Another prominent Converso was the Rabbi Jehoshua Ha-Lorqui, who took the name of Gerónimo de Santafé and founded a family almost as powerful as the Santa Marías. He too showed his zeal in the book named Hebræomastix, in which he exaggerated the errors of the Jews in the manner best adapted to excite the execration of Christians. Another leading Converso family was that of the Caballerías, of which eight brothers were baptized and one of them, Bonafos, who called himself Micer Pedro de la Caballería, wrote, in 1464, the Celo de Cristo contra los Judíos in which he treated them with customary obloquy as the synagogue of Satan and argues that the hope of Christianity lies in their ruin.[336] In thus stimulating the spirit of persecuting fanaticism we shall see how these men sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
Meanwhile the position of the Jews grew constantly more deplorable. Decimated and impoverished, they were met by a steadily increasing temper of hatred and oppression. The massacres of 1391 had been followed by a constant stream of emigration to Granada and Portugal, which threatened to complete the depopulation of the aljamas and, with the view of arresting this, Henry III, in 1395, promised them the royal protection for the future. The worth of that promise was seen in 1406, when in Córdova the remnant of the Judería was again assailed by the mob, hundreds of Jews were slain and their houses were sacked and burnt. It is true that the king ordered the magistrates to punish the guilty and expressed his displeasure by a fine of twenty-four thousand doblas on the city, but he had, the year before, in the Córtes of 1405, assented to a series of laws depriving the Jews at once of property and of defence, by declaring void all bonds of Christians held by them, reducing to one-half all debts due to them and requiring a Christian witness and the debtor’s acknowledgement for the other half, annulling their privileges in the trial of mixed cases and requiring the hateful red circle to be worn except in travelling, when it could be laid aside in view of the murders which it invited.[337]
This was cruel enough, yet it was but a foretaste of what was in store. In 1410, when the Queen-regent Doña Catalina was in Segovia, there was revealed a sacrilegious attempt by some Jews to maltreat a consecrated host. The story was that the sacristan of San Fagun had pledged it as security for a loan—the street in which the bargain was made acquiring in consequence the name of Calle del Mal Consejo. The Jews cast it repeatedly into a boiling caldron, when it persistently arose and remained suspended in the air, a miracle which so impressed some of them that they were converted and carried the form to the Dominican convent and related the facts. The wafer was piously administered in communion to a child who died in three days. Doña Catalina instituted a vigorous investigation which implicated Don Mayr, one of the most prominent Jews in the kingdom, whose services as physician had prolonged the life of the late king. He was subjected to torture sufficient to elicit not only his participation in the sacrilege but also that he had poisoned his royal master. The convicts were drawn through the streets and quartered, as were also some others who in revenge had attempted to poison Juan de Tordesillas, the Bishop of Segovia. The Jewish synagogue was converted into the church of Corpus Christi and an annual procession still commemorates the event. San Vicente Ferrer turned it to good account, for we are told that in 1411 he almost destroyed the remnants of Judaism in the bishopric.[338]
OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS
The affair made an immense impression especially, it would seem, on San Vicente, convincing him of the advisability of forcing the Jews into the bosom of the Church by reducing them to despair. At Ayllon, in 1411, he represented to the regents the necessity of further repressive legislation and his eloquence was convincing.[339] The Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, promulgated in 1412 and drawn up by Pablo de Santa María as Chancellor of Castile, was the result. By this rigorous measure, Jews and Moors, under savage and ruinous penalties, were not only required to wear the distinguishing badges, but to dress in coarse stuffs and not to shave or to cut the hair round. They could not change their abodes and any nobleman or gentleman receiving them on his lands was heavily fined and obliged to return them whence they came, while expatriation was forbidden under pain of slavery. Not only were the higher employments of farming the revenues, tax-collecting, and practising as physicians and surgeons forbidden, but any position in the households of the great and numerous trades, such as those of apothecaries, grocers, farriers, blacksmiths, peddlers, carpenters, tailors, barbers, and butchers. They could not carry arms or hire Christians to work in their houses or on their lands. That they should be forbidden to eat, drink or bathe with Christians, or be with them in feasts and weddings, or serve as god-parents was a matter of course under the canon law, but now even private conversation between the races was prohibited, nor could they sell provisions to Christians or keep a shop or ordinary for them. It is perhaps significant that nothing was said about usury. Money-lending was almost the only occupation remaining open, while the events of the last twenty years had left little capital wherewith to carry it on and the laws of 1405 had destroyed all sense of security in making loans. They were moreover deprived of the guarantees so long enjoyed and were subjected to the exclusive jurisdiction, civil and criminal, of the Christians.[340] They were thus debarred from the use of their skill and experience in the higher pursuits, professional and industrial, and were condemned to the lowest and rudest forms of labor; in fine, a wall was built around them from which their only escape was through the baptismal font. Fernando of Antequera carried the law in all its essentials to Aragon and King Duarte adopted it in Portugal, so that it ruled the whole Peninsula except the little kingdom of Navarre where Judaism was already almost extinct. It is significant that Fernando, in promulgating it in Majorca, alleged in justification the complaints of the inquisitors as to the social intercourse between Jews and Christians.[341]
While San Vicente and Pablo de Santa María were thus engaged in reducing to despair the Jews of Castile, the other great Converso, Gerónimo de Santafé, was laboring in a more legitimate way for their conversion in Aragon. He had been appointed physician to the Avignonese pope, Benedict XIII, who had been obliged to cross the Pyrenees, and who, on November 25, 1412, summoned the aljamas of Aragon to send, in the following January, their most learned rabbis to San Mateo, near Tortosa, for a disputation with Gerónimo on the proposition that the Messiah had come. Fourteen rabbis, selected from the synagogues of all Spain, with Vidal ben Veniste at their head, accepted the challenge. The debate opened, February 7, 1414, under the presidency of Benedict himself, who warned them that the truth of Christianity was not to be discussed but only sixteen propositions put forward by Gerónimo, thus placing them wholly on the defensive. Despite this disadvantage they held their ground tenaciously during seventy-nine sessions, prolonged through a term of twenty-one months. Gerónimo covered himself with glory by his unrivalled dialectical subtilty and exhaustless stores of learning and his triumph was shown by his producing a division between his opponents.[342]
OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS
During this colloquy, in the summer of 1413, some two hundred Jews of the synagogues of Saragossa, Calatayud and Alcañiz professed conversion. In 1414 there was a still more abundant harvest. A hundred and twenty families of Calatayud, Daroca, Fraga and Barbastro presented themselves for baptism and these were followed by the whole aljamas of Alcañiz, Caspe, Maella, Lérida, Tamarit and Alcolea, amounting to about thirty-five