Posted: Mon 04 Apr 2005 01:22 Post subject: The Spanish One Drop Rule?
I have been reading a book called "The Origins of the Inquisition" by B. Neyanyahu, (1995) Random House.
It focuses on developments in 15th century Spain which preceded the Inquisition. The author's thesis is that the charges of heresy which were leveled at the "conversos" (i.e. persons who were converted from Judaism to Catholicism or who were descended from such persons) were a pretext to deprive the conversos of their property and, in some cases, their lives.
In the book, he cites the following regulation from the Colegio Viejo de San Bartolome, in Salamanca, which he estimates was adopted in the first half of the 15th century:
"Since it has always been our will and intention that no person of Jewish origin should be allowed entrance to this college, and since we cannot permit this wish of ours to be forgotten in the course of time, we have stipulated and we order that no one who orignates in the said stock whether from both sides or from one, be admitted to the collegiate and chaplaincy of the said College, and that in this matter no difference be made, whether the grade of origin is remote or near."
p. 272.
Later, he quotes from the Sentencia-Estatuto (Judgment and Statute) of Toledo passed in 1449, which "denied all conversos the right to any office (either public or private), the right to any ecclesiastical benefice (again, both public and private), and also the right to give testimony in court, both in Toledo and its territory. Furthermore, the Statute declared these denials binding also upon the conversos' offspring - that is, both their immediate descendants and their progeny in later times." p.325
Finally, he marks this Sentencia-Estatuto as the beginning of a centuries long epoch of discrimination and hatred, on a racial (as opposed to a religious) basis, directed at persons of "Jewish stock." p. 382.
This book raises several interesting questions and may be relevant to Frank's general inquiry regarding why the U.S. developed its one-drop rule and Latin America (among other places) did not.
First of all, to what extent were laws such as the one quoted accompanied by prohibitions of intermarriage between conversos and "old Christians"?
Secondly, to what extent did this statute suppress inter-marriage between the two groups, even if no other law specifically prohibited it?
Thirdly, to what extent was this approach to the conversos transmitted to the newly discovered and conquered territories in the Western Hemisphere?
Fourthly, if this approach to the conversos was transferred to the "New World" how did it effect the relationships between the Spanish and the non-Spanish as well as the offspring of Spanish and non-Spanish?
Finally, were the British aware of this attitude of the Spanish towards the conversos, and if so, how did it influence the development of British and American ideas of race?
I think that Frank should investigate all of these questions thoroughly and report back within a reasonable time. Let's say some time in the next few days?
The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain
by B. Netanyahu
Random House, 1,384 pp
Netanyahu writes that three main factors led to the creation of the dreaded tribunal. First, by their exceptional success in public life the conversos provoked widespread enmity. Jews were non-Christians and therefore disqualified from holding public office, even though they had sometimes held other posts such as tax officials and estate administrators. Conversos, by contrast, were eligible for all public positions and honors. During the fifteenth century, conversos and their descendants rose to high office as administrators, judges, and bishops. Many entered the nobility. In some cities their success provoked continuous rivalry, particularly in Toledo in the 1440s. Their enemies everywhere struggled to eliminate them by accusing them of being secret Jews. A new tribunal was required to deal with those who were accused.
Second, the clashes during the fifteenth century between Old (non-Jewish) Christians and New (converso) Christians, as the two categories were called, gave rise to conflicts over identity. In those conflicts, Netanyahu argues, we can see the birth of racism. Conversos could not be denounced by their enemies as Christians, for that was of course no crime; they were therefore denounced as "Jews." In many cities attempts were made to exclude them from office, and the notion of "blood purity" (limpieza de sangre, in Spanish) was conceived as a doctrine to be used against them; the only pure blood, so the theory went, was Christian. Jewish blood, and by extension converso blood, was impure. In city after city, statutes were proposed which disqualified people of "impure" blood from entering universities, religious orders, and city councils.
The most important of these statutes was adopted by the city council of Toledo in 1449, and in subsequent decades other institutions promulgated similar laws. Historians have frequently referred to the existence at this time of a "Marrano problem," by which they mean the alleged tendency of conversos to secretly practice Judaism. Netanyahu disagrees. For him what was in question was "the struggle of the Old Christians to reduce the status of the New." The statutes prescribing blood purity were an important weapon in this struggle. Drawing on his studies of converso practices and writings, Netanyahu adds a very important piece of information to help us understand one aspect of the racism of the time. He points out that many of the Marranos, long after their conversion, continued to look on themselves as a "nation," separate from Jews as well as Old Christians. "The Marranos," he writes,
were viewed as a distinct nationality which, in more ways than one, was related to the Jews. Indeed, not only did their enemies so regard them, but also their friends among the Old Christians; and, what is more, they were so regarded by the Marranos themselves. The latter, who insisted that religiously they were Christians and had nothing to do with Judaism and its followers, could not help admitting their actual belonging to a separate entity, which they clearly defined.
This, obviously, created a special identity which marked them out from others and fostered racism.
Third, the crown, in the person of King Ferdinand "the Catholic," decided to fortify its weak political position by allying itself with anti-converso forces. Neither the king nor Queen Isabella was anti-Semitic. They had been friendly toward individual conversos and Jews and they would continue to be so. But their political strategy turned them against conversos generally. Traditionally, Jewish historians have identified Isabella as the malign influence. Netanyahu, by contrast, sees Ferdinand as the dominant partner, and he is unsparing in his characterization of him. Ferdinand is, for him, the real founder of the Inquisition. He did not establish the Holy Office for any religious reason; nor, as some have claimed, was it primarily his intention to prey on the accumulated wealth of the conversos. Robbery was only the incidental consequence of his anti-converso policy, not its main purpose. Ferdinand's motive was straightforward Realpolitik, an attempt to form an advantageous alliance.
The grid of history: Cowboys and Indians
Monthly Review, July-August, 2003 by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The Vatican created the original institution of the Inquisition in 1179 for routing out Christian heretics, the original mandate being free of racialization. However, the 1400s in Spain saw increasing Inquisition investigations of conversos, that is, Christian converted Jews, and of moriscos, Christian converted Muslims. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were finally deported en masse from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. (It is said that Columbus watched the people being loaded on to ships for deportation as he set sail in 1492).
Before this rime the concept of biological race based on "blood" is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or anywhere else in the world. (5) As scapegoating and suspicion of con versos and moriscos intensified in Christian Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, "purity of blood," was popularized and had the effect of granting psychological, and increasingly legal, privileges to "Old Christians" thereby obscuring the class differences between the poor and the rich, i.e. between the landed aristocracy and the land-poor peasants and shepherds. In Cervantes' Don Quixote the impoverished Sancho Panza says, "I am an Old Christian, and to become an earl that is sufficient," to which Don Quixote replies, "And more than sufficient." And Cervantes' contemporary, Lope de Vega, wrote in his Peribaniez: "soy un hombre, /aunque de villana casta, /limpio de sangre y jam /de hebrea o mora mancbada" (I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood.)
The "Old Christian" Spanish, whatever their economic situation, were allowed to identify with the worldview of the nobility. As one Spanish historian puts it, "the common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping to climb, and let themselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory, and the noble life." (7)
We can also locate the origin of genocide and its linkage to colonialism in the late 1400s in Spain. Two punishments were devised to root out uncertain Christians deemed to have unclean blood: the extermination of many burned at the stake and the social isolation and persecution of the rest.
Linda Martz. A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority. (History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003.
Pp. xviii, 461. $72.50
Quote:
Some of the families Martz studies, like that of Diego de San Pedro, gave up a "compromising surname," married children into Old Christian families, and avoided all mention of ancestors. How assimilated was the family? San Pedro's grandson, a member of the Cortes of Castile in 1618, voted against moderating the pure blood statutes. Other families, like that of Juan de Herrera, Sr., acknowledged ancestors who had appeared before the Inquisition and intermarried with other converso families. But no matter what their attitude or how uncertain their position, converso families became part of the larger Toledo community. As Martz remarks, "It is not easy to pinpoint any local institution that does not include conversos, despite statutes dedicated to keeping them out" (p. 407). Each of her families displayed a sustained resilience in the face of varied challenges. Martz reminds us, in the end, that these people deserve to be remembered for their generous contributions to the intellectual, artistic, and political life of Toledo.
The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico
As a number of scholars have written, New Spain's race, or caste, system was partly inspired by the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre, which originally referred to the status or condition of having unsullied "Old Christian" ancestry, free of Jewish, Muslim, and heretical antecedents.8 Used mainly against converted Jews and Muslims (conversos and moriscos, respectively) on the Iberian Peninsula, this concept began to be deployed against colonial categories at the end of the sixteenth century, a process that is reflected in probanzas de limpieza de sangre (purity certifications) made by certain colonial institutions, among them the Inquisition and the Franciscan Order.9 Two aspects of this discursive shift are worth stressing here. First, at least initially, the concept of limpieza retained its metropolitan religious connotations for Spaniards in Mexico; its deployment against blacks and native people was tied to their status as "New Christians." Second, although colonial Spaniards increasingly marked both native and African ancestries as impure and generally saw mixture with either group in negative terms, it was black blood that was more frequently and systematically construed as a stain on a lineage.
Posted: Wed 06 Apr 2005 12:13 Post subject: The Spanish One-Drop Rule?
Thanks to Ms. Powell for her reply.
So, is it fair to conclude from this that the Spanish invented racism, and that the English and later the American "Anglo-Saxons" only modified it to fit their own purposes?
Posted: Wed 06 Apr 2005 16:09 Post subject: Re: The Spanish One-Drop Rule?
johnh01923 wrote:
So, is it fair to conclude from this that the Spanish invented racism...
The Romans called the Greeks "graeculi," a derogatory term implying innate inferiority and justifying the enslavement of Greeks. Certainly, Spain and Portugal had a hundred-year head start over the Brits in launching their colonial empire (along with all that that implies, such as co-opting previous ethnocentric contempt for those whom they had conquered). But to say that the Spanish "invented racism" requires a reasonably objective definition of "racism"--one that includes Spain but that excludes Rome, for example.
'
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