Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord

Madrid, contain a host of cases against “Portuguese” lenzeros, estanqueros de tabaco (tobacco stand-keepers), and vendedores de paños (sellers of woven fabrics, usually inexpensive, imported wool).¹³⁴ The abundance of such cases gives the strong impression that immigrant conversos were especially numerous in textiles, tobacco, chocolate, and other portable, high-demand commodities. The areas of central Madrid in which Simon Fernández and his sons sold linens, namely the marketplaces and residential streets surrounding the Calle Mayor, seem to have developed something of a “foreign” air with the mass immigration of Judeconversos from Lusitania after 1580, as well as other extranjeros (foreigners) throughout the seventeenth century. It is nonetheless unclear whether any areas of the city developed as specifically “Portuguese” sectors.¹³⁵

      A possible reason that it is not easy to find such sectors is that relatively few converso merchants stayed in one place along the course of their commercial careers. Economically and geographically, Spain’s New Christian minority as a whole was extremely mobile. In that respect, Judeoconversos differed from a majority of Old Christians and resembled a multitude of foreigners, chiefly Flemings, Frenchmen, and Italians, who flocked to Spain throughout the seventeenth century, attracted by the prospect of commerce in American and European imports. Of course, a key distinction between these foreigners and the conversos was that the latter were a very familiar part of the socioeconomic landscape of Iberia. By the seventeenth century, most Peninsular conversos were thoroughly Ibericized, that is to say, they were culturally (if not religiously) “Spanish” or “Portuguese.” Their language, public behavior, tastes, and social mores were in line with those of Old Christians of various social classes.¹³⁶

      One advantage that cristianos nuevos (Portuguese and non-Portuguese alike) had over the immigrant foreigners was that they could avail themselves of preexisting networks of fellow conversos whose presence and support throughout the peninsula made commerce in portable goods an attractive and potentially profitable pursuit. Of course, conversos also differed from the foreigners in that they bore an old social stigma and were often legally disabled by reason of their Jewish ancestry.

      Conversos in general, and especially the “Portuguese of the Nation,” became the objects of a popular backlash against foreigners as alarm over the political and economic crisis of the Habsburg kingdom grew during the seventeenth century. The backlash manifested itself in various arenas.

      Among the educated, eminent social critics struck a xenophobic chord when they bemoaned the fact that immigrant businessmen had become the country’s de facto mercantile and entrepreneurial class. Some commentators were particularly distressed that religiously suspect foreigners such as Frenchmen (possible Calvinists) and Portuguese New Christians (presumed Judaizers) prospered, while native Catholics wallowed in debt. Along these lines, the commentator Tomas de Mercado denounced what he called “our senseless subjection to foreigners in giving them control of all the most important things in the country…. The best properties are theirs … [and] the bulk of the kingdom [is] in their hands.”¹³⁷ The mercantilist Sancho de Moncada was more specific. For him, the ills of Spain derived from “the new trade of foreigners,” the radical cure for which was to prohibit foreign manufactures altogether.¹³⁸ Invective against Luso-converso businessmen flowed with particular venom from the pens of various commentators. One polemicist wrote to Philip IV that, “being lords of commerce and of the [customs] of all the ports … through the arrendamientos of royal rents, all [conversos] have their wealth outside of [the Habsburg Kingdoms] and the greater part of it in the provinces of your enemies … and they bleed these [Hispanic] realms continually, weakening them more every day, and making your enemies more powerful.”¹³⁹ Such condemnation grossly exaggerated the power of aliens and glossed over the obvious fact that most immigrants were not merchant tycoons. It is true that foreign businessmen had attained prominence in economic life. Frenchmen and Flemings, for example, founded large trading houses in Seville. Genoese bankers, the German Fuggers, and wealthy Portuguese conversos bankrolled the Spanish state at high interest. As mentioned earlier, a few of these conversos also secured the lucrative royal contracts.¹⁴⁰ For all their ire, however, nativist reactionaries could not erase the fact that the commercial activities of the immigrants satisfied Spanish demand that native businessmen and capitalists could not meet, be it demand for credit, administrative services, or foreign goods.

      At a popular level, the attitudes of Old Christians toward converso merchants and businessmen during Spain’s century of crisis were often tinted by a host of fears about the latter’s supposed greed, deceitfulness, and general immorality. Some libelous fictions that circulated freely as late as the 1700s had obvious roots in the mythological repertoire of medieval Judeophobia,¹⁴¹ and had little if anything to do directly with the economic activities of seventeenth-century conversos. For example, in the 1630s a royal bureaucrat by the name of Juan de Quinones devoted a purportedly scientific treatise to the subject of Jewish male menstruation. Quinones argued not only that Jewish men and their male descendants menstruated, but that all who descended of Jews emitted a peculiar odor, that they drank Christian blood to alleviate their God-given maladies, and so on.¹⁴² Quinones’s fabulous claims were centuries old,¹⁴³ yet they proved remarkably resilient despite the fact that there had been no openly professing Jews in Iberia since the 1490s.

      One of the most successful propagators of mythic conversophobia was the Portuguese polemicist Vicente da Costa Mattos. His Breve discurso contra a herética perfidia do Iudaismo (1622) was replete with Judeophobic folklore, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the work sold well both in Costa Mattos’s homeland and in Spain.¹⁴⁴ The Spaniard Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s oft-cited Centinela contra Judios, which dated from the early 1670s, rehearsed the same gamut of anti-Jewish legends for a Spanish public not yet weary of reading about Jews and the evil inclinations and physical monstrosities they supposedly transmitted to their descendants.¹⁴⁵

      Given the currency of conversophobic myths in the Spain of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV, it does not seem coincidental that a major outburst of anti-converso hatred occurred in 1632, when a libel known as the Cristo de la Paciencia spread throughout Madrid. This cause célèbre centered on a group of Portuguese conversos whom local inquisitors had accused of ritually flogging an effigy of Christ in their “secret synagogue.”¹⁴⁶ The inquest into the supposed crimes culminated in a monumental auto general de fe in which two of the accused received sentences of death, to the vocal delight of thousands of onlookers.¹⁴⁷

      The image of conversos as bloodthirsty sadists clearly had a wide and lasting appeal. Shortly after the Paciencia scandal subsided, another celebrated Judeophobic libel became the subject of a popular literary revival. The libel in question was the late medieval legend of the Holy Child of La Guardia (1492), a gory tale of Eucharist desecration and the ritual murder of a Christlike child by Spanish Jews and conversos. Among latter-day dramatizers of this story were the playwrights Jose de Cañizárez (La viva imagen de Cristo, 1641), and the undisputed bestseller of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, Lope de Vega (El niño inocente, 1640).¹⁴⁸ For its part, the accusation that conversos relived their ancestors’ deicidal bloodlust by whipping statues of Christ resurfaced as late as 1650, in the inquisitorial process against Maria de Sierra.¹⁴⁹

      By itself, the recurrence of old defamations suggests that Judeophobic images had enormous resonance both as narrative motifs and as accusatory devices to be wielded against conversos. However, during the late 1500s and throughout the 1600s anti-converso sentiment was much more than a perpetuation of medieval hatreds; it was also a product of the specific historical circumstances in which it occurred. Seventeenth-century conversophobia was similar, often identical in form to medieval Judeophobia, yet the meanings that the latter-day bigots attached to their fantasies were not necessarily the same as those the medieval Jew-baiters attached to theirs.

      Seventeenth-century Portuguese and especially Spanish conversophobia adhered closely to the essentialist ideology (or ideologies) of pureza de sangre. It is not by chance that vociferous defenders of that ideology were at the forefront of anti-converso agitation. In numerous essays, virtually all of them depicted Judeoconversos as greedy, socially ambitious parasites with a hereditary proclivity toward unproductive occupations, such as