enough to pen a letter.28 If this is the case, why did he not inform Peralta of this fact, in order to assuage the prisoner? Was it because Peralta did not wish to confide his unease to this unknown slave? Sebastian/Munguia’s account of the whole relationship differs considerably. As I will explain, at the time he was already in trouble with the Inquisition, hence his current ‘job.’ He was then also caught transmitting the messages described in all this testimony. His deposition comes from his own trial. He claims that Peralta called to him through the open door of his cell when he had been sweeping the jail patio on one occasion, asking for some fire or heat. Peralta supposedly then begged him, “for the love of God,” to do something for him, which Sebastian/Munguia “promised to do.” Peralta then allegedly told him “that if a black of his comes and brings a paper for him from his wife he should bring it to his cell.” Within two days, a black boy of ten to twelve years, dressed in a green choker, torn outfit and barefoot, came to call on Sebastian/Munguia, sent as an intermediary by a black woman slave of Peralta’s. Whether this boy belonged to Beatriz or was Antonia’s son (or both), we get a vivid sense of the kind of clothing provided to slaves of even fairly well-off households. The boy informs Sebastian/Munguia that she wanted to see him and the latter went to meet her at the given address where she awaited him. The slave tells Sebastian/Munguia that her mistress would give him 50 pesos “if he managed to bring a note to the master of the said black woman,”

AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 55r.–57v.; see also AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 312r.–313r. 28 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 219v. 27

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Thomas Nuñez de Peralta.” Sebastian/Munguia replies to the slave, “who is called Antonia and is chubby and young, that he cannot leave the holy office [complex] because he was serving the jailer,” but she pleads, “for the love of God do it and began pulling this confessant by the cape in order to bring him to her house and notwithstanding the pleas that the said black Antonia made to this confessant he did not want to go and he remained at this holy office and house of the jailer and that this happend about seven at night he does not remember what day of the week.” Antonia comes back another day, also in the evening, enters into the Inquisition complex, finds Sebastian/Munguia, makes him sit down, sits next to him, and gives him a note for Peralta. According to Sebastian/Munguia, perhaps trying merely to protect himself, he and Peralta never exchanged a word when he delivered or picked up the messages.29 From the testimony it is clear how each party presents the story in a light that defends his own actions. While Peralta claims that he was being duped by an unknown message writer, Gaspar Vaez Sevilla testifies that indeed Beatriz Enriquez, his aunt, “had communication with” her husband “by means of a black man” while Peralta was imprisoned, “that he received papers and wrote papers, according to what he told” Vaez. But, says, Vaez, Peralta “neither wrote them to nor read them from the said doña Beatriz, and neither to [Vaez’s] mother doña Juana [Beatriz’s sister], nor did he know who should write them nor did the confessant give her the message to write, the witness [Vaez] awaiting that the said doña Beatriz should send him to the said Peralta.”30 Vaez claims that Antonia was romantically interested in Sebastian/Munguia.31 This is a possibility, but it could be that her interest was feigned in order to execute the commands of her owners. Indeed, using as a go-between the Black slave Antonia de la Cruz, who belonged to her husband, Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, and to her, Beatriz got in touch with the Black slave she leaves unnamed, “who served in the jails of the Holy Office,” according to the testimony of

29 Testimony of 319v. 30 Testimony of exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 31 Testimony of exp. 12, leg. 3, fol.

1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fols. 317r.– Gaspar Vaez Sevilla, 15 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, 113r. Gaspar Vaez Sevilla, 15 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, 115v.

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Beatriz’s sister Juana from the same trial.32 Beatriz claims, in her own testimony from her own trial, that the whole idea of these communications came from her slave Antonia: “[Beatriz] being greatly afflicted and disconsolate by the imprisonment of her husband Thomas nunez de Peralta by this holy office, one black woman of hers, a slave named Antonia, a creole of Çacatecas, having much knowledge regarding him, began to console [Beatriz], saying that she would bring a black man she knows in the Inquisition and that [Beatriz] should give a note [ papel] for her said husband.”33 If there is any truth to Beatriz’s statement, which could well be an attempt to deflect culpability, Antonia, who in 1642 declares herself to be around 25 years old, played the role of empathetic partner, whether out of duty or sincere involvement in the emotional life of her mistress.34 In addition, it is Antonia’s connections and social knowledge that saves the day here.35 This is true of other slaves as well, who use their social network in order to carry out their masters’ orders. One of Simon Vaez’s slaves, the Black Ysavel Criolla, has her mother, Leonor, then a slave to yet another supposed judaizer, Juan Mendez de Villaniciosa, contact someone on the outside to come speak with Simon Vaez.36 Yet it is noteworthy that Beatriz, in referring to Antonia,

32

114.

Testimony of 17 March 1643; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro,

33 Testimony of 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 219r. Antonia tells the inquisitors that she is from San Luis Potosi, a province of Mexico (AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 492r.), but Beatriz bought her in Çacatecas, where Antonia had been taken to be sold (below we will see why). 34 AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 492r. Francisco de la Cruz, slave of Simon Vaez Sevilla, tells the inquisitors that he is revealing how he helped the Judeoconverso prisoners “because he is a baptized christian, and that he begs pardon and mercy for this his sin, and that he did it as a poor slave, desirous of liberty” (ibid., fol. 527v.). Attesting to choice use of language, Francisco relates how one imprisoned Judeoconversa implored him “not to say anything even if they should crucify him” (ibid., fol. 533v.). 35 From her testimony it appears that Antonia engaged in healing, even later, while in the Inquisition jails, where the jailer brought patients to her and sent her to treat others, including imprisoned members of the extended Enriquez circle of accused judaizers (10 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 501v.–502r., 503r., 504v., 507r., etc.). Once again we see how a slave with skills is pressed into service by the Inquisition, gaining thereby certain privileges and a modicum of status. If Antonia’s depositions from this date onward are at all accurate, it appears that many of the prisoners, understanding her mobility, entrusted her to convey oral and even written messages to one another, information that Antonia reveals fully to her inquisitors. Various prisoners reward her for her messenger services with little gifts and even money. 36 Testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 22 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 536r. Ysavel also healed people and was used for this purpose by the jailor (testimony of Ysavel Criolla, 20 October 1643; ibid., fols. 540v.–541r.).

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almost always calls her “la negra” or “la negra Antonia” throughout her testimony, and not merely “Antonia.” It seems from testimony in other cases that Beatriz made similar attempts to communicate through slaves with other prisoners. Beatriz testifies (19 September 1642) during the trial of Juan de León about some of her efforts to communicate by means of a Black slave with the accused while he sat in prison. Beatriz made this whole attempt “even though it was difficult, and that it had cost her much money.” With the help of relatives and friends, such as Jorge Jacinto, husband of Blanca Juarez, Beatriz prepared a package for Juan de León: “some pieces of cotton soaked in ink and a small pen, all wrapped in a sheet of white paper and twenty pesos in reales.”37 It could well be, then, that she is merely attempting to shift culpability for concocting this scheme onto her slave Antonia. Antonia, for her part, claims that it was Beatriz who approached her with the idea: “one day the said Doña Beatriz Enriquez said to this deponent, does she know some person who lives in the Inquisition and this one saying to her, no she does not know anyone, being recently arrived from the mines of san luis Potosi.” Suggesting that Antonia get to know some youth in the employ of the tribunal, Antonia responded by saying that “she didn’t want to involve herself in this.” Nonetheless, Beatriz allegedly implored her to forge a relationship with someone working on the inside. Antonia eventually meets a “half mulato” whom she asks whether he works for the Inquisition. He tells her that his sister, a Black slave, came from Puebla to make a life in Mexico City with her spouse, who works for the Inquisition. This Mulato introduces Antonia to the Black who works for the inquisition—right at the front door of the institution’s building, a sign of how little attention slaves and non-Whites might attract—and she shows him to her mistress’s house (actually that of Beatriz’s sister Juana and brother-in-law Simon Vaez) in order to get the process rolling.38 Antonia declares (with pride?) that she alone of all the household’s slaves knows about these messages “because of how much she is trusted by” her masters.39

Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 88. Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 493r.–v. 39 AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 497r. Perhaps knowing of this trust, after the slaves Antonia and Luçia are summoned to testify before the Inquisition in late August 1642 Beatriz’s sister Micaela calls them to her house. The two slaves are afraid to enter, however, because Micaela has told her Black slaves Çiçilia and Maria that “they had to kill [Antonia] with a dagger,” a threat that they convey to Antonia (ibid.). 37 38

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According to Juana Enríquez, who claims she has never seen him, Beatriz described this Inquisition slave to her as “an old, bald Black man who did not speak much Spanish.”40 Antonia describes him as “between ladino and Boçal.”41 The slave arrived at the same time as always,42 and this confessant [Beatriz] asking him if he knew the said Juan de León, he responded that he did, giving his proper signs [i.e., describing him correctly] and saying that he had all the prisoners at hand, because he gave them [food] to eat, and this confessant beseeching him to take to him [ Juan de León] the said paper and message to write, he took it and the said twenty [pesos] which the said Jorge Jacinto had given for him, and the said Black did not return for two days, this confessant went back to call him with the said Black woman [Antonia], and having come he said that he had not dared to give the said paper or the message to write to the said Juan de León because he was a dead man [the many and damning charges against De León were published on August 29, not even a month before Beatriz’s testimony], and for so little [money] he did not look at his face, and likewise he had not wanted to go in with him, and that he had thrown away the paper and the message to write, and as this confessant begged him greatly how important it was to her that he give the paper to the said Juan de León, the said Black said to her that for a very good profit he would do it, that she should give him twenty pesos and he would return for the paper, and this confessant gave him the said twenty pesos, and afterwards she sent to Jorge Jacinto, that he should give these [pesos] to her and write the paper, mentioning to him what happened with the said Black, and the said Jorge Jacinto wrote another paper for the said Juan de León and paid this confessant the twenty pesos which he had supplied for him [the slave], and the said Black having come at the same time as always, he took the said paper of Jorge Jacinto for the said Juan de León, and as he did not return that day nor the next, this confessant sent to see him the said Black woman, who returned saying that the the Black man responded that he could not go to see this confessant, that he had given the said paper to the said Juan de León from whom he already had an answer, that she should send him [the slave] monies and go to him, and this confessant gave notice of this to the said Jorge Jacinto, who gave her another ten pesos which this confessant sent to the said Black man with the said Black woman and she went and gave them to him, and he responded that he would then take the answer, and this happened the Saturday before they would arrest her [Beatriz], with which she has no

Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 115. AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 493v. 42 According to Juana Enriquez, the slave always arrived at midday (Inq. 393, exp. 1, leg. 3, fol. 184r.–v.). 40 41

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chapter six more seen the said Black nor has anything else happened between them other than what she has mentioned.43

Among other functions, Sebastian/Munguia offers Beatriz emotional support, telling her on one occasion when there is hope that someone close to Beatriz might be freed from the Inquisition “that she should be of good spirit.”44 Antonia would supposedly meet Sebastian/Munguia in an alley around seven in the evening in order to communicate and/or give or recieve the messages “because she knew that at those hours he helped empty out the chamberpots.”45 Antonia doesn’t seem to have been the most effective secret agent, however. One day Antonia arrives at the Inquisition complex herself. One of the inquisitors asks her what she is seeking. She answers that she seeks a morena named Luçia. The inquisitor disappears into the building, from which Sebastian/Munguia soon emerges. Antonia gives him one of the written messages and he “said to her that she should go so that they should not see her speaking with him,” accompanying her out by way of the yard, inserting her into a little door when he sees that people are about and telling her to hide herself before simply making himself scarce. No doubt Antonia’s indiscrete appearance led Sebastian/Munguia to tell Beatriz and the others at their next meeting that he would no longer deliver messages for them, something he announced “very disturbed.” At this point, Simon Vaez allowed the slave to remove as much as he wanted from a small sack of money.46 Given the degree to which the inquisitors frowned on such illicit communications, it makes sense that, as Juana Enríquez testifies, the slave “charged her [Beatriz] that no one should know about this, that he ran a

43 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fols. 220v.–221r.; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 88–9. Francisco de la Cruz, known as Queretano, the Black slave of Simon Vaez, performed nearly identical functions for his jailed master (see, among other sources, the testimony of Francisco de la Cruz, 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 524v. and passim; testimony of Antonia de la Cruz, 21 October 1643; ibid., fols. 519r.–520v.). 44 Testimony of an unnamed witness (Beatriz’s slave Maria Bautista or Antonia herself ?); AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 392r. 45 Testimony of Sebastian Domingo, 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 319r. 46 Testimony of Antonia de la Cruz, 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 495r.–v. Simon Vaez’s generous payment is also mentioned in the testimony of an unnamed witness, possibly Sebastian/Munguia himself (AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 391r.).

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great risk.”47 Sebastian/Munguia also tells Antonia “for the love of God not to say anything regarding that he was taking and bringing papers,” for should she talk, “they would put him and her in a dungeon in this inquisition where they are very dark and that it wasn’t good to be in them.”48 In the face of the great risk involved for all the parties, compensation became a major issue. Beatriz’s estimate, related by her sister Juana, “that she had given to the said Black a hundred or a hundred and fifty pesos,” sounds realistic.49 Antonia claims her mistress “twice gave to the said black man fifty pesos,” while on four other occasions she gave him an unspecified amount of money. Sebastian/Munguia himself testifies that the very first time Antonia communicated with him she announced that her mistress was summoning him and would give him fifty pesos if he would carry a message.50 One time, according to Antonia, Beatriz gave Sebastian/Munguia “many coins, which the said black man put in his pouches. But they were so many that they did not allow him to walk quickly. In order to go he had to hold the pouches in his hands.” No doubt afraid of its evidentiary power, Sebastian/Munguia is said to have given over his earnings to a Black woman for hiding; he himself confesses eventually that he buried some of it it in the alcove where he lived in the jailer’s house and what he received from Antonia he gave to a compatriot, a Chinese man.51 Beatriz, on the other hand, testifies that though he demanded a hundred pesos “in Reales” after his first delivery, she paid him only thirty, promising more if he continued delivering messages.52 Notwithstanding the importance to her of these deliveries, she negotiated the price down significantly. In a deposition given during his own trial, Sebastian/Munguia dicusses an occasion on which “because they would not pay him his money this

47 Testimony of 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 184v.; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 115. 48 Testimony of Antonia de la Cruz, 2 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 499v. 49 Testimony of 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 184v.; cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 115. 50 Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 318r. 51 Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 494r.; testimony of 2 September 1642; ibid., fol. 498v.; testimony of Sebastian, where he denies giving money to a Black woman (testimony of 3 September 1642; ibid., Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 325v.), testimony of 4 September 1642; ibid., fol. 328r. According to the testimony of Jorge Jacinto Bassan from the trial of Beatriz Enriquez, he provided her money to pay the slave carrying the messages (AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 162v.). 52 Testimony of 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 220r.

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confessant became very angry and enraged.”53 One would think that the slave would have wanted to continue to earn such good money, despite the obvious risks, yet he also would have appeared to have the upper hand in such a negotiation. Beatriz, in contrast, had little or no money, her husband’s goods having been confiscated by the tribunal. One witness, most likely Sebastian/Munguia himself, repeatedly uses the verb rogar [to pray, beg] to describe Beatriz’s requests to the slave, on whose willingness to help she is completely dependent. One witness (Sebastian/Munguia?) says that on one occasion Beatriz told the slave “that she would give him as much money as he should like if he would bring a response from a certain prisoner and also gave him two pesos in order to buy chocolate.”54 She ends up paying the slave twenty pesos after each delivery, “with which he left very content,” according to her.55 With the final delivery, Beatriz gives the slave in addition “an embroidered shirt from Rouén which this confessant bought for ten pesos.”56 Sebastian/Munguia, for his part, claims, on the one hand, that Beatriz gave him a shirt the time when she wouldn’t or couldn’t pay him his money, and, on the other hand, that it was Peralta who promised him a shirt for conveying the messages but never actually gave it to him.57 In her own testimony Antonia adds that one day Sebastian came to her house “to order a loaned skirt for his wife.”58 According to Sebastian/Munguia’s response to the charges against him, he received money only on two occasions and only enough to buy for himself first “some shoes” and then “long johns of blue cloth and other shoes and some sweets.”59 Such items would likely cost far less than fifty pesos. In comparison, the Black slave Juan, testifying in 1601 in the trial of Diego Díaz Nieto, says that the prisoners for whom he carried messages

53 Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 320r. After walking out on them Sebastian/Munguia flung away the paper that they had given him. This might be the message he claims to have lost. 54 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 388r. 55 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 221r. 56 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 221r. 57 Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fols. 326v., 323r. 58 Testimony of 2 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 499v. Sebastian/Munguia denies this (testimony of 3 September 1642; ibid., Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 326v.). 59 Testimony of 3 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 325v.

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“did not give him anything other than that when they should get out they would pay him and reward him because at present, as prisoners, they did not have what to give him.” Others (those on the outside?) gave him “bread and fruit and coins” and the like.60 Another time, according to the deposition of an unnamed witness (most likely Antonia herself ), Beatriz seems quite excited because she heard that a certain prisoner very close to her might be released, the inquisitors having come up with no charges. She gives the Sebastian/ Munguia the usual twenty pesos, to which her brother-in-law adds more coins, yet “not content with this the said Beatriz promised liberty to her said black woman,” i.e., Antonia.61 Referring to an occasion on which Beatriz sent her to discover how Peralta was doing in prison, Antonia says that Beatriz gave her a necklace of a row of pearls from China, “giving her word that she would give her liberty.”62 The Black slave Francisco de la Cruz asserts that his imprisoned master, Simon Vaez Sevilla, told him “that he should come see him every day and that he would give him a letter of liberty [i.e., of manumission].”63 Ysavel Criolla claims that one day Simon Vaez promised her and Francisco Queretano (de la Cruz) “freedom when he leaves” jail.64 In her response to the charges of the various witnesses Beatriz seems to confirm having made this promise to Antonia.65 On the other hand, Antonia testifies that a close friend of her masters warned her that if she revealed

Quoted in Uchmany, Vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo, 209–10. AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 391r. On the next folio (and day?) Beatriz’s promise is repeated: Sebastian/Munguia “said to the said black woman [Antonia?] that her master said to her that if he should leave [the jail] well he had to give [her] liberty” (AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 392r.) All this is repeated with only slight variation in the testimony of Antonia de la Cruz (AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 496r., 498r.). In her testimony, Antonia seems pretty insistent that she is telling the truth and that her mistress knows all this to be true (ibid., fol. 496r.). Sebastian/Munguia denies that Peralta promised Antonia her freedom, only that Sebastian/Munguia heard this from her, but he does state that Beatriz indeed promised to free Antonia if her husband was released from prison (testimony of 3 September 1642; ibid., Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 326r.). 62 Testimony of 10 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 507r. It is unclear whether this refers to an episode mentioned above or to something that transpired after they were all arrested. Ysavel Criolla says that it was a necklace of pearls (testimony of 20 October 1643; ibid., fol. 546r.). 63 Testimony of 3 September 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 524v. 64 Testimony of Ysavel Criolla, 20 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 543r. 65 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 1, leg. 3, fol. 421v. 60 61

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anything of these jailhouse communications the inquisitional tribunal would give her two hundred lashes.66 The differences between the parties in their depictions of their interactions are revealing. Despite the good service this slave performed for Beatriz, she claims to her inquisitors that she does not even know his name, though she provides them what would seem to be an accurate and operable description: “tall, old, bald and with a bad face [de mala cara].”67 According to one unnamed witness (Sebastian/Munguia?), however, Beatriz clearly expressed her gratitude to the slave with emotion, for on at least one occasion she “embraced the said black man and told him to return for the response.”68 Does she really not know his name, and is this ignorance a sign of class or racist blindness, or is she trying to protect him, however ineffectively, by making the inquisitors work to find him? In any case, a month later, having conveyed already a great deal of information about herself and many others, she remembers his name or decides to give it away.69 It should be noted that Beatriz repeatedly disputes Sebastian/Munguia’s testimony, declaring many of his statements to be false. She calls him both a spinner of tall tales (embustero) as well as fearful. She also disputes the veracity of assertions that seem to have been made by other slaves/servants, possibly Maria Bautista and/or Antonia.70 For his part, Sebastian/Munguia, who was incarcerated based on the testimonies that arise from these trials of various Judeoconversos, at first denies several of the statements concerning him raised by others, but changes his testimony over the course of a few days of interrogations; it is clear that indeed he performed many of the missions requested of him.71 Perhaps the question of compensation had become a source of overmuch tension between Beatriz and

Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 492v. Testimony of 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/1/3, fol. 219v. 68 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 386v. In his own testimony during his own trial Sebastian/Munguia says that the first time he and Beatriz meet, after he has already conveyed a message for her, “seeing this confessant she thanked him greatly for his having brought the said paper” (testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 319r.). He also declares that Antonia embraced him on one occasion (testimony of 5 September 1642; ibid., fol. 329v.). 69 Testimony of 18 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 245v. 70 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/1/3, fols. 421r.–v. 71 Testimony of 3–11 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 324v.– 333r. The inquisitors eventually order Sebastian/Munguia tortured, in order to draw out definitive testimony. He “persevered,” though through how much is not stated, and repeated his previous testimony enough to satisfy the inquisitors (ibid., fol. 336v.). 66 67

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Sebastian/Munguia, as seems to be the case. Perhaps Beatriz resented the fact that she had sunk to the point where an unknown slave could dictate financial terms to her. Is it also possible that beyond trying to make herself look as innocent as possible, she is trying to salvage before the White inquisitors some class or racial status that would be marred by her abject dependence on a group of slaves? Perhaps Sebastian/Munguia had simply taken advantage of her: he claims, for instance, that she gave him a fighting knife to give to her husband but that instead he sold it.72 Antonia de la Cruz was incarcerated as well. The inquisitors have some harsh words to say about her and suspect her assertions. [B]eing a slave, vile person, and by nature intrepid, and being of bad habits, she was sent from this city, to be sold, to that of Çacatecas, as is done with the slaves of bad nature, and of whom it is truly possible to believe that she lies against her said masters and other persons against whom she deposes.73

The inquisitors order her to be threatened with torture, stripped and, if necessary, submitted to the mancuerda (where the wrists are tied with cords and the torturer would throw his weight to produce a rack-like effect). She is then to be brought back for further testimony. This is done. Insisting that everything she has said is true, Antonia does not change a word of her testimony. It is not clear that the inquisitors did anything more than take Antonia to the torture chamber and strap her to the rack.74 After this judicial procedure that supposedly produced proof that Antonia had been telling the truth, the tribunal seemed content to make ample use of her statements in trials against various alleged judaizers. Despite the difficulty of cutting through the variant testimonies, the loyal relations between slave and mistress seemingly continued during their mutual imprisonment. Antonia takes the shirt that Ysavel Texosso gave to her as a reward for one of her jailhouse services, as well as the necklace given her by Beatriz and sells them, through her godmother,

Testimony of 4 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 328r. 16 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 510v. 74 17 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fols. 513r.–518v. Ferry notes that Antonia’s testimony came only after she had been caught colluding in the exchange of messages, in other words, long after her owners had been arrested by the Inquisition. 72 73

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the mulata Ynes, in order to buy shoes for her incarcerated mistress.75 In an audience shortly thereafter Antonia relates that she “has told her mistress doña Beatriz Enriquez that they had brought her [Antonia] to this Holy Office a prisoner in a dungeon so that she should tell about the messages, and that she had not wanted to tell, that she began to cry.”76 The pent up feelings of fear of the Inquisition, fear of her mistress, continued affection, stress, guilt and betrayal explode, however comingled. Other slaves also remained loyal to their masters. Juliana, the Angolan slave of María de Rivera, never denounced them, “[e]ven though they had whipped her, and even though she knew all about their religious practices, even as the Inquisition tortured her.”77 Sebastián/Munguía probably requested as much money as possible for these risky tasks because the reason he served in the Inquisition jails in the first place was as punishment for his ‘crime’ of being married twice—doubling the risk he took in passing messages to and from the jails. Having been married in 1624 in New Veracruz with the Black slave Felipa de la Cruz, his master later put him up for sale “because of his bad habits.” But “there was nobody who wanted to buy, saying he was married.” His master brought Sebastián/Munguía to Puebla de los Ángeles, where he sold him to an obrajero. Supposedly, some friends told the slave that his wife Felipa had been sold from New Veracruz and had died, so that Sebastián/Munguía eventually yielded to the importunities of his new master to marry one of his slaves, Ysabel, in order “to assure his money, fearing lest he run away.”78 The above explanation may well be true, but one should keep in mind here, as many scholars have pointed out, that African marital and sexual customs differed from those practiced in Christendom, while, on the other hand, the difficult exigencies of enslavement led to behaviors, modes

75 Testimony of 21 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 521r. Likewise, her master, Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, “sent her among the dirty laundry some new shoes that didn’t fit him” (ibid., fol. 521v.). Francisco de la Cruz testifies that in prison Beatriz Enriquez gave him for various services an old shirt, which he sold, and two reales (Testimony of 19 October 1643; ibid., fol. 533r.). He calls her fat—“da Beatriz la gorda.” 76 Testimony of 21 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 521r. 77 Robert Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” Still, Ferry, who does not appear skeptical of Inquisition records, does not consider that perhaps some, much or perhaps even all of the testimony regarding the Blancas de Rivera is not credible. I.e., Juliana may not have denounced them because there was nothing to denounce. 78 Trial and Criminal Cause against Sebastian Domingo, alias Mungia, AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fols. 345r.–346r.; García, Documentos ineditos, 216–7.

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of coping, that might not have ‘normally’ arisen. Coming from the Congo nation, Sebastián/Munguía likely saw multiple partnerships as something perfectly reasonable, a sign of largeness of spirit and communality rather than treacherous adultry. If such partnerships could be sanctioned and sanctified by the Catholic Church, so much the better.79 Yet, perhaps significantly, not a single one of the other witnesses, even Antonia, also a slave, knows him by his African name, Munguia. In any event, the Mexico City Inquisition arrested Sebastián/Munguía a second time for “violating the secret of the secret jails,” i.e., transmitting information and/or messages, something he was said to have done “with ample malice and damaging intention.” Not only had he brought messages back and forth, but he also conveyed, “in a very important manner, knowledge of those who were imprisoned [. . .] and the state of their proceedings.” “Being ladino,” Sebastian/Mungia understood exactly what he had done.80 Antonia relates already in 1642 that his wife had informed her of Sebastian’s arrest.81 The inquisitors gathered enough evidence for them to convict him on seven charges.82 Sebastian/Munguia found himself a penitent at the 30 March 1648 auto de fe in Mexico City. Sebastián/Munguía’s new punishment: appearing at the auto carrying a green candle, with a rope around the neck and a penitent’s hat on his head, he made a light abjuration; he received 200 lashes and six years at the oars in the galleys in Spain. Probably due to his age, the authorities freed him from the galley sentence, selling him instead for 100 pieces of common gold, which went to pay the Inquisition’s expenses for his trial. After six years, he was to be returned to his master.83 Speaking “African” The worries these jailhouse communications provoked for the inquisitors has been mentioned. I will now contextualize them further. One of the ‘judaizers’ accused and tried in Puebla, Mexico, in 1648, doña Blanca 79 See, for instance, Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, esp. 61–78, 156–80; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 35–50. 80 Trial and Criminal Cause against Sebastian Domingo, 22 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 312r.–v.; García, Documentos ineditos, 216–7. 81 Testimony of 2 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 500r. 82 AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fols. 335v.–336r. 83 AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 350r.; García, Documentos ineditos, 216–7.

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Juarez, participated in jailhouse conversations with other prisoners under aliases and used “the language of Angola in Guinea to communicate with the maidservants and slaves who serve in the secret jails.”84 In her testimony to the Mexico City tribunal, Ysavel de Silva says that Beatriz Enriquez speaks the language of Angola very well and implies that her husband Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, as well as Rafaela Enriquez and her daughters Ana [Suarez?] and Blanca understand it too.85 First comes the question of which language is meant here. It could be Kimbundu, a Central African tongue very similar to the neighboring language of Kikongo, which by the seventeenth century became known as Angolan and “operated as the lingua franca of the entire region, even among interior peoples,” no doubt among slave traders as well.86 Where did these individuals learn this language? Are their skills in it exaggerated by the witnesses to the Inquisition? Given that Blanca Enriquez was born in Puebla and most probably never travelled to Portuguese West Africa, she must have learned it from her family’s slaves in Mexico. Alberro writes in reference to Blanca Juárez that “some families devoted themselves to the slave trade and sometimes the children of Portuguese born on African land were raised by black women slaves who taught them their language. Subsequently, the richest of these went along surrounded by slaves, and domestic requirements such as those which imposed prudence in some periods kept alive the use of this language.”87 Blanca’s husband was Jorge Jacinto Bassan, a slave trader. Blanca and her sister Ana had a half-sister who had been born in Lima, Peru, Violante Xuarez, an illegitimate daughter of their father, Gaspar Xuarez, who perhaps traded in slaves.88 Rafaela Enriquez testifies that her maternal grandfather—Diego is the only part of his name that she can recall—died in Angola.89 This is Diego Lopez, who

84 Cited in García, Documentos ineditos, 235. Perhaps Blanca Juarez was also the object of the reference to an imprisoned judaizer with whom Isabel Nuñez used to communicate in the Inquisition jails, other than her son, mentioned earlier: “se comunicó con otros presos, con los nombres supuestos de Clavellina, Zapatilla, y la Angola, por saber hablar la lengua Guineota.” See Bocanegra, Auto general de la Fee, s.v. Ysabel Nuñez. Whoever this Judeoconversa was who adopted the code name “Angola,” she adopted the identity of an Angolan name and/or language. 85 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 93v. 86 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 19, 250, n. 2, basing himself on the work of Joseph Miller. 87 Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 146. 88 Relacion del Tercero Auto Particular de Fee, 40v. 89 Testimony of 2 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 246v.

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had died in Angola or Guinea, presumably involved in the slave business. Others in the circle of Mexico City Judeoconversos had connections to the slave trade as well. Blanca de Rivera’s father, Enrique Rodriguez Obregon, worked as a “sailor/longshoreman [Cargador] of blacks from Angola to this New Spain.”90 We do not know much about how or why these Judeoconversos picked up African languages. Did they learn it to better command their slaves? Did they wish to understand them and their culture? If nothing else, their knowledge of the slave language bespeaks the proximity, if not intimacy, in which the master’s children (themselves masters) lived with their servants.91 Such intimacy troubled colonial authorities for a variety of reasons, in this case, due to the possibilities of conveying knowledge. But such facility in the language of the previously-idolatrous servile class additionally posed an obstacle to the smooth acculturation of these servants (as well as to the smooth decimation of their idolatrous culture) and an unwanted, unnecessary flirtation on the part of the master class with the servants’ culture. According to Maria Odila Leite Silva Dias, in 1698 the governor D. Artur de Sá e Menezes “was dismayed by the habit that São Paulo women had acquired of speaking Tupi with their native Indian servants: ‘the majority of those people cannot express themselves in any other language, especially the female sex, and all the servants, and serious harm is resulting from this shortcoming.’ ”92 Not only did many Judeoconversos involved in the slave trade not know an African language, not all those chased or caught by the Inquisitions desired these dangerous liaisons with slaves. After María de Rivera’s sisters had been imprisoned by the Inquisition in Mexico City, in May 1642, “she attempted to find the Blacks who in 1635 had brought numerous messages to the prisoners of the Inquisition, but when she presented the penitents from that time [i.e., those former prisoners] with the proposal of requesting their help in order to find

Estrada y Escovedo, Relacion sumaria del auto particular de fee, 10v. On the other hand, Juana Enriquez and Simón Váez Sevilla owned may slaves— Robert Ferry says at one point “as many as two dozen, both adults and children,” and elsewhere “at least 18” (“Don’t Drink the Chocolate”)—yet they are not alleged to speak Angolan. This couple was accused of frequently whipping their slaves and hence the question of intimacy or lack thereof varied radically depending on, among other factors, the personalities of the owners. 92 Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995 [1984]), 62. 90 91

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the slaves, it was poorly received by them [the former prisoners] and she was unsuccessful in establishing contact with [her sister] Clara.”93 Despite the possibility of helping new victims of the Holy Office, these former prisoners justly continued to be wary of drawing onto themselves the Inquisition’s wrath by abetting communications the Inquisition considered illicit. In addition, the sources imply that the former prisoners protected these slaves. As seen above, slaves also at times resisted the requests made of them, or at least so they told the inquisitors. Ysavel Criolla, slave of Simon Vaez, relates that one day her master, imprisoned in the Inquisition jails, called to her. “This confessant not wanting to speak with him and for this [reason] asking him not to call to her because she had a companion [with her] and she did not want her to see her [engaged] in some job” that might not be above-board.94 Communicating with slaves aroused the inquisitors’ wrath, whether it was done in Angolan, Portuguese or Spanish. A revealing passage in a report about the Lima auto de fe of 23 January 1639—in which Francisco Maldonado de Silva was burned at the stake—corroborates the connections described in the cases from Mexico: Before publicizing the auto, all the Blacks who served in the jails were enclosed in a part where they would not be able to hear, know or understand about the publication, so that they should not give notice to the accused parties, for even though the Inquisition used for this [service in the jails] unassimilated, non-Spanish-speaking Blacks [bozales], just taken from the boats (less is not possible in this kingdom), the Portuguese use assimilated [Blacks, i.e., ladinos], who, as they bring them from Guinea, knew their languages, and by this means they are much helped in their communications, with other skills, like that of [using] the lemon and the alphabet of knocks, a remarkable thing.95

93 AGN Mexico, Inq. 387, exp. 11, Memoria del día en que entraron los presos de esta Complicidad, desde el año de 1639 hasta el de 1647; 403, exp. 3, Proceso contra María de Rivera (1642), fols. 339–341v.; Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 558. 94 Testimony of Ysavel Criolla, 20 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 543r. 95 Montesinos, Auto de fe celebrado en Lima, 5 [1639 ed., unpag.]; the text is reproduced in full in Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 375–429. A letter from the Inquisitor Antonio de Castro y del Castillo, Lima, 8 June 1641, explained how the lemons were used: “many times they give them [their Black slaves] papers written with the juice of lemons, which they request for ailments that they feign or for the farce [sainete] of their food, and even though it seems that the papers go out blank, put to the fire the letters emerge, a secret discovered by the señor Licenciado Juan de Mañosca” (quoted in Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 372).

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This passage describing the preventative segregation of the jail’s Black slaves indicates that some Inquisition jails in the Americas followed a policy of using slaves who did not speak or understand Spanish, to prevent unwanted communication of just the sort mentioned here, but also, no doubt, because they were cheaper than acculturated slaves. Here again we see that, from the Inquisitions’ perspective, knowledge of African slave languages was a dangerous vehicle, despite the ironic contradiction in the description that the problem inhered in the slaves and prisoners sharing both Iberian and African tongues—but this doubling only multiplied the situation’s dangers. Jewish linguistic skill—itself a kind of foreignness—often served as a pre-modern form of the charge of double loyalty. In the jails of the Inquisitions this alterity overlapped with that of the empire’s largest and most downtrodden caste. In addition, the tribunals had to deal with the somewhat amusing fact that often the prisoners could and did communicate with one another between their cells. In the context of the Lima tribunal Irene Silverblatt quotes accusations from the trial of Manuel Bautista Peréz that New Christians of Jewish background “could speak their languages in front of Old Christians, and Old Christians would not understand a word.” Bautista Peréz and a friend of his who was also imprisoned would “speak to each other in a language only understood among themselves, talking about the Law of Moses.” This was “a secret language,” and “Old Christians just heard normal words, not that out-of-the-ordinary language,” in which the Judeoconversos spoke with “duplicity and scheming, so that the prisoner and the rest of his ancestry and kin could converse about conspiracies and heresies.”96 Though possible, it is doubtful that any of these Judeoconversos knew enough Hebrew to converse in it. Does this charge raise Old Christian hallucinations of Hebrew? Is this a reference to judezmo or Judeo-Spanish? Is it possible that Bautista Peréz and other Portuguese Judeoconversos involved with the slave trade knew enough of an African language to speak it with one another? In any case, the language described bears all the hallmarks of a magical, unfamiliar and, hence, suspect tongue. That the Inquisitors at Lima went to such precautionary lengths to prevent unwanted communications shows the degree of their fears. An

96 Quoted in Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 271–2; she cites AHN Inq. 1647/13, fols. 53r.–v. and 266.

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earlier letter from the inquisitors at Lima, 18 May 1637, notes how some prisoners tear their shirts and sheets and on the shreds write that which they desire with the smoke of the candles, and to the Black bozales who enter the ministries, they [the prisoners] give them over so that they [the slaves] will take them, and in this manner some have come into our hands.97

The problem was not new to those who ran the jails. Already in the 1570s action was taken against two Black women who worked in the prison kitchen, the one called Antonia, and the other Marica, regarding certain messages and documents which they carried from certain prisoners out of the jails, and verifying what happened surrounding this and the damage that might have been involved, Antonia was given 200 lashes by the secret jails, and Marica the same amount, and they were returned to their owners, ordering them not to enter this Holy Office.98

Nonetheless, the problem continued. The 1641 letter from the inquisitor at Lima, Antonio de Castro y del Castillo (cited in part above in note 95), reiterates many of the same complaints: “The servants for these people were Black bozales, which is the service around here, and the accused were even traders in this merchandise, bringing large parties of them from Cartagena, they spoke to them in their language, and they gave messages to be taken from the ones to the others, and many times they gave them papers written with the juice of lemons [. . ..] Other times accounts in figure, in old papers, which were known ciphers among them were sent with the Blacks who took out the plates,” as appeared in the trial of Manuel Bautista Pérez.”99 In Cartagena in 1654, Juan, a Black slave of the jailer, received two hundred lashes and a metal ring affixed to one leg as a sign of his imprisonment, and also had to serve at a hospital for his whole life for “having carried messages from the outside to the prisoners,” many of whom at that time were Portuguese and accused ‘judaizers.’100 To prevent such occurrences, the practice was instituted, at least for the Cartagena tribunal, of giving prisoners paper—to take notes regard-

Quoted in Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 132. Quoted in Medina, Inquisición de Lima, 1:138–9. 99 Carta del inquisidor don Antonio de Castro y del Castillo, Lima, 8 June 1641; quoted in Böhm, Historia de los judíos en Chile, 372. 100 Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 274. 97 98

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ing their case, to detail challenges to the accusations against them, to list names of those they wished to denounce—that was numbered, to enable tracking, in the hope of preventing its use for messages outside the jail.101 It is unclear when this practice began. In the jails of the Mexico City tribunal as well, some efforts were made to stop jailhouse communications by means of slaves. Maria de Rivera, conversing from her cell with her mother Blanca and sisters in 1642, is said to have mentioned that “a black who was here [working in the jails] in the past did all that [imprisoned judaizers Thomas Tremiño (sic) de Sobremonte and his wife] ordered, [and] that so said Tremiño and his wife also. And that because of this the jailer now did not permit either the [current] black man or black woman to enter within.”102 Sobremonte, whose name is usually given as Treviño de Sobremonte, was, next to Váez Sevilla, probably the wealthiest New Christian merchant in the viceroyalty and also one of the most prominent members of the Mexico City Marrano group. Castigating the slave Sebastian/Mungia for his crimes, the Mexico City inquisitors reveal an informed and global perspective: [T]he said black Sebastian, having communication with other blacks within and outside the patios and corrals of this Inquisition, which blacks infallibly belong to people who, being observers of the Law of Moses, desire to know about the prisoners in said jails, and they value the said blacks, people whom ordinarily are held to be of little or no account, with whom they relate concerning their own color and nation. And by this route the observers of the said Law procure the achieving of their designs, as with notable damages has been experienced in the Inquisitions of Lima, Cartagena and here.103

Hence among the punishments meted out to Sebastian/Mungia was “that he be publicly castigated [with lashes] to give others a lesson.”

Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 2:350, n. 916. Testimony of Gaspar Alfar, who reported these conversations, 16 June 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396, exp. 3, fol. 576v. Adding to the discussion of New Christians’ allegedly dangerous linguistic abilities, Sobremonte, who traded in the northern mining regions of New Spain as well as in Oaxaca, knew Nahuatl, as Stanley Hordes cites a letter sent him by one of his agents in this language, warning him about the Inquisition (End of the Earth, 43). Seymour B. Liebman mentions, without giving details, that Sobremonte’s trial revealed that he had had “a sexual relationship” with an Amerindian woman (Seymour B. Liebman, “The Mestizo Jews of Mexico,” American Jewish Archives 19,2 [November 1967]: 155). 103 Trial and Criminal Cause of Sebastian Domingo, 22 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 399, exp. 2, fol. 313r. 101

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chapter six Judeoconversos, Portuguese and Other Rebellious Others

Recurring violations of the Inquisition jails’ secrecy terrified authorities in the context of Spanish worries regarding national security leading up to and following the Portuguese rebellion of 1640 against Castile, which generated a war lasting some 28 years. These worries frequently manifested a particular wariness of enemy alliances forming along ethnic and racial lines. On 10 March 1641, a royal decree to Mexico asks officials to keep a close eye on Portuguese residents but not to provoke them because of their “mixture” with “the natives of [the Indies] and Spaniards, slaves and persons who serve them.”104 King Felipe IV issued a royal decree concerning Portuguese foreigners in Mexico (10 February 1642), based, possibly, on information supplied by the Bishop of Puebla, Juan de Pálafox y Mendoza: “they are very intermingled with the Blacks, with whom they have a great union, and they [the Blacks] respect them.”105 Exaggerations of this kind built upon Spanish fears, but contained elements of truth. The accused judaizer Ysavel de Silva probably alludes to (and feeds) worries about the connections of judaizers with Africans when she testifies in the mid-1640s that there was no Portuguese Captain of blacks [. . .] who did not enter the houses of doña Ana Xuarez, Doña Micaela, Doña Rafaela and Doña Cathalina enriquez because they had tables for playing naypes. [. . .] And that of all the captains of blacks who have come to this city one could give a very large Relation [regarding] their being observers of the law of Moses or not.106

Another seventeenth-century communication fretted about the same combination of anti-Spanish hostilities: the Portuguese in the Indies “are more [numerous] than the castillians, and most are conversos, and people who by religion and origin have such hatred toward Castille, Sobre el levantamiento de los portugueses en Buenos Aires, December 1649, Cartas de la Audiencia, 18 May 1650, AGI Santo Domingo, 57, r. 2, n. 31, fol. 5v. My thanks to Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert for sharing this document with me. 105 AGN, Reales Cédulas Originales, vol. 1, núm. 288, f. 528; also in AGI Mex. 1067, lib. 12, fols. 35–137v; cited in Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 551. Such ethno-racial anxieties were nothing new. Already in the 1530s Spanish authorities worried that mestizos on Santo Domingo—who are said to be bellicose, mendacious and friends of every evil—would cause rebellion among Blacks and full-blooded natives and therefore should be removed from the island when still young (Schwartz, “Spaniards, Pardos, and the Missing Mestizos,” 10–1). 106 Testimony of 21 August 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fols. 123r.–v. 104

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and being full of the greatest number of slaves, the best that there are, [. . .] even without external aid they are so many that, helped by their slaves, they will be more powerful that the castillians.”107 Spanish fears marked more than mere paranoia and anti-Jewish sentiment: in the 1570s Sir Francis Drake had allied with some Black cimarrones to ambush several mule trains laden with silver and gold. The Spanish responded worriedly about “This league between the English and the Negroes,” because, “being so thoroughly acquainted with the region and so expert in the bush, the Negroes will show them methods and means to accomplish any evil design they may wish to carry out.”108 Due to similar worries, in the 1590s, Peruvian Viceroy Garcia de Mendoça prohibited Blacks from carrying arms.109 A 1615 report from Lima warns about the potential dangers of Perú’s various non-White groups, who evinced no great love for their overlords, “should they attempt a general insurrection, because their number greatly exceeds that of the Spaniards.”110 From the authorities’ vantage point, slave uprisings and resistance were all too well known in New Spain.111 The insurrectionary intent of Judeoconverso-Afroiberian relations may on some level have been real. It could well be that this is the

107 Álvarez Alonso, Inquisición en Cartagena, 117, citing a letter from AGI Con. 5171, without identifying the date or author. On the other hand, generalization based on nationality or ethnicity is always dangerous. It appears that two Portuguese slave traders in Mexico City who spoke Angolan revealed the plot of the planned 1612 slave uprising; see Luis Querol y Roso, “Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, historia de su alzamiento de 1612,” Anales de la Universidad de Valencia 12,90 (1935): 121–162. On the context of Spanish political-economic-theological anxieties, see Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies”; idem, “New Christians and New World Fears in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” Comparative studies in society and history; an international quarterly 42, no. 3 ( July, 2000), 545, n. 71.; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Panic in the Indies: The Portuguese Threat to the Spanish Empire, 1640–1650,” in Werner Thomas and Bart De Groof (eds.), Rebelión y resistencia en el mundo hispánico del siglo XVII: Actas del Coloquio Internacional Lovaina, 20–23 de Noviembre de 1991 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992), 205–26. 108 Cited in Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 140. 109 Medina, Inquisition in Lima, 1:203. 110 Relación del estado en que se hallaba el Reino del Perú, hecha por el Excmo. Señor Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Marqués de Montesclaros, al Excmo. Señor Principe de Esquilache, su sucesor, reprinted in Colección de las memorias o relaciones que escribieron los virreyes del Perú acerca del estado en que dejaban las cosas generales del reino, ed. Ricardo Beltrán Rózpide (Madrid, 1921), 1:169. 111 Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 119–44; David M. Davison, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650,” HAHR 46 (1966): 235–53. Spanish anxieties regarding internal tranquility in the colonies led to many attempts to segregate Afroiberian and Amerindian populations over the course of the sixteenth century.

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reason why the anonymous description of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru from around 1615, quite possibly written by a Portuguese Judeoconverso merchant named Pedro de León Portocarrero,112 elaborates on the physical and martial potential of the colony’s Blacks: They are always in fear that the blacks should not rise up; for this reason consent is not given to them to carry arms. Some blacks of officials [oidores] and captains and other ministers of justice are permitted to bear a sword and the blacks who go for firewood to the mountains and for herbs to the field and the mule drivers are allowed a knife.113

Still, the detailed accusations of treasonous relations between members of these minorities remain murky. The description of Peru’s policy regarding Blacks/slaves and weapons may simply have been a matter of curiosity for this text’s author, a worthy fact to be mentioned in a traveler’s description. We do not know whether some of the accused judaizers in Mexico indeed possessed, as the inquisitional authorities claimed in early 1643, “a list of the slaves which were and are on all the sugar plantations.”114 Similarly, no external evidence has been found to corroborate the allegation made in the late 1630s by the Lima tribunal that Manuel Bautista Peréz and others were “stockpiling gunpowder earmarked for a second Dutch invasion of Peru’s major port city, Callao.”115 The implication, coming as it did amid talk of the judaizers’ connections with still-subjugated but rebellious Portugal, needed little elaboration. In a letter that Maria Ventura thinks might come from 1641, just after the secession of Portugal, an official in Potosí wrote to the Spanish king, warning that Brazilian Portuguese were “entering [Spanish territory] every day to capture and take indians from among those recently converted to our holy catholic faith, burning churches and committing infinite sacrileges.” In this era of persistent contesta-

112 The author’s identification was made by Lohmann Villena, “Autor de la ‘Discriçion.’ ” The article, though evincing thorough archival research, drips with retrogressive anti-Jewish overtones, making suspect some of its sweeping assertions about persistent Jewish identity. 113 Descripcion del Peru, 40. According to Hanke, the Descripcion was submitted to the Dutch Estates General (“Portuguese in Spanish America,” 29). 114 AHN Inq., libro 1054, Cartas del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de México al Consejo, fol. 31; cited in Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 573. 115 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 271.

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tion over colonies and control of their trade, Spanish fears may have been well-grounded.116 Spanish concerns regarding ‘Portuguese’ connected directly not only to anxieties regarding their rebellious activities and intentions, but also to more diffuse perceived patterns of sedition, including their contraband trade, which was seen as undermining Spanish imperial designs. These anxieties to no small degree generated the New World autos de fé of the late 1630s and 1640s. It is no coincidence that many of the New Christians arrested by the tribunals in Lima and Cartagena were engaged in trade and particularly in the trade in slaves. When Spain swallowed Portugal in 1580, the extreme cruelty of the Portuguese Inquisition generated an exodus of New Christians back to Spain, irony of ironies. From this time on, Spanish officials harped on the treacherous potential of the “Portuguese” diaspora population. Often, this treachery entailed the commercial prominence of the New Christian community. Jonathan Israel reminds us that the Portuguese New Christian Duarte de Paz, living in Italy in the 1530s before emigrating to Istanbul in the early 1540s, whose history of loyalties reveals much ambivalence, wrote a letter to the Portuguese ambassador in Rome in 1545 detailing some of the European opinions regarding Portuguese New Christians. Paz gave an account of a dinner at which he had been present, attended by the French ambassador and other French notables in which the Emperor Charles V and Portuguese crown had been severely taken to task for driving the Portuguese New Christians to emigrate to Turkey. The reason given was the Turks had previously been thoroughly backward compared to the Europeans but now, thanks to the Portuguese Jews, were provided with all the industries, “officios mecanicos [mechanical profesions],” and up to date weapons they needed.117

116 Quoted by Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:19. According to Stanley Hordes, communiqués to New Spain related the slaughter of three thousand Spanish residents of Brazil. In November of 1641, Pálafox warned the viceroy of New Spain that the wealthy Portuguese merchants there planned to buy up “all the flints and arquebuses, thus secretly controlling all the arms [. . .] Veracruz is the principal key to these kingdoms and there are currently in that port more Portuguese than Spanish” (End of the Earth, 50–1). In 1642, the Mexican Inquisition tried the exiled Irishman and possibly an agent of the Count Duke of Olivares, Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán or William Lampart, who was accused of plotting insurrection, including the abolition of slavery and opening the holding of political offices by former slaves and mestizos (Schwartz, “Questioning Slavery and Accepting Africa”). 117 Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 54; he cites Lúcio de Azevedo, História dos cristãos novos, 446–47.

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Spanish doubts about this population’s threat no doubt increased with the significant entry of Portuguese New Christian bankers and merchants into the Spanish “system of royal asientos and contracts for tax farming, supplying stores and munitions to fleets and fortresses, and for the supply of slaves to Spanish America,” beginning in the reign of Felipe III (1598–1621).118 As early as 1606, Francisco Valverde Mercado, governor of Panama, reported to the Council of the Indies in Madrid that today the traders of the Indies are Portuguese because they have the asientos [monopoly contracts] for supplying slaves, and the dispatch of the fleets and flotillas with proper provision, on which all commerce depends, and of this nation there have been many Jews merchants around here who live according to their Law [of Moses] and they, upon becoming wealthy, go to other realms before they fall into the hands of the Inquisition.119

A 1615 Spanish treatise laid the blame for the country’s weakening economy directly on the “commerce of the ‘Portuguese,’ [who controlled the Spanish slaving asiento from 1580 to 1640,] and especially their shipping unregistered cloth and spices, along with slaves, via Angola and Guinea.”120 “From the most vile negro of Guinea to the most precious pearl,” all trade passes through the hands of the “Portuguese” merchants, reads an oft-quoted line from a 1636 letter that the inquisitors in Lima nervously wrote to Madrid.121 By 1641, in the wake of the Portuguese secession, the Spanish had banned the importation of all products by Portuguese or from Portuguese colonies.122 The fact that in the face of the dire financial crisis beginning to cripple the empire in the

118 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 101; James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1650 (New Brunswick, 1983). 119 Quoted in Eva A. Uchmany, “The Participation of New Christians and CryptoJews in the Conquest, Colonization and Trade of Spanish America, 1521–1660,” in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 197, 202. Despite fears of New Christian “judaizing,” neither Spain nor Portugal made any effort to control or curtail New Christian commercial activity, other than through the indirect, inefficient, ineffective and always reactive means of the Inquisition, a sure sign of the economic self-interest motivating state policy. 120 Alonso de Cianca, Discurso breve [. . .] en que se muestra y da a entender la causa que a enflaquecido el comercio de las flotas de Nueva España y Tierra Firme (N.p.: n.d. [c. 1615]), 1–6; quoted in Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 102; see also Israel’s essay in the same volume, “Buenos Aires, Tucumán and the River Plate Route: Portuguese Conversos and the ‘Commercial Subversion’ of the Spanish Indies (1580–1640),” 125–50. 121 Letter of 16 May 1636, printed in Medina, Historia del Tribunal de Lima, 2:46. 122 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 225, 272.

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1620s Spanish authorities became desperate to obtain the wealth and commercial power of Portuguese Judeoconversos, appointing some to significant positions within and around the goverment, failed to assuage the enmity against them. It likely exacerbated it. Furthermore, the Converso wealth that could not be securely assimilated for the empire by open invitation perhaps heightened the temptation to grab it through the arm of the Inquisition, the flip side of the pressures leading to the vast sweeps of the 1630s and 1640s. Political and economic anxieties bled easily into theocratic worries, and the other way around. In 1632, in Madrid, allegations erupted that a group of Portuguese Conversos were ritually flogging a figure of Christ. The resulting trials culminated in an auto de fe in which two of the accused were executed. Shortly thereafter, the even more tragic accusation arose (again) of the ritual murder of a Christ-like Catholic child. Purported Jewish deicide had resurfaced once more; these people simply could not be trusted. In his immense compilation of the laws of the Spanish Indies and meditation on the theological meaning of these territories, Política indiana, Juan de Solózano Pereira fretted over the possibility that the empire’s African and Amerindian New Christians—he calls them “Peru’s simple people”—would be led astray by the judaizing heresies of the Portuguese. Judeoconversos, he argues, actually sought to undermine the faith of these two populations of neophytes.123 In the 1590s, Portuguese merchants, many of them Judeoconversos, began flocking to the provinces of Chile and Peru, drawn by commercial opportunities and the fountain of silver pouring wealth out of Potosí. Some of these individuals may well have been fleeing intensifying religious persecution in Brazil, where the Inquisition sent several official investigators (visitadores) in 1591 and 1593. In late 1602, King Felipe III issued a decree warning against the infiltration into Chile and Peru of so many Portuguese New Christians (often by means of the slave ships and without permission), whose questionable religious orientation might infect the spiritual education of the Amerindians, and ordering their expulsion. Worries that these merchants engaged in contraband trade and neglected to pay the required royal fees likely constituted an equal motivation, as was true throughout this era.124 In and around Juan de Solózano Pereira, Política indiana (1647), in Biblioteca de autores españoles, vols. 252–56 (Madrid, 1972), bk. 1, vol. 2:262. 124 See, for example, a letter to this effect from the governor of Chile to the king (cited in Molina, “Primer banquero,” 61). 123

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Buenos Aires, a sweep and expulsion performed in 1603 needed to be carried out again in 1605. Lists of foreigners were compiled by Spanish colonial officials in Potosí in 1581 and again in 1610 and in Cartagena in 1630.125 In 1631, royal officials in Madrid ordered the audiencia of Charcas, responsible for the mining center of Potosí, to “move against the Portuguese who have entered the Indies through Buenos Aires, of whom many are to be found in Potosí.”126 In Lima, a census of the slave and free non-White population was conducted in 1636, possibly motivated by related security concerns.127 The sweep of alleged Marranos in Mexico City beginning in the late spring of 1642 followed royal decrees from January 1641 that ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese who sympathized with the secession organized by the Duke of Bragança and the confiscation of all their goods; the immigration of all Portuguese to New Spain was ordered terminated immediately.128 Robert Ferry calculates that of the 121 individuals arrested for suspicions of judaizing between 1642 and 1649, 48 were Portuguese, or nearly 40 percent of the total.129 The inquisitors’ anxieties produced enough convictions between these dates that no fewer than four autos de fe were held. On 10 February 1642 a royal decree (from which I cited another section above) had ordered further preemptive measures, warning of the many “landed and commercial class” Portuguese who resided in New Spain without license, perceived as brazen in their expressions of disloyalty and charged with having “a strong relationship with the blacks, as much for having many slaves as for having raised them and brought them from Angola

125 The last reprinted in Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 3:25–77. Medina prints a 1611 letter from the Lima tribunal urging quick and severe action against Portuguese of the Hebrew nation (Tribunal del Santo Oficio, 341–2). 126 Hanke, “Portuguese in Spanish America,” 22; his translation. 127 Bowser, African Slave in Peru, 341, offers a different explanation. 128 Hordes, End of the Earth, 51; Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 210–16. It should be recalled that the Spanish Crown was fighting other rebellions that burst out in 1640, when Catalonians rose up and allied themselves with France and various nobles attempted a secessionist plot in Andalucía. Furthermore, Portuguese had been very active in the major Mexico City uprising of 1624, in part out of frustration with the antagonistic stance of the viceroy Diego Carrillo Mendoza y Pimentel (Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 123, 135–60). 129 Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate.” Jonathan Israel provides similarly high percentages in his tally of those tried between 1620 and 1650, but suggests that 150 individuals were arrested between 1642 and 1646 on charges of judaizing (Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 125–6, 130).

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and [the blacks] see them as parents.”130 Again, fears of collaboration between the different aggrieved minorities not only agitate the Crown, but appear already materialized. Most fascinating is the language used in this royal document regarding relations between the slaves and those who transported them across the notoriously treacherous middle passage, which can be read as sexual/biological as well as emotional. From the perspective of the threatened Spanish monarch, the Portuguese slavers stand in the eyes of their African merchandise as caretakers, as parental figures—not the belligerent relationship ordinarily posited between slaves and their enslavers. Here, not only do the slaves not resent or hate their enslavers, but they look up to them, respect and admire them. Whether there is more to this intriguing ethnographic projection than situational anxiety is difficult to say. While inquisitors might claim that Judeoconversos maintained suspect closeness with African slaves, those working for the Inquisitions were not averse to maintaining their own beneficial relationships with Judeoconversos, even profiting from their slaving connections. In testimony given in Cartagena in 1649 regarding events of the previous decade, one witness recalls how the local tribunal’s notary and Inquisitor, Juan de Uriarte, was suspected of overly friendly connections with some of the prominent Portuguese New Christian merchants, in particular Luis Gomes Barreto, who were then arrested and tried by Uriarte’s tribunal. Slaves seemed to be one of the items of merchandise in which both these Judeoconverso slave traders and this inquisitor shared an interest and which seemed to pass between them in ownership and service. In addition, and troublingly, the witness, Juan Ramos Perez, nuncio of the local tribunal, “knows that it was much rumored that Juan de Uriarte was served by servants of the Prisoners and that papers of the faith [i.e., dealing with Inquisition matters] would be given to the cashier of Manuel de Fonseca Henriquez to copy, [he] being a servant of the Prisoner and dutch by nation.”131 The Inquisition, in Cartagena, for instance, periodically investigated incoming slave ships in a search for contraband. One such investigation, in 1635, brought forth a confession from one witness to a bribing scheme that allegedly went back

130 AGI Mex. 1067, lib. 12, fol. 135–137v., in my translation; cited in Hordes, End of the Earth, 51. Hence an Inquisition document of December 1643 tallies the number of slaves who had belonged to the arrested crypto-Jews, a total of 53 (AHN Inq. 1737, exp. 1, leg. 3, fols. 79r.–82v.; cited in Ferry, “Don’t Drink the Chocolate,” n. 11). 131 AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 72v.; Rotbaum, Documentos, 351.

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13 years, arranged supposedly by Blas de Paz Pinto and another New Christian slave trader, in which slaves were given to Spanish officials, including the Governor, Lieutenant-General, the factor in Cartagena and others, so that they would look the other way.132 What remains unclear is the feelings of the Africans and Afroiberians who aided Judeoconversos imprisoned by the Inquisition. Whether they empathized with the suffering of their mistresses and their peers, were merely carrying out the commands of their social superiors or simply sought to earn some much-needed cash—or some unquantifiable combination of all three motivations—cannot be said definitively. From the other direction, it seems impossible to disentangle the sentiments of the imprisoned members of the master class in their awkward dependence on the help and good wishes of their social inferiors from the micropolitics of property and race that structured their mutual relations in ordinary situations. Crisis breeds strange bedfellows, of course, and it may well be that the kind of variegated inter-group relations discussed in this and the previous chapters reiterate the degree to which little can be said to have been ordinary about the extended unfreedom that characterized life for so many Afroiberians and Judeoconversos in the colonial Iberian Atlantic world.

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Green, “Masters of Difference,” 231, n. 305.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ESPERANZA RODRIGUEZ: A MULATA MARRANA IN MEXICO CITY The mixing of Judeoconversos and Afroiberians was not just cultural. On a more embodied level, in the Inquisition trials, as well as in other sources, one sees various mentions of New Christian men having sex, relationships and children with Black, Mulato or Amerindian women. Leonor de Carvajal, sister of the well-known Mexican judaizer Luís de Carvajal, confessed that they had a mulata half-sister, Agustina de Quiñones.1 The Portuguese dealer in slaves Luis Franco Rodríguez, an alleged judaizer tried in Cartagena in 1624, had two daughters, Felipa and María, despite his never having been married. They were born of “a single mulata who is called Ysabel Górez who lives in the said city of Çaragoza.”2 Another Portuguese New Christian tried in the same year by the Cartagena tribunal, Manuel Antonio de Paz, had married a woman he characterized as a Mestiza Old Christian.3 Relationships

1 Seymour B. Liebman, The Enlightened: The Writings of Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, [1967]), 144; Liebman cites AGN, Inquisición, tomo 560 (1652), Expediente 21. 2 Cited in Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 151. 3 Tejado Fernandez, Vida social en Cartagena, 161. Other examples: Wiznitzer, “Crypto-Jews in Mexico during the Sixteenth Century”; the mulatos listed as Jews in the Portuguese communities of Joal and Ali, on the West African coast, toward the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth (Mark and Horta, “Two Early Seventeenth-Century Sephardic Communities” 252–4); Gonçalo Roiz Mendes and Pedro Heitor Cortes, of Angola and Bahia, bore children with Black lovers out of wedlock (Salvador, Cristãos-novos e o comércio, 317, n. 53); the voluntary confessant Francisco Lopes (Paraíba, 16th cen.), son of a New Christian father and a “black brazilian (i.e., Amerindian), gentile, pagan” mother, who was married to a mameluca (i.e., mestiza) (Mello, Confissões de Pernambuco, 137–8; Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, mentioned before, who was said to have had “a sexual relationship” with an Amerindian woman, according to Seymour Liebman one of only two such cases mentioned in the files of the Mexican Inquisition (Liebman, “Mestizo Jews of Mexico,” 155).; Miguel Nunes de Almeida (Bahia, 17th–18th cen.), who had two sons with one of his slave women, see Suzana Maria de Sousa Santos, “Uma família cristã-nova portuguesa na Bahia setecentista,” in Gorenstein and Carneiro, Ensaios sobre a intolerância, 154–5; one scholar identified 29 cases of illegitimate or bastard mulato children in eighteenthcentury Rio de Janeiro whose New Christian fathers acknowledged their paternity (Lina Gorenstein F. da Silva, Heréticos e impuros: A inquisição e os cristãos-novos no Rio de

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between Judeoconverso women and Black or Amerindian men have not left any documentary record, as far as I have found. Intriguingly, none of these children seem to have been crypto-Jews. This fact of course raises questions about proselytization of slaves; if Judeoconversos did not induct their own offspring into Marranism in these cases, it is doubtful that they would have sought out the participation of slaves. A few cases of marriages with non-Whites are known from Europe as well. In the family genealogy prepared by Isaac de Matatia Aboab (ca. 1676), with later notes and additions by his son, Matatia Aboab, we find that among the ancestors of the author’s wife, Sara Curiel (daughter of David Curiel/Lopo Ramirez), her paternal great-grandparents, Duarte Nunes and Gracia Nunes, bore ten children, among them Phelipa Duarte, who married Domingos Lopes. Their daughter Branca Duarte bore five children. The fifth was Duarte Ramirez de Leão, alias Binyamin Benveniste, “who married a bastard [black woman] named Beatris da Costa.”4 The woman’s race seems to have been added in by Matatia (?). Together this couple had ten children, all technically mulatos. None of this is surprising. Yet, as in many of the instances of comingling, the question of voluntary participation is critical, and messy. As Mary Louis Pratt warns, “It is easy to see transracial love plots as imaginings in which European supremacy is guaranteed by affective and social bonding; in which sex replaces slavery as the way others are seen to belong to the white man; in which romantic love rather than filial servitude or force guarantee the willful submission of the colonized. [. . . .] The allegory of romantic love mystifies exploitation out of the picture.”5 Still, the use made of these same avenues (relationships, marriages) by those ‘below’ should not go unappreciated. Under this sign they might romanticize or take advantage of trans-racial relationships as a means of escape upward, into Whiteness. Discussing later Sephardic concubinage on Curaçao, Eva Abraham-van der Mark notes how

Janeiro—Século XVIII [Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura/Departamento Geral de Documentação e Informação Cultural, 1995], 95). 4 I.S. Revah, “Pour l’Histoire des Nouveaux-Chretiens Portugais: La Relation Généalogique d’I. de M. Aboab,” Boletim Internacional de Bibliografia Luso-Brasileira 2,2 (April–June 1961): 299. 5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 97.

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For a black woman, having a relationship with a white man was one of the very few ways to acquire upward social mobility in Curaçao’s castelike society. But only a minority of those who had such a relationship ever reached the status of kerida [“beloved,” that is, a concubine installed in her own house] and for most of these life was not easy. Nevertheless, they were envied by their sisters because of their light-colored children. The fact that these sometimes were given a better education and achieved higher positions in society must have been their reward.6

Suzana Maria de Sousa Santos argues that the willingness of the Bahian New Christian Miguel Nunes de Almeida to acknowledge paternity of the children born to his slave woman, and guarantee their status as his heirs, went against the norm of the surrounding slavocratic society.7 Not all trans-racial relationships united a ‘master’ and ‘slave’; statuses and motivations were messier than a constant diadic schema imagines. In any event, the offspring of these unions embody the creolization so famously assigned to Latin America, though the same crossing of borders occurred in Europe and the Mediterranean as well. Afroiberian Judaizers? Other ties of pragmatism or affection came to bind non-Whites to Judaism or the Marrano Law of Moses, particularly when they were in the employ of judaizing Conversos. As mentioned before, documents speak of several Mulatos who affiliated in one way or another with the small Sephardic communities along the West African coast, while evidence regarding Mulatos and Blacks who were born or (were) converted into Sephardic communities in Amsterdam or Suriname has long been known.8 While it might be more surprising that Afroiberians would open themselves to the dangers of judaizing in Spanish or Portuguese territories, some few indeed did so. Thus Beatriz Enriquez tells her inquisitors that a Mulata slave of Maria de Campos, named Catalina, “also was found guilty of Judaism,” like her mistress.9 The means by which Afroiberians came to know of crypto-Judaism varied, as did their motivations, which on the whole paralleled those of interested 6 Abraham-van der Mark, “Marriage and Concubinage among the Sephardic Merchant Elite of Curaçao,” 43. 7 Santos, “Uma família cristã-nova,” 155. 8 See Schorsch, Jews and Blacks. 9 Testimony of 9 August 1646; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fols. 289r.–v.

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Afroiberians in non-Catholic territories. As always, each case needs to be investigated thoroughly, to attempt a determination of whether such affiliation was real, substantive, deep or not. After a brief review of several such instances, I devote the remainder of the chapter to an indepth analysis of the case of Esperanza Rodrigues of Mexico City. In the Sevillan auto de fe of 28 February 1623, a Berber Mulato named Domingo Vicente appeared among the penitents. Condemned for professing the law of Moses, he received 200 lashes on the afternoon of 1 March.10 Yet two years later the same Mulato involved himself in a public act of defiance. On 27 November 1625, a poster appeared on the door of the parochial church of San Isidoro, which read: “Long live Moses and his Law, for all the rest are madness.” The following night, some local residents watched from a window opposite the church and saw a man arrive at the postered door. Rushing out, they caught him in the act of pasting up another similar proclamation. Taken by them to the Inquisition, the perpetrator turned out to be the previouslycastigated Mulato Domingo Vicente. His punishment this time consisted of a public humiliation: led on a donkey to the scene of the crime, he was propped up with his right arm shackled aloft against the wall, remaining thus for an hour, after which he served four years in the galleys and then faced life imprisonment.11 If the account of his crimes is accurate, Vicente must have either believed fervently in Judaism or possessed an enormous and careless rebellious streak. Left unclear is the origin of his Jewishness or affinity for Judaism and its extent (and content). At the time of his exploits he was not a slave, though he might have been in the past. Perhaps he had been born of a black mistress of a Jewish New Christian. Perhaps he was a North African Jew dark

10 José María Montero de Espinosa, Relación histórica de la judería de Sevilla, establecimiento de la inquisición en ella, su estinción, y colección de los autos que llamaban de fé celebrados desde su erección (Sevilla: D. Juan J. Franco, 1849), 71. Montero de Espinosa does not identify his sources, but it would appear that he quotes from the published and unpublished Relaciones concerning the various autos de fe held in Seville. 11 Montero de Espinosa, Relación histórica de la judería de Sevilla, 91–2. This is probably the same unnamed Berber Mulato cited by Manuel Barrios, El tribunal de la inquisición en Andalucía: Selección de textos y documentos (Sevilla: Editorial Castillejo, 1991), 79, from the unidentified La Inquisición en memorias de cosas sucedidas en Sevilla. Notice about Domingo Vicente is surprisingly absent from Antonio Domínguez Ortiz’s supposedly thorough account of the Sevillan Inquisition’s autos of the seventeenth century (Autos de la inquisición de Sevilla [Siglo XVII] [Seville: Servicio de Publicaciones del Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1981]), despite the fact that he admits relying for certain points on Montero de Espinosa, whom he nonetheless criticizes for being disorderly and unscientific (14).

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enough to earn the racial category of Mulato. Perhaps he had been the servant of secret Jews whose religious passion he adopted. Once again, answers do not present themselves from the documentation I was able to check. Luis de Páez, a Black, was denounced in 1651 by a priest who claimed that while living on the island of Santo Domingo Páez observed the Law of Moses, did not confess with regularity and, when he did confess, related false information. It is not clear when he arrived in Cartagena nor when he was arrested by the Cartagena tribunal. In 1654 the inquisitors ordered him inspected to see if he were circumcised. The two doctors and surgeon who carried out the examination could not determine whether the condition of Páez’s penis derived from a natural condition or an intentional operation. He died before his trial concluded, hospitalized for deteriorating health.12 In 1655, the case was suspended by the Cartagena Tribunal.13 In 1572, five New Christians and a Mulato priest said to be “part New Christian,” all from the town of Beja, Portugal, were arrested by the Évora tribunal. They were accused of organizing denunciations of 26 Beja Old Christians for judaizing. The imprisoned Old Christians, in turn, denounced many others, both Old and New Christians, leading to numerous executions, deportations and other punishments. According to a manuscript description of this so-called “Conspiracy of Beja” that circulated among New Christians, the Old Christian confessions of judaizing demonstrated the essential unfairness of inquisitorial procedure.14 Here it can be seen that not all Judeoconversos were necessarily White. If there is truth to the events as narrated, this partly-New

12 “Copia de la relación de causas del año de 1654 desde 27 de Abril, que fue con los galeones del cargo del Marqués de Monte Alegre, hasta Junio de 1655,” AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 404r.–405r.; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:405–6. Splendiani calls this “the first case of a black accused of judaizing” by the tribunal. I was not able to determine if any records from Páez’s trial remain extant. 13 Medina, Inquisición de Cartagena, 292. 14 Saraiva, Marrano Factory, 76–7; Salomon, Portrait of a New Christian, 24–5; Azevedo, Cristãos-novos, 137. Various versions of the episode were published. I am following the reconstruction by Saraiva and Salomon. Saraiva describes other cases of “perjurers” who denounced Old Christians, seemingly with the intention of undermining Inquisition “justice,” but at the least in order to wreak vengeance on members of the class persecuting New Christians. Irene Silverblatt discusses a similar episode from 1630s Lima, supposedly orchestrated by a New Christian named Antonio de Acuna, who allegedly advised others to give false testimony against Old Christians in order to show that the inquisitors operated according to ethnic stereotypes rather than real evidence (Modern Inquisitions, 42–3).

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Christian Mulato may have been part of an attempt to undermine and act against the Inquisition. In some of the cases in which Afroiberians found themselves tried by the Inquisitions as judaizers enough documentation exists to enable a fuller elaboration of the extent and nature of the attachment to Judaism or Judaic practices, in some instances even the motivations. Social and/ or commercial contacts with judaizing New Christians may have been a motivation in some cases. In others, projected visions of the benefits of this subaltern religion/culture may have played a role. Joanna Barreta, one-quarter New Christian, Mulata (parda), found herself imprisoned in 1713 by the Inquisition in Brazil, after having been denounced by many people for living under the law of Moses, “with the intention of being saved in it and for observance [. . .] of the fast of the great day (the day of expiation [i.e., Yom Kippur]), praying the oration of the Our Father without saying Jesus at the end, keeping the Sabbaths as holy days and not eating the meat of pig, rabbit or fish with skin [i.e., without scales].”15 In short, the behaviors alleged in her case were no different than those of many crypto-Jews of non-Black background, a sign of her ‘real’ Jewish belief and practices? Only in 1718, after five years of imprisonment, did she confess to maintaining the practices for which she had been denounced. Condemned to abjuring her heresies at the Lisbon auto da fé of 26 June 1720, to imprisonment and the wearing of the penitential habit, she was granted license to return to Rio de Janeiro that September. Manoel Rodrigues Monsancto of Pernambuco and his wife, as well as his woman slave Beatriz, an African, her Mulata daughter Rachel and her other daughter, married to a Mulato, the son of a Judeoconverso named Solis, were all denounced to the Inquisition in Lisbon in 1646 by the Catholic priest, Manoel de Moraes, himself suspected of being a Calvinist.16 According to the arrested priest, Manoel Rodrigues, “on arriving in Amsterdam, was circumcized and declared that he

15 Quoted in Egon and Frieda Wolff, Judeus, judaizantes e seus escravos (Rio de Janeiro: Egon and Frieda Wolff, 1987), 36. 16 Wiznitzer, who cites this material, has in one place “a mulatto Jew, the son of Salim” ( Jews in Colonial Brazil, 60) and in another “son of the Jew Solis” (ibid., 150). Only the latter accords with the transcribed trial record (“Processo de Manoel de Moraes, sacerdote e theologo, natural da villa de S. Paulo, estado do Brazil, residente que foi nas partes do norte, preso nos carceres da inquisição de Lisbôa [1647],” in Revista do Instituto Historico e Geographico Brazileiro [Rio de Janeiro], 70,1 [1908]:25).

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had always been a Jew in Brazil, he and his entire house.”17 Another case: Among the 78 victims of the auto-da-fé of July 9, 1713, there were 37 men and 41 women. One of the women was the freed Negro slave Marianna, forty years of age, a native of Angola and a resident of Rio de Janeiro; there was also the mulatto Marianna de Andrade, daughter of Catherina, a native and resident of Rio de Janeiro. Both were accused of Judaizing activities and sentenced to carcere e habito perpetuo, perpetual imprisonment and wearing of the penitencial habit. The younger woman was probably the daughter of a Marrano and his Negro slave, who had been converted to Judaism.18

Other cases show that charges of judaizing could work even against Afroiberians. Manuel Gonçalves Doria, a Mulato who was awarded knighthood in the Portuguese Order of Santiago around 1627, had his appointment delayed because of accusations that his maternal grandmother, Isabel Fernandes, had either been sentenced as a judaizer herself or descended from New Christians. It turned out from a second investigation into his genealogy, however, that the charge had derived from an enemy of his who seems to have arranged the choice of witnesses in the first investigation. Nonetheless, the pertinent advisory body, as well as the king, denied Doria authorization for the awarding of his honor.19 Solange Alberro adduces many cases which, she argues, prove that “the Jewish-Christians,” i.e., Judeoconversos, came “to constitute the valued and admired reference” for “these pariahs who are the slaves and the free men of African origin,” linked by them “to the Portuguese rebels [against Spain], victims of oppression like the blacks and mulatos, but who participate without room for doubts in the splendor which confers prestige and social power.”20 These cases hint at the range of possible attributes Judaism might have held for these exiled, destitute Africans: wealth, power, the capacity of defiance. A few months after a wave of autos de fe in 1651 Mexico City, one slave, Diego de la Cruz denounced himself to the Holy Office, declaring “that he had desired to adopt the Old Law in order to be rich since ‘this “Processo de Manoel de Moraes,” 25. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil, 150. 19 Dutra, “Manuel Gonçalves Doria,” 98, 105–6. Doria was being rewarded with knighthood for his exploits in helping fight off the Dutch attacks on Bahia in 1624–5. 20 Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 144. 17 18

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was the cause by which the Portuguese [i.e., Jews or judaizers] had so much money.’”21 Such views of material reward had many adherents among non-Blacks as well, of course, and constituted a popular vestige of ancient anti-Jewish rhetoric among non-Jews and of a redemptive logic of resentiment among Jews.22 Such class consciousness among Judeoconversos themselves arises occasionally in Inquisition sources. Testifying against the Mexican Conversa Rafaela Enriquez, an unnamed witness relates the following conversation: Rafaela was chatting at her house with a female friend one day. In walked another acquaintance, someone who “had not wanted to help [fund] by means of a charitable donation the wedding of someone very close to the woman who spoke” with Rafaela. So Rafaela’s friend commented pointedly “that God did not have to give goods to the Portuguese because they did not know how to act well toward” one another. The newcomer responded, in resoundingly theological language, that “he did not want to give his hazienda and remain poor, for no one poor is able to be saved.”23 On the other hand, another Mexico City New Christian, Maria de Rivera, supposedly taught another alleged judaizer a prayer that included the following lines: Give me honesty Against the dishonesties of this world Don’t give me riches That I should grow haughty [me ensoberbesca] Nor poverty that brings me down Only an alm with which to serve you [God].24

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Pedro de Villanueva of Quintanar, Castile, denied to the inquisitors that his grandfather, Fernán Sánchez de Villanueva, who had converted to Catholicism, had said that “like a good Jew his only wealth was the Law of Moses.”25 Cited in Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 144. See, for some examples from sixteenth-century Aragón, Encarnación Marín Padilla, Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: La ley (Madrid: n.p., 1986), 15; from Spain, Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 311; from sixteenth-century Portugal, Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 267. 23 Early 1640s; AGN Mexico, Inq. 403, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 364r. Indeed, the scribe or one of the inquisitors underlined the last statement as if to call attention to its heretical character. 24 Charges against Maria de Rivera, 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 403, exp. 3, fol. 379r. 25 Salomon, “Spanish Marranism Re-examined,” Sefarad 67,1 ( Jan.–June 2007): 117. 21 22

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As Alberro suggests, wealth was not the only attraction the Law of the Jews held for downtrodden Afroiberians. The hopes of poor slaves for material ease need no explanation, but the rhetorical use of ‘Judaism’ by slaves operated on more ideational levels as well. In the 1650s, another slave in Mexico, the Mulato slave Sebastián de los Reyes, wielded the already martyred judaizer Thomas Treviño de Sobremonte as an exemplar.26 Sobremonte, a wealthy merchant, had become reknown for his defiance and even mockery of the Inquisition, up to and including his dramatic public execution. When drunk, the Mulato slave Sebastián would rave: “I’m not a Christian, I am Treviño.”27 Even years later, another slave in Mexico, a Black woman named Maria de la Cruz or Maria de Armijo, spat out, among other statements deemed to be heretical blasphemies, “that if she had not confessed her crime, it would have been worse than [it was with] Tremiño.” The legend of Treviño’s life (and/or death) obviously made quite an impression. Maria was said to be over twenty five years old, and might actually have seen Treviño’s martyrdom first hand.28 Such sympathetic glances at the fate of crypto-Jews came from non-Afroiberians as well. The Carmelite Ana de Guillamas, tried in Mexico in 1598 as a “false” visionary (an alumbrada), stated that while she prayed one time “the devil had spoken to her [. . .] and said, ‘Poor Carvajal who was killed without guilt.’ ”29 Guillamas was probably referring to Luis de Carvajal, executed the year before, and it is not surprising that she dissociates herself from having originated this thought. New Christians, obviously, were those who most fervently upheld the notion that the victims of the Inquisitions were martyrs. Some Afroiberians, like others, could not help but be influenced by the riveting fates of Judeoconversos: insiders often persecuted as outsiders, insiders who yet might challenge and even defy the powers-that-be. Hence the disgust with which one mid-seventeenth-century inquisitor described one such scene of cultural contamination:

26 Beatriz Enriquez related that Margarita de Rivera told her that Sobremonte “knew many prayers of the Law of Moses and that hearing, she was left with her mouth open, because he was very learned in the matters of the Law” (testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 7 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 270v.). 27 Cited in Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 146. 28 See Auto General de la Fee [. . .] Celebrado En la Plaça mayor de la muy noble, y muy leal ciudad de Mexico, à los 19. de Noviembre de 1659. años (Mexico: La Imprenta del Secreto del Santo Officio, n.d.), s.v. Maria de la Cruz. 29 Cited in Jaffary, False Mystics, 33.

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chapter seven Certain Portuguese judaizers presented a Comedy in this city [Mexico City], the author of which was this evil man [a “great Jew,” praised by Blanca Enriquez], and he gave the foremost seats to two jews who had been reconciled by this H[oly] Office, standing were many other Catholics, and honored, having waited for those two reconciled to begin the Comedy. After it finished he took them to his house and entertained them, an action so evil that it caused admiration in one Black boçal, slave of one of the Presenters [Actors?], who said (though a barbarian) that they had been at the Comedy in such beautiful seats, just as those seated men had been taken out [as penitents in the auto de fé] in S. Domingo [cathedral] with green candles and yellow caps [capisayos]. Such is the rupture [rotura] and shamelessness with which this infamous jewish people proceeds.30

Jews or Judaism, then, sometimes appeared “good for thinking with” (Lévi-Strauss) for Afroiberians as a means of needling their Christian overlords.31 One wonders, for instance, exactly what was meant by the Mulata servant of a New Christian in Pernambuco, who in 1599 “extolled the New Christians.”32 A similar motivation pushed nonAmerindian magical practitioners in Peru to invoke in their prayers or incantations “the Inca [emperor], and sometimes the Coya or Inca queen,” pagan royalty who reigned before the coming of the Spanish or Christianity, and who had never been baptized.33 A startlingly explicit formulation of the logic at work here can be found in the twentiethcentury family memoirs of an Afroamerican woman from Philadelphia. Her mother, she writes, would fight prejudice by claiming to belong to whatever group was being denigrated. [H]er strategy is usually confined to strangers or people who do not know her very well. Her strategy is to counteract prejudice against any group by immediately informing the speaker that she is a part of whatever group is under attack. If it is the Jews, she is a Jew; if it is the Italians, she is an Italian; if it is the Catholics, she is a Catholic. And there are 30 From the summary regarding Pedro de Mercado, in Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee celebrada, unpag. 31 Basing himself largely on Alberro, José Piedra has likewise found that most of “the self-accusations [of prominent black citizens of New Spain] are of being Jewish, and it remains difficult to separate fact from fiction, particularly because many blacks enjoyed a symbiotic cultural relationship with Jews” ( José Piedra, “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference,” in Dominick LaCapra [ed.], The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance [ Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1991], 286, n. 14). Ironically, Piedra erases the negative side of this “symbiosis,” ignoring the cases Alberro brings which show Afroiberians adopting the anti-Jewish prejudices of their new religion and society (a few cited in previous chapters). 32 Mello, Gente da nação, 25. 33 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 265–6.

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no exceptions. One day I asked her about Native Americans, and she said, “Well, I just say that my grandfather was one, or my daughter is married to one, or something like that.”34

A similar tendency manifested itself among Moriscos, Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity during and after the Spanish Reconquista, such as the slaves Brianda and Andrés Cano, both punished by the tribunal of Córdoba, Andalucía, between 1575 and 1576 for performing Muslim ceremonies, both of whom proffered the transparent provocation “that the Christians are Jews/que los cristianos son judíos.”35 Blanca Becerra, “black in color,” slave of Jorge Becerro from Ubeda near Córdoba, probably had something similar in mind when she repeated even after being castigated that “the better law was that of the Jews and not that of the Christians.” Being a minor helped this slave escape with no penalty other than a light abjuration of her delinquencies sometime between 1571 and 1572. In addition, variance between the testimony of the witnesses injured the prosecution’s case, with “most of them saying that she said that the Jews were better people and more charitable than the Christians,” a far more pointed statement indeed, whether she believed it or not.36 Utterances like these must be seen in a comparative light. Insulting the dominant religion entailed a tack taken by a variety of individuals. In the mid-sixteenth century at least eight Muslim Africans who had been imported to Lisbon found themselves arrested and tried by the Inquisition. Most had asserted “the superiority of Islam over the religion of their Catholic masters, pointing out, among other things, that Christians did not bathe before prayers. Several others expressed the belief that God had no son and that Jesus was the servant of Mohammed.”37 Though here the religion wielded rhetorically was their own, mistreated slaves often put comparative polemics to good use in self defense. In 1661, one Black slave in Mexico, Nicolás Bazán, begged the inquisitor to ignore the blasphemy he had uttered while enduring a horrific, if altogether common torture administered by his master, assuring him that his suffering as a Christian “ ‘redeemed by Christ’s

34 Kathryn L. Morgan, Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 102–103. 35 Cited in Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la inquisición de Córdoba (Córdoba: Publicaciones de la Excma Disputación Provincial, 1983), 160. 36 Quoted in Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la inquisición de Córdoba, 83. 37 Sweet, Recreating Africa, 89.

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blood at the hands of fellow Christians’ was so painful that ‘not even among Turks and Moors was a comparable martyrdom endured.’ ”38 This appeal was meant to include the slave within the Catholic body politic, as he should have been according to theology, and to remind the inquisitor that Christians were supposed to behave better than ‘barbarian’ non-believers. White Christians also wielded such polemics when critiquing what they saw as problems within the Christian body politic. A Mexican alumbrado of the sixteenth century, Juan Núñez de León, was accused of having publicly announced that “the Jews kept their God better than the Christians.”39 Certain cases show how the various facts or fantasies about ‘Judaism’ were picked up from the environment and came to be put to use. The fifty-year-old Francisca de Carvajal, slave of doña María de Carvajal, “dark black,” was apprehended by the Inquisition of Córdoba, Andalucía, sometime in 1598 or 1599 for blasphemy.40 Because of variations in her testimony, the inquisitors held several audiences with her. In the third one she confessed that on an occasion other than the one pertaining to her crime, when quarreling with some women, they asked her why she did not attend mass, to which she replied “that she did not want to go, that the law of Moses was better than that of God, which she said with the rage that she had because she had heard the law of Moses named in the autos without knowing what it was and without having the intention of following it.”41 Her reference indicated the recent autos de fe in Córdoba aimed at extirpating the alleged conspiracy of judaizing in the area, in which numerous “judaizers,” real or otherwise, had appeared (25 March 1597: 71 ‘judaizers’ reconciled, 1 burned at the stake; 8 March 1598: 32 ‘judaizers’ reconciled, 1 burned in absentia). Such a confession notwithstanding, in the heat of an argument the law of Moses served this slave well and spontaneously as a tool with which to belittle the Christianity that, for whatever reasons, so frustrated her. Regarding Francisca de Carvajal, as with many of the Afroiberians mentioned above, there is no question of knowledge of Judaism; it simply stands for the anti-norm, which the powerless wield against the norm disempowering them.

Quoted in Villa-Flores, “Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain,” 436. Quoted in Jaffary, False Mystics, 33. Needless to say, the inquisitors suspected Núñez of crypto-Judaism. 40 She is called atesada, meaning “double black” or “jet black.” 41 Quoted in Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisición de Córdoba, 359. 38

39

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Sincere non-White judaizers must have perplexed and enraged Christian ecclestiastical authorities. Such a reaction erupted in 1579, when a Spaniard from Córdoba visiting in Venice sighted in the Ghetto a young Black boy wearing the yellow Jew’s cap. Rebuking him, the good Christian visitor, Don Ferdinando de las Infantes, became further exercised on hearing from a local Jew how slaves bought in Constantinople were circumcised, “made of their own law,” and brought West (the quote and paragraph are brought in the previous chapter). Don Fernando informed the local Inquisition, which arrested several people, though they could not find the Black youth in question. One of those whom they did interrogate was the dark-skinned Samuel Maestro, [who] appeared to be the child of a well-to-do Jew by a middle-aged servant of Ferrara who was “neither white nor black”, and was said to be Jewish herself. [. . . .] “Are you not ashamed,” the pious Spaniard remonstrated, “you were born black, you have this grace given you by God to be able to turn Christian, and you have become a Jew?”42

Christianity, seen as a remedy for Blackness, became conveniently confused with Whiteness. Not surprisingly, such a confusion proliferated in this era. The Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, in his 1627 tract on Africans and Christianity, argues that given their treatment at the hands of Europeans, most Africans would never voluntarily consent “to receive that water [of baptism] and be like whites.”43 An incident from early New France, i.e., Canada, then very much Jesuit territory, reflects similar notions. One minister to the natives, Father LeJeune, wrote the following back home in 1632: 42 Cited in Pullan, Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 74–75, from Archivio di Stato, Venice, Santo Uffizio, b. 44, proc. Samuel Maestro, 30 April to 6 Aug. 1579. Testimony given to the Lisbon Inquisition by a visitor to Amsterdam records a 1611 encounter with Diogo Dias Querido, a prominent trader whose career had moved between Brazil, Amsterdam and the West African coast. The visitor met Querido at the synagogue: “there were three blacks at the door of the synagogue, making a great fuss because the Jews had perverted (sic) one of their black friends and turned him into a Jew” (Green, “Masters of Difference,” 190). On Querido, see Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, 93; Green, “Masters of Difference,” 189–91). What remains unclear from this testimony is whether the fuss is positive or negative, though it is probable that the understanding that the Black’s conversion was a perversion belonged to the denouncer. 43 Sandoval, Tratado sobre esclavitud, 397; cited in Olsen, Slavery and Salvation, 111. See also Olsen’s sensitive parsing of a passage in Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum, in which an African priest who converted to Christianity explains to a Muslim that Whites are free and Blacks enslaved because God created Whites first and sent those created last to serve their elders/betters (Olsen, Slavery and Salvation, 129–30).

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chapter seven I have become a teacher in Canada: the other day I had a little Savage on one side of me, and a little Negro or Moor on the other, to whom I taught their letters . . . The little Negro was left by the English with this French family which is here. We have taken him to teach and baptise, but he does not yet understand the language well; therefore we shall wait some time yet . . . His mistress asking him if he wanted to be a Christian, if he wanted to be baptized and be like us, he said “yes,” but he asked if he would not be skinned in being baptized. I think he was very much frightened, for he had seen these poor Savages skinned. As he saw that they laughed at his questions, he replied in his patois, as best he could: “you say that by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin taken off then in order to be like you” (this comment followed by general laughter).44

The boy’s imputation that the priests encouraged the belief in the whitening power of baptism was not false. The famous António Vieira stated in his Epiphany Sermon of 1662: “An Ethiope if he be cleansed in the waters of the Zaire is clean, but he is not white; but if in the water of baptism he is both.”45 From the Catholic perspective, Judaism, a deviation from Christianity, turned logically into a deviation from Whiteness. The ostensibly separate discourses of ‘religion,’ ‘race’ and ‘politics’ become entangled, revealed in their entanglement. Conversion ‘upward’ meant, entailed entrance into the circle of those ‘chosen’ for acceptance, recognition and citizenship, or so went the rhetoric.46 In both senses, from the Christian point of view, not only did Judaism not offer non-Whites salvation—terrestrial or celestial—but it stood as a diversion, distraction and mirage for them on their path to the Christian city of heaven.

44 Masarah van Eyck kindly informed me of this quotation; The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, the original French, Latin, and Italian texts, with English translations and notes, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 73 vols. in 36 (New York: Pageant Book Co., 1959), 5:63. 45 Cited in Boxer, The Church Militant, 36. These sentiments were not limited to the Iberian Catholic sphere. Perhaps the best indication that the valences involved in such distinctions contained metaphysical import is the revealing title of a mid-seventeenthcentury English translation of a conversionary tract aimed at Jews by the formerly Jewish “Samuel of Morocco”: Thomas Calvert, The Blessed Jew of Marocco: or, A Blackmoor Made White Being a Demonstration of the True Messias out of the Law and Prophets by Rabbi Samuel (York: Thomas Broad, 1649). In this case, Jews are themselves seen as non-White; see Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, chs. 7 and 8. 46 For a view from other places and era, see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities.

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Esperanza Rodriguez I turn now to the case of Esperanza Rodriguez, “a mulata, dark, born in the city of Puebla and resident of Mexico City, widow of Juan del Bosque, of the German nation, deceased, is 50 years old, more or less, tall, aged, greying,” who was tried as a judaizer by the Mexican Inquisition in the mid-1640s.47 Also accused were her mulata daughters, María Rodríguez del Bosque, age 20, Isabel Rodríguez del Bosque, age 25, and Juana Rodríguez del Bosque, age 29.48 All were arrested in the summer of 1642, along with numerous other alleged Marranos, many of whom knew and associated with one another. Esperanza also had two sons, Juan and Diego (a carpenter). The denouncers of the Rodriguez/Del Bosques include many of the extended circle of judaizers, real or alleged, around the Enriquez clan of Mexico City, many of whom had been born in Seville, as had Esperanza Rodriguez. Solange Alberro writes that Rodríguez’s case reflects “a direct participation in Judaism,” unlike some of the cases where Judaism was feigned for various reasons, as I have tried to show in previous chapters.49 Esperanza Rodriguez had been a slave of Doña Catalina Enriquez, who had emigrated from Seville to Veracruz, widow of Pedro Arias Maldonado. Having won her freedom, Esperanza worked as a dressmaker,

47 The accused and members of her family appear under the year 1647 in the Relación de los Reos que este Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Iquisición de México ha Penitenciado y castigado, con otros, por la observancia de la ley de Moisén, en dos autos de fe que han celebrado; y bien desterrados perpetuamente de estos reinos y provincias [. . .] con testimonio de sus sentencias, edades y señas exteriores para presentarse con dichos testimonios en el Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la dicha ciudad de Sevilla [. . .], (1647; reproduced in García, Documentos, 70–74), as well as in the Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, que el trbunal del santo officio de la Inquisicion de los Reyes, y Provincias de la Nueva España, celebro en la muy noble, y muy leal Ciudad de Mexico a los diez y seis dias del mes de Abril, del año de mil y seiscientos y quarenta y seis (1646; García, Documentos, 137–177). In the latter, we are informed that Juan Bautista had been a sculptor and assembly worker (escultor y ensamblador; García, Documentos, 155). Esperanza’s age is given there as seventy four. 48 García, Documentos, 70–74. The youngest daughter’s description: “María Rodríguez del Bosque, mulata, white, single, [. . .] born in Guadalajara [. . .] age 20, tall, fat, black eyes, of good appearance.” Isabel: “mulata, white, single, born and resident in Mexico City, [. . .] age 25, thin, good body, and black eyes.” Juana: “mulata, white, married to Blas López, Portuguese, observer of the law of Moses, fugitive many years, born in the city of Cartagena of the Indies, and resident of Mexico City, [. . .] age 29, of good body and appearance, round-faced, somewhat fat.” Blas López is listed as a tailor and assembly worker (ibid., 160). 49 Alberro, “Negros y mulatos en los documentos inquisitoriales,” 156.

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as did all her daughters.50 Beatriz Enriquez says in her testimony that Catalina arrived years earlier in Mexico City but returned thereafter to Veracruz. Blanca Enriquez told Beatriz, her daughter, that this other Catalina—one of Beatriz’s sisters also was named Catalina Enriquez—observed the law of Moses.51 Rodriguez’s mother, Isabel, a Black/negra from the West African region called by the Spanish Guinea, had died in Seville when Esperanza had been six or seven. Rodriguez asserts that her mother died a free woman.52 Though Rodriguez at first tells the inquisitors that she does not know anything about her father, she eventually reveals that he had been Francisco Rodríguez, a New Christian of Seville, accused of judaizing.53 At one point, Esperanza tells the inquisitors that her mother had been the slave of this Francisco Rodrigues.54 According to the son-in-law of Blanca Enriquez, Thomas Nuñez de Peralta (married to her daughter Beatriz), Esperanza “was brought up with” Blanca, who, besides being the matriarch of the extended Enriquez clan, appears to have been the de facto spiritual leader or one of the leaders of a large circle of Marranos.55 A close family friend of Blanca Enriquez, Blanca Mendez de Rivera, from the same generation as Esperanza Rodriguez and Blanca Enriquez, says that she “knew [Esperanza] from the city of Seville” and that Esperanza had been the daughter of a female slave (Isabel) belonging to a Portuguese widow named Ynes Lopez.56 Ynes Lopez had been married to 50 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458r. 51 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, a cousin of the Catalina Enriquez who was Rodriguez’s mistress, 19 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 222v. A crossed-out list of people against whom Esperanza deposed lists as different people Catalina Enriquez o Tinoco (daughter of Blanca Enriquez), Catalina Enriquez (with Veracruz noted in the margin) and Catalina Enriquez deceased—Seville (AGN Mexico, Inq. 408. exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 457r.). Below I refer to the fact that Esperanza’s former mistress was imprisoned under suspicion of judaizing. 52 Testimony of 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458r. 53 Testimony of 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 458r., 469r. and elsewhere. “[L]ibre y antes esclava de doña catalina Enríquez, reclusa en este Santo Oficio por judaizante; e hija de Isabel, negra de Guinea, que murió en Sevilla, y de Francisco Rodríguez, hebreo, cristiano nuevo; de oficio y ocupación costurera” (García, Documentos, 155). 54 Response to the charges against her, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 107v. 55 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 68r. 56 Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410r.; testimony of 18 November 1642; ibid., fol. 411r.–v. Ysavel de Silva also deposes that Rodriguez had grown up with Blanca Enriquez (testimony of 25 June 1643, ibid., 415, exp. 6, fol. 519r). In a depositions of her own, Rodriguez confirms having grown up in Seville with both Blanca de Rivera and Blanca Enriquez (testimony of 21 April 1643;

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a Portuguese merchant of Seville named Rodrigo Fernandez Salçedas and had immigrated to Vera Cruz, where she passed away. Catalina Enriquez was one of their daughters.57 Lopez had given the young Esperanza to her daughter Catalina as part of the latter’s dowry.58 Though the full genealogy remains unclear, Ynes Lopez and the Mexico City Enriquez clan were related to one another, while Esperanza Rodriguez also shared blood ties, not to mention longstanding familiarity, with various members of the extended family. Ynes Lopez’s first cousins included the sisters Margarita and Beatriz Enriquez, who were also related to the Mexico City clan matriarch Blanca Enriquez. Esperanza knew Lopez’s sister, Ana Enriquez, since Seville, where the latter had been penitenced by the Inquisition. Ana’s daughter, Ysabel Duarte, married Diego Antunes. Their son, Manuel Antunes, was arrested in the 1642 sweep of alleged Mexico City judaizers.59 Maria de Rivera, daughter of Blanca de Rivera, both involved in the Enriquez clan’s judaizing activities, had married Manuel de Granada. Manuel’s father had been Antonio de Granada (or at least so Esperanza Rodriguez thinks she recalls his name), who passed away in Seville. Esperanza’s mother had cooked for him. Esperanza states that these Granadas are relatives of hers through her father, Francisco Rodriguez.60 Pedro de Espinosa, husband of Ysabel de Silva (sister or niece of Blanca Enriquez), was the son of Simon Rodriguez, who was the brother of Esperanza’s father, Francisco Rodriguez.61 Esperanza’s son, Diego, was married to Geronima de Miranda, whose cousin was Gaspar de Robles,

ibid., fols. 357v.–468r.) and that she knew Blanca de Rivera “very well” in Seville, along with her oldest daughter Maria, who was then very little (response to the charges against her, ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 72r.). Indeed, Rodriguez, in her response to the charges against her, seems to say that Blanca and Margarita de Rivera are relatives of her former mistress, Catalina Enriquez in Veracruz, but that that Catalina and Margarita, at least, had a falling out (ibid. 419, exp. 6, fol. 106v.–107r.). 57 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458r.; Bocanegra, Auto general. According to another source, this “very old” Catalina Enriquez, also a Jewess, now of New Veracruz, who had owned Rodriguez’s mother, Isabel, was a sister of Ynes Lopez. 58 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 30 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 465v. 59 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 472r. 60 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 467r. 61 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 469r.

?

?

Clara DeSilva

?

Simon Rodriguez

?

–•–•–•–

=

Juan Bautista Del Bosque

Isabel Negra

Antonietta

Thomas Beatriz = Enriquez Nuñez De Peralta

Blanca = Jorge Raphaela Elvira Suarez Jacinto

Josepa

Sebastian Micaela = Cardozo Enriquez

Ana = Francisco Suarez Lopez De Fonseca

Rafaela = Gaspar Enriquez Suarez

Clara

Ysavel Juan Maria Del Bosque Del Bosque

Manuel Antones

= Diego Antones

Figure 4. Genealogy of Esperanza Rodriguez and the Extended Enriquez Family, from Seville to Mexico City.

Genealogy of Esperanza Rodriguez = Marriage –?–?–?–?– “cousins” Sexual/romantic relationship master/slave relationship

Micaela

Esperanza Rodriguez

–•–•–•–•–•

Ysavel Duarte

Ana Enriquez = ?

Diego = Geronima Juana = Blas Del Bosque Del Bosque Lopez

Francisco Rodriguez

Antonio Tinoco

Ysavel = Antonio Caravallo

Ana

Ysavel = Manuel Miguel Tinoco De Acosta Tinoco

Elena Gomez De Silva = De Silva

= Leonor Vaez

Simon Vaez Sevilla

Gaspar Gonzalez Soburro

Juana = Simon Juarez Pedro Tinoco De Espinosa Tinoco

?

?

Pedro Arias Maldonado = Catalina Enriquez ? ?

Rodrigo Fernandez Salçedas = Ynes Lopez

Ysavel DeSilva = Pedro De Espinosa Espinosa

Blanca = Antonio Enriquez Rodriguez ? Arias ? ?

Joana = Enriquez

?

?

Gaspar Vaez

Gaspar Nuñez

Catalina = Diego Enriquez Tinoco

Geronima Esperanza

Juana Rodriguez = Diego Lopez

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another accused judaizer in the Enriquez family circle.62 According to Bocanegra’s summary, Pedro Arias Maldonado, husband of Esperanza’s former mistress Catalina Enriquez, was the cousin of “the famous Jew” Antonio Rodriguez Arias, while Blanca Enriquez and Antonio Rodriguez Arias were married at Arias Maldonado’s house in Seville. Other ties, unmentioned, may also have existed. Esperanza Rodriguez’s story is both remarkable and typical for an age of incipient globalization and racial intermingling. She had remained in Seville, in the house of Pedro Arias Maldonado and Catalina Enriquez until the age of seventeen or eighteen. Toward the end of this period she spent a year in a convent of the nuns of Nuestra Señora de Socorro (Our Lady of Help), along with her mistress Catalina (!), as Maldonado had gone to Havana, where he was killed. In order to recover the estate of her deceased husband, Catalina Enriquez left with Rodriguez for San Lucar. They arrived in Cartagena de las Indias around 1602 and shortly thereafter left for Havana.63 Rodriguez married Juan Baptista del Bosque in Havana around 1606.64 The couple remained together in Havana for about a year, at which point she accompanied Baptista del Bosque back to Cartagena, where he worked as a sculptor, for five years, more or less. Her owner, Catalina Enriquez, seems to have remained in Havana during this time. Rodriguez and her husband then left Cartagena and met up with Catalina Enriquez in Veracruz, but after fifteen days left for Mexico City, where the couple resided for four or five years. In Mexico City Rodriguez ran a shop. At some point Bautista del Bosque got work in the port city of Acapulco and Rodriguez went to be with him. After two and a half years they returned to Mexico City. After another four or five years they transferred to Guadalajara, where they lived for ten or twelve years and where Rodriguez again operated a store.65 Baptista del Bosque died around 1629 in Guadalaxara, about

Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 470v. Geronima’s mother had been a Mexican mestiza who married Henrique de Miranda, whom Esperanza knew from Seville as well as from Cartagena. 63 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 459v. 64 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458v. It could be that Rodriguez is getting the dating muddled. She says she and her mistress arrived in Cartagena in 1602, where they stayed only about “fifteen or twenty days,” before sailing for Havana. Arriving there, she married Del Bosque “within eight days” (ibid., fols. 459v.–460r.). 65 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 460v.–r. Ysavel de Silva testifies to having been aware that Blanca 62

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five years after their arrival there.66 Their long marriage, terminated only because of Del Bosque’s death, seems to reflect an impressively stable relationship. Rodriguez moved back to Mexico City with all her children sometime between 1634 and 1636.67 An Extended Family of Fervent Marranos? According to the inquisitional testimony of many witnesses, the Enriquez family matriarch Blanca comes across as a fervent marrano, knowledgeable about crypto-Jewish practices, possibly even capable in Hebrew. Ysavel de Silva testifies that Blanca’s mother, Juana Rodriguez, had been imprisoned by the Inquisition already back in Seville.68 Many other members of the family appear to have been active as well. A comprehensive portrait is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the following examples hopefully will more than suffice. Various people are said to have gathered on Saturdays at the house of Juana Enriquez in order to celebrate the sabbath.69 Blanca and her daughters are said to have fasted on Fridays.70 Before fasts, Blanca would bathe and put on clean clothes.71 Maria Baptista, a mestiza who worked in the house of Blanca Enriquez as a servant or slave, and served as well her daughter Beatriz Enriquez, relates that she saw that in the houses of Micaela and Rafaela Enriquez meat was soaked in water to remove the blood, while the throats of chickens were cut in her own house, and that Ysavel de Espinosa, Blanca’s sister, “ordered her black Margarita” to do these tasks, basic requirements of keeping kosher.72 Pedro Tinoco describes to his inquisitors how his grandmother Blanca Enriquez once Enriquez maintained contact with Rodriguez during the latter’s time in Guadalajara (testimony of 25 June 1643, ibid., 415, exp. 6, fol. 519r.). 66 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 458v., 460v. 67 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 460v. 68 Testimony of 25 June 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 415, exp. 6, fol. 519v. As had Blanca (see below). 69 Testimony of Antonio Lopez de Orduña, 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 176v. 70 Testimony of Gaspar Vaez Sevilla, 13 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 111v. 71 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 211r. 72 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 192r.

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called him alone to her and had him prepare bread, following her instructions, such as using a new knife. But this was bread unlike “the ordinary bread that the catholics eat,” and she explained to him that this was “the bread of bitterness that the Israelites ate in the desert” and that now must be eaten by those who observe the Law of Moses, clear allusions to matzah and Passover.73 In addition to making matzah with her daughter Beatriz several times, Blanca gave her as well an extended explanation of the history and meaning of this bread “without yeast nor salt,” which the ancient Israelites “ate together with much parsley and many herbs and which in memory of this the observers of the Law of Moses have to eat three days before the Passover of the Resurrection that the Christians celebrate.” Blanca used only new utensils when preparing her matzah—a traditional precaution of Jews to ensure complete kashrut for Passover. Blanca (and Beatriz) even knew some of the terminology involved as well as the halakhic requirement of removing and burning a bit of the dough: “having burned [?; açetado] the sacrifice of the Jala [challah bread], which was that little piece of massa [matzah] that she removed from the middle of what she had in the new saucepan.” As is ritually required for the Passover seder, Blanca made from her dough only three tortitas.74 Among others, Gaspar Vaez Sevilla (son of Juana Enriquez and Simon Vaez Sevilla) tells the inquisitors that he and other family members observed “the great fast,” i.e., Yom Kippur.75 At least when Blanca Enriquez fell sick, relates Catalina Enriquez, she and her sisters 73 Testimony of 27 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 132r.–v. Pedro was the son of Catalina Enriquez and Diego Tinoco. The latter had lived openly as a Jew in some non-Spanish territory (AGN Mexico, Inq. 410, exp. 4, leg. 5, fols. 524v.) or was born in such a place (according to Margarita de Rivera; testimony of 8 July 1642; ibid., fol. 527v.). Catalina testifies that Diego was circumcised (testimony of 9 November 1643; ibid., fol. 527r.). Her testimony—that Diego, ill, did not want a surgeon called in because he was circumcised—seems rather suspicious. As his wife, aware that he observed the Law of Moses, as she testifies, one would think that she already knew from direct experience whether or not he was circumcised. Perhaps, on the other hand, many women in the seventeenth century had no idea how a circumcized penis actually differed from a non-circumcised one. Somehow, Catalina and Margarita de Rivera knew of his being circumcised, though Catalina is not sure whether this was told to her directly (by Catalina Enriquez?) or to her mother Blanca (testimony of Catalina de Rivera, 30 June 1642, ibid., fol. 528r.; testimony of Margarita de Rivera, 8 July 1642, ibid., fol. 527v.). 74 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 14 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 243r.–244r. 75 Testimony of 17 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 117v. Ysavel de Silva says that one year the Fast of the Great Day was held in Blanca’s

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gathered to celebrate “the fast of the great day” at their mother’s house, each bringing a candle to light “as a ceremony of the said law,” and covering each candle with a box. Blanca recited some prayers which the others did not understand. Catalina’s sister Beatriz prayed barefoot (on Yom Kippur leather was not worn and, hence, most shoes).76 This all took place the evening of the holiday. The next day, all simply fasted until nightfall, each then going home to break the fast with a supper of fish.77 In his own testimony, Pedro Tinoco recounts one such occasion when all those present “got on their knees, the said Blanca Enriquez, standing and putting her hands over their heads, recited the blessing of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob,” also saying “other words that this confessant did not understand well.”78 Beatriz Enriquez relates that after the blessing “each asked forgiveness of the other, the youngers then embracing the elders.”79 According to the testimony of one witness, one year thirteen members of the clan plus six other intimate associates observed the fast of the Queen of Esther, a popular Marrano ‘festival’ in honor of this ancient proto-Conversa heroine.80 Juana Tinoco (daughter of Catalina Enriquez) says that the fast of Queen Esther was at least sometimes

home as “she was alone and had no black woman in the house because they had left” (testimony of 30 June; ibid., 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 89r.). 76 Robert Ferry nicely connects going barefoot with Catholic practice, as taken up by Teresa de Jesús, among many others (“Don’t Drink the Chocolate,” n. 16). 77 Testimony of 28 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 148v.–149v. Describing her first “fast of the great day” under the tutelage of her mother Blanca, Juana Enriquez says that they “ate the supper of vespers of the said fast/çenaron la bispera del dho ayuno” (testimony of 13 October 1642, ibid., fol. 183v.), using the Christian term for marking sacred hours and prayer services. She is describing the meal before the fast, rather than following it. Beatriz, her sister, uses the same language (testimony of 24 July 1642; ibid., fol. 210v.). 78 Testimony of 6 June 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 139r.–v. This was the parental blessing of the child, which traditionally invokes Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, for boys and Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, for girls. Catalina Enriquez, Pedro’s mother, describes the scene identically, with one difference (Testimony of 28 May 1643; ibid., fol. 149r.): each went one by one before Blanca to receive her blessing. Again, this occured on the festival eve. Beatriz Enriquez says that they went in order of age and that it was the blessing “that Jacob gave to his grandchildren and sons” (testimony of 14 November 1642; ibid., fol. 238v.). 79 Testimony of 14 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 238v. 80 Charge by an anonymous witness read to Gaspar Vaez Sevilla, 16 February 1644, and confirmed by him the following day; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 113r.–v., 117r.–v. On Esther, Purim and the fast dedicated to her, see Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 116–17, 377–79, 470.

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conducted in her house.81 One witness, Ysavel de Silva, tells the inquisitors that she heard that when Beatriz Enriquez was ill at one point, her sisters, including Catalina, said prayers for her that included the word “Adonay.”82 Mixing Catholic practice with Jewish intentions, Beatriz relates how Blanca and her daughters would light candles, usually three, at the supper of certain fasts. In Beatriz’s case, “the one in honor of the God of Israel, the second for the health of her spouse and good tidings [buenos suçessos] and the third for herself.”83 When Violante Suarez says she asked her aunt Micaela Enriquez to make her a scapular of Our Lady of Mercy [a cloth shawl covering both the front and back; part of the habit of many religious orders], the latter responded that she couldn’t for she and all of her sisters followed the law (of Moses). Around the same time, Violante’s aunt Beatriz Enriquez supposedly mentioned to her that a man who lived in Mexico City had asked to marry Beatriz but that her mother Blanca would not allow it “because he was not an observer of the said law of Moses.”84 When Blanca Enriquez passed away, according to the mestiza Maria Baptisa, Juana Enriquez “sent to her house” for a piece of new linen cloth (tocro de lino) and “cut a tora [sic] for the said deceased.”85 Esperanza Rodriguez, among others (see below), washed Blanca’s head after she died, in order to clean off the blood that had come from “a little dove that they had placed” there.86 Washing the head was a component of the traditional Jewish ritual for preparing the corpse for burial. After the funeral, “peeled, hard-boiled eggs” were distributed among her children and grandchildren.87 Eggs comprise a food rich in symbolism,

Testimony of 23 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 142r. AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 78v.–79r. 83 Testimony of 14 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fols. 237r.–v. At one supper that took place on quaresma, according to Rodriquez, the food that remained “was given out to the black serving women and girls” (response to the witnesses, 15 September 1644, ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 112v.). 84 Testimony of Violante Xuarez, 27 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol.172r.–v.; and see the testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 3 September 1643; ibid., fol. 253r.–v. 85 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 193r. 86 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 59v. The inquisitors characterize this as a “ceremony used by the Jews with their deceased.” There is a kabbalistic healing ceremony in which one or two birds are placed (sacrificed?) on the body of the sufferer in order to draw out the illness. Despite inquiries, I was not able to obtain concrete information about this quasi-magical operation. 87 Charge by an anonymous witness read to Gaspar Vaez Sevilla and confirmed by him, 16 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 113r. 81 82

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used on many ritual occasions; a sign of fertility and future possibility, their roundness alluding to the natural cycles of life, the fact that they can be easily broken but never reconstructed a kind of reminder of the fragility of life. During mourning, they are eaten by traditional Jews before getting to the more common main dishes.88 Other witnesses corroborate the distribution and eating of eggs, including Pedro Tinoco, who says that during the first days of mourning they would eat hard-boiled egg from which the shell had been removed, without salt, “according to their custom, [. . .] as a sign of sadness for the relatives of the deceased.”89 Various family members supposedly gathered at Blanca’s house on the third day after her death, to share a supper of fish and eggs together.90 Like other Marranos, Beatriz says this is called “the Bird of Light/Ave Luz,” which, whether referring to the eggs themselves or the whole mourning ritual, is either a sign that Beatriz knew the Hebrew term for mourning, avelut, whether she understood it or not (a hyperliteralistic Inquisition scribe then made it Spanish, ave luz), or constitutes a misunderstanding or creative translation of this term Hebrew term.91

Shulkhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah, sec. 378:9. Testimony of 28 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 135r.; testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 28 May 1643; ibid., fol. 150r. 90 Testimony of Antonio Lopez de Orduña, 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol.177r. Below we hear of a gathering on the third day after a death to fast. It could be that the supper occurred at the end of the fast. The prominence of marking the third day of a death derives from Christianity, which marked the day with a special mass for the deceased. This day commemorated the three days which Jesus passed in the sepulcher and as a prefiguration of the resurrection there is a special prescription in the Apostolic Constitutions (VIII, xlii): “With respect to the dead, let the third day be celebrated in psalms, lessons, and prayers, because of him who on the third day rose again” (The Catholic Encyclopedia [New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911], s.v. Masses of Requiem). Eating fish on the third day might hearken to the broiled fish that the astonished disciples gave to the resurrected Jesus, who had asked for meat (Luke 24:41–43). Ysabel de Rivera speaks of a fast carried out on the seventh day after the death of her sister Blanca’s husband, various Enriquez sisters being present (AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 28v.). Blanca de Rivera testifies that it is a custom of observers of the Law of Moses to eat a fish supper on the ninth day after the death of a relative, as was done after the death of her spouse, with Blanca Enriquez and her daughters in attendance (ibid., fol. 35r.). In medieval Catholicism, the novena or ninth day of mourning was marked with special significance. 91 Testimony of 14 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 241v.; see also Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 293. Esperanza Rodriguez also knows this name (testimony of 21 April 1643; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 472r.). I thank Maynard P. Maidman for suggesting the avelut connection and thereby extricating me from my perplexity. 88 89

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Blanca Enriquez is alleged to have instructed various family members in religious matters. Pedro Tinoco testifies that his grandmother advised him to observe the Law of Moses, “in which it is necessary to be saved” and which “was better than than that of my lord Jesus Christ which this confessant observed.”92 Isabel Tinoco, Pedro’s sister, tells the inquisitors that she preserved and observed the law of Moses because her grandmother Blanca taught it to her when she was a girl. A few days after her instruction, Isabel says she asked Blanca if she had taught others, to which her grandmother replied that she had taught the law of Moses to Catalina, Isabel’s mother, as well as Isabel’s brothers Pedro and Miguel; that her sister Juana “knows the law”; to Isabel’s aunt Juana and her son Gaspar Baez; to Isabel’s aunt Rafaela and her two daughters Ana and Blanca; to Isabel’s aunts Michaela and Beatriz.93 Ysavel de Silva claims that Raphaela Enriquez called her sister Juana Enriquez “Queen of the Jewesses and that all the women kissed her feet.” It seems Silva, who is here reporting jailhouse conversations, means this in a concrete, ritual sense; she also speaks of “the vicequeen (virreyna) who had arrived.”94 Some in the community considered Gaspar, the infant son of Juana Enríquez and Simón Váez Sevilla, to be the messiah they awaited. When this turned out not to be the case, other women were considered as potential mothers of the messiah. Beatriz states that when she was around the age of twelve her 92 Testimony of 23 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 131r. For a time, Pedro lived with his grandmother (testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 3 August 1643, ibid., fol. 153v.). 93 Testimony of 9 September 1642, AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 167v.–168r. Ysavel de Silva asserts that Catalina Enriquez, her sisters and their daughters are not only Jewesses but witches (hechizeras), using drinks and other means—Catalina supposedly carried a bag (bolsa) contained the tooth and navel of an infant, some powders, and two recipes (?; raysitas) called feminine and masculine, the latter bearing some colored hairs—to bewitch men (atontarles, that is, to turn them into fools), cause them to hallucinate or make them attracted to the spell-casting woman. A slave of Rafaela Enriquez allegedly told Ysavel de Silva that when her mistress was going to sleep with a man (not her husband) she placed two vanilla beans under the pillows. These comprise typical elements of romantic magic. Lastly, De Silva heard that Rafaela had a moon (tattooed?) on her breast (testimony from 1646; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, 99r.–100r.). Carrying a bolsa with magical powers, containing “any number of substances, including folded pieces of paper with Christian orations written on them, rocks, sticks, roots, bones, hairs, animal skins, feathers, powders, consecrated particles, and so on,” comprised both an African and an old European practice. A bolsa might protect its wearer from harm, assure luck, help slaves escape or relieve suffering (Sweet, Recreating Africa, 179–81). Could Rafaela’s alleged moon tattoo refer to a Moorish symbol? 94 Testimony of 6 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 102r.

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mother Blanca told her that “she should believe in the one sole true God and should observe the law of Moses” and that she has also taught the law to all her other daughters.95 Beatriz recites for the inquisitors two prayers that her mother taught her, which she said daily, the first in the morning when arising and the second at night before retiring.96 While the deceased Blanca Enriquez was burned only in effigy at the 11 April 1649 auto de fe, her daughter Catalina was executed alive, along with Catalina and Maria de Rivera, Ysabel de Silva and all too many others. Various other members of the clan came out with their lives and relatively lighter punishments. Becoming Marrano As for Esperanza Rodriguez, she appears to have been a familiar and active participant in the Enriquez family’s circle of judaizers. Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, husband of Beatriz Enriquez, tells his inquisitors that his mother-in-law Blanca Enriquez told him on one occasion that Esperanza was God-fearing and “a good woman,” a code word for her being an observer of the Law of Moses.97 Various permutations of the same basic story about Rodriguez’s coming to Judaism circulated. Ysavel Antunes, a close associate of the Enriquez family, imprisoned as a judaizer by the Mexico City tribunal, confesses that Rodriguez and she declared themselves to one another as observers of the Law of Moses “on many occasions,” and that Rodriguez told her “how she had been taught it by them in Seville,” that is, how she had been taught the Law of Moses by the Enriquez family.98 Clara de Rivera also relates that when Rodriguez and her daughters visited the house of Clara’s mother, Blanca de Rivera, Rodriguez told them “that she had been taught [the Law] in Seville.”99 Clara’s mother, Blanca de Rivera, claims that she and her daughters declared themselves to Rodriguez as observers of the Law of Moses, and vice versa, “on different occasions” and that Rodriguez had told her that she had been taught the 95 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 209v.; 24 October 1642, ibid., fol. 225v. 96 Ibid., fol. 210r. 97 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 68r. 98 Testimony of 30 July 1642, AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 156r.; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 432v.–433r. 99 Testimony of 28 May 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 406v.

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Law of Moses in Seville by a Portuguese widow named Ynes Lopez. Later, Blanca deposes that Ynes Lopez had told her herself about teaching Rodriguez (who was the daughter of her slave woman Isabel).100 According to Raphaela Enriquez, Rodriguez was taught the Law of Moses by “a mistress of hers, the mother of a Doña Catalina who is in vera cruz.”101 It is intriguing that after her arrest, when pressed for her genealogy by the inquisitors, Rodriguez, who so far has said nothing about her New Christian father, seems to grow testy: “as she does not know who her father was, neither does she know who her grandparents were.”102 Ysavel de Silva thinks she heard from Blanca Enriquez that Rodriguez’s mother Isabel “also knew of the said law. And had been a prisoner in the Inquisition of Seville three days.”103 Intriguingly, in their summary of the case and sentencing the inquisitors make no mention of Isabel’s judaizing.104 Rodriguez’s first encounter with a ‘judaizer,’ as far as she tells it to her inquisitors, was striking. It took place more than thirty years earlier, in Seville, yet her memory of it seems fraught with emotion still. The incident only emerges in her response to the charges read to her by her inquisitors, that is, relatively late in her trial. She says that an old Portuguese woman, Maria Hernandez, lived right next door and the young Esperanza could see into her house through the kitchen window. Esperanza watched her conduct fasts at nighttime, or so she claims.

100 Blanca de Rivera knew Lopez, who was deceased by the time of her deposition. Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410r.–v.; testimony of 18 November 1642; ibid., fol. 411r.–v. 101 Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 425v.– 426r. 102 Testimony of 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458r. 103 Testimony of 25 June 1643, AGN Mexico, Inq. 415, exp. 6, fol. 519r. Silva testifies that Blanca Enriquez had been imprisoned, along with the slave Isabel, by the Seville tribunal “for six or eight months. And that all that the inquisitors said was that they should tell the truth and that [ Blanca] had said to [Ysavel de Silva] as well that from the beginning to the end she had defied [the truth, i.e., denied all allegations]. And that they had put her to the torture and she indicated the arms on which they had given it to her, with signs that this confessant saw. And how much better was it to suffer that than to lose honor and estate.” Others also had seen Blanca’s scars, such as Blanca Méndez de Rivera and Isabel Duarte (Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, ed. and trans. Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004], 162, n. 27, 163). According to the summary of the 11 April 1649 auto by Bocanegra, Ynes Lopez was sentenced as a judaizer by the Seville tribunal, but earned reconciliation (Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee celebrada, unpag.). 104 AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 118r.

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One day Hernandez asked her to give an afternoon snack to her son, about seven years old. The young Esperanza gave him a piece of bread with a slice of ham. Discovering this, Hernandez smacked it away, knocking it to the ground, shouting at her son not to eat pig. Offended, Rodriguez said that she must be a Jewess if she is not allowed to eat pig meat. Hernandez “made her cry,” Rodriguez tersely reports. All of this seems to have caused Rodriguez’s masters amusement (“they laughed to/among themselves”).105 The manner in which Rodriguez reports the episode reveals the deep and confusing emotions caused to this young slave girl by the contradictory religious dictates motivating the different individuals, herself included, and by her relatively powerless position resulting from her less than full knowledge in a situation in which she is still expected to know how to act. Rodriguez, finally giving information (accurate or not) to the inquisitors after a few months in prison, relates that Ynes Lopez began teaching her the Law of Moses when she was about twelve or thirteen. Rodriguez, possibly trying to stall the inquisitors’ search for information, first divulges matter from years earlier, that incriminates others rather than herself, and that incriminates people already deceased. One afternoon, says Rodriguez, Lopez, along with her cousins Margarita and Beatriz Enriquez (Lopez’s daughter Catalina Enriquez was also present), called the young Esperanza over and tried to persuade her not to believe in Christ nor in his mother Maria, nor to make anything of the sacred images of the religion built around them. The latter attack aimed at various images of Mary that Esperanza possessed (currosas estampadas [. . .] de bulto). Esperanza was told that one should believe only “in a single God who was called aDonay.” If she were to accede to these requests, her mistress “would give her freedom, she would be very happy, and greatly fortunate.” The young Esperanza supposedly “replied to them with the art of confusion that she would look into this,” but their importunities and promises of benefits, combined with Esperanza’s young age, ignorance and vulnerability led her to yield, which caused them “particular joy.”106 Catalina Enriquez, who “also showed pleasure,” said that “with her husband Pedro arrias she would

AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 108r. Testimony of 30 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 1, leg. 1, fol. 464v.–465r. The underline was made by the inquisitorial scribe. In her response to the charges against her, Rodriguez says all this happened when she was “eight or ten” (ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 72r.). 105

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do it [so that Rodriguez] would be given liberty.”107 In testimony given after having heard the charges against her and responding to them, Rodriguez says that it was Margarita Enriquez who had promised her liberty, “a thing greatly desired by slaves,” and at the time she had been “between nine and ten years old.”108 Because of the testimony of Rodriguez and others, Ynes Lopez was relaxed in absencia at the 11 April 1649 auto de fe in Mexico City.109 Lopez’s daughter Catalina Enriquez also appeared at the same auto, aged 80 years old, where she was reconciled with a formal abjuration. Her goods were confiscated at her arrest She is accused of having judaized continuously since the age of twelve. In her confessions, she claims that after her incarceration she saw in her dreams a crucified Christ surrounded by innumerable lights and resplendant glories. This, she asserts, indicates her good intentions. Her many confessions and desperate pleas for mercy did not prevent her from dying while still in prison. Though the inquisitors granted that she died “with signs of penitence,” her goods were nonetheless confiscated.110 Rodriguez seems to have been active as a judaizer and known as such by many. She is said to have made and attended various fasts, including those devoted to Queen Esther, which lasted three days, the number of days the biblical Esther fasted before calling on King Ahasuerus.111 Many witnesses testify to gathering for fasts at Rodriguez’s house or going there simply to pass the fast day. Pedro de Espinosa thinks that his wife, Ysavel de Silva, confided in Rodriguez that he was an observer of the Law of Moses, a sure sign of trust, and, in any case, he himself declared being an observer of the Law of Moses with Rodriguez, her daughter Juana and her son Diego, and vice versa, at Rodriguez’s

107

465v.

Testimony of 30 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol.

Testimony of 24 September 1644, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 113v.–114r. Note that if Rodriguez’s mother Isabel indeed knew something of crypto-Judaism, it is not she who is credited—or blamed—for transmitting it to her daughter. 109 “Enseñó à muchas personas de su parentela, y estrañas la ley de Moysen, y à Esperança Rodriguez mulata su esclava ofreciandola la libertad, y ayunado con todos ellos, y otras personas, lo qual calló en su causa, y se le probó, conque murió en los mesmos delictos, è impenitente. Salió su Estatua al Auto, con vn Sãbenito, y Coroza de cõdenada con vn letrero de su nombre [. . . .]” (Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee celebrada, unpag.). 110 Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee celebrada, unpag. Catalina’s husband, Pedro Arias Maldonado was also sentenced at this auto. 111 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 62r. 108

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house.112 Antonio Lopez de Orduña relates that he and Rodriguez declared themselves to one another.113 Catalina Enriquez (the daughter of Blanca, not the former mistress of Rodriguez) claims that one day, “a long time ago,” Rodriguez paid her a visit. Offering her guest a drink of chocolate, Rodriguez declined, saying that she couldn’t because “she was doing a fast of the law of Moses.”114 Beatriz Enriquez claims that Rodriguez declared herself in her presence and names Esperanza as someone who was present at at least one fish supper, held on a “meat day/dia de carne,” one of many conducted by the extended family.115 It seems Rodriguez hosted one such supper of fish after the death of Leonor de Roxas, attended by some fifteen individuals from the Enriquez clan’s circle of judaizers.116 During cuaresma of 1642, according to Juana Enriquez, when her sister Beatriz was badly ill, Rodriguez was one of the women who fasted for the return of her health.117 When Catalina Enriquez (Blanca’s daughter, not Esperanza’s former owner) was informed of the death of her father, Antonio Rodriguez Arias, she happened to be in the company of most of the women of the clan, including Rodriguez, who was among those who fasted on the third day after the death.118 Rodriguez was present at Blanca Enriquez’s final hours.119 Catalina Enriquez, Ysavel de Silva and Beatriz Enriquez relate separately to the inquisitors that after Blanca’s death Rodriguez was among the women who washed the body, dressed it in a new shirt set aside for this purpose and arranged the deceased on the bed.120 Juana

Testimony of 18 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 413r.–v. 113 Testimony of 1 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 451v. 114 Testimony of 24 October 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 421r. 115 Testimony of 19 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 278r.; 7 November 1642; ibid., fol. 235v. 116 Testimony of Pedro de Espinosa, 18 November 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 414v. 117 Testimony of 23 February 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 185r. 118 Testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 22 June 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 152v.; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 423r. 119 Testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 28 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 149v.; elsewhere given as testimony of 18 May 1643; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 421v. 120 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fols. 80v., 149v., 294v. Intriguing differences accompany the question of who washed the body of Blanca Enriquez. Her daughter Beatriz says that it was Blanca de Rivera and Rodriguez who were supposed to do so 112

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Enriquez claims to have been told by her mother Blanca before her death “to buy four or five yards of Ruan [fabric],” which she sent “to the house of Esperanza Rodriguez so that she would make a shroud for her said mother.”121 Rodriguez was present at the gathering of the Enriquez clan that took place the day Blanca Enriquez was buried (in the Carmen convent).122 Rodriguez was one of the attendees at the fast of mourning held the day after the burial of Diego Antunes.123

(testimony of 19 September 1647; ibid., fol. 294v.). Raphaela Enriquez says that it was Blanca de Rivera, some of Blanca’s daughters and Rodriguez (response to charges, 28 September 1647; ibid., 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 343r.). Also involved in preparing Blanca’s corpse was Maria Baptista, the “mestiça of the said house,” as well as a Black slave woman of Rafaela Enriquez named Sicilia (only mentioned in the testimony of Antonio Lopez de Orduña, ibid., 393/12/3, fol. 177v.; and in the testimony of Maria Baptista, ibid., fol. 192v.). It seems from Maria Baptista’s deposition that it was she, Rodriguez and the slave Sicilia who actually washed the body (ibid., 193r.). As in other similar cases, it is unclear whether such arrangements reflect sentiments of intimacy, convenience or necessity. Like Blanca (and Rodriguez, for that matter), Maria Baptista was an older woman, aged fifty in 1643 (testimony of Maria Bautista, March 1643; ibid., fol. 191r.). Beatriz Enriquez testifies that before she died Blanca took from her desk an agnus dei to give to Maria, something that seems to greatly upset one of Blanca’s daughters, who ran out of the room. It is not clear if Beatriz is describing her own reaction or that of one of her sisters nor whether the reaction stems from a feeling that this gift is too good for Maria Bautista (and should have gone to one of the daughters) or from sadness over Blanca’s impending death (testimony of 29 October 1642; ibid., fol. 234r.–v.). It should be noted that Ysavel de Silva claims that when Blanca Enriquez was at the moment of death she, all her daughters and Ysavel Tinoco threw out the two women who were present who were not observers of the Law of Moses, one of whom was Maria Baptista (testimony of 30 June 1643; ibid., 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 90r.). Finally, Rodriguez testifies that she noticed that after Blanca’s death, Maria Baptista was “very angry that they made her eat things fried in oil” rather than in lard (testimony of 21 April 1643; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 473r.). Baptista later testifies before the Inquisition. 121 Testimony of 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 441v.; also mentioned in the testimony Ysavel de Rivera, 22 September 1642; ibid., fol. 429v. Rodriguez confirms that Juana sent to have this garment made five days before Blanca’s death (testimony of 21 April 1643; ibid., fol. 472v.). 122 Testimony of Gaspar Vaez Sevilla, 13 February 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 110v.–111r.; testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 28 May 1643; ibid., fol. 150r. Though Blanca Enriquez is not named in Vaez Sevilla’s testimony, it is clearly her funeral being described. Among other clues is the discussion of the burial with her body of some of her teeth that had fallen out while she was alive, which someone reported the tribunal was going to investigate, to the point of disinterring the body, considering it a Jewish practice to make sure all body parts were properly buried. Her fallen teeth are mentioned by other witnesses who describe her death or the burial. Ysavel de Silva claims that Blanca “expressly ordered” that these teeth be buried with her (testimony of 30 June 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 415, exp. 6, fol. 521r.). 123 Testimony of Juana del Bosque, 15 September 1642; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 403v.

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In her own depositions, Rodriguez confirms many of the above allegations and adds details of her own.124 Rodriguez testifies that she and Blanca Enriquez declared themselves to one another many times back in Seville, as was also the case with Justa Mendez, Blanca de Rivera’s sister and Mendez’s spouse. In both Seville and in Mexico City, Rodriguez “saw” Blanca Enriquez conduct so many fasts of the Great Day, of Queen Esther and ordinary fasts that she can’t count them all.125 Rodriguez and Blanca Enriquez were clearly close to one another. Rodriguez testifies that Blanca would visit her house in Mexico City.126 According to Rodriguez, Blanca Enriquez’s mother, a Portuguese “Jewess” named Juana Rodriguez “was very happy to see this confessant become Jewish.”127 This statement reflects either this woman’s great desire to see this Mulata slave girl join the family religion, perhaps because of special qualities she recognized in her, perhaps because of Rodriguez’s New Christian paternal blood (or both), or it might reflect Rodriguez’s great desire to be wanted. Rodriguez was present at the “Jewish” wedding of Maria de Rivera and Manuel de Granada (in Seville?) and she confesses that she and the Riveras declared themselves to one another “various times and that they did fasts together many times, that she couldn’t come up with a definite number of these fasts because they were so many.”128 The Rivera women apparently spent various fasts at Rodriguez’s house, as did Ysabel Duarte, widow of Diego Antunes, with her son Manuel.129 Not only did Rodriguez and Juana Enriquez (daughter of Blanca) declare themselves to one another “very many times,” but Juana, from whom Rodriguez frequently received dresswork, was her godmother (comadre) in the realm of their Catholic

124 Beginning with her testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 466v. and passim. 125 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 467v.– 468r. All this was true as well with Blanca Enriquez’s sister, Clara de Silva (ibid., fols. 468r.–v.). 126 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 469r. 127 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 468r. Is it possible that Juana Rodriguez was related to, was even the mother of Esperanza’s father, Francisco Rodriguez? 128 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 467r., 466v. Rodriguez claims that when Margarita de Rivera married her cousin Miguel Nuñez de Huerta they didn’t even bother with the Christian wedding procedures, usually performed later just for appearances (ibid., fol. 467r.–v.). 129 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 471r.–472r.

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existence.130 Rodriguez claims that when she married Juan Bautista del Bosque, her coreligionists Blanca Enriquez and her former mistress Catalina Enriquez held it to be a bad thing, as “he was not Jewish but German.”131 If accurate, the testimony of Juan de León/Salomón Machorro, provides a glimpse into the social network of Esperanza Rodríguez. One day he went to visit the elderly Blanca Enríquez, with whom he maintained close relations, and who lived at the time with her daughter Beatriz. He found there with them “an old mulata named doña Esperanza Rodríguez.” That is, Rodriguez happened to be in the company of some of her relatives, however distant. In the presence of this Mulata, Blanca Enríquez narrated to De León/Machorro some things about his grandfather, Rodrigo Rodríguez, who had died in Antequera, Spain or Nueva Granada. Thus Blanca Enríquez came to tell the said Esperanza Rodríguez who this confessant [León/ Machorro] was and that he kept the said Law of Moses, to which the said Esperanza Rodríguez responded that she had heard about or [had] known the said Rodrigo Rodríguez, grandfather of this confessant, and then the said doña Blanca told him how the said Esperanza Rodríguez was an observer of the said Law of Moses, and the said Esperanza Rodríguez said that it was indeed true that she kept the said Law.132

Esperanza Rodríguez is obviously the “unnamed mulata judaizer,” about whom Solange Alberro speculates; “having gained the respect of honored judaizers among the 17th-century Mexican community, [she] even organized in her house fasts that were well-attended.”133 It must be noted that Rodriguez, like so many New Christians and acculturated Africans, knew how to cross herself and say the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo and Salve Regina well in Spanish. She also insists that she heard mass and confessed regularly.134 Before her two Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 470r. The constant maximalization of the charcter of the connections between Rodriguez and the others may point to a need on her part to assert her centrality, her firm standing within this White judaizing circle—to her White inquisitors? to herself ? 131 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 468r. 132 Cited in Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro, 201–2. León/Machorro continues by saying that on another occasion Blanca Enríquez informed him that Rodriguez’s daughter, Juana, whom he had never met, was also a secret Jew. 133 Alberro, Inquisición y sociedad, 436. 134 According to the Inquisition’s scribe; deposition of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 459v. After months in jail, when first 130

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youngest daughters began observing the Law of Moses, Rodriguez would spend entire days on which she was fasting at the church of Santa Clara with them, “in order to dissemble and distract herself ” from her hunger.135 From her teachers Rodriguez seems to have learned much and well. She is accused of explaining to her daughter Ysavel that when one fasts “one should not be menstruating but be very clean” and that one should observe the sabbath—on Saturday, of course—by not working. Rodriguez allegedly knew enough to inform Ysavel de Silva that the burning of candles on the fast of the Great Day—the Marrano Yom Kippur—“that she never had burned them because it was an invention.” In other words, that burning candles in this manner was borrowed from Catholic practice.136 Rodriguez is said to have told her daughters that on fast days “one must not enter the churches of the christians” (though she allegedly frequently did exactly this, as was just mentioned).137 Supposedly, Rodriguez taught her daughters, Ysavel and Maria, the following prayer, to be said daily: With the weapons of Adonai I go armed. With the cape [capa] of Abraham I go covered. With the faith of Ishmael in my prayer, wherever [God?] wants that I go and come Good and bad people I will meet. The good should come to me The bad should be intimidated by me that I not fear the rod of justice neither the jailer nor the [Inquisition] agent [ familiar] that he will not be able to harm me nor initiate evil

moved to confess her sins/crimes, Rodriguez says that “satan [el Demonio] had blinded her,” a phraseaology perhaps more common to AfroIberians before the Inquisition than Judeoconversos (testimony of 30 January 1643; ibid., fol. 464r.). 135 AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 70r. 136 Publication of charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fols. 80v., 81v.; charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, ibid., fol. 60r.–v. In the latter document, the person/people on whose testimony these charges are based is/are not named. The trial record against Rodriguez is not complete, though some of the missing material appears in other places. In her response to the accusations against her, Rodriguez denies having said these things (ibid., fol. 70r.). 137 Response to the charges against her, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 70r.

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nor [do] more evil that that which Haman did to Mordechai Con las armas de Adonai ando armadas. Con la capa de Abraham ando couijada. Con la fee de Ysmael en mi oracion. por donde quiera que fuere y Viniere Buenos y malos encontrare. Los Buenos se me llegaran Los malos se me arredraran que no temere bara de justiçia ni alcalde ni familiar que no me podra maleçer ni mal empeçer ni mas mal de lo que passo Aman sobre Mordocheo.138

This prayer contains some intriguing features. Marrano prayers took three forms: (1) traditional prayers handed down from one generation to the next, regardless of how distorted; (2) original prayers formulated by individuals based on specific needs, desires, situations; (3) combinations of the two forms. As far as I can recall, Rodriguez’s prayer does not have traditional antecedents, though some of its lines hearken to known Jewish prayers. For instance, the line referring to meeting good and bad people and being kept safe from the latter vaguely echoes a prayer from the morning service, the Yehi Ratzon, that derives from the ancient sage, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, while the general tenor of the prayer vaguely resembles other morning prayers said by other ancient sages, all listed in the same talmudic passage (BT Berakhot 16b–17a).139 Rodriguez’s

138 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 60r.–v. In her response to the charges against her, Rodriguez confirms that she taught this prayer to her daughters, but that they recited it only when they fasted (ibid., fol. 70r.). A slightly differing version appears in the publication of charges against Rodriguez, ibid., fol. 81r.: “Con las armas de Adonai/andare armada/con la capa de Abrahan/andare cobijada/con la fe de Ysmael/en mi coraçon/por donde quiera q fuere/y viniese, buenos y malos encontrare/los buenos se me allegaiar/y los malos se me arredraran/que no temere vara de justicia/ni alcalde, ni familiar/que no me podra maleser/ni mal empecer/ni mas mal de lo que paso/Aman sobre Mardoqueo.” 139 As rendered quite traditionally in a fifteenth-century Ladino siddur for women, God is asked “non me traygas [. . .] ni a lugar de menos precio,” and “que me escapes [. . .] de desverwuensamentos de façes y de desvergüensán façes, de ombre malo [. . .] de vesino malo, de encuentro malo [. . .] de xuixio grave y de dueño de xuicio duro, quier

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prayer obviously refers explicitly to functionaries of the Inquisitions, whose malevolent powers God is asked to avert. As was not uncommon in Marrano discourse, the Marrano sees herself here as Mordechai, persecuted by the powerful servant to the Crown, Haman/the Inquisition. Through the surprising appearance of the figure of Yshmael, the prayer reminds us of the importance of Moorish or Islamic tropes in anti-establishment Iberian discourse. This Marrano seems to envision herself and her group as downtrodden in the same way as Ishmael, the son from the ‘wrong’ side of the family. Many scholars have pointed to the symbolic importance of the Moriscos in the Iberian imaginary. Irene Silverblatt mentions that Moriscas were “commonly held to be experts in occult matters.”140 A Mexican Mulato, Francisco Ruíz de Castrejon, who was accused in 1597 of witchcraft and making a pact with the devil, was allegedly called by his Amerindian acquaintances Mahoma, that is Mohammed.141 The imprisoned priest Francisco de la Cruz characterizes part of his own anti-establishment mysticism, a one-time dialogue with God against Rome, as one in which both De la Cruz and God speak “in the way that moriscos who are not very ladinos pronounce the Castillian language.”142 Even in the Philippines, a festival of “Moors and Christians,” re-enacting and celebrating the triumph of reconquista was regularly held into the seventeenth century.143 Both of these features—anti-Inquisition rhetoric/magic and Morisco/ Muslim symbology—percolate through the religious-magical practices of Afro-Iberians, as discussed in an earlier chapter. That they surface in a prayer of a Mulata judaizer in New Spain, whose African mother might have worshipped according to the Law of Moses in the formerly Muslim city of Seville, not only makes perfect sense, but adds poignant nuance to the heritage of her religious discourse. Rodriguez’s daughters also seem to have been involved to some degree in the Enriquez clan’s judaizing activities, especially the oldest, Juana.

que es de mi ley quier que non sexa de mi ley” (Siddur Tefillot: A Woman’s Ladino Prayer Book [Paris B.N., Esp. 668; 15th c.], A Critical Edition by Moshe Lazar [Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1995], 4). 140 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 262, 275, n. 12. 141 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 143. 142 Quoted in Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:46. 143 See Robert Ricard, “Otra contribución al estudio de las fiestas de ‘moros y cristianos,’ ” Miscelanea P. Rivet, Octogenario Dicata (Mexico: Universidad Nacional, 1960), 2:871–79; Nicolás Cushner, “Las fiestas de ‘moros y cristianos’ en las Islas Filipinas,” Revista de Historia de América 52 (Dec. 1961): 518–20.

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Juana’s husband, Blas Lopez, allegedly told Blanca Enriquez that he married her because “she was of a good heart,” in other words, that she was an observer of the Law of Moses.144 Esperanza supposedly told Blanca de Rivera that she had taught Juana the Law while the latter was still a child and tells her inquisitors the same thing, though she later changes her testimony and claims that Blas Lopez had taught Juana.145 Juana herself testifies that she learned the Law of Moses from her spouse and his family around 1632, over the course of a period of about fifteen days.146 Isabel Antunes offers a similar story, saying that Juana “was taught [the Law] by Blass Lopez her husband, being in Guadalaxara, where she married him.”147 Juana’s mother Esperanza “showed great joy that this confessant oberved” the Law and that “her husband had taught it to her.”148 Shortly after this Juana and Blas Lopez celebrated their first “fast of the great day” together.149 In this same deposition Juana makes it sound as if until this point she was unaware that her mother also observed the Law of Moses, but it seems likely that Rodriguez had ensured that Juana married a Marrano. (Is it possible that Lopez was related to the same Ynes Lopez to whom Esperanza’s mother had belonged and who had brought the young Esperanza into judaizing?). The next September Juana and Rodriguez celebrated the Great Day fast together, washing their heads, putting on clean clothes and supping that evening on eggs and vegetables. The next day they fasted at home through the afternoon.150 Pedro Tinoco thinks he recalls Juana attending one or more of the quasi-ritual suppers held as Blanca 144 Testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 19 January 1645; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fol. 278r. Blanca de Rivera states that Lopez was Portuguese (testimony of 18 July 1642; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410v.). 145 Testimony of Blanca de Rivera, 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410v.; testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 471v. 146 Testimony of 13 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 400v.; testimony of 15 September 1642; ibid., fol. 401r. 147 Testimony of 30 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 433r. 148 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 401v. 149 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 401v. 150 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 401v. All this took place in Guadalajara. Going out to the river to distract themselves, they eventually got trapped in an unwanted social call by a couple they knew, who would not let them return home despite their excuses. They decided that it was better to break the fast than to attract suspicion and remained and ate (ibid., fols. 401v–402r.; testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; ibid., fol. 471v.).

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Enriquez grew increasingly ill and close to death, while Juana says that she participated in the fast of mourning held the day after the burial of Diego Antunes.151 Juana confesses to attending suppers with her mother after her first Great Day fast, at which she, her husband and her mother all declared themselves to one another.152 According to Blanca de Rivera, Juana confessed herself to her and her daughters as a Marrano, and they to her.153 Ysavel de Rivera says that one day when she and her sister Margarita were fasting they went to the house of Rodriguez at mid-day, where they continued the fast with Esperanza and Juana.154 When Rodriguez finally taught Ysavel and Maria the Law of Moses she conveyed to them exactly what she had learned from Ynes Lopez and her cousins: “they they should not believe in the most holy Virgin nor in Christ nor should they adore the Images.”155 After having fasted on behalf of Blanca Enriquez and after having been taught the Law of Moses by Rodriguez, her daughters Ysavel and Maria were said to have declared themselves to Ysavel and Margarita de Rivera. Both Ysavel and Maria Rodriguez/Del Bosque would sleep over at the house of Ysavel de Rivera, who was about their age.156 Simon Suarez de Espinosa claims that his wife, Juana Tinoco, Catalina Enriquez the younger’s daughter, told him that Rodriguez had taught the Law to her daughters Ysavel and Maria.157 When Maria de Rivera and all of her daughters were arrested by the Inquisition, her son Rafael de Granada went to Juana Rodriguez’s house, a sign of their closeness.158 The nature and extent of the Del Bosque/Rodriguez sisters’ cryptoJewish knowledge does not seem particularly vast. Juana knows that certain things are ceremonies of the Law of Moses: fasting on the Great 151 Testimony of 28 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 136r.; testimony of Juana del Bosque, 15 September 1642; ibid., 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 403v. 152 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 401v. 153 Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410v. 154 Testimony of Ysavel de Rivera, 12 October 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 429v. 155 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 470v. 156 Testimony of Ysavel de Rivera, 22 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 428v.–429r. Maria was also known as Cota. Ysavel de Rivera claims to have been 19 or 20 in 1642, Maria Rodriguez/Del Bosque 20 and her sister Ysavel 25. 157 Testimony of 9 June 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 449v. 158 Testimony of Juana del Bosque, 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 402v.

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Day until nightfall; eating hard-boiled eggs after a death; fasting after a death; the closest friend(s) or relative(s) of the new widow/er send food; to pour out the water at the house of the deceased. The sisters evince certain political interests, at least as their situation deteriorates. After their imprisonment, some of the Del Bosque sisters and Enriquez sisters carry on extended conversations from their cells. Among the many topics they discuss is a mysterious man, a gentleman (muy hidalgo) of illustrious lineage, from Bragança, who is present in the kingdom to liberate them. He is in contact with the king of France and of Portugal, even has orders from the Spanish king to remedy the ongoing abuses. The women talk about God giving long life to the king of Portugal, that the kingdom should thrive; that of all places they could only live safely in Portugal.159 I was not able to determine the identity of this mysterious savior, but he would seem to be connected, whether in the sisters’ minds or in reality, with the Duke of Bragança and his recent secession from Spain. Within the Bosom of the Clan: From Slave to Elder According to Blanca de Rivera, just after Blanca Enriquez passed away (in late 1641), Esperanza Rodriguez told her that Blanca Enriquez’s daughter Beatriz Enriquez gave her seventy pesos for her and her daughters to observe fasts in honor of the soul of Blanca Enriquez. Ysabel and Maria supposedly told Blanca de Rivera about these fasts as well. Rodriguez also allegedly told Blanca de Rivera some days later, at the latter’s house, how after having received the seventy pesos she had instructed her two younger daughters, Ysabel and Maria, in the Law of Moses, in order that they be able to carry out the necessary fasts along with their older sister Juana, who evidently was already inside the judaizing circle. Blanca de Rivera goes on to claim that Esperanza, Ysabel and Maria then declared to one another their mutual allegiance to the Law of Moses.160 According to Beatriz herself, she gave Rodriguez 159 As reported by Ysabel de Silva, also imprisoned for judaizing; testimony of 9 July 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fols. 107v.–108r., 109r. 160 Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 10r.–v.; 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 411r. Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, Beatriz Enriquez’s husband, confirms in his own testimony merely that Beatriz “gave her some money that should go to doing well for the soul of her mother/le dio algunos dineros q serian para hazer vien por el alma de su madre” (AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 68r.), as

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seventy pesos.161 Esperanza’s daughter Juana testifies that Beatriz gave Esperanza “eighty or ninety pesos,” which she saw the former bring.162 Catalina Enriquez was given by their mother the key to a trunk containing money, from which Catalina distributed 400 pesos as alms with her own hands to various individuals, including Esperanza Rodriguez. Beatriz herself says that the alms were to go to observers of the Law of Moses.163 According to her daughter Juana, Rodriguez “fasted three or four Mondays” for the sake of the soul of Blanca Enriquez.164 The fact that Beatriz Enriquez offered Rodriguez money to perform a spiritual favor sheds some light on the latter’s relationship to the crypto-Jewish community. On the one hand, leaving money for the reciting of certain prayers or psalms on behalf of the dead comprised standard practice within both Judaism and Catholicism. Blanca Enriquez left money so that masses should be said on her behalf in at least two local churches.165 Beatriz asserts that paying people to perform fasts is a “custom” among observers of the Law of Moses.166 Blanca de Rivera states that Beatriz Enriquez asked other daughters and grandchildren of Blanca Enriquez to observe similar fasts, offering them a mere peso or a few, openly given and accepted as alms,

does Ysavel Antunes (ibid., fol. 156r.). Ysavel de Silva also corroborates that Esperanza and her daughters were given money along with many others, while Pedro Tinoco says he knows that Esperanza was given four pesos to carry out some fasts (ibid., fol. 81r., 137r.). 161 Testimony of 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 446r. 162 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 402r. 163 Testimony of Catalina Enriquez, 28 May 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 151r.; testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 7 January 1645; ibid., 271r. The latter states that up to 20 pesos went to “Justa Mendez, who was secluded in the hospital of the Indians, who was dying,” transmitted by a Black slave named Ysavel. What was this crypto-Jew doing in the hospital for Amerindians, which had been founded for that purpose in the mid-sixteenth century, endowed and sponsored by the Crown itself ? Or was this hospital no longer solely serving its originally-intended population? Rafaela Enriquez says that her husband, Gaspar Suarez, withrew to this hospital because of various lawsuits and demands to pay debts brought against him (testimony of 2 January 1643; ibid., 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 249v.). 164 Testimony of 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 402r. 165 Testimony of Maria de Rivera; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol.30r. 166 Testimony of 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 405, exp. 8, fol. 430r. Ferry thinks that the above-mentioned masses were actually a code word for the judaizing fasts and notes the close parallel between the Catholic practice of paying priests to say masses for the souls of those who had died (“Don’t Drink the Chocolate”).

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while Beatriz testifies that Maria de Rivera was sent two pesos so that her two daughters should fast.167 On the other hand, Rodriguez, as both a beloved former slave and a Mulata, stood unclearly defined in relation to this ‘family’ of Marranos. Despite the many attestations of familiarity cited above, the intimacy of relations do not seem to have been consistent among all members of these Marrano circles. The husband of Beatriz Enriquez, Thomas Nuñez de Peralta, for instance, claims never to have communicated with Rodriguez, while Raphaela Enriquez fails to include her in the list of those present after the burial of Blanca Enriquez.168 Beatriz Enriquez herself testifies that though she knew from others that Rodriguez was an observer of the law of Moses and that Beatriz had had various interactions with her, the two women had never declared themselves to one another until the death of Beatriz’s mother, Blanca.169 Raphaela Enriquez says that though she knew Rodriguez, the two never spoke about judaizing matters.170 Blanca de Rivera, who knew Rodriguez already in Seville, claims that neither “she nor her daughters ever did a fast in [Rodriguez’s] company, but when they declared themselves to one another they said that they had done the fasts.”171 Ysavel de Rivera allegedly asked Ysavel del Bosque whether her two brothers were Jews. When Del Bosque replied in the negative, Rivera exclaimed that “Esperanza Rodriguez was worthless and that they would have to bring the demons because she had not taught [her sons]/era para poco, y se la auian de lleuar los diablos porque no los auia enseñado.”172 Even within these ostensibly tightly-knit crypto-Jewish circles race or social status appears to have surfaced as a factor. Though her father

167 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393/12/3, fols. 13v.–14r., 325r. Pedro Tinoco, for instance requests “three or four pesos” (testimony of Beatriz Enriquez; ibid., fol. 257r.). 168 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 68r., 127v. Peralta’s statement might be assessed in light of the assertation of Raphaela that “it is very normal that men do not declare themselves [observers of the Law of Moses] to women/es muy de ordinario no declararse los hombres con los mugeres” (ibid., 129r.). 169 Testimony of 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 213r. 170 Testimony of 13 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 426r. Rodriguez offers a different story, saying that she and Raphaela, as well as her sister Catalina, confessed their Jewishness to one another around 1630. One source of the distance alleged by Raphaela could be Rodriguez’s knowledge that both Raphaela and Catalina were carrying on extramarital affairs, or so Rodriguez told the inquisitors (testimony of 21 April 1643; ibid., fol. 469v.). 171 Testimony of 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410v. 172 Publication of the charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 82r.

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was a Judeoconverso, almost every witness for the Inquisition who refers to her mentions her status as a Mulata. In other words, they choose to highlight her mother’s Afroiberian lineage ( just as, I must confess, I do). Beatriz Enriquez says, seemingly distantly, that she also distributed monies to “a mulata called esperanza Rodriguez.” Others, such as Blanca and Clara de Rivera, identify her as “a mulata called Esperanza Rodriguez,” while Catalina Enriquez says “an old mulata,” putting her racial status before her personal name. Though this marker most likely was inserted in order to aid the inquisitors in identifying the person being discussed, perhaps even to provide psychological distance between the witness and the person being denounced, one cannot help but wonder if and how the consciousness of this racial difference affected the everyday relations between the involved parties.173 On two occasions it appears that race became an issue within the crypto-Jewish community itself. According to one unnamed witness, Rodriguez and her daughter Juana once visited Blanca Enriquez, who was speaking openly of ‘Jewish’ matters with her daughter Beatriz and them. When Antonio Caravallo (Ysavel de Silva’s husband) entered and understood the topic of conversation, he asked Beatriz “in secret [. . .] how they dared to speak such things in front of the said Esperanza Rodriguez.” Beatriz assured the new guest that Rodriguez and her daughter were trustworthy (“que segura era la gente”), but it seems that his initial reaction was based on the assumption that a Mulata only could have been an outsider and not to be included in discussion of such dangerous subjects.174 In the final publication of the charges Caravallo’s complaint bears even more distance: “how did they speak in such a manner in the presence of these three people?” Similarly, one day, testifies Manuel Nuñez Caravallo, he went to visit his relatives, the sisters Elena and Ysavel de Silva. Esperanza Rodriguez was there with one of her daughters, a girl. The two “acted familiarly/trataban familiarmente” with the Silva sisters. After Rodriguez and her daughter left, he asked, “who were those people with whom they acted with such familiarity. They responded that they were from mine [i.e., of my people/de los mios], which is the same as saying that they were observers of the Law

Testimony of 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 213r. Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fols. 67v.–68r. 173

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of moses.”175 In their summary of the case and issuing of the sentence, the inquisitors fill in what went unsaid, stating that Caravallo’s perplexity arose from the Rodriguez’ “being a few mulata dogs/siendo unas perras mulatas.”176 Paying Rodriguez so much money for the service of conducting fasts on behalf of the late Blanca Enriquez might have reflected Rodriguez’s marginal status within the community; in other words, family members did not require such an amount, as they acted on an unquestionably personal level. Rodriguez’s poverty may well have moved Beatriz Enriquez to offer her such a sum of money as an act of charity, unless Blanca had specified the amount. Indeed, according to Maria de Rivera (Blanca’s sister?), also accused of judaizing, and other witnesses, Blanca had ordered before her death the distribution of some 400 pesos to the poor among the Marrano community and these witnesses list Esperanza Rodriguez explicitly as one of the recipients.177 The Blancas de Rivera together received 60 pesos. Yet, according to Beatriz Enriquez, and Rodriguez confirms this independently, it is Rodriguez who showed up at Beatriz’s house to ask for 70 pesos, indicating that Beatriz was unaware of the arrangement. Beatriz even queried Rodriguez, who had to explain why she wanted such an amount.178 When Blanca Enriquez died, various clothes of hers were distributed to poor observers of the

175 Testimony of 13 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 435r. According to Ysavel de Silva, the response was that Rodriguez and her daughter “were from our people/eran de los nuestros,” which makes more sense (testimony of 10 July 1643, ibid., 415, exp. 6, fol. 524r.). 176 AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 121r. 177 “[E]sta confesante creyo, y entendio que la dha da Blanca enriquez se los avia dado, a la dha doña Beatriz su hija, para repartir entre pobres, observantes de la dha ley de Moisen” (AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 28v., 30r.; see also the testimony of Antonio Lopez de Orduña, 1 September 1642, ibid., fol. 175v.). 178 “Y tambien Repartio de este dinero hasta en cantidad de setenta ps. a una mulata llamada esperanza Rodriguez q aun q esta confessante sabia por Relacion q era obserbante de la ley de moissen, y la havia tratado en diferentes cossas nunca se havia declarado con ella hasta q murio la dha d. Blanca enriquez su madre q fue la dha esperansa Rodriguez a cassa de esta confessante, Y pidiendole del dho dinero la cantidad q arriba Refiere Para aiunarles por el alma de la difunta esta confessante la Pregunto q Para q queria tanto dinero junto a q la dha esperanza Rodriguez Respondio que Para ella, Y Para sus hijas Por q, Ya las havia enseñado al ley de moissen Conte ql esta Confessante le dio les dhos setenta ps. declarandose con ella, Y ella Con la dha esperanza Rodriguez por obserbantes de la dha ley” (testimony of Beatriz Enriquez, 24 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 213r.). In her response to the witnesses, Rodriguez mentions that “she requested the money” from Beatriz (15 September 1644; ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 113r.).

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Law of Moses, including a mattress that was given to Rodriguez.179 One unnamed witness told someone else that one could send alms to Rodriguez, as he/she had “sent alms several times to the said Esperanza Rodriguez as a poor observer [of the Law].”180 According to Juana del Bosque, the payment from Beatriz was only “one of the times that the said Esperanza Rodriguez her mother took money” from the Enriquez women. Raphaela Enriquez claims that “she has given various alms” to Rodriguez, meaning, or including, the “three or pesos” she sent Esperanza from the money Rafaela received from Manuel Albarez five or six times to distribute to poor observers of the Law of Moses, so that they would fast on his behalf. Juana Enriquez testifies that she gave alms to Esperanza three times, later adding that after the death of Blanca Enriquez she gave Esperanza at different times eight or nine pesos.181 One unnamed witness sums up the relationship bluntly: “because the said Esperanza Rodriguez, and her daughters, profess [the Law of Moses], all the rich observers of [the Law] give them alms, and do them much kindness (“las hazen mucho bien”).182 At any rate, the fact that Rodriguez told Blanca de Rivera that she had been given seventy pesos on the occasion of Blanca’s death to conduct these fasts with her daughters shows that it meant a great deal to her.183 Rodriguez’s poverty is easy enough to deduce. When she and her daughters were arrested by the Mexico City tribunal, their goods are inventoried together. Among these goods is “an ordinary guitar.”184 Perhaps one of the women or Rodriguez’s deceased husband knew how to play. Like a fair number of her goods, it is listed as broken. The 179 Testimony of Ysabel Antunes, 14 December 1644; AGN Mexico, Inq. 402, exp. 1, leg. 2, fol. 152r. Rodriguez also received the two shirts which she had wet in order to wash the blood off of Blanca Enriquez’s head, which Rodriguez seems to have asked to have (responses to the charges against her, ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 69v.) or, elsewhere in the same responses, two shirts and two sheets (ibid., fol. 110r.). 180 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 63v. 181 Testimony of Juana del Bosque, 15 September 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 404r.; testimony of Raphaela Enriquez, 18 July 1642; ibid., fol. 426r.–v.; testimony of Juana Enriquez, 17 March 1643; ibid., fol. 441r.; 22 June 1643, ibid., fol. 441v. Rodriguez claims that she doesn’t recall receiving alms on one occasion from Juana, but from Juana’s sister Beatriz (response to the witnesses, 15 September 1644, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 111v.). 182 Publication of the charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 88v. 183 Testimony of Blanca de Rivera, 18 July 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 410r. 184 AGN Mexico Inq. 392, exp. 2, fol. 2r.

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inquisitional inventory deems many of the items belonging to her to be old.185 Even as free urban Mulatas the Rodriguez women lived in the multicultural American world; hence their possession of “nine small, old pictures of different saints, painted by indians,” an “old turkish woman of black damask,” “three small measures of silk from China,” various skirts, muffs and cloths from Rouen, “a little desk from Japan.”186 The only enumeration of the value of the Rodriguez estate, or at least of some of its items, yields a total of 17 pesos.187 When deposing in connection with the trial of Beatriz Enriquez, Juana del Bosque describes with seeming excitement how her mother Esperanza spent the money she received for the above-mentioned fasts, retrieving, for instance, a little rug that she had had to pawn.188 Their stark financial situation lends motivation to Juana’s exaggeration of the amount her mother received to fast for Blanca Enriquez. It also makes understandable how on two occasions Rodriguez sent one of her grandsons “to request from [ Juana Enriquez] three pesos for her household, and the other time two pesos which she sent her said grandson to request, saying that [ Juana Enriquez] would pay it in sewing. But [ Juana Enriquez] sent to her saying that she did not want it paid in sewing but rather that [Rodriguez] should commend her said mother [ Blanca] to God.”189 In fact, there was more to the relationship between Rodriguez and the other judaizers than mere charity. One unnamed witness deposes that Rodriguez, among other poor Marranos, was given money on different occasions by a judaizer who was having an extramarital affair, so that Rodriguez would fast for the sake of his/her gaining forgiveness for this sin (“por la intençion de la dha persona”).190 According to Rodriguez herself, Ana Xuarez one time sent her two pesos by means of Pedro Tinoco (her cousin, Catalina’s son) so that Rodriguez (and her daughter/s?—the language is plural) would fast on her behalf, “that God should enlighten her [la alumbrasse] because she was about to give Descriptions such as maltratado, quebrado, mui roto, muy viejo abound. AGN Mexico Inq. 392, exp. 2, fol. 3v.–4v. 187 AGN Mexico, Inq. 392, exp. 3, fol. 6r. 188 AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fol. 145r.; repeated in Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 402v. It should be noted that Juana claims that Rodriguez also bought with this money an engraving or plate (lamina) of “our lady of the conception” and a purple christening robe. 189 Testimony of Juana Enriquez, 17 March 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 441r. 190 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 65r.–v. 185 186

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birth.” On another occasion, Rodriguez claims, Blanca Enriquez herself sent her a peso (again, through Pedro Tinoco) to fast “for the peace of her house.”191 It is likely, therefore, that Rodriguez was considered a particularly powerful spiritual presence because of her age, knowledge and close connections to Blanca Enriquez and the fonts of their collective heritage in Seville. The inquisitors themselves are convinced of the high esteem in which she was held. In their summary of the case and sentencing they state that Rodriguez was “held to be a holy Jewess” or “Jewish saint” (“tenida por sta judia”), “was esteemed as a perfect Dogmatizer/perfecta Dogmatiçadora” and they speak of “the respect with which she was treated among the Jews,” indeed pointing to the alms given to Rodriguez as evidence.192 In a circle of White merchants, some of a prominent and even internationally-recognized stature, Esperanza Rodriguez stands out as an anomaly in terms of both economic status and race. It is understandable if Rodriguez had aspirations for a better life and more secure social status. Unusual for a woman and helf-White, she knew how to read and write, having been taught during her year at the convent in Seville.193 When discussing her grandchildren—having been prompted by the inquisitors to do so—some of her strong character and worldliness shines through the usually dry deposing. She offers seeming apologetics when mentioning that her eldest daughter Juana had children by different men, yet notes proudly that the father of Juana’s son was “Don Nicolas de Alarcon, son of the former governor of Soconusco [?]” and the father of her daughter “Hernando Cassado, servant of Don franco de Arevalo Suazo.”194 When relating the story of her youth and arrival

191 Testimony of 21 April 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fols. 469v.– 470r. The use of the term alumbrar here is intriguing. Rodriguez uses it elsewhere in her depositions, but as far as I could see it is rarely mentioned by any of the judaizers associated with the Enriquez clan. Is Xuarez requesting divine illumination in order to teach her future child properly? Enriquez’s request may contain an allusion to the messianic beliefs that some family members attached to certain newborn children, who were hoped/expected to become the new savior, such as the son of Juana Enriquez and Simón Váez Sevilla. 192 AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 120v. 193 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 459v. A note to the inquisitors in her handwriting, rather strong and legible, appears among the trial records (ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 130r.). 194 Testimony of 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458v.–459r. “y aunque la dicha su hija tiene oltro niño y niña son de diferentes padres el hijo es de Don Nicolas de Alarcon hijo del governador que fue de soconuz[. . .].” Juana’s husband was much older; Esperanza says he is 70. At some point he had gone to

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in Mexico to the inquisitors, she points out, as if the social connections rebound to her credit, that she arrived in the Americas (at Cartagena) on a fleet led by “general Juan de Sulas de Valdes nephew of the Señor Inquisitor Don Juan de Llaro y Valdes who was the godfather or companion [compadre] of the said Doña Catalina her mistress. And by her order the said general brought her until Cartagena.”195 When relating her husband’s work experience, she states that one of his employers in Acapulco had been “the third Marquesa of Guadalcaçar.”196 Unlike most of the Mexico City judaizers, especially the younger generation, Rodriguez tends to use in her testimony the term “Jewish” rather than “observer of the Law of Moses,” whether applying it to herself or to others; people teach others “to be Jewish,” before some men are permitted to marry into the family they were “made to be Jewish,” which most likely refers to being taught some of the tradition rather than to being circumcized. Rodriguez seems to regard herself self-consciously as “a Jew,” an upholder of a significant and legitimate tradition rather than a follower of a cowering, subterranean cult. An indication of what all this meant to her can be gleaned from a moralistic tale told one night at her house by Diego Tinoco, who grew up as an open Jew somewhere outside of Spanish territories, when she and her daughters and he had been discussing the Law of Moses: In an ossuary in a certain place where Jews live in freedom, a spanish catholic stayed in order to sleep. he saw rising up two deceased jewesses, discussing how the following day another jewess had to die from a fall. The said catholic, making an inquiry in the city after the said woman and seeing that she had not died that day, returned to sleep in the same place, and turned to see the same jewesses who spoke, saying that the [other] jewess did not have to die from the fall for having given alms to another jew, from which it resulted that the catholic became a jew.197

In this story, related by a group of Marranos to bolster their own faith and practice, Judaism is figured as the embodiment of ancient statements repeated around and on Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year,

Caracas to work in Cocoa, but never returned; they think he is dead (testimony of 21 April 1643; ibid., fol. 471v.). 195 Testimony of 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 460r. I could not confirm the identification of these two figures. 196 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 460r. 197 Publication of the charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 96v.

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and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that charity saves one from death (Proverbs 11:4; BT Bava Batra 10a). The death which charity can stave off is, as the Talmud exhorts, the spiritual punishment meted out in the afterlife. In Tinoco’s tale Judaism comprises the possibility of escape from fate, a path for transcending the inevitable through goodness and good deeds.198 Such sentiments likely had an even more particular resonance for a part Afroiberian and former slave such as Esperanza Rodriguez. When asked regarding her maternal grandparents by the inquisitors, she retorts that “her said mother being a black woman born in Guinea, she therefore has no notice of who her parents were.”199 Another insight into the motivating factors of her devotion to her new religion might be obtained from the statement made to her by her mistress Ynes Lopez and Lopez’s cousins when they tried to convince her around age thirteen that “whoever believes in that which they say [i.e., the Law of Moses] cannot be a slave/no podia ser esclaba.”200 The reasoning Rodriguez relates is not merely an effort at manipulation of a young slave girl. It constitutes a form of cognitive self-liberation, a stance of symbolic marronage wielded by those who so often historically were constrained by external circumstances. The same logic was proferred already by Philo and Paul. It also finds expression within “normative” Jewish circles before and during her own lifetime. Commenting on the commandment to bore a hole into the ear of a Hebrew slave who chooses not to go free after the sixth year (Exod. 21:6; Deut. 15:17), the ancient Mekhilta (parshat Bo) explains that this is a fitting punishment for the ear that heard at Mt. Sinai God announcing, “for the children of Israel are slaves to me and not slaves to slaves [i.e., other

198 A remarkably similar tale is recounted to the same effect by an unnamed modern informant of Middle-Eastern background (Susan Starr Sered, “Food and Holiness: Cooking as a Sacred Act Among Middle-Eastern Jewish Women,” Anthropological Quarterly 61,3 [1988]: 129). I have not investigated the origins of the story, which may have been well-known among Sephardim. 199 Testimony of Esperanza Rodriguez, 7 August 1642; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 458v. Her lack of any siblings, aunts or uncles from her mother’s side might also explain her search for a community among her owners’ family. 200 Testimony of 30 January 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 408, exp. 2, leg. 1, fol. 465r.; repeated in the summary and sentence of the inquisitors, ibid., 419, exp. 6, fol. 117v. Ironically, or suitably, depending on one’s perspective, the young Esperanza responds as one commanded, whether as a young slave girl to her masters or as a servant only of God: “she responded that she would do that which they commanded and would believe in that God of aDonay.”

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people],” yet refuses to act on this epiphany. The fifteenth-century Isaac Abravanel cites this midrash in his commentary to Deut. 15:17. Rabbi Ishac Athias of Amsterdam, a contemporary of Esperanza Rodriguez, concludes his discussion of why Jews use non-Jewish servants with a nod to the same biblical statement: “He commanded you that pagan servants serve you in perpetuity, in order that your own brothers don’t serve you, who are the children of Israel, all elected for My service, and as such it is necessary to be unoccupied [that is, unemployed, available, free to serve divine needs and seek holiness]. And whoever serves such a Master needs not serve humans.”201 How attractive such a rhetoric of overturning must have appeared to someone who managed to escape a fate of servitude through it. The Tragic Sense of Humor of the Cosmos Perhaps it was the women of the Rodriguez/Del Bosque family who resorted to the dealer in cocoa Luis Núñez Pérez, a fellow prisoner listed in the same Relación sumeria, who “not only was a Jew, but rather a superstitious prophet,” who, among other suspect practices, “promised safety from imprisonment to certain Jewesses. He also later assured them “that he hadn’t denounced them another time when he was a prisoner, but rather a man or a Black woman [had]; what was certain was that hardly had he separated from them when they were immediately arrested by this Holy Office.”202 In jail, Rodriguez claims to have suffered from delirium, giving this as the reason in late September 1644 that she did not confess immediately upon her imprisonment. It is not clear whether this illness, as she calls it, is identical with the rational fear she then describes having experienced that if she confessed she would be burned or gravely punished, a fear she says was put in her by the devil.203 In light of what struck the inquisitors as Rodriguez’s willful observance of Jewish practices, they decided to apply “the most serious penalties established by the law, relaxing her person to justice 201 Ishac Athias, Thesoro de preceptos adonde se encierran las joyas de los seys cientos y treze preceptos, que encomendó el señor a su pueblo israel. Con sv declaracion, razon, y dinim, conforme a la verdadera tradicion, recibida de Mosè y enseñada por nuestros sabios de gloriosa memoria (Amsterdam: Semuel ben Israel Soeyro, 5409 [1649]; orig. Venice: Gioanne Caleoni, 1627), 67a. 202 Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, in García, Documentos, 163. The 30 year-old Portuguese-born Pérez was said to be circumcized. 203 Testimony of 24 September 1644, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 114r.

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and to the secular arm,” Inquisition-speak for execution.204 In her later meetings with the inquisitors, however, Rodriguez repeatedly expresses repentance for her judaizing and remorse for having shunned “the Law of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” begging the Inquisition for mercy. Evidently, the inquisitors were convinced of the sincerity of her remorse. According to the 1646 summary of that year’s autos-de-fe, Rodriguez Was imprisoned as a Jewess, observer of the law of Moses, with confiscation of goods. Was negative a long time and, becoming tightfisted [i.e., not giving what was wanted], pretended to be crazy, allowing herself to eat lice; saying and doing actions and words with which she pretended to be taken for such [crazy], like the gathering of her shirts and tearing them up, making a large doll, with her mantilla [a lace scarf ], girdle, stuffed arms and capillos [cloths used in Mexico as a hat or mantilla] on the head; and kissing it, making as if she gave it the breast, saying it was her baby, and that they would look after him and they would not kill him; and other times, hiding it herself deliberately, she implored and cried that he should return; thinking, by this route so beyond reason, to escape from confessing her grave sins and speaking against the many accomplices who she knew kept the said law of Moses.205 Ultimately, becoming more agreeable, she admitted being a Jewess judaizer and begged mercy. Was admitted to reconciliation and sentenced to the auto in the form of a penitent; green candle in the hands; confiscation of goods, which she did not have; formal abjuration; sambenito, and perpetual imprisonment,206 and in public humiliation and in perpetual banishment from all the West Indies and from the city of Seville and town of Madrid, Court of His Majesty.207

Like all those reconciled, Rodriguez was to leave Mexico on the first available fleet to Spain and present herself to the Inquisition in Seville within a month to be assigned the place where her sentence was to 204 Charges against Esperanza Rodriguez, 2 September 1644, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 68v. 205 This behavior supposedly went on for six months (summary of the case and sentencing, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 121v. 206 According to E. William Monter and John Tedeschi, the “compilers of inquisitorial handbooks were unanimous in their opinion that this sentence [of life imprisonment] should be commuted when, after three years, the convicted heretic had shown signs of real contrition” (E. William Monter and John Tedeschi, “Toward a Statistical Profile of the Italian Inquisitions, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in Henningsen and Tedeschi, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, 157, n. 73). Various cases show that such penal theory did not always triumph in practice. 207 Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, in García, Documentos, 155–156. Rodriguez might well be the “mulata loca” whom Francisco de la Cruz describes calling for him and asking “when the news of leaving [the jails] and the pardon arrives,” a question she asked the other slaves as well (Testimony of 19 October 1643; AGN Mexico, Inq. 396/3/6, fol. 535r.).

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be served. A former slave who had sought to improve her lot, she was forbidden now to wear or possess “gold, silver, pearls, nor precious stones, nor silk, camlet [chamelote, a strong, impermeable woven fabric that originally might have been made of camel or goat hair], nor fine cloth, nor to ride on horseback.”208 Rodriguez’s eldest daughter, Juana del Bosque, Was imprisoned as a Jewess, observer of the law of Moses, with confiscation of goods. She confessed to being a Jewess judaizer and begged mercy. Before her imprisonment she agreed with certain Jews and her mother and sisters not to speak against accomplices in the Inquisition, and after imprisonment she communicated in the jails with many of the prisoners, in order to know what they had deposed against her and whether it was contrary to what she had confessed.209

Juana was also reconciled, with a sentence slightly different than her mother’s, a rope around the throat at the auto, only six months imprisonment, and 100 lashes. She too had no goods to be confiscated. Juana’s sister Isabel found herself accused of the same crime of judaizing and likewise begged mercy.210 She herself, of her own will and cause, made application to Esperanza Rodríguez, her mother, that she teach her the law of Moses, having heard said that a certain famous Jewess [ Blanca Enriquez], deceased, had left money so that another Jewess, her daughter [Beatriz Enriquez], would dispense it in order to make abstinence for her soul, taken away from the avarice that is innate in the Hebrews and their descendants. And being a prisoner, she feigned revelation from the Heavens and that she had heard a voice which exhorted her to confess and discharge her conscience, and the revelation was the communications of the jails which she had with other prisoners, under false names, discussing and confirming among themselves about their lawsuits, laying out the way in which they had behaved in them; threatening with notable temerity a certain minister [of the Inquisition?], that she, through the hand of a Jew, would have his face cut.211

Isabel also had no goods to confiscate. She received the same sentence as her sister Juana. María del Bosque, the youngest sister, likewise confessed to the same crime of judaizing, received the same sentence as her older sisters, Summary and sentence, AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 126v. Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, in García, Documentos, 160–1. 210 In the Relación sumeria, Isabel is said to be 24, not 25, and Juana’s aunt, not sister (hermana de padre y madre de la dicha Juana del Bosque; ibid., 160). 211 Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, in García, Documentos, 160. 208 209

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and likewise had no goods to be taken from her.212 Of María we read that She had notable rebelliousness in confessing her sins, and with threats of denouncing her said mother to this Holy Office for what she had seen her do in the observance of Judaism, she obliged her to teach her the law of Moses [!]. Making up, when she judaized, with some famous Jewesses, she and they made mockery and ridicule of the processions of the Catholics, speaking ill of them. And all that she got out of her apostasy and of the monies she received for making fasts of the said law of Moses was but a damask doubloon of China, blue and red, which she brought to the jails, so that, as a witness, it would convince her of her evildoing. And in them [the jails], stubborn and rebellious, she communicated with her sisters and other Jews and Jewesses, using false names and serving as intermediary, giving assurances from some prisoners to others, that they shouldn’t confess, and if they should, it should be about what they had arranged.213

Esperanza Rodriguez delivered the renunciation required of her by the Inquisition, states formally that she understands the proceedings and promises to live as a good Christian. On 29 October 1646, still imprisoned after some 4 years, she penned a note to the inquisitors begging to be allowed to serve out her life imprisonment together with her daughters. The same day, permission is granted, as well as to leave the place of her incarceration on holidays to hear mass with the other penitents.214 In the cases of the Rodriguez and Del Bosque women one sees at work some of the various forms of resistence and mutual cooperation taken up by those caught in the Inquisitions’ net. With perhaps little choice, Rodriguez opted to identify herself as a daughter of her Judeoconverso father, though little surfaces regarding their relationship. It is possible that her mother, Isabel, had already chosen to throw her lot in with crypto-Judaism. These choices may have reflected positive affection for this religious complex or mere efforts to escape a slave status or both. All in all, the story of Esperanza Rodriguez, at least insofar as it can be gleaned from Inquisition documents, offers a glimpse of a rich if idiosyncratic example of how a part-Afroiberian went about forging the kind of “new kinlike ties” that helped remake the “natal network of kin” lost in enslavement.215 212 213 214 215

María is said to be 19, not 20, in the Relación sumeria (ibid., 169). Relacion sumeria del auto particular de fee, in García, Documentos, 169. AGN Mexico, Inq. 419, exp. 6, fol. 130r.–v. The quotes are from Sweet, Recreating Africa, 33.

Swimming the Christian Atlantic

The Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830

Edited by

Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington

and Wim Klooster Clark University

VOLUME 17/2

Swimming the Christian Atlantic Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century

By

Jonathan Schorsch

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: Italian and French Comedians Playing in Farces, 1670 (oil on canvas) by Verio (fl. 1670) (attr. to). Comedie Francaise, Paris, France/Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality/copyright status: Italian/out of copyright. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schorsch, Jonathan, 1963– Swimming the Christian Atlantic : Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the seventeenth century / By Jonathan Schorsch. p. cm. — (The Atlantic world, ISSN 1570-0542 ; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17040-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Church history—17th century. 2. Conversion—Christianity—History. 3. Christian converts. 4. Slaves—Religious life. 5. Montezinos, Antonio de, d. ca. 1650. I. Title. II. Series. BR440.S46 2008 909’.0971246—dc22

2008029086

ISSN 1570-0542 ISBN Set: 978 90 04 17040 7 Volume 17/2: 978 90 04 17253 1 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS VOLUME 17/1 List of Maps and Illustrations ...................................................... Acknowledgements .......................................................................

vii ix

Introduction ..................................................................................

1

Maps ..............................................................................................

19

PART ONE

Chapter One Otherness and Identity: Judeoconversos, Judaism, Afroiberians and Christianity ...................................................

25

Chapter Two The Free and Not so Free, the Christian and Not so Christian ....................................................................................

85

Chapter Three Some Incidents in Cartagena de las Indias ............................. 121 Chapter Four Masters and Slaves under the Stare of the Cross ................... 169 Chapter Five Slaves and the Downtrodden Religion of their Masters ......... 209 Chapter Six Jailed Judaizers and their Jailers’ Servants ............................... 245

vi

contents VOLUME 17/2

Chapter Seven Esperanza Rodriguez: A Mulata Marrana in Mexico City .... 283

PART TWO

Chapter Eight The Racial Imagination in the Writings of (Ex-)Conversos ... 337 Chapter Nine (Re)Reading the Old/New World in the 1640s: The Relación of Antonio de Montezinos ....................................................... 379 Postscript ....................................................................................... 479 Appendix An Unpublished Letter from Antonio de Montezinos ............ 505 Bibliography .................................................................................. 513 Index ............................................................................................. 541

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RACIAL IMAGINATION IN THE WRITINGS OF (EX-)CONVERSOS The seventeenth century marks the historical moment in which Black Africans became a significant presence in Europe and its colonies. By the end of this period slavery constituted a nearly universal foundation of European colonial governance, with the number of Black slaves growing at least tenfold.1 Along with this increased social visibility, treated in the previous chapters, came a heightened literary awareness of Black Africans. The writings of many New Christian authors on the Iberian peninsula or in Spanish and Portuguese colonial territories, as well as Sephardic authors in northwestern Europe, especially those born as New Christians, reflect both the variety of concerns Blacks raised for Europeans and often concerns specific to Judeoconversos and/or Jews. Amerindians also surfaced in these writings, likewise playing a role in the working through of European identity. In this chapter I explore this literary output in light of European overseas expansion and colonialism, and the demographic and cultural upheavals they engendered. The increased visibility of Blacks and Amerindians in Judeoconverso and Sephardic literature, as was true for European literature in general, recapitulates the confusion of social and racial categories wrought by the mongrel world order of the Baroque period. (In this chapter I use the term Blacks to refer to all those designated as Africans and their descendants.) Blacks and Amerindians, generally denigrated as primitive, uncultured and born to servitude and the most menial forms of labor,

1 According to David Eltis, while between 1500 and 1580 some 74,000 Africans were forcibly boarded on boats for transshipment to the Americas, between 1580 and 1640 some 714,000 Africans found themselves in the same dire circumstance (David Eltis, “Atlantic History in Global Perspective,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 [1999]: 151 [table 1]. Robin Blackburn writes that “the really massive importation” of slaves into Spanish America began only after 1595. Between then and 1640 some 268,600 slaves were officially brought over, the actual number probably far higher (Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 [London: Verso, 1997], 140).

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troubled a social system increasingly defined by Whiteness. As I hope to show, Converso and Sephardic authors frequently shared the anti-Black discourse now flowing between European national cultures. In addition, Conversos and Jews also found Blacks useful as a rhetorical topos through which Jewish self-identity under the new stars of colonialism could be worked out. Many Sephardim in particular felt it necessary to argue their own Whiteness in order to counter their own tenuous position as persecuted or marginalized religious and cultural Others. Attitudes toward Amerindians wavered between denigrating portraits of barbarians and romanticizing depictions of noble pastorals. Herein I investigate the racial imagination coursing through the mostly Atlantic-world writings of (former) Conversos such as Menasseh ben Israel (or Manoel Soeiro), Josef Penso de la Vega (Córdoba, Livorno, Amsterdam, Hamburg; 1650?–1692 or 1693), Abraham (Diego) Gómez Silveira (Castille, Portugal, Amsterdam; ca. 1645–1720), David (or Felix) del Valle Saldaña or Saldanha (Badajoz, Amsterdam; 1699?–1755), Daniel Levi (aka Miguel) de Barrios (Montilla, Italy, Tobago, Amsterdam; 1635–1701); those whose religious identity continued to fluctuate, such as Antonio Enríquez Gómez (Cuenca, Madrid, France, Seville; 1600–1663); and those whose religious identity remains a mystery, such as Miguel da Silveira (1576–1636?). I have left the authors’ Jewishness as an open question, though in some cases the answers are for the most part known from the growing body of literature treating (ex-)Converso writers. Rather than fixate on an impossible definition of Jewishness based on biographical criteria, I argue that despite some ‘Jewish’ rhetorical particularities in these writings, it is precisely the fluidity of the racial imagination between disparate European sub-cultures that one finds. Since the Portuguese and Spanish had a headstart of over a century of direct experience with Black and Amerindian populations, these Sephardic authors’ firm self-positioning within Iberian culture must be kept in mind throughout.2

2 Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilizations, 2000), especially ch. 6; Henry Méchoulan, “The Importance of Hispanicity in Jewish Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” In Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews Between Cultures (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 353–372; idem, introductory essay in Hispanidad y Judaismo en Tiempos de Espinoza: estudio y edicion anotada de La Certeza del Camino de Abraham Pereyra, Amsterdam, 1666 (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1987); M.J. Benardete, Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews (New York, 1953).

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To be clear, I am making no claims about a distinct Judeoconverso discourse of hidden significations.3 There is no such a thing as ‘Converso discourse’ if one is seeking a unified, homogeneous field of textual production.4 Most obviously, some of the authors to be discussed wrote as open Jews, in Hebrew, in a style bejeweled with biblical or rabbinic references, while others wrote as Catholics, in Spanish or Portuguese, fully in the Baroque mode of the general literature, and yet other writers comingled the two modes. What these writers have in common is belonging, if only sociologically, to a group persistently labeled as descending from (converted) Jews. While some unique characteristics might be found in their works regarding certain topics of primary significance vis à vis Converso identity, although even this is doubtful, the variety of stances taken by (ex-)Conversos makes far less likely the existence of a consistent approach toward subjects ancilliary to the question of Converso identity. Still, it is clear that the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who lived in Amsterdam, Seville or Lisbon produced a body of literature far more cosmopolitan and up-to-date than, for instance, the melancholic, introspective pastoral works or Byzantine novels of sixteenth-century (former) Conversos who remained on Iberian soil or fled eastward, to Italy. The former body of literature, containing almost every genre then current (epic, lyric, drama, prose, pastoral, satire, etc.), reflects all the developments of an Atlantic world commercial system and culture, including an increased textual prominence of Blacks. The views of Africans and Amerindians proffered by Conversos and Sephardim parallel the latters’ attempts to work out their own identity. Their writings frequently serve to situate the writers and their people, the Judeoconversos or Jews, in a favorable light as White Iberians, as members of the world’s most advanced civilization, White Christian

See Constance Hubbard Rose, Alonso Núñez de Reinoso: The Lament of a SixteenthCentury Exile (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971); José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Colbert I. Nepaulsingh, Apples of Gold in Filigrees of Silver: Jewish Writing in the Eye of the Spanish Inquisition (New York/London: Holmes & Meier, 1995); Gregory B. Kaplan, The Evolution of Converso Literature: The Writings of the Converted Jews of Medieval Spain (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002). 4 It is worth pointing out that scholars such as Guillermo Díaz-Plaja see in some of these Converso authors the quintessential fulfillment of the aesthetic-philosophical aspirations of the “Jewish” Baroque: a pessimistic devaluation of all human activities, the picaresque as a philosophy of desperation, covert or overt attacks on classical Iberian values (Espíritu del Barroco, 91–2). 3

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Europe. Not surprisingly, geography and comparative ethnography surface repeatedly in Converso and Sephardic literature. Iosepho (or Jacob or Francisco) de Caceres, in a translation of a prose work describing the seven days of the creation of the world, names many of the world’s rivers when it comes to the third day, including the Nile, the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, the Eufrates, the Gange, and even the Parana, Amazon and Marañon rivers of Brazil, a list reflective of the recent expansion of the known world “from Iceland to Guinea.”5 Barrios penned two dedicatory poems replete with geographic and ethnographic descriptions for the Spanish translation of a Dutch book on pirates and Spanish naval experience in the Americas, as well as a verse “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico y de America.”6 Throughout the works of Antonio Enríquez Gómez, themes, images, metaphors and action are grounded in things American (among other mentions: Nicaragua, Mexico, Quito).7 Menasseh ben Israel is known to have contributed to the massive Spanish Atlas of Janssonius published between 1653 and 1656.8 Among the many figures to whom Barrios devoted poems in his Coro de las musas appears the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu, whose world atlas had already become a standard text.9 Indeed, Barrios and several other Sephardim collaborated in producing a Spanish version of Blaeu’s atlas, a sign of the Amsterdam Sephardic elite’s abiding interest in the geography of ethnicities and states, this

Iosepho de Caceres, Los siete dias de la semana, sobre la criacion del mundo (Amsterdam: Alberto Boumeester, 1613), 57v, 153v. This work is a translation of Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas, Sepmaine ou Création du monde (1578). 6 “Epigrama” and “Armonico Epilogo: Al Traductor,” in A.O. Exquemelin, Piratas de la America y luz a la defensa de las costas de Indias Occidentales (Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la Unesco, 1963 [orig. 1678]). Barrios had sailed in 1659 with a group of Jews from Leghorn to settle on the island of Tobago in the Caribbean. After a few years he left for Europe. 7 Enríquez Gómez is said to have had business interests in Perú (Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Sonetos, romances y otros poemas, ed. Antonio Lázaro [Cuenca: Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Cuenca, 1992], 225, n. 10); Glen F. Dille, Antonio Enríquez Gómez [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988], 19). 8 Johannes Janssonius, Nuevo atlas o theatro de todo el mundo de Juan Janssonio (Amsterdam, 1653–). Harm den Boer reports that the copies at the University of Amsterdam library do not seem to contain any reference at all to Ben Israel, so that “only a comparison with the Dutch or French edition could reveal” his contributions (personal communication; May 2007). 9 “Elogio L. [50],” Coro de las musas dirigido al excelentissimo Señor Don Francisco de Melo, Cavallero de la Orden de Cristo, [. . .] su Embaxador Extraordinario à la magestad de la Gran Bretaña (Brussels: Baltazar Vivien, 1672), 224. 5

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elite’s preparedness to produce such knowledge and the commercial/ political attractiveness of doing so.10 Many of these writers dedicate poems to noblemen and women, monarchs of various European countries. Some of these authors obviously write as Christians, but even those who produce attacks on the Iberian inquisitions and Iberian anti-Jewish discourse might also elsewhere praise the very same governments and cultures.11 When the Poles defeated

10 Nuevo Atlas del reyno de Inglaterra (Amsterdam, printed after 1672); Harm den Boer and Jonathan I. Israel, “William III and the Glorious Revolution in the Eyes of Amsterdam Sephardi Writers: The Reactions of Miguel de Barrios, Joseph Penso de la Vega, and Manuel de Leão,” The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 447. According to Harm den Boer, the Spanish Blaeu presents a very complex bibliographical puzzle. The series was produced between 1659 and 1672, but the work was interrupted by a fire at Blaeu’s print house in 1672 and is supposed to have stopped. The extant 2 or 3 editions of the 10 volumes bear numerous inconsistencies. The volume on England is a good example of the Sephardic contribution: the one printed in 1672 contains poems by Barrios and Manuel de Pina, among others, and continuous etymological and erudite digressions by Barrios in which he uses the Hebrew language and Biblical history to explain the ancient history of Britain. The volume on Spain has “some slightly apologetic references to Jews, but no continuous use of this kind of discourse on the Jewish medieval past.” Some other volumes have similar, though not as many digressions by Barrios and company. In the earlier volumes “one finds digressions (visible through the use of italics or brackets), wherein an anonymous translator makes many erudite and above all moral commentaries, which are a little bit far fetched. These do not seem to reveal Jewish sources, but more likely Spanish and Latin moral treatises.” Finally, the remaining copies of Blaeu, some extremely rare, are distributed over 54 libaries worldwide; the volumes are so monumental and contain such large maps that getting microfiches or films is not easy (personal communication; May 2007). A study of the Sephardic contributions to these seminal European atlases remains an important desideratum. 11 Iosepho (or Jacob or Francisco) de Caceres’s Visión deleitable y sumario de todas las ciencias (Frankfurt, 1623; Amsterdam, 1663), is dedicated to “the most serene Lord Don Emanuel, prince of Portugal.” Writing under his pen name Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo, Enríquez Gómez writes a historical play celebrating King Fernando III (d. 1252), full of patriotic aspersions against the infidel Moors and heretical Albigensians (The Perfect King. El rey más perfeto, Critical ed., trans. and Commentary by Michael McGaha [Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1991]. Barrios’ early geneological homage to one Spanish nobleman revels in tributes to various relatives’ exploits against Muslims (Corte real genealogica, y panegirica. Al excelentissimo Señor Don Francisco de Mora y Corte Real, Marques de Castel Rodrigo [. . .] [N.p., n.d., bound with Sol de la vida (Brussels: Jacob van Velsen, 1673)]. In a poem celebrating an important Portuguese military victory of 1663 and dedicated to the Count of Villaflor, Barrios rehearses the history of Portuguese military triumphs and lauds “the Portuguese paradise” (“Palacio de la sabiduria, y panegirico al Excelentissimo Señor Don Sancho Manuel, Conde de Villaflor &c.,” in Aplauzos academicos e rellaçaõ do felice successo da celebre victoria do Ameixial. Oferecidos ao excelentissimo Senhor Dom Sancho Manoel Conde de Villaflor, Pello Secretario da Academia dos Generosos [de Lisboa], e Academico Ambicioso [Amsterdam: En Casa de Jacob van Velsen, 1673], 221, 226). In his Coro de las musas, Barrios devotes a poem to “undefeated

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the Turks at Vienna in 1683, several authors immediately penned laudatory works in honor of this triumph over expansionist Muslim designs.12 The panegyric composed by Penso de la Vega, Los triumphos del águyla y eclypses de la luna, ends with applause offered in response to this victory of Christendom by “Vienna, Poland, Europe.”13 In many of their writings these authors praise the expansionist colonialism and commercialism of various European powers.14

Lusitania” (“Terpsicore, Imperio De la invicta Lusitania. Metro XX,” 164). The New Christian Manoel Thomas (1585?-1665) dedicated a poem to the Portuguese king João IV (Vnião sacramental, offerecida a El Rey Nosso Senhor Dom Ioam Quarto do Nome, &Xviij entre os Reys Portuguezes [Rouen: Laurens Maurry, 1650]). 12 Miguel de Barrios, Panegírico al Juan Tercero, Rey de Polonia (Amsterdam, 1683); idem, Epístola y panegírico al ínclito y victorioso monarcha de Polonia Ivan Tercero (Amsterdam, 1684); Josef Penso de la Vega, Los triumphos del águyla y eclypses de la luna (Amsterdam, 1683). 13 Tryumphos del Aguyla, 126. 14 Antonio Enríquez Gómez/Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo wrote a comic play concerning the conquest of Mexico, showing the pagan gods vainly opposing the introduction of Christianity (La conquista de México [pub. 1668]). Manoel Thomas composed a lengthy poetic tribute to Portuguese domination overseas, particularly on Madeira. The epic poem is studded with references to the defeat of the Moors and dedicated to one of Madeira’s leaders (Thomas, Manoel, Insulana [Amberes (Antwerp): Ioam Meursio, 1635]. In one of the dedicatory poems written by Captain (of the Spanish army) Don Miguel de Barrios for Exquemelin’s book on pirates and Spanish naval experience in the Americas he thanks the authors in the name of Spain, while his poetic description of Atlantic geography offers an extended homage to the “angelic reign” of the Spanish king—slavery or mistreatment of Indians is never mentioned (Exquemelin, Piratas de la America [orig. 1678], 47, 55). The fifteenth book of the Judeoconverso Miguel da Silveira’s epic poem, El Macabeo, opens with an obviously anachronistic and narratively irrelevant tribute to Europe, many of whose stanzas limn the glories of Portugal, including the North African military campaigns and overseas expansion which enlarged the Portuguese empire to “the dark (adustos) ends of Ethiopia” (Miguel da Silveira, El Macabeo: poema heroico [Naples: Egidio Longo, 1638], bk. 15, stanzas 6–25, quote from stanza 25). Penso de la Vega lauds England’s William III for his military triumphs over recalcitrant Ireland, while Barrios compliments Charles II for similar victories, astutely linking the Irish campaigns with those in the Indies (Retrato de la prudencia y simulacro del valor que en obsequioso panegìrico consagra al augusta Monarcha Guillermo Tercero rey de la Gran Bretaña [Amsterdam: Joan Bus, 1690], 92, 104, 114–15; “Panegirico a las inclitas, y soberanas magestades de la Gran Bretaña, Carlos segundo Y Doña Caterina de Portugal,” Coro de las musas, 21). A few pages later Barrios trumpets “Albion Planetary Regent,” who “with such lofty valor [and] restless navy” has defeated “the American, Libyan and Asian” (ibid., 23). Barrios uses Columbus as an exemplary figure several times, and holds up the achievements of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral as feathers in the cap of Portuguese expansion (Columbus: in “Prologo/Nueva Admiracion, del Capitan D. Miguel de Barrios, en elogio del Author,” Don Josseph de la Vega, Rumbos peligrosos, por donde navega con titulo de novelas, la çosebrantes nave de la temeridad temiendo los peligrosos escollos de la censura surca este tempestuoso mar [Amberes (Antwerp), 1683], 65; Columbus and Da Gama: “Glossa Musea,” Coro de las musas, unpag.; “Imperio De la invicta Lusitania. Metro XX,” ibid., 168). Eulogizing William IV, Prince of Orange and Nassau, Saldaña praises him for “his

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Textual Africans Given the thorough Iberian identity of even openly Jewish authors, it is not surprising that they shared the mostly negative general perception of Blacks and Mulatos. In the writing (ex-)Conversos produced, Africans figure both in their native setting and as the increasingly sole source of menial and domestic laborers for Europeans at home and abroad. Their portrayal shows how useful a topos (ex-)Conversos found them when teasing out issues of collective self-identity. Writers frequently note or make use of the social presence of Blacks, itself a sign of their overdetermined meaning for Europeans. Black characters seemingly cannot appear in a neutral fashion. Particularly with regard to Blacks in Europe, mostly known as slaves or servants, even openly Jewish writers differed insignificantly from other Spanish and Portuguese authors.15 Blacks almost always raise for their authors either the issue of slavery and the slave trade, both positively and negatively, race, as a signifier of the lower nature/culture of sub-Saharan Africa, or class, as a population of lackeys whose background muddies the assumed (and desired) Whiteness of proper society. None of this should appear surprising. Critiques of the methods that built the Spanish and Portuguese empires were few and far between even from Catholics. Conversos still living within this orbit, even if they condemned their own treatment, seem to have overwhelmingly accepted the premises of the Eurocentric caste system. This was particularly so for those who profited from the opportunities opened up by empire. deserved superior fame/[he] composed the commerce of the east” (“Poema Fúnebre del Glorioso Guillermo Cuarto, Príncipe de Orange y Nasao” [1751], in David del Valle Saldaña, El Afrodiseo y otras obras jocosas y festivas, ed. Kenneth Brown and Harm den Boer [Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura, 1997], 241). Barrios, who wrote against the terrors of the Inquisition, goes so far as to praise the success of the Spanish in missionizing to the pagans who inhabit their territories (“Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico y de America,” in Exquemelin, Piratas de la América, 58). 15 For the general discourse see Baltasar Fra Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1995); Moses Etuah Panford, Jr., La figura del negro en cuatro comedias barrocas (PhD Dissertation, Temple University, 1993); Luis de Albuquerque, et al. (eds.), O Confronto do olhar: o encontro dos povos na época das navegações portuguesas, séculos XV e XVI (Lisbon: Caminho, 1991); José Ramos Tinhorão, Os Negros em Portugal: Uma presença silenciosa (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1988), 185–225, 255–295; Howard M. Jason, “The Negro in Spanish Literature to the End of the Siglo de Oro,” in Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Miriam DeCosta (Port Washington, NY: National University Press/Kennikat Press, 1977); Frida Weber de Kurlat, “Sobre el negro como tipo cómico en el teatro español del siglo XVI,” Romance Philology 17 (1963/1964).

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The propagandistic advertisement for colonial possibilities (for Whites) by the New Christian Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil (1618), makes a perfect example.16 Though more nuanced than many of the views proferred in literary works from the metropole, the proto social-scientific text’s depictions of Africans and Amerindians remain well within the range of contemporary stereotypes. At one point the author’s seeming stand-in, the interlocutor named Brandônio, laments the fact that the “men who work the [gold] mines [in São Vicente Captaincy], by importing a stock of slaves and other necessary things, will not trouble to do so. And for this reason the mines are almost deserted.”17 Fernandes Brandão’s interlocutors also speculate at length about the causes of human Blackness, trying to distinguish between the Black Africans and Brazil’s “brown” natives. His characters proffer mostly environmental causes, but Brandônio asserts that the Africans of the so-called torrid zone who developed black skin and kinky hair were “the descendants of the wicked Ham and his son Canaan.”18 At the same time, the generic status of the Dialogues, which put it into a different category than fiction or poetry, and, even more importantly, the author’s extensive personal experience with African slaves, on occasion yield a more realistic depiction. At one point, for instance, he has Brandônio praise a slave of his who “used to make an ingenious trap” to catch monkeys and he is well aware that Brazilian “farmers live on what the[ir] slaves raise.”19 Recognition of this ‘human tool’ suffused many of the literary works from Europe, as well, where Blacks are wielded as a metaphor for the most servile forms of labor. In an early riddle poem (probably from 1673), Barrios writes: My baron is in Granada when he served, like a Black woman (negra), one who is an Egyptian King [. . . .].20

16 Twice denounced to the Inquisition, and cleared, Fernandes Brandão does not appear to have had any Jewish leanings. 17 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogue of the Great Things of Brazil, 48; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 44. 18 Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 90–6; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 51–60. 19 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 276, 306; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 205, 213. I cite a few of this author’s narratives concerning slaves in chapter 5. 20 “Enigma dirigiendose al Sr. Don Manuel de Pinto y Ribera,” unpaginated, bound with Sol de la vida.

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‘Being treated like a Black’ constitutes a recurring expression that presumes the by-then common equivalence of ‘Black’ and ‘slave.’21 In a play of Enríquez Gómez, set in imperial Rome, a character protests against his patron: [. . .] Give me to the devil all together in one piece, and don’t command me to steal anything except women of Guinea, daughters of the Congo, and Mandinga; which are sold, and bought. dame al diablo todo junto en una pieza, i no me mandes robar sino damas de Guinea, hijas de Congo, i Mandinga; que se venden, i se mercan.22

Despite the play’s historical setting, Enríquez Gómez does not even attempt to use classical names for these African peoples, giving instead contemporary terms. Though Enríquez Gómez criticizes the slave trade from time to time (a theme to which I will return), here appears an acceptance—at least in the view of the character speaking—of the kidnapping of certain kinds of people, with perhaps only a covert authorial critique of such a view. For many (ex-)Converso authors, the characteristics of Blacks frequently connect them to the most negative of stereotypes. Based on classical and medieval precedents, the predominant ramification of 21 Barrios: “Muy a lo señor no pagan/lo que deben sus luceros,/miren si en esto son primos,/tratándose como negros” (“A la Fábula de Vulcano y Venus. Romance,” in Barrios, Las fábulas mitológicas: Flor de Apolo, ed. Francisco J. Sedeño Rodríguez [Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 1996], 110); see also Barrios’s “Al matrimonio de Don Alonso Penso y Doña Leonor Passariño (de Brabante),” Coro de las musas, 30 and 338. In his burlesque retelling of the nativity scene, Abraham Gómez Silveira alludes in similar fashion to the traditionally Black magus Baltasar: “con tres reyes se vio puesto a primera,/mas con terribles modos/como a unos negros los trataba a todos” (“Fábula burlesca de Jesucristo,” in Kenneth Brown and Harm den Boer, El barroco sefardí Abraham Gómez Silveira: Arévalo, prov. de Ávila, Castilla 1656—Amsterdam 1741: Estudio preliminar, obras líricas, vejámenes en prosa y verso y documentación personal [Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2000], 104). Kate Lowe cites Count Duke Olivares of Portugal telling Felipe II of Spain that Pope Sixtus V treated the English Cardinal Willian Allen “like a black man” in 1588 (“Introduction: The Black African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 9). 22 Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Amor con vista, i cordura. Comedia famosa (Seville: Imprenta Real, 1731[?]), 29 (Act 3).

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human Blackness tends to be strangeness or ugliness, images repeatedly invoked: “as black as coal,” “as black as jet.” One of the stories in Penso de la Vega’s cortesanal novel Rumbos peligrosos (1683) involves four knights competing for women and honors in a courtly tournament set in Spain. Each knight chooses a color and explains his choice in typically florid style. The knight who chooses black provides a veritable lexicon of contemporary meanings, which pertain both to the color in the abstract and to those whose skin bears it: black is nocturnal, funereal; “There is no color [other than black] that achieves the impossibility of changing into another [. . .] only black [is] made an impregnable rock toward the assaults of the most speculative curiosity; valiant, [it] defends itself, incontrastable, resists and constant, battles: so I cannot adorn myself with a more mysterious color”; “the Lover professes to be a Slave of his Lady, thus always desires to serve her like a slave: therefore the lover dons the Color of the slave”; “some opine that [black] is not a color, I defend a color that is nothing, to show that I am nothing.”23 Penso de la Vega’s courtly contest and the different colors of the four knights (white, black, green and purple) form a likely allusion to the polyglot new world created by European overseas expansion, establishing an avowedly colonial context. Metaphors reinforce this theme: “Colonies of the Monarchy of her beauty,” goes part of one Lady’s portrayal, while another Lady is “called a faulty Map, on which the numbers do not conform to the pictures, and which with disproportionate lines connects America with Asia, and Africa with Europe” (241, 261–62). The tourney’s culmination is met with the following explicitly political reinvigoration: “The Nobles pondered the favorable star of that State, in having merited such an undefeated Hero as King, who, uniting the scientific and the generous, would be capable of defending with Judgment that which he should acquire by the sword. And finally the People was assured with deferential vassalage that they had a King who would know how to keep them peaceful, venerated and happy, preserving like a Sage their estates, augmenting like one intrepid their possessions, and defending like one benign, like a Pastor and like a Father, their children, their riches and their lives” (295). Needless to say, victory belongs to the white knight.

23 De la Vega, “Luchas de ingenio, Y desafios de Amor,” Rumbos peligrosos, 179, 178, 180, 181.

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In one play of Enríquez Gómez, a “barbarian of Ethiopia” appears in one character’s list of uncivilized and oppositional peoples and forces.24 In another of his plays a wealthy household is described: “In this house there are six Blacks.” “More than in all of Hell,” responds someone, with a nod to the common Christian portrayal of demons as Blacks.25 Elsewhere Enríquez Gómez has a character add insult to a complaint about an ill-fated marriage by literalizing his metaphor: “this evil (negro) love, this black, wishes to blind women and give sight to men.”26 Alluding to various traditions in one mythological poem, Barrios assumes the Blackness of the accursed biblical Æam, or at least links this with the Blackness of (certain?) Africans: The Hebrews call me Cham, which is heat, [. . . .] From envy the sun browns my face, through which event many whom I dominate in Lybia are, like its fate, black. Cham los Hebreos me nombran, que es calor, [. . . .] Tuestame de embidia el Sol la cara, por el sucesso que quantos domino en Lybia, son como su suerte negros.27

Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Fernan Mendez Pinto. Comedia Famosa en dos Partes, ed. Louise G. Cohen, Francis M. Rogers and Constance H. Rose (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 131. 25 “Contra el amor no ay engaños,” in Academias morales de las musas. Dirigidas a Don Iuan de Goyeneche, syndico de la Santa Provincia de Burgos, del orden de nuestro padre San Francisco, y administrador de los puertos secos de Castilla (Madrid: Juan Garcia Infançon, 1690 [orig. 1642]), 282. The line’s other, opposite, reading—that few Blacks are sent to hell for punishment for their sins—makes little sense in the original context. 26 El siglo pitagórico y vida de don Gregorio Guadaña, critical ed. with intro. and notes by Charles Amiel (Paris: Centre de recherches d’histoire et de philologie da la IVe Section de l’Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes à la Sorbonne/Ediciones Hispanoamericanas, 1977 [orig. pub. 1644]), 191. 27 “Euterpe, Musa pastoril. Canta. Çampoña I. De Pan y Siringa,” Coro de las musas, 251. On Æam and Blackness, see Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, ch. 6; David M. Goldenberg, “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism?” Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 54, no. 1 ( January 1997): 103–42. 24

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Blacks become particularly useful when these authors write in the burlesque mode. Here the various attributes of Blacks which serve as targets for mockery surface with full vigor. One satirical poem in Barrios’ collection, Flor de Apolo, recounts a mocking tale about a Mulato musician of Seville.28 It should be noted that due to the numerous pagan references within it Flor de Apolo had been banned even before its publication by the Rabbi of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, Ishac Aboab da Fonseca. A satiric verse retelling of the nativity by another (ex-)Converso author, apparently popular among former Conversos—a manuscript copy with appreciative comments sits in Amsterdam’s Ets Haim library—includes a depiction of Indians and Blacks performing their strange dances, Blacks and peasants tussling, and the three kings, “of the color which the village papier-maché giants [made for festivals and processions] usually are”; in other words, a nativity in a raciallyconscious picaresque mode.29 Though never published, one of the novelas Penso de la Vega had planned to include in his Rumbos peligrosos is El negro amor y el negro amado (“Evil love and the Evil/Black Lover”). The bad (negro) love and lover here may have been more than a moral characterization. Given that this was to have been a burlesque piece (burlesca), the title may indeed hint at Penso de la Vega’s taking up of the medieval literary topos of the Black lover. Several other works by (ex-)Conversos play on the already stereotypical sexual prowess or danger of Black men. A poem in Saldaña’s cycle, El afrodiseo, portrays one Don Diego, a knight who chases women and wealth, whose designs focus in on the rich and beautiful Doña Beatriz. Before the wedding, however, he discovers her leaving her bath one night for “a shameful place,” where she meets her lover, “a Black as dark as coal.” Distraught only because his plans threaten to unravel, Diego uses Beatriz’s infidelity in order to bind her to him emotionally after the proverbial exchange of tears and promises. The Black lover dies and Beatriz, no less calculating than Diego, decides to polish her reputation in order to move up in the world. But Diego will have none of it, writing to her: “I was torn away from your visage 28 “Satira,” in Flor de Apolo. Dirigida al Ilustrissimo Señor D. Antonio Fernandez de Cordova [. . .] (Brussels: Baltzar Vivien, 1665), 180–181. See also the description of a mulatazo of Medellín in Enríquez Gómez, La Torre de Babilonia, primera parte. Dedicada al Excelentissimo señor don Luis de Alongny, Marquez de Rochefort [. . .] (Ruan: Laurens Maurry, 1649), 21. 29 “Quintillas de Don Gerónimo Cáncer, al Nacimiento,” reprinted in Brown and Den Boer, El Barroco Sefardí, 278–280.

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[. . .]/and this is the reason you remain in good stead [quedes en blanco]/ but finally your Black died.” Diego leaves, affirming “that a woman with discretion is a big problem,” and that “painful tasks [await] one who trusts women.”30 Don Diego’s “black” intentions and deeds are matched by those of Doña Beatriz, the latter not coincidentally made literal in her Black lover. Saldaña reinforces this through his punning linkage between the romantic dishonesty so agreeable to Don Diego (quedar en blanco), which would not burden him with the need for true affection and loyalty, and the inconvenient death of her Black paramour. Less certain is the status of this Black and his own intentions, as he does not appear as a subject in his own right, but only as an (unwilling?) object of sexual play. Beyond the black-white wordplays so popular among Baroque authors, Beatriz’s Black lover embodies the uncertainty of the feminine for men, the very Otherness of women. Black women almost always appear as sexualized objects. Barrios finds room in one mythological tribute poem for “two beauties of Angola.”31 Nymphs seem to bloom in Africa.32 Saldaña’s collection of poems, El afrodiseo, contains two poems describing the physical and sensual charms Black women. The Afrodiseo, in which Saldaña makes use of Black characters rather frequently, may constitute a rather unique text among Sephardic writings. As can be gleaned from its title, many of the poems within are explicitly erotic, but also irreverent, even bawdy. One poem treats a girl passing for a virgin, another a hysterical woman. One sonnet addresses “a large penis” and the next poem “a very large penis.” Two poems are devoted to different women’s breasts (all white as snow), while other poems are devoted to other body parts of women. Here are the two poems devoted to Black women: To a Beautiful Black Woman Among other Black Women O, black fare divided into flavors! each one filled with astonishments, since it has, through fragrances given off, horrors which irk the eyes [?]; among those of the group are some preferred which form a Black woman, a little White one;

“Novela poética: Lo que son mujeres. Parte 1a,” El Afrodiseo, 125–129. “Al matrimonio de Don Alonso Penso y Doña Leonor Passariño (de Brabante),” Coro de las musas, 338. 32 Enríquez Gómez, Torre de Babilonia, 12: “Para besote las manos,/aya su risa de Angola.” 30 31

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chapter eight O, who could climb a mountain so dark! will mount it [her] step by pleasurable step without tiring! ¡O, negro rancho en gustos divididos! que cada cual asombros predomina, pues tiene por efluvios desprendidos horrores que a los ojos a mohína; en los del rancho hay unos preferidos que forman a una negra, blanquecina; ¡O, quién subiera a monte tan moreno! ¡sin cansar lo montara bueno a bueno!33 To Another Black Woman, Bathing Who would not be strongly heated up (even suffering a chill from rickets), discovering in a transparent bath Venus converted into black jet? There is no power, no impertinent disdain, that could dispatch me from this pleasant site, for here today a certain instinct moves me to forsake the white wine for the colored. ¿A quién no lo calienta fuertemente (aunque un frío padezca que la rache) descubriendo en un baño transparente a Venus convertida en azabache? No habrá rigor, desdén impertinente, que del sitio agradable me despache, pues hoy aquí me mueve cierto instinto dejar el vino blanco por el tinto.34

The obvious attraction exerted by these women does not come without an equally obvious awareness of the perceived somatic and aesthetic problems of Blacks. Their looks annoy the eyes, they smell strongly, the sight of them inspires disdain. Yet it is their very Blackness, their exotic beauty, that lures in the author. Elsewhere one finds these ambivalences expressed even more forthrightly. Barrios produces several poems that revolve around the ambiva-

“A una negra bonita entre otras negras. Octava,” El Afrodiseo, 83 (poem 34). “A otra negra, bañándose. Octava,” El Afrodiseo, 84 (poem 35). The nonJudeoconverso (?) author João Cardoso da Costa, Musa Pueril (Lisbon: Oficina de Miguel Rodrigues, 1736), also dedicated two poems to Black women; they are reproduced in Maria do Rosário Pimentel, “A escrava negra numa sociedade de senhores brancos,” in Rosto feminino da expansão portuguesa, 1:565–6. 33

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lent attractiveness of Black women.35 In one from a 1665 publication, Barrios’s scene recreates the vicissitudes faced by domestic servants, possibly drawn on his experience in Sephardic Amsterdam, where many elite households employed Blacks.36 Burlesque Surrounded by plates and bowls, in her filthy hand a scourer, the absences [of members of the household] setting her on heel37 wiggling at the same time bed and knees, shirttails wet with dirty water, cleaning her face with a rag, sweating filthily with the enormous work, unable to do it except by squatting; My Morena scrubbed in the kitchen, when to the sound of plates I arrived not at all unhappy to find her alone; And at her telling me, “you come at a good time,” since that posture helped her, a plume departed from her ass. Rodeada de platos y escudillas en su mugrienta mano un estropajo, pegadas las ausencias al çancajo meneando à la par lecho y rudillas, Mojada en agua sucia las faldillas, limpiandose la faz con un andrajo, sudando mugre con el grantrabajo de no poder estar si no en cuclillas: Fregava en la cozina mi Morena, quando al son de los platos yo llegava no poco alegre por hallarla sola; Y al dezirme vengays en hora buena, como aquella postura la ayudava se le saliò una pluma de la cola.38

35 See, for instance, his “Pintura. Encareze la fealdad de una negra interessable,” Flor de Apolo, 136–137. This poem is not without an empathetic eye toward the unenviable situation of Clara, its young Black slave girl. 36 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, ch. 3. Of course, by the end of the seventeenth century, many elite non-Jewish families employed Africans or their descendants. Though rampant in the Dutch colonies, slave-holding was ostensibly illegal in The Netherlands itself. 37 The phrase las ausencia a alguno has an implied sexual meaning, since it refers to staying at home while one’s spouse is away. 38 “Soneto XLVII, Burlesco,” Flor de Apolo (1665), 239.

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In this case, the poet’s sexual desires for ‘his Morena’ seem to be frustrated only by her passing gas. Still, the scatology should not distract one from the unmistakable depiction of the allures which the ‘lowly’ and exotic maid evidently holds for her bourgeois master. Indeed, the satiric climax both interrupts and confirms such top-down desires.39 Again, Black sexual attractiveness and repugnance go hand in hand. On occasion Blacks receive sympathetic treatment. In his Vida de Don Gregorio Guadaña, Enríquez Gómez presents a scene in which the main character, while traveling near Cuenca, is hosted by a man who sets up a triangular table covered with some cloths from “Ethiopia.” One of the group of guests can only believe that his hosts had acquired these by having “despoiled some black.”40 Fernandes Brandão, polemicizing as a Portuguese settler in Brazil against the supposedly greater Spanish conquests, argues that in the West Indies and Perú the Castilians defeated “a weak and timorous people, whose hands were always tied against their own defense, for they lacked both the weapons and the will to resist,” while the Portuguese managed to conquer “those kingdoms of Angola and the Congo; the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé,” which regions contained by implication stronger and more valiant enemies.41 But Blacks rarely appear as purely positive figures. Penso de la Vega, describing the loyal ardor of one lover, invokes the passionate loyalty of one “Ethiopian” people, the Manucodíatas, whose soldiers willingly kill themselves at the death of their king.42 This image of course bears a double meaning: of ultimate faithfulness, on the one hand, but also of primitive, fanatical self-immolation. The Black anti-hero Muley in the play of Zárate y Castronovo, Las misas de San Vicente Ferrer, often attributed to Enríquez Gómez, presents a similarly ambivalent portrait. Muley, an enslaved Congolese, falls in love with a White woman, but the relationship cannot come to fruition due to, among other factors, his color. This sympathetically drawn man’s tragic

39 Barrios’ scenario might be compared with more or less contemporary depictions, such as the explicit (and critical?) painting by the Dutch artist Christian van Couwemberg (1604–1667), The Rape of the Negress (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, France), in which three amused young White men try to bed a fully naked Black woman, who resists with desperate facial expression and bodily gesticulation. 40 El siglo pitagórico y vida de don Gregorio Guadaña, 131. 41 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 20; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 9. 42 “Retratos de la Confusion, y Confusion de los Retratos,” Rumbos peligrosos, 147.

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death, required to save her honor from such an affront, results from his stereotypically African inability to control his passions.43 Blacks and the Critique of Europe Despite pervasive negativity regarding Blacks, some of these authors also adopted a stance of critique toward the behavior of ‘Europe,’ noting, for instance, the debased state of Black Africa and the troubling nature of the Atlantic slave trade. Barrios, in a poem that presents a kind of ‘state of the world’ survey under Spanish imperialism, writes about how the Ethiopian suffers the anger of fate, which “treats him like a Black/slave.”44 Particularly in his satiric mode, Enríquez Gómez frequently criticizes colonial endeavors. Introducing his La torre de Babilonia, he slyly adumbrates his stance: “I am not a friend of playing the White girl, I content myself with the black girl, for I am not an Indian to be deceived by a glass bead/No soy amigo de jugar la Blanca, contentome con la negra, que no soy Yndio para que me engañen con avalorio.”45 In his poem “We are All Crazy, the Ones and the Others,” he merges the fates of the European and non-European victims of religious imperialism: The whole world is lost, only [self-]interest reigns, the Genovese is already Indian and known because of Columbus. The false hypocrite makes laws and precepts, and with peaceful logs his devotees are scorched. 43 Printed in Parte veinte y tres de comedias nuevas, escritas por los mejores ingenios de España (Madrid: Ioseph Fernandez de Buendia, 1665), 174–219. The play has already been treated by David M. Gitlitz, “La angustia vital de ser negro: Tema de un drama de Fernando de Zárate,” Segismundo 11 (1975): 65–85; Glen Dille, “A Black Man’s Dilemma in Las misas de S. Vicente Ferrer,” Romance Notes 20 (1979): 87–93. Due to the play’s “Christian enthusiasm” and “uncritical zeal,” Timothy Oelman doubts that it was written by Enríquez Gómez, even if one accepts that he returned to Catholicism toward the end of his life (Introductory matter, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Romance al divín mártir, Judá Creyente [don Lope de Vera y Alarcón] martirizado en Valladolid por la inquisición, A critical edition [Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986], 25). 44 “Uranìa, musa celeste. Canta. Fabula de Prometheo y Pandora,” Coro de las musas, 30: “En su Reyno esperimenta/el Ethiope Zepheo/los enojos de la Diosa/que lo trata como à un negro.” 45 Torre de Babilonia, 8.

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chapter eight Todo el mundo está perdido, sólo reina el interés, ya es Indiano el Genovés y por Colón conocido: El hipócrita fingido hace leyes y preceptos, y con leños recoletos se chamuscan sus devotos.46

In another poem, “A Class at the Cathedral of Good Taste,” he seems to urge the defense of the rights of the Amerindians.47 Enríquez Gómez mentions slavery quite often and the practice and its institutions seem to have genuinely preoccupied him. He alludes to the slave trade in a poem called “Injustice in the World (The First Pilgrim disputes with Divine Knowledge)”: Justice neither shines nor does it show its face and among the dismal thrones of Ethiope truth is clouded over with money’s pall.48

Listing the virtues to be sought by one desiring to lead a good life, he advises elsewhere: “do not aggravate the stranger with power.”49 In yet another poem, Enríquez Gómez directly addresses certain dishonest men, most likely slave traders. To One’s Word Man, do you promise? Comply, if you desire that the honored hold you as noble; words make men, not ducats, I take you for a beast if you understand something different. You sell yourself to yourself without term50 (do the Learned/Lawyers deny what I tell you?)

46 “Todos Somos Locos, Los Unos y Los Otros,” in Enríquez Gómez, Sonetos, romances y otros poemas, 97. 47 “Una Clase en la Catedra del Buen Gusto,” Enríquez Gómez, Sonetos, romances y otros poemas, 138–39. Here, too, ambiguity courses through his pleas “Defended con el derecho/de México los Indianos,/con el de Jauja, los bobos;/con el de Caco, los Cacos./Las leyes de la Partida/son leyes de cal y canto;/sin ellas somos perdidas,/ cuidado, amigas, cuidado.” 48 Translated in Timothy Oelman, ed., Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: An Anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel de Barrios (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 161. 49 “El passagero,” Academias morales de las musas, 25. 50 I.e., without end, but also without contractual terms.

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if you put aside your misused documents, you seek lawsuits and offend the peace. With a word/promise were you born, man, born; but since you don’t keep it, don’t let this be made public, by God, lest you lose it. O, what a talker I am! Beautiful Guinea, do you seek a promise? Nice joke; is one’s word the tide? Hombre, ¿prometes? Cumple si pretendes que te tengan por noble los honrados; palabras hacen hombres no ducados, doyte por fiera si otra cosa entiendes. Tú mismo a ti sin término te vendes (¿lo que te digo negaran Letrados?) si dejas tus escritos maltratados, los pleitos buscas y las paz ofendes. Naciste con palabra, hombre naciste; pero pues no la cumples, que no sea, pregonada, por Dios, si la perdiste. ¡Oh qué hablador estoy! Linda Guinea, ¿palabra buscáis vos? Donoso chiste, ¿es la palabra acaso la marea?51

Here Enríquez Gómez voices his indignation on behalf of Africa, personified in standard fashion as a woman, where the one characteristic assigned her remains her attractiveness. The poet defends his lady by pointing out the hypocrisy of those who seek honor in unscrupulous profitteering, Christians (“born with the word”?) who fail to live up to their claims of morality, who hide behind a misguided legalism, whose ethics rise and sink like the tide on which they ply their trade.52

“A la palabra,” Academia morales de las musas, 413–414; reprinted in Enríquez Gómez, Sonetos, romances y otros poemas, 105. 52 Though shared by only a small minority, the sentiments of Enríquez Gómez are by no means unique to him or to “Jewish” authors. See José Tomás Lopez Garcia, Dos defensores de los esclavos negros en el siglo XVII (Maracaibo/Caracas: Biblioteca Corpozulia/ Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, 1981); the more ameliorationist Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, trans. and ed. Enriqueta Vila Vilar (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987). Miguel de Cervantes, whose possible descent from Conversos remains much debated, has a speaker in one novela complain about people “fooling the world with tinsel on their tattered breeches and their pretended Latin, as the Portuguese do to the Negroes of Guinea” (“Dialogue of the Dogs” in Miguel de Cervantes, Six Exemplary Novels [Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educations Series, Inc., 1961], 22). At the same time, another character voices fairly vicious opinions about Judeoconversos. Stuart Schwartz has gathered a good number of oral statements opposing racism or African slavery made 51

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Such critiques of the behavior of Europeans do not necessitate a concomitant positive regard for Blacks. To sense the discursive continuities, one might compare Judeoconverso authors’ depictions of Blacks with those created by a few of the Mexican Catholic mystics deemed heretical by that colony’s Inquisition during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At least one of these, a woman named Getrudis Rosa Ortiz, experienced visions in which Blacks explicitly appear alongside Whites adoring Christ, expresses criticism of the mistreatment of Afroiberians and at one point imagines herself becoming a Black woman.53 Though Ortiz “pictured blacks as potential Christians, virtuous redemptors, and people mistreated by other members of colonial society”—roles not assigned them by contemporary sacred sources54—she says nothing overtly positive about them. Similarly, the Judeaconversa Leonor Vaez Sevilla, daughter of Simon Vaez Sevilla, claims that she had visions of angels and that, in addition, she saw at the foot of her bed a little Black girl (una negrilla), which filled everyone with admiration.55 Whether Leonor saw heavenly Black angels out of subconscious guilt for her father’s slave-trading or shared his presumed sentiments remains unknown. The description of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru from around 1615, probably written by a Portuguese Converso merchant named Pedro de León Portocarrero, generally finds Blacks less than esteemable.56 Yet the author’s political motivation of undermining Spanish claims to civility, much less nobility, lead him to polemicize that the province’s “blacks and indians are more barbarous than before they got to know the spaniards because then they had no one to direct them. Now they are full of superstition, practice witchcraft, and have commerce by various individuals whose dissidence, tolerance and/or syncretism brought them to the attention of the Inquisition. Many of these statements took the egalitarianism that was often expressed regarding individuals from any of the three major monotheisms and extended it to those overseas who had until recently been pagans. Few of these freethinkers seem to have been New Christians, but this remains uncertain (Schwartz, “Questioning Slavery and Accepting Africa”). 53 Jaffary, False Mystics, 109–14, 133–5. 54 Jaffary, False Mystics., 135. 55 Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee celebrada, unpag. The inquisitors were less impressed; Bocanegra adds parenthetically: “must have been the devil, and the [heavenly] music [she imagined] real.” 56 The author’s identification was made by Lohmann Villena, “Autor de la ‘Discriçion.’” The article, though evincing thorough archival research, drips with retrogressive antiJewish overtones, making suspect some of its sweeping assertions about persistent Jewish identity.

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with the Devil.”57 With the same polemical intent, the author asserts that the Blacks “are stronger than the spaniards, and as they are always exercised in labors are sturdier.”58 Enríquez Gómez, in a vicious attack on merchants, very possibly specifically Jewish merchants,59 produces the following scene, whose narrative sense remains less important than the workings of its prophetic imagination: Scarcely had the Ethiopian finished the last verses, when the Lady rushed toward the market, saying: O Relics of my God Pecunia [from pecuniary—js], O universal happiness of the World. What chastity is not consecrated to such a Deity? Were you, Lord Money, to order that I love this Ethiopian Lover, ugly as the night, I will do it, because it is commanded by you, whiter and blonder than the Absolutiuons [Absaloves] of the North. I don’t say “Ethiopian”; a black from the abysses of Guinea will be my Lover as I will have the God Pecunia for a guide.60

Black ugliness stands for Enríquez Gómez as the pinnacle of the revolting. As is so typical among European writings, Blacks stand for the antithesis to European values and virtues. Blacks and Jewish/Converso Identity Many of the rhetorical usages of Blacks in Converso and Sephardic literature reveal more than mere participation in the general culture’s anti-Blackness. Blacks often appear in direct contiguity with attempts to Descripcion del Peru, 73. Ibid., 40. 59 “The merchants who have crossed over to Damascus, to Milan, to Holland, and to London, solely to enjoy the grace of Money, bring in their [finger- or toe-]nail their voyage in [a?] place of memory, and the wandering ladies through their delight give voice in performing their Whoring before money/Los mercaderes que auian atrebesado a Damasco, Amilan, a Olanda, y a Londres, solamente por goçar de la gracia del Dinero, trayan en la vña su biaje en lugar de memoria, y las peregrinas por su gusto dauan vozes por cumplir sus Ramerias ante el dinero” (Torre de Babilonia, 51 [6th dream]). 60 Torre de Babilonia, 62 (6th dream). The counter-intuitive love raised by the author hearkens back ironically to Jerome’s comparison of Christ’s love for humanity with the love a White man might have for an Ethiopian woman (Epistulae 22, 1/5, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum [Vienna: C. Geroldi Filium, 1866–1913] 54:145; The Letters of St. Jerome, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow; intro. and notes by Thomas Comerford Lawler, Ancient Christian writers: The works of the Fathers in translation [Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1963–] 33:134). Perhaps this helps explain the meaning of the “Absolutions of the North”: the manner in which becoming European “cleanses” away Blackness. 57 58

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work out issues of identity. The perceived problematic facets of Blacks, so often parallel to those of Jews and Conversos, become handy foils with which authors can put forth Jewish/Converso worthiness. Even more, it becomes essential to refute the problematic Blackness often assigned to Jews in medieval and early modern Europe. Already in one of the early seminal works of Converso/Sephardic literature one finds the situations of Jews and Blacks contrasted. Samuel Usque, who fled Portugal in the 1530s for Italy, wonders about the justice of idolaters and evildoers living peacefully throughout the world while Jews suffer the fate they do in the Iberian lands: “In Africa, the people commit turpitudes beyond all human comprehension. [. . . .] And above all, they are not Mohammedans, or Jews, or Christians, nor do they have any religion or offer prayer to any thing; rather they live like the beasts of the field.”61 Elsewhere, resorting to terminology that was ubiquitous in medieval discourse and that conflates outer and inner qualities, Usque mentions the “barbarous and burnt Guineans.”62 Denying that the Egyptians who enslaved the Jews are better, Usque asserts in a chapter entitled “Origin of Idolatry” that the “first god they worshipped was Ham, son of Noah, the worst of his three sons.” Since “the wicked sorcerer” Ham ruled over Africa, whose capital was in Egypt, these peoples took him for a god, and as such they obeyed his laws and judgments and did not attain to any higher knowledge of God than of seeing Him [sic?] as the first king and monarch whom they were subject to in their region. And changing his name, they called him the god Saturn. They built cities and many temples in his honor, and offered sacrifices to him.63

61 Translated in Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, trans. Martin A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1965), 221; Samuel Usque, Consolação às tribulações de Israel: Edição de Ferrara, 1553, com estudos introdutórios por Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi e José V. de Pina Martins, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), 2:227–28. I discuss this passage further in the next chapter. 62 Usque, Consolation, 44; Consolação, 2:iiir. 63 Usque, Consolation, 85. The trope of Ham as originator of black magic stems from ancient writers such as Berossus/Annius, Clement and others; see, for instance, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought, International Archives of the History of Ideas, 189 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 427; Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29–30; Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 333–37.

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In a similar vein, Barrios, who shuttled back and forth between Catholicism and Judaism and the names Miguel and Daniel Levi, states in one work that the first people to fail to honor wisdom and, by implication, lack the fear of God, were certain descendants of the biblical Kush. These Barrios opposes to the God-fearing supporters of Solomon, who conquered them. Barrios links these scorners of wisdom and religion with unreason or insanity, calling them “locos.”64 Elsewhere, he describes “the serpentine Ham of Africa,” a characterization likely taken from a well-known Zoharic passage that links Canaan with the snake from the garden of Eden.65 In a Hebrew poem written while still in Brazil, Rabbi Ishac Aboab da Fonseca refers to the leader of the Portuguese rebellion that ousted the Dutch and the Jews in 1654, João Fernandes Vieira: “From the gutter he [Portugal’s king] raised an evil man, whose mother was of Negro descent, a man who did not know his father’s name.” All of the contemporary Portuguese chronicles agree on the rebel leader’s Mulato status and some engage in backbending apologetics to harmonize his racial background and patriotic stature. In a line further down, Aboab da Fonseca continues: “Traitor bastards and black mameluks revealed the secrets to the enemy to capture Recife.”66 No doubt Aboab da Fonseca’s fears (quite justified) about the significance of a Portuguese takeover added fuel to his passionate denunciation of this enemy. But it remains unclear whether the insult to which he resorts in a moment of crisis, which wittingly or not mingles earlier European ethnographic observations about primitive Black African sexuality and marriage with more contemporary social commentary, is completely foreign to his everyday sentiments. Another, similar, perspective comes from Saul

64 “[. . .] y los temerosos de Dios, fundan el palacio de la Sabiduria, en los cimientos del temor, por no haver ciencia como temer el Divino castigo; ni delirio como despreciarlo con las presunciones de excederlo: los primeros que no la preciaron fueron los que el noticioso Aldrete llama Evileos, descendientes de Chus: y los que temen à Dios son, los que con Salomon dominan à los Evileos, Evelim, (Locos) Temor del Señor es principio de Sabiduria: Ciencia, y castigo los locos despreciaron” (Triumpho del govierno popular [N.p., n.d. (1683)], 66—the various editions of this work differ significantly from one another). 65 Sefer ha-Zohar im Perush ha-Sulam ( Jerusalem: M. Klar, n.d.), 3:105 (parshat Noah, sec. 298); “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico y de America,” Exquemelin, Piratas de la America, 56. 66 The first line is translated in Meyer Kayserling, “Isaac Aboab: First Author in America,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897): 130; the second line is cited in Böhm, Sefardíes en los Dominios Holandeses, 53.

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Levi Morteira (1596?–1660), rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation in Amsterdam, who might well have been aware of Aboab da Fonseca’s poem. In a description of several contemporary miracles wrought by God for His people, the Jews, Morteira offers the example of the escape of the Jewish population from Brazil and from the rabidly anti-Jewish Portuguese. As a foil to the glorious, noble Jews they hated and persecuted, Morteira portrays the members of this militia as comprising the basest demographic elements: “blacks, mulatos, outlaws, the poor, the riffraff [lit. barefoot, i.e., badly armed and barefoot soldiers], the hungry and those desirous of improving their fortune.”67 Though accurate insofar as the high number of slaves who fought for the Portuguese, it is not coincidental that Morteira begins his litany with non-Whites. One of the most sustained efforts to distance Jews from Blacks appears elsewhere in the writings of Barrios. His history of the Amsterdam Sephardic community comprises an amazing hodge-podge of genealogical and other efforts to glorify the Jewish descendants of Shem. Noah acclaimed God the creator, but He was “not [the God] of Iamphet, nor of Cham, but rather of Sem, because Sem conveyed his true knowledge to the Hibrim,” the Jews. Unlike Iaphet and his stock, however, Ham’s line receives no mention whatsoever in Barrios’s family trees. Elsewhere Barrios exerts himself in refuting genealogical linkage between the Jews and the Indians or Ethiopians.68 He specifically refutes the genealogical links asserted by Thomas de Pinedo, whereby the Jews descend from the Ethiopians.69 Barrios is also writing against authors such as the Mantuan Jesuit Antonio Possevino (ca. 1533–1611), who cites “Prester John” as an authority for the fact that the Abyssinians in general originated from Solomon and their aristocracy from Abraham, and Bernardo José Aldrete (1565–1645), canon of the church at Cordoba, who argues that ancient Hebrew had (d)evolved into Ethiopian after the exile of the Jews

67 Saul Levi Mortera, Tratado da verdade da lei de Moisés, edição facsimilada, leitura do autógrafo (1659), edited by Hermann Prins Salomon (Coimbra: Por ordem da Universidade, 1988), 75 (ch. 11); similarly in the first Spanish translation, Saul Levi Morteira, Providencia de Dios con Ysrael (Amsterdam: Ms., escrivio Iehuda Machabeu, 1662), 28. 68 Triumpho del govierno popular (1683), 48, 54–58. 69 Eriphanos peri poleon. Stephanus De urbibus. Quem primus Thomas de Pinedo Lusitanus Latii jure donabat, & observationibus scrutinio variarum linguarum, ac praecipue hebraiciae, phoeniciae, graecae & latinae detectis illustrabat . . . (Amsterdam: typis Jacobi de Jonge, 1678). I have not had a chance to examine this work.

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to that locale.70 It is true that ancient writers such as Sulpicius Severus (ca. 360–ca. 425) had written that the barbarian nations, such as the Parthians, Medes, Indians and Ethiopians, descended from the Jews, but the early modern writers, including Barrios, probably are influenced by the appearance of the first Spanish translations of the Ethiopian royal chronicles, the Kebra Nagast, which details the Solomonic ancestry of the Christian kings of Ethiopia.71 Barrios’ distancing of Jews from Ethiopians is no mere genealogical exercise, but part of current and vivid Iberian polemics about the cultural status of Jews, as is evident from its seemingly irrelevant appearance in a history of the Sephardim of Amsterdam. The Converso physician Juan Huarte (d. 1588) provided naturalistic explanations for the physical features of Blacks. Basing himself on Aristotle, he asks “What is the reason that the Blacks of Ethiopia [. . .] are bowlegged, thick-lipped, and snout-nosed?” Huarte approvingly quotes Aristotle’s answer: “the great heat of the region, toasts the sustenance of these members, and makes them twist, as a strap is shrinked before fire; and for the same reason, their hair is shrunken, and likewise are they frizzy and slow.”72 Huarte sets forth some rather interesting comparisons between Jews and Blacks. Jews, whose ‘natural’ disposition for medicine derives from their slavery under the wisdom-inducing heat of Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum (N.p., 1607 [orig. 1603?]), bk. 15, ch. 19; Bernardo José Aldrete, Varias antigvedades de españa africa y otras provincias (Amberes [Antwerp]: A costa de Iuan Hasrey, 1614), 165. Hasan bin Muhammed al-Wazzan al-Fasi (1488?–1554?), better known as Leo Africanus, also mentions the Jewish descent of the Black Cafris living at the fountains of the Nile ( Johannes Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, translated and edited by John Pory [London, 1600], 41). 71 See, for example, Enrique Cornelio Agrippa, Historia de las cosas de Etiopía (Toledo, 1528) and Manuel Almeida (1580–1646), Historia de Etiopía, the latter not published in its entirety. Barrios also denies the Ethiopian or Indian origins of the Jews brought forth by Tacitus and Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 1, ch. 6). On the ancient writers, see Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen Über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols. in 6 parts (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1957–63), 2:406. 72 Examen de ingenios para las sciencias (Amsterdam: Juan de Ravestein, 1662 [1575]), 236. “Como si dixera: Que es la causa, que los negros de Ethiopia, y los naturales de Egypto, son patituertos, hocicudos, y las narizes remachadas? Al qual problema responde, que el mucho calor de la region, tuesta la sustancia de estos miembros, y los haze retorcer, como se endoje la correa junto al fuego; y por la mesma razon, se les encojen los cabellos; y assi tambien son crespos y morosos.” This text is identical to that of the only earlier edition I was able to check (N. p. [Antwerp?]: En la oficina Plantiniana, 1603). Huarte cites Aristotle 14. Sect. probl. 4. The 1611 Castilian dictionary of Covarrubias Orozco used the lips of Blacks to illustrate the word “hocico,” which Huarte here employs: “when the lips stand out too much, as with black women/cuando demasiadamente salen afuera los labios, como en las negras.” 70

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Egypt, pass on their skills even long after their Egyptian sojourn, just as Blacks pass their color on to their descendants even in Spain, away from their homeland.73 It is due to the power of semen that these two outstanding characteristics are passed on, an ability, as Huarte himself says, possessed by all humans. Yet one should not be left with the impression that something distinguished is being described in Huarte’s distinguishing of these two peoples’ most apparent features. His other remarks about Blacks are withering. As we have seen before from Iberian Catholic sources, for this New Christian author as well, Blackness and Jewish traits, which are hardly positive, parallel one another as indelible characteristics, biologically but also rhetorically.74 Given the anxieties among Sephardim regarding their own Whiteness and among Conversos regarding their own religious and cultural in-betweenness, it comes as no surprise that some (former) Conversos shared the widespread habit of White Iberian writers of harping on Blackness as a signifier of doubtful truth in self-presentation, of inconsistency between essence and appearance. Though Penso de la Vega’s knight in black calls his color “the most honest,”75 other authors delighted in pointing out the questions raised by Blacks in a White world. Saldaña offers the following poem on the subject: Question About a Black Woman who is Called Blanca [White] It is not madness to know, asking makes the soul happy, to quiet my will:

73 Examen de ingenios, 250. “Tanta es la fuerça de la simiente humana, quando recive en si alguua calidad bien arraygada. Y de la manera que los negros, comunican en España el color de sus decendientes, por la simiente (sin estar en Ethiopa) assi el pueblo de Israel [viniendo tambien a ella] puede comunicar a sus decendientes, el agudeza de ingenio, sin estar en Egypto.” Such “natural” traits remain constant only without interbreeding. Because of Jewish mingling with non-Jews, their medical skills are not what they once were, while Blacks who have children with Whites produce Mulatos (ibid., 251, 399). 74 David Ruderman reads Huarte as having internalized Iberian racialist prejudices against “Jewish medicine,” while trying to defend his profession at the same time (Ruderman, “The Community of Converso Physicians: Race, Medicine, and the Shaping of a Cultural Identity,” in Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 273–309). The “Converso” nature of Huarte’s psyche seems rather slim, however; more a product of Ruderman’s analytical drive than anything to be found in Huarte’s life and works, which come across as eminently Catholic. Furthermore, it is somewhat disappointing that Ruderman, in an essay on “race,” fails to mention Huarte’s views about Blacks. 75 “Luchas de ingenio, y desafios de amor,” Rumbos peligrosos, 180.

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for what reason is Blanca black? Is there someone who can unravel this mess? El saber no es desvarío, preguntar al alma alegra, por aquietar mi albedrío ¿por qué causa Blanca es negra? ¿Hay quién desate este lío? Toward a Response The dark reason resonates, today my black opinion wrenches, for just as the blond bronzes [i.e, darkens], no poet until now said that black was white [or that Blanca was Black or that a Black was a White]. La obscura razón sonora hoy mi negro juicio arranca porque en cuanto el rubio dora ningún poeta hasta ahora dijo que negro era blanca.76

In an inter-denominational dialogue from the early eighteenth century, Abraham Gomes Silveira has his Calvinist state the same conundrum: “The name supposes nothing,/from the heavens on down./I have known a Black/who was called Juan Blanco [ John White].”77 The idiom used by Gomes Silveira in the second line—de las texas abaxo—is explicated in Covarrubias’s 1611 dictionary (s.v. tejas): speaking de las tejas abaxo conveys that one who doesn’t understand theology should not insert himself into theological discussions. Both of these authors, then, play with the paradox, presented almost in the manner of a proverb, of naming Blacks that which they are not.78 Saldaña’s multilayered puns, unrenderable in translation, reiterate the circularity of the misnomer “Pregunta sobre una negra que se llamaba Blanca. Quintilla,” and “A la respuesta. Quintilla,” El Afrodiseo, 88 (poems 46 and 47). 77 Entretenimentos gustozos, O Dialogos Burlescos: Entre un Judío, Turco, Reformado, y Catolico. Ms. written by Abraham Baruch Henriquez (n.p., n.d. [after 1737]), fol. 70. 78 This was a widespread Spanish trope; earlier authors already refer to this phenomenon as something common: In a drama of Tirso de Molina’s, one character complains regarding the unsuitability of his own name, Ventura: It shows quality that I am very warm and frank; but though my name pleases me, it is like my black/slave woman calling her Black “John White.” 76

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involved. Though his poem evinces a certain amount of sympathy lacking in the curt brush-off by Gomes Silveira’s Calvinist, both find something perplexing, perhaps even ridiculous, in the brazenly contradictory Whiteness applied to (taken by?) Blacks. Could it be that as former Conversos, subject to the same kinds of accusations of falseness, these authors look with insistence on Black incommensurability with ‘normalcy’?79 Es de calidad que soy muy cálido y franco; Pero aunque el nombre me alegra, Es por ser mi dicha negra, Llamar al negro, Juan Blanco” (La Celosa de sí mismo [1619/20], act. ii, scene vii). From New World chronicler Pedro Simón: “the [warmongering tribe of the] Paeces, who seem to have the name of peace [ paz] as a figure of antiphrasis or contraposition, as it is common to call the Black ‘John White,’ ” and, elsewhere, “In this country [the region of Tolú, Nueva Granada] there grow many ‘nimble parakeets’ [sloths], so called because of the great heavyness of their movement, in the manner that people are used to calling a Black ‘John White’/al modo que al negro le suelen a llamar Juan Blanco” (Simón, Noticias historiales, 5:314, 5:61). Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing in the 1520s, might have been the first to cite this origin for the ironic animal name: “The first Christians who saw this animal, remembering that in Spain it was common to call a Black ‘John White’ because the reverse was intended, so also this animal [. . .]/Los primeros cristianos que este animal vieron, acordándose que en España suelen llamar al negro Juan Blanco porque se entienda al revés, así como toparon este animal le pusieron el nombre al revés de su ser, pues siendo espaciosísimo, le llamaron ligero.” 79 These meditations on the meaning of Blackness and Whiteness might be compared to the similar wordplay in the rather harsh poems of the Catholic writer João Cardoso da Costa in his Musa Pueril (1736) cited in Pimentel, “Escrava negra numa sociedade de senhores brancos,” 565–6. In contrast, a redemptive and subversive reading of Blackness by a Catholic, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, can be found in her poem #281, “Maitines de la Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora, Puebla, 1689, Villancico Séptimo”: Estribillo Morenica la esposa está, porque el sol en el rostro le da. Coplas Aunque en el negro arrebol negra la esposa se nombra, no es porque ella tiene sombra, sino porque le da el sol de su pureza el crisol, que el sol nunca se le va. ¡Morenica la esposa está, porque el sol en el rostro le da! Comparada la luz pura de uno y otro, entre los dos, ante el claro sol de Dios es morena la criatura; pero se añade hermosura mientras más se acerca allá.

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Josef Penso de la Vega’s homage and critique of the new capitalism, Confusión de confusiones (1688) will serve as my final example here. Within his text’s worldly gaze Blacks occupy a noticeably negative position. Responding to the climatological dangers threatening overseas commercial ventures, Penso de la Vega’s capitalist (accionista) utters a despairing lament: Oh unfortunate me! for I have lost time and oil, like he who taught a crow to speak; I might just as well take on as an undertaking of my insomnia the Ethiopian who, some nymphs washing him, a curious [bystander] nicknamed [the effort] “lost time.”80

Avoiding natural disasters in the search for commercial success is as fruitless as trying to wash an Ethiopian white, as the age-old adage had it even in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere Penso de la Vega provides a most business-like description of the recently won Dutch West India Company slave asiento (contract) with Spain.81 The contract offers “the hope that the returns from Guinea and Curaçao will bloom”: This contract, which is the firmest column of this edifice, is formed of the obligation that some Dutch merchants here take on with the Company of taking so many blacks consigned to Curaçao at the signalled price, whom ¡Morenica la esposa está, porque el sol en el rostro le da! Del sol, que siempre la baña, está abrasada la esposa; y tanto está más hermosa cuanto más de él se acompaña: nunca su pureza empaña, porque nunca el sol se va. ¡Morenica la esposa está, porque el sol en el rostro le da! [. . .] Sor Juana here draws on the figure of the biblical Kushite wife of Moses, as read through the lens of the female narrator of Song of Songs (especially 1:5), a tack frequent among Christian thinkers since ancient times, who saw her as a symbol of the Church despised by the Jews. See Schorsch, Jews and Blacks, ch. 4. 80 José de la Vega, Confusión de confusiones, ed. Catalina Buezo, pedro Corrales, et al. (Madrid: Universidad Europea-CEES Ediciones, 2000), 170–171. 81 In 1641 the Dutch made Curaçao, which they had just captured from the Spanish in 1634, the collection point for slaves taken in privateering raids on non-Dutch vessels. By 1668, the WIC warehouse held 3,000 Blacks ready for re-shipment elsewhere. The WIC subcontracted for several slave asientos with the Spanish, including contracts of 1668, 1670 and 1683 (Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580 –1680 [Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971], 361–62), and won the asiento directly in 1685.

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chapter eight [the Company] conducts from the coast of Guinea in order to import. And the contractors, remitting them to the Indies, for which effect they have in Spain a person satisfactory to them, with a pension that they pay to their illustrious monarch for the license to conduct this business, at times the contractors in the agreement do not gain less than that which the Company gains from the contractors.82

If, as seems likely, Penso de la Vega refers to the WIC asiento of 1685, the most recent and only directly-held slaving contract with Spain, he neglects to mention that several of the silent players in securing this deal were Sephardic Jews in The Netherlands, including the prominent Manuel de Belmonte and his relative François de Schonenberg.83 It makes sense that Penso de la Vega would take advantage of this opportunity to plug, even if covertly, a victory for Sephardic commercial prowess. It is not difficult to imagine that he knew about this Sephardic participation, as Belmonte was one of his patrons, to whom Penso de la Vega dedicated one of the novellas in his Rumbos peligrosos.84 Penso de la Vega’s only comment, however, is to immediately underscore that “This is the soul of this game, where the risk of the returns and detriment of the deposits serve as well in the ungilding of the confusions [stock markets or financial interests] of Europe.”85 The object of this contract, transporting thousands of Blacks into miserable servitude, seems to draw no criticism, only the fickle costs of doing business. Since the only other Africans to appear in Penso de la Vega’s text are curious, bizarre or monstrous creatures, often taken from classical ethnography, the surface assumption might be that the suffering of Black slaves is of little account.86 Yet the author’s ironic choice of phrasing, calling a Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 188–89. Daniel M. Swetschinski, “The Portuguese Jewish Merchants of SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam: A Social Profile” (Phd Dissertation, Brandeis University, 1980), 267–269. 84 “Dedicatoria al Illustrissimo Señor Don Manoel de Belmonte,” in Rumbos peligrosos, 65; see also Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 465–66. 85 Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 189. 86 Africans in the text include: the honey-making Zigantes (or Gizantes or Bizantes) of Africa described by Herodotus, History, 4:194; one “olive-skinned” woman who slept for 12 hours every day, behavior explained by the fact that she came from Ethiopia, and hence “the whole year was equinox for her”; the “Ethiopians of the mountains” near the source of the Nile, who play about like children amid the waterfalls’ tempestuous currents; the Ethiopian kings who were lame. Africa itself is seen as home for the strange and marvelous: Ethiopia boasts gold mines; Africa suffers from lobsters (Pliny, Natural History 8:29); in Ethiopia resides a bird that teaches its young to fly by dropping them thousands of times during low flights, according to Diodorus Siculus; during some seasons of the year in Ethiopia atmospheric vapors are converted into hail without 82

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slaving asiento “the soul” of the mercantile game, as throughout the text, might introduce a critique signalling the obvious disparity between the soul-lessness of “this game” and its profit-minded “soul.” The ambiguous and unvoiced Blacks in Confusión de confusiones might be juxtaposed with another figure portrayed in the text. Several passages offer veiled allusions to the Jewishness of many of the merchants and stock brokers whose paths intersect at the exchange. In one passage, readers find that in order to beseech a “person of security [. . .] one announces ‘that he is a man like a tower’ and that he has ‘such a nose.’ ”87 Penso de la Vega speculates playfully about the meaning of this term. I do not understand who could have introduced this phrase, “such a nose,” other than the knowledge that God had breathed the soul [into Adam] through the nose [Gen. 2:7] and wanting to assure this loyal servant that he who favors him is a man who has soul, which is the same as signifying that he has a conscience. And being that the nose is that which distinguishes one man from another—for this reason the Hebrews call the face and the nose by the same name, as the nose is that which makes the face88—the agent announces that his man has a great/large nose in order to signal that his man is a great man.89

Penso de la Vega’s prominently positive noses serve as a clear if coded rebuttal to one of the tropes used by Iberian Jew-haters.90 These merchants, many of them Jews, as Penso de la Vega hints here and elsewhere, are praised for their conscience, that is, their moral quality. Their large noses serve here as positive, rather than negative indicators. While holding the nose to be a metonymic stand-in for the entire face, and therefore character, may have been a phraseology of Sephardic

having gathered first in clouds, according to Aristotle; Ethiopia hosts the miraculous Phoenix (Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 231, 209, 220, 270, 191, 175, 176, 150, 116). 87 Vega, Confusion de confusiones, 205. 88 Penso de la Vega might have in mind the ancient etymological connection of af (nose) and apa’im (face), expanded in rabbinic literature, for instance, in the Jerusalem Talmud, Sota 9:3, 23c, where the nose is called the place that provides recognition of a person’s face. See the sources discussed in Admiel Kosman, “‘And He breathed the breath of life through his nose’ (Gen. 2:7): The Exegetical Debate and its Findings regarding Variations in the Hymn ‘Nishmat kol Æai,’” [Hebrew] Beit Mikra 160 (1999): 41–42, n. 26. Thanks to Profs. Willis Johnson and Admiel Kosman for their aid in this matter. 89 Vega, Confusion de confusiones, 206. 90 Or non-Iberian Jew-haters. Jonathan Israel reminds us of one economic/political context of Penso de la Vega’s text, the stock market crash of 1688, and the infamous role that Jews were said to have played in it (Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 449–86).

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writers, it was also wielded by Iberian authors as a means of denigrating Jews. The famous Spanish poets Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) attacked ‘Jewish’ writers with swipes at the large noses of Jews. The latter wrote in one poem: In the filth you have sung and in the amount of rubbish [or: the length of noses], and the rest of what you say, you have shown that you are not clean. En lo sucio que has cantado y en lo largo de narices demás de que tú lo dices que no eres limpio has mostrado.91

Quevedo’s critique emerges in the punning links between the supposedly telling ‘Jewish’ facial feature, lowliness and lack of blood purity (limpio, as in limpieza de sangre). Góngora, in a similar attack on what he calls “a man stuck onto a nose,” states: Why do you censure the Greek language, being merely the Rabbi of the Jewess, something that even your nose does not deny? ¿Por qué censuras tú la lengua griega, siendo sólo Rabí de la Judía cosa que tu nariz aun no lo niega?92

Though the precise allusion in the middle line stands beyond the purpose of this essay, Góngora as well connects the ‘outsiderness’ of Jews through both cultural and biological difference, the former attempted willfully, the latter an e(x)ternally betraying mark of Cain. It is no coincidence, then, that when Diego Lopez, the Mulato surgeon of Cartagena discussed in chapter 3, describes for his inquisitors suspicious young men, Portuguese alleged judaizers, he includes their “large nose/ nariz Larga” as a telling feature.93

91 Cited in Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, El espíritu del Barroco: Tres interpretaciones (Barcelona: Editorial Apolo, 1940), 78. 92 Cited in Díaz-Plaja, 79. 93 Testimonio de Diego Lopez, 20r. and 21v.–22r. Already in the fifteenth century the famous Converso jester Juan Alfonso de Baena alluded to his “Jewish” nose: “Por ende, guardat que non se amostase/mi gorda naris en este exedres” (quoted in Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Jewish ‘Fools’ of the Spanish Fifteenth Century” Hispanic Review 50 [1982]: 394). Gregorio García, Origenes de los indios de el Nuevo Mundo, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Francisco Martinez Abad, 1729 [orig. 1607]), 87, sees the large noses of the

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I have no desire to exaggerate the centrality of the Black and Jewish figures in Penso de la Vega’s text. His Blacks and Jews share no immediately obvious contiguity. Yet their contrasting figuration reveals some of the interests operating within the work, which is not only a reflection of the frequently opposite statuses of Blacks and Jews within the world market but a willful construction of this opposition. Amerindians in the Text There is much to be said about relations between Sephardim and Amerindians in and beyond Iberian territories. A number of studies explore the ways in which the various native American peoples were compared and conflated with Jews.94 In the limited space available within the scope of this project, however, I will deal solely with a few pertinent textual references, of which many more no doubt remain to be explored. In contrast to the overwhelmingly negative image of Africans, Amerindians often drew sympathy from (ex-)Conversos. Though hardly achieved in reality by any group, according Amerindians rights and deference out of respect for their original political independence, lack of acquaintance with Christianity and (in places) cultural sophistication became a common trope among those who were critical of Spanish mistreatment. During the mid-seventeenth century when anti-Portuguese sentiments rose in Spain, Lourenço de Mendonça, a New Christian (?) residing in Potosí, wrote a defense of the Portuguese in light of Spanish

Amerindians as proof of their Jewish origins. It is possible that other Europeans in the seventeenth century also constructed Jewish difference symbolically through the nose (see the sources quoted in Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 247). 94 I list here only those treating my period. Jonathan Boyarin, “Jews, Indians and the Identity of Christian Europe: Desiderata for a Research Project,” unpublished book ms. (the version I have stems from New York, 1993); Judith Laikin Elkin, “Imagining Idolatry: Missionaries, Indians, and Jews,” Religion and the Authority of the Past, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 75–99; Richard H. Popkin, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 63–82. Several younger scholars are currently working on social and discursive relations between Jews and Amerindians in the early and late colonial epochs: David Koffman, Limor Muenz-Manor, Rachel Rubinstein. Their results promise to enlarge a rather neglected field.

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sentiments. Having a position with the local Inquisition (as a comissário), Mendonça does not seem to have been writing a covert vindication of Portuguese Conversos. Still, he could not refrain from nationalist polemics. In addition to arguing that his countrymen were not thieves, spies or heretics, he asserts that they are far less cruel than the Spanish toward the Amerindians, though the latter, having internalized Spanish prejudices, nevertheless “look down on them with scorn.”95 In one poem, Barrios depicts the Amerindian, “who appears violent to the Spaniard, [who] has his foot on his neck.”96 Seeking as he was to boost the reputation of the struggling colony of Brazil, Fernandes Brandão had reason to downplay Amerindian resistance, yet he has his character Brandônio narrate a personal incident that re-presents what sounds suspiciously like an Amerindian counter-narrative that he was told. In the aftermath of a campaign against some hostile Petiguares in 1591, Brandônio stumbles across a cave that terrifies the natives, possibly the Tabajara allied with the Portuguese, who refuse to enter it. The interior of the cave serves or served as a burial place. According to the clearly friendly Petiguar accompanying him, “many white persons had already gone into the cave and smashed some of the earthen vessels, but [. . .] when they had gone back inside the next day they found the urns sound and all in one piece and the skeletons back inside them.”97 Brandônio also repeats the Amerindian insistence, quite correct, “that they never had [syphilis, described in the previous passage as a kind of bubonic plague] before the Portuguese came to settle this New World and that they caught it from them.”98 As was true for European authors in general, for some (ex-)Converso authors, or for the sake of certain of their rhetorical moments, Amerindians served well as noble savages, modern-day idyllic pastorals who, like their ancient counterparts real or mythological, might appear healthily close to nature and lacking the distortions and hypocrisies of overmuch civility. In this sense, positively-depicted Amerindians fell

95 Mendonça, Supplicación en defense de los portugueses (1630), a copy of which was found by Lewis Hanke in the British Museum; see Hanke, “Portuguese in Spanish America,” 21–2; Ventura, Portugueses no Peru, 2:15. The quote is from Hanke. 96 “Uranìa, musa celeste. Canta. Fabula de Prometheo y Pandora,” Coro de las musas, 38. 97 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 41; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 33–4. 98 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 111; Diálogo das grandezas do Brasil, 80.

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into the wider category of non-Europeans, whose recent “discovery” generated modern European ethnological and anthropological thinking. In an early prose essay Barrios comments on Jer. 2:8 and 2:10–11 that here God is praising the constancy possessed by the barbarous gentiles toward their idols, even if their ignoring Him offends God.99 These Others could also reinforce the truth of Jewish beliefs or customs as well as mitigate their strangeness. Isaac Cardoso (Madrid, Venice; 1604–1683) supports the notion that the world was created in the month of Tishrei, as held by Rabbi Eliezer (BT Rosh HaShana 10b–11a), by pointing to the traditions of other nations that begin their year in September: the Persians, Chaldeans, Indians, Egyptians, Etruscans (citing Festus Pompeius and Livy), the Ethiopians (citing Damião de Goes) and the Muscovites (citing Mercator’s Muscovia).100 To show that the human race has not degenerated since ancient times, when there lived giants such as the Anakim, Refa’im, Goliath and Gog, Cardoso brings examples from current ethnography: there are giants today among the Patagonians in the Straits of Magellan, in Sumatra and in China.101 A 1658 defense of the Jews allegedly penned by Menasseh ben Israel dismisses charges that the Jews are engaging in idolatry when they kiss the Torah scroll by arguing that such a custom is a widespread sign of devotion: “In Asia (and it is the same almost in all the World) the People receiving a Decree, or Order of the King, they take it, and kiss it, and set it upon the Head.”102 On the other hand, it seems the iconoclastic Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera used “the Chinese tradition,” which holds “that the world is much older than Judaism teaches,” as a means of critiquing the Jewish position on the creation of the world.103

“Epistola. A una Ilustre Señora,” in Sol de la vida, 74. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 242. 101 Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 242–43. 102 Edward Nicholas, An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, And all the Sons of Israel (London: John Field, 1648), 30. Harm den Boer suggests that this text was written by Menasseh ben Israel (“La literatura hispano-portuguesa de los sefardíes de Amsterdam en su contexto histórico-social (ss. XVII y XVIII),” [PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1992], entry #31). 103 Cited in Faur, In the Shadow of History, 154. Somewhat cynically, Penso de la Vega has even his “modern” accionista negatively compare the ethnographic attitude of contemporary globe-trotting merchants to that of the “explorers” sent out by Moses to scout out the land of Israel. The latter regarded everyone they met as giants and themselves as pygmies, while the former “imagine that all are pygmies and that only they are giants” (Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 172). Some aspects of the European context of these Converso/Sephardic moves are treated, differently, in Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 99

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Such interest in, tolerance of, if not admiration for exotic Others extended at times to Amerindians directly. In a philosophical work of 1554, physician and philosopher Gómez Pereira (Medina del Campo; 1500–1558), said to have been the son of a Jew who fled Spain for Portugal, treats the relativity of opinion about human beauty. Pereira resorts to the novel example of the American natives, “discovered shortly before my birth,” who “considered the first Spaniards who arrived to be extremely ugly. Without doubt, later on, due to the power of trade and the custom of marrying those who rule, they began to hold as attractive those who, until then, they held as very ugly.”104 The still nebulous Indies west of the Atlantic serves Pereira as an analogy for the difficult but inexorable knowledge of the immortality of the soul.105 Pereira presents the probably common opinion that “nature has refused this knowledge [of the soul’s immortality], which is so useful, to so many Indians found, in our epoch, in the New World.”106 Pereira dismisses this supposition, based on evidence not from distant testimony, but from his own brother and nephew, who lived for many years among these people. Thus the natives of Cartagena de las Indias, he writes, bury their people with all the gold they possessed during their lifetimes—proof that they maintain a powerful belief in the soul’s afterlife.107 Such Montaignian ethnography notwithstanding, it is doubtful that (ex-)Conversos proffered a kinder opinion of non-Europeans than other Europeans due to an awareness of their own denigration. The rose-tinted gaze merely functioned as but one of several rhetorical stances. In the case of the immortality of the soul, the alleged behavior and beliefs of these “primitives” served to confirm a tenet of critical importance to rabbinic Judaism and increasingly under attack by skeptical Conversos. Hence Moses Raphael d’Aguilar (d. 1679) writes in his Tratado da immortalidade da alma that the belief in the immortality of the soul “is one of those creeds common to all the human species.”108 In a similar vein, to show that no one really denies God, Isaac Cardoso refers to the Tapuya, an allegedly cannibalistic Brazilian tribe; though said to be utter barbarPress, 1964); Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 104 Gómez Pereira, Antoniana Margarita. Reproducción facsimilar de la edición de 1749, with Spanish translation, ed. José Luis Barreiro Barreiro (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela/Fundación Gustavo Bueno, 2000), 151. 105 Pereira, Antoniana Margarita, 225. 106 Pereira, Antoniana Margarita, 293. 107 Pereira, Antoniana Margarita, 298. 108 Translated in Faur, In the Shadow of History, 135.

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ians, they nonetheless recognize in thunder a manifestation of divine power.109 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin reminds us that the sixteenth-century Sephardic chronicler Shlomo ibn Verga took this same anthropological, humanist tack in his Shevet Yehuda (1550) vis à vis Jews themselves. In one scene he has a Christian scholar named Thomas defending the Jews to the Spanish King Alfonso against accusations such as the blood libel. “Thomas presents the Jews primarily as a tribe with a monotheistic faith, and as bearers of an ancient and authentic wisdom, wisdom that may also serve to confirm the Christian faith.”110 This new cosmopolitanism and/or relativism, here represented by an imagined Christian Hebraist, arose involuntarily from the Jewish/Converso as well as non-European perspective, yet proved powerful as a rhetorical means of challenging triumphalist Christianocentric ethnology. For some authors, the most admired Amerindian peoples are those whose civility and productivity resembles that of the Europeans and, most especially, offer the latter commercial possibilities. In one poem Barrios describes various Amerindian peoples, distinguishing between their environments and traits. Michoacán, the central, western region of Mexico, receives positive review in Barrios’ pastoral fantasy: the delightful soil of Mechoacan, opulent and extensive, is praised, celebrated for its ingenious people, famous for its medicinal root. It produces the sweet coconut, the pineapple, opined to be the flavorful King of the fruits, surrounding, all is parks, springs, noble cities, excellent ports. Se sublima opulento y dilatado de Mechoacan el suelo deleitoso, por su inegniosa gente celebrado, por su raíz medicinal famoso: Produce el Coco dulce el opinado Ananas de las frutas Rey sabroso, ciñendo todo parques, todo fuentes ciudades nobles, puertos excelentes.111

109 Cardoso, Philosophia libera (Venice, 1673); cited in Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 265. 110 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory between Exile and History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97,4 (Fall 2007), 540. 111 “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico,” in Exquemelin, Piratas de la América, 71.

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Despite their critiques of Iberian behavior overseas, many of the depictions of non-Europeans in (ex-)Converso writings reflect the norms of European ethnocentrism. Iosepho Caceres’s global survey of 1613 makes frequent reference to the Indies and mentions “barbaric Peru.”112 Penso de la Vega warns (through the character of his Philosopher) against imitating “the barbarians of Mexico who, before Cortes conquered them, were served by the light of charred sticks for candles” only because they had “forests of wax” which derived from “the spontaneous labor of the bees.”113 In his description of Atlantic world geography, Barrios divvies out the consensual negative Iberian conceptualization of various peoples. Cumaná, an island belonging today to Venezuela, is a land of shadow (isla umbría), with barbaric cruelty, with impious brutality, its tanned people adroit with the bow, intrepid, and violent, fighting one another; from the exhausted bodies is [it] fed. con bárbara crueldad, con saña impía, diestra en el arco su tostada gente, combatiéndose intrépida, y violenta, de los cuerpos rendido se alimenta.114

In the Mexican mining regions of New Vizcaya and Zacoteca, the barbarous Chichimeca progeny is free and ignorant of the [Christian] doctrine; with striped face and diamond/hard arrow [diamantina?] from the uncivilized valley, the hollow mountain it goes out naked to eat its enemies at great risk, and for keen gain. se ostenta libre ajena de doctrina la bárbara progenie Chichimeca: con faz rayada, y flecha dismantina, de valle inculto, de montaña hueca sale a comer sus émulos desnuda al riesgo fuerte, y al engaño aguda.115

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Caceres, Los siete dias, 180v. Vega, Confusión de confusiones, 191. “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico,” in Exquemelin, Piratas de la América, “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico,” in Exquemelin, Piratas de la América,

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Writing his spiritual autobiography concerning the development of his Judaism in Mexico, the Marrano Luis de Carvajal, the younger, describes an inland trip with his uncle the Governor “in that land of the savage chichimecs.”116 Many of the depictions, especially the more extensive ones, were in fact highly ambivalent and nuanced. In the next chapter I offer a detailed treatment of the Relación of Antonio de Montezinos, first published in Amsterdam in 1650, which describes the author’s purported meetings with ‘Jewish Amerindians’ in the remote interior of Nueva Granada. Images of an edenic life amid great abundance for the Brazilian natives, gathered not without ingenuity, recur in Fernandes Brandão’s early eighteenth-century Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, though the same peoples are on occasion called savages. His character Brandônio distinguishes between the Peruvian natives, “exceedingly weak by nature and little inclined to war,” and the inhabitants of the Brazilian coast, “exceedingly bellicose and spend[ing] their lives in wars and raids.” Yet it is the latter whose salubrious environment and “natural” existence—the men “having three and four wives, of whom they have carnal knowledge”—allows them to live until well over a hundred years, mostly without falling ill. Even their “brutish way of life,” in which they commit “such great excesses in eating and drinking during their drunken bouts [. . .] still does not do them any harm, and they live healthy and happy.”117 The character Alviano dismisses the theory that the Brazilian natives descend from the Israelites, while Brandônio seems to favor it, though they pass over the topic rather quickly.118 In an extensive treatment of the native Brazilians in the final dialogue, Brandônio describes their relatively equalitarian political and

116 “Autobiografía,” in Alfonso Toro, La Familia Carvajal (Mexico City: Patria S.A., 1977), 687. 117 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 25–30, 102, 104, 105–6; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 16–22, 67, 69, 71. Reflecting a thoroughly masculinist perspective, Brandônio asserts that the multiple wives never complain or fight; “rather they are quite resigned—which is much to be admired” (310; 220). Yet women can become sorcerers as well as men (313; 224). Finally, there are among the Brazilian Indians Amazon-like women, “who have a great love of chastity. Some there are who flee absolutely from having any coupling with a male, intending rather to remain virgins. The better to do this, they train with the bow and arrow and generally wander through the fields and woods hunting wild beasts” (322; 236). 118 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 103; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 67.

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societal setup: they have no king, but “simply choose some headmen, in whom they recognize a certain superiority, especially in matters of warfare.” Though some “inherit the post from their fathers and grandfathers,” most of these leaders “owe election to their own merits.”119 One can detect here a certain amount of envy. The natives, who until the arrival of the Europeans went mostly naked, supposedly have no religion at all of any kind. Yet it “is their habit to give away most liberally everything they are asked for” and “one cannot discern in them even a trace of covetousness.” Food, or at least the planted manioc, is considered common property.120 Still, “the superstitions they have, and the credit they give their sorcerers, are their undoing.”121 Though they follow inherited custom unthinkingly—a common complaint made by “advanced” European Christians—“still one meets among them people who can reason a thing out and give you a shrewd answer. They do not allow themselves to be deceived by anyone.”122 Their barbarous cruelties, of course, occupy numerous paragraphs. Amerindians also found rhetorical use as negative comparisons to bolster Jewish identity. Probably the best-known example is Menasseh ben Israel’s oft-quoted dissociation of the Jews and Native Americans. The latter could not descend from the former, since “the Jews were the best disposed people, of the most handsome looks and the most beautiful understanding in the world; how then could these be the Indians, who lack all of this: [being] ugly in body and with rude understanding?123 Ben Israel’s dissociation of Jews and Amerindians aimed directly at the “widely-held opinion” that the Amerindians descended from Jews, since the Amerindians “are fearful, ungrateful, weak, superstitious, shrewd, and lying: all properties of Jews.”124 Similarly, a Portuguese 119 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 307; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 215. 120 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 307–8, 311–12; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 215–17, 222–23. Again, with their near total lack of goods, “they think themselves richer than Croesus with all his gold, and they live as happily and as free of covetousness as if they were masters of the world” (311; 222). 121 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 312; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 224. 122 Fernandes Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 309; Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil, 219. 123 Menasseh ben Israel, Esperança de Israel (Amsterdam, 1650), 118. This litany of terms comes nearly verbatim out of Garcia, Origen de los indios, 100 (bk. 3, ch. 4). 124 Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova, Memorial de las historias del nuevo mundo piru: Méritos y excelencias de la ciudad de lima, cabeza de sus ricos y estendidos reynos y el estado presente en el que se hallan (Lima: Coleccion Clasicos Peruanos, 1630), 11. Some of these tropes

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Converso merchant living in Lima within a few years of the publication of Menasseh ben Israel’s book, Luis de Valencia, “refused to admit that ‘Hebrews’ and natives had the same origins.”125 The author of an anonymous 1704 tract assessing natural philosophy, probably London rabbi David Nieto, has one of the characters in his dialogue defend the Jews against charges of seeing the world’s beings and forces as divinities by crying, “who is to believe that a Jew believes that which the most blind ancient pagans did not believe, nor the most barbarous modern idolators of Asia and America?”126 Such people represented, after all, the idolatrous peripheries of the civilized world: “The same cause that motivated God to pity Nineveh, will move him [to pity] Tartary, China and Japan, or any other people or nation, which should seem the same.”127 Though God cares about each people, who in some sense stand as equals, the structure of Nieto’s geographic metaphor reinforces a particularly Eurocentric hierarchy. Inside Outsiders/Outside Insiders Though Converso or Sephardic literature does not manifest a homogeneous racial outlook, I have tried to show that insofar as they wrote as insiders, as Europeans, many (ex-)Converso authors depicted Blacks and Amerindians as outsiders—primitive, servile, unattractive, laughable. In this regard (ex-)Converso writers come across as full participants in the ethnocentric discourse that had now spread into northwestern Europe from Portugal and Spain.128 Writing as outsiders, as ‘Jews,’ many of these authors sensed a need to distance themselves and their people from Blacks and Amerindians, these other Others whose proximity,

had pedigrees going back to the literature of the Reconquista; see Louise Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Bruce Rosenstock, “Alonso de Cartagena: Nation, Miscegenation, and the Jew in Late Medieval Castile,” Exemplaria 12, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 200–201. 125 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 267, n. 49; she cites AHN Inq. 1647, no. 12, fol. 32. On Valencia, who had resided for a while in Italy, see 146–8, 154–6. 126 [David Nieto,] De la divina providencia, o sea naturaleza universal o nataura naturante, tratado theologico. Dividido en dos dialogos, enlos quales se prueva la identidad destos terminos (London: James Dover in Tower Hill, 5464 [1704]), 6 (first dialogue). 127 [Nieto,] De la divina providencia, 64 (second dialogue). 128 An exploration of Sephardic Hebrew-language writings yields the same conclusion. See Schorsch, Jews and Blacks; Abraham Melamed, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other, trans. Betty Sigler Rozen (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

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even kinship threatened Jewish entry into the elite circle of White Europeans. Of the authors who give voice through Blacks to critiques of European hypocrisy, one, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, can only be described as ‘Jewish’ with the greatest uncertainty. The social and discursive background of Atlantic imperialism and colonialism helps contextualize the overwhelmingly negative images of Blacks and Amerindians that Conversos and Sephardim borrowed or produced. In this case, the triumphant force consisted of the desire to fit in; hence the attractiveness and importance of hegemonic ‘White’ attitudes. As I argued in my previous book, the aspects of negative ethnography put into place by Conversos and Sephardim were not internalized or appropriated as though came from without. They derived from aspects of the Jewish culture Conversos shared at home and that Sephardim (re)appropriated at home again beyond the Iberian world; from apects of the Iberian and then northern European culture to which these non-Catholic Spanish and Portuguese belonged as insiders from the perspective of lineage, wealth, virtues and science, as one fifteenth-century Castilian Rabbi put it.129 Finally, despite frequent White Christian ambivalence, Sephardim considered themselves insiders from the perspective of skin color and all that it signified.

129 Cited in Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 8.

CHAPTER NINE

(RE)READING THE OLD/NEW WORLD IN THE 1640S: THE RELACIÓN OF ANTONIO DE MONTEZINOS Menasseh ben Israel [in Vindiciae Judaeorum] recounts an amusing tale of a Portuguese nobleman, who in order to secure the release of his bodyphysician, who had confessed to the crime of Judaizing under torture, seized the Inquisitor himself and extracted a precisely similar confession out of him by the same means! —Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos

In this chapter I offer a close reading of a text from the mid-seventeenth century, the Relación of Antonio de Montezinos, which purports to relate the discovery of a previously unknown group of Jews in the Spanish colony of Nueva Granada. This text served as one of the instigations for Menasseh ben Israel’s famous Mikveh Israel [The Hope of Israel]. The oft-mentioned but relatively under-analyzed text of Montezinos provides a chance to explore further Judeoconverso and Sephardic attitudes toward and relationships to European colonialism and native Americans. In an effort to make this Jewish discovery narrative less strange and fantastic than most scholars have been willing, I place it in its historical and discursive context, which entails a comingling of the Converso/Sephardic experience of persecution by Catholic Spain and Portugal with the Converso/Sephardic experience of the opening up of new continents with European overseas expansion. In particular, I juxtapose the Relación of Montezinos with knowledge from the seventeenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries of actual Amerindian populations in Nueva Granada, something no one seems to have thought to do. My excursus here comprises a midrash on a mestizo text, one following Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, a reading of the messianic theo-political dreams of Conversos and Conversos who managed to flee to open Judaism.

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Continuing the discussion of the previous chapter, it should be no surprise that many of the leading Sephardic literati in seventeenth-century Amsterdam—Daniel Levi de Barrios, Joseph Penso de la Vega, even ‘orthodox’ men such as Isaac Orobrio de Castro—not only show familiarity with, but repeatedly cite classic works of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, including Luis de Camões, Os Lusiadas; Manuel de Faria y Souza, Comentarios a la Lusiada de Luis de Camoes; José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias; Bernardo Jose Aldrete, Varias antiguedades de Espana, Africa y otras provincias; Sebastian Manrique, Itinerario de las missiones que hizo . . . en varias missiones del India Oriental; Pedro Teixeira, Relacciones . . . de los reyes de Persia.1 Nor should it surprise us when Menasseh ben Israel dedicates the second part of his Conciliador (1641) to the “most noble, most prudent and fortunate señores of the Council of the West Indies,” that is, the directors of the West India Company.2 Here Ben Israel “recounts in the panegyric style the story of the birth of the United Dutch Provinces which had set themselves free from Spanish tyranny”3 and dedicates his work to these gentlemen, who were meanwhile busy wreaking havoc around the Atlantic in pursuit of profits. The cruelty wielded in this pursuit by the other Dutch mercantile/military body, the East India Company, toward natives and others is astounding, as any reader of Edmund Scott’s Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians can attest.4 Scott served as the principal agent for the East India Company in Bantam, Java from 1603–1605, and his book was published already in 1613 in England, by the Rev.

1 Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Conflict and Opportunity in ‘Europe’s Other Sea’: The Adventure of Caribbean Jewish Settlement,” American Jewish History 72,2 (December 1982): 67. 2 Translated in Benjamin Schmidt, “The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of America,” in Bernardini and Fiering, ed., Jews and the Expansion of Europe, 95; Méchoulan and Nahon have the “very noble, very wise and illustrious Gentlemen of the Council of the West Indies” (“Introduction,” Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel: the English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed., with introduction and notes by Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], 39). 3 Méchoulan, “Menasseh ben Israel and the World of the Non-Jew,” in Kaplan et al., Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, 86. 4 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11.

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Samuel Purchas.5 Did Menasseh ben Israel, voracious reader of works Jewish as well as non-Jewish, perhaps read the book? Was he troubled by such violence? Perhaps he was aware from other sources of the troubling practices of overseas colonial enterprises such as the East India Company? Is there any inkling of such awareness in his writings? Would Ben Israel or other Sephardim have been troubled by such cruelty, which was, of course, standard operating procedure for the time? Evidently not, since several Portuguese Jewish merchants living in Amsterdam played a part in the founding of the East India Company in 1602, while Dutch Sephardim eventually became disproportionately prominent as investors in it.6 Prominent Sephardic shareholders (hoofdparticipanten) in the West India Co. claimed roughly 5 percent of shares in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, with their control rising to 34 percent by 1700 and remaining there throughout the eighteenth century.7 Of course, the Dutch Portuguese Jews were active elsewhere as capitalists of colonialism; from 1595–1620 they “imported sugar, Brazil-wood and Indian diamonds via Oporto or Lisbon; they shipped diamonds and other products from Asia, such as cinnamon from Ceylon (all from areas not yet penetrated by the Dutch East India Company).”8 In Dutch Brazil, to which Menasseh ben Israel tells readers of the second part of his Conciliator that he is departing (though he ultimately never leaves), Sephardim controlled a good part of the colony’s internal trade in slaves.9

Ibid., 11–12. Cecil Roth writes that the Portuguese Jews ultimately “controlled 25 percent of the shares” (Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934], 244). He then goes on to insist that “the story of their being largely instrumental in its foundation is untrue. At the outset they owned only 1/10 of 1% of the shares” (392, note 3). 7 Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 117; Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 458–59. 8 Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 62. 9 On Ben Israel and Brazil, see Jonathan I. Israel, “Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (1645– 1657),” in Kaplan, Menasseh ben Israel and His World, 139–63. On Jews and slave-trading in Dutch Brazil, see Mello, Gente da nação, 233–35. Ben Israel had sent his brother, Ephraim, to Brazil to engage in commercial activities, as he notes in De Termino Vitae (Amsterdam, 1639), 237. They were joined in this endeavor by Ben Israel’s brotherin-law, Jonas Abrabanel. By 1651, Ben Israel was writing to Isaac Vossius that he had lost his fortune in Brazil and Poland, two of Holland’s central overseas commercial endeavors (E.N. Adler, “A Letter of Menasseh ben Israel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 16,3 [1904]: 565). Open Jewish settlement in the New World was first made possible by 5 6

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Menasseh ben Israel’s silence on the issue of colonial violence should come as no surprise. After all, Scott’s book itself was no critique of the East India Company and its practices; it was published by the Reverend Purchas as part of a series commemorating English voyages and military exploits.10 Henry Méchoulan points out that Ben Israel likewise greatly admired the extraordinary Dutch military successes, and concludes his above-mentioned dedication thusly: “May Almighty God always grant the Gentlemen of the Council success in their undertakings and guarantee the well-being of the country.”11 Here the welfare of the country is the welfare of the Jews, and Menasseh ben Israel was by no means alone in making this linkage a piece of the argument to Christian rulers for permitting a Jewish presence in their territory. Yet not all Sephardim threw in their lot with Europe. In the previous chapter I attempted to show how Judeoconverso and Sephardic writers on occasion critique European behavior overseas. As Noah Efron shows, the sixteenth-century account of Spanish and Portuguese overseas expansion by the Jewish chronicler Yosef ha-Kohen recounted the cruelty to the natives of the territories they conquered: “And it was in those days, the ships of the king of Portugal traveled to pillage plunder and to seize spoils in the land of Ethiopia.” This emphasis does not derive from a particular sympathy toward those natives, but rather served to corroborate their cruelty and rapaciousness toward the Jews.12 Samuel Usque, a Sephardi exile, betrays a complicated set of attitudes about Europe and its other Others. This makes sense in light of what little we know about his life. According to an autobiographical aside, Usque’s

the temporary Dutch conquest of north-east Brazil (1630–54), which enabled the founding of the first organized Jewish community in Recife, which became the main port of the Dutch colony. 10 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 12. 11 Méchoulan, “Menasseh ben Israel and the World of the Non-Jew,” 86. 12 Noah J. Efron, “Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands among Jewish Communities of Europe (from 1492 to the Thirty Years’ War),” in Bernadini and Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 55–6. The closest thing that I have seen to an explicit Jewish critique of European internal colonialism comes not from the Sephardic world but from Ashkenazic eastern Europe. In Poland, Jews made up a service class to the land-owning nobility. But some Jewish leaders were wary of Jewish colonization, warning Jews to be circumspect in the exercise of their political and economic power. According to Jacob Katz, “Jewish authorities in Poland tried to deter Jews from tax-farming and Rabbi Joel Sirkes gave the reason—lest people should say that Jews wanted to rule over them” ( Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times [West Orange: Behrman House, 1961], 152, n. 1).

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family was part of the ‘Diaspora of Castille’ that had fled Spanish persecution to Portugal. Around the time of Usque’s birth (1497) his family, along with the rest of the Jewish exiles in Portugal, was forcibly baptised by King Manoel I. Usque himself later fled Portugal, probably after the establishment of the Inquisition there in 1531, according to Martin Cohen.13 In his Consolaçam as Tribulaçoens de Israel (Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, first published in 1553), Usque describes the inhabitants of Asia and Africa. As with Maimonides some centuries earlier, the concern is the supposed lack of religious, and for Usque especially ethical, attainment. Why, Usque wants to know, does Israel suffer so for its sins while these idolatrous peoples appear to prosper? Borrowing heavily, if not verbatim, according to Martin Cohen, from two non-Jewish ‘ethnographic’ sources, the popular Itinerary of the Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema and The History and Description of Africa by Leo Africanus, the Muslim al-Hasan al-Wazzan who converted to Christianity,14 Usque lists some of these evil practices: The heathen who occupy Asia and enjoy its delights and lavish wealth murder men in vicious ways and shed the blood of their own kith and kin. [. . .] The people of India also follow customs that contradict human and divine reason. [. . .] And, O Lord, You are acquainted with their infernal religion. In Calcutta, the capital and principal city of all India, the entire population worships the devil. A metal devil, hideous and repulsive to behold, is seated on a huge throne in the center of their loathsome temple. [. . .] And what shall I say about the abominable rites and bestial customs of the other heathens in the continent of Asia? On the island of Java [. . .] their infernal practices are no better than those of wild beasts, for there are many on that island who eat human flesh and suck their own kin’s blood. [. . .] In Africa, the people commit turpitudes beyond all human comprehension. [. . .] And above all, they are not Mohammedans, or Jews, or Christians, nor do they have any religion or offer prayer to any thing; rather they live like the beasts of the field. Yet, despite this, they have a kingdom, they possess territory and dominion of their own, and they do not wander in alien lands.15

The above passages come from the third and final dialogue of the book. Here Usque recounts a “Final Lament over All Israel’s Misfortunes Past and Present,” beginning with Israel’s ancient oppressors. He then asks

Usque, Consolation, 40, 12–13; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “A Jewish Classic in the Portuguese Language,” in Usque, Consolação, 1:50–7. 14 Cohen in Usque, Consolation, 273–74. 15 Usque, Consolation, 220–21; Consolação, 2:225v–27v. 13

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God to consider “the works of the contemporary peoples into whose power You have delivered Your world and observe whether they have left the errant path which their forebears followed.”16 Yet, as Cohen notes, [t]hough he is clearly referring to the European nations, Usque discreetly proceeds to narrate the idolatries of the Asians and the Africans, with none of whom the Marranos had any appreciable contact. But to ascertain that his readers understand his true intent, he concludes: “But why O Lord must I dwell on what You can know so intimately of the religions and practices contrary to Your pleasure, not only of these people in Africa, but also in other kingdoms of the world?”17

Usque’s circumlocution indeed seems odd given his focus on the then “modern” and mostly European travails of the Jews, your [God’s] children whom you saw compelled to change their faith in Spain; [. . .] those who were burned and despoiled in France; [. . .] those who were converted so violently and then killed by the sword in England; and [. . .] the unexampled cruelties committed against them in Germany, Italy and throughout the world, continuing to our own day in Portugal.18

These mostly European oppressors will, of course, get what’s coming to them, according to Usque.19 He provides several examples of ‘modern’ anti-Jewish rulers (Sisebut, king of Spain; King Philippe of France; King João II of Portugal) and the vengeance that God chose to use on each (respectively: poisoned in the prime of his life; fell over cliff in stag-hunting accident; son died on wedding day, king was later

Usque, Consolation, 220; Consolação, 2:225r–v. Usque, Consolation, 25; Cohen’s emphasis. 18 Usque, Consolation, 224; Consolação, 2:230v. 19 He certainly pulls no punches in describing what he thinks are their just desserts, even if he buries his description nearly at the end of his book as well as hides his character’s words behind those of the prophet Micah: “I shall also see my enemy Bozrah [Rome, i.e., the Catholic Church] covered with dishonor and shame, she who now asks me mockingly: ‘Where is your God? Why does he not save you from your perils and from my hands?’ But I trust in the Lord of Hosts that my eyes shall see her trodden down as the mire in the streets” (Micah 7:7–10; Usque, Consolation, 261; Consolação, 2:279r). With Usque’s overt anti-Christian polemic, nationalist messianism, and belief in an imminent millenium which will restore Jewish power and autonomy, it is no wonder that Cohen speculates that “[p]erhaps to avoid the Inquisition’s scrutiny most of its copies were concealed and forever buried by its first Marrano readers” (Consolation, 31). 16 17

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poisoned). But rather than “weary [the reader] with more details,” Usque simply lays his cards out on the table: let me tell you generally that among all your abusers, though they were brethren of one and the same religion and faith, such an accursed strife has arisen and continued to this day that great torrents of Latin blood [sangue ytaliano] have run throughout their lands and abroad. We can thus say of Spain that Italy is its grave; of France, that Spain is the means of its consumption; of Germany, that all of its neighbors, including the Turk, are its executioners, who make it the wall where their artillery strikes; and of England, that continual pestilence and hostile Scotland are its scourge.20

As far as Usque is concerned, Europe can go to hell. Let them destroy one another in religious strife and war. Usque is happy to see Muslim Turks, Europe’s age-old enemies, contribute their share to God’s revenge.21 Even hostile Scotland, home to the ‘barbarian’ Scoti, receives Usque’s implicit support in its struggle against the English oppressors.22 It would seem that in the battle of the colonizers with the colonized, Usque’s persecution as a Jew at the hands of Europe shifted his sympathies vehemently in favor of the peoples fighting against Europe. His appreciation for the enemies of his enemy came despite his view of some of these peoples, which I assume was negative.23 And although he apparently believed in the imminent return of the lost ten tribes,24 Usque, Consolation, 229; Consolação, 2:237v. The Ottomans were, out of self-interest, relatively welcoming to and tolerant of the refugees streaming out of the Iberian peninsula. The myth of Ottoman beneficence to the Jews has been quite exaggerated, however. See, for instance, Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans: the Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 194. 22 See Arthur H. Williamson, “The Jewish Dimension of the Scottish Apocalypse: Climate, Covenant and World Renewal,” in Kaplan, Menasseh ben Israel and his World, 7–30, for a full discussion of Scotland’s status as barbarian and idolatrous in European and Christian thought until well into the seventeenth century. 23 He only once makes reference to the American natives, in the context of “Israel’s Lament on the Loss of the First Temple.” He writes: “O my daughters, whiter than pure milk and more beautiful and delightful than the clear sun, I saw hunger turn your skin the color of the Brazilians, your covering the color of the Ethiopians” (Usque, Consolation, 103; Consolação, 2:81v). After coming upon this previously unknown continent, the Portuguese sometimes referred to indigenous Americans as negros da terra, that is, Blacks of the [new] land. Still, the widespread somatic norm that Usque here shares is not in and of itself enough to go on. 24 Cohen, “Introduction,” in Usque, Consolation, 27. Cohen notes that a “curious account by the bibliophile Isaac Akrish in 1577 speaks of Usque as being among those who were preaching the doctrine of the imminent return of the ten lost tribes around the year 1550” (ibid., 14). 20 21

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he evidently didn’t entertain the notion that they were living in the Americas, or at least not enough to mention it. Nevertheless, Usque’s conflicted attitudes toward Europe and its Others recur among some of the later Sephardic exiles who had made their way by various routes to the Netherlands, Amsterdam in particular. Two Portuguese Among the Dutch: Menasseh Ben Israel and Antonio de Montezinos The Netherlands, which had won its independence from Spain in 1581, had since its inception, according to Martin Cohen, “welcomed Marranos.”25 In 1619 the Amsterdam City Council allowed Jews to live in the city according to Jewish law, granting citizenship to certain well-off Jews in 1657. These and other benevolent acts put the United Provinces of the Netherlands some two hundred years ahead of much of Europe in terms of religious and social tolerance. The life of Menasseh ben Israel well exemplifies the manner in which Jews repaid that tolerance. Cecil Roth reflects the feelings of Portuguese Dutch Jews such as Ben Israel when he refers to “the Dutch Jerusalem.”26 Menasseh ben Israel grew up as Manoel Diaz Soeiro, though scholars differ on the details of his early life. Born in 1604, he states that he comes from Lisbon, which he calls his “patria.”27 His father, “Joseph ben Israel of pious memory,” he writes in De Termino Vitae, “was stripped of all his goods by the Spanish Inquisition because he was a Jew. He was previously subjected to torture, which seriously impaired his health.”28 When the Soeiro family arrived in Amsterdam they were poor enough to have been “cared for by the Jewish ‘Nation.’ ”29 The hatred he felt

Cohen, “Introduction,” Usque, Consolation, 31. Roth, Life of Menasseh Ben Israel, 236. 27 Menasseh ben Israel, Mikveh Yisrael, Esto es esperanza de Israel, reprint ed. with introduction by Santiago Perez Junquera (Madrid: S. Perez Junquera, 1881), 97; H.P. Salomon, “The Portuguese Background of Menasseh ben Israel’s Parents as Revealed through the Inquisitorial Archives at Lisbon,” Studia Rosenthaliana 17,2 ( July 1983): 105–7. When he registered his marriage in Amsterdam in 1623, Ben Israel declared that he came from La Rochelle (Salomon, “Portuguese Background,” 107). 28 Trans. by Méchoulan and Nahon, “Introduction,” Ben Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), Hope of Israel, 23; Roth, Life of Menasseh ben Israel, 11–16. Salomon provides details from the Inquisition trial record itself (“Portuguese Background,” 108–15). 29 Méchoulan and Nahon, “Introduction,” Ben Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), Hope of Israel, 26. 25 26

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for the Inquisition was matched by his gratitude toward the Dutch: “We were protected from Spanish tyranny, and for that neither I nor my co-religionists will ever be able to thank you enough.”30 However, it is not actually Menasseh Ben Israel in whom I am interested, as much as the Relation of Aharon Levi, aka Antonio de Montezinos, the text forming in a way the center of Ben Israel’s Mikveh Israel. Scholars invariably mention it and immediately pass over it; perhaps its ‘fantastical’ nature warrants dismissal on a ‘historical’ basis. Such considerations led Heinrich Graetz, enlightenment scholar par excellence, to denounce Montezinos’s narrative as a fable and Menasseh as an emotional enthusiast for making it the foundation of his own messianic fantasies.31 Cecil Roth merely says that “[t]he fantastic character of this account needs no elaboration.”32 Scholars feel compelled to distance Menasseh Ben Israel from Montezinos. Richard Popkin writes that “Menasseh was far from an advocate of the [ Jewish Indian] view,” and in correspondence with English millenarians ben Israel was “most cautious, unconvinced; until he was finally willing to say that the group encountered by Montezinos could be part of a Lost Tribe, while the rest of the inhabitants of the Americas were migrants from Asia.”33 Perhaps these scholars are reacting to sentiments similar to those expressed by Voltaire—that is, by enlightenment rationalists—about such fantastical Jewish political dreaming: I know that there are some Jews in the English colonies. These marranos go wherever there is money to be made . . . But that these circumcised Jews who sell old clothes to the savages claim that they are of the tribe of Naphtali or Issachar is not of the slightest importance. They are, nonetheless, the greatest scoundrels who have ever sullied the face of the globe.34

30 Conciliador, pt. 2; cited by Méchoulan and Nahon, “Introduction,” Ben Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), Hope of Israel, 24. 31 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1861–1876), 10:97. 32 Roth, Life of Menasseh Ben Israel, 330, n. 1. 33 Popkin, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” 63, 68. Jacob Rader Marcus was one of the few dissenting scholars, noting that Menasseh ben Israel was “convinced that Montezinos’ narrative was true” ( Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew: 1492–1776 [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970], 1:41). Another exceptional piece, in every sense, and one that pays serious attention to the text of Montezinos, is Schmidt, “The Hope of the Netherlands,” 86–106. 34 Letter to Jean Baptiste Nicolas de Lisle de Sales (1773), Correspondence 86:166; cited by Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York/Philadelphia: Columbia University Press/Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 284–5.

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Some modern Spanish scholars make arguments similar to Voltaire’s. C.A. Mackehenie, writing in the 1930s, chuckles at how “Such an extraordinary invention [of Montezinos] was accepted [. . .] by the celebrated Portuguese Rabbi Manoel Dias Soeiro, the ‘hakan [sic]’ Menasseh-ben-Israel, who propagated [. . .] the fantastical relations that he heard from his coreligionist and compatriot.”35 In fact, the Relación of Montezinos nowhere argues that the Indians are themselves of Jewish descent, nor does it make much effort to determine how Jews got to the Americas; the text’s contribution in this regard is unoriginal. While Menasseh Ben Israel may be cautious on the narrow issue of the Amerindians’ Jewishness, he repeatedly supports in unambiguous terms Montezinos’ relation, which, he writes, “I prefer before the opinions of all others as most true”; “As for the other things in the relation of our Montezinos, they say nothing which savours of falsehood.”36 Elsewhere Ben Israel writes: That to which I give credit over all else is the relation of our Montezinos, Portuguese by nation, Jew by religion [. . .] of known and honored parents, forty years of age, a good man and above all ambition [. . . .] I myself spoke with him, in the course of six months when he was here, in my presence and that of many persons of quality, he solemnly swore that all that he said was true. Afterward he went to Pernambuco, where he lived two years and died, making the same oath at the hour of his death [. . .] And if all this is so, why should I not give credit to a virtuous man, enemy of all human [self-]interest?37

The fact that Ben Israel lent his authority to Montezinos’ story by publishing it as the preface to his own book, without any disavowal or disclaimer, shows how disingenuous are the efforts to separate the texts of these two men. Méchoulan and Nahon assert that 35 C.A. Mackehenie, “Apuntes sobre judíos, paulistas y jesuítas,” Revista de la Universidad Católica del Perú 5,34 (Lima, 1937): 452, n. 2. 36 Menasseh Ben Israel, The Hope of Israel: A Reprint, with an introduction by Lynn Glaser, “Indians or Jews?” (Gilroy, Calif.: Roy V. Boswell, 1973), 53, 56; Ben Israel, Mikveh Yisrael ( Junquera), 115–16, 125. 37 Ben Israel, Mikveh Yisrael ( Junquera), 41–2; Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Méchoulan/ Nahon), 124–25. According to the Yiddish edition of Mikveh Yisrael (1691), which seems to incorporate elements from Ben Israel’s text into that of Montezinos, the deathbed oath was made in the presence of two witnesses, Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, chief rabbi in Brazil between 1642 and 1654, and the unknown Yaacov Asher b. Alexander. This information is not attested anywhere else. The second man is said to have just died himself, having sworn that he heard Montezinos’ story in Brazil (Shlomo Berger, “Ashkenazim Read Sephardim in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” Studia Rosenthaliana 35,2 [2001]: 261).

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[a]s a religious official, [Ben Israel] was reluctant to give his backing to a story which was so extraordinary in content. But once the tale was known, made use of, and distorted by the Christians, he had to claim it as a Jewish piece of good news [. . . and] to put a very quick end to the explanations of the Jewish origin of the Indians suggested by [the Scottish-born millenarian] Dury and supported by [his English colleague] Thorowgood.38

This reasoning is inconsistent and gets things backwards. It seems that Montezinos’ Relación already carried the implicit sanction of Ben Israel, who seemingly sent it to Dury himself, if not to others, and of the official Amsterdam Jewish community leadership, since they would never otherwise have “had [Montezinos’ story] embodied in an affidavit executed under oath before the chief rabbi of the Amsterdam synagogue.”39 While official notarization may not have been obtained in the secular civic sense, according to the Spanish version of Mikveh Yisrael, Montezinos “solemnly swore that all he had said was true” in the presence of Ben Israel, as rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, and “many persons of distinction.”40 In the Spanish version of Mikveh Yisrael, the Relación states that Montezinos “recounted the following relation before various individuals of the Portuguese Nation.” The Latin version mentions that Ben Israel himself was present and glorifies the stature of the audience: “Montezinus recounted to Lord Menasseh ben Israel and to other leaders/nobles of the Portuguese nation [. . .] the following things,” as does the slightly earlier English translation, by Dury, at the end of Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America, just before the publication of Mikveh Yisrael: “[Monterinos (sic)] declared before me Manassah Ben Israell, and divers other chiefe men . . .”41

38

66.

Méchoulan/Nahon, “Introduction,” Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon),

39 Glaser, “Jews or Indians?,” 37. Richard Popkin asserts that Ben Israel had Montezinos “state [his tale] before a notary and swear to its truth” (R.H. Popkin, “The Lost Tribes, the Caraites and the English Millenarians,” Journal of Jewish Studies 37,2 [Autumn 1986], 215; and see Popkin, “Jewish Indian Theory,” 67). I do not know where the idea of a notary or official affidavit comes from; I have seen no direct evidence supporting it. 40 Ben Israel, Esperança, 41–2. Ben Israel’s presence is also mentioned in John Dury’s translation from a French version of Montezinos’ narrative supposedly sent him by Ben Israel himself (see below). 41 Ben Israel, Esperança, 1; Ben Israel, Spes Israel (Amsterdam, 1650), 1; “The Relation of Master Antoine Monterinos [sic], translated out of the French Copie sent by Manaseh Ben Israel,” Thomas Thorowgood, Jewes in America, or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race (London, 1650), 129. Méchoulan and Nahon conjecture that Ben Israel wrote

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All we know from Mikveh Yisrael is that the narrative of Montezinos was “circulating these past few years [. . .] as a novelty, agreeable, and the desire being great to inquire into the truth, not solely through their letters did our own [i.e., other Sephardim] solicit me to state my opinion regarding it.”42 No original or free-standing text of the Relación, such as a notarized document, has yet been found in any language. The English millenarian Puritan John Dury, in Holland during 1644, was told about Montezinos’ story and “heard that a Narrative was made in writing of that which he has related,” according to Dury’s letter to Thomas Thorowgood of January 1650. Dury asserts, just before the publication of Mikveh Yisrael, that he “procured it [i.e., Montezinos’ narrative] from the Low Countries, and received a Copie thereof in French, attested under Manasseh Ben Israel his hand, that it doth exactly agree with the originall, as it was sent me.”43 Dury’s translation of the narrative appears at the end of Thorowgood’s book and declares that the French version was sent to Dury by none other than Ben Israel. Dury received it on 27 Nov. 1649.44 The French version Ben Israel sent to John Dury, before December 1649, contains the former’s signature and attestation: “I Manasseh Ben Israel underwritten, beare witnesse, that this present paper hath been coppied with the whole truth of the

his text first in Spanish, yet apparently supplied his Latin translator with a different version than the one he “gave his community” (Méchoulan and Nahon, Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel, 62–3). Indeed the two versions differ and it is clear that the Latin one was prepared first and for a non-Jewish audience; Ben Israel refers to the Latin version on the second page of the Dedication to the Spanish edition (13 Sebat 5410), stating that “As a new person of great quality and letters from England should obligate me to write something longer, I made this treatise in the Latin language, with some caution . . .” 42 Ben Israel, Esperança, Dedicatoria, unpaginated [3–4]. According to J.W. Wesselius, a December 1642 letter from the Silesian Boehmist and Rosicrucian Abraham von Franckenberg to the Austrian millenarian Johann Permeier refers to Montezinos’ narrative (Ernestine G.E. Van der Wall, “Johann Stephan Rittangel’s Stay in the Dutch Republic [1641–1642],” in Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century: Studies and Documents, ed. J. Van den Berg and Ernestine G.E. Van der Wall [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988], 130–1; review of this book by J.W. Wesselius, Studia Rosenthaliana 22,2 [Autumn 1988]: 208; Van der Wall cites the letter from Th. Wotschke, “Der polnischen Brüder Briefwechsel mit den märkischen Enthusiasten,” Deutsche Wissensch. Zeitschr. f. Polen 22 [1931]: 58). 43 John Dury, “An Epistolicall Discourse to Mr. Thorowgood, Concerning his Conjecture that the Americans are descended from the Israelites,” in Thorowgood, Jewes in America, unpaginated. 44 Dury, “Relation,” in Thorowgood, Jewes in America, 129, 139. Ben Israel corresponded with others besides Dury in French (R.H. Popkin, “Menasseh Ben Israel and Isaac La Peyrère. II.,” Studia Rosenthaliana 18,1 [ January 1984]: 20).

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originall, and that the Author, Monterinos [sic], is a vertous man, and separate from all manner of worldly interests, and that hee swore in my presence that all that which he declared was a truth.”45 All of the above makes it likely that a written version of the Relación had existed and was circulating and that it may well have been Ben Israel himself who was distributing copies of this newsworthy little text. The elements of Montezinos’ Relación would have been of the utmost interest to a Jewish community already deeply imbued since (at least) 1492 with the kind of messianic fervor that readily found expression in, as André Neher eloquently recalls, the impressive series of flesh-and-blood Messiahs appearing every twenty or thirty years, none of whom—it cannot be overstressed—was ever regarded or treated as a false Messiah, and the equally impressive series of Messianic theories which, especially in Safed, were tested against historico-mystical reality.46

As Neher goes on to suggest, the specific messianic theme of the lost ten tribes comes to the fore after 1492 not on account of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, but rather the discovery of the New World. In this sense, Menasseh Ben Israel’s use of Montezinos’ Relación should be considered alongside Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which “purported to be the account of a sailor, encountered by the author in Antwerp, who had participated in Amerigo Vespuci’s 1497–1498 expedition to the Americas.”47 It is precisely the fantasy of the New World embedded in Montezinos’s text, although thinly disguised, that intrigues most. This fantasy, in all senses of the word, seems on the one hand to explain just why Menasseh Ben Israel would have been so attached to such a tale, despite its problems, and on the other hand to contradict the very project his English millenarian connections tried

Dury, “Relation,” in Thorowgood, Jewes in America, 138–39. André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541–1613) and his Times, trans. David Maisel (Oxford: Oxford University Press/ the Littman Library, 1986 [orig. 1974]), 120–21. 47 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 69. The complexity of the feedback loop between discourse and action/event can be appreciated from the fact that Vasco de Quiroga, Bishop of Michoacán and founder of the hospital network of Santa Fe, named among the sources of his philanthropic inspiration More’s Utopia, from which he drew practical ideas for organizing his hospitals ( John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta [1525–1604], 2nd. rev. ed. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970], 44, 128, n. 7). 45 46

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to build on the text’s foundation, perhaps even mocking these attempts (more on this below). Further support for Ben Israel’s trust in Montezinos may be found in the attitudes of contemporaries to issues of scientific proof and ‘bearing witness’ in scientific experiments. As late as the eighteenth century one finds European scientific researchers confronting (knowingly or not) the gap between their social biases and their need for neutral and reliable subjects and witnesses for scientific experiments. One French researcher explains why he is “very delicate in the Choice of the Persons who I was desirous should be admitted to our Experiments. I declared that I was not willing to receive thereto either Children, Servants, or People of the lower Class; but only that reasonable People should be admitted, and of an Age sufficient to leave nothing to be feared of the Truth of what they might depose.”48 From these attitudes it becomes clear that the ‘character’ or ‘quality’ of witnesses might be of greater importance than the ‘evidence itself,’ as Ben Israel’s comments about Montezinos show.49 Hence Ben Israel’s repeated references in Mikveh Yisrael to Montezinos as “our Montezinos.” One of the characteristics that most recommended Montezinos to Ben Israel was their shared Portuguese nationality, in addition perhaps to their mutual interest in the New World. Little is known of Montezinos’ life. He was born in the northern Portuguese town of Vila Flor around 1610, to a Luis de Montezinos. (Some scholars hold that Ben Israel was also born in Vila Flor.50) Antonio moved at some point to Spain, the two kingdoms having been unified in 1580.51 By the late 1630s or early 1640s, Montezinos had made his way to the Spanish colonial territory of New Granada. He traveled about the region before departing for 48 Cited in Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson and Harry Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 76. 49 This attitude was not new by any means. The same aproach dictated the entire genre of works aiming to establish the chain of Jewish tradition, such as the Sefer HaQabbalah of Abraham ibn Daud, in which the “character of the men in question [i.e., the earlier Jewish sages] was [. . .] the very essence of the argument, for the probity of a ˜adith [tradition] depended ultimately on the probity of its bearers” (Gerson D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition [Sefer ha-Qabbalah] by Abraham ibn Daud: a Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1967], lviii). The use of this approach was borrowed by Jewish authors from Muslim historiography, itself perhaps a descendant of Greek practice. 50 Bernardo López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes ([Alcalá de Henares, Madrid]: Universidad de Alcalá, 2001), 62, n. 55. 51 The biographical data derives from Ben Israel, Esperança, 1, 41–2.

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Amsterdam, where he seems to have remained a mere six months. It was in the midst of this free Dutch Sephardic community that he adopted or officially began using the Jewish name of Aharon Levi.52 Here also he publicly conveyed his narrative of his encounter with the possibly Jewish Amerindians, seemingly just after his arrival in 1644. According to the Spanish version: “On the 18th of Elul [. . .] he arrived in this city of Amsterdam [. . .] and declared before various persons of the Portuguese Nation the following Relation.”53 Whether Levi/Montezinos related his tale the day of his arrival or a month or two later remains unclear. Investigating the rolls of those who received charity from the Amsterdam Sephardic community, Méchoulan and Nahon failed to find Montezinos listed, either a sign that he was, as Ben Israel states, above worldly interest or that he lacked financial troubles.54 While in the Americas, Levi/Montezinos does not seem to have been particularly well off; when he was arrested by the Inquisition in Cartagena de las Indias his goods were sequestered, but, reported the Inquisition, these were “few.”55 From Amsterdam he went to Pernambuco, the Dutchcontrolled section of Brazil, and no doubt to its main, really only town, Recife, where Menasseh also talked of moving, a place then at the peak of its promise for adventurous Sephardim. Levi/Montezinos may have gone because he had relatives there. A Semuel or Samuel Montecinos appears in numerous registries as a purchaser of incoming slaves in

52 “Aron Levi, at another time, in Spain, Antonio de Montezinos” (Ben Israel, Esperança, 1). Twice in his narrative, produced after his arrival in Amsterdam, he informs his Indian interlocutor(s) that he is “of the Tribe of Levi” (ibid., 4, 15), but it is impossible to know whether he really knew of his levitical genealogy while still a Converso in Iberian territories. In a transcription of a letter from Montezinos to Elias Perera, dating from sometime in 1644, the unknown transcriber writes of Montezinos, “who is now called Aron Levy” (unpaginated correspondence found at the back of the copy of Esperança de Israel at the Lilly Library, Indiana University). I discuss this letter below and translate it in the Appendix. 53 Ben Israel, Esperança, 1. Shlomo Berger, basing himself on Méchoulan and Nahon, states that Montezinos “drew large crowds in Amsterdam’s Sephardi community [. . .] with tales of Jews in the jungles of Colombia.” This is either an embellishment or drawn from sources unknown to me (Berger, “Ashkenzaim Read Sephardim,” 260). 54 Introduction, Ben Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), Hope of Israel, 69. 55 Elisabeth Levi de Montezinos, “The Narrative of Aharon Levi, alias Antonio de Montezinos, Related by him to Haham Menasseh Ben Israel in Amsterdam ANNO 5404 (1644), Published in the Spanish Language in Amsterdam ANNO 5410 (1650), Translated into English by Elias Hayyim Lindo in London ANNO 5613 (1853), Published for the First Time in E.H. Lindo’s Version, with Menasseh Ben Israel’s Comments and a New Commentary and Annotations,” The American Sephardi 7–8 (1975): 83.

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Brazil until 1640, when he could no longer pay his debts, though he remained in the colony at least through 1649, when his signature appears in the minute book of Congregations Tzur Israel of Recife and Magen Abraham of Mauricia.56 An Isaque Montesinos Mesquita was a member of the latter congregation at least from the late 1640s.57 Semuel or Samuel was buried in the Amsterdam Sephardic cemetery in 1670; Ishac or Isaque in 1676.58 Whether Semuel and Isaque were related to one another, or to our author and, if so, how, is not known. Two years after arriving in Brazil, Aron Levi/Antonio Montezinos died in the colony, in either 1646 or 1647. This scanty knowledge of Montezinos’ life leaves us with many questions. Nearly all Spanish-language scholarship assumes that Montezino(s) is a Converso name, though, as Anita Novinsky has recently remarked, no names were borne exclusively by Conversos.59 Vila Flor, Montezinos’ hometown, was situated very close to the Portuguese border with Castile and hosted a New Christian population of some significance after 1497. Indeed, an encampment for those expelled from Spain seems to have operated in or around Vila Flor.60 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a census conducted by the town estimated some 120 New Christians out of a total of 400 residents, while around mid-century someone testifying before the Inquisition claimed that the town and its area had very few Catholics because most of the people were of the Hebrew nation.61 Vila Flor has been called a “well-known centre of Marranism” by modern scholars as well.62 I could not find any evidence to connect our Montezinos with any other prominent Montezinos, Converso or otherwise. One of the group of New Christians, according to Colombian scholar I¢ic Croitoru Rot-

56 Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses, 76–7; he cites Mello, Gente da nação, 183; Arnold Wiznitzer, The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1954), 78. 57 He served as the congregation’s Gabbai (sexton) in 5409–11 (1649–1651) and from 5413 (1653) for an unknown period (Wiznitzer, Records, 50). 58 José Alexandre Ribemboim and José Luiz Mota Menezes, O primeiro cemitério judeu das Américas: Período da dominação holandesa em Pernambuco (1630–1654) (Recife: Edições Bagaço, 2005), 52. 59 Anita Novinsky, “The Myth of the Marrano Names,” Revue des Études Juives 165,3–4 (2006): 445–56. 60 Tavares, Judeus em Portugal, 1:256. 61 Cited in López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda, 27. 62 Henry Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon, Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), 69.

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baum, who accompanied the conquistador Rodrigo de Bastidas (or Bastides) was a Montesinos.63 In the repartimiento proclaimed in 1514 regarding the natives of Nueva Granada, one Francisco Montesino is listed among the many Spaniards said to be married to Amerindian women.64 According to Rotbaum, this Montesino stands among other “encomenderos [holders of a license to Amerindian labor and tribute] of undoubtedly Jewish origin.”65 I could identify no connections with the well-known Dominican friar Antonio Montesino whose sermonizing against the mistreatment of the Amerindians in 1511 is recorded by Las Casas;66 nor with Friar Ambrosio de Montesinos (1444?–1514?), a Franciscan, who served as confessor at the Royal Court and later as Bishop of Sarda (Albania), to whom one of the most popular religious texts was attributed, Epístolas y evangelios para todo el año;67 the friar Francisco Montesinos who was active in the land of the Aruacans (present-day Chile) around 1560;68 the fabulously wealthy Madrid

63 Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 113. Was this Montesinos de Lebrija, who seems to have been among a group of soldiers who conspired to kill Bastidas? (Simón, Noticias historiales, 3:21). 64 Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Orígenes de la dominación española en América (Madrid: BaillyBailliere, 1918), 384, n. 4. 65 Rotbaum, De Sefarad, 117–18. 66 This Montesino, according to a Royal Deed of 3 September 1516, transcribed by Manuel Serrano y Sanz, was to go from the island of Hispaniola to the “Coast of Pearls” and the province of Cumaná (now Venezuela) in order to aid the conversion and Christian education of the local Amerindians, who were rebelling and attacking the already-present priests because of the mistreatment and abuse they were suffering at the hands of an armada of Spanish residents of Hispaniola (Serrano y Sanz, Orígenes de la dominación española, 373, 376–77). According to the historical chronicle of Antonio de Remesal, Montesino was chosen to accompany a contingent of Germans sponsored by the Welser bankers of Augsburg to exploit the mines of Venezuela (Felix Jay, Three Dominican Pioneers in the New World: Antonio de Montesinos, Domingo de Betanzos, Gonzalo Lucero: Translations from original sources with an introduction [Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002], 4, citing Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias occidentales (1619), vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 17). 67 The text was banned by the Spanish Inquisition and some scholars dispute that Montesinos authored it. See Historia de la inquisición en España y América, ed. Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos/Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984–2000), 3:916; M. Morreale, “Las epístolas y evangelios de Ambrosio de Montesinos: Eslabón entre los romanceamientos medievales y la lectura de la Biblia en el siglo de oro,” in Studi in onore di A. Corsano (Lacaite Editore, 1970), 451–69; A.M. Álvarez Pellitero, La obra lingüística y literaria de fray Ambrosio Montesino (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1976); Maria Matesanz del Barrio, “ ‘Epístolas y Evangelios por todo el año’: Una errónea atribución de autoría,” Revista de Filologiá Románica 13 (1997): 215–30. 68 In this year two youths left Spain for the New World as assistants to him and thirteen other clerics; Luis Romera Iruela and Maria del Carmen Galbis Díez, Catálogo

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New Christian merchant Fernando Montesinos Téllez (1588–1659);69 or the Jesuit historian, traveler and metallurgist Fernando Montesinos, active in Lima and Peru more generally (early- to mid-17th cen.).70 This last figure penned a description of the auto de fé held in Lima on 23 January 1639. One of the Inquisition suspects who appeared in this auto was a Francisco Marques Montesinos. His case is summarized in the description of the event: “merchant by profession, who made journeys to diverse parts, and to New Spain, hailing from Torre de Moncorbo, in the Archbishopric of Braga, in Portugal, 40 years of age, [and who] was imprisoned in this city as a judaizing Jew.” This Marques Montesinos admitted the charges and begged mercy, winning reconciliation with the Church and a punishment of confiscation of all his goods and perpetual imprisonment. Because of the “variations and diminutions of his confessions and the testimony that he raised,” he was sentenced further to 10 years in the galleys of Spain, permanent banishment from the Indies and 200 lashes.71 Finally, Méchoulan and Nahon discovered that a licenciado (i.e., university graduate) by the name of Luis de Montesinos “is to be found in 1624 in the Kingdom of Quito” and speculate about whether this is our author’s father.72 Though he could be a relative, Luis de Montesinos could not be our Antonio’s father, as he was a young bachelor.73 Openly Jewish individuals de pasajeros a Indias durante los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII (Seville: Archivo General de Indias/Ministerio de Cultura, 1980), 4:83. 69 See the recent study of him by López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda. Fernando had left Vila Flor, also our Montezinos’ hometown, in 1603 for larger horizons. Fernando’s Castilian great grandfather had settled in Vila Flor after fleeing Spain in 1492, going on to engender a sizeable extended family there. 70 The best biographical study to date is that of Juha Hiltunen, Ancient Kings of Peru: The Reliability of the Chronicle of Fernando de Montesinos, Correlating the Dynasty Lists with Current Prehistoric Periodization in the Andes, Bibliotheca historica, 45 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999), 166–76. His family hailed from the mountains of León, he himself born in Osuna. León is not that far, relatively speaking, northeast of Vila Flor and environs. 71 Montesinos, Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima, 31 [1639 ed., unpag.]. Below I take up the remarkable similarity between this Marques Montesinos and our author. It should be noted that fully a third of the Portuguese in Lima between 1580 and 1640 whose background could be identified derived from the region of Trás-os-Montes and Beira, the highest such concentration in the entire colony (Ventura, Portuguese no Peru, 1:20). 72 Méchoulan and Nahon, Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Méchoulan/ Nahon), 75; they cite John Leddy Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 260. 73 In a document clarifying his identity in order to receive permission to travel to Quito, Luis states that he is single, comes from the Spanish town of Verín, that his

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named Montezinos are also known to us. A Samuel Montesinos lived in Amsterdam, ca. 1637–53, a relation of Fernando Montesinos Téllez of Madrid;74 I have found no documentation that connects this man to our author. The same can be said for the Daniel Montezinos who served as samas (sexton) of the Bet Israel synagogue in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, and of the Danjel Montezinos (the same man?) who sold meat ca. 1624, of whom several children were buried in the Sephardic community’s cemetary.75 In testimony given to the Madrid Inquisition in 1635, Esteban de Arias de Fonseca mentions from a few years past yet another Fernando de Montesinos, then living in Bordeaux, one of a group of men who tried to convince Fonseca to become an open Jew.76 Though a descendant of Montezinos published documents from the Inquisition of Cartagena that seem to corroborate his imprisonment there, as mentioned curtly in the Relación, from September 1639 to February 1641, I am less interested in proving the veracity of his tale than in interpreting its importance to its teller and his audience.77

father is Antonio de Montesinos and his mother Francisca de Ribera, that he is an Old Christian without Moorish or Jewish blood and that none of his family members were sentenced to penitence by the inquisition (“Expediente de informacion y licencia de pasajero a indias de Luís de Montesinos, natural de Verin, hijo de Antonio de Montesinos y de Francisca de Ribera, a tierra firme,” 26 March 1620, AGI, Contratación 5371, no. 63/1/1, fol. 1r.). In the pages that follow, several witnesses, who claim to know his parents, corroborate these facts, one calling Luis a “youth/mozo.” Though it is known that individuals lied about such information, and Verín lies just over the border from north Portugal, some 50 km. from Vila Flor, I could find no confirmation of Luis being Portuguese, as was claimed by Carlos Landazuri Camacho, El Dr. Antonio de Morga, octavo presidente de la real audiencia de Quito, 1615–1636 (Quito: Departamento de Historia y Geografia de la Universidad Católica, 1973), 76. 74 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 227. 75 Wilhelmina C. Pieterse (ed.), Livro de Bet Haim do Kahal Kados de Bet Yahacob (Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., 1970), 97, 107. 76 Yosef Kaplan, “The Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam: From Forced Conversion to a Return to Judaism,” Studia Rosenthaliana 15,1 (March 1981): 41. 77 Levi de Montezinos, “Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 62–83. H.P. Salomon informed me that in fact he ghost-wrote this essay (personal communication, Nov. 2006), which offers some insightful propositions, but still leaves much undetermined. For instance, if Montezinos was arrested in Cartagena in 1639, it is unclear why the Relación states that he arrived in the Caribbean only in 1641 or 42. If the narrative within the Relación treat events after his imprisonment, it seems to ignore the fact that he first met the Amerindians he describes before being arrested, as he claims (Ben Israel, Esperança, 1); Méchoulan and Nahon already notice this problematic chronology (Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 74–5).

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chapter nine Preliminary Considerations Before Entering the Text

Considering the various genres of written reportage used in the Iberian world at the time, Rolena Adorno argues that the relación, in contrast to the crónica or historia, constitutes “the least formal and most personal,” mode, connoting “immediacy and even partisanship,” in which “writers gave testimony of specific events, looking microscopically at steps whose proposed importance on the grand scale was often left implicit.”78 Other scholars, such as Roberto González Echevarría and José Rabasa, point to the history and legalistic constraints of the relación as the official mode of reporting on discoveries and events to the Crown. In this sense, intriguingly, Montezinos’ text bears greater kinship with the more flexible Portuguese version of the relação, which “can boast wildly fantastic content.”79 With this in mind, I treat Montezinos’ text as a cultural artifact rather than as a reflection of the author’s (authors’[?]) viewpoints, which cannot with clarity be read through the mediated transmission. The search for the “authentic” text of the Relación seems fruitless given that no original has been found. The best we can do is compare the three extant versions: the earliest, the French one provided by Ben Israel to Dury, known only through its English translation by Dury; the Latin Relatio in the Latin version of Mikveh Yisrael; the Spanish Relación of the Spanish version of Mikveh Yisrael. Dury’s English translation from a French original corresponds throughout to the version in Spes Israel, while the Spanish version of Esperança de Israel contains slight but at times significant differences. Though Montezinos was Portuguese, he had clearly lived in Spanish territories for a while and could have conveyed his narrative in Spanish. Is the Spanish version from Mikveh Yisrael the original as dictated by Montezinos? Was it edited by Ben Israel for ‘foreign’ consumption? It is impossible to know and scholars offer different solutions. Drawing on Margarita Zamora’s analysis of the letters of Columbus, Ronnie Perelis highlights the ‘corporate’ nature of the Relación’s production: an oral text delivered in first person before

78 Rolena Adorno (ed.), From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period (Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs/ Syracuse University, 1982), 10. 79 José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 5; Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, 57.

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important witnesses—and crafted for the benefit of the particular audience?—regarding events from some time previous, then transcribed in third person by another individual.80 Rivka Schatz is of the opinion that Montezinos’ Relación was actually “Menasseh’s, who adjusted all its details to fit the setting of English millenarian literature.”81 Benjamin Schmidt feels that the Relación was “shaped by the Amsterdam rabbi.”82 Shlomo Berger writes that “Menasseh provided a messianic sequel to the story, incorporating Montezinos’s account as his introduction,” though I am not sure whether his two clauses refer to one action or two or whether he means that Menasseh literally added something to the Relación.83 While I agree with Schatz that Ben Israel may have adjusted the text for ‘foreign’ consumption and while Schmidt’s novel highlighting of the Dutch resonances that help make sense of Mikveh Yisrael and on which Ben Israel might have sought to play is convincing, I will try to show that the Relación itself derives from and strongly reflects earlier Jewish messianic and specifically Iberian discursive patterns. As far as I can see, there is no evidence for the argument that Ben Israel wrote the Relación, though we do not know whether the original document was in Latin, like the rest of Spes Israel, or in Spanish, Montezinos’ adopted language, or Portuguese, his mother tongue. (Why did Ben Israel send a French version to Dury? Who produced it?) To think that this prominent rabbi would take such literary license seems counter-intuitive and opposed to the very characterization of Ben Israel and his own Mikveh Yisrael that many scholars (including some of those above) proffer. If he did not believe in the Jewish Indian theory, why would he dabble in convincing Christian colleagues of its possible veracity? This is particularly difficult in light of the self-aggrandizing prophecies in the Relación implying that Montezinos himself is the awaited messiah (discussed below). If, on the other hand, the contents of the Relación corroborated his own feelings, why would he stoop to

80 Ronnie Perelis, “Marrano Autobiography in its Transatlantic Context: Exile, Exploration and Spiritual Discovery” (PhD Dissertation, NYU, 2006), 27–28, 59–60. Perelis, who made use of an earlier draft of this chapter, and on whose dissertation committee I served, provides a more extended and nuanced literary analysis of the Relación than I do. 81 Rivka Schatz, “Menasseh Ben Israel’s Approach to Messianism in the JewishChristian Context,” in Kaplan, Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, 251. 82 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 98. 83 Berger, “Ashkenazim Read Sephardim,” 260.

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adulterating the text? I will address these questions after a review of the Relación itself. Journey Into the Unknown Sometime in or just before 1639, Antonio de Montezinos travels with some hired mules and Amerindians in the Andean Cordillera mountains in the interior of Quito Province of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. The text picks up as he comes from the town of Honda (in present-day Tolima Province, Colombia), situated on the Magdalena River, which eventually flows into the Caribbean east of Cartagena.84 His goal was Popayán, an important town because of its location between Lima, Quito and Cartagena, a main transfer point of gold and other riches going via Cartagena by ship back to Spain. The cargo Montezinos brings on the mules makes it likely that he was a merchant, carrying his wares. He later says he has “his business/su ventura” in Honda (3).85 A storm strikes, not surprising in a region boasting not a few peaks over 5,000 meters tall, a day of much rain and wind, it happened that, with many loads falling, the Indians irked by the work of the day, they began to curse their fate, saying that this and much more they deserved for their sins. To which the said Indian Francisco [whom the others call Chief/Cazique], encouraging them, said that they should have patience, that shortly they would have a day of rest. To this they responded that it was not just [i.e., fair] that they should have it, as they treated so badly a holy people and the best in the world, and that all the labors and inhumanities that the Spanish practiced toward them were well deserved for this crime un dia de mucha agua y viento, le sucedio, que cayendo muchas cargas, los Indios enfadados del trabajo del dia, empeçaron a dezir mal de su fortuna, diziendo, que esso y mucho mas merecian por sus pecados: a lo que el dicho Indio Francisco, animandolos dixo, que tuviessen paciencia, que en breve tendrian algun dia de descanço: a esto respondieron, q , no era justo le tubiessen, pues que trataron tan mala una gente santa y la mejor del mTdo, y que todos los trabajos y inhumanidades que los Españoles uzaban cõ ellos, tenian bien merecidas por esta culpa (1–2). 84 Rotbaum, De sefarad al neosefardismo, 208, suggests this identification for Honda. Lucien Wolf prefers “Bahia Honda, an inlet at the north-eastern extremity of Colombia” (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Glaser], 77). 85 Henceforth, quotations from Montezinos’ Relación, all taken from Ben Israel, Esperança de Israel, will appear in parentheses in the main body of the text.

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Montezinos, a patriotic Iberian, though kind, later offers the Amerindian Francisco “some biscuits and sweets [or sweetmeats], though you speak ill of the Spanish” (2). Chief Francisco answers: he had not complained about them as much as he should have, their being a people cruel, tyrannical and totally inhuman. But shortly he would see himself well revenged on them, by means of a hidden people no se avia ,qexado dellos con mucha parte de lo que devia, por ser gente cruel, tirana, y de todo inhumana: pero que en breve se veria bien vengado dellos, por via de una gente oculta (2).

Francisco certainly could complain. The pre-conquest societies and cultures had been decimated. Survivors suffered the burdens of the encomienda system and forced tribute. Hunger, if not starvation, was rampant. The work for which these Amerindians were hired by Montezinos, to move cargo across the territory’s difficult routes, reflected their displaced status. At least by Montezinos’ time such work was not coerced and mules were available to do the actual carrying, neither of which had not been the case in the opening decades after the conquest.86 One chronicler describes a tough-love governor of 1580s Nueva Granada, under whose administration “whole strings of Indians would be brought out on foot and whipped through the streets, some as vagabonds, others as thieves, with the chickens, the handful of maize, the playing-cards or whatever else it was they had stolen hanging round their necks.”87 Francisco’s cryptic remark about the hidden people is left hanging in the air, however, for Montezinos is thrown in prison by the inquisition (September 1639, according to the above-mentioned Inquisition records) after arriving in the main port city of Cartagena.88

86 Luis Enrique Rodriguez Baquero, Encomienda y vida diaria entre los indios de Muzo (1550–1620) (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispanica, 1995), 99–102. 87 Juan Rodríguez Freile, The Conquest of New Granada, trans. William C. Atkinson (London: Folio Society, 1961), 152–3. 88 In other words, Montezinos claims to have gone from Honda (upper Magdalena, center of present-day Colombia) to Popayán (near the southern border of Colombia), though it is not clear whether he arrived or not. From there he crossed the entire country to Cartagena (on the northern, Caribbean coast). After his release from the Inquisition jail he made his way back to Honda to satisfy his wonder, no small journey. As Michael Zeuske pointed out to me, in light of Alexander Humboldt’s description of his own journey on the Magdalena, such a trip was “absolutely ‘normal’” given the quality of river transportation (personal communication; Jan. 2007); see Humboldt, Reise auf dem Rio Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico, selected and ed. from Humboldt’s travel notebooks by Margot Faak, introductory study by Kurt-R. Biermann, Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, 8 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), 65–84.

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Already several ideas common to the spiritual landscape imposed on the New World by Iberian thinkers appear in Francisco’s statements. Most prominent might be the idea that the Amerindians are either descended from or related to the Jews, a theory that has already received much scholarly treatment. The Dominican friar Diego Durán, whose manuscript history of the pre-Hispanic region that became New Spain had been completed by the 1580s, asserts in the work’s first chapter that the Amerindians descend from the Jews. He interprets the Amerindians’ conquest at the hands of so few men, “the labors and misery” they suffer under the Spanish and their “weak and fearful” spirit as divine punishment for “their evil ways and abominations and idolatries,” as was frequently said by Christians about Jews and Jewish history itself. These contemporary punishments are none other than those promised by God to the ten Israelite tribes exiled for their ancient sins (and also prove the Amerindians’ Jewish descent).89 That Francisco and, as will be seen later, Amerindians in general repeatedly emphasize the imminence of a still-obscure but radical transformation, on the one hand relates to the messianic fervor of the Old World, which motivated figures from Columbus to Menasseh ben Israel, and many others, to assume, or hope, that “the day of the promised Messiah unto us doth draw neer,”90 though it also points to other New World exigencies, as will be treated later. The “hidden people” mentioned by

89 Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. and ed. Doris Heyden (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 5–6. Tzvetan Todorov thinks Durán came from a Converso family and reads his many Aztec-Jewish comparisons, sensitivity to the Amerindian plight and seeming predisposition towards cultural hybridization in this light (Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other [New York: Harper & Row, 1984], 210–11). Though they may not have shared the belief in the theory of Jewish descent, Toribio de Motolinía and Juan de Torquemada, both Franciscans, shared Durán’s view regarding the divine providence involved (Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 26, 108–09), as do Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, in his “Aztec-Spanish Dialogues” of 1524 (Walden Browne, Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity [Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000], 85–6, 192) and Pedro Cieza de León, Cronica del Perú: Cuarta Parte, ed. Pedro Guibovich Pérez (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú/Fondo Editorial/Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1991), 1:329. Back in Spain, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Pedro Velarde de Ribera, a priest among the moriscos of Granada, writes of having heard that the ten tribes were found among the tribes of Peru and New Spain (Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, “Les juifs portugais, le Maroc et les dix tribus perdues,” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian 48 [Paris, 2004]: 167). 90 John Dury quoting Ben Israel in Dury, “Epistolicall Discourse,” Thorowgood, Jewes in America, unpag. See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 59.

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Francisco, though unnamed, would also have reminded readers of the lost ten tribes, whose hiddenness had been a commonplace since the apocalyptic and apocryphal Fourth Book of Ezra or Esdras.91 Durán, for example, cites 2 Esdras, chapter 13, for proof that the lost tribes “went to live in a remote and distant country that had never before been inhabited. There was a long and wearisome journey of a year and a half to reach the region of the Islands and the Mainland, to the west and beyond the seas, where today these people are found.”92 While ethnographically accurate, the Relación’s Amerindians and their mules also echo biblical and talmudic speculations that the messiah will arrive riding a donkey. Finally, it is tempting to read the stormy weather that ignites the Amerindians’ ire as more than mere dramatic setting. Andean peoples, according to the Spanish, believed that rain came from Thunder [the god Illapa, also called Rayo or Lliviac, among other names], and that he was responsible for providing it when it seemed appropriate [. . .] Since they attributed Thunder with the power to cause rain and hail and all the rest which refers to clouds and the celestial regions [. . .] they adored the lightning, the rainbow, the rains, hail, and even storms and whirlwinds.93

Francisco and his men might have been dispirited precisely by the disparity between the raging natural forces, traditionally attributed to the people’s favor in the eyes of their own culture’s deities, and the crushing totality of the Spanish conquest and destruction of that very culture. So, for instance, the ecclesiastical councils of Lima, first convened in 1551, ordered that “‘pagan’ seasonal festivals associated with sowing, rain, and snow be refocused on temporally equivalent Christian celebrations.”94

91 Schatz, “Messianism in the Jewish-Christian Context,” 251. The second book of Ezra/Esdras was inserted by Jerome into the Latin Bible as 4 Ezra/Esdras. It appeared also in the vulgate, adding to its circulation. It is the only book Ben Israel cites several times in Mikveh Yisrael. In refering to the book as either 2 Esdras or 4 Esdras I follow the author who cites it. 92 Durán, History, 5. 93 Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653), translated in Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 22. Garcilaso de la Vega denies that the Inca saw these natural phenomena as deities (Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987], 68–9, 80). 94 Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 16.

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This moralizing approach, theological meteorology, is precisely how seventeenth-century chronicler Pedro Simón reads the weather of one highland locale in Nueva Granada: “Before it was populated, the place of this people was often struck by lightning, which has ceased its frequency since there is [now the] Most Holy Sacrament, even though there are fearsome thunderclaps and the land is no less rainy.”95 Finding Oneself Wherever One Goes Returning ourselves to the plot, we find Montezinos, stuck in the local Inquisition jail in Cartagena. He prays to his own God: Blessed be the name of Adonay, who did not make me an idolator, barbarian, black, nor Indian. And at saying Indian, he then took stock of himself, saying, these Indians are Hebrews. But coming to himself, he again went back to taking stock of himself, saying, am I crazy or out of my senses, how can it be that these Indians are Hebrews? Bendito sea el nombre de Adonay, que no me hizo idolatra, barbaro, negro, ni Indio, y al dezir Indio, se retrató luego, diziendo, estos Indios son Hebreos: mas tornando en si, de nuevo bolvio aretratarse diziendo, estoy loco, o fuera de juizio? como puede ser que estos Indios sean Hebreos (3).

Repeating his prayer and speculations on the following two days, Montezinos is forced to concede the correctness of his epiphany that these Amerindians are indeed Hebrews. At this point, it is not clear what makes Montezinos think the Amerindians are Jews other than their bitter hatred of the Spanish and their obscure messianic hopes. Montezinos’ prayer is curious. It vaguely resembles the traditional blessings attributed to R. Meir, ca. 130 CE (BT Menachot 43b): “Three thanksgivings must be said every day: Praised (be God) . . . who made me an Israelite, who has not made me a woman, who has not made me an ignoramous.” Other sources offer a different first blessing, “Who has not made me a gentile [ goy],” attributing the blessings to R. Yehuda ben Ilai, ca. 150 CE (Tosefta Berachot 7:18; JT Berachot 9:2, 12b).96 By the

95 Simón, Noticias historiales, 5:284. He is refering to the Amerindians in and around the town of Anserma (see below). 96 Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 78. A similar prayer was attributed by Diogenes Laertius to both Socrates and Thales, i.e. the earliest as well as the most

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ninth century, sages such as Saadia Gaon and Maimonides replaced the term “ignoramous” with “slave,” based on another passage from the same talmudic source (BT Men. 43b).97 The fact that Montezinos repeats his prayer daily indicates that it is a permutation of these traditional Jewish blessings said every morning. Forgetting for a moment the ethnic terms, as a Converso, Montezinos would have been in good company offering a personal convolution of traditional prayers; indeed it was only in the late Middle Ages that these blessings moved from the status of individual meditations to be offered at home to official prayers to be uttered at the synagogue. Thus Violante Rodrigues, a Conversa from Montezinos’ hometown, Vila Flor, imprisoned by the Inquisition of Coimbra in 1584, revealed a detailed series of the morning blessings she said that was fairly accurate (God who gives sight to the blind, who makes a way for those who are lost, who frees the imprisoned, etc.), though she conflates these with statements from elsewhere in the prayers (God who always makes the heaven and earth and the days and nights, who makes the sea and the sands and the sun and the moon and the stars, etc.). Nowhere does she make mention of any negative characterization of non-Jews.98 Felipa Rodrigues, arrested by the Inquisition of Lisbon in 1591, confesses the content of her morning prayers, which includes her version of the standard line, “Blessed are You Adonai [. . .] that You did not make me a servant nor a captive and made me a woman.”99 What is distinct about Montezinos’ prayer is its content, the specificity and significance of his litany of ethnic categories. Less likely, Montezinos’s prayer derives from a statement in the Talmud that “one who sees a Kushite or a red-spotted [or red-faced] person or a white-spotted [or white-faced] person or a hump-back [or extremely tall or unshapely person] or a dwarf should say [the

famous Greek philosophers: “I thank Tyche that I was born a human being and not an animal, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian.” In the younger Seneca’s essay, “On Consolation, to Marcia (11.1),” he argues in Stoic fashion that grief wounds women more than men, barbari more than the civilized, and indocti more than docti. 97 Ibid. 98 Elvira Cunha de Azevedo Mea, “Orações judaicas na inquisição portuguesa— século XVI,” Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition, ed. Yosef Kaplan ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Hebrew University, 1985), 166–67. 99 Rodrigues’ prayers are quite faithful to the traditional Sephardic version and contain some Spanish words, leading H.P. Salomon to think she had access to a copy of one of the Sephardic prayer books printed in Ferrara or Venice (Salomon, “Portuguese Background,” 121–22).

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blessing]: ‘Blessed is He who varies the creatures’ ” (BT Berachot 58b; JT Berachot 12). In Lucien Wolf ’s notes to a reprint of the 1652 English translation of Mikveh Yisrael, he suggests, anachronistically, that the talmudic “red-faced” person in this blessing refers to “Redskins,” that is, American Indians.100 It is certainly possible that Montezinos made the same faulty conjectural leap as Wolf. Even so, the prayer seems confused, for what exactly distinguishes an idolater from a barbarian? And, given the preponderant Iberian attitude toward Amerindians, what distinguishes them (before naming them as Hebrews) from either of the two previous categories? And why the mention of Blacks, who never so much as make an appearance in this relation? Cartagena, the site of Montezinos’ imprisonment, was, of course, the main port of entry for most of the region’s slaves, as was discussed in previous chapters. Still, this does not explain the presence of Blacks in Montezinos’ prayers. We have here nothing other than an economy of Montezinos’ prejudices, reflecting quite accurately the Iberian racial hierarchy, in which Blacks have no redeeming features, while Amerindians just might be ‘one of us’? A strong parallel to Montezinos’ prayer is to be found in El libro de las costumbres de todas las gentes del mundo, y de las Indias, a translation and compilation by Francisco Thamara of Joannes Boemus, Omnium gentium mores, leges, et ritus (1520), with the interpolation of Girolamo Giglio, Suma y breue relación de todas las Indias. In his prefatory remarks to the reader, meditating on the mysteries of ethnicity, genealogy and God’s ways, Thamara thanks God, who “wished, and so it was his will, that we be of his corral and herd, making us Christians, and not infidels; civilized and not barbarians; Spaniards and neither Moors nor Turks, dirty idolators/Pues quiso, y fue assi su voluntad, que fuessemos de su coral y manada, haziendonos Christianos, y no infieles: politicos, y no barbaros: Españoles, y no Moros ni Turcos, suzios ydolatras.”101 Thamara’s invocation clearly echoes the above-mentioned ancient versions. Whether Montezinos knew it and transposed it to suit his own needs or whether the two invocations merely reflect widespread sentiments cannot be determined. For one reason or another, as was true for so many Europeans confronted by the newly-seen worlds and their Ben Israel (Glaser), Hope of Israel, 78. El libro de las costumbres de todas las gentes del mundo, y de las Indias. Traducido y copilado por el Bachiller Francisco Thamara Cathedratico de Cadiz (Anvers: Martin Nucio, 1556), 5. I thank Mercedes Garcia-Arenal for pointing me to this passage. 100

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populations, Montezinos was someone for whom racial matters meant a great deal, meant enough to become thematized as the subject of some of his spiritual meditations. He arrived in the Americas with, or the Americas instigated in him a veritable crisis of identity confusion. The Spanish depicts Montezinos’ state of mind with profound insight. The verb retratarse, used twice, means literally to have one’s portrait made, to take one’s measure. It indicates that Montezinos grapples here with an identity problem that is double, that of these Amerindians and also his own identity, which is doubled within; is he, the good Portuguese/Spaniard, a Hebrew also? Are these Amerindians like him? No doubt it seemed so obvious as to not bear mentioning in the text, since it is not, but Montezinos was obviously being held by the Inquisition on the suspicion of being the same judaizer named Montezinos who had been denounced in the hysteria over Portuguese, i.e., ‘Jewish’ infiltrators into the Spanish colonies.102 Indeed, one of the Portuguese New Christians sentenced in the 1638 auto de fé in Cartagena, Francisco Piñero, denounced, among others, a “so-and-so [Fulano] Montesinos.”103

See the Inquisition document published by Levi de Montezinos, “Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 75, 83: “arrested [. . .] due to testimony against a certain Montessinos for Judaism resulting from the recent conspiracy, with suspicions of his being himself involved in it/por testificacion resultada de la complicidad proxime passada contra un fulano Montessinos de Judaysmo con sospechas de ser el mismo en ella comprehendido” (my translation). The text, AHN Inq. 1021, fols. 49r.–v., from the Relación de los procesos y causas de fe que se han fenecido y proseguido desde 28 de enero de este año de 1641 que partieron los galeones pasados del cargo del General Don Gerónimo Gómez de Sandoval, hasta 7 de octubre . . ., is reprinted in Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:85–6. 103 AHN Inq. 1021, fol. 20r., Relación del auto; Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 3:54. It is tempting to connect our Montezinos with the allegedly judaizing Francisco Marques Montesinos reconciled to the Church in the Lima auto de fé of 23 January 1639 (our Montezinos was arrested in September of that same year). Marques Montesinos was said to have traveled extensively in the Viceroyalty of Perú, was also a merchant and hailed from a town around 10 km. southeast of Vila Flor (Montesinos, Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima, 31; AHN 1031, fol. 259; Yara Nogueira Monteiro, “Economia e fé: A perseguição inquisitorial aos cristãos-novos portugueses no vice-reino do Peru,” in Gorenstein and Carneiro, Ensaios sobre a intolerância, 89. A page earlier Monteiro lists a seemingly different Francisco Montesinos in connection with Potosí, but these could easily be the same man). Also intriguing is the fact that Marques Montesinos prevaricated enough to earn a stringent additional punishment, as mentioned earlier. Could it be that Marques Montesinos admitted the charges of observing the Law of Moses in order to flee? Or then fled anyway? Could it be that this man changed his name to hide his identity? But if Marques Montesinos had already been sentenced, why would the Cartagena Inquisition refer to Antonio de Montezinos (if they were the same man) merely as “denounced” or “accused”? Could this be our Montezinos? It is also possible, though speculative, to connect the Montesinos denounced in Cartagena with a man the licenciado Francisco Rexi of Cartagena mentions, in testimony given to the local 102

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According to the inquisitors’ summation, Antonio de Montezinos denied any connection to judaizing, though no specifics are given, through three audiencias. It is intriguing that Montezinos was released from the Inquisition jail and his case suspended precisely “because of the impossibility of establishing his identity with the accused person.” In the Relación, again, tornando en si, coming to himself, becoming himself again, that is, presenting himself to himself as he has become used to, as a good, that is Catholic, Iberian, Montezinos cannot believe the ethnic linkage that has occurred to him. Yet, whatever epiphany he has had that makes him consider these Amerindians as Jews works within him, pushes him beyond the border of his previous self-cognition, acts like a kind of madness, challenging everything he thought he knew about himself and his relationship to his world. Hence, his wavering between doubt and belief. His theory connecting Amerindians and Jews co-mingles radicalism and romanticization. Such lost tribespeople theories were common coin in an age that saw geographic and ethnographic discoveries as spiritual events, as typological signs of the coming of the messianic era. According to Apocalypse 7:4–9, 4 Esdras, ch. 4, and a wide range of other sources, the lost tribes of Israel would reappear at the Last Judgment. Despite much haze, one thing that is clear regarding the ten tribes is that their location shifted historically to parallel European geographic knowledge tribunal in 1643, Andres Diaz de Montesinos. Rexi says that one day, while standing around in 1637 with Don Rodrigo de Oviedo and others, “there came a portuguese called Andres Diaz de Montesinos to the said don Rodrigo de Oviedo and told him in the presence of everyone the circumstances that [meant] he had to pay him some two thousand and such pesos that in virtue of the ability of a correspondent of his the said don Rodrigo had recovered from the goods of a prisoner, who seemed to this witness was Juan Rodriguez Messa, that the said don Rodrigo de Oviedo responding that he only had in his power 1,500 pesos which he would give him. Repeated the said Andres Diaz Montesinos that he did not want to take the said 1,500 pesos but the whole amount because the said don Rodrigo had recovered it and the said Montessinos insisted that he had to recover it entirely [. . .]” (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fols. 154v.–155r.; Rotbaum, Documentos, 424–5). One of the men standing around in the conversation, the licenciado Don Francisco Vetancur, repeats the tale, with some differences. He calls this Montesinos, whose first name he cannot recall, a forastero, a stranger or outsider (AHN Inq. 1601/3/8, fol. 185v.–186r.; Rotbaum, Documentos, 454–5). This Andres Diaz (or Dias) Montesinos was a slave trader or ship captain (?) who on at least one occasion after 1629 brought to Cartagena “a shipment of slaves from the rivers of Guiné given to him by Alvaro Gonzalez Frances, so that he should give them in this city to his son-in-law Manuel Alvarez Prieto” (trans. in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 215, n. 237; AHN Inq. 1609, exp. 17, no. 1, fol. 4r.). Indeed, both Prieto and Mesa carried out commercial transactions with Alvaro Gonçalves Frances, a New Christian slave trader living for a while in Cabo Verde.

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and exploration. From their Crusader-era location in Asia (the original biblical siting), the tribes migrated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Africa, moving tentatively to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. By 1515, the popular travelogue, El libro del Infante Don Pedro de Portugal, placed the ten tribes between Amazonia and the Far East. A few Iberian authors before Montezinos declared that the Amerindians were somehow related to the wandering Jews. After landing on unknown shores, Columbus used a Converso, Luis de Torres, for reconnaissance missions into the interior, hoping his Hebrew and Aramaic would serve well in case the natives spoke those languages. Columbus cited 2 Esdras as proof that these new-found natives might be related to the lost tribes.104 Diego de Landa relayed a Mayan legend that their land was populated by descendants of a race who came from the east, through twelve paths that God opened for them in the sea. Landa concluded that the Amerindians must be descended from the Jews. The (troubled and possibly insane) creole Dominican friar Francisco de la Cruz, so extreme in his critique of Spanish imperialism that he was burned at the stake in Lima in 1578 by the Inquisition for heretical mysticism, declared that the Amerindians “descend physically [carnalmente] from the people of Israel.”105 According to Richard Popkin, “Reformed Franciscans, led by Cardinal Ximénes de Cisneros, prepared for the Millenium by fostering Hebrew and Aramaic learning at Alcala [. . .] and by ‘finding’ the Lost Tribes in America, saving them from destruction by the Conquistadores, and converting them to ‘pure’ Christianity.”106 The Jesuit Fernando Montesinos, active in Peru as a 104 C. Jane and L.A. Vigneras, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (London: Bonanza Books, 1960), 51, 206. 105 Jacques Lafaye, Mesías, cruzadas, utopías: El judeo-cristianismo en las sociedades iberoamericanas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984), 107–8; Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:46. 106 Richard H. Popkin, Introduction, Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (eds.), Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 3. Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros (1437–1517) founded the university of Alcalá and was the instigator of the Polyglot Bible, whose Hebrew and Aramaic sections were assigned to the supervision of three Conversos; see Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 57–65; Katz and Popkin, Messianic Revolution, 21–7. On defending the Amerindians from conquistadores, see Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 5–16; Serrano y Sanz, “El gobierno de las Indias por frailes jeronimos,” in Origenes de la dominación española, 339–450; on sparing the Amerindians from a false, outward Christianity, see Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 40–55. I am not sure how literally to take Popkin; despite much searching I have found no evidence of any explicit clerical hopes or goal of discovering the lost tribes in the Americas.

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preacher, historian and explorer from 1628 to 1642, held that Noah and his descendent Ophir colonized Peru with settlers from Armenia, where the ark had come to rest. While not Jews, they were originally upright and monotheistic, adoring “the God of the Patriarch Noah and of his descendants.”107 What is it that provokes Montezinos to theorize a kinship between Amerindians and Jews? The text offers only two bits of information: first, his guides’ complaints about Spanish domination and persecution; and, second, his guides’ hope for a future salvation. The Amerindians strike Montezinos as Jewish not because of some putative semitic origins, but due to their historical condition and response to it. These two features of his Amerindian guides’ speech and behavior strongly parallel what would have been his own beliefs if Montezinos were indeed guilty of the judaizing of which he was supposedly mistakenly accused by the Inquisition. In some sense, implies the text, the Spanish have made the Amerindians into Jews, as, in many ways, the Iberian obsession with limpieza de sangre and the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions made many New Christians into Jews. Since the Relación for the most part represses the possibility of Montezinos’ judaizing, though composed after arrival at Amsterdam and open Judaism—the charges could truly have been a case of mistaken identity, of course—his racialized jailhouse blessing points to the depth of his self-denial prior to his epiphany. In any case, Montezinos is released just as mysteriously from prison as he landed there. (It is now eighteen months later, February 1641, according to the Inquisition documentation.) He returns to Honda, where his business is, seeks out and finds Francisco, as he had sworn to do while in prison. Due to its prime situation at the confluence of the Magdalena and other waters, Honda, it should be noted, had comprised probably the central settlement of the pre-conquest Panche and other local riverine tribes. Montezinos reminds Francisco of the events and words of that fateful day in the mountains, which Francisco also claims not to have forgotten (4). Hearing this, he hires Francisco for a journey. Outside of the town, he reveals himself to the Amerindian; in Spanish, 107 Fernando Montesinos, Memorias antiguas historiales del Peru, trans. and ed. Philip Ainsworth Means (London: Hakluyt Society, 1920), 1–3, 7. In fact, Montesinos’ title for the planned work of which the Memorias constitute only a third was Ophir de España (Hiltunen, Ancient Kings of Peru, 173). He lists no fewer than twenty three earlier authorities who located Ophir in the Americas (ibid., 178, n. 155), though there are even others, including Azariah de Rossi (Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes [1573], trans. and ed. Joanna Weinberg [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], 211–12).

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hyperliterally, “he uncovers himself with the Indian/se descubrio con el Indio” (4), alluding to a mutual process of self-discovery, one for which Montezinos needs the help of the Other. He confesses: “I am a Hebrew of the tribe of Levi. My God is Adonay and the rest is deception” (4). Such peripatetic revelations out in the countryside were the norm for Marranos seeking to reveal themselves to others, even family members, and it seems Montezinos had intended to make possible just such a shared unburdening. The presence of the Amerindian Francisco has permitted Montezinos to gain certainty about his existential status, his authentic self and loyalties. Proclamations are easy, of course, and Francisco, unimpressed, insists on something more substantial: At which words the Indian, perturbed, asked him, what are your parents called? He responded that they were called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Indian repeated, have you no other father? He responded that, yes, and that he was called Luis de Montezinos. The Indian, not satisfied with this, again said to him, you have contented me by some things you have said, but on the other hand I am inclined not to give you credit because you do not know how to tell me who your parents were. But Montezinos responded with an oath that he spoke the truth and spending some time in demands and replies, the Indian, tired out, said to him, are you not a son of Israel? to which he responded that, yes, he is. The Indian, somewhat perturbed, then said, well, say it already, for you have me confused to death. A cuyas palabras el Indio alterado, le preguntó, como se llaman tus padres? respondio, que se llamavan Abraham, Ishak, y Iahacob. Replicó el Indio, no tienes otro padre? respondio que si, y que se llamava Luys de Montezinos. El Indio no satisffecho con esto, le bolvio de nuevo a dezir, por algunas cosas que me as dicho, me as causado contento, y por otra parte, estoy para no darte credito, por quanto no me sabes dezir, quien fueron tus padres: mas Montezinos, bolvió aresponder con juramiento, que le deziala verdad y gastando algun tiempo ‚ demandas y respuestas, ya enfadado el Indio le dixo, no eres hijo de Israel? a lo que respondió, que si: el Indio algo alterado dixo entonçes, pues dilo ya, que me tenias confuzo y muerto (4–5).

Twice Francisco is described as alterado, meaning troubled, perturbed, angry or surprised, but also, obviously, changed. In the charged atmosphere of the Iberian world, the emotional, existential import of self-presentation might change everything, might be a matter of life or death. Could you afford to ‘be real’ with someone, be open, be yourself ? Could you afford to respond to the revealing of the Other

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with your own openness?108 Hence the obsession with genealogy, with paternity, with national identity. Francisco’s queries comprise a striking parallel to the genealogical queries with which Montezinos’ inquisitors no doubt plied him in order to ascertain whether he was a New or Old Christian. Biological descent indicates spiritual descent. Francisco seems to be asking both who his biological father is but also who his spiritual father is; the Hebrew patriarchs or Christ? Francisco is only to be assured about Montezinos’ spiritual descent, and therefore allegiance, by being assured about his physical descent and vice versa. Despite his proclamation about his faith in Adonay—a version of the central Jewish credo, the Shema Yisrael, which often served as the sole and therefore metonymic declaration of Marrano belief—Francisco has sensed Montezinos’ continuing uncertainty regarding his true pedigree and belief. Noticeably, Montezinos does not probe Francisco in the same way. The Amerindian here knows exactly where he comes from, bears a stable identity, exactly in contrast to the perception of Iberian discourse; it is the European who appears riddled with doubtful ancestry and trustworthiness. Plunging Into the Forest of Symbols Finally assured, Francisco promises Montezinos that if “you dare go with me you will know that which you desire to know” (5). Before they set out, though, Francisco warns Montezinos “you will have to go on foot, have to eat roasted corn.” Francisco further tells Montezinos: throw away what he has in his pockets, put on these sandals, take this staff and follow me. So he did, and leaving aside his cloak and sword and all the rest that he brought with him quita todo quanto tienes en las faltriqueras, calçate estos alpargates, toma este palo y sigueme. Assi lo hizo, y dexãdo la capa y espada y todo lo demas ,q consigo llevava (5–6).

In order to truly ‘know,’ Montezinos must shed his European accoutrements, his European perspective, the “insignia of Spanish nobility.”109 He must ‘go native’—wear the native sandals, alpargates, made of linen, 108 Perelis makes wonderful use of Levinas to explore such questions in the text (“Marrano Autobiography”). 109 Levi de Montezinos, “Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 78.

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aloe or rough hemp twine,110 and eat roasted corn.111 Alpargates evidently could be so uncomfortable that they were worn as part of penitential outfits, as can be gleaned from one hagiography: The “alpargates,” or sandals, made of rough cords of hemp, are equally painful to wear, especially in the beginning. The Venerable Sister joyfully, but not without suffering, became accustomed to wear all these parts of our holy habit. The alpargates, above all, caused her great suffering; her feet, accustomed to a fine, soft covering, became inflamed, swollen, and chafed. Her suffering was the more intense as her occupations obliged her to be continually moving about.112

Corn was considered a ‘noble’ food.113 Its appearance here does not necessarily imply a degredation, but might be seen as an indication of the spartan nature of Amerindian society, along the lines of a comment made by Pedro Simón: “one Spaniard tore through more food in one day than ten Indians consumed in a month.”114 The nativist garb that Montezinos dons resembles that of a wanderer, a pilgrim, perhaps even a wandering Israelite in the desert. Montezinos’ disrobing also echoes the New World missionizing approach of the Franciscans, based on their prioritization of apostolic poverty. The original twelve Franciscan missionaries were known as the “barefoot friars.” They and their later colleagues “seldom used horses” and “ate the coarsest food,” and, in the words of one of the first such friars, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, tried not to come before the Amerindians as “luxurious bishops, dressed in delicate shirts, sleeping with sheets and mattresses and wearing soft garments,” but rather, “as in the Primitive Church, poor and humble, seeking not for wealth but for souls, and should not carry anything with them but their pontificals.”115 110 Dury, in his translation from the French copy of the Relación sent him by Ben Israel, identifies alpargates as “a certaine sort of shooes which the Indians weare” (Thorowgood, Jewes in America, 132). 111 Noticed by Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 105, n. 35. 112 Life of the Venerable Sister Teresa Margaret [Redi] of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Discalced Carmelite, Condensed From an Unpublished Manuscript of Monsignore Albergotti Count of Cesa, Bishop of Arezzo [1809], ch. 17; http://www.stteresamargaret.org/ Books/Albergotti/ALB17%20PenancePatience.htm. 113 Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530 –1570 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 64. 114 Quoted in Ángel Antonio Martínez Trujillo, Los inconquistables Panches del Magdalena: Epopeya de un exótico reino caribe y su infortunado tropiezo con el imperio español ([Bogotá]: MJ Editores, 2005), 145. 115 Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 45; Toribio de Motolinía, History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Andros Foster (Berkeley: The Cortés Society, 1950), 194.

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Contrast Montezinos’ cultural moulting with an earlier but parallel scene: Theodore Galle’s well known engraving, America, ca. 1585, after a drawing by Jan van der Straet. Louis Montrose describes Galle’s oftreproduced illustration as follows: Here a naked woman, crowned with feathers, upraises herself from her hammock to meet the gaze of the armored and robed man [Amerigo Vespucci] who has just come ashore; she extends her right arm toward him, apparently in a gesture of wonder—or, perhaps, apprehension. Standing with his feet firmly planted upon the ground, Vespucci observes the personified and feminized space that will bear his name. This recumbent figure, now discovered and roused from her torpor, is about to be hailed, claimed, and possessed as America.116

Most pertinent, though, is Vespucci’s outfit: Vespucci carries with him the variously empowering ideological and technological instruments of civilization, exploration, and conquest: a cruciform staff with a banner bearing the Southern Cross, a navigational astrolabe, and a sword—the mutually reinforcing emblems of belief, empirical knowledge, and violence.117

Montezinos had come to the Americas as a quasi-conqueror. The Christians permitted him to carry a sword (as they often permitted Jews to do from the medieval period on) only because they thought him a Christian.118 Ironically, Spanish fears about the disloyalty of the Portuguese at this time might have forced Montezinos to abandon his arms in any case, putting him in some ways in a position similar to the defeated Amerindians; the Jesuit Fernando Montezinos recounts in his history

This is not to romanticize Franciscan behavior in the Americas. By the late sixteenth century, in any case, the Franciscans had lost their control over missionizing to the natives and over the administration of the New World Church to the Crown and secular clergy, which pursued a vastly different understanding of how to Christianize the Amerindians. 116 Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (Winter 1991): 3–4. 117 Montrose, “Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” 4. 118 See, for instance, Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 6, who writes that “A feature of the high political standing of the Jews in the early part of [the medieval] period was the permission to bear arms, granted to the Jews in France and Germany well into the thirteenth century.” Ironically, perhaps, long before they were allowed to do so in Europe, Jews were often permitted to serve in colonial militias—often little more than anti-Amerindian or anti-Maroon forces—sometimes in their own units (for instance Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654; Surinam from at least the 1660s onward).

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of the Spanish in Peru the Viceregent’s 1642 edict ordering Portuguese residents not to carry “sword nor dagger nor other arms.”119 Nonetheless, Montezinos’ Jewishness can show itself openly as he approaches (in his own mind) the native point of view and (temporarily) escapes the view of Europeans. As they journey for over a week, Montezinos and Francisco rest only on the Sabbath (6). Montezinos can only approach these Amerindians truly if he, like them, does without the outward goods of Europe, but is satisfied with the inner goods bestowed by God. The two eventually come to a large river. Francisco tells Montezinos, “Here you will see your brothers” (6) and makes a sign which elicits a signal from across the river. Eventually three men and a woman in a canoe cross, though at first only the woman disembarks. After a long discussion between her and Francisco in their own language, the three men jump out and embrace Montezinos, as does the woman. Montezinos (at another point) provides a general description of these Amerindians: This people is somewhat darkened by the Sun, the hair of some reached to their knees, others wore it shorter, and others wear it as is generally common, cut evenly, [they are of ] good height, good faces, good feet and legs. And around their heads a cloth Es esta gente algo tostada del Sol, el cabello en algunos les llegava hasta las rodillas, otros le trahian mas corto, otros como se trahe cumunmente en general cortado po parejo, buenos talles, buenas caras, buen pie, y pierna: ‚ las cabeças un paño al derredor (10).

Two of the men approach Francisco, who throws himself at their feet. Though Francisco was called Chief by his companions at the beginning of the narrative, these four newcomers seem to command even his respect and obeisance. They “lift up [Montezinos] with humanity and affection” (7), the last two actions reminiscent of what happens to those who see the Virgin Mary in apparition narratives, several creole versions of which I treat below. Francisco informs Montezinos “do not be astonished, nor perturbed, nor imagine that these men will tell you a second thing before you have well understood the first” (7), a warning that the indoctrination he is about to receive will not resemble what must have been the typical religious instruction received by Amerindians. 119 Fernando Montesinos, Anales del Perú, ed. Victor M. Maurtua (Madrid: Imp. de Gabriel L. and Del Horno, 1906), 2:259.

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Enclosing Montezinos between them, the two men (one had gone back to the canoe), Francisco (?), but not the woman, “spoke the verse of Deut. ch. 6:4, SHEMA ISRAEL A. ELOHENU A. EHAD. Hear Israel, A. our God, A. [is] one” (7). Once again, the central Jewish and Marrano credo demands enunciation. The text fails to describe Montezinos’ reaction, an omission perhaps pointing to the speechlessness that could only have followed. Montezinos’ speechlessness might also have come from this scene’s resemblance to the apocalpytic vision of the prophet Daniel (12:5–7), a resemblance that possibly informed the writer and surely struck biblically-knowledgeable readers: Then I, Daniel, looked, and, behold, there stood two others, the one on this side of the bank of the river, and the other on that side of the bank of the river. And one said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of the wonders? And I heard the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the River, when he lifted up his right hand and his left hand to heaven, and swore by that one who lives for ever that it shall be for a time, times, and a half; and when the crushing of the power of the holy people shall have been completed, all these things shall be finished.

Daniel had, of course, also foretold that a scattering of the Jews would precede their restoration. In this, the river facing Montezinos can only remind readers of the mythical Sambatyon, across which lived the lost ten tribes (see also 2 Esdras 13:39–47). Like the Sambatyon, this Peruvian water constitutes a kind of ontological divide120 that can only be bridged by those behind the liquid curtain (‘they’ can be seen, but only when they wish) or by pure religious faith. One wonders whether the cloth around the heads of these men, which conforms to the style worn by some indigenous groups (see below), is meant to hint at the Jewish practice of men covering their heads. Juan Castellanos stands as a good precedent for this linkage, when he offers a description of Bochica, a legendary ancient figure of the Muisca (more below on the Muisca, considered after the Inca to be the most ‘advanced’ native society of the region), whose outfit is conflated with current Muisca fashion: the hair down to the waist, wrapped and gathered with a band,

120

I thank Matt Goldish for this phrase.

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in the style of the bun that they use, or like the ancient Pharisees the narrow phylacteries or crowns with which the head is wrapped; y hasta la cintura los cabellos, con venda rodeados y cogidos, al modo del rodete que ellos usan, ó como los antiguos fariseos los anchos filacterios ó coronas con que se rodeaban la cabeza.121

Not yet finished with their transmission, though, the strangers proceed to relate the following critical information, using Francisco as an interpreter: First. My father is Abraham, Isaac Jacob, Israel, and signalling 3. fingers they named these four. And then they added Reuben, and signalled 4. fingers. Second. Those who should wish to come to live with us, to them we will give lands. Third. Joseph lives in the middle of the sea, making a sign with two closed fingers, and then, opening them, said, in two parts. Fourth. Then shortly (speaking very fast) some few of us will emerge to see and to trample, and at this moment they signalled with their eyes, and stamped with their feet. Fifth. One day we will all speak, making at this time with their mouth, ba, ba, ba, and we will emerge as the earth birthed us. Sixth. A messenger will go. Seventh. Francisco will tell you a little more, signalling with their fingers a small thing. Eighth. Give us space that we may prepare ourselves, and moving their hands here and there, they said with their mouths and with their hands, do not detain yourself long. Ninth. Send 12 men all of them signalling beards, who write Primera, Mi padre, es Abraham, Ishak Iahacob, Israel, y señalado 3. dedos nombravan estos quatro: y luego acrecentaron, Reuben, y señalaron 4. dedos. Segunda. Los que quisieren venir a vivir con nosotros, les daremos tierras. Tercera. Ioseph, vive en medio de la mar, haziendo señal con dos dedos cerrados, y despues, abri‚dolos, dixeron, en dos partes.

121 Juan de Castellanos, Historia del Nuevo Reino de Granada, ed. D. Antonio Paz y Mélia, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de A. Pérez Dubrull, 1886 [1601]), 1:48.

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chapter nine Quarta. Luego con brev‚dad (diziendo muy de prissa) saldremos unos pocos a ver y a pizar, y a este tiempo señalaron con los ojos, y patearon con los pies. Quinta. Un dia hablaremos todos, haziendo en este tiempo con la boca, ba, ba, ba, y saldremos como que nos pario la tierra. Sexta. Yra mensagero. Septima. Francisco dira mas un poquito, señalando con el dedo, cosa poca. Octava. Danos lugar para que nos apercebamos, y moviendo la mano a una y otra parte, dezian cõ la boca y cõ la mano, no te detengas mucho. Novena. Embia 12 hombres de todos señalando barbas, que escrivan (8–9).

Some elements of this are easier to decipher than others. I will simply go through them in order. First, though, a general comment. What is one to make of this bizarre revelation that seems to generate more questions than it provides answers? For one thing, the information is evidently so critical that the author chose to number the items, like the Ten Commandments or a sequence of clauses in a legal document. Perhaps the enumeration of statements comprises a mainstay of prophetic discourse; one finds the same thing in a 1627 letter of the sebastianist Portuguese Converso Manoel Bocarro Francês (aka Jacob Rosales).122 Besides the obvious allusions to a messiah (#6), a millenarian vision (#2, 5) and a vengeance against Israel’s enemies (#4); besides its purposeful vagueness (#3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) and the baffling final command—besides all this there is a sort of comedy of the encounter with the foreign going on. The hand signs, the winking and stamping, the almost physical comedy of attempting to communicate across a divide, though Montezinos had the advantage of Francisco’s interpretative services (8). This kind of comic encounter was of course long a mainstay of colonial ‘discovery’ narratives, no doubt based on the reality of attempting to communicate without a common language. The English explorer Richard Hawkins reported an encounter (ca. 1593–4) with some naked Indians, “who spake unto us and made diverse signs; now pointing to the Harbour, out of which we were come; and then to the mouth of the Straites: but we understood nothing of their meaning.

122 The letter was published in Francisco Moreno de Carvalho, “O Brasil nas profecias de um judeu sebastianista: Os ‘Aforismos’ de Manoel Bocarro Francês/Jacob Rosales,” in Grinberg (ed.), Judeus no Brasil, 116–18.

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Yet they left us with many imaginations.”123 Even the presence of an interpreter did not guarantee adequate mutual understanding, as the seventeenth-century Andean chronicler Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua complains regarding the Spanish priest who ineptly converted the Amerindians brought before conquistador Francisco Pizarro: “if he had known the language, it would have been much more effective, but he spoke through an interpreter.”124 Even closer to home, Montezinos’ scene bears a resemblance to an evidently well-known anecdote regarding the first encounter between Chibcha-speaking Muisca or Muyquyta villagers and some soldiers under the conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. (Montezinos could well have traversed the former lands of these peoples, the high plains of Bogotá and environs, Cundinamarca, the source of the legend of El Dorado). The Muiscas, “on seeing the Spaniards, murmured some words unintelligible to the ear of the outsider, which they emitted themselves while signalling at the same time with the finger.” Even the threefold repetition of an unintelligible word appears in this account: “Of the first vocal emission it seems the troops could only retain, muysca, muysca, muysca,” and jokingly named them the mosca or “fly.”125 Could it be that our author knew this tale or was familiar with the chronicles that related it? Could such attempts at communication already have become a trope to be repeated at the necessary narrative moment? In the Relación, the tragi-comic encounter is put to a Jewish use that chooses an alternative to the tragic assumptions and goals of possession that characterized too many Christian European colonialists. Compare, for example, a description by Columbus of his meeting with the ‘king’ of the Caribbean island of Tortuga: I saw that he was pleased with a coverlet that I had on my bed. I gave it to him and some very good amber beads that I wore on my neck, and

Cited in Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 92–3. Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Relación de antiguedades deste Reyno del Piru: Estudio etnohistórico y lingüístico de Pierre Duviols y César Itier, facsimile edition and transcription of the Madrid Codex (Cuzco: Institut Français d’Etudes Andines/ Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1993), 268. Francisco de la Cruz opined that “the clerics who indoctrinate should know the language of the indians because if not they are occupied only with transactions and in things that scandalize the indians” (quoted in Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 2:910). 125 Cited in Mariana Escribano, Cinco mitos de la literatura oral mhuysqa o chibcha: Primer análisis hacia el enigma de la lengua mhuysqa (Bogotá: Semper Ediciones, 2000), 17, who unfortunately does not name her source. 123 124

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chapter nine some red shoes, and a flask of orange-flower water, with which he was so pleased that it was a marvel. And he and his tutor and counsellors were very troubled because they did not understand me nor I them. Nevertheless I gathered that he told me that if something from this place pleased me that the whole island was at my command. I sent for some beads of mine [. . .] and again, as yesterday, I told him how Your Highnesses commanded and ruled over all the best part of the world, and that there were no other princes as great. And I showed him the royal banners and the others bearing the cross, which he esteemed greatly. What great lords Your Highnesses must be, he said (speaking toward his counsellors), since from so far away and from the heavens they had sent me here without fear; and many other things passed between them that I did not understand, except that I saw well that they took everything as a great wonder.126

Columbus, unperturbed by his own lack of understanding, comes as a royal emissary, a distributor of power downward; it is he who dispenses knowledge and the natives who feel wonder at the sight of the marvels of civilization. Montezinos, the relatively powerless ‘Jew,’ on the other hand, is the recipient of knowledge from the natives, a knowledge and power from the empire’s bottom and periphery that could challenge oppression from the top and center, and it is he who feels wonder and astonishment. And though it is getting ahead of ourselves, Montezinos’ “epistemological optimism”, as Stephen Greenblatt calls it, the great latitude of interpretation he allows himself in understanding cultures he doesn’t understand, comes across as less “reckless” than that of Columbus.127 One could also contrast the level-headed self-assurance of Columbus in the above encounter with the wide-eyed bungling of Montezinos (on which more below). Perhaps the text’s parody (selfparody?) is not so far below the surface after all. The components of the revelation: No. 1: Reuben is here made into one of the patriarchs, the fourth or fifth, depending on how one counts. Does this signify, as so many readers assumed over the centuries, that these Amerindians are claiming themselves to be from the tribe of Reuben? If so, why? The ten lost tribes, including Reuben, were frequently marshalled to serve Jewish apocalyptic visions, especially as conditions under militant Catholicism worsened. By then Jewish claims regarding the future martial aid of the ten tribes were thoroughly intertwined with Christian hopes from 126 127

Cited in Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 13. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 94.

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Prester John and his kingdom, which would supposedly help Christendom take on and defeat the perceived infidel Muslim empire. Yitz˜ak (Don Isaac) Abravanel, whose post-Expulsion millenarian speculations were well known, wrote in various places that the armies of the ten tribes would confront, terrify and weaken the forces of Christendom, though only God, of course, could bring about the final defeat.128 But why does the Relación isolate the tribe of Reuben? Reuben was, of course, the first-born son of Jacob, though nothing seems to have accrued to him as a result. Reuben comprised the easternmost tribe, contributed little positively to ancient Israel’s affairs, indeed is cited as idolatrous and seems to have faded from historical consciousness (Judg. 5:15–16; 1 Chr. 5:9–10, 20–21). The tribe was the first to be carried into captivity by Assyria (1 Chr. 5:25–26). Following 1 Chron. 5:10 Reuben defeated the Hagarites during the reign of King Saul and occupied their lands eastward. Perhaps this contributed to the image of the tribe as living abroad, in far off lands. Messianic readings of the tribe’s significance may derive from a number of sources, in particular martial accomplishments such as the one above. In their campaign against the Hagarites, they “cried to God” and “put their faith in Him” (1 Chron. 5:20). Based on Gen. 35:21–22, Targum Yonatan interprets: “We know from this text that the King Messiah will first be revealed to Israel at the field of Migdal HaEder,” where Jacob camped after burying Rachel and where Reuben sinned against Jacob by sleeping with his concubine Bilhah, thereby losing his birthright. The early medieval author Eldad HaDani relates that the tribe of Reuben “made war against all those around them,” according to one version.129 Already in the time of Maimonides a “messianic pretender” appeared in Persia named David Alroy or David al-Daud (David the Davidite), according to sixteenthcentury Jewish chronicler Shlomo ibn Verga, who claimed to or was held to come from the tribe of Reuben.130 The Zohar (1:236–37, parshat 128 B. Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher, 5th ed., revised and updated (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 229; and see his insightful explanations 229–32. For other similar fifteenth-century and later statements, see Avraham Gross, “The Ten Tribes and the Kingdom of Prester John: Rumors and Investigations Before and After the Expulsion from Spain” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 48 (Summer 1991): 5–41. 129 Aaron Ze’ev Aescoly (ed.), The Story of David Hareubeni: copied from the Oxford Manuscript, together with writings and testimonies from his contemporaries, with introduction and notes, 2nd, enlarged ed. [Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1993 [1940]), 48, n. 7. 130 The latter according to Ya’akov Barnai, Sabbateanism: Social Perspectives ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2000), 21. I have found no other corroboration of his Reubenite background. Perhaps it derived from his having gathered the Jews of

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VaYe˜i) interprets Moses’ blessing of Reuben (“great strength/yeter oz”) as indicating that when the Messiah comes, Reuben, which tribe will have penetrated all four corners of the world, will engage in many battles and win them all. These messianic views may all flow from the blessing bestowed on the tribe in Deuteronomy (33:6): “May Reuven live and not die, though his numbers be few.” In letters circulated during the 1520s and 30s, the well-known apocalyptic kabbalist Abraham ben Eliezer HaLevi, an exile from Spain, tried to encourage his co-religionists with news of the ten tribes, underlining the prominence of Reuben: “and my heart tells me that the children of Reuben and some of our brothers from the other tribes emerged and shifted from their place and went out from their borders” in 1524.131 Montezinos may have drawn on Reuben in light of the well-known sixteenth-century “messianic pretender” David Reuveni, David the Reubenite, whose arrival in Portugal in 1525 and subsequent activities there, in Spain and in Italy created a tremendous stir among New Christians. He came declaring himself a representative sent by the leader of the two and a half lost tribes. By 1532 Reuveni had been arrested by the Inquisition and jailed; he seems to have been executed in 1538.132 Reuveni’s story does not appear to have been known widely among later Conversos.133 Menasseh ben Israel cites it in Mikveh Israel (sec. 17), but he was living in Amsterdam and had access to materials unavail-

the mountains of Chafton into his military service, “to go forth and fight against all the nations, and to march and capture Jerusalem,” according to Benjamin of Tudela, one of the main sources of information about Alroy. These mountain Jews comprised “more than 100” communities and “belong to the first captivity which King Shalmanezar led away” (The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages [Malibu, Calif.: Joseph Simon/Pangloss Press, 1987], 110–11). An entire chapter of Usque, Consolação, is devoted to this David, but without mention of Reuben (Third Dialogue, ch. 8). 131 Cited in Gross, “The Ten Tribes,” 29. 132 The best study of Reubeni remains Aescoly, The Story of David Hareubeni. 133 Mercedes García-Arenal provides testimony from a handful of trials from the Inquisition tribunal of Évora, from the first half of the sixteenth century, of Conversos who had contact with and memories of Reuveni (Mercedes García-Arenal, “Expectativas messianicas en el Magreb y la Peninsula Iberica: Entre David Reubeni y Sabbatai Sevi,” in Os judeus sefarditas entre Portugal, Espanha e Marrocos, ed. Carmen Ballesteros and Mery Ruah [Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2004], 65–6). Elisheva Carlebach provides a brief discussion of the literary afterlife of Reuveni’s career, along with that of his lieutenant, Shlomo Molkho (formerly the Portuguese New Christian Diego Pires), but mentions no Converso writings or statements (Elisheva Carlebach, “The Sabbatian Posture of German Jewry,” The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior [ Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 2001], 2:14–18 [English section]).

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able to Conversos still in Iberian territories. The only concrete evidence seems to derive from the Inquisition trial of Don Lope de Vera y Alarcón (d. 1644). An Old Christian who had been a candidate for a chair in Hebrew at the University of Salamanca, and who had contact with Portuguese Conversos—he himself was executed by the Spanish Inquisition as a judaizer after announcing, while in jail, his having become Jewish—Vera came across a manuscript concerning Reuveni, probably at the university library.134 During his trial ( June 1639) Vera mentions having read “the Embassy of Rabbi David [la Enbajada de Rabi David] and other Arabic papers” and speaks of him as David Sarraçerbat [sic],” which Gérard Nahon notes is the Hebrew for Sar ha-Tzava [Chief of the Army], the title Reuvenieni gave to himself in Portugal.135 Reuveni notwithstanding, vestiges of the tribe of Reuben as a messianic harbinger appear scattered in Catholic, Jewish and Converso discourse. Gershom Scholem, in his book on Shabtai Zvi, cites letters of Jewish provenance circulating in late 1665, stating that “the sons of Reuben and Gad, or, according to another version, Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh, were marching on Gaza.” According to Scholem, these tidings “represent the literary condensation of earlier rumors which, at first, had not mentioned Palestine but merely spoke of events in faraway countries and the abodes of legendary Jews such as the Sahara, or Habor in the Arabian desert.”136 Zvi’s colleague Natan of Gaza generated prophecies, cited by the poet Emanuel Frances, among others, regarding the arrival and conquests of the armies of the tribes of Reuben and Gad.137 David Gitlitz cites a Conversa from Mallorca who stated in 1678 that her father had told her that “there was a tribe and a half which was dispersed and lost out in the world, and that Moses and Aaron would come and take them out of captivity.”138 The tribe and a half might allude to Reuben, Gad and half of Menasseh, the Israelite groups that settled east of the Jordan River. 134 Miriam Bodian, “In the Cross-Currents of the Reformation: Crypto-Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition 1570–1670,” Past and Present 176 (2002): 98, n. 111, and personal communication (Nov. 2006). 135 Gérard Nahon, Notes, Annuaire Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Ve section, Sciences religieuses 87 (1978–1979): 243. The original Inquisition documents are AHN Inquisición, Legajo 2135, nos. 28–29. 136 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Âevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 333. 137 Scholem, Sabbatai Âevi, 352, 353, n. 40. 138 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 106. See Francisco Maldonado de Silva’s comment about the two tribes cited in chapter 2.

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According to the seventeenth-century New Christian then Jewish physician and author Isaac Cardoso, the well-known Portuguese ‘prophet’ or ‘messianic pretender’ Gonçalo Anes Bandarra (the name is given in various forms) said “many things in his verses about the coming of the tribes of Reuben, Simon, and Levy, and grand things of a great shepherd and king.”139 Bandarra’s reading of certain biblical passages in his verse “prophecies” and contact with Conversos earned him suspicion as a judaizer and a lover of novelties and free-thinking scriptural interpretation, and a trial in 1540 by the Lisbon Inquisition. It is doubtful that he was a judaizer, though he did circulate among the New Christian population, where his statements and activities made a great and lasting impression. Many Conversos even considered him to be of Jewish descent.140 Bandarra prophesied that the appearance of the Lost Tribes would commence with the emergence of Reuben, as in stanza 135: The imprisoned one will go out From the new people who come, From the Tribe of Reuben, First son of Jacob With all that they have. Sahira o prisioneiro Da nova gente que vem, Dessa Tribu de Rubem, Filho de Jacob primeiro Com tudo o mais que tem.141

139 My translation from Cardoso’s Las Excelencias de los Hebreos (1679); cited in Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 309, n. 16. García-Arenal calls Bandarra “the principal disseminator of the belief in the Ten Tribes” in Portugal (“Expectativas messianicas,” 61). 140 Jacqueline Hermann, No reino do desejado: a construção do sebastianismo em Portugal séculos SVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998), 41–51; Elias Lipiner, Gonçalo Anes Bandarra e os cristãos-novos (Trancoso/Lisbon: Câmara Municipal de Trancoso/ Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Judaicos, 1996), 57–61; Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 308–09. Hermann cites Julio Caro Baroja as claiming to have found an Inquisition document that attests to Bandarra’s descent from Jewish exiles from Spain and J.L. Azevedo as producing an Inquisition document from 1687, requested by Bandarra’s descendants, proclaiming that Bandarra was not tried for “crimes of Judaism” (Reino do desejado, 44). 141 Lipiner, Bandarra e os cristãos-novos, reproduces the 1809 edition of the Trovas as an appendix; see p. 215. See also stanza 113.

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Elias Lipiner interprets Bandarra’s highlighting of the tribe of Reuben as an allusion to David Reuveni.142 Bandarras’ trovas circulated widely in varying oral forms before being published incompletely in 1603, in Paris, and completely in Nantes in 1644. According to A.J. Saraiva, Montezinos, like almost every Portuguese of his time, knew the prophetic verses or trovas attributed to Bandarra.143 Bandarra had in fact “maintained systematic contact with the New Christian community of Trancoso,” where he was born, some 50 km south of Montezinos’ hometown of Vila Flor.144 Saraiva’s hunch regarding Montezinos comprises mere speculation—many messianic statements by Portuguese Conversos do not mention the tribe of Reuben, for instance. On the one hand, other than the shared focus on Reuben I could find little of Bandarra in Montezinos’s Relación; on the other hand, if Montezinos knew nothing of the various eschatological traditions discussed herein, he would have found a rich source in the Trovas. All things considered, it is likely that Saraiva is correct. Intriguingly, like Montezinos, Bandarra as well as the Mexican cryptoJew Simón Váez Sevilla also declared themselves to be from the tribe of Levy.145

Lipiner, Bandarra e os cristãos-novos, 52. A.J. Saraiva, “António Vieira, Menasseh ben Israel et le Cinquième Empire,” Studia Rosenthaliana 6,1 ( Jan. 1972): 35. García-Arenal cites one Converso from Vila Flor, who had begun his education in Trancoso (tried by the Toledo Inquisition Tribunal between 1605 and 1610) who knew many of Bandarra’s verses by heart, as did his father, and who paraphrased various statements about the apocalyptic role of the “nine and a half ” tribes, who “finally ended up in the far corner of Portuguese India” (“Expectativas messianicas,” 61–2; “Juifs portugais, le Maroc et les dix tribus perdues,” 168); other New Christians citing individual trovas to messianic ends were denounced in sixteenth-century Brazil (Mendoça, Primeira visitação, 316–18; Hermann, Sonho da salvação, ch. 2); see also Antonio Baião, “Trovas dos cristãos-novos no século XVI,” Lusa 43–44 (Viana do Castelo, Dec. 1918–Jan. 1919), which I was not able to investigate firsthand. 144 Hermann, No reino do desejado, 43. 145 Trovas, stanza 124; Lipiner, Bandarra e os cristãos-novos, 213; Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “The Periodization of the History of the New Christians and Crypto-Jews in Spanish America,” in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies, ed. Yedida K. Stillman and George K. Zucker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 121. Well into the early modern period, many individuals and families, both Jewish and Christian, claimed to know from which Hebrew tribe they originated. The descendants of Rabbi Salomón Ha-Leví/Pablo de Santa María of Burgos “were believed to be descended of the same Hebrew tribe as the Virgin Mary,” while Diego de Paiba, a relative of Luis de Carvajal, soldier in Guatemala and later merchant in Mexico City, arrested by the Inquisition in 1589, testifies that he had heard (from his priest!) that “[a]ll of his race 142

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Montezinos’ ‘discovery’ of specifically Reubenite Indians in the Relación may have served to refute those such as Dom Ioam de Castro (ca. 1550–1623), Sebastianist author of the 1603 paraphrase of and commentary on the Trovas, who asserts, polemicizing against the prophesies favored by some Jews, that when the Trovas mention the tribe of Reuben “they promise nothing to the Jews, nor speak of a Jew, but rather of a Christian, more, of [the Christian] race.”146 Later, in the 1670s, the viciously anti-Jewish polemicist Francisco de Torrejoncillo insisted that Conversos “did not work on the land and were drawn towards 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.”147 Perhaps such a view had been expressed earlier. On the other hand, Torrejoncillo could have been responding to Montezinos. Various reports show that some believed the Amerindians descended from other tribes. Juan Rodríguez Freile, son of Spanish settlers who came to Bogotá in 1553, wrote a history of the colony and memoir, as much frontier soap opera as anything else, when he turned seventy in 1636, still living in Bogotá. Within the text he mocks those who trace the American natives to the Lost Tribes: they “could conceivably be on the right track, since they adduce the patriarch’s prophecy about his son Issachar and these races are, for the most part, but beasts of burden.”148 Perhaps, though, it was precisely Reuben’s sinful past that made him an appealing figure for Conversos such as Montezinos, who worried about atoning for their own sins, such as having converted to Christianity in the first place.

and generation were Jews, and descendants of the Tribe of Benjamin” (Hordes, End of the Earth, 109, 80; Uchmany, La vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo, 88–9). 146 Ioam de Castro, Paraphrase et concordançia de alguas propheçias de Bandarra Çapateiro de Trancoso, facsimile ed. (Porto: Lopes da Silva, 1942 [orig. 1603]), 76. 147 Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 105. The work in which this statement appeared, the Centinela contra judíos, was apparently based on Vicente da Costa Mattos’ 1622 treatise, Discursos contra a perfidia do judaismo. I have not had a chance to see if the earlier text contains this idea, which may derive from a reading of the first phrase of Gen. 49:4. 148 Freile, Conquest of New Granada, 56. Whether or not Freile hated Jews, in his chronicle he proudly proclaims his non-Jewish lineage through a mention of the fact that his parents arrived while the well-known ban was “in force at that time in Seville, by order of the emperor, forbidding the passage to the Indies of any save Spaniards, and Spaniards only if they were old Christians [. . .] Nowadays anybody can come” (68). Keep in mind the anti-Portuguese and anti-Converso sentiments circulating in these colonies during the 1630s.

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No. 3: Who is this Joseph? Is it an individual or the tribe? Why is he/it in the middle of the sea? The split fingers might signify the priestly hand gesture made when the priests bestow their blessing on the people, though the Reubenite/Amerindian messengers use only two and not four of their fingers. The two parts may refer to the two tribes that represent Joseph, who lacks a tribe bearing his own name, Menashe and Efraim (see Deut. 33:17). This Joseph could as well refer to the harbinger of the messiah proper, according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah son of Joseph. It should be noted that David Reuveni claimed that his mission was authorized by his brother, king of the lost tribes residing in the land of Æabor, King Joseph,149 so that the reference to the middle of the sea could be serving as a circumlocution for Ethiopia or the like. No. 4: seeing and trampling. Perhaps the Reubenites/Amerindians here discuss their messianic role of ascertaining who is worthy of being saved. In 1500, one Converso of Córdoba, Alonso de Córdoba Membreque, preached about the future coming of Elijah, who would gather together the Conversos and “ask all the conversos what it was they believed, and if they truly believed in the Law of the Jews [. . .] he would ask them what prayers of the Jewish Law they knew, and in what fashion they prayed them in order to know whether they were truly of the law of the Jews.”150 The trampling that comes after depicts their messianic function as punishers, executing vengeance on nonbelievers and enemies. No. 5: Their incomprehensible speech in the Relación indicates the foreignness of these Reubenites/Amerindians. “Ba, ba, ba” constituted the standard Spanish way of imitating nonsense speech. One Black slave woman, testifying to the Cartagena Inquisition regarding magical practitioners, noted that “good” women sing Spanish songs which can be understood, while women who “are brujas [witches, sorceresses] come giving bleats [bienen dando balidos] and saying ‘ba ba ba’ as the said women went about doing, by which I knew that they were brujas,” i.e., because they were singing some African gibberish or other.151 Intriguingly

149 Aescoly, Story of David Reuvenieni, 7, 76–8 [Reuveni’s diary]; see Reuveni’s letter, reproduced in Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 321. 150 Quoted in Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 106–7. 151 Cited in Ceballos Gómez, Sociedad y prácticas mágicas, 297–98. Consistent with this, the imprisoned priest Francisco de la Cruz characterizes part of his own antiestablishment mysticism, a one-time dialogue with God against Rome, as one in which

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(perhaps amusingly), the repetition of a word in the Chibcha language turns it into a superlative, and the example that one scholar gives to illustrate this process is “the word BA [which] signified “deserving,” “noble” or “dignified,” and BABA, “most noble” or “most dignified.”152 The notion that Amerindians were still able to avoid or had already shed the Spanish language that, according to the Franciscan critics of imperial policies of hispanicization, only contributed to their distance from their innocence and true divine calling, may be echoed here.153 Why do these strange Jews prophesy a messianic discourse that sounds like the bleating of sheep? Are these sounds—“ba, ba, ba,” meant to be those of sheep? In Spanish, sheep say “bee” or “baa” or even “bala,” while making the sound is called balar. It is doubtful that sheep entail a native trope, as the species was introduced by the Spanish and evidently was not particularly favored by Amerindians.154 The testimony given to the Inquisition by the Black slave woman, quoted above, shows that the Spanish imitation of nonsense speech and the sound of bleating were indeed linked. No doubt the (former) Converso Montezinos was aware of the long tradition of Catholic legal/theological discourse linking pagans (including American Indians) with animals, especially sheep. The most pertinent origin might be the influential commentary of Pope Innocent IV, Sinibaldo Fieschi (1243–54), on the question of whether the invasion of the lands of infidels was licit: “Both infidels and the faithful belong to Christ’s flock by virtue of their creation although the infidels do not belong to the sheepfold of the Church.155 The later Pope Paul III, in his bull of 1537, Sublimis Deus, remonstrated against those who mistook the Amerindians’ bestial natures for being any more metaphorical than any other Christians’: “that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable both parties—he and God—speak “in the way that moriscos who are not very ladinos pronounce the Castillian language” (Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:46). 152 Roberto de Zubiría, La medicina en la cultura muisca (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1986), 117. 153 Gerónimo de Mendieta, for instance; Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 83–5; Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance, 53–6. 154 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 143, citing the Atunrucana Relación. 155 Peter Hulme, “Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean,” in Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 179.

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of receiving the catholic faith.” Instead, insisted the Pope, “We [. . .] seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside, into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men.”156 The “progressive” view of the Papacy (at least on this occasion) was too little, too late, as more realistic observers like Bartolomé de Las Casas lamented: “Amongst these tame sheep, gifted with the aforementioned qualities by their Maker and Creator, came the Spaniards, who behaved, as soon as they knew them, like wolves and tigers and lions made cruel by many days’ hunger.”157 Perhaps these Reubenites/Amerindians are trying to prove themselves the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s promise from God (34:12–14): I will seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been dispersed in the cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from among the peoples, and gather them from the countries, [. . .] and in a fat grazing land shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel.

Perhaps their bleating entails a trope of overturning? A verse used by Jews often during and after persecutions, Isaiah 53:7, which Menasseh ben Israel cites (Mikveh Israel, Sect. 29), and which is echoed in 4 Ezra 15:10 reads: “He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before his shearers; he shall be dumb, and shall not open his mouth.” Messianic sheep, on the other hand, do not keep their mouths shut. Hence the bleating could be an attempt to fulfill the eschatological verse from 4 Ezra 7:65: “Let the human race lament, but let the beasts of the field be glad; let all who have been born lament, but let the fourfooted beasts and the flocks rejoice.”158 Perhaps it is a scenario twisted by black humor: the revenge of the sheep; “the meek shall inherit the earth” with a vengeance. Describing the end times, the Book of Revelations 6:12–17 puts forth a vision of “the lamb,” Christ, ushering in the apocalyse, from which everyone, from kings to slaves, flees to the mountains to hide “from the anger of the Lamb.” After all this Hulme, “European Ethnography and the Caribbean,” 189. Cited in Hulme, “European Ethnography and the Caribbean,” 189–90. Another translation has it: “Upon these lambes so meeke . . .” (1583 English translation of the Brevisima relación). Gerónimo de Mendieta in particular emphasized the childlike purity, meekness and docility of the Amerindians (Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 58, 64). While Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana was not published until 1870, his writing and thought was known—forming one of the bases for Juan de Torquemada’s famous Monarquía indiana, for example—and his views were shared by others. 158 Trans. B.M. Metzger, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 1:539. 156 157

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transpires, the twelve tribes will be reunited, standing, along with a vast international multitude, before a throne on which sits “the Lamb” (Rev. 7:4–9). Bleating like sheep might signify the perceived unity of the flock; “Sheep bleat as one and stick together,” as one later Hasidic master put it.159 There is evidence that, perhaps combining all the above, bleating like sheep entailed a social form taken during possession of the spirit among Christians, such as the nuns of Wertet, in Brabant, whose frequent possession in the 1550s led to their “convulsing, tearing off their veils, bleating like sheep, and climbing trees like cats.”160 This last manifestation would seem to attest to a transcendence of human limitations or specificities, such as the basic Aristotelian/Rabbinic notion of humans as possessing language. Furthermore, Montezinos’s utopian sheep issue directly from ‘Mother earth,’ the embodiment of the ‘natural’ men Spanish discourse envisioned them to be. Indeed, some Andean cultures placed the forces of earthly regeneration—human, animal, vegetative and even mineral—under the care and power of Pachamama, Earth Mother and her daughters.161 The feminized natural world, usually seen as existing to be conquered by the masculine colonialists, here spawns the conquerors of those who conquered their ‘mother’ and her children.162 Animals and animal-like humans comprise powerful rhetorical voices, untainted by the artificial and false perspectives of civilization, able to unmask the evils of empire.163 No. 9: Why are twelve men to be sent to these Reubenites? The number obviously resonates with the total number of the tribes of Israel, but that seems irrelevant here. Schmidt wonders whether the twelve requested emissaries might signify “Amsterdam hakhamim,”164 which may well be the case, though the number twelve has no significance in connection with a body of Jewish men. The model would seem to have been taken from elsewhere The characteristics required 159 Shmuel Bornstein of Sochaczev, Poland, Shem Mishmuel: Selections on the Weekly Parashah and Festivals, trans. Zvi Belovski (Southfield, MI: Targum Press, 1998), 268. 160 J.H. Chajes, Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1. 161 Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, 20–1, 24–31. 162 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda: “In prudence, intelligence, virtue, and humanity the Indians are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women to men” (Sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios [Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941], 100). 163 Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 1–17. 164 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 98.

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of these men make one think of the earliest Amerindian visions of the Spanish. The sixteenth-century chroniclers from Cuzco highlight what makes the Amerindians think the Spanish are divine beings: “beards, fair or dark; clothes completely covering the body; [. . .] magic language enabling them to communicate with one another by means of pieces of white cloth.”165 Some natives even grew beards “in imitation of the conquerors.”166 On the other hand, Chibcha myth speaks of a deity/hero, Bochica, “the Wise, Bochica who had a long and white beard and a great and wide boat,” who saved the ancient Chibcha after the ancient floods.167 The symbolic number twelve may well refer to the twelve friars sent in 1523 to New Spain as missionaries by the Franciscan Order and King Carlos V. Calling themselves the “twelve apostles” after the precedents of Christ and St. Francis, these preachers became legendary within the discourse of the mendicant orders and their peripatetic work created a deep impression on the Amerindian population. The number symbolism obviously resonated; in 1550, twelve Augustinian friars were sent from Castile to Peru and another twelve Franciscans to Nueva Granada in 1604.168 The mission of these groups was frankly eschatological, as can be seen from the speech delivered by the Franciscan minister general who sent off the first of these, Friar Francisco de los Ángeles, on the day of St. Francis itself: To you, then, o sons of mine, I, unworthy father, cry out as the last end of the century approaches and grows old, and I move and awaken your wills in order that you defend the squadron of the High King that moves as if vanquished and almost fleeing the enemies; and that, undertaking

165 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 21–2; on the “magic” of writing, from the Amerindian perspective, see Michel de Certeau, “Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry,” in The Writing of History, 212–15. Note Poma de Ayala’s illustration of “Good Government,” depicting the members of the royal Audiencia, all bearded (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno and Jorge L. Urioste, 2 vols. Cronicas de America, 29a–b [Mexico City: Historia 16, 1987], 2:497). 166 According to the late-sixteenth-century friar and chronicler Pedro de Aguado; Orlando Fals-Borda, “Fray Pedro de Aguado, the Forgotten Chronicler of Colombia and Venezuela,” The Americas 11,4 (April 1955): 572. 167 From a version told by a 94-year-old informant (1999?); Escribano, Cinco mitos de la Mhuysqa, 25; see also Zubiría, medicina en la cultura muisca, 73. 168 As related by the sixteenth-century chronicler Juan de San Pedro, one of the twelve friars; La Persecución del demonio: Crónica de los primeros agustinos en el norte del Perú (1560), manuscript transcribed by Eric E Deeds, Introduction by Teresa van Ronzelen, Preliminary studies by Luis Milliones, John R. Topic and José L. González (Málaga: Editorial Algazara, 1992), 8; Martínez, Inconquistable Panches, 111.

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chapter nine the victorious struggle of the Sovereign Triumpher, you preach to the enemies with words and works.169

Though the twelve emissaries Montezinos is asked to send seem to be for the benefit of the lost tribespeople themselves and not for the purpose of indoctrinating enemies, the beards and facility with writing requested by the Reubenites would appear to point to a recollection or emulation of the clerical role played in Amerindian life by the twelve Franciscan friars and their followers. Further, it should be recalled that despite what to us today seems the unsavory, self-interested behavior of such clerics, many of them stood as ‘friends of the Indian’ in their willingness to critique settler and royal practice. The Difficulties of Going Native This conference and transmission of information took all day. The same men returned the next two days and “repeated to him the same thing” (9), just as Montezinos had thrice repeated his jailhouse prayer. The three-day gathering is vaguely reminiscent of the days-long ceremonies or festivities of various Amerindian peoples frequently mentioned by chroniclers. The Muisca pilgrimmage circuit between their five sacred sites, “the whole affair with its attendant observances would occupy twenty days or more.” On the last three days “the caciques and other leaders would assemble by the great lake of Guatavita and [. . .] give themselves over to wild carousal.”170 Lacking temples or sanctuaries, the Muzo or Colima “are accustomed since the time of our ancestors to go a good distance to/for our devotions,” as a later informant put it, perhaps referring to one of the principal sites of indigenous worship, the forbidding crags and rocky formations of Furatena.171 Of course, the three day conference between Montezinos and the Reubenites equally recalls the three days the Israelites were gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:11) before receiving the Torah172 and the later repeated Quoted by Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, translated in Browne, Sahagún, 113. Freile, Conquest of New Granada, 38. 171 Napoleón Peralta Barrera, El país de los muzos (Tunja, Colombia: Academia Boyacense de Historia, 1998), 130. 172 Three days marked a common and significant biblical period of waiting, as when Abraham takes Isaac to Mt. Moriah (Gen. 22:4), the time between the circumcision of the men of Shechem and their massacre at the hands of Shim’on and Levi (49:5–7), the time between Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams of Pharoah’s baker and butler 169

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ascents and descents of Moses in an effort to educate the people. In light of this, the nine enumerated contents of the transmission evoke even more strongly the Ten Commandments highlighted immediately afterward in the biblical narrative. Understandably dissatisfied, as these repetitions added nothing new and the Reubenites/Amerindians “did not respond to that which he asked them” nor let him cross the river (9), Montezinos, dissembling, drew near to the canoe in order to get to the other side. But they withdrew it with an oar, and, falling in the water, he sank, not knowing how to swim. They seeing this, suddenly thew themselves into the river and took him out. Showing themselves to be angry, they said to him, do not think that by force or rashness you can succeed with what you intend se llego dissimuladamente a la Canoa para en ella passarse de la otra parte, pero ellos la retiraron cõ un palo, y cayendo en el agua, se fue a pique, por no saber nadar: lo ,q visto por ellos, supitamente se arrojarõ al rio, y le sacaron, y mostrandose airados, le dixeron, tu no piensses que por fuerça o locura as de salir con lo que intentas (9–10).

The river, previously a liminal marker of Montezinos’ desire to plunge into the world of the natives/lost tribespeople, becomes a marker of the limits to how deeply Montezinos can enter this world. The Spanish chronicles are filled with rivers impassable because of their difficulty. As Josiah Blackmore notes, in European travel literature “[s]wimming is a talent of the barbaric other.”173 Montezinos’ plunge into the native is rudely interrupted. Compare Montezinos’ attempted crossing with the much later (and at least temporarily successful) plunge of Gauguin in his 1893 Tahitian journal, Noa Noa. Hal Foster performs an insightful reading, to which I am much indebted, of this episode of Gauguin’s attempting to ‘go native.’ The following paragraph from it, with Foster’s comments in square brackets, comes in the midst of a trek into the mountains by Gauguin and a young Tahitian friend (male), so that Gauguin could “obtain a rosewood trunk . . . from which to make a sculpture”: I drew nearer, unafraid of laws, my temples pounding. The path had come to an end, we had to cross the river; my companion turned just

and their fulfillment (Gen. 40:19), Jonah’s time in the whale’s belly ( Jonah 1:17), the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection, etc. 173 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, 91.

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chapter nine then, his chest facing me. The hermaphrodite had disappeared; this was definitely a young man; his innocent eyes were as limpid as clear waters. [Here Gauguin decides that, if his identity is to be refounded rather than confounded, he must reclaim a masculinist position. This return is marked by a plunge into water: innocent, singular touch ‘negates’ decadent, promiscuous vision. Meanwhile nature remains coded as feminine, and the initiation ends, very conventionally, with her violent penetration.] I plunged eagerly into the bush.174

The unnamed river in which Montezinos nearly drowns again reminds readers of the mythical Sambatyon, the river beyond which reside the lost ten tribes, uncrossable because it only stops running on the Sabbath. The scene also suggests the revelation at Mt. Sinai, where the Israelites are warned against approaching too near the mountain. Perhaps Montezinos’ ignorance of swimming, well known as one of the three skills a Jewish father must transmit to his sons (BT Kiddushin 29a), metaphorizes the Converso predicament and the pedagogical failure—not necessarily their own fault—of all too many of those living under its shadow. Montezinos’ failure to cross the river does not stem from physical or natural obstacles, yet, unlike the intrepid conquistadores who ford rivers with their horses or who throw down bridges at a moment’s notice when needed, he cannot even swim. Sent packing, although with generous provisions and gifts (10), Montezinos leaves with Francisco. The things bestowed on him entail more than a mere nicety, for these Reubenites/Amerindians show him “how they enjoy all the goods that the Spanish have in the Indies, in foodstuff, as in clothing, flocks, seeds and all the rest” (10–11), a clear sign not only of their ‘civility,’ but also of their already having equalled in some respects the status of their conquerors, the Spanish.175 If these Reubenites/Amerindians comprise cimarrónes, rebellious Amerindians who have fled to the mountains, the gift they bestow on Montezinos indicates the success of their covert, seditious and predatory existence. One report from 1627 describes how in one mountainous area near

174 Hal Foster, “ ‘Primitive’ Scenes,” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (Autumn 1993): 86–90, quote from 88. 175 Pedro Simón makes mention, when discussing the early seventeenth-century native inhabitants of Anserma (100 or so km east of Honda, just west of the Cauca River), of their importing “the provisions of flour, clothing and other necessities of this Kingdom” of Nueva Granada, including fowl, fruit, legumes and vegetables from Spain; some plantations even grew sugar cane. The Quimbayas (some 70 km due south) garner a practically identical description (Simón, Noticias historiales, 5:283, 297–8).

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Cartago indios cimarrónes had “cleared fields, domesticated wild or runaway cattle and made pastures.”176 In his own messianic writings, Abravanel emphasizes this kind of equalization: the Jewish nation (or the Converso nation?) “stood fast through a long exile, did not trade away its respect. And they suffered the yoke of the exile, because it was not in their hands to escape it and to become like all the nations. But the best of the land [tuv ha-aretz] will they eat, as if they were like the rest of the nations. Because of this was [the nation] worthy of redemption.”177 As will be seen below, like the Jews and Conversos who chose to ignore the option of conversion to Christianity, perhaps even in this New World exile these Reubenites chose not to assimilate into their Amerindian surroundings. Still, even consequently, the oppressed enjoy the spoils that belong to the oppressor. If the Relación’s author possessed a sense of humor one might even suspect he is hinting with these goods at the proverbial commercial prowess of Jews or at the prominence of Conversos in colonial trade. Finally, the fact that these Reubenites/Amerindians possess and can give away Spanish goods marks a reversal of the actual situation of the Amerindians, whose goods and means of production were completely commandeered by the Spaniards for themselves. Though I will return to this later, it does not seem that Francisco’s people shared in the bounty of the Reubenites. It is paradoxical, then, that the bestowal of gifts onto the visitor Montezinos so resembles the bestowal of gifts by Muisca caciques onto the tribute-bringing population that gathered at the recurrent festivals. Notes anthropologist Carl Henrik Langebaek, “evidence is not lacking in regard to the fact that some individual assistants to the festival returned to their huts with more than they had brought [in tribute].”178 Montezinos reminds his guide that he was told to reveal more to him. Francisco answers: I will tell you that which you would know without your pressing me and I will relate to you the truth as I learnt it from the tradition of my fathers.

176 Juan Friede, Los quimbayas bajo la dominación española: Estudio documental (1539–1810) (Bogotá: Banco de la Republica, 1963), 212. 177 Emphasis added. Quoted in Rivka Schatz, “Toward an Image of PoliticalMessianic Awakening After the Spanish Expulsion” [Hebrew], Da’at 11 (1983): 60–1; Abravanel, Yeshu’ot Meshicho, pt. 2, ch. 2. Perhaps Abravanel is playing with a passage from BT Sanhedrin 98b: “R. Giddal said in Rav’s name: The Jews are destined to eat [their fill] in the days of the Messiah.” 178 Carl Henrik Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento e integración étnica entre los Muiscas: Siglo XVI (Bogotá: Banco de la Republica, 1987), 49–50.

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chapter nine But if you press me, which I fear, since I see you given to speculations, you will oblige me to tell you lies. ye te dire lo que supiere sin que me apures y te referire la verdad como la supe por tradiciõ de mis padres, y si me apuras que lo temo, segT te veo especulativo, as me de obligar a,q te diga mentrias (11).

Francisco’s warning would seem to be equally applicable to European ethnographers and inquisitors. If you press ‘informants’ too hard for ‘answers,’ they will feel pressured to ‘tell you lies’ in order to give you what it is they think you want. How prescient this bit of ‘native wisdom’ seems. It might reflect an awareness of the power relations between colonizer and native. It is also an early, albeit rather oblique empathy with the incommensurable voices of other European Others. As such, it might even draw a parallel between the internally colonized Conversos/Jews and the externally colonized Amerindians. Or it could merely reflect a shifty authorial self-defense. Given what Francisco finally reveals about these lost tribespeople, it is perhaps all of these things: God brought your brothers, the children of Israel, to this land, doing for them great miracles and wonders [. . .] We, the Indians, came to this land, we made war on them, treating them worse than the Spanish treat us. Afterwards, by command of our Mohanes (native priests), troops of our soldiers entered that part where we saw your brothers, in order to make war on them, but of all those who entered, not one came out alive. They raised a great army and went in there and all these died. Finally, the last and most humiliating time, they depopulated the entire country in order to go out to this war, leaving only women, the elderly and children, and of all these [soldiers], not one remained alive. When this was seen by those left behind, they said that their Mohanes had deceived them and that through their advice such a great multitude of people had perished. Accordingly, it was just that they [the Mohanes] should die like the rest. Killing a large number of them, leaving only a small few, these pleaded that they be given a reprieve and some time to undeceive them and to tell them the whole truth, which they knew, and granting it to them, they declared the following: The God of these children of Israel is the true God. All that is written on their stones is true. At the end of time they will be lords of all the people of the earth. People will come to this land who will bring you many things, and after the whole land is supplied, these children of Israel will emerge from where they are, and will be made lords of the entire land, as it was theirs previously. Those of you who wish to be fortunate/successful, [should] join them. Tus hermanos los hijos de Israel, los truxo Dios a esta tierra, haziendo con ellos grandes maravillas, muchos asõbros [. . .] Venimos los Indios a esta tierra, hezimos les guerra, tratamoslos peor de lo que los Españoles nos

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tratan Despues por mandado de nuestros Mohanes (hechizeros) entravamos hasta aquella parte adõde vimos a tus hermanos, tropas de soldados a hazerles guerra, y de quantos entravã, ninguno salia bivo: hizieron grande exercito entraron alla dentro, y todos ellos murieron, y finalmente la ultima y prostrera vez, despoblaron toda la tierra, para ir a esta guerra, dexando solo mugeres, viejos y niños, y de todos ellos, no quedo uno bivo: lo qual visto por los ,q quedaron, dixeron, que sus Mohanes les avian engañado, y ,q por respeto de sus consejos, avia perecido una tan gran multitud de gente: por lo qual era justo, q , ellos pereciessen con los de mas. y matando gran cantidad dellos, quedando solos unos pocos, pidierõ, les diess‚ algun tiempo de vida para dezengañarles, y dezirles en todo la verdad ,q sabian, y concediendoseles, declararon lo siguiente. El Dios destos hijos de Israel, es el verdadero Dios, todo lo que está escrito en sus piedras, es verdad; al cabo de los tiempos, ellos seran señores de todas las gentes del mundo, vendrá a esta tierra gente que os trayga muchas cosas, y despues de estar toda la tierra abastecida, estos hijos de Israel saldran de donde estan, y se enseñorearan de toda la tierra,179 como era suya de ãtes. Algunos de vosotros que quizierdes ser venturosos, pegaos a ellos (11–13).

The constant warring of these Amerindians reminds one of the view held by many Spaniards, expressed for example by the historian and friar Pedro Simón, regarding the tribes of the upper Magdalena: “peoples occupied the entirety of their lives in making civil wars and committing evils through the use of arms.”180 Simón wrote in the 1620s and the bellicosity he describes reflects vehement and long-standing postconquest resistance rather than some pre-conquest ‘essence’ he pretends to know. The Amerindian caciques in the Relación wisely decide to make a pact with these Israelites, as now described by Francisco, who, we find out, is a descendant of caciques who alone know of these Israelites, through the “prognostications” of the surviving Mohanes, who learned them directly from Hebrew sages. The persistent warring against the Reubenites directly recalls the press of the surrounding Christian nations against the lost tribes of Ethiopia in the messianic discourse of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, echoes of actual historical conflicts.181 Of course, the lost tribes emerge triumphant. The fear with which these Reubenites were able to cow their

“Tierra” here could mean either the land being spoken of or the entire world. Cited in Juan Friede, Los andakí, 1538–1947: Historia de la aculturación de una tribu selvática (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953), 98–9. 181 Aescoly, Story of David Reuvenieni, 47, 54, 63, citing various reports; description of the wars of Menelik I of Ethiopia in Kebra Nagast, 127. 179 180

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neighbors recalls the depiction of the lost tribes by the ninth-century Eldad HaDani, canonical long before Montezinos’ time. The term mohanes, referring to the native priests of various indigenous peoples, recurs in Spanish chronicles. Regarding the Tairona people of the Valle de la Caldera, along the Caribbean coast of present-day Colombia, quite close to the town of Cartagena, Pedro Simón wrote in the late 1620s that “there is not a single town that does not have its own Cacique or Mohan,” while other chroniclers mentioned towns that had several mohanes.182 Many of the acts of resistance against Spanish domination were planned and executed by mohanes.183 According to one account from 1578, the local Amerindians obey only “the mohan who cures their diseases. When one of these dies his son takes his place; and to be a mohan like his father he has to remain ten years fasting, without seeing the sun.”184 Anthropologists today understand mohanes to have been essentially shamans. Weston La Barre, for instance, calls such Amerindian leaders shaman-messiahs. The mohanes oversaw the sacrificial rites, interpreted dreams, healed, confirmed the caciques’ decisions through supernatural corroboration, embalmed the caciques after their deaths.185 Montezinos seems to have perceived that unlike the stereotypical European witch, Andean shamans garnered enormous respect as “proud, potent, and influential” leaders, often political.186 182 Simón, Noticias historiales, 6:285–86; cited in Warwick Bray, “Gold, Stone, and Ideology: Symbols of Power in the Tairona Tradition of Northern Colombia,” in Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2004), 302. 183 Pedro Aguado, Recopilación historial, 4 vols., Biblioteca de la Presidencia de Colombia (Bogotá, 1956), 1:339; Simón, Noticias historiales, 6:118; Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento, 31. 184 Quoted in Bray, “Tairona Tradition,” 310. 185 Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 301; Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 203; Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 65–7. They mastered “hundreds of years of tradition, such as the knowledge of rites for the preparation of special drinks, the inhalation of smoke produced by burning mushrooms and herbs, the elaboration of potions and unguents from animal and vegetable sources, which, if rubbed onto the hands, feet, genitals and areas of the head where the temporal and frontal lobes are found, would help produce sharp perception and bodily transformation or metamorphoses” (Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 33–4). On the mohanes’ training and practice, see Zubiría, Medicina en la cultura muisca, 116–18; Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento, 31. 186 Frank Salomon, “Shamanism and Politics in Late-Colonial Ecuador,” American Ethnologist 10,3 (1983): 425. Among the Muisca, mohanes “lived in the temples with the greatest recognition” (Zubiría, Medicina en la cultura muisca, 79; Fernández Piedrahíta, Historia general de la conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada [Bogotá: Imprenta de Medardo

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Among some highland Caribe peoples, such as the Panche, mohanes played an important role in religious, political and military decisionmaking, bearing partial responsibility for electing the next leader in cases of unclear or contested succession.187 Evidently, the term mohan was used only in reference to certain peoples of the region.188 According to Diana Luz Ceballos Gómez, the term appeared only among or in reference to the Tairona (Caribbean coastal mountains), Calima (Valle del Cauca, western Cordillera) and Panche (Tolima province and environs, west bank of Magdalena; also the Tocaima on the east bank).189 Recall that the mohanes come from the Amerindian group or groups mentioned in the Relación, not from the Reubenites. The locales in which Montezinos claims to have journeyed would seem to preclude his Amerindians’ comprising Incans, though Inca influence flowed to these territories north of their actual political control. The area occupied by present-day Colombia hosted over 80 different ethnic groups, speaking some 64 languages. Keeping in mind the route taken by Montezinos, possible candidate tribes of the seventeenth-century speaking a language from the Chibcha linguistic family include the Tairona (Caribbean coastal mountains), the Inca-like Muiscas or, in Spanish, Moxca or Chibchas (central Andean region, highland plateaus of the Magdalena east of the Magdalena, their capitol Bogotá), the Guambianos and Paeces or Páez (Cauca province), the Pastos and Quillacingas (south of Popayán), the Guane (northeast of

Rívas, 1881 (1676)], 14) and were fed and clothed by the community (Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento, 31). As I discuss below, it is significant that Montezinos harps on religious rather than strictly political leadership. 187 Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 36, 40. Martínez mentions that “the Mohan” was also a deity of ancestral origin among peoples of the Tolima culture (165). 188 Most scholars hold the word’s origins to be Chibcha (Ceballo Gómez, Sociedad y prácticas mágicas, 138); Kris Lane says the term was and is used by Chibcha-speaking groups (personal communication, Jan. 2007). According to Martínez, the word’s origin is Caribe, as are the synonyms Marirri and Piache (Inconquistables Panches, 203). Caribe influence flowed up the entirety of the Magdalena River system. I must really also thank Ronnie Perelis, who was the first to mention the ethno-linguistic specificity of this term to me. 189 Ceballos Gómez, “Grupos Sociales y Practicas Mágicas”; cited by María del Pilar Eraso Soler, “La medicina en Colombia: Una reseña histórica,” www.gfmer .ch/Colombia_Pilar/Historia.htm, 21 January 2007. The term had many synonyms, including jeque (the Castilianization of the chibcha word Chyquy), noama, marirri and piache; the Muzo used the term cora or core ([ Juan Suárez de Cepeda,] “Relación de la región de los indios muzos y colimas ordenada hacer por el gobernador Juan Suárez de Cepeda,” reprinted in Francisco Morales Padrón, “Aspectos de la cultura de los indios muzos (Alto Magdalena),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos [Seville] 15 [1958]: 596).

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Muisca territory) and Cuna; those representing the Caribe language group include the Quimbayas (Central Cordillera), the Muzo (east of Magdalena), the Pijaos and Panches (Tolima province and environs, west bank of Magdalena), the Calima of the Valle del Cauca and the tribes of the highland San Agustín culture (Huila province), the Motilones, Zenúes, Turbacos, Urabaes, Catíos, Chocoes, Pantágoras, Opones, Carares, Yareguíes, Nauras and Colimas. I have tried to offer possible evidence of Montezinos’ familiarity with actual native groups, which may in fact be minimal or even nonexistent, but ultimately, whether Montezinos’ knowledge of the term mohan derived from personal contact or from familiarity with other texts cannot be determined. After the wars, Francisco continues to explain, the surviving Indians went to live near those parts, to see if they could gain entry in order to speak with your brothers. Many days passing, they finally succeeded, through many entreaties and persuasions, because your brothers never wanted to speak with my ancestors nor consented that the ones should speak with the others. Thus any of the Indians who entered into that land died, and from your brothers none passed into these parts. The agreement was made by means of this woman who did that which your brothers commanded her, with these conditions. That five men, sons of the Chief, or his heirs, would come every 70 months to see them. That no other men would come, and that the man to whom this secret will be declared will be 300 months of age, and that none of this will be revealed in town, but only in the countryside, and that when it is revealed the Chiefs have to be together. se vinieron a morar cerca destes partes, por ver si podrian tener entrada para hablar con tus hermanos y andando muchos dias la vinieron a alcançar, por muchos ruegos y persuaciones, por ,q tus hermanos nunca quisieron hablar a mis padres ni se consentia que los unos hablassen con los otros: por que el ,q entrava de los Indios en aquella tierra, moria, y de tus hermanos ninguno passava a estas partes. Hizose el concierto por medio desta muger la qual hazia lo que le mandavan tus hermanos, con estas condiciones. Que cinco hombres hijos de los Casique, o sus herederos, vendrian cada 70. lunas a verlos. Que no vendrian mas otros hombres, y que el hombre al qual se declarasse este secreto, tendria de edad 300. lunas, y nada desto sele podria revelar en poblado, sino enel campo, y que quando se revelasse, avian de estar los Casiques juntos (13–14).

Regarding the time periods mentioned here, the numbers 70 and 300 do not appear to bear any significance in any of the literature on the Amerindians on Nueva Granada. Seventy months equals some 5.8 years, while 300 months comes to 25 years. Among the Muisca (at

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least pre-conquest), caciques-in-training were secluded in a temple or other place of worship under a stringent regimen for “from five to seven years,”190 but, despite the superficially similar contexts, it seems a stretch to import that timeframe here. Though again the immediate context differs, the period of seventy months between visits with the Reubenites may allude to the well-known prophecy of Daniel (ch. 9) that Israel’s captivity would last only seventy years. Bandarra hints at this number as well.191 Here in the Relación, the Amerindians are to come to the Reubenites only every 70 months, unless some important event occurs (14), as we will see later. The age of twenty five seems to have constituted the Iberian or at least Spanish point when a person had reached full adulthood; it arises repeatedly, intriguingly, in the inquisitorial legal process, where it seems ideal witnesses had to have reached this age, while prisoners under twenty five were supposed to be assigned a guardian.192 Pragmatically, the Amerindians keep the secret of these secret Jews, “because of the great reward which we hope to have for the great services that we have done for your brothers” (14). It is noteworthy that only a woman could serve as a conduit between these Israelites and the surrounding Amerindians, and that women have been present, though often silent, at most of these meetings. Who is “this woman” who is spoken of here? She might be an echo of the many Amerindian women who served as cultural intermediaries, whether willingly or not, such as Malintzin or Malinche, (in)famous mistress of Cortés, interpreter for the conquering Spaniards or, closer to our scene, “a Ladina, Christian Indian woman named Inés, interpreter for our own, servant of a soldier named Alvaro Sánchez.”193 She could comprise a symbol of the centrality of Conversas in maintaining and transmitting the faith. She might even be a nod to the biblical figure of Esther, so beloved by Conversos as to have been made into a kind of Marrano patron saint. (In a 1644 letter, Montezinos states that this interpreter was a Reubenite; see below and the Appendix.) This woman is perhaps also a reflection of the matrilineality or women’s prominence 190 Vicente Restrepo, Los chibchas antes de la conquista española, Biblioteca Banco Popular, 26 (Bogotá: Imprenta Banco Popular, 1972), 130. 191 Trovas, stanza 128; Lipiner, Bandarra e os cristãos-novos, 213. 192 See, for example, the Cartagena trial record of Diego Lopez (treated in chapter 3), against whom testified “nine witnesses, women, older than twenty five years” (AHN Inq. 1620/1/7, fol. 3r.); Splendiani, Tribunal de Cartagena, 1:62. 193 On Malintzin, see Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 4–5; Simón, Noticias historiales, 6:36.

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in so many Andean peoples. Muisca leadership, for example, went to a son of one of the Zipa’s/Cacique’s sisters (the fact that the Relación states that the caciques’ sons were not necessarily their successors may indicate that its author knew this ethnographic fact).194 Among the Quimbaya, women could inherit the office of Cacique and had the right to vote in war councils.195 Among the neighboring Panche as well, women were actively connected to warfare.196 Indeed, the lawyer, conquistador then chronicler Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada reported that the Panche have “a strange custom in war never to send [anyone] to ply for peace nor to negotiate accords with their enemies except women, it seeming to them that things would not be denied them [to the women] and that in order to arrange peace among men, they [the women] should have more powers so that their requests be executed.”197 The fact that the revelation of the Israelites’ secret must occur only in the countryside seems to point again to the personal confessions of so many Conversos, who pointedly avoided revealing themselves amidst the social orbit that included untrustworthy Old Christians. Here, though, the Converso predicament parallels that of the Amerindian, for whom the town also signifies a ladino site, a danger. Indeed, the entire history painted here of relations between the Israelites and the surrounding Amerindians echoes the history of conflict between Old and New Christians within the Iberian world. This history repeated itself within the Amerindian world. One late-sixteenth-century native chronicler of Peru records a speech outlining the ‘Marrano’ strategy of the surviving Inca loyalists, here summarized by Nathan Wachtel: “Should Indians be forced, by violence, to be present at Christian ceremonies, they are to make a pretence [sic] of obedience, but, secretly, they are to remain faithful to the traditional gods.”198 The Taqui Ongo movement, which stayed active for over a decade in the 1560s in central Peru, forbade Amerindians to eat or dress like the Spanish, to enter churches and to

194 Piedrahíta, Historia, 19; Juan Friede, Invasión del país de los Chibchas: Conquista del Nuevo Reino de Granada y fundación de Santafé de Bogotá: Revaluaciones y rectificaciones ([Bogotá:] Ediciones Tercer Mundo, [1966]), 173. 195 Friede, Los quimbayas, 22. 196 Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 29. 197 Cited in Martínez, Inconquistable Panches, 69. 198 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 173; he cites the Relación of Titu Cusi Yupangui, alias Diego de Castro.

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bear Christian names. Later groups followed this mode of resistance.199 Pedro Simón relates a story that concerns a dying Amerindian leader from the town of Cogua (in the province of Cundinamarca, just north of Tolima province) who “summoned a priest” and “went through the religious ceremony of bien morir [dying well/properly] with an image of the god Bochica hidden inside the crucifix that he held in his hand. The Coguan [. . .] did not recant his paganism, much to the dismay of the Christian minister.”200 Historiography Through the Looking Glass The fantastic history of the Relación is a historical fantasy of monumental proportions. Montezinos completely rewrites European Jewish history as wish-fulfillment on the canvas of the New World, an inscribing relatively common in European discourse by the 1640s. Like the Old World Christians, these Amerindians oppressed the Jews and even tried to destroy them. But unlike the Christians, the Amerindians failed to execute their plans and ultimately ‘convert’ to being Jewish allies. In the New World, the populace, instead of rampaging against the Jews at the behest of their mohanes (read: priests) as in the Old World, actually turn on their own mohanes because of their “false dealing.” Though obviously a wishful projection, the narrative role of the mohanes reflects an attitude toward them found throughout Spanish discourse and practice. In the course of a 1628 official visit, one encomendero of Timaná province lashed out at one of ‘his’ Indians who had complained about the excesses of forced labor: the complainer is merely “an Indian of poor resolve, a cimarrón and held among the Indians as a mohán.”201 Chronicler friar Pedro de Aguado held mohanes to be “the very impersonation of Satan.”202 Spanish colonial authorities 199 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 181; Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 26, 189–90, 193–203. 200 Cited in Fals-Borda, “Fray Pedro de Aguado,” 544, n. 15. 201 Cited in Friede, Andakí, 185. 202 Fals-Borda, “Fray Pedro de Aguado,” 569; see also Simón, Noticias historiales, 3:383–87, on chibcha mohanes or jeques and the sacrificial cult; 5:52–3 on the origins of worship of “el demonio” by the tribes of Tolú and the continued danger of mohans, and, 5:55–7, a whole chapter on the Mestizo mohan Luis Andrea, tried by the Inquisition of Cartagena in 1630; 5:426–27 on the mohan opposing the missionizing of Fray Luis Beltrán; 6:69 on the mohan Cuibana, who kills the captured Spanish Governor; 6:118, the most extensive denunciation of mohanes. A modern-day

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reserved the worst treatment not for Amerindian political leaders but for religious practitioners, burning alive at the stake anyone caught serving as mohan, threatening anyone who consulted with a mohan with fifty lashes and the punishment, to them highly degrading, of cutting off the hair.203 Anthropologist Michael Taussig paraphrases the bishop of Quito, Peña Montenegro, insisting in a 1668 manual for missionaries that it is the native sorcerers “who threaten the Christian Indians with drought, failure of harvests, and with sending tigers and serpents to eat them [. . .] who stimulate uprisings against the Spanish.”204 Montezinos could paradoxically agree with the Spanish view of mohanes because he then turns it against the Spaniards. In the Relación, the mohanes represent ‘magic as power,’ to some degree rightfully seen by the Spaniards as characterizing many aspects of Amerindian social structure (though misunderstood and prejudicially devalued),205 while to Montezinos ‘magic as power’ characterizes just as well the Catholic clergy driven by anti-Jewish hatred. Finally, the eventual triumph of the Jews over all their enemies, over the entire continent or even over the whole world, as it was subject to them formerly (!?), becomes the crown of this fantasy: a total reversal of Jewish political powerlessness.206 Fantasies such as those in the Relación and attempts to realize them were not mere fantasy at this time. Escape was not merely a military tactic, but a mode of survival; Marrano marronage. Colombian anthro-

Colombian folktale, told by an anonymous child, that I came across on a “multicultural kids’ website” similarly wields the mohan as a symbol of seemingly cultural punishment (all spellings are as in the original): “This legend is about when a man that lived in a farm in the mountains. He was a miser and not much help to his family. One day, when he was in the town, an older woman was sitting in the floor, who said to him, ‘Give me some money, please.’ And the man said, ‘No.’ And the older woman said, ‘I gave you one maledication.’ And the man when to his farm. On another day, it rained in the mountain and his farm went flooded and the animals and plants died. This was because the malediction. Days later, the man went to his parents and friends to get help but they didn’t help him. Then, he died too. After the time, the main is the Mohan; his hair is big and large in colour green and black. His eyes are red in colour and live in the lakes” (www.mde.k12.nf.ca/kmcw/folktales/themohan.html). 203 Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento, 31. 204 Taussig, Shamanism, 376. 205 Ceballos Gómez, Hechicería, brujería, e inquisición, 65. 206 It is on this note that Schatz’s speculation that Ben Israel “wrote” Montezinos’ Relación falters; if, as she argues so cogently, Ben Israel’s messianism comes across as universalist and tolerant (Schatz, “Messianism in the Jewish-Christian Context”), how does one explain the militancy within the Relación? Is he revealing things he otherwise suppresses under the the protection of the forger’s pseudonymity?

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pologist Juan Friede summarizes the laments of the colonial Governor in 1629: “Many Indians, in order to liberate themselves from their ‘civilizers,’ fled to the mountains, where they lived dispersed and without religion.”207 A 1627 official visit to the region of Cartago found both Amerindians and Spanish encomenderos alike stating that more natives had fled than had remained as “useful Indians.”208 So common were such forms of Amerindian resistance that the Spanish coined terms like indios cimarrónes (Indian maroons, Indians who went lawless) or indios del monte (mountain Indians). The repression of the mocambos and quilombos of runaway African slaves in Brazil had begun as early as 1575, culminating in the famous ‘Republic’ of Palmares, that flourished throughout the seventeenth century until its 1694 destruction at the hands of thousand of Portuguese troops (other quilombos survive to this day).209 The flight of slaves from Cartagena entailed a constant problem for the authorities, while serious slave rebellions shook Cartagena already in 1545 and 1599.210 By 1610, some 200 runaway slaves were living in the forests, raiding the local mines and stealing off with slaves.211 In Nueva Granada a number of maroon communities were founded before Montezinos’ travels in the region: San Basilio (1526), La Matuna (1600), Zaragoza (1620), Limón (1633) and Sanaguare (1633), while certain mountain communities of runaway slaves were granted freedom in 1619 in order to put an end to their attacks.212 Friede, Andakí, 188. Friede, Los quimbayas, 196–97. 209 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 334, n. 115. The literature on the early modern quilombos and on Palmares has been experiencing a welcome growth. See, inter alia, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, A hidra e os pântanos: Mocambos, quilombos e comunidades de fugitivos no Brasil (séculos XVII–XIX) (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005); João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Liberdade por um fio: História dos quilombos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997); R.N. Anderson, “The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in Seventeenth-Century Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Studies 28 (1996): 545–566; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil,” in Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconstructing Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1992), 103–36; Décio Freitas, Palmares: A guerra dos escravos, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Graal, 1978); R.K. Kent, “Palmares: An African State in Brazil,” Journal of African History 6, 2 (1965): 161–75. 210 A sign of the latter event’s significance is the relatively large amount of attention Pedro Simón devotes to them (Noticias historiales, 6:319–26). 211 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 459–60. 212 An incomplete map of maroon communities appears in Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 793; see also Borrego Plá, Palenques en Cartagena, 25, which offers a detailed analysis of the provinces’ palenques at the end of the seventeenth century; Anthony McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques: Runaways and Resistance in Colonial Colombia,” Slavery and 207 208

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The specter of Amerindian rebellion against their Spanish overlords, not all imagined, evoked even more tangible fears within the Spanish colonial world.213 It may have been well remembered in Montezinos’ day that the suppressed 1565 rebellion planned against the Spanish, stemming from the messianic and insurrectionary Taqui Ongoy movement, derived precisely from “the Inca [ruler] hiding out in the Andes [who] is the cause of this unrest,” as the local governor wrote to the Spanish king at the time.214 Amerindian dramas and dances, performed to this day in Peru and Bolivia, commemorate the Spanish conquest in terms that could easily have served the author of the Relación: about to die, the last Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, makes his son promise “to retreat to Vilcabamba with his faithful subjects and refuse the Spanish yoke; one day their descendants, remembering that this was the country of Atahuallpa [. . .] will drive out the bearded enemy.”215 Closer to Montezinos’ trail, in the late-1530s Tisquesusa, the last Zipa of Bogotá, refused to submit to the conquistador Quesada, failed to halt their invasion and fled to his mountain palace some 20 kilometers away, whence he conducted nocturnal sorties against the Christians until his death, without having revealed the site of the treasure that the Spanish considered their rightful booty.216 One indigenous motivation for fleeing to the mountains was a belief that a great flood would come soon and destroy all the Christians, but the Amerindians who could escape to the mountainous heights would be spared.217 Pedro Simón describes a rebellion planned in 1603 among the Quimbaya, when a “messiah” appeared to the wife of a cacique, who then transmitted her spirit familiar’s instructions to various other caciques. The instructions conveyed to the newly-formed confederation—renamed “Nabsacadas,” meaning “fallen star” in Spanish—bear an eerily similar ring to various allegedly Marrano attitudes: baptism is meaningless, confession is

Abolition 6 (1985): 131–51; Aquiles Escalante, “Palenques in Colombia,” in Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 74–9. 213 See Chapter 6; Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 169–87. 214 Emphasis added; quoted in Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, “Writing as Resistance: Peruvian History and the Relación of Titu Cusi Yupanqui,” in Adorno, Native Andean Chronicles, 52. 215 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 37. 216 Friede, Invasión, 173. So also the Bogotá’s rival, Guatavita (Freile, Conquest of New Granada, 49). 217 As voiced by one mohan among the Tairona of Santa Marta (Simón, Noticias historiales, 6:116).

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ineffective, priests are human like the rest of us and have no power to forgive sins.218 One cannot help but think of the star of Jacob prophesied by the Bible (Numbers 24:17). That Simón, a friar, constitutes the only source for this supposed rebellion, some of whose details conflict with known evidence, does not erase the resonances such a narrative might have had for the author of our Relación. The Pijaos of the central Cordilleras, who lived on the west bank of the Magdalena River (present-day Tolima province) conducted a rebellion with some of their allies that pushed Spanish forces into a conflict simmering from 1602 onwards. Though by 1606 the Spanish countercampaign had depleted the provincial treasury of Popayán, hostilities continued until at least the 1690s.219 The Panches and others provoked the outbreak of a different, all-out war that lasted from 1605 to 1611. This became the so-called “systematic war” conducted by Governor Juan de Borja to complete the pacification of the indigenous populations, using tactics successfully deployed in Spain against the Muslims during the Reconquista. The pacification remained incomplete. Perhaps Montezinos’s narrative found inspiration in the apocalyptic tenor of even later rampages attributed to the allegedly cannibalistic Pijao against settlements in the upper Cauca region such as Cali, Buga and Cartago (in testimony given in 1637), “burning them, scorching them, and killing the resident Indians and their children and Spaniards and they were taken alive,” while at the fort at the port of Buenaventura “they killed the people and the alcaides who guarded and defended it [. . .] that because of the deaths and assaults of the said Indians travel has been stopped and commerce ceased, among the Spanish and inhabitants alike.”220 The elements of Montezinos’ “prophecy” find broad parallels with those expressed by recalcitrant Amerindians: the resurrection of the native gods, war with and defeat of the Spanish, the restoration of native lands—though it is often impossible to distinguish ‘native’ tropes from the Judeo-Christian matrix in which they reach us. Benjamin Schmidt raises the significance in this regard of Dutch attempts to forge alliances 218 Friede, Los quimbayas, 168–69. The author, usually reliable and thorough, gives no source in Simón, Noticias historiales, and I could not find this narrative in the text. 219 Luis Fernando Calero, Pastos, quillacingas y abades, 1535–1700, Biblioteca Banco Popular (Bogotá: Banco Popular, 1991), 163; Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 89; Friede, Los quimbayas, 164–65. 220 Cited in José Maria Arboleda Llorente, El indio en la colonia (Bogotá, 1948), 15–6.

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with ‘Peruvians’ and ‘Chileans,’ in 1630 and 1643, respectively, against Spain.221 Such Dutch attempts went back to the 1620s and were also paralleled in Brazil.222 The instigator of several of these Dutch efforts was Joan Aventroot, a fervent activist for the Reformed Church. His “apocalyptic musings,” published in a pamphlet printed at the expense of the Dutch government, envisioned a “bond of strategic assistance” that was actually signed into an official treaty with the “Serene Lords of Peru.” Aventroot’s perspective bears strong parallels with the vision of Montezinos. Aventroot held these Amerindians to be “the key to Dutch salvation” and sought “a cataclysmic uprising in America, triggered by the Dutch-Indian confederation, [that] would displace the hegemony of the Habsburgs and the primacy of the Catholic Church.”223 (Here, again, it behooves us to recall Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s insightful reconstruction of the similarities between Catholic and Protestant visions of the Atlantic world’s new-found denizens.) As Schmidt points out, Mikveh Yisrael offers up a number of texts that present critical accounts of the Spanish conquests in the Americas: the epic of Alonsus de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana (Antwerp, 1586 and 1597), which depicts the native Chilean resistance against the Habsburgs as a heroic endeavor; the chronicles of the half-Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega. It is tempting to see in the Relación’s depiction of the Reubenites an image of the Araucans, who managed to resist the Spanish long after the Peruvian peoples had succumbed, using and even improving on the weapons and tactics of the invaders themselves. Still, though the idea might have inspired the author of our Relación, as far as I could see, Ercilla’s voluminous and poetic history bears no real similarity to and offers few if any details parallel to the Relación, other than frequent complaints about Spanish cruelty and the canto regarding hidden peoples cited by Ben Israel in Mikveh Yisrael.224 It must be recalled that the notion of an alliance between the lost tribes and the nation of the author of any particular notice about them had long been a staple of the discourse, including Prester John’s various self-proclaimed emissaries and David Reuveni himself. 221 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 94; idem, “Exotic Allies: The DutchChilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 440–73. 222 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 94, 103, n. 20. 223 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 94. 224 I used the critical edition of Isaías Lerner: Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana (Madrid: Cátedra, 1993); Ben Israel, Mikveh Yisrael ( Junquera), 31.

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From the Jewish perspective, imperial Spanish nightmares such as these culminated in the frenzy of arrests and executions of Portuguese New Christian merchants in the commercial urban centers of Spanish America in the mid- to late-1630s, Lima, Cartagena and Mexico City, known as the “gran complicidad,” the great conspiracy. The accused, though charged with judaizing, frequently raised Spanish anxieties because of feared contact and seditious plotting with Indians and Blacks, especially as Portuguese desires for independence from Spain loomed ever larger (described in chapter 6). From the perspective of Amerindians in Nueva Granada, Montezinos’ Relación comes after a century of Spanish domination (Cartagena was founded in 1532, [Spanish] Bogotá was founded in 1538), ‘pacification’ of the native inhabitants and dying off of the indigenous population. One scholar concludes that forty two percent of the Amerindian population of the Pasto district (southwest Colombia) died off between 1558 and 1570. Among the Muzo, the demands of working the (in)famous emerald mine, alongside other factors, reduced the population by 1629 to a tenth of its estimated 1558 size. Of the peoples in the Timaná region (100 km southeast of Popayán, just off the Magdalena), estimated to have numbered between twenty and twenty five thousand at the time of the conquest, a 1628 investigation lists a mere 430 individuals, now tributaries, while a document from 1642 speaks of two hundred and fifty.225 By 1626, due to warring, flight by the native inhabitants and disease, Bogotá, the former Muisca capital, stood unpopulated.226 Montezinos’ Relación came toward the end of the Spanish campaign to extirpate native ‘idolatry’ that began around 1610 and lasted through 1660. Already a decade and a half before Montezinos’ adventure in Nueva Granada, Pedro Simón notes the longing for cultural connection: “In particular those whom these lands bore and who inhabit them are tormented by not finding a way to comply with and to know the things of their predecessors, from whom they descend.”227 According to Montezinos’ Relación, the Reubenites can claim their own Marrano authenticity. The geographic hiddenness of the Reubenites stands in for

225 Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 99; Peralta Barrera, País de los muzos, 238; Friede, Andakí, 66, 68. 226 Friede, Invasión, 171. This was true for numerous other towns, all then standing in need of repopulation. 227 Cited in Héctor H. Orjuela, Historia crítica de la literatura colombiana: Introducción al estudio de las literaturas indígenas (Bogotá: Editora Guadalupe, 2002), 72.

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the psychic hiddenness of the Conversos; the lost tribes are lost now in a new way, though not without resistance. The counter-narrative of Montezinos comes just after the cruel and forceful Spanish repression of an only partially imagined epidemic of attempts by the Empire’s downtrodden minorities to lift the boot off their neck. New Worlds, New Messiahs Ronnie Perelis reads Montezinos’ counter-history as a direct undermining of Spanish triumphalist discourse, which melded political and religious imperialism; everything Spanish writers saw as proofs of Spain’s glory and chosenness becomes here evidence to the contrary. Benjamin Schmidt just as cogently notes that Montezinos’ narrative and Ben Israel’s framing of it seek to instill Jewish hopes for and in the New World in the face of the increasingly successful Portuguese rebellion in Brazil against the Dutch and their Sephardic allies.228 I would argue that the persecutions of the 1630s against the Portuguese

228 Perelis, “Marrano Autobiography,” 124–28; Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 91. Seeing Spain or Portugal as the new Israel was common. Columbus quotes Joachim of Fiore as having stated that the Christian rebuilder of Jerusalem and Zion will come from Spain ( John Edwards, “The Friars and the Jews: Messianism in Spain and Italy Circa 1500,” Friars and the Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Steven J. McMichael and Susan E. Myers [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 283). A group of mystics in Mexico claimed that they had been taught by the sixteenth-century visionary Mexican hermit and botanist Gregorio López that a new Jerusalem would be founded in the colony ( Jaffary, False Mystics, 32). Other examples include the sixteenth-century millenial poet and historian Gerónimo de Mendieta, biographer of Mendieta and historian Juan de Torquemada (see the final chapter of his Monarquía indiana), even the rationalist José de Acosta, and conquistador Martín Fernández de Enciso, co-author of the infamous Requerimiento (1510) that was read to Amerindians by their conquerors (in Spanish, of course) and supposedly gained their assent to the Spanish conquest. Enciso, perhaps not surprisingly, argued that “God had given the Indies to Spain just as he had granted the Promised Land to the Jews [. . .] in order that idolatry might be suppressed in Palestine and in the Indies, respectively” (Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 117, n. 19). Mendieta, for instance, “was confident that the whole world was soon to be recast in a Spanish mold” (ibid., 104). The Ethiopian Christian Kebra Nagast, first translated into Spanish in the sixteenth century, cast the alliance of the kings of Rome and Ethiopia with the Archbishop of Alexandria as a means of attacking and destroying the Jews (Kebra Nagast, 172), the inverse of David Reuveni’s mission. Amos Funkenstein made much of the notion of counter-history; see “History, Counter-History and Memory,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 66–81. Montezinos’ tale, like so many “popular” tales and legends, “reverse[s] the relationships of power and, like the stories of miracles, ensure[s] the victory of the unfortunate in a fabulous, utopian space” (Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 23).

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Conversos by the Inquisition tribunals in Lima and Cartagena pose the most immediate context of the Relación, despite their textual repression. The so-called ‘Great Conspiracy’ alleged against the Portuguese Converso merchants in Lima, which began in April of 1635, swept Cartagena and Mexico City as well.229 If it is true, as charged by the Cartagena tribunal, that Montezinos attempted to flee in fear of the Inquisition, he no doubt knew about the mass arrests and punishments carried out over the past few years. The Cartagena tribunal sentenced nineteen alleged judaizers between 1636 and 1642.230 Though only one of these men was sentenced to be burned at the stake, he died in prison while awaiting the Suprema’s review of his case, along with two others who died before the conclusion of their trials. The 1639 auto in Lima featured the sentencing of 63 accused judaizers, 11 of whom were publicly executed. The world conquest by the post-messianic Jews envisioned in the Relación itself indicates a certain discursive stance on Montezinos’s part. Within Jewish discourse, understandings of the onset and nature of the messianic era fall into two categories. On the one hand stood those such as Maimonides, who specifically writes against political fantasizing in his great law code, the Mishneh Torah: “Sages and prophets longed for the messianic age not in order that they should dominate the world and rule over gentiles . . . but solely in order to be free to devote themselves to the Torah and divine wisdom without oppression and hindrance” (bk. 14, chs. 11–12, “Laws of Kingship”). One New Christian who flirted with Judaism, the playwright Antonio Enríquez Gómez, concludes his defense of an Old Christian executed for judaizing by the Inquisition and apologia for Judaism, Romance al divín mártyr, Judá Creyente, written in or around 1648, with a traditionally theological description of messianic events: war will break out, in which “the Hebrew will clamor,” inspiring dread in all, horrific things will occur, in the East “a Venus rises, a new star of Jacob, prince of eternal peace. With the staff of his mouth he will tame the Idumeans, and in great Jerusalem he will have his divine seat. The Word will go out from there and from Zion The

229 According to Alfonso Quiroz Norris, this wave of persecution, which lasted until 1649, unfolded with the tacit approval of the Suprema in Madrid, the governing body of all inquisitorial tribunals worldwide (Quiroz Norris, “La expropriación inquisitorial de cristianos nuevos portugueses en Los Reyes, Cartagena y México, 1635–1649,” Historia 10,2 [Lima, Dec. 1986]: 238). 230 Álvarez Alonso, Inquisición en Cartagena, 117.

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Idea [el Concepto], and all the peoples will fear The Law and The Holy Name. In Jacob will the nations be blessed, and at this time idolatry will die.”231 Given the travails of Jewish history, however, fantasies of revenge and domination repeatedly shaped messianic thought. Biblical passages such as Isaiah 11:14 look forward to post-messianic vengeance over local enemies, while the Talmud (BT Sanhedrin 98a) states, according to one reading of the passage, that the messiah will not come until even the pettiest kingdom ceases to wield power over Israel. One must note similar political elements in, for instance, the roughly contemporaneous Sabbatian movement, though these could assume ludicrous proportions. Letters from various supporters of the messianic pretender Shabtai Zvi written about 1665 report wishfully that “all Christian churches [in Palestine] had sunk into the earth.”232 Zvi’s first official messianic proclamation from prison in Gallipoli requested followers to change the fast of the Ninth of Av into a feast: “And fear you nothing, for you shall have Dominion over the Nations, and not only over those who are on the surface of the Earth, but over those creatures also . . . in the sea.”233 Many Christians certainly accused Jews of holding such desires for vengeance. In Hans Folz’s play, Ein Spil von dem Herzogen von Burgund, the rabbis proclaim that they await their messiah because he will usher in Jewish “power, dominion and rule.” According to Folz’s rabbis, “We have been in misery now/For fourteen hundred years/And in that time/Suffered a great deal at the hand of Christians/[. . .] If only they knew/What great curses, what hatred and envy/We have always harbored for them [. . .].”234 Certainly the events of the 1490s sharpened Jewish messianic attitudes. Abravanel practically relishes the topic of the revenge to be wreaked on Israel’s enemies, to which he returns time and time again.235 Shlomo Molcho, the Portuguese New Christian royal scribe who became David Reuveni’s partner, wrote in his letters (1530–31) to the Salonika yeshiva where he studied about the coming destruction of the Chris-

Enríquez Gómez, Romance al divín mártir, Judá Creyente, 170. Scholem Sabbatai Âevi, 266. 233 Ibid., 617. 234 Cited in Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500 –1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 70. 235 Commentary to Deut. 17:14; Ma’aynei ha-Yeshu’a, 120b; Mashmi’a Yeshu’a, 7a, 31c; see Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 165; Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, 226–228. 231 232

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tian world.236 Other Conversos voiced similar hopes. One informed his Mexican inquisitors at the end of the sixteenth century that “the Messiah was to be a son of King David and not a son of God, and that the Messiah would redeem the entire world [. . .] and that some Christians would incur eternal punishment.”237 As Matt Goldish notes, “converso messianists saw the solution to their ostracism in the form of a messianism which stressed the salvation of the conversos, resettlement in Zion, and punishment of their oppressors.” They focused on a “return to the terrestrial Jerusalem,” that most Christians—and Jews, for that matter—found less central.238 Similar motivations are said by some scholars to have led a group of sixteenth-century Portuguese New Christians, including Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, to settle the remote frontier region of northern New Spain as a Jewish kingdom and haven.239 Francisco tells Montezinos about the prophecies that foresaw the latter’s coming. Francisco can think of only three events worthy of being considered prophetic news: “the first: the arrival of the Spaniards to these kingdoms; the second, the arrival of ships in the south sea; the third, your arrival” (14–15). The first component, prophecies about the coming of the Spanish, comprised a common element in Iberian discourse, a collective wishful thinking whose echoes were desparately sought among Amerindians and prized when found. The Mestizo writer Garcilaso de la Vega recounts how amid portents and ominous happenings the eleventh Inca emperor remembered the prophecy of one of his predecessors that in the reign of the twelfth emperor strange men would invade, force the abandonment of idolatry and destroy the empire. The earlier emperor had dreamed the image of the strange men: “a tall, bearded man, dressed in a long tunic.”240 The idea that the messiah and messianic movement would originate out of their

236 Schatz, “Political-Messianic Awakening,” 63. See also the letter found in the Cairo geniza concerning the returning ten tribes, seemingly sent out by a member of Reuveni’s entourage (reprinted in Aescoly, The Story of David HaReubeni, 157–59). 237 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 103. See also the rather bold anti-Christian eschatology of the physician António Vaz, arrested in 1580 by the Coimbra tribunal (Lipiner, Bandarra e os cristãos-novos, 68–70). 238 Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism,” 51–2. 239 See, for example, some of the historians of Nuevo León cited and discussed by Hernández, Delirio, 180–2. This narrative of “Jewish” political machinations is disputed by many (ibid., 186–9). 240 Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, 16.

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own suffering population was widespread among New Christians.241 In Bandarra’s Trovas the tribe of Reuben gives birth to “a new people,” understood by some to refer to the New Christians.242 Montezinos clearly wants to hold out the possibility that he himself—a Converso—is the one whose arrival has been prophesied, the final prophetic event in the sequence of three that Francisco tells him. The sequence makes clear the Converso impetus behind them. The second item, the arrival of ships in the South Sea, I believe refers to Dutch naval activity against New Spain, whether by privateers or by official Dutch forces. In 1614, the Dutch blockaded the major Peruvian port of Callao. Sizable Dutch fleets appeared off the Peruvian coast in 1624, when they attempted an invasion, and again in 1628. Throughout these years, Dutch ships attacked and on occasion sank Spanish treasure ships. This second prophetic event constitutes a retrojected annunciation of the arrival of enemies of Spain and friends of Jews. Montezinos’ possible relative, Luís de Montesinos, residing in Quito as of the 1620s, seems to have been close to the president of the town’s royal Audiencia, Dr. Antonio de Morga, who was alerting the Crown as early as 1620 about the increasingly frequent incursions of maritime interlopers and persistently raising notice of a possible Dutch attack.243 All of this becomes rather ironic considering the ostensible usage to which Montezinos’ Relación was put by both millenarians Jewish and non-Jewish.244 In one sense, the text simply reflects a “Marrano millenarianism that developed in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 241 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 103–10; Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism,” 46–7; in the 1530s and after, the New Christian tailor Luís Dias was taken by many to be “Messiah to the New Christians” (Lipiner, Sapateiro de Trancoso, 77, 81–4, 105, 123). 242 Castro, Paraphrase, 96. 243 Raúl Hernández Asensio, La frontera occidental de la audiencia de Quito: Viajeros y relatos de viajes (1595–1630), Travaux de l’Institut Français d’Etudes Andines, 203 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2004), 182–86. Recall also the allegations regarding the “Cofradía de Holanda,” which was allegedly raising funds for Dutch naval attacks on Brazil and Cartagena (chapter 3). The Relación also might be referring to Dutch maritime attacks on Pernambuco in 1621 and 1630. 244 The text was first published by the millenarian Thomas Thorowgood in England as an appendix to his treatise, Jewes in America, or the Probability that the Indians are Jews (London, 1650). According to Lucien Wolf and Lynn Glaser, Thorowgood’s tract was “at least partially conceived in order to prevail upon the Philo-Jewish public to provide support for the missionary work of John Eliot” targetting native New England peoples (Glaser 1973:37). Méchoulan and Nahon suggest that in his Romance al divín mártir, Judá Creyente, devoted to an alleged judaizer executed by the Inquisition, Enríquez Gómez echoes Montezinos’ eschatological scenario when he writes, “A new empire will come

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in New Spain to the effect that God would save the faithful, the hidden Jews in America.”245 Montezinos might well be expressing the kind of rhetorical overturning of Iberian Catholic imperialism practiced by so many Portuguese Conversos, a weapon of the weak discussed throughout this book. It would not be unreasonable to suggest, as does one scholar, that one of those “agents infiltrated in the territories [. . .] who would smooth the way for the foreign invasion,” one of “these spies was the Portuguese judaizer Andrés [sic] de Montesinos, alias Aaron Levi, who looked about Nueva Granada.”246 Not suprisingly, the means and results of Jewish salvation differ almost ludicrously between the Christian and Jewish views.247 One explanation for this difference in our case might be inferred from the biographies of men like Montezinos. His full biography, according to Menasseh ben Israel, reads as follows: our Montezinos, Portuguese by nation, Jew by religion, born in a city of Portugal called Villaflor, of known and honored parents, 40 years of age, a good man and beyond all ambition. He sailed to the Indies and there was imprisoned by the Inquisition, as happens to many other born in Portugal, descendents of those whom the King D. Manuel made Christians by force. “O wicked and injust action!” says Osorio ([in his book] De Rebus Himanuelis), and further down, “this was done neither according to law, nor religion.” And because of this even today they secretly preserve and observe the Law of their parents, which they abandoned due to force, not will. Freed from prison, he went with heartfelt desire and curiosity to investigate this case, found that people, spoke with them and from

to light/with the Indian frontiers,/neither seen nor discovered” (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 76, n. 47). 245 Popkin, “Jewish Indian Theory,” 65. 246 Villena, “Autor de la ‘Discriçion general del Peru,’ ” 92, citing Mackehenie, “Apuntes sobre judíos, paulistas y jesuítas,” 439–40. 247 The lines between Jewish and Christian messianism or millenarianism were not always clear, however, particularly among Conversos; see, inter alia, Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism.” Sebastianism and Marrano messianism often show much overlap. Protestants on the whole also looked toward the liberation of the people hidden by their oppressors (Rome, the papacy), while a strong Old Testament bent made many prone to seeing “zionism” as a necessary precursor to Christ’s Second Coming. The heterodox thinker Isaac la Peyrère, in his controversial book, Du rappel des juifs (1643), also foresaw the ingathering of the Jews in their land and emphasized the central role to be played by Conversos in the world’s salvation. Another typically Baroque example, El paraíso en el nuevo mundo (1656), which sought to prove that the four great Amazonian rivers were in reality the four rivers flowing from Eden, came from the pen of Antonio de León Pinelo, whose grandfather had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Lisbon as a judaizer. Whether Pinelo’s typological messianism was Jewish or Christian is an open question.

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chapter nine that time did not rest until arriving here to give us such happy news. In this voyage he consumed all that he had, living thereafter in great need and poverty.248

In the Christian understanding, the hidden Jews and the open Jews will be converted to Christianity, ushering in the millenium of Christ’s Second Coming, as in this little ditty from Thomas Thorowgood: From the Jews our faith began, To the Gentiles then it ran, To the Jews return it shall Before the dreadful end of all.249

According to Jewish views such as that of Montezinos what will return to the Jews is not faith, but power: the hidden and open Jews will wreak vengeance on their former oppressors (mostly Christians) before the messianic return to Jewish political autonomy and power. More of a divergence could not be found. Despite the overt Jewish messianic militancy expressed in Montezinos’ Relación and the only slightly lesser militancy in Mikveh Israel, Menasseh Ben Israel is said to have submitted these texts to Cromwell in the hope of persuading England to readmit the Jews.250 What was he thinking? Did he expect his Christian readers not to notice? Did he

Ben Israel, Mikve Yisrael ( Junquera), 41–2. Cited in Glaser, “Indians or Jews?” Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Glaser), 35. 250 Ben Israel continues Usque’s litany of the divine punishments enacted on various persecutors of the Jews (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Glaser], 47–48, 51) but somewhat more circumspectly, as for the benefit of his English audience he provides examples of only Spanish and Portuguese (i.e., Catholic) persecutors. One section of these litanies opens with the straightforward statement that “Moses saith in his last song, that God would revenge the bloud of his people who are scattered” (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Glaser], 51). Ismar Schorsch argues that sections 28–36 of The Hope of Israel were the last to be written by Ben Israel, and directly under the influence of Usque’s Consolaçam, which Schorsch says Ben Israel discovered in 1649 (Ismar Schorsch, “From Messianism to Realpolitik: Menasseh ben Israel and the Readmission of the Jews to England”, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 45 [1978]: 201–207). Méchoulan and Nahon call Menasseh’s thought “no less militant for being prudent” (Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 25), but perhaps their definition of “prudence” needs clarification. Elisabeth Levi de Montezinos also identifies the “conflict” between the texts of Montezinos and Ben Israel (“Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 77), though her reading of Montezinos as a proto-Zionist fails to convince me given that his Relación mentions an ingathering in the Holy Land only implicitly. Reading this textual conflict contrarily, I think that the absence of a stronger statement of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews, given the notion’s predominance in English millennial thought, further argues against Ben Israel’s authorship of the Relación, as he could have fruitfully made use of this shared hope. 248 249

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forget his history lessons, which should have taught him that Christian rulers did not take kindly even to the mere expression of challenge by the powerless?251 Perhaps Ben Israel felt that Montezinos’ anti-Spanish narrative and its implications would resonate with his English readership, just as Schmidt argues that Ben Israel framed Spes Israel in ways that would appeal to his domestic audience of Dutch patrons and protectors.252 Such was not completely the case, however. While philoSemitic Christian millenarians such as John Dury “envisaged the Jews, the Lost Tribes, including the Indians, and the Caraites marching into the Holy Land,”253 the nationalist goals of such dreams as expressed by Jews was not lost on critics of Ben Israel and the millenarians.254 Thus Edmund Spenser complains that “unless you be a Millenarian [. . .] you will finde no such National glory of the Jewes.”255 Indeed, it seems clear that the interest of millenarians in the Jews stemmed the convergence of English (Protestant) expansionist designs and the hope for

251 Hence the importance of Popkin’s reminder that “[t]he English translation contains several changes which make the work more palatable to Christian readers” (“The Lost Tribes, the Caraites and the English Millenarians,” Journal of Jewish Studies 37,2 [Autumn 1986]: 216, n. 14). Ismar Schorsch argues that The Hope of Israel was not written by Ben Israel in an effort to “reopen England officially to Jewish settlement” (Schorsch, “Messianism to Realpolitik,” 187), but rather solely to rebut Christian millenarian self-interested misconstruals of the Native Americans’ Jewish origins. “The dedication to Parliament was not politically motivated, but stemmed from the fact that [Edward] Winslow [the former Governor of Plymouth colony] had mentioned [Ben Israel’s] name in a pamphlet dedicated to that body[, The Glorious Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England (1646)]” (Schorsch, Messianism to Realpolitik,” 196). 252 Schmidt, “Hope of the Netherlands,” 99. 253 Popkin, “Lost Tribes,” 70. 254 See Theophilus Spizelius, Elevatio Relationis Montex-Inianae de Repertis in America Tribubus Israeliticus et Discussion Argumentorum pro Origine Gentium Americanarum Israelitica a Manasseh ben Israel seu spes Israelis Conquisitorum (Basel, 1651); Sir Hamon l’Estrange, Americans no Jewes, or Improbabilities that the Americans are of that Race (1652); Sir Edmund Spenser, anonymous letter “To the Translator of Menasseh Ben Israels Spes Israelis” (London, 1652; published as an appendix to Moses Wall’s second edition of The Hope of Israel); Hulsius, Theologiae Iudicae (Breda, 1653). As cited earlier from Neher, many Christians regarded even the general notion that the American Indians were Hebrews as “the work of Satan, an obstacle to redemption and to the conversion of the New World to Christianity” (Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 125). Neher cites, for example, Spanish critics such as Torquemada, Gomara, Cortez and Diaz. Perhaps such fears, comprising the subject of some of chapter 6, refect a renewed conflation of the medieval Other within and the Other without such as was expressed already in John Mandeville’s Travels that “a Jew had personally confessed to him that with a deadly poison in Borneo his people had plotted to kill all of Christendom” (cited by Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, 50). 255 Cited by Glaser, “Indians or Jews?” Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Glaser), 67.

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the Jews’ conversion.256 Méchoulan and Nahon restate the obvious and merely reinscribe Ben Israel’s work in the critical gaze of Christianity, when they write: “In the Dutch Puritan chiliastic accord, the Mikveh Israel struck a false note, because the work reaffirmed a specifically Jewish expectation.”257 If Menasseh ben Israel’s work was indeed used in an attempt to convince the English Parliament to allow Jewish settlement in England, perhaps he merely overestimated the extent and influence of philo-Semitic millenarianism. Perhaps Ben Israel, in his unwillingness to compromise too much, tested and revealed the limits of Christian tolerance in England. If so, perhaps such Jewish nationalism was one of the factors which led Cromwell’s Council of State to reject Ben Israel’s entreaty.258 Perhaps they correctly sensed the true import of his title, “The Hope of Israel.” Discerning Relations Back to the Amerindians. These Amerindians are more than mere allies of the Jews. Francisco sends Montezinos three other young men (mançebos), whose names they keep hidden, who, upon hearing that Montezinos is “a Hebrew from the Tribe of Levi”, embraced him again, saying [. . .] we are all brothers, it is a mercy that God made us [so] (15).

Finally Francisco, takes his leave as well, declaring: Regarding this land do not show concern, for we have all the Indians at our command. In finishing with these Spaniards we will go forth, to save you from the captivity in which you exist, if God should will [it].

256 See Christopher Hill, “Till the Conversion of the Jews,” in R. Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 12–36. For a contrary, or complementary, reading, see Richard W. Cogley, “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the ‘Judeo-centric’ Strand of Puritan Millenarianism,” Church History 72,2 ( June 2003): 304–32. 257 Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Méchoulan/Nahon), 92. 258 Nonetheless, on an informal basis, “the Jews very quickly were allowed to live in England, to practise their religion there, and to bury their dead there in their own cemeteries” (Méchoulan and Nahon, Introduction, Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 60).

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Desta tierra no te dé cuydado, que todos los Indios tenemos a nuestro mandado, en acabando con estos Españoles iremos, a sacarvos a vos otros del captiverio en que estays, si quisiere Dios (15–16).259

Here it seems the Indians have not only become Jewish allies, but have ‘converted,’ since they are all now “brothers.” Francisco seems to be speak as a Reubenite, not as one of their Amerindian allies.260 The embrace serves as a symbolic sign of trust, affection, acceptance. It resonates with unspoken emotion, hearkening both to the Converso predicament—isolated, tense, fragile—as well as to a kind of transboundary affection, an attraction to the exotic Other. Another movement is discernible here also, one that parallels Spanish efforts, beginning in the 1560s, to delegitimize Inca claims by asserting that Inca history itself proves that they had acted as tyrants, usurping political power by conquering other Amerindian peoples and then ruling unjustly.261 Instead of justifying Spanish colonial rule by revoking discursively the governing authority of the Inca, Montezinos’ Relación legitimizes Amerindian rebelliousness and its historical manifestations by tying it to a divine narrative of Jewish claims, which trump those of the Spanish and lend legitimacy to Amerindian dissatisfactions.262 The ‘we’ of 259 The Latin version differs here, as reflected in the English translations of Dury and Wall. The latter: “saluting Montezinos as a brother, then bade him farewell, saying, farewell my brother, I have other things to do, and I go to visit your brethren, with other Hebrew Cazici. As for the country, be secure, for we rule all the Indians. After we have finished a business which we have with the wicked Spaniards, we will bring you out of your bondage, by Gods help [. . .] Endeavor you in the meanwhile while that those men may come (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 111). 260 In the Latin edition and the English translations deriving from it or its French equivalent, now there are even “Hebrew Cazici,” a phrase with no parallel in the Spanish edition, as noted also by Méchoulan and Nahon (Ben Israel, Hope of Israel [Méchoulan/Nahon], 111, n. 20). This specific conflation of Jews and natives comes from the Christian translators rather than from Menasseh or Montezinos. Still, Ben Israel’s version of the Relación takes enough care to emphasize their kinship and the fact that Francisco himself descends from Chiefs (13) that I think the point remains valid even in the “Jewish” version. 261 Hiltunen, Ancient Kings of Peru, 280–82. 262 Many mendicant preachers took a similar approach. A Spanish bishop, the Franciscan Antonio de Guevara, wrote a book purporting to translate writings from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and dedicated it to the Spanish emperor Carlos V. In it Guevara seems to have invented a speech delivered to Aurelius by a Danubian peasant that can only be a critique of Spanish behavior in the Americas: “So greedy have you been for the goods of others, and so great has been your arrogance in seeking to rule over foreign lands, that the sea with all its deeps has not sufficed you . . . for you Romans pay no heed to others, except to trouble peaceful folk and rob the fruits of other people’s toil” (quoted in Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 9, from Guevara, Libro del emperador Marco Aurelio con relox de principes [Valladolid, 1529]). Francisco de la Cruz, a

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Francisco’s ‘native’ voice seems to conflate the lost tribespeople and the Amerindians in a confusing and fusing finale to this revelation. The perceived kinship between Jews and (these) Amerindians stems from shared suffering at the hands of the same enemy; those who escaped Iberian cruelties against Jews in the Old World will be saved by those who will escape the Iberian cruelties of the New World. The Relación of Montezinos bears certain broad structural similarities to another, more famous narrative of religious discovery in the New World, the Nican Mopohua, the Nahuatl text that relates the events around the revelation of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the 1560s (the first printed edition dates from 1649). The elements common to both texts point to shared concerns in this age of ethnic encounters, racial conflicts and miscegenated identities that find their expression in discourse in particular generic features. These features combine the form of the ‘discovery’ narrative with that of the prophetic epiphany, though it is arguable that the former in fact derived from historical examples of the latter. By no means am I trying to make these two colonial narratives identical. One main difference between the creole Virgin apparition arratives and our Relación is that the former employ mystical tropes such as visions and miracles, whereas the latter conveys its religious narrative in the naturalistic tones of travel reportage.263 The student of Las Casas at Valladolid, was particularly direct. His angel taught him to doubt “whether in good conscience the [Spanish] residents [of the Indies] can take the tributes of their indians” and “whether the conquests are licit” (Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:617). Due to hypocritical and unjust Spanish behavior, De la Cruz denied as well Las Casas’ justification of Christianizing the Amerindians (ibid., 3:1379–80). Likewise, a Jesuit colleague and participant in the circle that formed around a creole woman who claimed to experience visions, Luis López, was accused by the Lima Inquisition of having proffered “systematic attacks against the legitimacy of the sovereignty of the Spanish crown in the Indies—including before making his destination Peru” (ibid., 1:74, n. 44). De la Cruz himself to his inquisitors: the angels sing of “the liberty that God will give the Indians, making sure that they will not be oppressed by the Spaniards, as in many parts they are, just as were those of Israel by the hand of Pharaoh, and worse” (ibid., 1:146). Like Montezinos, De la Cruz believed his mission, liberation from the Church and imperial laws, to be divinely ordained and that he himself was of the tribe of Judah, descended from King David. 263 My reading of the Nican Mopohua draws heavily on Roberto Goizueta’s recent analysis, though many scholars read the text similarly. See Roberto S. Goizueta, “Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Heart of Mexican Identity,” in Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction, ed. Craig R. Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 140–51; Virgil Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997); Miguel León-Portilla, Tonantzin Guadalupe: Pensamiento náhuatl y mensaje cristiano en el “Nican Mopohua” (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000).

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Relación, on the other hand, remains within the orbit of the mystical through its messianism and its refusal of the Aristotelian/Ramusian sylistics of ‘proper’ travel writing: “What is of fundamental importance is inseparable from the insignificant. [. . .] The mystic discourse transforms the detail into myth; it catches hold of it, blows it out of proportion, multiplies it, divinizes it.”264 According to the Nahuatl text, the revelation of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a poor, “ordinary” indigenous man, Juan Diego, occurred in 1531, “ten years after the water, the mountain, the city of Mexico was conquered,” that is, just after the pinnacle of Spanish destructiveness in/of the Aztec world.265 Though of a totally different sort than the revelation conveyed in Montezinos’ Relación, the revelation depicted in the Nican Mopohua presents a seemingly self-conscious mestizaje of Old World Christianity with New World Aztec religiosity; the Virgin Mary, mother of the Spanish God, calls herself as well Tonantzin, the name of the goddess virgin-mother of the Aztec gods. Based on the textual description, her “face, her features, and her dress are proper to an Indian woman.”266 Juan Diego first hears the otherworldly sounds and voices that presage the appearance of Mary/Tonantzin on the mountain outside the city that had been the sacred site of Tonantzin; he wonders “am I in the land of the ancient ones, our ancestors, our grandparents, maybe in the Land of Flower, Xochitlalpan, in the Land of our Sustenance, Tonacatlalpan, maybe over there in the heavenly Land, Ilhuicatlalpan?”267 As with Montezinos, the revelation pertains to the unveiling of hidden pasts, true genealogies and names, all obscured by a history of persecution and terror. Native claims are questioned, suppressed. Discussing the Muiscas, Pedro Simón asserts that “The Indians of the New Reign [i.e., New Granada] do not know how to give account of whence they came to these lands in which they live

264 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10. 265 My translation from the text of the Nican Mopohua, translated into Spanish, in León-Portilla, Tonantzin Guadalupe, 93; an English translation can be found in Elizondo, Guadalupe, 5–22. The two translations differ, often radically, but I cannot (yet) access the original Nahuatl. Elizondo brings out the class implications of the Nahuatl terms used to describe Juan Diego—a menial laborer, nameless, one of the masses, simple, yet dignified (Guadalupe, 50–1). 266 Elizondo, Guadalupe, 65. The Virgin/Tonantzín quickly became known as La Morenita de Tepeyac, the little dark one. 267 León-Portilla, Tonantzin, 97.

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off of farming.”268 As Virgil Elizondo points out, Amerindians who proposed such collations of indigenous ancestry, sacred and mundane geography, and native religiosity faced punishment, even death from Spanish authorities.269 The apparition’s “olive skin tells the indigenous people of Mexico [. . .] indeed, all Latinos that she is one of them,” while her eyes reflect the image of Juan Diego himself, reassuring the forcibly Latinized and Christianized Amerindians that God mirrors their condition.270 Yet the mestizaje of the epiphany has universalizing significance. The Virgin/Tonantzin promises “to the peoples [a las gentes] all my love, my compassionate glance, my help, my protection Because, in truth, I am your compassionate mother and mother of all the people who live together in this land as well as all of the other peoples.”271 Both Juan Diego and Montezinos are asked to serve as messengers, the former assigned to build a temple for the Virgin, though the local bishops to whom Diego is sent initially do not believe his tale. Both messengers, their previous identities confused and problematic, discover their own kinship with the redeemer: for Montezinos and the Reubenites it is a form of brotherhood, for Juan Diego and the Virgin/Tonantzín a combination of sibling and parental bonds (in both directions).272 Goizueta elucidates the narrative trajectory of the Nican Mopohua, which could apply, with modifications, to Montezinos in his Relación: Juan Diego evolves from being the passive object of others’ actions to the active subject of his own future. In other words, the story begins as an ‘apparition’ but ends as an ‘encounter.’ Before he was approached by La Morenita, Juan Diego thought of himself as subhuman: ‘the people’s dung.’ As his relationship with her grows and deepens, however, he gradually claims his own identity and reclaims his dignity as a child of God, a

Simón, Noticias historiales, 3:401. Elizondo, Guadalupe, 36. 270 The statement about her eyes goes beyond the text itself to the miraculous image of the Virgin at her sanctuary; Goizueta, “Our Lady of Guadalupe,” 145. 271 León-Portilla, Tonantzin, 103. The historical and cultural forces that generated the narrative of a Mexican appearance of the Virgin Mary recurred in 1635 in the Costa Rican town of Cartago, where a Mulata girl, Juana Pereira, claimed to see traced in a dark stone an image of the Virgin holding the infant Christ. Because of the stone’s color this Virgin became known as a “parda” or as La Negrita. 272 Juan Diego calls the female apparition “hija mía la más pequeña, mi muchachita, señora,” while she addressed him as “hijo mío” (León-Portilla, Tonantzin, 117, 129). 268 269

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self with intrinsic value, someone whose value is determined not by the Spanish conquerors but by God.273

Montezinos, when we first meet him, represses his Jewishness out of fear, in order to survive; he may not have realized what his Jewishness means to him. Even this does not prevent his persecution at the hands of the Inquisition. He thinks and behaves as a Spaniard, one of the dominators, yet in relation to his true identity he is passive, an object of the actions of Catholics. The ‘apparition’ he stumbles across changes all this, permits/forces him to reclaim his real identity—his path leads him to the Sephardic center of Amsterdam—and status as belonging to a people valued by God, whose destiny will soon match up with the value denied it by history. Both the Relación and the Nican Mopohua present post-discovery, post-conquest tales, focused neither on encounters between national representatives nor on collective triumphs for Crown and Cross but on private, personal encounters, narrative efforts to listen for the meanings of these new landscapes as much as impositions of meanings on them.274 Such narratives might be seen as the merging of the genre of the picaresque with the modality of theology; in these narratives the teleology of wandering is discovered in the wandering itself. The response of the ordinary Juan Diego to the revelation is somewhat bungling and comical, as is that of Montezinos, with several missteps, though eventually he succeeds in conveying the miraculous divine appearance. The comic aspect emphasizes the reluctant messenger’s humility and unworthiness and the fact that his mission was not sought, but “assigned” involuntarily (like the semi-comic Jonah), both facts offered as evidence of the revelation’s veracity. This comedic inversion

Goizueta, “Our Lady of Guadalupe,” 146. It seems that seventeenth-century discourse produced numerous such narratives. Marie Theresa Hernández cites one from Alonso de León, whom she calls “the most noted early historian of [the North Mexican state of ] Nuevo León.” Relating an etiological myth that comes to explain a pair of footprint-like impressions in a rock near a particular spring, León “asks himself if there could be some man (or angel) in El Nuevo Reino who, with God’s will, could give light to the truth and leave the vestige of his message inscribed in stone. When he finds Martinillo [the Amerindian who told him the legend of the stone footprints], he begins a march, hoping to reach el ojo de agua [the spring] and the rock that holds the imprint of what appeared to be Christ. Unfortunately, before they reach their destination, Martinillo fell ill and died. León is not wholly disappointed. Instead, he is pleased because Martinillo, being an indio, was with God. The miracle of the rock is for León a way of giving light to God’s truth” (Hernández, Delirio, 47). 273 274

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of the character and career of the heroic discoverer or conquistador serves well to make these texts of minority discourse—Sephardic, Amerindian—both subversive and palatable.275 Like the Relación of Montezinos, the Nican Mopohua performs other inversions to a similar end. As Goizueta writes, If Juan Diego is to be evangelized, it will be through a dark-skinned Lady on Tepeyac, the sacred place of the Nahuas, not through a Spanish bishop in his palace. Indeed, through Guadalupe, the very relationship between evangelizer and evangelized is reversed: the indigenous man, Juan Diego, is sent to evangelize the bishop.276

Elizondo nicely emphasizes the Virgin as embodiment of “the Indian Mother,” who with her native son, Juan Diego, indoctrinates the Spanish father (the bishop) in a powerful “anthropological reversal” of the traditional Catholic trinity.277 For downtrodden minorities in the Spanish colonial orbit, textual challenging of the dominant culture revels in appropriating their dominant modes in order to remake them for their own purposes. Yet Montezinos’ dream of brotherhood with the American natives is far from unambiguous, as befits a Mestizo text. Firstly, one detail of the Amerindian/Israelite pact is that “your brothers [the Reubenites] never wanted to speak with my ancestors [. . .] any one from the Indians who entered that land died and from your brothers none passed to these parts (13–14).278 This stipulation can be read in several ways. 275 Though Josiah Blackmore points out that from the perspective of shipwreck narratives the colonizers’ “presence in other lands is always accidental, not purposeful, and the satellite culture of the metropole represented by the inhabitants of the ship is at a disadvantage in its relations with indigenous peoples and its exercise of supposed cultural superiority” (Manifest Perdition, 44; see also Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, 148–9). From within its own fragmentation, the dominant majority also can be tentative and vulnerable. 276 Goizueta, “Our Lady of Guadalupe,” 145. 277 Elizondo, Guadalupe, 107–12. See also Ronald Wright’s inventive reading of this legend in Mexican colonial history (Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 151–60. Margaret Olsen interprets the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who ministered to the African slaves of Cartagena, similarly: perhaps “Sandoval’s primary intention was in fact the redemption of African souls, and that a subtle (or not so subtle) incentive for fellow missionaries was their own implied salvation”; “By melding the historical destinies of African peoples and Jesuits [the latter relatively independent from the Iberian mainstream and arrived in the Americas relatively late], Sandoval secures salvation for both” (Slavery and Salvation, 21, 28). 278 It is not stated that Reubenite trespassers were/are similarly killed for entering Amerindian territory. The English translation of Wall shifts the passive death of the trespassing Amerindians to their active murder by the Reubenites.

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In it can be heard an echo of statements such as that offered by the fifteenth-century Spanish rabbi Yits˜ak Arama that in their exile “no stranger dwelled among” the lost tribes.279 For Arama, this segregation maintained the necessary distinction between these Jews and their surroundings and highlighted their cohesiveness and unity, already a feature of the lost tribes mentioned in 2 Ezra 13:41. The Relación’s statement is also reminiscent of the Franciscan insistence on keeping Amerindians separate from Spanish culture and society in order to protect them and also prevent their contamination by the problems of the Old World. This attitude was shared to some degree by the colonial government of Potosí, if not governing authorities elsewhere, which prohibited “any outsiders of Spanish or African descent [from] trespassing in indigenous neighborhoods.”280 Contrariwise, the strict segregation hints at lessons well learned by those who suffered many attacks and not surprisingly echoes the warning of one of the last Inca sovereigns, Manco Inca, as written by his son, Titu Cusi Yupanqui in his 1570 chronicle: “Do not consent that they enter your land despite their protestations, for the sweetness of their words fooled me; if you believe their promises the same will happen to you.”281 The stipulation also implies that strict boundaries define even the most critical of political alliances. Jewish insecurity or ‘exclusivism’ appears no less diminished among the long lost tribes than among Old World Jews. This Jewish exclusivism ironically reproduces the Iberian exclusivism that Jews tried so desperately to escape. Marc Shell describes it thusly: In one version of the categorizing process I have outlined, the crucial Christian doctrine “All men are brothers”—or “All human beings are siblings”—sometimes turned all too easily into the doctrine “Only my “brothers” are men, all “others” are animals and may as well be treated as such.282

279 Quoted in Gross, “The Ten Tribes,” 23, from Arama’s commentary to Deuteronomy. 280 Mangan, Trading Roles, 70. 281 Quoted in Chang-Rodríguez, “The Relación of Titu Cusi Yupanqui,” 59. Garcilaso de la Vega quotes the chronicler Pedro Cieza de León as stating that under Inca justice, anyone who “made so bold as to enter the sown fields of houses of the Indians, even though they did little harm, he had them killed” (Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 102). 282 Marc Shell, “From Coexistence to Toleration or Marranos (Pigs) in Spain,” Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25.

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In this case, Jews seem unwilling to offer unadulterated siblinghood to their most important allies. Menasseh Ben Israel, contra Montezinos, rejecting the argument that the Amerindians are lost tribespeople who degenerated in their wanderings, writes that “all men know that the Indians are deformed, dul, and altogether rude.”283 Jews, of course, “are of a comly body, and of a good wit.” Furthermore, it evidently seemed imperative to Ben Israel to assert the cultural purity of even lost and wandering Jews: “And we have abundantly shown, with how great study, and zeal, the Israelites have kept their Language, and Religion, out of their Country.”284 Secondly, the formerly-Converso, now-Jewish Montezinos replicates the same tension found in Christian attitudes toward the Amerindians. These previously ‘primitive’ and warring Amerindians have enough of the ‘noble savage’ in them to raise themselves to a ‘civilized’ state of nominal Jewishness. That is, their being ‘noble savages’ does not mean they are to be left alone, but rather that they are capable of being ‘converted’ to civilization, or Christianity or, here, Jewishness, even if only by contiguity.285 From the paucity of extant evidence it would seem that nothing at all akin to the active and coercive Christian missionizing toward Amerindians was conducted by Jews. In testimony stemming from the 1614 arrest of an alleged judaizer in New Spain named Cristóbal de Herrera, a witness mentions a conversation he had with Herrera regarding eight Portuguese who had been arrested for teaching the Law of Moses to Amerindians in Oaxaca.286 Another early alleged judaizer in Mexico, Juan Bautista Corvera, was said to have been charged by the Inquisition “because he circumcised Indian children with his fingernail,” probably an invented or misunderstood

Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Glaser), 54. Ben Israel, Hope of Israel (Glaser), 54. 285 A similar ambivalence—allegorically defending Amerindian “difference” while also desiring their subsumption into the “higher,” ostensibly universal culture—courses through Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s drama El Divino Narciso (Mexico City, 1690); see, inter alia, Robert S. Oventile, “Idolatry’s Allegorical Overcoming: The Loa of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s El Divino Narciso,” American [Huelva, Spain] 1,2 (2003): 33–55. 286 Hordes, End of the Earth, 112. I have not been able to verify these arrests or the background of the charges. Perhaps a connection exists between these men and Gonzálo de Tal and Alonzo González, two Amerindian servants of Alonso de Rivera who were accused in 1605 of “practicing certain Jewish acts” (Liebman, “Mestizo Jews of Mexico,” 173; he cites AGN Inq. 281, exp. 61). 283 284

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pretext.287 As mentioned in chapter 6, an anonymous legal opinion from around 1620 warned against letting New Christians reach Peru from Buenos Aires due to fears of their judaizing among the ‘natives,’ “as experience has shown that they have done in some parts of Guiné, where they have managed to teach Judaic ceremonies and rites to the gentiles.”288 In one sense, however, Montezinos’ text has it that Montezinos, the European Jew, converts to a belief in the future coming of these messianic natives and not the more typical reverse, again a characteristic of some of the New World mendicants. Are the Reubenites genealogically Jews? Are their Amerindian allies, Francisco’s people, also of Jewish descent? Like the eschatological Franciscan friar Gerónimo Mendieta, Montezinos leaves this unclear. It seems he makes his Amerindians ‘mystical’ Jews. Mendieta cites Jerome’s etymology of the word “Israel,” which is said to refer in the Hebrew to seeing God; in other words, all those who recognize and practice the true religion become the new Israel.289 For Mendieta and many others, the pure, childlike ‘natural’ Amerindians, untainted by the European lust for wealth and power—i.e., for that which is external, carnal or fleshly, in Pauline terminology—held the potential to save Europe. As expressed in symbolic language by Francisco de la Cruz, the theo-historical process entails “that the Christians of Europe should be improved. If not, that God would destroy them at the hand of the turk and will found his Church in the Indies. And that this is said in the Apocalypse [Revelations] and in many prophets.”290 The Jews, of course, represented the worst of the Old World. The Franciscans, who in 1525, prohibited anyone with Jewish ancestry within four generations from joining the order, issued a decree in the mid-fifteenth century warning that New Christians possess ‘Jewish’ attributes that make their admission dangerous: arrogant ostentation, which makes them always want to be the most rather than the least important; avarice and cupidity, which are very rooted in

287 Toro, Judíos en la Nueva España, 131, 181; cited in Seymour B. Liebman, New World Jewry, 1493–1825: Requiem for the Forgotten (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982), 45. The latter has also written on some modern Mexicans “mestizos” who claim descent from converso settlers (Liebman, “Mestizo Jews of Mexico”). 288 Cited in Green, “Masters of Difference,” 190. 289 Phelan, Millennial Kingdom, 100. Jerome’s etymology is reminiscent of the explanation given in BT Megilla 13a that all who deny idolatry are called “yehudim,” that is, from the tribe of Judah, i.e., Jews. 290 Quoted in Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:1169.

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Mendieta himself asked in the 1570s that candidates be subjected to a secret investigation to prevent the acceptance of any “person of this ‘perverse race’ (mala raza).”292 The Relación and Ben Israel’s biographical comments about Montezinos attempt to work against such anti-Jewish views. Indeed, the Relación comes to tell its audience that the Jews, by means of one of the lost tribes, will achieve in the Americas what the Catholics could not, a true pacification of and bonding with the Amerindians. Montezinos performs for his Dutch Sephardic cousins an act so often performed previously by Christian European travelers and missionaries to the Americas. He puts his personal experiences and contacts with Amerindians to work as evidence of the authenticity and authority of his reading of their situation, plans and motives. In his case, however, it is to convince his Jewish cousins in Europe that their hopes will not be disappointed. His belief in his own ‘discoveries’ may well be what led him to abandon Amsterdam after only six months for Dutch Brazil, where perhaps he hoped to re-encounter his American cousins. Intriguingly, as befits such a mysterious case, Cecil Roth wrote in his book on Menasseh ben Israel that “a [unique] copy of the Esperanca de Israel [. . .] contains a contemporary transcript of correspondence on the subject of his travels, hitherto unknown, between Montezinos and Abraham Israel Pereyra (or Pereira), Menasseh’s patron.”293 Debate exists over whether the wealthy Pereyra was born, before 1605, in Madrid or in Vila Flor, but it is certain that his parents hailed from Vila Flor, the birthplace of our Montezinos. Pereyra maintained strong commercial connections with the prominent Converso merchant Fernando Montesinos, who operated out of Madrid, to whom he was distantly related through marriage.294 With help, I tracked down this copy of Ben Israel’s book, which indeed contains a transcription of a 291 Quoted in Francisco Morales, Ethnic and Social Background of the Franciscan Friars in Seventeenth Century Mexico (Washington: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1973), 11. 292 Ibid., 15. 293 Roth, Life of Menasseh ben Israel, 331, n. 5. 294 Henry Méchoulan, “Abraham Pereyra: esbozo bio-bibliográfico,” in Henry Méchoulan, Hispanidad y judaismo en tiempos de Espinoza: Estudio y edición anotada de La Certeza del camino de Abraham Pereyra, Amsterdam, 1666 (Salamanca: Ediciones

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5-page letter from “Antonio Montesino” to one “Señor Elia Perera.” Abraham Pereyra had himself arrived in Amsterdam only in 1646 and Montezinos wrote this letter in 1644 to Venice, where Pereyra had fled from Spain, while Montezinos was in Amsterdam, but therefore before Pereyra had become Ben Israel’s sponsor. Despite much effort, however, I have not been able to establish any connection between this Elia Perera and Abraham Pereyra (see the Appendix). In his letter, Montezinos recounts his journey and discusses his desire to go to Brazil.295 Were his correspondant indeed Abraham Pereyra, it would be easy to speculate on the motivations that led the two to communicate; according to the person who transcribed the letter, it was a reply to an earlier letter. It is possible that (via Menasseh ben Israel?) Pereyra’s messianic and, later, sabbatian interests drew him to Montezinos and his story or that Montezinos approached Pereyra in the hope that the latter’s wealth might be of some assistance in regard to finding and helping the Reubenites (such as sending the twelve emissaries) or publicizing their story. Just as likely, Montezinos and Perera shared the messianic expectations that comprised more than mere atmosphere. Indeed, from various Inquisition trials it seems that a good number of members of the intertwined families Montesinos, Bueno de Mesquita or Amezquita, and Ferro, all of Vila Flor, held and even promulgated messianic beliefs or were involved in sabbatian circles, as discussed by Mercedes García-Arenal.296 Others certainly shared various messianic hopes. Our author’s descendent, Elisabeth Levi de Montezinos, relates a “family tradition” she learned from her father “that when Antonio was in Amsterdam, messengers came to him in order to invite him to London.” He “flatly refused” the invitation, which presumably came from one or more of the English millenarians.297 Regarding correspondence with a member of the Pereyra family, Ben Israel and Montezinos himself understandably might have been eager to bring together the

Universidad de Salamanca, 1987), 49–54; Lo,pez Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda, 62–3. 295 As it contains significant details and has never before been published, I transcribe and translate the letter in the Appendix. There I also provide a more detailed biography of Abraham Pereyra. 296 It was one such who cited the verses of Bandarra, as mentioned earlier; see García-Arenal, “Expectativas messianicas,” 74; idem, “Juifs portugais, le Maroc et les dix tribus perdues,” 168–70. 297 Levi de Montezinos, “Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 78–9.

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two means, messianic and monetary, by which Jewish history could be radically and favorably altered. Ethnography of the Mythical? Are Montezinos’ Reubenites or the Amerindians to which Francisco belongs reflections of actual Amerindian peoples or are they merely a discursive concoction? Is Montezinos a traveler telling a true account or, to cite Percy Adams, a travel liar?298 Are the muddled Jewish phrases and symbols a result of Montezinos’ muddled Converso knowledge of Judaism or a purposeful muddling for the sake of packaging and selling the story? On the other hand, was this narrative constructed after he had gained some knowledge of Judaism in Amsterdam? It seems clear that Montezinos spent time actually traveling in Nueva Granada and/or knew some of the discovery chronicles: the language describing the weather, terrain, equipment for mountain travel strongly parallels similar descriptions. The Relación purposefully obscures the location of Montezinos’ main revelatory encounter. According to Levi de Montezinos, when her ancestor Antonio refused to go to London it was because “he wanted to keep the precise wherabouts of the Reubenites a secret.”299 (Other reasons for his not coming forth with their whereabouts are easy to imagine.) According to the Relación, the Amerindian guide Francisco took Montezinos on a trek from Honda through the mountains that lasted from Monday through the next Thursday, resting on sabbath, that is, a march of more or less ten days. The direction of the hike is not given. The river they reach, said to be as wide as the Duero in Spain, could well refer to the Cauca, the western branch of the Magdalena, but could refer to the Coello or Anchique, among other sizable bodies of water. In any case, the riverine setting seems to point to a place in the upper highlands of the Magdalena system (whether or not all this actually happened). Coherent models for particular tribes do not readily come forward. Montezinos certainly could have met up with members of runaway groups or remote, even previously unencountered peoples. The anonyPercy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (New York: Dover Publications, 1980 [1962]). 299 Levi de Montezinos, “Narrative of Aharon Levi,” 79. 298

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mous description of Peru (ca. 1615) characterizes Nueva Granada as a region “where it rains and [it] has great forests and many provinces and places of indians, and there are some [tribes of ] warrior indians [indios de guerra].”300 After the withdrawal of Spanish forces from the war against the Pijaos in 1612, much of Tolima province was desolate and unpopulated, except for indios cimarrónes.301 It is impossible to resist citing the fact that around this same time, in 1637, the nephew of the Jesuit scholar and traveler Fernando Montesinos, the latter then living in Lima, one Francisco de Montesinos, journeyed into the mountains east of Lima, accompanying the colorful Pedro Bohorques, and took from the town of Tarma some “wild Indians,” whom they brought back to Francisco’s uncle’s house.302 Yet ethnographically, the Relación is disappointingly thin, regarding both the Reubenites and the Amerindians, with few markers of social, political or cultural particularities. Very little seems to correspond with the rich lives of the local Amerindians as known from contemporary Spanish discourse or later scholarship. Very little appears to echo pre-Columbian indigenous existence as it is known. The most logical source for confirming evidence or similarities would be in documentation pertaining to the Amerindians in the upper Magdalena River region still remaining in the late 1630s. One must keep in mind the difficulty of knowing to what extent pre-conquest features continued to be present, as well as the loss of Amerindian cultural specificities that occurred the advance of hispanicization. Caciques continue to be mentioned in sources well into the seventeenth century, while the report from an official visit to Popayán province in

Descripcion del Peru, 23. José Ignacio Arciniegas, El tolima: Geografia, historico-socio-económica (N.p., 1979), 20. 302 Don Pablo Patrón, “La veracidad de Montesinos,” Revista historica de Lima (1906) 1,3: 289; Sir Clements Markham, Introduction, in Fernando Montesinos, Memorias antiguas historiales del Peru, trans. and ed. Philip Ainsworth Means (London: Hakluyt Society, 1920), 3. Bohorques’ exploits make an intriguing parallel to the narrative of our Montezinos. He was a poor Spaniard who had married into a Quechua-speaking family in Peru, set off for the Amazonian region in search of the mythical city of Paititi, founding his own frontier colony there, before being exiled to southern Chile, where he posed and was received as a descendant of the Inca emperor who would lead the unvanquished Calchaquí Amerindians in rebellion against the Spanish; see Ana María Lorandi, De quimeras, rebeliones y utopías: La gesta del inca Pedro Bohorques (Lima: Pontificía Universidad Católica del Perú, 1997; Robert Ryal Miller, “The Fake Inca of Tucuman: Don Pedro de Bohorques,” The Americas (1975): 196–210. 300 301

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1585 accused the Amerindian residents of having mohanes, whether this marks a continuation of the institution or its resurrection.303 The people around Anserma or Quimbaya might make a suitable match for the Reubenites or Amerindians, but only based on such vague factors as their residing in the remote and mountainous western Cordillera, their possessing many Spanish goods and their widely-known valor. Various tribes from the fiercely resistant Pantágoras, living in the Central Cordillera to the north, west and south of Honda, were not anthropophagous; by Montezinos’ time, few remained. Of those groups associated with the term mohan, none seem akin to our Relación’s Amerindians or Reubenites. Of the Calima, known for their ancient goldworking skills, who built their residences on raised platforms and whose agricultural system employed fields drained by canals, we hear nothing. The Pijaos, whose resistance against the Spanish Montezinos would have admired, were often accused of cannibalism, as were the Panche, though this did not prevent Father Pedro de Aguado from describing the latter as being “of noble condition, marvellously generous when not at war.”304 The Muzo or Colima were a mobile, expansionist, ostensibly cannibalistic, pre-political aggregation of tribes who for the most part went without clothing. If we suspect, along with many modern scholars, that the charge of cannibalism was hurled by Spanish sources all too casually and may not reflect reality, we can decide not to eliminate possible matches such as the above peoples, though this may not be of much help. The Chibchas or Muiscas come across as an almost amusingly perfect fit for those holding Jewish-Indian proclivities: a highly industrious and mercantile people, even claiming a deity sponsoring/protecting merchants.305 Had Montezinos heard, along with at least one modern scholar, that Chibcha mythology, “which circulated in the depth of the Sanctuaries, among [. . .] the Mohan,” presents a version of “the occult Tradition of Israel and of Phoenicia” and that in order to understand this mythology “it is necessary to turn to the Kabbalah, from the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzira attributed to Shimon bar Yochai, and the reconstruction of the Cosmogony of Moses, but after the Egyptian

303 304 305

Friede, Los quimbayas, 148–49. Cited in Fals-Borda, “Fray Pedro de Aguado,” 569. Langebaek, Mercados, poblamiento, 138–39.

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method”?306 In addition to wearing on their heads caps of animal skin (bear, jaguar), adorned with bird feathers and, in front, half moons of gold and silver,307 the Chibcha also wore, at least before the Spanish conquest, as described in our Relación, head coverings of cotton, in “a simple, narrow strip with which the head was wrapped” or consisting of “nets and little caps of thick cord or braids, in which the hair remained gathered,” while the number of cords around the head might vary from two to twelve.308 Unfortunately, the Muisca lived for the most part in the highland plains, not in the sort of mountainous terrain described by Montezinos. They were not known for being great warriors, but quite the contrary, being continually harrassed by their enemies, the Panches and Muzos. In a manner resonating with the autonomy of the lost ten tribes, as late as the eighteenth century, some Andakí (Timaná province, near south of Magdalena route to Popayán), a people that had fled their Magdalena highlands home for the mountain forests of the eastern Cordillera in order to escape the Spanish, declared that they lived in veritably edenic style (from their perspective, at least), “no cacique, governor, nor mayor; that everyone was governed by himself.”309 Indeed, using Aristotelian categories, with or without knowing it, Spanish chroniclers repeatedly cite the ‘indomitable’ nature of the tribes of Popayán province, in contrast to the character of Peruvian tribes who had already experienced submission to the Incas.310 Did Montezinos visit or know about La Tora, a town sitting on the middle Magdalena River at the confluence of several branches, an important Chibcha marketplace (at least in pre-conquest times) where salt was exchanged with riverine tribes for wild cotton and blankets and fish?311 Did he know that this town, La Tora (present-day Barrancabermeja), some hundreds of kilometers north of Honda along the Magdalena, was named by the conquistador Quesada, at the time frantically searching for gold, territory to claim, the source of the Magdalena and

306 Escribano, Cinco mitos, 180–81. The Egyptian method refers to the hermetic tradition and corpus. By means of a similarly wild syncretistic etymology and genealogy, the Colombian Jewish scholar I¢ic Croitoru Rotbaum concludes that the name Chibcha can be defined as “the poor descendent of the astute and subtle Jew who rejects arrogance” (Rotbaum, Documentos, xxiii). 307 Zubiría, Medicina en la cultura muisca, 56. 308 Restrepo, Los chibchas, 171. 309 From an archival source, quoted by Friede, Andakí, 88. 310 For instance, Simón, Noticias historiales, 6:328. 311 Friede, Invasión, 18, 67; Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 57.

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a passage down from the Cordillera mountains to Perú, and that the name corresponds to the Hebrew name for the sacred scriptures, Torah, and that some have taken this name as an indication of Quesada’s Jewish origins?312 In another episode described by various sources the conquistador tracks the Magdalena to the point where it pours into the Opón River, then “climbed until reaching the high plateau, coming to situate himself in the valley of the fortresses (valle de los Alcázares), the region of the Chibcha or Muisca. In that pleasant bend of Teusaquillo he built twelve straw houses in honor of the twelve apostles or the twelve tribes of Israel and began a chapel.”313 Juan Castellanos places this incident at Serrezuela (50 km SE of Honda), at the beginning of the plain of Bogotá, nicely within the orbit of Montezinos’ trek with Francisco, and says that the twelve “ranches” represented “the houses of the twelve tribes of the Hebrews” among other spiritual antecedents, though not the apostles.314 Finally, as mentioned before, the prominence of women in negotiating is reminiscent of Panche practice, something reported by Quesada himself. In short, it is possible that Montezinos knew of the above things from direct experience or from reading the chronicles. It is also possible that Menasseh ben Israel ascertained such ‘facts’ when reading the chronicles and descriptions he lists as sources for Mikveh Yisrael, such as Alonso de Erzilla (or Ercilla), Garcilaso de la Vega Inca, Juan de Castellanos, José d’Acosta, Pedro de Cieza de Leon and Pedro Simon. To consider Ben Israel the author of the Relación seems implausible, however. For him to have entirely fabricated this text would mean that this prominent rabbi engaged in producing a literary forgery, one, incidently, that would have evinced brilliant skills of dissembling the textual borrowing.315 All 312 Martínez, Inconquistables Panches, 61. According to Pedro Simón, the name derived from the local people (Noticias historiales, 3:117). Piedrahíta asserts that it derives from the site’s red slopes and the four branches of the Magdalena, though I do not follow his linguistic logic (Historia, 72). In Aramaic, tura means mountain. 313 Óscar Gerardo Ramos Gómez, Sebastián de Benalcázar: Conquistador de Quito y Popayán (Madrid: Anaya, 1988), 78. 314 Castellanos, Historia, 1:243. It is near La Tora that some Spanish soldiers, near to starving, come across some grain that seems to be “from that manna of the Jews” (1:421). 315 Such a forgery would have differed from the kind of pseudonymous writing typical of that epoch, in which even Ben Israel may have engaged. Thus Harm den Boer speculates that it might well have been the Dutch rabbi who penned Edward Nicholas’s An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, And all the Sons of Israel (London: John Field, 1648); see Harm den Boer, “Spanish and Portuguese Editions from the Northern Netherlands in Madrid and Lisbon Public Collections: Towards a Bibliography

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of the specific and odd details in the Relación, its Converso confusion, its plausibly Catholic motifs, the lack of direct quotation from any of the many earlier textual sources, convincingly point to Montezinos as its sole author. As is clear from his letter to Perera, Montezinos actually traveled around Nueva Granada, the Relación’s historico-ethnographic parallels with other texts evince its author’s knowledge of the field, however gained and however spun to suit his rhetorical purposes. Looking for an earlier appearance of Montezinos’ Reubenites ultimately may be fruitless for textual rather than historical reasons, however. The logic of a Marrano text about hidden tribes would seem to dictate that the Reubenites were and remain for the most part invisible. The central role played by Francisco, the “native guide,” comes across as a seemingly conscious reference to, even play on the fact, highlighted so often in the conquest chronicles, that most of the conquistadores would not have survived their (mis)adventures were it not for the knowledge and skills of their Amerindian guides, many of whose service was coerced. While the Spanish came and obsessed themselves with domination and discovering gold, Montezinos discovers the ultimate treasure, one invisible to the Spanish.316 Furthermore, in comparison with the discovery/conquest accounts by Spanish authors, the Relación is utterly lacking in any of the staple mentions of Amerindian barbarity or depravity: no cruel violence, no hideous idols, no drunken orgies, no cannibalism, no malice or deceitfulness. Discussing Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of Converso origin himself, José Rabasa brilliantly observes the conceptual consequences of the conflicted vision of the American natives:

of Spanish and Portuguese Editions from the Northern Netherlands (1580–1820),” Studia Rosenthaliana 22 and 23 (1988): 151–52). 316 An illuminating comparison could be made between the Relación and the tale, related at length by Pedro Simón, of the Genovese turtle fisherman Bartolomé Marín. Though in some respect various details strongly resemble our Relación, the narrative trajectory could not differ more. In 1617, on one of his fishing expeditions, Marín meets a noble coastal Amerindian, the two befriend one another, Marín is taken to the Amerindian’s village, while his native friend visits Cartagena. Marín returns with an Amerindian wife and her female cousin, both of whom he converts. Marín treats his new-found Amerindian acquaintances “with such courtesy as if they were nobles” that they return the favor by informing him regarding “the people and metals and the rest of the secrets that he could comprehend.” This friendship results in an agreement with the Spanish to help them conquer unfriendly territory to gain access to the mineral wealth (Noticias historiales, 6:453–67).

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chapter nine If “noble” encompasses Christian and civilized values, which is certainly the meaning Las Casas gives to the term when he attributes it to the Amerindians, the nobility of the savage (future new converts, non-noble) cannot be sustained in a society defining aristocracy with viejos cristianos (Old Christians, nonsavage) and effecting a meticulous limpieza de sangre (blood purity). If, as has often been said, Las Casas was a converso, a Jew who converted to Christianity, then the invention of the noble Amerindian makes of the converso a “savage” without “nobility.”317

In the case of the (ex-)Converso Montezinos, the Amerindians are positioned vis à vis their Israelite brethren in exactly the same relationship that Iberian New Christians stood vis à vis Iberian Old Christians: they could both ‘convert’ but still remain unaccepted (and unacceptable) as true kin. Thus, finally, when Francisco brings his three Amerindian companions to Montezinos after returning to the town of Honda, they confess their brotherhood bond to Montezinos. They tell him that “Some day you will see us and will not know us. We are all brothers; it is a kindness that God made us [so] [or: did for us]/algun dia nos veras, y no nos conoceras: todos somos hermanos, merced es que Dios nos hizo” (15). The somewhat enigmatic statement of (non)recognition possibly refers to the strategic invisibility of these future saviors and conquerors, who quickly reassure Montezinos that “we are all brothers.” It may also allude to their present Marrano status: hidden out in the open like so many New Christians and Amerindians. The lack of recognition may also refer to the ambiguity of identity that has here been introduced, for these are clearly ‘Amerindians,’ companions of Francisco, not Reubenites and their communication with Montezinos ignores the very strictures the Reubenites related: that further revelations must not be in towns, that five sons of chiefs must be present (hence Francisco’s apology that the fifth Indian, an old man, could not come).318

317 Rabasa, Inventing America, 173. See also Todorov’s sections entitled “Love” and “Knowledge” in Conquest of America, which meditate on similar ambivalences; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man. 318 One wonders whether Montezinos knew of the fact that Pedro Simón’s 1620s history of the colony relates an extended tale about a “bad” Amerindian servant of the province of Guane (the Guane lived east of the Magdalena, just north of Muisca territory), named Montecinos (Noticias historiales, 4:551–55). The tale comes from the time when the Amerindians of these territories began adopting Spanish customs and receiving Spanish surnames. It raises the question of an altogether different sort of brotherhood.

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It is also just possible that the Amerindians’ statement betrays an acknowledgment of some of the misprisions that enabled to begin with such a Jewish fantasy about Israelite Indians. This fantasy is hardly Jewish alone. Anthropologist Juan Friede warns us to recall that in many cases the names [given to Amerindian tribes] are arbitrary, imposed by the conquistadores, encomenderos, clerics or indigenous interpreters, and depend on the physical aspect, particularity or geographic names of the places inhabited by the Indians at a specific moment. But over the course of time, not only are diverse names employed to designate the same Indians, but also names utilized originally for definite tribes are extended, on occasion, to completely distinct Indians.319

It makes sense that the Amerindians’ anxiety regarding Montezinos’ trustworthiness is bound up so intimately with Montezinos’ genealogy. In any case it is significant that the native should here be portrayed investigating the ethnographer, instead of the usually reversed role. Francisco’s fear should remind us of the often expressed fears of the Conversos themselves, whose lives depended on the reliability of anyone to whom they confessed their true identity.320 Perhaps it makes sense that Montezinos’ Relation so consciously constructs the ambiguous relationship between the native Jews and non-Jews. The warriors of the messiah are the Conversos of a former-Converso’s political imagination. I have tried here to highlight some of the texts that stand parallel to and possibly influenced the Relación of Antonio de Montezinos. Ultimately, the Relación comprises more than the sum of its parts. With its hodgepodge of old/new motifs and settings, its miscegenation of Jewish and Christian elements, it stands as one of the most original and creative textual reflections of the Americas and remains one of the few authentic Jewish “discovery” narratives, helping shed light on Converso/Sephardic self-understanding within the theo-political geography of the Baroque Atlantic.

Friede, Andakí, 13. Ironically, as reported in chapter 4, a recurring fear among New Christians in the Spanish Americas focused on their Amerindian and African servants. 319 320

POSTSCRIPT Post-Script I The woman who knows giving birth will not feel the [Inquisition’s] torture La muger que sauia parir no sentia el tormento.1

So proclaimed the Mexican Marrana Blanca Enriquez to her young relative Ysavel de Silva when recounting her months-long imprisonment by the tribunal of the Seville Inquisition and displaying the marks of the torture she had received at its hands. To give birth in this imperfect world is to become familiar with pain. To make life is to come to know the handiwork of decay, of degeneration, of death. To generate the future, to have felt its powerful potential, to have seen that creation is not only possible but survivable, is to become—to varying degrees—inured to the forces trying to prevent that future. To a large extent, trust in the future may well be nurtured best through a connection to a past that will be met on the road through that future. Like so many Judeoconversos and Afroiberians, Amerindians “venerate their memories constantly with great love [in] the hidden depths of their hearts,” in the words of seventeenth-century Quito Bishop Peña Montenegro.2 Still, the past wields only so much power on its own in the face of so overwhelming a present. Introducing, in the portentious year of 1992, his monumental three-volume study and transcription of the excruciatingly drawn-out Inquisition trial of the messianistic friar Francisco de la Cruz, Vidal Abril Castelló lauds in excited capital letters the NEW GOD WHICH AMERICA AND SPAIN DISCOVERED IN THEIR RECIPROCAL RELATIONS DURING THE 16TH CENTURY. IT IS THE AUTHENTICALLY EVANGELICAL GOD OF BROTHERHOOD AND OF SOLIDARITY, OF EQUALITY AND RECIPROCITY OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES, OF LIBERTY AND TOLERANCE.3 1 Testimony of Ysavel de Silva, 25 June 1643, AGN Mexico, Inq. 415, exp. 6, fol. 519r. My translation is intentionally loose. 2 Quoted in Taussig, Shamanism, 377. 3 Castelló, Francisco de la Cruz, 1:24.

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While I, too, am fascinated by this new Mestizo god and long followed his/her revolutionary efforts, I wish these utopian hopes had come to fuller fruition. It seems more accurate to say that we have seen more promise than fulfillment, or fulfillment for a select few. It also seems important to note that part of this god’s ‘mestizo’ quality inheres precisely in the collusion his/her followers aroused between her/his ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ arms, even as these arms struggled against one another. Early modern ‘race’ stands as a significant bridge for scholarship between the ‘raceless’ culturally-oriented medieval world and the ‘scientific’ racism of the modern world. Like its later progeny, early modern race was both biological and cultural, essentialist and situational, rigidly defined and permeable, political and theological. The Inquisitions maintained and stoked anti-Jewish stereotypes, just as various European/White institutions and individuals maintained and stoked anti-Black prejudices, in order “to relegate” each group “to being ‘objects of phobia,’” as Marie Theresa Hernández explains the theory of journalist Abraham Nuncio regarding the use of regional legends and folklore about Amerindians by those in power in Nuevo León.4 I have tried in the preceding chapters to show how constructs—racial, ethnic, religious—were used also by groups other than the dominators. Belonging to a collective, real or imagined, held out powerful identityforming possibilities, both for negative, external, ascriptive purposes regarding others as well as for positive, internal purposes for oneself. New Christians of Jewish, African or Amerindian origin suffered for centuries from their being positioned by the dominant majority and other minorities as ‘in-between’ (Certeau, The Mystic Fable) yet also cultivated on their own such in-betweeness as a defensive barrier, a privileged space, an unsharable uniqueness. To borrow terminology from Hernández, they were ‘maybe’ Christians, ‘maybe’ Spaniards, ‘maybe’ Whites.5 Though many, perhaps even most individuals from these groups no longer practiced many or any particulars of their traditions, the entire group remained, seemingly permanently, ‘designated’ as Jews, Africans or Amerindians. As has been argued, correctly, some New Christians expressed skepticism toward religious and political

4 5

Hernández, Delirio, 48. Hernández, Delirio, 204.

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orthodoxies.6 Many individuals also expressed egalitarian views in opposition to dominant ethnic and/or racial hierarchies. I have not found, however, that Judeoconversos voiced distinct urgency for tolerance other than for themselves under the tyranny of the Catholic Inquisitions (or later against a perceived authoritarian Jewish establishment), nor that Afroiberians argued for an end to anti-Converso/Jewish state-church activities. While Marranos might have depended for their survival on verbal and behavioral circumlocutions for expressing their identity, these expressions merely articulate that which almost everyone else would have said in any case. Several New Christian women accused in Mexico City of judaizing in the early 1640s, relate that it was enough to say so-and-so is like us, or, they are good, or, they do as we do, and they are known and they declare sufficiently and it is made understood how they keep and observe the said law of Moses.7

‘We’ are the norm, though devalued and denied, and therefore need to stick together. Many parallels attend these efforts at separate survival. Just as the enslaved and ‘colored’ might have sought in their get-togethers ( juntas) a means of escaping misery, as María Méndez, also known as María Quelembe, of Cartagena, put it in her 1634 Inquisition trial,8 so too might Marranos have seen in judaizing practices and beliefs a mode of being true to themselves and their past. While those of African origin might have sought an escape, literally or figuratively, back to their homeland from which they had been wrenched, for Judeoconversos, on the other hand, flight from Iberian territories, which was often achievable, likely entailed an undesired self-exile from the homeland in which they continued to live but that had in a deep sense been wrenched away from them by the rise of militant Catholic xenophobia. Many Judeoconversos, Amerindians amd Afroiberians therefore sought, “through the use of specific knowledges, liberty, goods and to oppose slavery,”9 though the kind of slavery members of each group faced differed. The insulting term used for Judeoconversos, marranos is said to derive from a word for pig, but the more likely etymology is that given in 6 For instance, Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 34–6. 7 Testimony of Maria de Rivera, AGN Mexico, Inq. 393, exp. 12, leg. 3, fols. 25v.–26r.; see also the testimony of Catalina Enriquez, ibid., fol. 150v. 8 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 577. 9 Maya Restrepo, Brujería, 593.

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anti-Jewish literature; that marranos feign (marran) Christianity. One way or another, the plights and categories of Marranos and Maroons echo with seeming significance. It is not coincidental that one finds among dedicated members of all three subaltern groups efforts to recreate real or symbolic structures of self-governance and even royal households, messianic or realist.10 Though in my book I do not dwell on the martial efforts of slaves to undo their captivity, often and surprisingly successful despite the disparity of military might, Judeoconversos also at times attempted to make use of more normative forces, diplomacy, wealth and even physical/military resistance, with perhaps less success. Yet each group had at its disposal mostly the weapons of the weak. For most Afroiberians or Judeoconversos, the most one could hope to do might involve casting a spell over one’s master or doing violence to a crucifix. Symbolic marronage may well have permitted psychic survival, even if it did not undo the objective conditions of oppression. From the perspective of the dominant elite, the advances of globalization birthed their own shadow realm. It makes great sense that not only in the hegemonic imaginary but also in the antipodal discourse of magic and resistance the various Others took on exaggerated dimensions. Hence in Peru, as Irene Silverblatt shows, “Jewish symbols and the insights of moriscas [. . .] were common ingredients in devilish brews,” and the same women who wielded them “were also experimenting with indigenous lore.” Magical practitioners made purposeful use of the bones of Amerindians, who “never [had been] baptized,” who “had never been touched by the Christian world,” or chanted incantations to and used the bones of “men who had been either hanged or decapitated.”11 Hybridity, cultural and discursive mestizaje were never neutral cominglings nor mere imitations by those below. The borrowings, forced and voluntary, the mimesis by the subaltern constantly sought a renegotiation of the terms.12 As with Antonio de Montezinos’ Relación, this is the upshot of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s more monumental sixteenth-century Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno and it is also the 10 See, for example, Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “Who is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil,” in Linda M. Heywood (ed.), Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153–82; Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista: História da festa de coroação de rei Congo (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002). 11 Silverblatt, “Colonial Conspiracies,” 262, 263, 275, n. 13. 12 I find Fuchs’s conclusions (Mimesis and Empire, 164–6) insightful and convincing.

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manner in which Margaret Olsen reads Alonso de Sandoval’s 1647 De instauranda Aethiopum salute (originally published in 1627 under a different title). Beyond the creation of lengthy texts, this is the inner movement beneath Afroiberian citations in everyday conversation of Jews and Jewishness and Judeoconverso wieldings of Blacks and Blackness and Amerindians. As simultaneous insiders and outsiders, these groups shared certain perspectives of the dominant majority, but inevitably from a dissonant position. Fuchs calls it the “deliberate enactment of imitation as a strategy for inclusion.”13 This is not to say that they automatically questioned or opposed the prejudices of the mainstream, which would be little more than a retrojected romantic hope, but that their echoes of such views meant something else as well. Such mimesis, especially when utilizing another Other, might take both positive or negative forms. When, in 1566, Felipe I prohibited Moriscos from owning Black slaves, various fifteenth-century morisco noblemen, such as Don Francisco Núñez Muley, protested their right to do so and the importance of doing so in order to protect Morisco society from the erosion that would come from rampant servitude. Muley’s insistence on the entitlement of Moriscos to own Black slaves accompanied his ardent defense of Morisco cultural difference, which he and the others correctly saw Spain as trying to eradicate.14 One scholar finds that in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, “Marginal individuals, in particular, foreigners such as Portuguese, were likelier to recognize mulatto children than were those in a better social position.”15 On the Caribbean island of Montserret, the Irish immigrants who made up two thirds of the population by the late seventeenth century, were relegated to second-class status by the English elite. By the early eighteenth century, the Irish constituted the island’s primary sugar producers and slaveholders.16

Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 165. Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “Juan Latino and His Racial Difference,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 334–5; on Muley, see Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 101–7. Morisco protest proved ineffectual. By the mid-1570s, 14 percent of the morisco population of the city of Granada, mostly women, had been enslaved. 15 Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 115. 16 Donald H. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 117–53; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 130. 13

14

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Examples such as these are a variant of what Michel de Certeau has in mind when analyzing how “users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules”: Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the [American] Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them [by the Spanish colonizers] something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it. The strength of their difference lay in procedures of “consumption.”17

Likewise, James Scott famously illuminated the modes of resistance taken by those in a position of weakness in relation to the larger structures of domination: within certain limits, peasants and all subaltern “human actors fashion their own response, their own experience of class, their own history.”18 Here is the prolonged, persistent struggle or dance between the dominant cultural system and the groups and individuals under and within it, each with its own forms of weaponry, each ceaselessly attempting to make use of, to seduce, to trick, to exert control over the other. It is important to recall, as Scott and Gil Anidjar remind us, that the agency of (dominated) individuals functions in a context of (dominating) institutional agencies, whose power and effects often mock a pretense to symmetry between the parties.19 Even so, the dominant sociocultural system is never totally homogeneous, it is also made use of by those who participate in producing it, though this may not prevent its being received as a monolith. It must also be remembered that Europeans in the Americas were “strangers in a strange, often dangerous, and hostile world” where “European power and control was often weak, especially during the early, most crucial stages of culture formation.”20 From a different context and perspective, Mieke 17 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiii–xiv; see also Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 185. 18 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 42. 19 Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 68–9. 20 Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, 167.

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Bal underscores that “Insecurity is not a prerogative of the dominated. The burden of domination is hard to bear. Dominators have, first, to establish their position, then to safeguard it. Subsequently, they must make both the dominated and themselves believe in it.”21 In addition, both Certeau and Scott, focusing on the ‘everyday’ and on resistance, in opposition to empire and imperialist elites, fail to note that subaltern self-fashioning can be decidedly reactionary, mirroring, consuming and wielding empire’s most exclusionary and divisive aspects. Who ‘wins’ is perhaps not clear until long after the struggles subside; perhaps not even then, as contestation continues over the re-presentation of the struggles. All this points to ways of reading the recurring violence against Christian discourse and images (the crucifix, images of Christ, the Virgin, etc.) often attributed to Judeoconversos but also to Afroiberians and other Others. The same goes for the range of magical acts wielded by slaves and downtrodden minorities against their masters. These acts seem difficult to believe for moderns, who are inclined to take all this supernatural stuff less than seriously. In a recent study of Purim and Jewish violence, Elliott Horowitz offers the first extended scholarly treatment of alleged Marrano violence against Christian icons.22 Such alleged violence, at one and the same time physical and semiotic, may be part of a larger issue. For one thing, given the intertwining of body and spirit in the pre-modern world, physical violence constituted a legitimate avenue for problem-solving, in the judiciary system or in religious disputation. Discussing the matter of the treatment of Amerindians, Anthony Pagden points out that most of the encomenderos in the New World “had come from a stratum of society where violence was endemic, and where religious beliefs frequently assumed highly unorthodox forms in which outbursts of frustration might easily express themselves by physical attacks on holy images.”23 There is more. In a world thoroughly or highly determined by religious matters, which to varying degrees encompass what today would fall under politics, seemingly minor differences take on disproportional symbolic importance; the world does depend on theological or

21 Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 110. 22 Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 174–81. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 162–4, also discusses the phenomenon, coming to conclusions very similar to Horowitz. 23 Anthony Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 36. Pagden cites various Inquisition cases.

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metaphysical construction. Readers need only recall the intense physical violence wreaked in Europe by Protestants against Catholic churches, their statuary and imagery, or ‘idols,’ in particular.24 Calvinists effected similar destruction in Pernambuco after they conquered it from the Portuguese/Brazilians in the early seventeenth century. In the Iberian orbit, William Monter notes that “[o]utrages to the crucifix were often alleged against Jews, but more often practiced by Moriscos,” and he provides some pertinent examples.25 Playing out their own issues regarding gender and femininity through a ritual semiotics, a number of the ilusas or alumbradas in colonial Mexico were accused of desecrating “religious sites and symbols—altars, hosts, and crucifixes—with sexual acts.”26 The blasphemies and sacrileges alleged to have been uttered or performed by crypto-Jews can fruitfully be compared to those of Afroiberian slaves. Here, the semiotics of ritual went from the suffering caused by slavery, a beating by a master, for instance, to a pointed renunciation of the master’s religion; in other words, became a denunciation, a challenge, an undoing of the discourse making such injustice possible, of the discourse insisting on such injustice as part of the logic of its own maintenance. In many cases similar, sometimes even the exact same kind of charges are made against Afroiberians: denying Christ or the power of the priests, desecrating the host, mocking, abusing and even destroying sacred images.27 Hence, around 1608, two Mexican Mulatos who “kept company with Indians” and had spent time in an isolated region that served as a destination for runaway slaves were “accused of removing from a church sacred images that they then spit on and stepped on.”28 For individuals accused from all of these groups it is fair to ask whether their actions were misunderstood. For instance, Afroiberians may not have intended mockery or attack on Catholic icons but merely to Africanize them for the sake of their own spiritual lives, while New Christians may have been attempting to sincerely worship as Catholics

24 Carlos M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 105–65; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence”, Past and Present 59 (1973): 51–91. 25 William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 228. 26 Jaffary, False Mystics, 10. 27 For New Spain, see Javier Villa-Flores, “ ‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596–1669,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82,3 (2002): 435–68; for the Portuguese world, see Sweet, Recreating Africa, 210–14. 28 Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, 108.

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but in a manner that reflected their particular subject position and the insights gained therefrom. At the same time, it is clear that minorities and dominated groups, while politically dependent, were not necessarily timid about self-expression. With some colorful examples, Horowitz shows the frequency and unselfconsciousness of early modern Jewish responses to (perceived) Christian domination, responses that were often physical and violent, to which many others could be added.29 Horowitz is misleading, however, in characterizing violence against Christian icons as “part and parcel of what [Cecil] Roth memorably described as ‘the religion of the Marranos.’ ”30 For one thing, Roth takes a particularly romantic and maximalist stance regarding Marrano religiosity, one that lends it far more coherence and systematicity than might be warranted. For Horowitz to quote him here betrays a desire to establish a persistent and homogeneous tradition of violence.31 There is no such thing as ‘the religion of the Marranos,’ but rather numerous variants produced by individual families, groups of individuals and even isolated individuals, some of which bear as tenuous a resemblance to one another as they each might bear toward normative Judaism. Some Marranos may have seen fit to act out their well-earned hostility toward the Catholicism imposed on them by twisting the mandated adoration of crucifixes and other icons into its opposite, a psycho-theologically mandated denigration. Many other Marranos, most of them, in fact, were never accused of such behavior. To generalize or to err with sloppy phrasing as Horowitz does here is reckless. He cites Gitlitz, who reasons that since allegations of violence against Christian icons were so widespread and often based on first-hand reports, they must have had some truth to them.32 This logic does not hold up and returns us to the crux of the hermeneutic conundrum of the Inquisitions. A priori acceptance of accusations because of their ubiquity cannot be sustained as a rule. Blood libels against Jews were also a widespread allegation, but this does not mean that they were true. Gil Anidjar argues convincingly that late medieval accusations of desecration of the host by Jews had more to do with Christian fixations on the blood of Christ

Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 197–8, 271–2. Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 181. 31 Though Horowitz tells us (Reckless Rites, 181) that this Converso behavior did not descend from rabbinic tradition, the narrative of his entire book seems to establish Jewish violence from ancient times to modern as a coherent cultural feature. 32 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 162. 29 30

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and projection onto the Jewish Other.33 As Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt note, “For a Jew to attack the Host seems strange, since there would appear to be no reason to attack something you believe to be a mere piece of bread.”34 Indeed, the medieval examples brought by Horowitz could just as easily reflect Christian anxieties and unconscious projections of what they thought Jews would want to do, perhaps what Christians themselves wanted to do or feared was something they wanted to do. It is possible that even the anti-Christian violence reported to the Inquisitions and ‘documented’ by them continues to reflect a kind of collective wish-fulfilment. Again, Gallagher and Greenblatt, “The Jews are inevitably guilty in such stories because they do not believe and because at the same time they are made to act out, to embody, the doubt aroused among the Christian faithful by eucharistic doctrine.”35 This is not to suggest that the extremity and perversity of oppression from above could not have generated such subaltern anti-establishment hostility. In many cases no doubt it did. Re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ might have suited Judeoconversos or Afroiberians who had internalized their own subversive role in Catholic discourse, particularly in a Catholic discourse that seemed to wield the cross as the ultimate weapon. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the symbolic violence of domination “is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator.”36 This shared conceptual-emotional vocabulary helps explain the kind of symbolic violence from below with which we are concerned. Here, too, subversive intent and refashioning is not hard to see, whether we judge it effective or not, for in whipping crucifixes or similar acts, the individual may have been refashioning the intense, inner, emotional life that monastic as well as mystical Catholicism insisted in different ways on “organizing” by/into “apt performance of conventional behavior” into anti-normative ritualized emotional behavior. Thus weeping, guilt

33 Anidjar, “Lines of Blood,” 4–5; see also William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 192–3; Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, ch. 3 (“The Wound in the Wall”). 34 Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 99. 35 Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 104. 36 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 170. Emphasis added.

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or penance, for example, as expressed in self-mortification, flogging or inquisitorial torture was inverted to become a near-ecstatic flagellation of the demonic embodiment of oppression, Christ or the host.37 Another plausible Christian source for the practices in question can be found in the medieval monastic practice of ritual humiliation of saints’ relics as part of prayers to God for help against an enemy (known as a “clamour”). This inversion ritual included placing relics and a crucifix on the floor on a hair shirt, thus in some sense punishing the relics/ saints for not having done their duty as intercessors. In the hands of laypeople imitating the monkish rite this clamour included actual striking of the altar supporting the relics.38 These scenarios offer a mental set and setting of circumstances remarkably similar to the incidents involving Judeoconversos and other aggrieved subalterns. My insistence on maintaining the possibility that such subaltern violence happened but also was imagined/projected stems from a desire to uphold the cogency of both logics. The violence of the dominators produced violent reactions as well as the imagination/projection of violent reactions. Both occurred; that is, subaltern violence was real at times and also absent at times yet projected. I will return to this matter below, but I suggest that it stems from the effects of the domination itself. Recent scholarship of Amerindian and Afroamerican responses to colonization recognize the post-traumatic symptoms manifested in these societies and cultures over the course of the following centuries. The emotional and psychic consequences of slavery for Afroamericans has long been a staple of scholarship. There is a tendency in scholarship regarding Judeoconversos to treat only the religious ramifications of the group’s similar but peculiar post-traumatic situation. Hardly alone in this, Norman Simms is right to highlight the individual and familial pathologies to emerge as a consequence of the continued non-integration of personality and culture forced onto devoted crypto-Jews and even frequently onto religiously distinterested New Christians.39 Given

37 The quote is from Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 64; see also ch. 3 (“Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual”); Kagan and Dyer, Inquisitorial Inquiries, 168, n. 46. 38 Patrick Geary, “Humiliation of Saints,” in Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 123–40. 39 Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). Though studded with insights and novel perspectives, Simms’ study

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the insanity of their situation, it is noteworthy that compensatory antiBlack racism, an easy place to channel displaced anger, was not more evident (as is true of the relative lack of anti-Jewish or anti-Judeoconverso prejudice among Afroiberians), just as the frequency of melting into a quiet Catholic life is noteworthy. David Graizbord’s research in the archives of various inquisitional tribunals leads him to think that “Portuguese tribunals classified [ Judeoconverso] defendants’ racial identities much more specifically than did their Spanish counterparts.”40 I do not believe this distinction to be true for attitudes toward Africans or Amerindians, certainly not after the sixteenth century, though some scholars have suggested that Spaniards thought of themselves as being less racist than the Portuguese. I also do not believe that the evidence brought in this book reveals Portuguese Judeoconversos to have been more race-conscious than Spanish Judeoconversos or than Iberian Catholics. Recalling some of the examples from the preceding chapters pressures for definition of the discursive modality of the various statements or conceptions regarding Others. Some quite clearly convey a theo-politics, such as Montezinos’ prayer thanking God for not having made him a Barbarian, Amerindian or Black. This prayer seems to have been lifted right out of Spanish imperial, Catholic discourse, but it served this wandering and wondering Judeoconverso perfectly as a reassurance of his valid, valuable identity through negation of its binary “opposite,” really Other in a triadic scheme. When Afroiberians denounced their masters or others as alleged judaizers they played on the empire’s theo-politics, whether they shared it or were just manipulating it to their advantage; likewise for the contrary vector, when Afroiberians adopted aspects of crypto-Judaism. While many such theo-political acts might not constitute direct instantiations of religious discourse or practice, nearly all reflect “a community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices.”41 Other utterances seem to reflect a world view less specificannot transcend its own kind of reactive mania, a scattershot lack of methodology, over-the-top generalizations, ahistorical psychologistic speculations, idiosyncratic black-or-white maximalizations and a seeming unconcern for the most basic forms of analyzing historical actors and events (he does not cite a single solid source in Spanish or Portuguese and relies on a disturbingly high number of materials from the internet). 40 Graizbord, “Conformity and Dissidence among Judeoconversos,” 321, n. 53. 41 Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 6. Lincoln defines religious discourse

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cally religious if at all. Though I have purposely chosen not to take up the exploration of New Christian slave traders—a study very much in need of execution, but that would have necessitated writing a different book—not one of the investigations of New Christian slave traders with which I am familiar has managed to excavate any sentiments vis-à-vis Africans directly related to individual New Christians’ self-conception, much less delineate even the most basic outlines of their religious lives independently of very problematic Inquisition sources.42 Similarly, it remains unclear whether Afroiberians who denounced New Christians did so for religious reasons or socio-economic ones. When Juan de León/Salomón Machorro laments that colonial Blacks receive better treatment than ‘honorable’ men, we must ask whether he is referring to New Christians or Whites in general.43 Even if the former, whether this is a statement of ethnocentrism that is ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ may depend on a variety of factors. The distinction, in any case, may not be particularly important, given the ways religious and secular discourse as a “discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendant status,” and religious practices as those “whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected” (5–6). Depending on the intentions of the actor, the social and institutional discourse that gave rise to it as well as the social/institutional interpretations of his/her act, denouncing a crypto-Jew, for instance, may entail a religious practice. 42 The authors seem to be able to offer only generalizations that merely adduce blood or family connections to judaizers or open Jews. José Gonçalves Salvador, relying on Inquisition records in discussing New Christian slavers living or working in Angola, still only raises the vaguest proofs of judaizing (Cristãos-novos e o comércio, ch. 8). Ventura, Negreiros portugueses, a fine study, cannot produce a single substantive description of the identity or religiosity of the sixteenth-century slaver Manuel Caldeira, her main subject, whose biography occupies a good chunk of the book (75–117). In a more recent work, Portuguese no Peru, Ventura expends much effort trying to lay out the identity and religiosity of the seventeenth-century Lima slaver Manuel Bautista, coming up with convincing evidence (not necessarily original to her) of his judaizing, but nothing explicating his understanding of his own profession. Even Green’s outstanding recent contribution, “Masters of Difference,” offers only circumstantial evidence of the religiosity or subject position of various New Christian slavers of the West African coast. 43 The formulation, “honorable” men, was of course ubiquitous among European elites and their creole counterparts. In 1598, the officers of the royal audiencia in Mexico wrote to the Spanish king, warning of the consequences should the crown fail to uphold the feudal contract with its Mexican subjects. The text is suffused with the moralizing language of race and class: “Honorable men who by chance see themselves, their encomiendas exhausted, [reduced] to great poverty while others who arrived yesterday grow wealthy in the land their forefathers helped to win, taking due account of the value of their services, these men, who are unused to suffering ills, may join up with mulattoes, blacks, and other perfidious peoples and attempt some uprising” (quoted in Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” 54).

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overlapped in forging notions of race and Otherness, overlapped in what Kathryn Burns rightly calls a “spiritual economy.”44 Let us recall some basic definitions of what we mean when we speak of religiosity or belief in connection with individuals and groups from the early modern Atlantic world. On the most general level, the interactions and statements depicted within this study reflect an ongoing cultural drama—albeit one that its participants perceive only fragmentarily—that illustrates how members of a group draw on the symbols of their group (a symbolic economy always imbricated with those of other groups) to face crises and make meaning of life and the world. Counterveiling rhetoric notwithstanding, all of the three monotheisms were essentially communal, to some degree even ethnic demarcations. Among other things, Marrano, Afroiberian and Amerindian religiosity served as repositories of social memory. Elizabeth Castelli, working on early Christian martyrdom, suggests that religion offers a critical theory of suffering.45 Collective memories of suffering, as well as religious discourses themselves, frequently serve as levers for liberation; psychic liberation of the self and socio-theo-political liberation of the group.46 Both Catholicism and Judaism sought a “maximalist” unity, where “there could be no radical disjunction between outer behavior and inner motive, between social rituals and individual sentiments, between activities that are expressive and those that are technical.”47 In distinct opposition, those Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians who resisted their own Christianization all to some degree made a virtue of necessity, that is, made the modalities that were necessary for their survival—splitting their subjectivity into inner and outer; refashioning the symbols of the dominators into usable symbols for themselves, Burns, Colonial Habits, 3–4. Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory, and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 46 See, for example, Kenneth Surin, “Liberation,” in Taylor, Critical Terms, 173–85; Carlos Carrete Parrando, “Nostalgia for the Past (and for the Future?) among Castilian Judeoconversos,” in Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean World after 1492, ed. Alisa Meyuhas Ginio (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 25–43. Attempts to sacralize trauma and to preserve its transcendence pose their own dangers; see, for instance, Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004], 117–23). This may be seen in the ways that Marrano and Afroiberian religiosity—each differing within itself and vastly differing between each other—could become stuck in a kind of repetition compulsion around victimization and projection of totalizing power onto the dominant Other. 47 The term “maximalist” comes from Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 5; the quote is from Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 63. 44 45

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the dominated; foregrounding elements of their religious culture that aided, encouraged and glorified the avoidance, subversion or even destruction of ‘false’ Catholicism—into new virtues. One prominent Converso tack—whether among those of Jewish, African or Amerindian background—entailed a subjectivization or relativization of truth claims. Spinoza expresses this possibility of overturning the purportedly natural modalities of domination when he declares goodness to flow from subject position rather than the other way around: “We neither strive for, nor will, nor want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (Ethics [1677], pt. 3, prop. 9, note). Spinoza’s proposition relativizes belief on both subjective and institutional levels, as was done by numerous Marranos, Afroiberians and others. As long as one lives well according to one’s religion, it is not so important which religion one follows. In other words, no one religious system, no matter how dominant or imposed on people, can claim absolute truth. Part of the evidence for this sort of ‘modern’ proposition was, it would seem, experiential and emotional; the unjust suffering forced on ‘us’ as different and subaltern justifies the very difference that served as an excuse for the dominant power to oppress us. At the time, New Christian survival skills included participating in the anti-Black strategies of the empire for boosting and maintaining its own economy. A good number of the Portuguese New Christians in the preceding pages had family members involved in, had themselves participated in the slave trade, had benefited from it directly and indirectly. Yet nowhere in the multitude of Inquisition pages that I read, nor in the studies done by other scholars have I found more than a hint among the Whites involved in the trading of slaves or close to it of awareness or acknowledgement, guilt, shame, sense of remorse regarding the moral horror of what they or others were doing. The profits of those who served on the ships, hard won, of course, came only through an exceedingly cruel and calculated process that nakedly created salable human objects based on racialist premises. (It must be said that the Portuguese New Christians were using their commercial skills to carry out a trade commanded by and ultimately benefiting the Kings of Castile and Portugal and their imperial ambitions.) Those involved knew that mortality and conditions on slave ships were miserable, that the lives of slaves were terrible, unfree, likely brutal. Criticisms of African (and Amerindian) slavery and of the slave trade had even been voiced by a few jurists and theologians, as well as by “ordinary”

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people here and there, though response to criticism and, certainly, action deemed to be seditious could be severe. Perhaps the involved New Christians were simply in denial, did not realize the depth of the dehumanization or did not care. Perhaps anti-Blackness was so “in the air” that it went unsaid, so that their sentiments regarding slavery and Blackness did not register on historians’ limited instruments, but can only be inferred from shreds of evidence regarding statements, choices and actions. No doubt the evil of racialized slavery did not strike most White Europeans as any worse or much worse than what was happening to them, not enough over which to invite trouble. Spinoza’s allegedly Marrano relativism reminds us not to mistakenly think that all pre-modern individuals lived exclusively by or in religious discourse and practice; or, alternatively, religious discourse and practice by no means prevented cognition and experience of the world that today we would distinguish as secular. What is, I think, remarkable about many of the individuals who appear in the preceding pages is the lucidity of their understanding of their situation from the perspective of what today we would call sociology or politics. Perhaps this lucidity, a kind of practical knowledge—which is not the same thing as the ability to effect desired changes—stems from the improvisational skills developed by so many Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in order to survive the very mobility foisted upon them by the incipient modernity of the European empires: “the ability both to capitalize on the unforeseen and to transform given materials into one’s own scenario.”48 Members of all the early modern Atlantic world cultures took advantage of the chances for which they hoped they were ready, driven by the pragmatic and promiscuous will to survive. Perhaps most importantly, their capacity for mutation, for self-metamorphosis—into faithful Catholics, into well-behaved slaves, into Whites—carried with it the threat of the kind of difference and distance that could transform into satanic opposition yet was also a sign that such rebellion had already transpired.49

48 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 225. 49 The dark early modern obverse of the kind of miraculous medieval transformations treated in Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

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Post-Script II Throughout the relations established among facts, or the elevation of certain of them to the value of symptoms of a whole period, or the “lesson” (moral or political) which organizes the discourse as a whole, in every history a process of meaning can be found which “always aims at ‘fulfilling’ the meaning of History”: “Historians are those who assemble not so much facts as signifiers.” —Certeau, The Writing of History, 39–40, quoting Roland Barthes In his book, The Culture of Literavy (1994), Wlad Godzich [. . .] writes that he was conceived and born in a Nazi concentration camp. [. . .] Godzich tells his reader that although four members of his family died because of Nazi persecution, there were others who collaborated with the enemy. —Hernández, Delirio, 207 I suspect all of us have survivor’s guilt, aware of those who did not make it, of aspects of ourselves that died as well. —Michael Eigen, Toxic Nourishment, 160 [H]esitation signifies that one is contemplating [doing an] injustice. —Cicero, On Duties, I,31 (p. 13) Come with a good will Or not at all. Love’s the only engine of survival.

—Mother Goose —Leonard Cohen, “The Future”

Tying up Toxic Loose Ends What at first glance appears to be distant and obscure history of the seventeenth century turns out to persist into to the present. Standing as a near constant is the tension and wavering between at least two competing visions: the homogeneity of collectives as opposed to their internal non-coherence. Blacks suffered from slavery. Portuguese New Christians enslaved and sold Blacks. Jews suffered from Christian persecution. Whites and Blacks oppressed Amerindians. New Christians of Jewish, Black and Amerindian background suffered exclusion, denigration and worse at the hands of Old Christians. Identity versus multiplicity, identity as multiplicity. Can an identity—singular, the same as itself—be multiple, that is, many, different from each other? The question comes with perhaps even greater force when polyglot colonial situations are discussed. For the many scholars of Jewish matters since the nineteenth century who have mentioned Afroiberian judaizers, the

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phenomenon seems to signify little more than something exotic, that is, aberrant and, therefore, insignificant, on the one hand, or to signify the obvious attractions of Judaism even in the bowels of Christendom and particularly to those who have ‘nothing.’ These scholars do not seem to have noticed how race may have refracted the stance of Judeoconversos toward Afroiberians or Amerindians in the fractious context of colonialism. Scholars of things Iberian have on the whole not noticed how race refracted the Catholic behavior vis-à-vis Judeoconversos of those subalterns the scholars wanted to be nothing more than Catholics, while many scholars of the African diaspora have been too busy focusing on the supposedly exclusive victimization of Afroiberians to recognize their religious collusion as Catholics against those seen as Jews.50 The behavior and attitudes of Marranos/Jews continue to shock some Iberian Catholic and Spanish or Portuguese nationalist scholars. The peak of the Nazi period produced many feverish speculations. A relatively sympathetic 1939 book on the Portuguese New Christian Diego López cites as a factor in his rise to commercial, military and political prominence his “qualities of shrewdness and the power of insinuation, very typical of his Jewish blood.” The author resuscitates a charge from a medieval forged letter (that he treats in one of the chapters within) to the effect that López was a “hidden Jew, who spared nothing in knocking down the sacred orders in order to be better defended and to profane the sacraments, a thing neither new nor incredible among those of his class.”51 The Spanish scholar Guillermo Díaz-Plaja writes in a 1940 book that what is most characteristic “of the Jewish soul is the desire, conscious or unconscious, but which leads dissolved in the persecuted blood, of liquidating or of attacking the classical forms, that is to say, those decisive for the stable equilibrium of the society in which it lives.” This is nothing less than a Jewish “eagerness for sabotage.” Such race-thinking enables the author to produce an essay titled “A Possible Racial Factor in the Baroque.”52 Covering the Jews

50 For a meditation on simultaneous status as victims and dominators, see Athalya Brenner, “‘On the Rivers of Babylon’ (Psalm 137), or Between Victim and Perpetrator,” in Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post Biblical Vocabularies of Violence, ed. Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood (London: T & T Clark International, 2003), 76–91. 51 Luis G. Martínez Villada, Diego López de Lisboa (Córdoba: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1939), 24, 32. 52 Díaz-Plaja, El espíritu del Barroco (Barcelona, 1940), 65–7, 76. In this fascistic/ nostalgiac discourse, the Jewish affinity for sabotage and search for the transcendent

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who flocked to Dutch Brazil and the difficulties facing White colonization in the tropics, another patently partisan book from the same year rehashes medieval folklore to the effect that “The immunity of the Jews to the plague is a verified historical fact,” citing one historian who “observed categorically: ‘This illness never attacks the Jews,’” as well as supposed medical sources going back to 1505.53 Later periods also yielded similarly bitter fruit. One Peruvian scholar writing in the 1960s about a seventeenth-century Converso who penned an anonymous description of Peru called this involvement in contraband and espionage a “primary form of semitic reaction,” “a negative gesture of undermining the society which has welcomed them.” Though selfcontradictory, our scholar alleges that “The accomodating character and atavistic caution of the Jews permitted them to lead a double religious life.”54 Similarly García Proodian, who treats Judeoconversos in the American colonies and enjoys highlighting their role in the trading of slaves. Her analysis conveys her anti-Jewish feelings without veil. Her second section, for instance, purports to trace the “Continuity of the Hebrew Tradition.” Its first chapter, “Temperment and Character,” a dubious scholarly category to begin with, turns immediately to the Jews’ predominant ( primerísimo) trait: “Love of Money.” Her treatment of Converso women—Marranos all, of course—she titles “Woman and the Life of Ostentation.” Such scholarship repeatedly calls all New Christians Jews, in a willfully biologistic obfuscation.55 At the same time, from the other direction, a woman from a synagogue my wife and I attend was at our house one day. In the course of conversation about Jews and Blacks and my research she asked to see a copy of my first book. Showing it to her—I was opening to the first page of the Introduction to show her how I state there that extreme Black charges against Jews regarding slavery are often suspect—she said,

absolute lives on, an unkillable blood-type as from the twice-produced horror flick, The Thing (Christian Nyby, 1951; John Carpenter, 1982): “It is not anecdotal to note that Karl Marx is a very characteristic Jew and that in the U.S.S.R. the Jews have a role as a preponderant minority” (Díaz-Plaja, Espíritu del Barroco, 66). 53 José Honorio Rodrigues e Joaquim Ribeiro, Civilização Holandesa no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940), 153. I hope to return elsewhere to the subject of Jewish immunities in the service of colonialism. 54 Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Una incógnita despejada: La identidad del Judió portugués,” Revista Histórica (Lima, Peru) 30 (1967): 55, 85. 55 Lucia Garcia de Proodian, Los judios en America: Sus actividades en los Virreinatos de Nueva Castilla y Nueva Granada s. XVII (Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano, 1966). The topic of love of money comes on 112.

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in an offhanded way, “oh, I was told by someone at shul [synagogue] that your work is anti-Semitic.” (I am not sure whether I had already told her that one of my essays was put online by a rabidly anti-Jewish Black nationalist website.)56 All this confirmed my wife’s worries that the book would make me public enemy number one in the Jewish world. But the deeper meaning is more frightening. After all, what is ‘anti-Semitic’ about a book treating, in a scholarly methodology of relatively moderate tone and fact-based argumentation, Sephardic relations with Blacks? Likely for some Jews any conclusion that deems Jews to have been less than angelic in some way, that dares raise a critical voice suggesting that Jews behaved like others, that airs dirty laundry in public—verges on anti-Semitism. Despite such conclusions, there is no ‘disposition’ for members of a group to respond to their group’s persecution or oppression in a given manner,57 but only a multitude of micro-dispositions within any society, in and between powers and fields; more dispersed and internally-riven than some structuralists (of all kinds) might like yet less autonomous and disinterested (or unentangled by forms of complicity) than asserted by radical individualist or “non-political” historiographies. Yirmiyahu Yovel’s attempt to harness studies of Marranos in order to explain the philosophy of Baruch/Benedict Spinoza rests on a problematic, if not dangerous thesis regarding Marranos of the opposite order from Iberian anti-Jewish thinkers but that nonetheless shares a tendency toward generalization. This thesis imagines that Marranos display “a this-worldly disposition; a split religious identity; a metaphysical skepticism; a quest for alternative salvation through methods that oppose the official doctrine; an opposition between the inner and outer life, and a tendency toward dual language and equivocation.”58 Historically, given the hermeneutical and epistemological difficulties of dealing with Inquisition records and the extreme situations that produced the Marrano problem and that it in turn produced, I believe Yovel’s

56 www.blacksandjews.com. The now dated site is/was possibly affiliated with but certainly adulates Louis Farrakan and the Nation of Islam. It is anti-Jewish because it goes beyond justifiable critical appraisals of Jewish involvement in slave-trading and Jewish participation in colonial domination over and control of Black populations to indulge in unjustifiable attacks—on Jews as almost innate capitalists and anti-Black racists, on Zionism and Israel—and extreme partisan apologetics, such as denying that Muslims had anything to do with the bombings of 11 September 2001. 57 See, for instance, Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 156–63. 58 Yovel, Marrano of Reason, x.

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thesis is simply inaccurate, as new historical studies make increasingly clear. On another level the danger of such theses lies in the ease with which they become generalized into essentialist understandings about the group under discussion. Many Judeoconversos evince none or few of the above characteristics, while many non-Marranos of the era, New Christian or otherwise, do manifest them. Similarly, Afroiberians showed a wide range of reactions to their captivity, mistreatment and exclusion. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that individuals living in postcolonial situations are “interested either in proving that they are ethnic subjects and therefore the true marginals or that they are as good as the colonials.”59 The peculiar ‘in-betweenness’ of Christian Afroiberians and Judeoconversos is their simultaneous existence under both colonial and post-colonial conditions, being subject and marginal according to one term of domination (‘race’) yet included according to another term (‘religion’). Irene Silverblatt sees the rise of “race thinking, nationalist sentiments, bureaucratic rule, colonialism—and the nascent capitalist order girding them” in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish empire.60 I fully agree, though I would include Portugal. Yet the truth of this does not mean that subaltern populations and their individual members did not also collude, wittingly or not, in the perpetuation and manipulation of prejudices, as I hope to have shown. Indeed, some dominated groups willingly allied with dominating groups against other dominated groups, some members of every dominated group willingly aided, served or joined the forces of domination, either on specific occasions or for life.61 Bourdieu comments on this perhaps disappointing propensity: the deadly passions of all racisms (of ethnicity, sex or class) perpetuate themselves because they are bound to the body in the form of dispositions and also because the relation of domination of which they are the product perpetuates itself in objectivity, continuously reinforcing the propensity to accept it, which, except in the case of a critical break (that performed

59 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 290. 60 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 16. 61 For examples, Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 64,4 (October 2007): 679–716; John Thornton, “African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade: Central African Dimensions.,” http://muweb .millersville.edu/~winthrop/Thornton.html.

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postscript by the ‘reactive’ nationalism of dominated peoples, for example), is no less strong among the dominated than the dominant.62

Characterizing “Black-Jewish” relations in the seventeenth century, therefore, almost inevitably retrojects today’s socio-economic and political tensions. The very question itself divulges this fact. Yet, despite some significant and vast differences between the two eras and situations, it is hard not to recognize some similarities. As two groups of intermediaries or go-betweens that served vastly different purposes for the empires, Judeoconversos and Afroiberians stood very much in conflict, often quite direct, with one another. Added to this was a very real religious and theo-political divergence. Nonetheless, it is difficult to detect much, if any, particular animus between members of the two groups. “Progressive” alliances, proclivities or moments might indeed have existed in the seventeenth century. Tobias Green, in his study of New Christians in the Cabo Verde islands, speculates that the local New Christians may have been more inclined than others to interact with and even adapt to surrounding African cultures.63 Historian of colonial Brazil, Stuart Schwartz, uses the theo-political miscegenation of early eighteenth-century Bahia as a narrative of proto-Enlightenment selfemancipation in which the colonial world’s peculiar social contexts (in this Brazilian case, the presence of many New Christians [and widespread African practices]), the opportunities for “liberty” of conscience and action, and the difficulty of imposing conformity tended to diminish the authority of Church and State, or force those institutions toward accomodation with local realities.64

The scenarios highlighted by Green and Schwartz may well have been real, but they cannot be projected onto the totality of ‘Judeoconverso life’ or ‘Afroiberian experience’ any more than their negative counterparts. Analysis must be able to free itself from structuralist binarisms, attentive to the different modes in which power circulates from above to below, from bottom against top, attentive to the multiplicity, partial awareness and even uncertainty that might characterize personal moti-

62 63 64

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 181. Green, “Masters of Difference,” 98–9, 112–14. Schwartz, “Questioning Slavery and Accepting Africa.”

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vation, self-consciousness and self-justification.65 Discussing “the range of experiences of indigenous women in [colonial] Potosí,” Jane Mangan highlights how one finds women “who suffer, manage, and thrive,” and she insists that the object of her inquiry can be understood “only by treating this complexity.”66 Walter Mignolo has proposed approaching colonial situations with diatopical or pluritopical perspectives.67 Pointing with condemnation at ‘empire,’ harping on ‘asymmetries of power’ erects the dominators and their instruments as metaphysical principles, totalizing and incontestable, erases through negativity the agency and efficacy (those these are not the same) of those who resist or oppose from below or from within, and seemingly seeks to absolve resisters and opponents from moral standing. On the one hand, even if, as Michel Foucault and others have argued, power circulates diffusely, this does not mean that its local forcefulness and effectiveness cannot be measured, described. At the same time, agency and responsibility continues to exist even where power is less generously to be found. The agency of those ‘under’ power’s sway and the circulation of power do not make up a zero sum game. This is the very tension laid out by Talal Asad between history from the perspective of the dominant power (global capitalism) and the ‘active’ subaltern history favored by anthropologists.68 It would seem self-evident that neither pole can exist in isolation. Asad himself concludes with a query: “People are never only active agents 65 Some revisionist works wind up suffering from a kind of reverse imbalance. Thus Sweet’s fine study does not, ultimately, convince me that “the adoption of African spiritual elements by Catholic priests was no different from the African embrace of [Portuguese] Catholic elements” or that “the impact of Christianity on Africans was no greater than the impact of African beliefs on Christians” (Recreating Africa, 225, 230). Or Ramón Grosfoguel: “Slaves’ prayers to Catholic saints are strategies of hibridization and mestizaje that have nothing to do with ‘syncretism.’ The hybridization practiced on the subaltern side of colonial difference represents ‘subversive complicity,’ ‘border thinking,’ and ‘transculturation;’ subsistence and resistance in the face of colonial power. The Catholic saints were ‘transculturated’ and ‘transmodernized’ so as to subvert and redefine them within a global, non-European cosmology. Each saint was converted into an African God” (Ramón Grosfoguel, “Hybridity and Mestizaje: Sincretism or Subversive Complicity? Subalternity from the Perspective of the Coloniality of Power,” in The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries, ed. Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 125). Even Certeau’s awe-inspiring analysis of mysticism proffers at one point a romanticized homogenization of ‘Marrano’ mysticism within Catholicism (The Mystic Fable, 22–3). 66 Mangan, Trading Roles, 11. 67 Walter D. Mignolo, “Colonial Situations, Geographic Discourses, and Territorial Representations: Toward a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial Semiosis,” Dispositio 14,36–38 (1989): 93–140. 68 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 3–24.

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and subjects in their own history. The interesting question in each case is: In what degree, and in what way, are they agents or patients?”69 The rub lies elsewhere as well. The question is not just what range of reactions did individuals or groups have to oppression, colonialism or the like. On the level of hermeneutics many scholars continue to operate as if there must be a single explanation for historical events, as if one must choose between ideological or materialist readings. Here, too, I would suggest, mutual exclusivity should not hover like a specter. Some acts of violence might be acts of resistance, some might be efforts to improve nothing more than the life of the actor. Some might be neither. Some might be both. A New Christian or zambo might well have been torn between both of these motivations as well as others, such as romance, hatred, jealousy or unpremeditated impulse. The same multiplicity holds even more for explanations of group behavior or complex phenomena such as colonization, racism or resistance to domination. Generalizations should make us wary, however well intentioned or rationalized as necessary for the production of ‘digestible’ historiography. One modern scholar, introducing a new translation of a seventeenthcentury Spanish chronicle about the discovery and conquest of Nueva Granada, concludes that “all history, at bottom, is a study in human nature.”70 If by ‘human nature’ we mean something like what the portmanteau term implies, something both cultural and natural, both constructed and real, something meaningless enough to extend to any number of conditions/situations yet meaningful enough that most of us use the term on occasion, then I might well agree. This human natureculture/subject-object operates within a real world whose parameters are quite concretely given. The confluence of multiplicity within the individual and heterogeneity between groups does not result in a simple symmetry of equal and equally free players. Rather, the variety of forces and claims need to be deconstructed with their origins, vectors and effects in mind. This is our job as scholars and citizen-activists; insofar as we are allowed by external circumstance, we must choose

69 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 4. Many of the points I argue above are made in Brian Sandberg, “Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern World, 1492–1700,” Journal of World History 17,1 (2006): 1–25, which reached me only as this manuscript was going to press. 70 Freile, Conquest of New Granada, 16. The author of the Introduction is not named, but I assume it must be the translator, William Atkinson.

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our allies, our candidates, our barricades. (And how many choose even when not permitted, even when the penalty is tremendous?)71 When confronting empire and its injustices, its naive defenders opposing alterity in the name of some right to determine the lives of others, I see it as imperative to foreground the right to be left alone and the relative unfreedom of the subaltern. When confronting subaltern romantic locals and nativists and anti-imperial fascists, I see it as imperative to identify and fight the dangers of undoing helpful universalisms in the name of small-minded particularism. We are more in-between than we imagine. If I press my nose to someone’s window, it isn’t to see everything in his house. There is much that would not satisfy my curiosity enough to repay the effort. The privacy I want to invade is that which allows me to learn the denouement of some story about which I have my own psychological urgency, and for which I lack an ending. —Janna Malamud Smith, Private Matters

I confess to having been significantly influenced by scholars, particularly feminists, who meditate on the meanings of anger in scholarship and wonder what the scholar who feels it is to do with it.72 Examining the early modern Atlantic should, I think, lead to anger over the ubiquitous instances and systemic use of denigration, mistreatment, cruelty and homicidal violence again Others (in many ways still with us). New Christians/Jews persecuted against both racially and religiously (in some cases even by Afroiberians), White and Whitish Christians Old and New persecuting Africans and their descendants, religiously and racially. Even the downtrodden were not (are rarely, if ever) free from the above sins. (It can be asked to what degree a lack of responsive anger or its dismissal signifies a desire for histories “purified” of “our” own transgressions.) Yet looking mostly for historical examples of resistance to domination, to oppression—their own or that of others—who will mirror the scholar’s own tendencies, often leads to romanticization and a blindness to the ways in which subalterns willingly acquiesce and submit to the systems in which they find themselves. I have tried to overcome this blindness, to intentionally face it, while not forgetting 71 Evoking Kierkegaard via Derrida, my colleague Mark C. Taylor calls this “the madness of decision.” 72 I have in mind Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 173–6, and some of the literature she cites (255, n. 2).

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the very real power of the dominators, of the empire-builders, and the abuses to which their power leads. Early modern Iberian political and religious triumph and expansion brought about its own tarnishing: immense wealth that barely improved the lives of most citizens if at all; a “pathological fear of uncleanness—of pollution by secret Judaizers, but also of Protestant heretics, demoniac witches, and sexual perverts—underlay almost everything in Spanish life”; a rampant and justified paranoia regarding denunciation by others for the slightest deviation, real or imagined, and a concomitant internal paranoia concerning whether one was deviating from the norms oneself; a fetishistic obsession with reputation, honor, glory, that is, with how one was seen by others.73 The seemingly societywide depths of projection of problems onto Others, of endless, obsessive-compulsive self-scrutiny, of willful obfuscation and denial stand in ironic proportional contrast to the very heights of victory, conquest, domination achieved by Spain and Portugal, achievements which should have brought about mostly security, confidence and satiety. It is difficult to refrain from drawing parallels to the empire built with sometimes similar methods by the United States toward sometimes similar ends, currently collapsing from internal misrule, fear of numerous Others and ignorance about the sources of true wealth.

73 I am paraphrasing somewhat and have taken the quote from Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror, 74–5.

APPENDIX

AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER FROM ANTONIO DE MONTEZINOS A unique copy of Menasseh ben Israel’s Esperança de Israel sits in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. At the back of the volume are several handwritten pages offering a transcription of a letter from Antonio de Montezinos to Elia Perera, in and/or of Venice. The text of the letter is in Italian. A brief introductory note claims this to be a copy of the letter and not a translation. Montezinos, therefore, seems to have written to Perera in Italian, which implies that the latter’s mother tongue was Italian. Montezinos’ Italian seems rather stilted, so that he often resorts to Spanish usages. I could not determine who penned the introductory note. Just who this Elia Perera was must remain a mystery for now. As mentioned before, Cecil Roth thinks the correspondant is Abraham Pereyra: “a [unique] copy of the Esperanca de Israel [. . .] contains a contemporary transcript of correspondence on the subject of his travels, hitherto unknown, between [Antonio de] Montezinos and Abraham Israel Pereyra, Menasseh’s patron.”1 Abraham Pereyra (also written as Pereira; or Abraham Israel Pereyra or Thomás Rodríguez; he died in 1699) was an extraordinarily wealthy leader of the Amsterdam Sephardic community, writer of a number of philosophical works in Spanish, founder of yeshivot in Amsterdam (1656) and Hebron (1659), and devotee of Sabbatai Zevi.2 Again, some scholars maintain that Pereyra was born in Montezinos’ hometown of Vila Flor in Portugal, from where

1 Roth, Life of Menasseh ben Israel, 331, n. 5. Roth mentions that the copy he saw, ca. 1934, was held by Maggs Brothers Rare Books of London. I contacted the company, where Paul Harcourt kindly and persistently followed the documentary trail to its conclusion. 2 On Pereyra, see Méchoulan, “Abraham Pereyra: esbozo bio-bibliográfico,” Hispanidad y judaismo en tiempos de Espinoza: estudio y edición anotada de La Certeza del Camino de Abraham Pereyra (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1987), pp. 49–54; Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 136, 211, 215, n. 170, 276, 279–80.

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Pereyra moved to Spain in 1617.3 Pereyra, of Portuguese parents, fled Madrid and, apparently, the Inquisition, for Amsterdam. He arrived in 1646 and established a sugar refinery in 1655 or 1656 with his brother Ishac, also an Amsterdam resident. They sold the refinery to a Dutchman in 1664 for over 45,000 guilders. According to Jonathan Israel, Abraham Pereyra came to Amsterdam bringing “important trading connections with [. . .] the Caribbean.”4 In Spain he had been a wool exporter and asentista, that is, he held an exclusive contract with the monarchy.5 Despite much effort, I have not been able to uncover any evidence that Abraham Pereyra used the name Elia nor have I been able to produce any concrete genealogical connection between the two individuals. It does not make sense that Montezinos would have written to Abraham Pereyra in Italian.6 Why would Montezinos have tried to contact Abraham Pereyra in the first place? Pereyra had not yet arrived in Amsterdam nor had he yet become Menasseh ben Israel’s patron. Is it possible Montezinos and/or various Pereyras and Ben Israel shared messianic interests going back to Vila Flor, Portugal or Spain? Is it possible that they knew each other prior to this correspondance? It is certainly plausible that Ben Israel tried to connect Montezinos with prominent (ex-)Conversos after Montezinos’ arrival in Amsterdam and Ben Israel’s circulation of the Relación. We can only hope that further research turns up something more definitive. Sources from Amsterdam suggest the possibility of connections between members of the Montezinos and Pereyra families. In 1621, two Portuguese men in Amsterdam, Jacob de Montesinos, age forty, and Elias Pereira, age thirty, came before an Amsterdam notary named Sibrant Cornelisz. They provided a statement at the request of a third Sephardic man who had recently been fired from his job helping yet a fourth Sephardi who dealt in civet cats (an African mammal, not actually of the feline family, from which certain perfumes were extracted).7 The 3 See for example: Bernardo López Belinchón, “Familia, negocios y sefardismo,” in Contreras et al., Familia, religión y negocio, 354–55. 4 Jonathan I. Israel, “Menasseh Ben Israel and the Dutch Sephardic Colonization Movement of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (1645–1657),” in Kaplan, Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, 145. 5 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 230; see also 234. 6 Several scholars with whom I consulted (Miriam Bodian, Jonathan Israel, Yosef Kaplan) think that Roth was simply wrong in his identification. 7 Notarial deed no. 2334, [Koen, E.M., W. Hamelink-Verweel, S. Hart, and W.C. Pieterse,] “Notarial Records in Amsterdam Relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639,” Studia Rosenthaliana 18,1 ( January 1984): 163.

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contents of the resulting notarial deed are irrelevant, but the fact that a Montesinos and a Pereira appear together might lend more weight to the idea that the two families had connections stemming from their mutual origins in Vila Flor.8 Other deeds from 1618 and 1619 inform us that Elias Pereira was a merchant in Amsterdam and also dealt, at least for a time, in civet cats, even co-founding a company to that end.9 Is this our Elia Perera? Did he retire or move to Venice? Even if so, given that he would have spoken Spanish and/or Portuguese in the Amsterdam community, why would Montezinos be writing to him in Italian? I was not able to investigate the communal records of the Sephardic congregation of Venice in time for publication but hope to do so in the future. The letter from Antonio de Montezinos/Aron Levi to Elia Perera has never before been published. Other than Cecil Roth, no one who treats the Relación of Montezinos has mentioned it, much less read it. I proceed with my analysis based on the assumption that regardless of whether Montezinos himself penned the Relación, this letter is definitely from his hand. Still, given that the introductory note suggests that this text constitutes only one ‘chapter’ of a longer letter, we remain ignorant of what the other parts contain, if indeed they existed. The details provided in the letter of course touch on the question of whether Montezinos (1) actually spent time in Nueva Granada

8 For instance, we know from other Amsterdam notarial deeds that in 1643, the two daughters of Abraham Montezinos, Rachel and Ester, one of whom was ill, borrowed twenty guilders from Lopo Rodrigues (alias Abraham) Pereira. As Pereira “did not have the money ready at that time and wanted to help them, he pawned his own silver cup with Manuel Martines Dormido, who then administered the Portuguese pawnshop” (quoted in A.M. Vaz Dias and W.G. Ven der Tak, “Spinoza Merchant & Autodidact: Charters and other Authentic Documents Relating to the Philosopher’s Youth and Relations,” Studia Rosenthaliana 16,1 [March 1982]: 144). This was not our wealthy Abraham Pereira (alias Tomás Rodrigues), but a relative. A deed from 1615 has Elias Pereira also coming to make a statement with another man Manoel Marcos, whose full name was Manoel Marcos Montezinos (see next note; deed no. 1086 and the explanatory note there; ibid., 11,1 [ January 1977]: 81). This Marcos Montezinos might well be a relative of the Marques Montesinos circulating in Perú discussed in chapter 9. 9 Notarial deeds no. 1547, 1840 and 1891, [Koen et al.,] “Notarial Records,” Studia Rosenthaliana 13,1 ( January 1979): 231; 15,1 (March 1981): 248; 16,2 (November 1982): 62–3. Other deeds from 1615 and 1618 mention an Elias Pereira who is a diamondcutter in Amsterdam (notarial deeds no. 861 and 1522, ibid., 13,1 [ January 1979]: 227; 8 [1974]: 305). His age, as given in one of these deeds, makes him just about the same age as the merchant of civet cats. Likely they are the same man and he had merely taken up another career path.

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traveling in the manner described in the Relación; and (2) authored the Relación himself. First, the letter itself, my translation, with the transcription following. Montezinos’ letter appears courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. My transcription and translation of the letter was greatly aided by Francesca Bregoli. I am most grateful for the help she repeatedly and graciously offered me. Adam Shear and Francesca Trivellato also came to my aid in the face of the miscegenated Italian-Spanish text. I thank them all for their invaluable contributions. Copy of a chapter of a letter from ier qs [?] 1644 that Ns. [Our señor (if in Spanish, or) Ms.: messer, Sir (if in Italian)] Antonio Montezino, now called Aron Levy, wrote from Amsterdam, at the time when he was to depart for Brazil by a Dutch ship, written to Venice to Sir Elia Perera, as a response to a letter written by the said Perera to the said Levi ___ From Cartagena to Baranche,10 it is three days’ travel; from Barancha to Maona11 five days; from Maona to the Port of Honda twenty days, rather more than less, going along a River, on a bank called the Magdalena.12 From the said Port of Honda we set off on the trip in the company of Francisco, eight days before we arrived where our brothers are, walking always [p. 2] and with grappling hooks of iron for gripping, because all the travel being harsh, [and] sometimes we passed along the rivers by many crags. I should advise VS [Your Honor] that when the five Caciques whom I have mentioned in my accont go to meet these brothers of ours, after seventy moons have passed, they follow a different path, and with mounts there is a month of travel, while the trip I took requires using some small boat to arrive more quickly, because it is impossible to get there except in the aforementioned way. All of the waters of the rivers of those parts flow into the sea of the north, two days of travel past the rivers of the Amazon. The woman whom I saw when I arrived there is a daughter of Israel from the tribe of Reuben [p. 3]. I should warn you that it was not permitted to anyone of those Hebrews to speak or to deal with any Indian, under serious Penalty, because of the past wars, and every

10 Possibly Barranquilla, at the mouth of the Magdalena, settled at least by 1629. Barrancabermeja, some 400 km. south of Cartagena and 240 km. upriver (north) from Honda, would be unreachable in three days except by boat. See Von Humbolt, Reise, 65. 11 I could not identify such a place. Von Humboldt makes no mention of it. Maóna means barge in Italian. 12 Von Humboldt’s 1801 journey from Barranca Nueva (founded in the mideighteenth century) to Honda took from 19 April to 15 June, nearly two months, though this explorer seems to have spent much time researching his surroundings (Reise, 65–78).

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time the Indians go [to the river] to quench their thirst, a woman served as interpreter, and so things went for the space of 250 years. This kind of People are used to the sun and water, are well formed, bright13 and nimble. They are deft of foot and leg. They wear three shirts, one white of cotton and two of wool, one larger than the other, and, of the same material, white stockings. On the head they wear white cloths wound in the style of a turban. They speak in Hebrew for they have always conserved their language, they live in the middle [p. 4] of Americha. From one side they border with spaniards and portuguese. They are averse to all Indians and do not have communications except with the five Caciques. They live in huts14 of straw [thatched], distant one from the other either fifty steps or a hundred steps, more or less distant depending on the quality of the family. The days that I spent there I received gifts, because they have [of ] everything that there is in the Indies, both what they [i.e., the Reubenites] have brought [in the past] and what the Spaniards bring [now]. Everything grows in that land. They were always with me by day and by night. I slept in their arms and I ate and drank with them, always in their company, and from the same [crossed out] from the same cup and on one plate. Many [p. 5] Other relations are here in Amsterdam No [S.nr—Our Señor (or) Sir] Camez15 will send them to V.S [Your Señor, i.e., Perera] as soon as he receives them. At the moment I cannot continue [or; write at length] as I am embarking for Brazil, nor will I expand/continue in any other way, but only to say that I go to Brazil at nobody’s Interest,16 and time will tell all. Salom [peace] to you ___ Copia di un capitolo di una le[tte]ra de ier qs [I am not sure about this abbreviation] 1644 che di Anserdam scrive Ns. Antonio Montezino, ora chiamato Aron Levy, nel mentre che stava per partire per il Berzil per scavo olandese, scritta a venetia al sr. Elia Perera, per res[pos]ta di una le[tte]ra scritta dal detto Perera al detto Levi _____ ________ _____ Da Cartagena a Baranche, ve sonno tre giorni di viaggio, da Barancha a Maona, cinque giorni, da Maona al Porto di onda, venti giornati, piu tosto di piu che di meno, andando per un Rio per Riviera chiamato della Madalena dal detto Porto de onda in compagnia di Despierto in Spanish means bright, intelligent. Cabaña in Spanish. 15 This could be Cameh, Carroz or some other variation. 16 In other words, Montezinos travels only at his own expense or in pursuit only of his own affairs. 13 14

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appendix Fran.co ponemmo per il viaggio, otto giornate prima che arevasemo dove i nostri fratelli stanno, caminando sempre [p. 2] e con uncini di ferro per a[gg]rapparsi, per essere il viaggio tutto aspero, alle volte passavemo lungho a fiumi per molte balze, avertendo a VS che quando i cinque Casique [?] che ho detto per la relatione, vanno a ritrovare detti nostri fratelli, passato settanta lune, vanno per altro camino, e con cavalcature vi è un mese di viaggio che per il viaggio dove io son stato, no cie si va se non per qualche naveta [?] per arivare più presto, per andare in questa parte, non vi si puole andare, se no nel modo espostovi, tutte le acque de fiumi di quelle parti vanno a sbocare nel mare di norte, passato il fiume delle Amazone due giorni di viaggio. La donna che io veddi quando ci andai è figlia de Israele della tribbù di Ru[ben] [p. 3] avertendo, che non era premesso [i.e. permesso] a nessuno di quelli ebrei, parlare ne trattare con nessuno Indio, sotto grave Pene, per le guerre passate, e sempre che andavano li Indi per abeverarse, serviva una donna per Interprete, et così è andato seguitando per il spatio di 250 anni, questa qualita di Gente sonno abiuati al sole et al. acqua, bene fatti desperti [?] e leggieri. vanno scaltri di piede e gamba Porteno tre camescie, una biancha di cottone e dua di lana, una piu largha del altra, e del medesimo sonno le calze bianche Portano In testa tele bianche rivolte a modo di turbante, Parlano in Ebraico che sempre hanno conservato il loro linguagio, stanno nel mezzo [p. 4] del Americha, da una parte confinano con spagnoli e purtughesi, con tutti li Indiani tenghono deversione [?] et non hanno altra comunicatione che con li cinque Casique [?], abitano in cappanne di paglia luntano luno da altra dove cinquanta passe ove cento passe, piu luntani e piu apresso, comforme la qualita delle famiglia, li giorni che jo ci dimorai

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fui regalato, per che hanno di tutto quello che sonno in le Indie, et che ci habiano condutto, et che ci conducano i spagnoli tutto nascie in quella terra, sempre stettero meco di giorno e di notte, dormii in le loro braccia [?] e mangiai e bevei con loro sempre in compagnia, et nel [crossed out] nel medisemo vaso et in un prato, molte [p. 5] Altre relatione sono qui in Anstderdam No [?S.nr] Camez le mandera a V.S. hauto che li havera, per ora non posso alunghare per imbarcarmi per il Berzil, non me alungharo in altro con q[uesto] solo che al Bersil non vado per Interesso nessuno, e il tempo dirà il tutto ve salom ____

Taking the first of the above questions first, regarding whether Montezinos actually spent time traveling in Nueva Granada, Montezinos/ Levi mentions in this letter other locations on his itinerary, Barancha and Maona, two other towns in Nueva Granada not referred to in the Relación. He also mentions that the Amerindians would travel to the Reubenites’ location by horseback, a journey that took a month. He implies Francisco and he reached a point only two days from the Amazon, an assertion it is difficult to assess. On the one hand, the western headwaters of some of the rivers in the Amazon system indeed near the upper stretches of the Magdalena. He also states that the Reubenites live “in the middle of ” America. The fact that they are bordered by Spanish and Portuguese, as Montezinos says, may suggest that they reside between Brazil and the Spanish colonies to the west of it. On the other hand, it is unclear how accurate Spanish geographic knowledge of the region could have been, much less that possessed by Montezinos himself. Nonetheless, these statements in the letter might imply that Montezinos went farther south (and east?) than we would have thought from the Relación. In the letter Montezinos gives a dating of the Reubenite history in the region: 250 years, at least, since this is how long their arrangement with the Amerindians are said to have lasted. This puts their arrival in the Americas in the 1390s. Clearly this is far earlier than the Columbian ‘discovery,’ which may be an attempt to trump the claims of Spanish Catholics. The date of the Reubenite arrival would thus coincide intriguingly with the persecutions in Spain against the Jews whose violence peaked in 1391. Could Montezinos have known enough history to make this connection? Is this dating just a coincidence?

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In terms of Montezinos’ interactions with the Reubenites, the letter dilvulges (or imagines) more details. The Reubenites continue to speak Hebrew. The letter clarifies that the woman interpreter was one of the Reubenites. Montezinos claims that he stayed with the Reubenites themselves, eating and drinking with them. He describes their simple thatched huts and village, which features a bit of hierarchy, as the ‘better’ families have their huts more separated from the others. None of this, as far as I can see, gets us closer to being able to identify any ‘real’ Amerindian models for these Reubenites. The letter relates a far greater degree of intimacy between Montezinos and the Reubenites: at meals he shares vessels with them, he sleeps in their arms! In certain ways the letter presents an even more fantastic scenario than the Relación. Questions abound. Who this Camez in Amsterdam is I could not determine. If this is indeed the correct spelling, no one of this name with any known significance appears in the Amsterdam municipal archives.17 Does this letter from Montezinos/Levi corroborate the idea I suggest in chapter 9 that he left for Brazil in order to pursue the matter of the Reubenites? Why doesn’t the Relación relate that the Reubenites speak Hebrew or arrived a hundred years before Columbus? Possibly the author(s) of the Relación decline to mention these two last elements because of their seeming illogic. Regarding the question of Montezinos’ authorship of the Relación, the letter does not necessarily resolve things. The text seems fairly incoherent. Perhaps this is because Montezinos does not really know Italian and hence produced a rather garbled document. The Montezinos of the letter adds geographic and narrative detail possibly based on his own real experience(s) in Nueva Granada. But the letter’s author merely could be elaborating—imagining?—somewhat different, even new elements of the story of the Relación, using the Relación itself as a narrative springboard. It might even be that Montezinos’ imaginings simply have become even more fantastical. My feeling is that Montezinos indeed generated the descriptions of both the Relación and the letter, based on a combination of actual experiences and imaginings.

17 I extend my deep thanks to Odette Vlessing of the GAA for searching on my behalf.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations BT exp JT

Babylonian Talmud expediente / file Jerusalem Talmud Archival Sources

AGI

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INDEX

Aboab, Isaac de Matatia, 284 Abravanel, Isaac, 331, 421 Abravanel, Yitz˜ak, 421 Acevedo, Alvaro Rodríquez de, 198 Acosta, Antonio de, 128 Acosta, José de, 108n68, 450n228; Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 380 Acosta, Manuel de, 128, 300 act of faith, public, 173; See also auto de fé Adams, Julia, 48 Adams, Percy, 470 Adorno, Rolena, 398 Afonso Álvares, Auto de São Vicente, 94 African Magic, 143, 144–47; See also Restrepo, Luz Adriana Maya Africans, as topos for ex-Conversos, 343 African sacred objects, 39 Africans in Colonial Mexico (Bennett), 76 Africanus, Leo, 361n70; The History and Description of Africa, 383 Afroamerican, 292 Afroiberian history, and Inquisitional records, 76 Afroiberian religions, 39 Afroiberians: and Catholicism, 39, 43, 44, 197; and crypto-Judaism, 232, 285–89, 291–92, 294; and denunciations by, 98, 101–2, 182; differing cultural norms of, 33n20, 37, 266; and Ethiopian Christianity, 39; and household interreligious dynamics, 219–22; Iberian perception of, 88, 275, 486; and the Inquisition, 76, 77; as judaizers, 285–96, 496; the Mexican Inquisition and, 45; and New Christians, 51; perception of Jews by, 94; religion of in Brazil, 39, 44; religiosity of, 39; religious status of, 40n45, 88, 268; as slaves of the Inquisition, 170, 171–73, 245–47, 275n111; See also Blacks; Marranos; Moriscos; Mulato; slaves Aguado, Pedro de (Friar), 443, 472 Alarcon, Ysabel Alvarez de, 192n84 Alberro, Solange: on Afroiberian religious status, 40n45, 268; on Afroiberians and the Mexican

Inquisition, 45, 45n67; on attraction of Judeoconversos for Afroiberians, 289, 291, 292n31; on crypto-Jews in Mexico, 57, 224n53, 231, 297, 315; on ethno-racial tensions, 274n105; on Simón Váez Sevilla, 191n82; and use of Inquisition records, 11, 12n24, 76 alcaide ( jailor), 245–48, 252n25 Alcoforada, Ana, 235, 242n123 Aldrete, Bernardo José, 360; Varias antiguedades de Espana, Africa y otras provincias, 380 Alencastro, Luis Felipe de, 44 Alfar, Gaspar, 205n131, 206n133, 246, 249, 273n102 Almeida, Jorge de, 205, 205n129 alms/almsgiving: by Jews, 329, 393; by Judeoconversos, 322, 325, 326; by prisoners, 167 al-Mûsili, Elias, on Cartagena, 167 Alonso, Álveraz, 275n107 alumbrar (divine illumination), 328n191 alumbrados (false mystics), 39, 291, 294 Amaia, Diego Fernandez de, 248 America (Galle engraving), 414 Amerindians: adoption of native foods/ medicines of, 146; blood purity laws and, 88n6; colonial status of, 27, 41; conditions for, 370, 401, 449; dramas commemorating Spanish conquest, 446; Dutch alliance with, 447–48; and emerald mining, 449; fear of rebellion of, 446; Iberian perception of, 114–16, 370, 375; influence of, 146n106, 209; mestizos and, 65; missionizing to, 413n115; mohanes and, 439, 444; as mystical Jews, 467; as noble savages, 466; as Others/Outsiders, 372, 377–78; and perception of the Spanish, 431; Potosí and, 465; rebellions, 446–47; religion of and the Inquisition, 403, 443–44; resistance of Europeans by, 448; Sephardic perception of, 338, 339, 369, 376–77; similarity with Marranos, 449–50; subversion of system by, 484; the Suprema and, 88n6;

542

index

Sweet on, 233; theory of origins of, 402, 409; tropes regarding, 369; See also Reubenites/Amerindians; tribes, Indian Amor con vista, i cordura. Comedia famosa (Gómez), 345n22 Amsterdam: and Antonio de Montezinos, 389, 393; as Dutch Jerusalem, 386; Roth on, 386–87; Sephardic community in, 53, 67, 93 Ana María (of Jamacia), 131 Andean culture: adoption of native food/medicine, 146n106; religious practices in, 403, 430, 438; women’s role in, 441; See also tribes, Indian Anderson, Benedict, 391n47 Ángeles, Francisco de los (Friar), 431–32 Angola: New Christians in, 148, 149, 150; and slave trade in, 66, 149, 164 Angola, Juan, 204 Anidjar, Gil, 484, 487 anthropological space, 9 anti-Portuguese hysteria, 125, 278–79, 449 Antunes, Beatriz, 234, 236, 242n123 Antunes, Diego, 320 Antunes, Heitor (husband of Ana Rodrigues), 237, 240 Antunes, Isabel, 234, 242n123, 319; See also Lianor Antunes, Manuel, 299 Antunes, Violante, 235 Antunes, Ysavel, 308 Antunes family: denunciation and condemnation of, 236, 240; and Enriquez family by relationship, 314, 319; and mourning practices, 235; voluntary confession of, 236, 240 Apollonius, Saint, 181n40 Arama, Yits˜ak, 8n15, 465 Araucana, La, 448 Arias, Diego López, 151 Arias de Fonseca, Estaban de, 397 Aristotle, 361 Arius (heresiarch), 135 arms, denial of right to bear, 275, 415 Arroyo, Gaspar Méndez del, 188 Arroyuelos, Spain, 65 Asad, Talal, 501 Ashkenazic, 382n12 asiento (slave contract), 122, 278, 365–66 Assis, Yom-Tov, 107 Atahuallpa (Inca emperor), 446

Atlas, of Joan Blaeu, 340, 341n10 auto de fé: in Cartagena de las Indies, 125, 134, 141, 160, 166, 174–75, 407, 451; in Córdoba, Spain, 106, 294; general details of, 99, 173, 175, 176; in Granada, Spain, 192; Inquisition slaves role in, 173, 177; in Lima, Peru, 176, 270, 396, 451; in Lisbon, Portugal, 89, 118, 288; in Madrid, Spain, 279; in Mexico City, Mexico, 267, 280, 289, 308, 311, 332; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 289; in Seville, Spain, 41, 65n131, 80, 88n6, 163–64, 184–86, 247, 286, 332, 451n229; as social event, 178; See also names of individuals accused Auto de São Vicente (Álvares), 94 Auto general de la fee celebrada (Bocanegra), 356n55 Avendaño, Fernando de, 6 Aventroot, Joan, 448 Avila, Francisco de, 6 Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma de, 431n165, 482 Azevedo, J. Lúcio de, 75, 424n140 Badajoz, Spain, 178, 199, 213 Baena, Juan Alfonso de, 368n93 Baer, Yitzhak, 75 Bahia, Brazil: the Inquisition in, 189, 191, 219; map of, 22; as a place of spiritual turmoil, 109–10; profile of social boundaries in, 232–44; and self-emancipation, 500; slaves in, 189, 233; sugar mills in, 51, 68, 237 Bahian Recôncavo (map), 21 Baiáo, Antonio, 425n143 Bal, Mieke, 485n21 Ballesteros, Carmen, 422n133 Baltazar (slave), deposition of, 222, 225 Bandarra, Gonçalo Anes: and messianic prophesies, 424, 425; Trovas, 454 Baptisa, Maria, testimony regarding Juana Enriquez by, 305 Barassa, Diogo, 148n111 Barassa, Tomás Rodrigues, 148n111 Barbosa, António, 180n38 Barcelona, Spain, 74, 80n172 barefoot friars, 413 Bar Æiyya, Abraham: Æibbur ha-Meshikhah ve-ha-Tishboret, 61; Megillat ha-Megalleh, 61 Barnai, Ya’akov, 421n130 Baroja, Julio Caro, 424n140

index Barreta, Joanna, 288 Barreto, Luis Gomes: and assistance by slaves after torture, 247; charges against, 127, 128, 185; and Juan de Uriarte, 163, 281 Barrios, Daniel Levi (Miguel de): Coro de las musas, 340; “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico y de America”, 340; on origins of Jews, 360–61; poems of, 344–45, 347–48, 349–51, 353–55, 373; writings of, 54, 286n11, 338, 341n11, 342n14, 359–61 Barrios, Miguel de: Piratas de la America, 342n14; writings of, 342n14 Bartolomé (slave), 143 Bassan, Jorge Jacinto, 268 Bastardo, Pedro, 64 Bastidas, Rodrigo de, 395 Battista, Giovanni, 66; See also religions, transferring between Bautista Peréz, Manuel, 491n42; and African languages, 271; and Blas de Paz Pinto, 124, 147; 148n11, 152; defense of, 190; jail communications of, 250; letter to, 116 Bayén, Carlos de, 95 Bazán, Nicolás, 293 Beatriz (slave), 194, 198, 212 Becerra, Blanca (slave), 293 Behar, Ruth, 76, 77n160 Beinart, Haim: on Jewish practices in Ciudad Real, 8n15, 183n45, 225n55, 227, 229; on Judeoconversos, 75; on use of slaves for intimidation, 211n7 Beja, Portugal, false denunciations in, 287–88 Belinchón, López, 396n69 Belmonte, Manuel de, 366 Belmonte, Moseh, 53 Beltrán, Fray Luis, 115 Beltrán, Gonzalo Aguirre, 146n106 Benbassa, Esther, 385n21 Ben Israel, Menasseh, 468 Bennett, Herman, 30, 32, 45; Africans in Colonial Mexico, 76 Bere˜ya, Rabbi Aharon, Ma’avar Yabbok, 241 Berger, Shlomo, 393n53, 399 Bible, 429 bio-politics, 5; See also caste system bipolar slavery, 44; See also Afroiberians; Amerindians; slaves; slave trade Bird of Light (avelut), 306

543

Blackmore, Josiah, 433; on European perception of swimming, 211n9, 464n275; use of shipwreck narratives by, 9, 148n113, 211n9 Blacks: and burlesque, 348; and Cartagena de Las Indies Inquisition, 45n67; as Christian neophytes, 40; conflict over religion of, 182; definition of, 337; and endogamy, 31; European perceptions of, 27, 343; and Ham (Biblical), 346, 347; languages and origins of, 36; literature regarding, 352, 363–64; and self-identity of, 25, 85, 358; stereotypes of, 36, 345–46, 348, 349, 350–51; See also Afroiberians; Inquisition, the; Mulato; slaves Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 379 Blaeu, Joan, cartography of, 340 Blandón, Francisco Lopez (Ferrasas), 224 blasphemy: Inquisition charges concerning, 44, 45n65, 66, 79, 89–90, 104, 294; and sacrilegious actions, 486 blood purity: and discourse concerning, 25–26, 83, 93; statutes regarding, 68, 107–8, 114; See also caste system; limpieza de sangre Bocanegra, Mathias de, Auto general de la fee celebrada, 356n55 Bodian, Miriam, 55 Boemus, Joannes, 406 Boer, Harm den, 474n315; Nuevo Atlas del reyno de Inglaterra, 341n10 Bogotá, Colombia, 449 Bohorques, Pedro, 471 Bolivia, Amerindians, 446 Bolibar, Don Joseph de, 164 Bonet, Bartolomé Escandell (ed.), Historia de la inquisición en España y América, 395 Borges, Bento Jorge, 66: See also Inquisition, the; religions, transferring between Borja, Juan de (Governor), 447 Bosque, Isabel, 333 Bosque, Juana Rodríquez del, 297, 327, 333 Bosque, Juan Baptista del (husband of Esperanza Rodriguez), 301 Bosque, María Rodríquez del (daughter of Esperanza Rodriguez), 297, 333–34

544

index

Botello, Francisco: penitenced in auto de fé, 206; and slaves, 171, 205; execution of, 206n134 Bourdieu, Pierre, 488, 499 Bowser, Frederick, 40 Boxer, Charles R., 122 Boyajian, 148n111 bozales (unacculturated African slaves), 220; See also slaves Brandão, Ambrósio Fernandes: Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, 213, 344, 370, 375, 375n117; on New World conquests, 352 Brazil: Afroiberan religion in, 39, 44; and Amerindian tribes in, 370; Brandão on, 213, 344, 370, 375; Judeoconversos in, 69; laws regarding intermarriage in, 105n57; map of, 21; mocambo and quilombo repression, 445; New Christians and, 50, 71, 232; New/Old Christians in, 68, 69; Olinda, 118; Portuguese Inquisition in, 45n67, 60, 74, 96, 232, 243, 279, 288; Republic of Palmares, 445; Rio de Janeiro, 49, 57, 69, 289; Salvador, 96; slaves, 445; slaves in, 233, 381, 445; sugar plantations in, 51, 51n85, 213, 233; tribes of, 372, 375–76 Bregoli, Francesca, 508 Brooks, Andrée Aelion, 180 brujería/brujo/brujas, definition of, 121, 131, 144 Brujería y reconstrucción de identidades entre los africanos y sus descendientes en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII (Restrepo), 76 Buenos Aires (Spanish), 50, 280, 467 Bugalho, Gil Vaz, 228, 231 burial practices: of Cartagena de las Indias, 372; of crypto-Jews, 234, 305–6, 312; on Enriquez, Blanca, 312n120; Galindo, Manual, 241; Jewish law, 229, 230; of Judeoconversos, 229, 241, 312; slaves and, 197, 197n97; use of shrouds, 241 burlesque, rolls of Blacks in, 348 burning at the stake: See sentence, death Burns, Kathryn, 492 Cabo Verde Islands: crypto-Judaism in, 113, 113n91; interaction with local African culture, 112, 210n3,

500; Judeoconversos in, 50, 62, 111; Judeoconversos in the, 41; as place of exile, 65 Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 342n14 Cabrera, Adriana Ruíz de, 35 Caceres, Iosepho de: global survey of, 374; writings of, 340, 341n11 Cacheu, West Africa, 148n111, 218 caciques: and mohanes, 437, 438; native tribal leaders, 432, 436, 441, 471; and Reubenites/Amerinidians, 437; training of, 441 Calchaquí tribe, 471n302 Caldeira, Manuel, 491n42 Calima tribe, 439, 472 Callao, Peru, 454 Camões, Luis de, Comentarios a la Lusiada de Luis de Camoes, 380 Canary Islands, 42, 43, 51, 74, 96, 193, 209 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 448 cannibalism, charges of, 472 Cano, Andrés, 293 Cantimpré, Thomas de, 134 Caravallo, Manuel Nuñez, 324 Cardigo, Pero, 96 Cardoso, Isaac, 16, 371, 372, 424 Carlebach, Elisheva, 422n133 Carlos V of Castile, King, 43, 431, 459n262 Carmen Convent (Mexico City), 313 Carmona, Alonso de (Friar), 187 Cartagena de las Indias, 13–14; 1630 list of foreigners in, 149; Afroiberians and slaves in, 36; escape of slaves and rebellions, 445; government corruption allegations in, 281–82; importance of, 121–23; native burial practices in, 372; and role in slave trade, 122, 406; See also auto de fé; Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of; Peru, Spanish Viceroyalty of Cartagena de las Indias Inquisition: anti-Portuguese hysteria and, 125; and Antonio de Montezinos, 397; auto de fé of, 125, 134, 141, 160, 166, 174–75, 407, 451; corruption allegations of the, 163, 216; denunciations to the, 121, 125–27, 281, 287; escape and rebellion of slaves in, 445; the Great Conspiracy and, 449, 451; and illicit jail communications, 272; magic and the, 160; prosecutions by the, 52n90; slaves of the, 247, 248; the Suprema

index and the, 185; tabulation of Pintos sequestered goods by the, 154–55; testimony to the, 31, 35, 37, 427 Cartago, Costa Rica, 462n271 Carvajal, Ana de Leon, 91 Carvajal family, 200, 283 Carvajal, Franscisca de, 294 Carvajal, Leonor de (sister of Luís de Carvajal), 283 Caravajal, Luis de, 375 Carvajal, Luis de (the younger), 201 Carvajal y de la Cueva, Luis de, 68 Carvalho, Francisco Moreno de, 418 Casas, Bartolomé de Las, 429 Cassanga, Juana, 181 Castellanos, Juan, 416 Castelli, Elizabeth, 492 Castelló, Vidal Abril, 480; Francisco de la Cruz, Inquisición, actas, 30n11 caste system: Amerindians and, 88; assumptions of, 5–6; and categories created by, 34, 38–39, 42, 175; ethnographic state and, 2; European perceptions regarding, 343; Iberian society and, 25–26; Judeoconversos and, 343; racial identity produced through, 26, 30, 31; regional differences in inheritance of, 38; as related to blood purity laws, 25; speculative nature of, 39; tensions as a consequence of the, 10; as theo-politics, 169; used to define Self and the Other, 7; See also limpieza de sangre Castile, Spain: missionaries to Peru from, 431; Portuguese rebellion against, 274; re-establishment of the Inquisition in, 74; slaves and servants in, laws regarding, 179n33 Castilian Inquisition: accused Marranos by the, 90, 180, 199n105, 226, 290; Judeoconversos and the, 50, 229; See also Inquisition, the castizos, 28 Castrejon, Francisco Ruíz de, 318 Castro, Ioam de, 426 Castro, Isaac Orobrio, 380 Castro, Izaque de, 223 Castro y del Castillo, Antonio de, 272 Catalina (slave of Pedro de Villareal), 183 Catalina (slave of Maria de Campos), 285 Catalina de Moya (Castile), 69

545

categories: racial and ethnic, 29; use of in creating racial identities, 25–26; See also caste system; ethno-racial identity; social engineering Catherine, Queen (Portugal), 188 Certeau, Michel de, 431n165, 484, 485 Cervantes, Miguel de, Six Exemplary Novels, 355n52 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Six Exemplary Novels, 355n52 charitable institutions, 129, 130, 138n74 charity: See alms/almsgiving Chaunu, Pierre, 81 Chibcha tribe: language of, 427–28, 439, 439n188; mohans of, 443n202; and mythology of, 431, 472–73 Christianity: and Africans, 295; conversion to as upward mobility, 296; globalization of, 4; Judeoconversos and relation to, 56; See also religions Chumillas, Sebastián de, 123 Church of Our Lady of Conceição, 96 Ciénaga de los Manzanillos, 145 cimarrón (runaway slave), 45, 443 circumcision: crypto-Jews and, 223, 224n51; Ethiopian Christian practice of, 110; Judeoconversos and the, 87; West African practice of, 112 Cisneros, Francisco Ximénez de, 409n106 Ciudad Real, Spain, 8n15, 183, 183n45, 225, 227, 229 Class at the Cathedral of Good Taste, A (Gómez), 354 class consciousness, perception of, 289, 290 Claver, Pedro (Priest), 40, 123, 153n140, 166 cobbler’s guild (Guatemala), 41n49 Cogolludo, Spain, 179 Cohen, Martin, 383 Cohen, Shaye J.D., Diasporas in Antiquity, 8n15 Coimbra Inquisition, 70 Colima tribe, 432, 472 Colombia, maps of, 20 colonialism: Amerindians colonial status, 27, 41; East India Company, 381, 382; and images of Blacks and Amerindians, 378; literary tributes of, 340–42; and post-traumatic cultural symptoms, 489; power relations with natives, 435–36

546

index

Columbus, 409, 419, 450n228 Comentarios a la Lusiada de Luis de Camoes (Souza), 380 Conçepçion, Maria de la, 97n34 Concilios, Mexico and Peru, 44 concubinage, 105n105, 107, 284–85 confession, Inquisition: of Ana Alcoforada, 235, 242n123; of Antunes family, 236, 240; of Beatriz Enríquez, 234; of Blas de Pas Pinto, 128, 129, 166; of Custódia, 234; of Diego de la Cruz, 289–90; of Diego López, 131, 160; of Fernandes, Nuño, 235, 238; of Gaspar de Robles, 149; of Isabel Antunes, 234, 319; of Leonor de Carvajal, 283; of Lianor, 234, 235, 242n123; of Manuél Prieto, 149; and slaves, 290; See also Inquisition, the; torture Confusion of Confusions (Vega), 54, 365, 367 Conquest of New Granada (Freile), 426n148 conquista de México, La (Gomez/ Castronovo), 342n14 conquistador: Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, 419, 442, 446, 473, 474; Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, 68; Martín Fernández de Enciso, 450n228 Consolaçam as Tribulaçoens de Israel (Usque), 383, 384n19 Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (Usque), 383, 384n19 Conspiracy of Beja, 287–88 contraband trade, Spanish, 277 Conversos: Africans as topos for former, 343; definition of, 1; early New Spain demographics and, 49–50; European ethnocentrism and, 374; and European ethnographic discourse, 377; messianic hopes of, 453; and trade, 52; See also crypto-Jews; judaizing; Judeoconversos; Marranos Copacabana, Bolivia, 116 Cope, R. Douglas, 6, 28, 30, 155 Cordoba Inquisition, 185, 294 Córdoba Membreque, Alonso de, messianic prophesies, 427 Coro de las musas (Barrios), 340 corpses (washing of ), 229 Correia, João Nunes, testimony against, 221 Corvera, Juan Bautista, 215, 466

Costa, Francisca da, deposition against Lianor Antunes, 243 Costa, Joáo Cardoso da, Musa Pueril, 364n79 Costa, Manoel da, 67; See also religions, transferring between Council of Trent, 39 Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastían de: Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española, 64 Covilhã (Portugal), 188 creole identity, 62; See also Amerindians; Judeoconversos; Mulato Criado, Pilar Huerga, 178, 199, 212 criolla (creole), 35 Criolla, Ysavel: social network of, 258; testimony by, 250–51, 257, 263, 263n62, 270; torture of, 187n62 cristãos novos, 41n48 cristianos nuevos, 46; See also New Christians Cromwell, Oliver, 456, 458 Crusader kingdom, 61 Cruz, Antonia de la (slave): involvement in Peralta jail correspondence by, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263; sentence of, 265; testimony by, 204, 257n35, 258 Cruz, Augustina de la, accused of converting to crypto-Judaism, 224 Cruz, Diego de la, confession of, 289–90 Cruz, Francisco de la (Dominican Friar): on Amerindians, 419n124; anti-establishment mysticism of, 318, 409, 427n151, 467; on Blacks, 191, 205n130; execution of, 109; on salvation, 43; visions of, 146n106, 205n130 Cruz, Francisco de la (slave of Simon Vaez Sevilla), 215, 249; defense of, 257n34 Cruz, Juana Ines de la: El Divino Narciso, 466n285; Maitinesde la Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora, 364n79 Cruz, Maria de la (Maria de Armijo), 291 crypto-Jews, 38, 47n71; accusations against, 279, 486; burial practices of, 234, 241, 305–6, 312; circumcision by, 223; Diego Lopez and, 131; judaizing of slaves by, 194–95, 232; in Mexico, 57, 224n53, 252, 315; Old Christian theories regarding, 135; perception of Black slaves by, 90; race and social status among, 323–24;

index and ritual impurity, 242; role outside Iberian lands, 47; self-identity of, 55, 338; slaves, 222, 224, 234–35, 244; and slaves of Inquisition tribunals, 171, 172, 251; social pressures and, 70; Solange Alberro on, 57, 224n53, 231, 297, 315; unauthorized status of, 49; See also Judeoconversos; Marranos crypto-Judaism: accusation of practicing, 215; and Afroiberians, 232, 285–89, 291–92, 294; and household interreligious dynamics, 101, 219; See also Ciudad Real, Spain Cuba, mixed race militia in, 34n23 Cueva, Luis de Carvajal y de la, 453 cultural commuters, religious, 56, 65–67, 146, 146n106, 483; See also religions cultural intermediaries, 190, 192n83 Cumaná (island), 374 Curaçao (Caribbean), Sephardic concubinage on, 284–85 Custódia (daughter of Beatriz Antunes), confession of, 234 Dán, Róbert, 8n15 David, (Rabbi of Narbonne), 61 De’ah, Yoreh, Turei Zahav, 233 Dedieu, Jean Pierre, 77 Denis, Amaro, 128 denunciations, Inquisition: of Afroiberians, 102; of judaizers, 96–97, 100, 215, 236; possible motivations for, 132, 155, 157, 180, 195–99; role of, 78; and servants, 178; by slaves, 179; torture and, 186–87; See also Antunes family; confession, Inquisition; Enríquez family; Mexico City Inquisition; Pas Pinto, Blas de; torture dEscovar, Lucas, 235 “Descripcion de las Islas del Mar Atlantico y de America” (Barrios), 340 desecration, accusations of, 104, 487–89 De Termino Vitae (ben Israel), 386–87 Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil (Brandão), 213, 344, 370, 375, 375n117 Dias, Branca, 220 Dias, Manuel, 123 Dias, Maria Odila Leite Silva, 269 diaspora, Portuguese, 277 Diaspora of Castille, 383

547

Diasporas in Antiquity (Cohen and Frerichs [eds.]), as a charge, 8n15 Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo, 339n4, 497 Diego, Juan: reclamation of his real identity, 463; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 461, 462, 463 Diogo de Montenegro, 89, 177 discourse, anti-establishment Iberian, 318 dominant elite and subalterns, 483, 484, 485 domination, effects of, 489 Domingo, Sebastián (Munguía): background of, 252; final accusation and sentence of, 266–67, 273; involvement in Peralta jail correspondence by, 256, 260, 261, 262 Dominican Order, 74 Dominquez, Luisa, 157 Doria, Manuel Gonçalves, 289 Drake, Francis, 275 Duarte, Pedro, 148n111, 154 Duarte, Sebastião, 147, 152 Duarte, Violante, 128 Durán, Diego (Friar), 402 Dury, John, 390, 457 Dutch/Amerindian alliance, attempts of, 447–48 Dutch East India Company, 380–81 Dutch Republic, 380, 386 Dutch West India Company, 161, 166 Earle, T.F., Auto de São Vicente, 94 East India Company, 381 Echevarría, Roberto González, 398 economy, spiritual, 492 edictos de fé, 126, 129 Edicts of Faith: Cartagena Inquisitors on the, 138n73; perceptions of to the, 183n45; role of the, 82, 98n35, 98n37, 182, 228, 236, 239n106 Efron, Noah, 382, 382n12 Eguiluz, Paula de, 145, 160, 167n197, 209; as African spiritual/magical practitioner, 131, 139, 144n97; charges from first trial of, 145; conviction of by Inquisition, 146n104; Diego López and, 159; magical gatherings of, 155; reconciliation of and auto de fé, 166, 167 Eimeric, Nicolau, Directorium Inquisitorum, 183 Eimerich, Nicolas, 175

548

index

Elbogen, Ismar, 404n96 Eliezer (Rabbi), 371 Elizondo, Virgil, 461 Eltis, David, 337n1 Encarnación, Marta de la, 144n97 Encío, María de, 103, 179 Enciso, Martín Fernández de, 450n228 encomenderos (license to Amerindian labor/tribute), 395 endogamy, 31, 57, 68 engenhos (sugar mills), 51, 232, 233; See also sugar mills England: readmittance of the Jews, petition for, 456, 458, 458n258; See also millenarianism, development of Enríquez family, 250, 308, 309, 320–21; judaizing activities of the, 319 Enríquez, Beatriz, 252; African langugage and, 268; almsgiving by, 69, 204, 322; almsgiving of, 212; confession of, 285; testimony by, 203n122, 204, 212, 230, 246, 258, 261–63, 264, 304–5, 307 Enriquez, Blanca: on burial preparation for, 312n120; as Marrano leader, 202, 212; testimony on, 98, 200–201, 202, 302–3; on torture, 479 Enríquez, Catalina (wife of Pedro Arias Maldonado), 301 Enríquez, Catalina (daughter of Ynes Lopez), 310–11 Enríquez, Juana: and messianic hopes of for son, 307, 328n191; outburst of, 191; and slaves, 204, 210, 212, 269n91; testimony of, 230n73, 259, 260, 304n77, 305, 307, 312, 326–27; See also Sevilla, Simon Váez Enríquez, Rafaela, 210, 215, 268, 290 Enríquez, Thomas Nuñez, 221 Enriquez o Tinoco, Catalina, 298n51 Epístolas y evangelios para todo el año (Montesinos), 395, 395n67 Erauso, Catalina de, 7, 29 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonsus de, La Araucana, 448 Esperança de Israel, 508–11 Esperanza, Isabel de (slave of Sevilla and Enriquez), 210 Espinosa, Montero de, 286n11 Espinosa, Simon Suarez de, 320 Espíritu Santo (hospital), 130 Esther, Queen (Biblical), fast of, 237, 304, 311 Ethiopia, and roots of language of, 360

Ethiopian Christianity, 39, 108–9, 110 ethnicity: and gender, 34n22; and identity, 55; See also ethno-racial identity ethnocentrism, European, norms of, 374–75 ethnographic discourse, European, 377, 470 ethnographic state, 2 ethnology, Christianocentric, 4, 49, 373 ethno-racial identity, 25–26, 28, 30 ethno-racial tensions, 274–75 Eupraxia, Saint, 181n40 Europe, literary critique of, 353 Évora, Portugal: and the Conspiracy of Beja, 287–88; Inquisition in, 100, 241, 422n133 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians (Scott), 380 execution, as sentence, 80n172, 177n28, 180n38, 279, 291; burned in effigy, 240, 308; of Diogo de Montenegro, 88, 117, 177; of Enriquez family members, 308; of Francisco Botello, 206n134; of Francisco Maldonado de Silva, 98n37, 270; of Friar Francisco de la Cruz, 409; of Lope de Vera y Alarcón, 423; of Manuel Alvarez Prieto, 167n197; of slaves and servants, 174; standard for mohans, 444; See also sentence Faleiro, Nicolao, 243 false mystics, 39, 294, 450n228 False Mystics ( Jaffary), 144n97, 294n39, 450n228 “familial states”, colonial powers as, 48 Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks, 81 Faria, Ignes de, 231 Faria, Sebastião de, 234, 238 Faria y Sousa, Manuel de, 380 fasting: as crypto-Jewish practice, 128, 237, 304, 311, 312, 320–21; mohan initiation and, 438 Faur, José, 56 fazenda (private farm), 233 feitiçaria (witchcraft), 69 Felipe I, King, 483 Felipe II, King, 68, 75 Felipe III, King, 61n115; and Cabo Verde as place of exile, 65; decree on Portuguese foreigners by, 279, 280–81; and royal asientos, 278; and Santa María family, 68

index Felipe IV, King, 137, 274 Ferdinando, King, 74 Fernandes, Catarina, 177, 191 Fernandes, Catharine, 95 Fernandes, Francisco, 195 Fernandes, Gaspar, 237 Fernández, Bartolomé, 183n45 Fernandez, Manuel Tejado, 171 Fernando III, King, 341n11 Ferrer, Saint Vincent, 115 Ferrerín, Antonio Rodríguez, 128 Ferry, Robert, 204n124, 207, 212, 280 fetish objects, 39 Few, Martha, 76, 96 “Fides, Religio, Moresque Aethiopum sub Imperio Preciosi Joannis” (1540), 109 Fieschi, Sinibaldo (Pope Innocent IV), 428 Flor de Apolo (Barrios), 348 Folz, Hans, 452 Fonseca, Ishac Aboab da (Isaac), 348, 359, 388 Fonseca, Manuel de, 128 Fonseca, Maria da, 188 Fonseca Enríquez, Manuel de, 126, 161, 161n176 forbidden religion: See Islam; Marranos Foster, Hal, 433 Foucault, Michel, 501 Frances, Alvaro Gonçalves, 407n103 Francés, Manoel Bocarro, 418 Franciscan Order, 75, 431, 465, 468 Francisco (slave of Simon Váez Sevilla), 215, 250–51 Francisco (guide of Montezinos), 400, 411–12, 415, 435–36, 437, 475–76 Franco, Matheus Lopes, 91 Fraternity of Holland, 161, 162 Freile, Juan Rodríguez, 177n28, 426 Frerichs, Ernest S., Diasporas in Antiquity, 8n15 friars, barefoot, 413 Friede, Juan, 477 Funkenstein, Amos, 450n228 Gabilho, Daniel, 66; See also Inquisition, the Galindo, Manual, accused of Jewish burial customs, 241 Gallagher, Catherine, 11, 488 Gama, Vasco da, 342n14 Gamliel, Rabban, 241 García, Gregorio, 368n93

549

García, Luis, 87n3 García-Arenal, Mercedes, 402n89, 406n101, 422n133, 424n139, 425n143, 469 Garofalo, Leo J., 146n106 Gauguin, Paul, Noa Noa, 433 gender, 414; assumptions of, 65; and ethnicity, 34n22; and identity, 58; issues regarding, 486; slave status determined by, 38 genealogy, importance of, 412 Genesis Rabbah (50:11), 53 gentios (pagan), 64 Giglio, Girolamo, 406 Ginzburg, Carlos, 10n19, 81 Gitlitz, David, 62 Glick, Thomas F., 55, 56, 71, 72 globalization and the dominant elite, 482; See also subalterns Goizueta, Roberto S., 464 Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), 72 Goldish, Matt, 416n120, 453, 454n241 Goldsmiths’ Guild (Portugal), 41n49 Gómez, Abraham (Diego), writings of, 338 Gómez, Antonio Enríquez: Amor con vista, i cordura. Comedia famosa, 345n22; El siglo pitagórico y vida de don Gregorio Guadaña, 347n24; La conquista de México, 342n14; La torre de Babilonia, 353n43; millenarianism, development of, 454n244; To One’s Word, 362; and Peru, 340n7; poetry of, 354–55; religious identity of, 338, 378; Romance al divín mártyr, Judá Creyente, 353, 451; themes of, 340; Vida de Don Gregorio Guadaña, 352; works of, 340; writings of, 341n11, 342n14, 353–55, 357n58, 362 Gómez, Ceballos, 140, 143, 157, 160, 427; on group interactions, 138–39; on surveillance of slaves, 189, 190 Gomez, Christoval, 205 Gómez, Diana Luz Ceballo, 76; on mobility of servants, 133; on the term mohan, 439, 439n189 Gómez, Rafael, 132, 141 Gonçales, Alvaro, 209, 222 Góngora, Luis de, 368 Gonzãlez, María, 183, 226 Gorenstein, Lina, 57, 69 Górez, Ysabel, 283 Graetz, Heinrich, 387 Graizbord, David, 67, 73, 79, 490

550

index

Gramaxo, António Nunes, 124, 125 Granada, Gabriel de, 203, 204n123 Granada, Manuel de, 299 Granada, Spain: Inquisition in, 74, 192, 192n84; magical practices in, 181n41; Moriscos in, 35, 483n14 gran complicidad (Great Conspiracy): Cartagena de las Indias Inquisition and, 449, 459; Judeoconversos and the, 415; in Lima, Peru, 449; in Mexico City, Mexico, 449; and the Suprema, 451n229, 452 Green, Tobias, 62, 113n90, 500 Greenblatt, Stephen, 11, 420, 488 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 501n65 Gross, Avraham, 421n128 Guadalajara, Mexico, 50 Guadalupe, Spain, 58 Guadalupe Mexico: See Virgin of Guadalupe Guatemala, Santiago de, 483 Guevara, Antonio de (Bishop), 459n262 guides, importance to the conquistadores, 475 Guide to the Perplexed (Maimonides), 87 guilds, 41, 41n49, 59, 170n4 Guillamas, Ana de, 291 Guiné, 50, 111, 113n90, 218, 467 Guiomar (slave), 100–101 Guiomar (murderess, Cartagena), 143 Guzmán, Guillén Lombardo (William Lampart), 277n116 Æibbur ha-Meshikhah ve-ha-Tishboret (Bar Hiyya), 61 HaDani, Eldad, 421 halakha, 228, 235, 242 Ha-Levi, Abraham ben Eliezer, 422 Ha-Leví, Salomón, 68, 425n145 Ha-Levi, Yehudah, 61 Hall, Stuart, 28 Ham (Biblical): images related to, 358, 359; Jewish genealogical linkages to, 360 Hamburg, 59 Ha-Nasi, Yehuda, 317 Harbison, Robert, 9 Hawkins, Richard, 418 hegemonic discourse, 85, 378, 482 Henriques, Diogo Nunes, 220 Henriques, Simão Vaz, 116 Henriquez, Manuel de Fonseca, 281 Herbas, Pedro de, 194 Heredia, Francisco de, 128 Hernandez, Maria, 309–10

Hernández, Marie Theresa, 463n274, 480 Herrera, Cristóbal de, 466 Hiltunen, Juha, 396n70 Historia de la inquisición en España y América (Villanueva and Bonet), 395n67 Historia eclesiástica indiana (Mendieta), 429n157 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Acosta), 380 History and Description of Africa, The (Africanus), 383 Holy Bible, verses from, 429, 430 Holy Office of the Inquisition, 73; See also Inquisition, the; names of individual inquisitions Holy Orders, Catholic, Africans and, 40 Honda, Quito, 400 Hordes, Stanley, 70, 277n116 Horowitz, Elliott: Marrano violence against Christian icons, 485, 487, 487n31, 488; on myth of male menses, 134n62 Hortensia, Juana de, 151, 151n125 Hortensio, Juan, 181 Hortensio, Juana, 131 hospital service, as sentence, 138n74 household interreligious dynamics, 193–96, 198 Hoyo, Eugenio del, 50 Huarta, Gerónimo de la (or Gómez de Huarta), 137 Huarte, Juan, 360–61, 362n74 Humada, Fernández de, 218 Iberian penisula: ‘Jewish question’ of, 49–50; society, elements of, 36, 48 Iberians: and Amerindian perception of, 114, 116, 175, 370; and Black perception of, 88, 275, 486; and limpieza de sangre, 410; perception of Jews/Judeoconversos, 107–8, 126; racial hiearchy and caste system, 25–26; scholars, 75 Ibn Verga, Solomon (Shlomo), 137, 373, 421 identity: creole, 62; and gender, 58; as multiplicity, 495; racial, 25–26, 28, 30, 31–35, 37–39, 55–57, 73, 85–86, 338, 362; religious, 55; See also creole identity identity of, and Afroiberians, 33n20 idol houses, 39 ilusos (false mystics), 39

index immigration, 5, 122, 280 imprisonment, sentence of: escape from, 215; four-year, 106n60, 286; payment for, 215; perpetual, 161, 166, 167n197, 215, 272, 289, 332, 333, 334, 396; six-months, 333; three-year imprisonment, 160; two-year, 186n59; See also sentence Inca, Manco, warning against Spanish, 465 Inca Empire, 446 indios cimarrónes (rebellious Amerindians), 434, 435, 471 Infantes, Don Ferdinando de las, 295 infanticide, as resistance and element of medico-magical practice, 145n103 Innocent IV (Pope), 428 Innocent IV (Sinibaldo Fieschi), 428 Inquisition, Seville, Spain, 286 Inquisition, the: and Afroiberians, 77, 98, 182, 318; in Brazil, 45n67, 232; defendents and denunciations to, 78–79, 96, 143; denunciations to, 219; distribution of, 74; documentation, question of, 36, 75, 77, 81, 82; equalitarian nature of, 184; ethnographic surveillance of, 74–75; examples of prosecutions by, 66, 79, 258–66; general details related to, 79, 332; interrogations by, 78, 264; Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and, 51, 60, 76; Judeoconversos, Afroiberians, and, 77; Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and, 77; Lope de Vega and, 29; as machinery of the state, 11; New World, role in, 39; as an observing entity, 142; in Portugal, 73, 74; in Portugual, 100–101, 108; re-establishment of, 46, 74; as reflection of mass hypnosis, 81; and role in protection of slaves, 77; role of in the New World, 39; slaves of, 14, 169, 171, 189, 257–58, 269, 270, 282; surveillance, importance for, 189, 191; target of, 74–75; torture and, 78, 79, 264; Valencia, Spain, 74; See also auto de fé; confession, Inquisition; execution, as sentence; names of regional Inquisitions; torture inquisitional records, and modern use of, 76, 77, 82 Insulana (Thomas), 342n14 insurrection, fear of, 275–76; See also rebellions intermarriage, racial, 105n56

551

interracial sex, 104–7, 283; See also social engineering interreligious dynamics, household, 190, 196 Irish slave ownership, 483 Isabella, Queen (Castile), 74 Islam, 26, 61, 293; See also Moriscos Israel, Jonathan, 40, 59, 149n117, 506; Nuevo Atlas del reyno de Inglaterra, 341n10 Israel, Joseph ben, 386; See also Israel, Menasseh ben Israel, Menasseh ben: Antonio de Montezinos and, 388; on charges of Jewish idolatry and the Torah, 371; Conciliador, 380, 381; early life of, 386–87; and Esperanca de Israel, 468; rejection of Israelite/Indian connection, 376, 466; and the Relaçion, 390, 399, 456n250, 474; Spanish Atlas of Janssonius, 340n8; writings of, 338, 340 Isreal, Jonathan, 187, 277, 367n90 Itamaracá, Brazil, 69 Itinerario de las missiones que hizo . . . en varias missiones del India Oriental (Sebastian Manrique), 380 Itinerary (Varthema), 383 Jacinta (slave), 189 Jaffary, Nora, 39 jail communications, illegal, 272 jail servants/slaves, 170, 245, 249 Janssonius, Spanish Atlas of, 340 Jewes in America (Thorowgood), 389; See also millenarianism, development of Jewish Dimension of the Scottish Apocalypse, The (Williamson), 385n22 Jewish historians, 75 Jewish identity: and genealogical linkages, 360–61; and perception of Blacks, 358–59; See also identity Jewish law: and burial practices, 229, 230; and Marranos, 228; ritual immersion in, 226 Jewish maladies, myth of, 137 Jews: alms/almsgiving by, 329, 393; and Amsterdam, 386; cultural status of, 360–61; expulsion from Iberia, 46, 163, 163n183; forced conversion of, 46, 72; and Iberians, 107–8; perception of, 467; role of in European society, 59; and their slaves, 218

552

index

Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Schorsch), 12 Jews of the Balkans: the Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries, The (Benbassa and Rodrigue), 385n21 João III, King (Portugal), 185 Johnson, Willis, The Myth of Jewish Male Menses, 134n62, 135 Juarez, Blanca, 268 Judaism: as anti-norm, 294; as a deviation from Christainity and Whiteness, 296; embodiment of, 329–30; Marrano Law of Moses and, 329; and messianic prophesies, 421, 422; and relations with Sephardic communities, 285; seen as possibility for escape from fate, 331; traditional blessings in, 404, 406 judaizers, accusations of, 8n15 judaizing: accusations of, 64, 90, 91, 92, 113n90; Afroiberians and, 285–96, 496; in Angola, 149; assumed signs of, 236; as a charge, history of, 8n15; as cover for socio-economic war, 75, 113; definition of, 8n15, 26n1; See also crypto-Jews; crypto-Judaism; Judeoconversos judangas (satiric recreations of Judaism), 94 Judeoconversos: accusations of, 222, 271; accusations of blasphemy, 89–90; and African languages, 269; Africans/Afroiberians and, 275, 281, 356, 405; alms/almsgiving by, 322, 325, 326; almsgiving by, 322, 325, 326, 379; assimilation of, 67, 68; on attraction of for Afroiberians, 289, 291, 292n31; in Brazil, 69; burial practices of, 229, 241; of Cabo Verde, 41; and Castilian Inquisition, 50, 229; as commercial intermediaries, 59; and creole identities, 62; definition of, 16; denunciations of as resistance, 196; domestic affairs, 219; example of, 232; forced labor by, 55; the Great Conspiracy, 451; and household interreligious dynamics, 65, 182, 193, 194; Iberian perception of, 126n148; and identity, 56–59, 73, 290; individual blessings by, 210, 236, 238, 304; and the Inquisition, 51, 60, 74, 76, 77; lack of unified discourse by, 339; literature of, 337; of Mexico

City, 269; mulato children of, 283–84; origins of, 237; and perceptions of Afroiberians, 77, 88, 90, 102, 338; and perceptions of Amerindians, 116, 338, 370, 379; Portuguese, 52; race and colonialism, 53, 496; and ritual impurity, 242; and slaves, 172, 173, 200–202, 203, 210, 246; social elements of, 58; tensions between Jews and, 53; and use of other conversos as servants, 180; wealth of, 279; See also Conversos; crypto-Jews; Marranos; New Christians Juliana (slave), 172 junta: as communal space of captivity, 151, 152; definition of, 145n102; as a means of escaping misery, 481 Kamen, Henry, 79; The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 11n22 Karen, the (native people in Burma), 55 Katz, Jacob, 382n12 Kebra Nagast (Ethiopian Royal Chronicles), 361, 450n228 Kiddy, Elizabeth W., 482n10 King, Karen, 8n15 Kush, descendants of, 359, 364n79 La Barre, Weston, 438 La conquista de México (Gómez), 342n14 ladinos (fluent in latinate language/ culture), 37, 43–44, 98n36; See also slaves La Matuna (Nueva Granada), 445 Lampart, William (Guillén Lombardo de Guzmán), 277n116 lançados (West African assimilated Portuguese traders), 112, 112n87 Landa, Diego de, 409 Langebaek, Carl Henrik, 435 languages: foreign, 268, 270–71; native, 269; secret, 271 Las misas de San Vicente Ferrer (Castronovo), 352 Las Palmas, Canary Islands, 74 Latino, Juan, 35 La Tora (present-day Barrancabermeja), 473 Latour, Bruno, 5 Law of Moses, 57, 100, 107, 159, 165, 202, 308; See also crypto-Judaism; Judeoconversos; Marranos

index Lehman, F.K., 55 Leo Africanus, 361n70; History and Description of Africa, The, 383 León, Alonso de, 463n274 León, Juan de (Salomón Machorro): and Esperanza Rodriguez, 315; Inquisition testimony of, 64, 92, 200, 205; Jewish background of, 200n109; lamentation of, 491; testimony about, 202 Léon, Juan Núñez de, 294 Leon, Maestre Juan de, 96 León, Pedro Cieza de, 465n281 León, Pedro López de, 158n160; Theory and Practice of Abcesses, 138 León Portocarrero, Pedro de: accused of passing messages out of Mexico City Inquisition jail, 250; mystical vision of, 356 Le torre de Babilonia (Gómez), writings on criticism of colonial endeavors, 353 Lewis, Laura, 37n34, 76, 92n20 Lianor (Antunes): conviction and sentence of, 240; voluntary confession of, 234, 235, 242n123 Liebman, Seymour, 49, 223, 224, 241, 283n3, 466n286 Lima, Peru, 37; auto de fé in, 176, 270, 396, 451; ecclesiastical councils of, 403; and the Great Conspiracy, 449; Inquisition of, 98, 409; religion in, 115–16 Limón, Nueva Granada, 445; See also Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of limpieza de sangre (blood purity), 5n8, 68, 88n5, 93, 108n68, 368, 410, 476; See also caste system Lipiner, Elias, 425 Lisbon, Portugal: auto de fé in, 88, 118, 177, 240, 288; foreigners in, 108; Inquisition in, 180n38, 195, 205n130, 211, 232, 288, 295n42, 424 Llerena, Spain, Inquisition in, 65 lloro (magical gathering), 151 Lockhart, James, 58n108 Lope de Vera y Alarcón, 423 López, Diego: accusations of, 116, 130, 145, 496; background of, 129; confession of, 131, 160; crypto-Jews, interest in, 131; debts of, 157; denunciations by, 141, 150–51, 153, 154–55, 160; final sentence of, 160–61; magical gatherings and, 146; on mobility of servants, 133;

553

Paz Pinto and, 139, 158; on physical signs of Jewishness, 368; and Rufina, 150; testimony by, 133–34, 152, 156, 158n160, 159, 245; See also Rufina (slave of Raphael Gómez) López, Gregorio, 450n228 López, Luis, Lima Inquisition accusation of, 459n262 López, María Elena Martínez, 41 López Mesa, Duarte, 162 López, Pero, 172 Lopez, Ynes, 310, 311 Lorandi, Ana María, 471n302 Los triumphos del águyla y eclypses de la luna (Penso de la Vega), 342 Lost Tribes, 391; and Menasseh ben Israel, 387; prophesies of the, 424; and segregation from others, 465; theories of, 403, 408–9 Luanda, 149, 150 Luso-Africans, 65, 112 mocambos, repression of, 445 Machado, Francisco, 109 Machorro, Salomón ( Juan de León): See León, Juan de Mackehenie, C.A., 388 MacLeod, Murdo, 28 Madrid, Spain, auto de fé in, 279 Maestro, Samuel, 295 Magdalena (river), 474 magical gatherings, 146, 155 magical practices, 144, 145n102; Amerindian influences in, 146, 146n106, 209; non-Amerindian followers of, 292; as part of community, 151 magical terrorism, 143, 145, 158, 159 Maidman, Maynard P., 306n91 Maimonides, Moses: Guide to the Perplexed, 87; Mishneh Torah, 451 male menses (belief in), as proof of Jewishness, 134, 135, 136, 138n75 mameluco, definition of, 64 mancuerda, definition of, 265 Mandeville, John, 457n251 Mangan, Jane, 501 Manoel, King of Portugal, 55 Manoel III, King of Portugal, 72 Mañozca y Zamora, Juan de, 146n106 Manrique, Sebastian, Itinerario de las missiones que hizo . . . en varias missiones del India Oriental, 380

554

index

Manucodíatas (Penso de la Vega), 352 maps: of Brazil, 21; of Colombia, 20; of Mexico, 22 Marcus, Jacob Rader, on Montezinos and Menasseh ben Israel, 387n33 Marín, Bartolomé, tale of, 475n316 Marín Padilla, Encarnación, 189 Mark, Eva Abraham-van der, 284–85 Maroons, 33n20, 445, 445n209, 445n212, 482 Marranos: and Amerindians, 449–50; of Badajoz, Spain, 178; definition of, 28, 55; and desecration of Christian icons, 478–79, 485; European perceptions regarding, 61n115; hidden status of, 476; and household interreligious dynamics, 238; identity of, 56, 72, 318; Islamic tropes, 318; and Jewish dietary practices, 228–29; and judaizing activities by, 319; messianism and, 455n247; of Mexico City, Mexico, 273, 280; millenarianism, development of, 454; mourning practices of, 203n118, 230, 241, 305–6, 312; race and social status among, 129, 323, 324; secrecy of, 62; and slaves, 219, 231; survival of in smaller towns and rural areas, 64; use of terms for religion by, 329; See also crypto-Judaism; Judeoconversos marriages, 32n16, 38, 105n56 marronage, symbolic, 144 Martinez, Antonio, 193 Martínez, María, 99 Martins, Diogo, 96 Mascarenhas, Thome Vaz, 112n86 master-slave relationship: cognitive self-liberation from the, 330; denunciations by slaves, 196; examples of, 213–14; gendered bonding in, 212; and household interreligious dynamics, 194–95, 217, 221; the Inquisition and the, 189, 200–202, 205, 246, 251, 257–58, 281–82; loyalty of slaves, 213; and New/Old Christians, 178; and plantation life, 239; use of death threats, 211 Matoim, estate of Antunes family, 232, 237 Mattos, Vicente da, 426n147 Mayans, legendary origin of, 409

Méchoulan, Henry, 382, 388, 396, 456n250 medical profession, 137 Medina, José Toribio, 52n90, 173 Megillat ha-Megalleh (bar Æiyya), 61 Meir, R., 404 Mekhilta, 330 Melammed, Renée Levine, 178, 241 Menasseh ben Israel, 123 Mendes, Catharine, 198 Mendes, Francisco (physician), 201, 201n113 Méndez, Antonio, 204 Méndez, Garci, 149 Méndez, Ruy, 149 Mendieta, Gerónimo de (Friar), 450n228, 467, 468; Historia eclesiástica indiana, 429n157 Mendoça, Garcia de (Peruvian Viceroy), 275 Mendoca, Thomassina de, 103n51 Mendonça, Heitor Furtado de, 233 Mendonça, Lourenço de, 369 Mendoza, Juan de Pálafox y (Bishop), 274 Mercado, Bernardino Vásquez del, 215 Mercado, Francisco Valverde (Governer of Panama), 278 Mercado, Luis, 158n160 merchant capitalism, 48, 381 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9 Mesa, Cortés de, 177n28 Mesa, João Rodriques (or Juan): 1641 accusation against, 203; 1651 charges presented against, 161; and Blas de Paz Pinto, 124, 126–27, 128; and Diego López, 153, 156 messianism, Jewish, 391, 422, 469; and prophesies, 424, 425 “Mestizo Jews of Mexico” (Liebman), 283n3, 466n286 mestizos, 28, 31, 65 metonyms, 27, 54 metropole, 86 Mexia, Hernando Godo, 145; See also Mexico City Inquisition Mexican Inquisition: accusations of judaizing by, 91, 222, 224; allegations of plotting insurrection by, 277n116; Solange Alberro on the, 45; testimony regarding accused judaizers, 64 Mexico, Solange Alberro on crypt-Jews in, 57, 224n53, 231, 297, 315

index Mexico City, Mexico, 75, 103, 180, 201, 203; auto de fé in, 267, 280, 289, 308 Mexico City Inquisition: auto de fé in, 311, 332; auto de fé of the, 289; Enríques family and the, 210, Rodriguez family and the, 332–34; and the Great Conspiracy, 449; illicit jail communications and, 258–67, 272; Marranos, indictments by, 280, 297; pressing of arrested slaves into service (1642), 170; slaves and, 221, 250–51; testimony regarding accused judaizers, 200, 229, 293; testimony regarding Enriquez family to the, 306–16 Michoacán, Mexico, 373 Mignolo, Walter, 501 Miguel, Juan Blázquez, 63 mikva, definition of, 226 Mikveh Israel (Menasseh ben Israel), 379, 387, 389, 422, 448 Milão, Anrique Dias, 180n38 Milão, Paulo de, 180n38 millenarianism, development of, 455n247, 456, 457 mills, sugar, 44, 51, 68, 205, 213, 232, 233 Mina, 36 Mina Catholics, 110 Minas Gerais, Brazil, 110, 220 mining, emerald, 449 Mishna, the, 235 mixed parentage: Mexico City Judeoconversos and, 283; perception of, 64; as reason for denunciation, 109 Moraes, Manoel de, arrest for Calvinism and denunciations of, 288 mohanes (native priests): and perception of, 443n202; and the Relación, 436, 444; and role within tribal society, 438, 439; as shamans for specific tribes, 438; term limited to specific tribes, 439 Molcho, Shlomo, 422n133, 452 Molina, Tirso de, 363n78 Molinero, Baltasar Fra, 35 Monsancto, Manoel Rodrigues, 288 Montchrétien, Traicté de l’oeconomie politique, 61n115 Montecinos (Amerindian servant), 476n318

555

Monteiro, Yara Nogueira, 407n103 Montenegro, Diogo de, 88, 177 Montenegro, Peña (Bishop of Quito), 6, 444, 479 Monter, William, 486 Montesinos, Ambrosio de (Friar), 395 Montesinos, Andres de, 455 Montesinos, Andres Diaz, 407n103 Montesinos, Fernando (of Cartagena), 175 Montesinos, Fernando (historian/Jesuit), 396, 409, 414 Montesinos, Fernando (Converso merchant, Madrid), 468 Montesinos, Francisco de, 471 Montesinos, Francisco (Friar), 395 Montesinos, Francisco Marques, 396, 407n103 Montesinos, Luis de, 396, 396n73, 454 Montesinos, Samuel, 397 Montezinos, Antonio de: and Amerindians in Nueva Granada, 375; and Amsterdam, 389, 393; and Andean shamans, 438; background of, 392–94; deathbed oath of, 388; and Francisco (Indian guide), 400, 411, 412; and ‘hidden’ people, 415, 417–18; and messianic inclinations of, 454; Mikveh Israel and, 389; millenarians and, 469; overview of, 15, 379; and Peryra, 468; on relation of Jews and Indians, 404; return to Dutch Brazil, 468; and Reubinite/ Amerindians, 420, 432–33; travels of, 439–40; unpublished letter from, 508–11 Montezinos, Daniel, 397 Montezinos, Elisabeth Levi de, 393n55, 397n77, 407n102, 456n250, 469, 470 Montrose, Louis, 414 Montserrat, Carribean island of, 483 Morera, Margarita de, 224 Morga, Antonio de, 454 Moriscos: and the Inquisition, 74, 293; insurrection of, 35; on Islam and Christianity, 293; medical schools and exclusion of, 137n69; and magical practices, 318; and slave ownership by, 483 Morocco, 111 Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 9 Morteira, Saul Levi, 53, 360 Mother Earth, 430

556

index

Motolinía, Toribio de, 114, 402n89, 413 mourning practices: and the Antunes family, 235, 313, 320; Jewish, 306; and the lloro, 151; Marranos, 230, 236, 241, 305–6 Mulato, 28n5, 37, 38, 64, 283, 283n3 Mulato Blanco (White Mulato), 38 Muley, Don Francisco Núñez, 483 Munguia; See Domingo, Sebastián Munguia, Gabriel de Uria, 166 Musa Pueril (Costa), 364n79 Muisca tribe, 416, 432, 435, 438n186, 442, 461, 472–73 Muslims, 88, 107–8 Muzo tribe, 440, 449, 472 Myscofski, Carole, 184, 239 mystical vision: Francisco de la Cruz (Dominican Friar), 146n106, 205n130; of Gertrudis Rosa Ortiz, 356 mystics, false, 39, 294, 450n228 Nabsacadas, 446 Nachmanides (13th century CE), on burial shrouds, 241 Nahon, Gérard, 423, 456n250 Natan of Gaza, prophesies by, 423 Netanyahu, Benzion, 75 native guides, importance to the conquistadores, 475 native languages, concern with, 269 native medicines, 157 Naturaleza, historia sagrada y profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina y catecismo evangélico de todos etiopes (Sandoval), 36 Neher, André, 391, 457n254 neophytes, 40, 40n46, 279 Netherlands, the, 386 Neto, Joáo Mendes, Discursos Medicinales (1608), 157 New Christians: accused judiazers, 111; Angola and, 148, 149, 150; in Brazil, 50, 69, 71, 232; commercial activities, 278n119; competition among, 86, 87; as “crypto-individualists”, 73; definition and overview of, 16, 28, 46–47; denied entry to Americas, 148; Duarte de Paz on, 277; endogamy and, 57; immigration of, 60; as ‘in between’, 480; and the Inquisition, 77, 79, 185, 467; Inquisition victims as martyrs, 291; merchant capitalism, 148n111; perception of, 64; Portuguese, 71, 277; as refugee colonialists, 60; religious visions and,

91; residual crypto-Judaism, 63; and Sephardic community, 71; slave trade and, 51, 148, 148n111; slave traders and, 150; survival skills of the, 493; trade network and, 50, 51, 111; and treatment of slaves, 217; writings of, 344; See also blood purity; caste system; crypto-Jews; crypto-Judaism; Judeoconversos New Concilios, 44 New France (Canada), on Africans and Christianity, 295 New Granada, Viceroyalty of, 400 Newitt, Malyn, 112; See also Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of New Reign: See Amerindians; Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of New Vizcaya, Mexico, 374 Ngone, Amari, 111 Nican Mopohua, 460–464 Niebla, Luis de, 193–194 Nieto, Diego Díaz, 262–63, 377 Nirenberg, David, 135, 178 Nis, Felipe de (Solomon Marcos), 222 Norris, Alfonso Quiroz, 451n229 nose, the 367: and Amerindians, 368, 368n93; in rabbinic literature, 367n88 Novinsky, Anita, 68, 69, 71, 76, 79, 220n42, 394 Nueva Granada, 15: Viceroyalty of, 177n28; Cartagena Inquisition Tribunal and, 74; Jews, discovery of in, 379; magical practices in, 146–47, 181n41; marroon communities (of runaway Indians), 445; Pedro Simón’s chronicle of, 115, 364; slaves and Christian indoctrination, 44; Spanish slave asiento in, 122; See also Amerindians; Montezinos, Antonio de; Relación Nuevo León, 50, 463n274 Nunes, Gaspar Rodrigues, 123 Nunes, Manuel, 93 Nuñez, Clara, 132, 141, 157 Nuñez, Isabel (Ysabel), 250 Nuño Fernandes, 235, 238 Old Christians, 41, 63, 135, 137; See also New Christians Olinda, Brazil, 118 Olivera, Matias Rodriques de, 210, 222, 225 Olsen, Margaret, 295n43, 464n277, 483 O Nação (The Nation), 48; See also Judeoconversos; Sephardim

index Oran (Spanish North Africa), 218 Orduña, Antoni Lopez de, 203, 203n118, 306n90, 312 Ortega, Ysabel de, 153 Ortiz, Gertrudis Rosa, 356 Ortiz, Juan, 156n152, 163, 163n185, 170 Os Lusiadas (Luis de Camóes), 380 Otáñez, Isabel de, 216 Othering discourse: religious nationalism and, 85 Otherness/the Other: African and Jewish Other, 111; Amerindians as exotic, 372; the barbaric, 371, 433; exaggerated dimensions of, 482–83; examples of, 490; projection of problems onto the, 504; and self-discovery, 411; of women, 349 Ottoman Empire, myth of the, 385n21 Outsiderness: of Blacks and Amerindians, 377–78; of Jews, 368 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 364 Pachamama (Earth Mother), 430 Pacheco, Francisco González, 228 Padilla, Diego de (Córdoba), 63 Páez, Luis de, 286 Pagden, Anthony, 485 Paiba, Diego de, 425n145 Paititi, mythical city of, 471n302 palenques, 144 Palermo, Sicily, 74 Palmares, ‘Republic’ of, 445 Palmer, Colin, 76 Panche tribe, 410, 439, 442, 447, 472 Pantágoras tribe, 472 Pánuco, Mexico, 201 Paraguay, 170 Pas, David, 217 Pas Pinto, Blas de: arrest of, 161; background of, 124; charges against, 72n149, 124–29, 139, 161–62, 282; and Diego López, 14, 142, 156–57, 164; and Manuel Bautista Perés, 124, 147, 148n111, 152; torture and confession of, 128–29, 165, 166; trade in sick slaves by, 152; trading partners of, 148n111; use of slaves as private police, 220; as wealthy resident of Cartagena, 154; See also Fraternity of Holland Patrón, Don Pablo, 471n302 Paul III (Pope), 428–29 Paz, Duarte de, 277

557

Penso de la Vega, Josef: and Atlantic geography, 374; background of, 7; classic works of Iberian colonialism and, 380; Confusion of Confusions, 54, 365, 367; on the Dutch West India Company slave asiento, 365–66; on ethnographic attitudes of merchants and ancient Israelites, 371n103; literary tribute to English triumph over Ireland, 342n14; Los triumphos del águyla y eclypses de la luna, 342; Rumbos peligrosos, 346, 362, 366; writings of, 338, 348, 352 Peralta, Thomas Nuñez de: charges against, 252–54; and jail communications, 206, 252; knowledge of Angolan language by, 268; and Rodriquez family, 298; testimony of, 308 Perdigão Malheiros, Agostinho Marques, 40 Pereira, Barbara, testimony of, 248 Pereira, Gómez, 372 Pereira, Juana, 462n271 Pereira, Juan de Solórzano, 40; Política indiana, 279 Perelis, Ronnie, 398, 399n80, 450 Perera, Elia, 469, 505–7 Pereira, Adrião de Faria, 69 Pereyra, Abraham Israel, 468; background of, 505–7 Pérez, Luis Núñez, 331 Peréz, Manual Bautista, 276; See Bautista Peréz, Manuel Pernambuco, 49, 64, 69, 91, 161, 191 Peru, Spanish Viceroyalty of: Amerindians in, 352, 442, 446; auto de fé in, 176, 270, 396, 451; Blacks in, 58n108, 352; magical practices in, 144, 292; Noah (Bibical) and, 409; Noah and descendents (Biblical) settlement of, 410; “Serene Lords of Peru”, 448; slave trade in, 122; Spanish Viceroyalty of, 356; Taqui Ongo movement in, 442; See also Cruz, Francisco de la (Dominican Friar) Peruvian Inquisition: 1650’s allegation of planned armed uprising, 276; Afroiberians and the, 45n67; Blacks in, 275; illicit jail communications and the, 271–72; Judeoconversos and the, 63, 407n103, 459n262; start of the, 60, 74; torture and the, 79n169 Pesqueira, Izabel, 191

558

index

Phelan, John Leddy, 184 Philip III, King, 60 Philippines, 51, 318 Phillips, Isaac, 63 Piedra, José, 292n31 Piedrahíta, Fernández, 438n186 Pijaos tribe, 440, 447, 471, 472 Pinedo, Thomas de, 360 Pineiro, Francisco, 156 Pinelo, Antonio de Leon, 455n247 Piñero, Francisco, 126, 128, 407 Pines, Shlomo, 87, 88 Pinheira, Maria, 236, 243 Pinto, Ishac de, 229 Pires, Diego, 422n133 Pious II (Pope), 40 Pizarro, Francisco, 419 plantations, sugar, 51, 118–19, 213, 233, 239, 483 Plaza Fernández Madrid, 125 Política indiana ( Juan de Solórzano Pereíra), 279 political treason, charges of, 161 Polyglot Bible, 409n106 polyglot urban populations, 96 Poma, Guaman, 65, 191n79 Popayán province, 44 Popayán, Quito, 400 Popkin, Richard, 457n251; on the Lost Tribes, 409; on Menasseh ben Israel, 387, 387n33; on Montezinos and Menasseh ben Israel, 389n39 Portocarrero, Pedro de León, 276 Portugal, 278; and New Spain, 275–78, 278, 280–81; Portuguese as synonym for Jew, 95 Portuguese Inquisition: See Inquisition, the Portuguese Jewry, 46, 72; See also crypto-Jews; Judeoconversos; Sephardim Portuguese New Christians, 50, 51, 71, 148, 493; See also New Christians Possevino, Antonio ( Jesuit), 360 Potosi, 50; bakers of, arrangement for slave labor, 170; and Portuguese forays into Spanish territory, 276; restrictions from Amerindian neighborhoods, 465; silver and, 279 Prado, Juan de, 371 Pratt, Mary Louis, 284 prayers: and the Inquisition, 78; Jewish, 101n44; magical practices and, 181, 292; Marrano, 63, 65, 200, 225, 316–17; and slaves, 181

Prester John, 360, 421, 448 Prieto, Manuel Álvarez, 126, 127, 128, 167n197; 1636 confession of, 149; 1651 charges presented against, 161; sequestered property and slaves of, 169, 170 prisoners, alms/almsgiving by, 167 probanzas de limpieza, 93 Proodian, Lucia Garcia de, 148; anti-Jewish analysis, 497 prophesies, related to Antonio de Montezinos, 453 protomédico (license), exam for, 130 Puebla, 50 Purchas, Samuel, 381–382 purity of blood: and discourse concerning, 25–26, 83, 93; statutes regarding, 10, 68, 88, 93, 107, 114, 136; See also blood purity; caste system; limpieza de sangre quarteron, definition of, 31 Queen Esther, fast of, 237, 304, 311 Queirós Mattoso, Katia M. de, 42n54 Querido, Diogo Dias, 295 Quesada, Gonzalo Jiménez de, 419, 442, 473, 474 Question about a Black Woman who is called Blanca (Saldaña), 362 Quevedo, Francisco de, 368; Virtud militante contra las cuatro pestes del mundo, 72 quilombos, repression of, 445 Quimbaya tribe, 442, 446 Quiñones, Augustina de, 283 Quiñones, Juan de, 135, 140 Quiroga, Vasco de (Bishop), 391n47 Quito Province, Nueva Granada, 400; See also Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of Rabasa, José, 398, 475–76 race: as bridge between medieval and modern worlds, 480; as constructed matter, 26; and denunciations, 156; divisions among, 151, 344; identities and categories, 25–26; identity and, 25–28, 30–35, 37–39, 55–57, 73, 85–86, 338, 362; imaginations, writings concerning, 338; and marriage, 105n57, 284; and racism, 5n10, 6–7; and social engineering, 25–26, 28, 30 (see also ethno-racial identity)

index racial literary images, 356–57, 362, 363n78 Ramires, Jeronimo Nunes, 188 Raz-Krakotzkin, Ammon, 373 rebellions: Amerindians, 446–47; Cartagena de las Indias, 445; fear of, 274n105, 446; Portuguese, 274, 359, 360, 450; slave, 33n20, 447 Recife, Brazil, 66; founding of, 381n9 Reconquista, 3, 46n69, 59, 74, 293, 318 Recreating Africa, Culture, Kinship and Religion . . . (Sweet), 10n20, 76 Reflections on Baroque (Harbison), 9 Reis, Mestre Gaspar dos, 108 Relacciones . . . de los reyes de Persia (Teixeira), 380 Relaçion de Antonio Montezinos (Aharón Levi), 387; elements of, 391, 397–98, 410, 443, 444, 459, 461, 477; extant versions of, 398, 471; on Montezinos and Menasseh ben Israel, 388; overview of, 379 religion: Andean practices in, 403, 430, 438; and critical theory of suffering, 492; and identity, 39 religions: caste and inclusivism in, 41, 42; othering discourse and, 85; and politics, 486; problematic, 26; servitude and hostilities related to, 198; societal desire for eradication of difference in, 66; transferring between, 66 religious visions, 91 Remesal, Antonio de, 395n66 Republic of Palmares, 445 Resende, André de, on foreigners to Lisbon, 108 Restrepo, Luz Adriana Maya, 13, 33n21, 36; Brujería y reconstrucción . . . en la Nueva Granada, 37n32, 41n49, 44n60, 76, 131n49, 138n74; on magical practicioners, 139, 144, 144n97, 145n102, 146n106, 147, 151; on politically motivated attacks, 146n104, 146n106 Rétama, Francisco, 61n115 Reuben, tribe of: historical overview of, 421; Indians as decendents of the, 426; messianic role of, 423 Reubenites/Amerindians: as an image of the Araucans, 448; messianic role of, 426, 427; possession of Spanish goods by the, 435; possible location of, 439–40, 470, 472; See also Relaçion de Antonio Montezinos

559

Reuveni, David, 422, 422n133, 423, 425, 427 Révah, Israel Salvator, 75 Revelations, Book of, 429 Rexi, Francisco, 407n103 Reyes, Sebastián de los, 291 Ribera, Daniel, 371 Ribera, Pedro Velarde de, 402n89 Ribeiro, Gaspar, 217 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 49, 57, 69; auto de fé in, 289 Río de la Plata Province, Peru, 50, 63, 198 Rios, Amador de los, 75 ritual impurity, 242 Rivera, Blanca de, 180, 250, 320, 322 Rivera, Blanca Mendez de, 298 Rivera, Catalina de, 202 Rivera, María de, 180, 200, 203, 206, 269, 290, 320 Rivera, Ysabel de, 246 Rivkin, Ellis, 73, 75 Robles, Gaspar de, 149, 299 Rodrigue, Aron, 385n21 Rodrigues, Ana, 236, 237, 238, 239 Rodrigues, Ana (Antunes), 234 Rodriguez, Esperanza: charges against, 297, 316, 317n138, 320; conviction and sentence of, 331–32, 334; former slave, 297; as Marrano spiritual leader, 298, 302; poverty of and almsgiving to, 325–27; role of in Marrano society, 327–28; testimony of, 314 Rodriguez family (Mexico City): burial practices of, 312; family tree of, 299, 300, 301; Marranoism, examples of, 302–3 Rodrigues, Felipa, 215, 405 Rodrigues, Gracea, 88 Rodrigues, Luis Franco, 283 Rodrigues, Maria, 117–18, 178 Rodrigues, Paolo, 148n111 Rodrigues, Pero, 150 Rodríguez, Sebastián, 181, 186 Rodrigues, Violante, 405 Rojas, Agustín de, 212 Romero, Maria, murder accusation against, 155 Rosario, Francisco del, 186 Rota, Giorgio, 66 Rotbaum, I¢ic Croitoru, 125, 395, 473n306 Roth, Cecil, 505; on Amsterdam, 386–87; on East India Company

560

index

and Sephardim, 381n6; A History of the Marranos, 379; on Menasseh ben Israel, 468; on the Relation of Aharon Levi, 387; on religion of the Marranos, 487; research of, 75 Roxas, Leonor de, 312 Ruderman, David, 362n74 Rufina (slave of Amador Pérez), 131 Rufina (slave of Raphael Gómez): Blas de Pas Pinto and, 131, 139; demonization, use of by, 151; and denunciation of Pinto, 154–55, 158; and gathering information by, 132, 133, 141; magical practices of, 140, 145, 158, 159; magical terrorism and, 145, 158, 159; and Paula de Eguiliz, 143; See also Eguiluz, Paula de; López, Diego; magical practices Rumbos peligrosos (Penso de la Vega), 346, 362, 366 Sá, Duarte da, 118; See also sugar plantations Sá, Mem de, 237 sacred objects, African, 39 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 402n89 Saint Gregory’s Nave, 58 Salcamaygua, Pachacuti Yamqui, 419 Saldanha, Antonio, 217 Salomon, Hermann Prins, 78, 180, 397n77 Salvador, Brazil, 96 Salvador, José Gonçalves, 491n42 salvation, differing views of, 455–56 Sambatyon (mythical river), 416, 434 sambenito: definition of, 99n39; penitential habit, 99, 161, 166, 332 Samuel, E.R., 188 Sanaguare, 445 San Basilio, 445 Sanches, António Nunes Ribeiro, 78 Sánchez, Martín, 133, 157 Sandoval, P. Alonso de ( Jesuit): on Africans and Christianity, 36, 295, 464n277; Naturaleza, historia sagrada y profana . . ., 36 San Juan, María de (Córdoba), 63 San Juan de Dios (hospital), 129 San Pedro, Juan de, 431n168 Santiago de Chile, 109; Inquisition in, 172, 179 São Tomé, 55, 57, 66, 111, 112 Saperstein, Marc, 53

Saraiva, António José, 75, 425 Sarfatim, Abraham Bendana, 218 Sarraçerbat, David, 423 Sassoon, I.S.D., 78 Schatz, Rivka, 399 Schmidt, Benjamin, 447–48, 450 Scholem, Gershom, 423 Schonenberg, François de, 366 Schorsch, Ismar, 456n250, 457n251 Schorsch, Jonathan: Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 12, 296n45, 347n27, 351n36, 365n79, 218n36 Schwartz, Stuart, 30, 38, 51, 355n52, 500 scientists, European, 392 Scott, James, 484 Sebastían (slave of Alonso Rodriguez), 192n84 Sebastianism, 455n247 secret jails: See jail servants/slaves Sefer Kol Bo (anonymous), 233 self-liberation, cognitive, 330 sentence: commutation of sentence, 167n197, 332n206, 334; escape from imprisonment, 215; four-year imprisonment, 106n61, 286; hospital service, 138n74; imprisonment, 91n19, 215, 216; imprisonment, perpetual, 161, 166, 167n197, 272, 289, 332, 333, 334, 396; payment for incarceration, 215; three-year imprisonment, 160; two-year imprisonment, 186n59; See also torture sentence, death: burned in effigy, 240, 308; of Diogo de Montenegro, 89, 117, 177; of Enriquez family members, 308; of Francisco Botello, 206n134; of Francisco Maldonado de Silva, 98n38, 270; of Friar Francisco de la Cruz, 409; of Lope de Vera y Alarcón, 423; of Manuél Prieto, 167n197; of slaves and servants, 174; standard for mohans, 444; See also torture Sephardic diaspora, 48, 113 Sephardim: Amsterdam community, 50, 67, 93, 360–61; colonialism and Amerindians, 338, 379; and commerce, 59, 162, 366, 381; interest of in geography of ethnicities and state, 340; literature of, 337, 346, 347, 348–50; O Nação, 48; and racial identity of, 362; role outside Iberian lands, 47; and White hegemonic

index discourse, 378; writings on regarding European practice of, 354 “Serene Lords of Peru”, 448 Serrano y Sanz, Manuel, 395n64 servants: denunciations of masters, 189, 190; example of false testimony by, 186; mockery of Jewish practices by, 190; See also crypto-Jews; Judeoconversos; slaves Severus, Sulpicius, 361 Sevilla, Diego de, 213 Sevilla, Gaspar Vaez, 256, 303, 313n122; See also Enríquez, Juana; Sevilla, Simon Váez Sevilla, Leonor Vaez, 90, 356 Sevilla, Simon Váez: relations with slaves, 204, 210, 250, 251, 263; use of slaves as private police, 220; wealth of, 148n111, 191n82; See also Enríquez, Juana Seville, Spain: auto de fé in, 41, 65n131, 80, 88n6, 163–64, 184–86, 247, 286, 332, 451n229; literature of, 74, 182, 479; and New Christian trade network, 50 sex, interracial, 104–7, 283 shamans: See mohanes Shear, Adam, 508 Shell, Marc, 465 Shevet Yehuda, 373 shrouds, Marrano use of, 241 Shulkhan Arukh, 194, 203n118, 226, 233, 238 Siglo de Oro (Golden Age), 72 Silva, Antonio José da, 104 Silva, Elena de, 229 Silva, Francisco Maldonado de, 99, 174, 216, 270 Silva, Jorge de, 128 Silva, Juan Rodrígues de, 128 Silva, Manuel de, 65 Silva, Ysavel de: testimony, Enriquez family, 268, 298, 301n65, 302, 303n75, 305, 307n93, 309, 316, 321n160; testimony, Esperanza Rodriguez, 312n120, 324, 325n175; testimony, slaves, 202, 215n19, 221n45, 247n4; testimony on Blacks, 274; testimony on inquisitors, 72n148 Silveira, Abraham Gomes (Diego), 338, 363 Silveira, Miguel da, 338 Silveira, Miguel da: El Macabeo, 342n14; El Macabeo: poema heroico, 342n14

561

Silverblatt, Irene: on denunciations, 183, 271, 287n14; Inquisition documentation, use of, 76; literature of, 11; on multicultural magic practice, 144, 146n106, 482; on perception of Moriscas, 318; on race and ethnicity, 5n10, 499 Simms, Norman, 489 Simón, Pedro: on the Musica tribe, 461; on the Paeces tribe, 363n78; Peru, 434n175; on a Quimbaya planned rebellion, 446; on slave rebellion in Cartagena, 445; on slave trade in Cartagena, 122; on the Tairona tribe, 438; and tale of Bartolomé Marín, 475n316; on Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, 115; on the tribes of the upper Magdalena, 436–37, 438, 443 Siqueira, Gracia de, 239 Sirkes, Joel, 382n12 sistema de castas: See caste system skin color, as metonym for status, 27, 118 slave ownership, 35 slave rebellions: Amerindians, 446–47; in Cartagena, 445; and church-sponsored organizations, 34; fear of, 274n105, 446; Morisco insurrection, 35; Portuguese, 274, 359, 450 slavery, bipolar, 44 slaves: as assassins, 211, 211n7; and the auto de fé, 176–77; in Brazil, 281, 381, 445; burial practices regarding, 197, 197n97; in Castile, Spain, 179n33; Christianization of, 42; confessions of, 290; conversion of, questions regarding, 284; and crypto-Jews, 205n130, 224, 234–35, 244, 290, 291; and household interreligious dynamics, 194, 198; and identity of, 33n20; illicit jail communications by, 272; importation of into Spanish America, 233, 337n1; and the Inquisition, 77, 169, 171, 172, 178, 183, 200–202, 215, 219, 245; and Irish ownership of, 483; Jewish ritual immersion of, 226; as judaizers, 232; as “living tools”, 199, 344; loyalty of, 210–11, 213, 266; and masters, 207; Moorish, 218; possibility of emancipation for, 263; reasons for denunciations by, 196, 197; role of African, 26–27; royal legislation

562

index

regarding, 43; social network of, 140, 257, 258; status and relations between, 37, 38; and sugar mills, 44, 103, 205, 233; and writings concerning, 345; See also crypto-Jews; Judeoconversos; New Christians slave trade, 124, 147–49, 268; and Angola, 149, 164; and asiento (contract) regarding, 365–66; criticism of the, 345; and New Christians, 51, 148; and Peru, 122; relations between slaves and traders, 281; and role of Cartagena, 45n67, 122–23, 406; writings on regarding European practice of, 353, 354 Smith, Janna Malamud, 503 Sobremonte, Tomás Tremiño de, 250, 273, 291 social engineering, 25–26, 28, 30; See also ethno-racial identity; identity; race social memory, religion as, 492 social network (slave), 140 social regulation, 95–96, 104–7, 142; See also blood purity social system, 338 socio-economic war, 75, 113 Soeiro, Manoel Diaz, 386; See also Israel, Menasseh ben Solís, Duarte Gomes, 60 Solís, Francisco Rodrígues, 128 Sotomayor, Antonio de, 128, 135, 211n7 soul, immortality of, 372 Sousa, Gabriel Soares de, 237 Sousa Santos, Suzana Maria de, 285 space, anthropoligical, 9 Spanish Atlas of Janssonius, 340 Spanish Council of the Indies, 42 Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (Yerushalmi), 16n25, 136n65 Spanish Empire: contraband trade and, 277; economy of the, 278–79; outsourcing of slave supply and, 51; perceptions of Portuguese by, 275–77; Portuguese imports ban by, 278, 279; slave trade into colonies of, 337n1; See also slave trade Spanish Inquisition: lack of judicial protocal and, 76; Madrid, testimony to, 397; political, economic anxieties and, 279; statistical analysis of, 80; territorial boundaries of, 73; See also

Inquisition, the; names of individual Inquisitions; Suprema Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, The (Kamen), 11n22 Spenser, Edmund, 457 Spes Israel, 457 Spinoza, Benedict, 54, 493 spirits, companion, 146, 147n107, 151, 181 spiritual economy, 492 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 499 Starr-LeBeau, Gretchen, 211 stereotypes, 344 stock exchange, as symbol of capitalism, 54 strict boundaries, role of, 465 Suárez, Fernando, 161 Suarez, Violante, 305 subalterns: desecration of Christian icons by, 487–89; dominant elite and, 483, 484, 485; and prejudice, 499; race and colonialism, 119, 496; religiosity of, 492; and struggle of for self-governance, 482; See also Afroiberians; ethno-racial identity; Maroons; Marranos; slaves sugar mills, 51, 232–33, 453 sugar plantations, 51, 51n85, 213, 233, 239, 483 Suprema (Supreme Council of the Inquisition): and Cartagena tribunal proceedings, 80, 154, 163, 164, 185; guidance related to torture victims, 247; Lima Tribunal, 80; purity of blood laws considered, 41, 88n5; on witnesses, 184; See also names of individual Inquisition Tribunals surgeons, qualifications for, 130 Surinam, 59, 285 Sweet, James H.: on Africans and the Inquisition, 77; on magical practicioners, 145; Recreating Africa, Culture, Kinship and Religion . . ., 10n20, 76; on slaves in Bahia, 233 symbolic marronage, 144, 146, 330, 482 syncretic religiosity, 43, 66, 110, 238 Tabajara tribe, 370 Tairona tribe, 438, 439 Talavera, Hernando de, 185 tangomaos (West African assimilated Portuguese traders), 112 Taqui Ongo movement, 442

index Tardieu, Jean-Pierre, 45n67, 207, 219 Taussig, Michael, 144, 444 Taxco, Mexico, 201 Teixeira, Marcos (Inquisitor), 223 Teixeria, Pedro, Relacciones . . . de los reyes de Persia, 380 Téllez, Fernando Montesinos, 396, 397 Terceira Island, 96 terrorism, magical, 143; See also magical practices Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española (Orozco), 64 Thamara, Francisco, 406 Theologico-Political Treatise (Spinoza), 54 theo-politics, 14, 490; See also caste system Theory and Practice of Abscesses (Léon), 138 Thomas, Jorge, 223 Thomas, Manoel, 342n14; Insulana, 342n14 Thorowgood, Thomas, 390, 456; Jewes in America, 389; millenarianism, development of, 454n244 Timaná province, and mohanes, 443 Tinoco, Diego, 329 Tinoco, Isabel, 307 Tinoco, Juana, 304 Tinoco, Pedro, 303–4, 306, 319 Tisquesusa (last Zipa of Bogotá), 446 Todorov, Tzvetan, 402n89 Toledo, Spain, 74 Tolima province, Nueva Granada, 471; See also Nueva Granada, Viceroyalty of Tonantzin, 462 To One’s Word (Gómez), 354 topos, 2, 338, 343 Torquemada, Juan de (Cardinal), 136n66, 402n89 Torquemada, Tomás de, 74 Torre, Diego de la, 157 Torrejoncillo, Francisco de, 426 Torres, Luis de, 49, 409 torture: of Álverez Prieto, 127; of Antonia de la Cruz, 265; of Blanca Enriquez, 309n103; of Blas de Pas Pinto, 128, 165–66; and the Inquisition, 78–79, 156, 184, 186–87; of Joseph ben Israel, 386; of Luis Barreto, 247; of Manuél Prieto, 167n197; of María López, 90; See also sentence; sentence, death

563

trade: contraband trade and, 277; New Christians network, 50, 111; New Christians slave, 51, 122, 148, 150; perceived domination of Portugal, 278; and role of Cartagena, 45n67, 122–23, 406; and slave asiento, 365–66; slave trade into colonies, 337n1; See also slave trade Traicté de l’oeconomie politique (Montchrétien), 61n115 Trent, Council of, 39 tribes, Indian: Calchaquí, 471n302; Chibcha, 427–28; Colima, 432; Muisca, 416, 419, 432, 435, 441; Panche, 410, 439, 442; Pijaos, 447, 471; possible candidates for the Relaçion, 472; Quimbaya, 442 Trivellato, Francesca, 508 tropes: of attempted communication with no common language, 419; of Ham as originator of black magic, 358n63; of loose talk or denunciation, 181; on naming Blacks that which they are not, 362–64; of overturning, 429; regarding Amerindians, 369; used by anti-Jewish Iberians, 367 Trovas (Bandarra), 425–26, 454 Tucumán, 50, 198 Turkish Jews, 162 Uceda, Gaspar de, 86, 87; on introduction of blood purity statutes, 114 Uchmany, Eva Alexandra, 425n145 Uriarte, Juan de: accusations against, 163, 163n185; allegations regarding Luís Gomes Barreto, 281 Usque, Samuel: on Amerindians, 385n23; on anti-Jewish rulers and persecutors, 384, 456n250; Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, 358n61, 383, 384n19; on Jews and Blacks, 358–59; on native peoples of Africa and Asia, 383–84; on Yosef ha-Kohen, 382 Utopia (More), 391 Váez, Gaspar, 200, 255 Vaez, Leonor, 203 Valdés, Garcia de, 204 Valencia, Luis de, 377 Valencia, Spain, 74; See also Inquisition, the

564

index

Valenzuela Sotomayor, Luis Joseph Sotomayor y, 187 Valle de la Caldera (coast of present Columbia), 438 Valle Saldaña, David del (or Felix), 363; El afrodiseo, 348–50; Question about a Black Woman who is called Blanca, 362; writings of, 338 Varias antiguedades de Espana, Africa y otras provincias (Aldrete), 380 Varthema, Ludovico di, Itinerary, 383 Vasconcelos, Nicolao Faleiro de (Antunes family), 237 Veer, Peter Van der, 4 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 465n281 Vega, Lope de, 30n10 Venice, Italy, 66, 223n48 Ventura, Maria, 148n113, 153, 276 Veracruz, Mexico, 50 Vicente, Domingo, 286 Viceroyalty of Peru: See Peru, Spanish Viceroyalty of Vida de Don Gregorio Guadaña (Gómez), 352 Vieira, Antonio (Saint), 27, 296 Vieira, João Fernandes, 359 Vila Flor, Portugal, 392, 394, 396n69 Vilar, Enriqueta Vila, 161 Villagómez, Pedro de, Archbishop, 115 Villanueva, Francisco Márquez, 290 Villanueva, Joaqúin Pérez (ed.), Historia de la inquisición en España y América, 395n67 Villanueva, Pedro de, 290 Villarreal, Pedro de, 182, 226 Villavicencio, Diego Jaymes Ricardo de, 115 Villena, Lohmann, 276n112, 356n56 Virgin of Guadeloupe, 460, 461, 462 Virtud militante contra las cuatro pestes del mundo (Quevedo), 72 visions, 90, 91, 416–18, 156, 420 Vitoria, Elena de, 155 Voltaire, on the Lost Tribes, 387 Wachtel, Nathan, 442 war: Amerindians and, 442, 447; of independence, Portugal, 274;

Inquisition as a socieoconomic, 75, 113, 142; Relaçion on Reubinite/ Amerindian, 436; tribe of Reuben and, 421; West India Company and Pernambuco, 162 West India Company, 113n90, 161, 380, 381 White Mulato, 38, 39 Williamson, Arthur H., The Jewish Dimension of the Scottish Apocalypse, 385n22 Winslow, Edward, 457n251 witchcraft: accusations of, 143, 307n93; and the Inquisitions, 45, 69; See also magical practices; magical terrorism Wolf, Lucien, 194, 406 Xaramillo, Duarte Leon, 250 Xuarez, Ana, 327–28 Xuarez, Violante, 268 Ydaña, Abraham, 188 Yehudah, ha-Levi, 61 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 95; From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, Isaac Cardoso . . ., 16 Yonatan, Targum, 421 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 498 Ysavel (slave of Beatriz Enriquez), 204 Yupanqui, Francisco Tito, 116 Yupanqui, Titu Cusi, 465 Zacatecas, Mexico, 50 Zacoteca, Mexico, 374 Zamba, Juana, 159, 160 zambos, 28, 31, 186 Zambujo, Balthesar Diaz de, 243 Zamora, Margarita, 398pZaragoza, Spain, 74, 445 Zárate y Castronovo, Fernando de, 341n11, 342n14, 352 Zeuske, Michael, 401n88 Zohar, 241 Zvi, Shabtai, 423; the Great Conspiracy and the Suprema, 452

The Atlantic World ISSN 1570–0542

1. Postma, J. & V. Enthoven (eds.). Riches from Atlantic Commerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12562 0 2. Curto, J.C. Enslaving Spirits. The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and its Hinterland, c. 1550-1830. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13175 2 3. Jacobs, J. New Netherland. A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. 2004. ISBN 90 04 12906 5 4. Goodfriend, J.D. (ed.). Revisiting New Netherland. Perspectives on Early Dutch America. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14507 9 5. Macinnes, A.I. & A.H. Williamson (eds.). Shaping the Stuart World, 16031714. The Atlantic Connection. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14711 X 6. Haggerty, S. The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760-1810. Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods. 2006. ISBN 90 04 15018 8 7. Kleijwegt, M. (ed.). The Faces of Freedom. The Manumission and Emancipation of Slaves in Old World and New World Slavery. 2006. ISBN 90 04 15082 X 8. Emmer, P.C., O. Pétré-Grenouilleau & J. Roitman (eds.). A Deus ex Machina Revisited. Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development. 2006. ISBN 90 04 15102 8 9. Fur, G. Colonialism in the Margins. Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland. 2006. ISBN 978 90 04 15316 5 10. McIntyre, K.K. & R.E. Phillips (eds.). Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15392 9 11. Roper, L.H. & B. Van Ruymbeke (eds.). Constructing Early Modern Empires. Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15676 0 12. Newson, L.A. & S. Minchin. From Capture to Sale. The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15679 1 13. Evans, C. & G. Rydén. Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16153 5 14. Frijhoff, W. Transl. by M. Heerspink Scholz. Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607-1647. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16211 2 15. Goodfriend J.D., B. Schmidt & A. Stott (eds.). Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America 1609-2009. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16368 3 16. Ebert, C. Between Empires: Brazilian Sugar in the Early Atlantic Economy, 1550-1630. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16768 1

17. Schorsch, J. Swimming the Christian Atlantic. Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17040 7 18. Huigen, S. Knowledge and Colonialism. Eighteenth-century Travellers in South Africa. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17743 7