The central predicament of early modern Judeoconversos both inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula lay in the fact that they inhabited a cultural threshold. This threshold was at once a boundary and a crossroads between the Christian and Jewish worlds. Collectively, New Christians were neither full insiders nor full outsiders of either world, but were simultaneously part of both. Because normative views of religion construed the boundaries of the Christian and Jewish camps as rigid and impermeable, the very existence of Judeoconversos confounded traditional meanings of religious community and religious identity. Notably, the anomalous condition of Judeoconversos—I will call it cultural liminality—was socially and historically determined; it was neither inherent in physical descent from Jews, nor always dependent on the conversos’ religious beliefs and intentions.
As titular Christians, conversos partook of an Ibero-Christian culture that many of them internalized as their own. One may say that conversos actually formed an integral part of Spanish and Portuguese life. In the main, however, Old Christians denied conversos complete, unqualified membership in Ibero-Christian society. The imaginary association of New Christians with Jews and Judaism tainted even the most Hispanicized and Christianized of Judeoconversos. It also sustained such peculiar mechanisms of persecution and social exclusion as the Holy Office and the statutes of purity of blood. These mechanisms institutionalized and magnified the attritional force of popular prejudice, itself rooted in Judeophobia. As a result, conversos—believing Christians, ambivalent ones, and crypto-Jews alike—had little choice but to remain outside the social mainstream, even when they participated fully in many of its facets.5
If Old Christian society was largely unwilling to accept conversos as “true” Christians, diasporic kehillot welcomed converso refugees only if the latter submitted to a public self-transformation. This entailed a process of reeducation, sometimes accompanied by penitential purification.6 To be sure, not all of the returnees were prepared to adapt to Jewish life even after experiencing their formal incorporation into Judaism. The same was true of several of the immigrants’ immediate descendants. Although a majority of the escapees underwent a successful cultural transition, an important minority abandoned mainstream, rabbinic Judaism for a variety of mystical-messianic, rationalistic, or wholly equivocal alternatives. Some refugees remained within the Christian fold throughout their exile. Others, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, returned to Iberia, where they became penitent Catholics.
The options of heterodoxy and full-fledged dissidence proved similarly appealing to Judeoconversos who lingered in the Iberian Peninsula. While most conversos chose to blend into Christendom as quietly as possible, several notorious ones were influenced by messianic, illuminist, and Erasmian currents.7 Still others actualized their sense of difference through a gamut of secret, eclectic practices with real or imagined origins in Jewish ideas, rituals, and folklore.8
It is important to note, however, that the religious status of Judeoconversos was not the only factor that shaped their cultural profile. A key deter minant of the social position of the cristianos nuevos (cristãos-novos in Portuguese) was political and economic in nature. Like their forbears in the Iberian juderías conversos constituted a predominantly urban minority. Its members were chiefly engaged in commercial, professional, scholarly, artisanal, and other nonagricultural occupations.9 From the 1580’s through the second half of the seventeenth century, an influential stratum of Judeoconversos and Sephardi grandees built and operated vast mercantile networks from entrepots such as Amsterdam, Istanbul, Curaçao, and Venice.10 When it did not derive from connections to these networks, the power of converso notables in Spain and Portugal was usually the product of alliances with Old Christian elites. Such alliances often entailed service to the crown, the church, and the Old Christian nobility, and were frequently built through the painstaking circumvention of social barriers. For example, several Judeoconversos improved their lot by securing bogus certificates of pureza, by marrying their children into the Old Christian nobility, or simply by purchasing forbidden offices and titles from corrupt officials.11 Yet, the basic social and political situation of these ambitious individuals remained fundamentally akin to that of the vast majority of conversos in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere: Usually the social climbers were not labradores (unskilled manual laborers). Neither did they belong to the traditional ruling classes, especially the hereditary nobility. Indeed, Judeoconversos comprised a middle class in the simplest and most immediate sense of the term. For rich and poor conversos alike (particularly for those in the peninsula) economic and political “in-between-ness” went hand in hand with religious liminality.
New Christians reacted to the condition of liminality in a variety of ways. I have already alluded to some of the least studied of converso behaviors. Again, these included maintaining a heartfelt Christian identity in exile, and returning to the Iberian Peninsula—and to Catholicism—after professing Judaism in the Diaspora. A third reaction, perhaps the most sinister, was the choice to cooperate willfully with the Inquisition. Conversos who pursued the latter strategy usually served as semiprofessional informers after undertaking formal penance for their own actual or alleged Judaizing.
The phenomena of return to Iberia, reversion to Catholicism, and the corollary incidence of voluntary denunciation have remained largely unexplored; this despite the fact that even cursory surveys of inquisitorial history reveal the existence of what one may call religious “wafflers,” habitual returnees, spontaneous self-incriminators, and enthusiastic informers of converso origin. The relative paucity of studies on such ostensibly unconventional types is doubly puzzling given the enormous energies that scholars have expended in reconstructing the institutional history of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
To be sure, experts on Iberian Jewry have devoted articles, book chapters, and footnotes to the problem of converso “deviants” or “renegades.” A number of scholars have written about the most notorious of medieval Jewish apostates (as distinct from informers), including anti-Jewish polemicists such as Abner of Burgos, Geronimo de Santa Fe, and the ultra-Judeophobe Alonso de Espina, whose status as a converso remains uncertain. A few scholars have contributed articles on the incidence of slander among Spanish Jews of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.12 For their part, students of early modern Europe have been diligent in scrutinizing the personalities and intellectual careers of Uriel da Costa, Baruch (or Bento or Benedict) Spinoza, and a handful of other arch-dissidents of converso origin. However, to my knowledge no investigator has ever placed the phenomena of return to the Iberian Peninsula, reversion to Christianity, and voluntary collaboration with the Inquisition at the center of an extensive analytical venture.13 Aside from Yosef Kaplan, no scholar has attempted to explain these phenomena or sufficiently analyzed the fact that that their “peaks” occurred in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That period saw the intensification of inquisitorial persecution in Portugal, the flight of thousands of Portuguese New Christians into Spain, the concomitant resurgence of the Spanish Holy Office, the massive emigration of Judeoconversos from the Iberian Peninsula, and finally, the integration of hundreds if not thousands of converso refugees into the Jewish Diaspora.
My own interest in the phenomena abbreviated by the labels “dissident” and “renegade” behavior centers on five clusters of questions that existing scholarship has tended to underanalyze or neglect altogether.
First and foremost, why did converso “renegades” exist at all? Why did many conversos choose to return to Iberia? Why did many of them return to Christianity? Why did some of the returnees opt to denounce themselves and their fellows without any apparent or direct pressure from the Inquisition?14
Second, were the returnees and spontaneous informers simply idiosyncratic individuals prone to “strange” behavior? Were they mere opportunists? Were they following their religious conscience(s)?
Third, were there specific historical forces or circumstances to which the dissidents’ behavior served as a response