Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
certain Portuguese men were contemptible “Jews.” All that the accusers’ passive bigotry required for it to turn into open abuse was a perception that its object was “Portuguese.”
The view that Portuguese immigrants and their descendants were ipso facto New Christians, and that all conversos of Lusitanian origin were secret Jews, arose in Spain in response to the Portuguese migrations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Like most sweeping, derisive generalizations, this double presumption was empirically untenable. Even so, it was not a mere product of bigoted hallucination; rather, it sprang from a small but significant kernel of historical actuality.
As several historians have noted, there is evidence that crypto-Judaism was a lingering reality among Portuguese conversos long after Spanish Judaizing had withered under the cumulative impact of Inquisitorial persecution.107 Many of the immigrants to Spain were indeed conversos, but, more importantly, it is probable that a number of them were also secret Jews.
Lusitanian crypto-Judaism, whatever its objective resemblance to normative Judaism, owed its survival to the conditions under which Jewish and converso life developed in Portugal. The scope of this study prohibits a thorough review of these conditions, yet the following important aspects are worth mentioning.
The Jews of Portugal pursued a separate social and religious existence in relative peace until 1497. In that year, King Manoel arranged for summary mass baptisms by which an overwhelming majority of them became titular Christians. Once baptized, the former Jews enjoyed legal protection from discrimination and persecution for a period of thirty-six years, in accordance with consecutive royal decrees. The explicit purpose of such protection was to permit the unhindered assimilation of all first-generation “conversos” (the children of the converts) and to avert the need to establish an Inquisition in the Spanish mold.108
Some scholars have argued that a vast majority of Luso-conversos took advantage of the long legal reprieve to acculturate into Portuguese Christian society.109 It is certainly the case that some families of cristãos-novos penetrated the upper echelons of the Portuguese nobility, the royal bureaucracy, and the financial and commercial elite of the Portuguese kingdom from 1497 until the establishment of the Lusitanian Inquisition in 1536.110 Still, it is not clear what proportion of Luso-conversos embraced Catholicism sincerely. Some data suggest the possibility that internal converso resistance to Christianization was considerable. For example, the first generations of cristãos-novos included several Spanish Jews who had successfully defied conversionist pressure in their native land, and had taken refuge in Portugal in 1492. That those tenacious refugees had not capitulated earlier, under the threat of banishment and expropriation, makes it improbable that they embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly after the sudden and utterly perfunctory mass conversion of 1497.
Perhaps the most prudent assertion one can make about the situation in Portugal prior to 1536, then, is that royal protection allowed those converts who wanted to preserve their Jewish attachments to cultivate and bequeath them in secret, while it also allowed those converts who wished to blend into the fabric of Christendom to pursue the path of assimilation in relative peace.
Sincerely Christian or not, Portuguese conversos became culturally “Ibericized” in the course of the sixteenth century, just as Spanish New Christians had before them. Externally at least, nothing distinguished New Christians from Old Christians in Portugal by the seventeenth century. Portuguese conversos were unique, however, in that their existence, unlike that of the Spanish cristianos nuevos, was not the result of a long period of persecution. A key difference between the Spanish and Portuguese Jewries is that the former disintegrated slowly, acrimoniously, and often as a direct consequence of Judeophobic violence, while the latter did not.111 Portuguese Jewry as a whole ceased to exist in an instant, and only by the most superficial and pragmatic of official acts. Despite episodes of brutality and discrimination, Portuguese Jews suffered nothing comparable to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 that gave rise to the converso problem in Castile and Aragon.112 Furthermore, unlike their Spanish counterparts, Portuguese Jews did not have to endure furious waves of conversionist and Judeophobic propaganda. In Portugal there was never any possibility of friction between the converted and the unconverted, as occurred in Spain, since baptism had swept up all the Lusitanian kehillot.113 Crucially, in Portugal most of the converted did not come under inquisitorial scrutiny, though that sorry fate would befall their descendants.
For these reasons, the former Jews of Portugal were able to retain a measure of internal cohesiveness and a sense of continuity with the (Jewish) past. If nothing else, certain group instincts passed by inertia from one generation of Luso-conversos to the next. As late as the seventeenth century, Portuguese conversos still tended to maintain their intracommunal bonds by pursuing endogamous marriage alliances and cultivating tightly knit commercial and professional relationships.114 In many cases, the familial and commercial networks formed by these bonds resembled or even continued ones that existed among Portuguese Jews prior to 1497. Additionally, cristãos-novos inherited many of the professional roles of their Jewish predecessors and thus much of the Jews’ social and political position in Portuguese society.115 When dealing with external authorities, Lusitanian conversos often behaved as a community, and the authorities treated them accordingly. This happened, for example, when conversos pooled together enormous sums of money and solicited João III and the pope through semiofficial representatives in a failed attempt to prevent the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition.116 Such communal patterns of activity would be repeated later, for example in the above-mentioned negotiations with Philip II of Spain.
Again, the probability is high that many if not most Luso-conversos retained a consciousness of belonging to an identifiable social group quite distinct from the Ibero-Christian mainstream. Many cristãos-novos developed a sense of ethnic difference.117 This group consciousness probably had roots in an awareness of common descent, and likely derived sustenance from circumstantial factors. Among these factors were continual social and economic intercourse among cristãos-novos, as well as the persistence of Old Christian prejudice against conversos irrespective of the latter’s religious convictions.
The entry of a sizable “Portuguese” element into the Spanish scene after 1580 was a watershed in the history of all peninsular conversos. By that time, the virtual disappearance of native crypto-Judaism had caused a shift in Spanish attitudes toward cristianos nuevos. Rather than focusing on religious behavior per se, these attitudes now focused on the purported ethnic or racial characteristics of Judeoconversos. So too, words like converso, which had applied to actual converts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had become hereditary labels with predominantly racial or ethnic meanings. The emergence of collective designations such as gente del linaje (people of the lineage), esta raza (this race), esta casta (this caste), esta nación (this nation), and gente de la nación (people of the Nation), underlined the perceptual turn toward racialism that took place in Castile and Aragon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.118
Once in Spain, Portuguese conversos presented a challenge to the conversophobic imagination because they revived the specter of widespread heresy at a time when racial criteria had become central in Spanish thinking about human difference and social danger. Not long after the arrival of thousands of Luso-conversos, terms such as portugueses de la nación—or simply, portugueses—came into popular use as a means of differentiating between Spanish conversos and those of foreign provenance. A practical effect of the new code words was to define Portuguese New Christians as a dangerous group in their own right. In time, the appellation “Portuguese” acquired the same cross-generational meaning that the term converso had attained at the turn of the sixteenth century: by the 1600s, Spaniards typically employed the word “Portuguese” to identify New Christians who were descended from Portuguese immigrants. The difference was that the designation “Portuguese” connoted a particularly grave religious menace as much as it connoted a purely racial one.
One result of these developments is the conceptual muddle exemplified by the narrative testimony of the informants in the Pereira investigation. The various instances of semantic slippage in that case do not suggest the relatively unambiguous trend toward