Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
his past, or both—he was not the Judeophobic caricature that his detractors drew of him.104
On its face, Pereira’s relative ignorance of Catholic dogma and prayer seems to buttress the accusers’ contention that he was not a bona fide Christian. As the reader will recall, Mártir’s wager was that Pereira could not bring himself to profess Christianity in public because Pereira was secretly so perverse that he denied the Catholic faith altogether.
In reality, however, all that Pereira’s ignorance suggests is that he was not a particularly pious Christian. If Pereira had been a skillful liar and a crypto-Jew, he would probably have trained himself in the tenets and verbal formulas of Christianity, for without the ability to repeat these tenets and formulas (however insincerely) he would not have been able to conceal his heresy very well, especially not while living in the midst of an arch-Catholic society such as that of seventeenth-century Spain. (By the same token, if Pereira had wanted to establish his credibility, he probably would not have told the inquisitors that he had previously undergone a genealogical investigation if had he not actually done so: Why would Pereira have risked his future and his reputation by concocting a story that his interrogators could easily disprove?)
Leaving aside questions of plausibility, we must recognize that Pereira’s lack of religious knowledge did not necessarily prove anything other than his own ignorance. The records of the Spanish Inquisition offer plentiful examples of defendants—conversos and Old Christians alike—who were far from well versed in official Catholicism. These records also attest to the fact that many self-incriminating Judaizers had not only mastered Christian prayers, but were very familiar with Christian theology.105 The point is that a defendant’s ability or inability to recite creeds and prayers by rote did not necessarily have anything to do with his or her consciously chosen religious identity or, for that matter, with the inquisitors’ conclusions regarding that defendant’s real or alleged attitude towards Catholicism.
It may well be that Pereira told his questioners the truth about himself. Yet, given the absence of definitive proof to that effect, the riddle of his “true” religious identity and his ethnic origin remains irresolvable. What interests us here, however, is not the informants’ credibility, but the substance of their testimony as an example of anti-converso sentiment.
Through their depositions, the defendant and his denouncers voiced a gamut of derisive preconceptions about New Christians that were widespread in the Iberia of the 1600s, as Pereira’s own observations about his homeland suggest. All of the informants, including the accused, appealed first and foremost to an anti-Portuguese variant of conversophobia, itself a form of Judeophobia, in order to place blame on conversos (real or imagined) and paint themselves in the colors of innocence and righteousness.
Pedro Mártir and his comrades articulated a rather crude Judeophobia through a kind of semantic slippage. Instead of defining Pereira as a New Christian heretic, the accusers referred to him almost obsessively as el Portugués occasionally shifting to anti-Jewish epithets such as perro judio (Jewish dog). In so doing they not only (mis)used the term “Portuguese” to mean “converso” and revealed their Judeophobic intent, but they tacitly conveyed that they were not interested in denouncing heresy in the strictest sense. In fact, none of the accusers employed such designations as hereje (heretic) and judaizante at all. Instead, the informants insinuated that the person they were accusing was a full-fledged Portuguese “Jew” who had disguised himself as a Christian. The focus here was not on the suspect’s religious behavior, but on his presumed nature: In the accusers’ eyes it was as if Pereira were ultimately not a Christian who behaved as a Jew, namely a Judaizer, but a wholly foreign and unassimilable creature whose essential character was “Jewish.” It is noteworthy that Friars Huerta and Mártir were educated men whose theological training could have allowed them to define Pereira in much more nuanced—and much more accurate—terms.
Interestingly, Pereira pursued the same anti-“Portuguese” logic as his accusers. This is highly ironic in light of the fact that Pereira was Portuguese himself. By his own account, Pereira had previously assailed five supposed Judeoconversos based on the same prejudiced view of Portuguese immigrants that had, according to him, driven Mártir and the other travelers to mistrust, curse, and assault him. Specifically, Pereira said that when he had been a resident of Cadiz, Seville, and Madrid, he had accused two merchants, a doctor, and a businessman of being “Jewish pícaros” merely because they, like himself, were Portuguese who happened to be living in Spain. The defendant even admitted that he had insulted the men although he possessed no evidence that they were Judaizers (one suspects Pereira did not even have any proof that his alleged victimizers were New Christians, let alone crypto-Jews). In short, the defendant admitted he had drawn the imaginary equation Portuguese = converso = secret Jew, to which he had fallen prey while traveling from Andalusia to Castile.
In contrast to the travelers’ portrait of Pereira, however, Pereira’s depiction of the five supposed Luso-conversos reflected a social or class bias as much as it expressed a sense of ethnic and religious opposition between Old and New Christians. The suspect explained that in insulting the alleged cristãos-novos he had upheld a popular notion that being bourgeois was tantamount to being of Jewish extraction, or at least was as reprehensible as being Jewish. Whether Pereira truly espoused this notion or had merely seized it as a convenient tool with which to level verbal abuse is not immediately relevant. What is more interesting is the mental association that Pereira claimed to have made between members of urban non-noble elites—businessmen, merchants, and professionals—on one hand, and stereotyped images of “Judaic” ignobility on the other.
Pereira’s imaginary association entailed four mutually reinforcing premises. The first premise was that a good Christian (by implication, a person of “clean” blood such as Pereira himself) could easily deduce that a given individual was a New Christian, and therefore a Jew, simply by ascertaining that the person was a merchant or businessman of some kind. The second premise was that merchants, and by extension businessmen in general, were easily identifiable by their social behavior, for example by the rudeness with which they treated honorable people. The third premise held, along the same lines, that a Portuguese merchant who acted contemptuously toward his (or presumably her) betters either had Jewish blood or was like someone who did. Conversely—and this was the fourth premise—having Jewish blood pre-disposed a person to offend the natural and proper order of society by withholding reverence where reverence was due and by embracing beliefs that were contrary to Catholicism. It is significant that Pereira did not pay any attention to the religious beliefs of his alleged libelers, as if to say that the heretical nature of Luso-conversos was well known.
To summarize, Pereira not only presented himself as a Judeophobe, but as an indigent aristocrat who resented low-born individuals (in this case, conversos) precisely because their power over him, like their material wealth, accrued not from the dignity of noble lineage but from the exercise of base commercial or professional skills. Where Mártir and the travelers had collapsed ethnic and religious categories in their testimony (“Portuguese” = “converso” = “Jew”), Pereira conflated two distinct religious classifications (“Jew” and “heretic”), an ethnic classification (“Portuguese of the Nation”), and a socioeconomic one (“businessman” and/or “merchant”).106
Judeophobia and the Place of Conversos in Peninsular Society
What does the testimony collected in the Pereira dossier tell us about the historical environment from which it sprang? What does the informants’ narrative conflation of religious, ethnic, and in Pereira’s case, socioeconomic categories reveal about the ways in which Old Christians tended to regard conversos in the seventeenth century?
Above all, the Pereira dossier bears witness to an atmosphere of suspicion that had the potential to mushroom into open animosity against Judeoconversos, particularly against those of Portuguese origin. That such hostility exploded in the face of Diego Pereira, whose outward behavior was probably beyond serious reproach, suggests the fact that at least some bigoted Spaniards (and a few Catholic foreigners like Torre and Pan y Agua) did not require any real evidence of heresy in order to “unmask” and persecute “secret Jews.” Pereira confirmed this fact when he indicated that he had not bothered to avail himself