7. "GOMEZ, THE ONIONS BEGIN TO SMELL!""THEY WALK with heads held high," a contemporary writer said of the members of New York's tiny (perhaps a hundred families in a city of ten thousand) eighteenth-century Jewish community.
"These haughtiest of Chosen People must deem themselves the princes of the earth." They may also have walked with a certain feeling of relief. Because, while families like the Gomezes were finding it possible to prosper in the new world, dark and frightening rumors drifted back to them from across the ocean -- tales that their rabbis told them in the synagogue of what Jews who had elected to remain in Spain and Portugal were undergoing.
Deep in the background of every American Jew's conscience, throughout those Inquisitional years, was an awareness of what was happening to his relatives and coreligionists in the land the Jews called the Sepharad. It was a frustrating awareness, too, because those who had escaped the Inquisition could do absolutely nothing to help those who had not.
And,
once the Inquisition had begun, there seemed to be no way to stop it. It grew like a malignant disease for nearly four hundred years, and when at last it died, its death was slow and hard and painful. It was founded in 1479, and
the last public burning took place in 1781, but even then the Inquisition was not over. Executions continued under the Holy Office until as recently as 1826.The last man to hang was a young Valencian, who, in public prayer, was said to have uttered -- witnesses swore they had heard him -- a blasphemous "Praise be to God," instead of the required "Ave Maria," His body swung in the plaza mayor for all to see.
It was not, in fact, until July 15, 1834, that the Spanish Inquisition was officially abolished. But the Expulsion Edict remained firmly in effect, and for years after that there were repeated urgings from the press and from the pulpit for "the restoration of our beloved Inquisition." Even by the 1890's,it seems -- while Americans were dancing gaily at Sherry's and laughing at the antics of Diamond Jim Brady -- Spanish zealots were clamoring to have their Inquisition back, nor had the country seemed to have grasped the fact that, in its long and arduous process, the Inquisition had destroyed Spain utterly, robbed it of all the bright promise it had once had in the years of the conquistadores.
The Inquisition would not die, even though it was based on an unworkable concept. For it set about with fanaticism to perform a labor that could not be done, to erase something that could not be erased, to create something that could not be created, and to solve a problem to which there was no solution, final or even partial. The Inquisition was, by the nature of the visions that bore it, endless, and so, when the end came, Spain lay spent and exhausted and powerless.
Apologists for the Inquisition, and defenders of Isabella, who inaugurated it, point out that the idea was not original with Spain, that Spain's version was based on an earlier Italian effort, and that the punishments it inflicted were no more brutal than those in other countries of the period. The technique of expulsion was not new. In England in 1290 the Jews were ordered out on the grounds that they tried to lure recent converts to Christianity back to "the vomit of Judaism." It has been said that the Inquisition was necessary because Jews had infiltrated Spanish life to such an extent that they had to be removed and that, from the beginning, it had been clear to the Jew that conversion would free him from the possibility of persecution. Also, it has been argued, Jews who were honest about their Judaism were never murdered, tortured, imprisoned, or mistreated in any way. Admission to being a Jew merely resulted in a man's being stripped of his property and bank account, and sent out of the country. But the terrible fact of the Inquisition, regardless of its origins and methods, was that for all its protracted length it was a massive failure. If its aim was to create a homogeneous Spain, its result was the opposite. It tore the country into warring and irreconcilable factions.
The Conversos, or New Christians, quickly reoccupied important positions almost identical to those they had held as Jews, those of physicians, lawyers, financial advisers to the nobility, jobs for which training or learning qualified them. Instead of a Jewish conspiracy, it now seemed like a New Christian conspiracy. Meanwhile, the actual strength of their new faith, the fullness of the conversion, was under heavy suspicion -- and for good reason. The man baptized at sword point was often less than sincere. When Converso doctors lost patients, the old accusations were muttered, and when the government attempted to take untrained men, who happened to be Old Christians, and turn them overnight into brilliant physicians, the results were equally disastrous. In the somewhat lowlier occupation of tax collector, more ironies appeared. When Old Christians took up these tasks they were looked down upon for performing "Jewish" chores, and soon were accused of being Jews in Old Christian clothing. Of this confused situation, a seventeenth-century writer complained:Formerly all who applied themselves to the gathering of taxes were Jews and people of low origin; yet now, when they are not so, people look down upon them as Hebrews, even though they be Old Christians and of noble descent.
Between Old Christian and New there grew an unbridgeable gulf of dislike and distrust. A number of ex-Jews, obviously supposing that the move would make them safer from the Inquisition, chose clerical careers and some of them rose to positions of importance in the Church. But even the Church's servants were not spared from suspicion that they were secret Judaizers, and before the Inquisition was over, hundreds of nuns, monks, and friars were marched to the stake. At one remarkable auto-da-fe in Coimbra, which lasted over two days and in which over two hundred suspected Jews were involved, the victims included nuns, friars, curates, priests, canons, professors, vicars, and an unfrocked Franciscan who stubbornly refused to confess that he was not a devout Catholic and was therefore burned alive as punishment.
The doctrine of limpieza, or purity of blood, was impossible to enforce from the beginning, with so much of the Spanish nobility already "tainted" with Jewish blood, and so it quickly became nothing more than a tool -- a powerful tool, for it was an instrument of blackmail -- which any noble could use in dealing with his enemies, or which the Church could use in its endless struggle with the nobility, or which one order within the Church could use against another. In 1560, for example, Cardinal Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla, annoyed that two relatives were not admitted to a particular military order, pettishly and vengefully turned over to Philip II a document, later called the Tizon de la Nobleza Espana (the Blot on the Nobility of Spain), in which he "proved" that the entire nobility of Spain was of Jewish descent. Apparently the Cardinal's proofs were convincing, for the Tizon became a standard Inquisitional reference book, used right up into the nineteenth century, hauled out whenever new victims were needed, republished, and amended at each publisher's whim -- many times. For a price, of course, one could have one's name removed from its list.Meanwhile, Conversos who had been converted under duress and who were bitter and resentful of the Church became a faction of their own. Outwardly labeled Marranos, they called themselves, in private, Anusim, "the Forced Ones," and continued to practice Judaism.
Soon there was agitated talk of "the Converso danger" and "the Marrano peril," and Conversos, in terror of their lives, fanned the flames by turning informer on Marranos as well as on each other. In Seville, one of the main centers of Conversos, the New Christians, led by Diego de Susan, a wealthy merchant, decided to resist the Inquisition. Diego's beautiful daughter, however, disclosed this secret to her Old Christian lover, who passed it on to the Inquisitors, and many distinguished Conversos of Seville were tried, convicted, and sent to the stake.
It was an endless whirlpool of hate and fear. A list was circulated of the thirty-seven signs by which one could recognize a Judaizer. With dismay, it was quickly noted that a number of the thirty-seven signs applied to everybody. There is no way of telling how many Marranos there were at any given point in time, how many had fled, how many remained.
Marranos, it was said -- and no doubt it was true -- worked harder for the Inquisition than most Christians as a way of preserving their disguise. How could you tell the traditional zeal of the fresh convert from what might be smoke screen and deception? There was no way, and the extra-zealous Converso was as much under suspicion and surveillance as the indifferent one. And thus the Inquisition revealed its essential dilemma: It was suspicious even of itself.When the Inquisitor of Seville wanted to locate the homes of Marranos, he went up on a hilltop on a Saturday and pointed out homes whose chimneys were not smoking. "You will not see smoke rising from any of them," he said, "in spite of the severe cold. They have no fires because it is the Sabbath."
As the Inquisition's power increased, so did the number of fleeing Marranos, and the number of Judaizers discovered and brought to trial. At the Inquisitional tribunal in Toledo, between the years 1575 and 1610, 175 convicted Judaizers appeared for sentencing. Later, between 1648 and 1794, the number had jumped to 659.
Though Judaizing was not the only crime the Inquisitional courts dealt with, it was by far the most popular one. Also punished were those found guilty of being secret Moors (or Moriscos), those guilty of blasphemy, witchcraft, heresy, solicitation in confession, and "those who do not consider fornication sinful." It is interesting to note that while the number of convicted Judaizers rose sharply, the number of persons accused of condoning fornication declined -- from 264 in the years 1575 to 1610 to a mere five in 1648 to 1794.
The prisons of Spain filled until there were enough prisoners to hold an auto-da-fe -- literally, an "act of the faith" -- and these autos quickly became a tremendously popular form of public entertainment. Today, the phrase conjures up scenes of human victims tied to rafters and fed into blazing pyres while a bloodthirsty populace screamed approval. In actuality,
the autos-da-fe were reasonably sedate affairs, conducted as public expressions of religiosity and pious justice. Fidel Fita, a fifteenth-century Spaniard, describes the ceremony that was held on Sunday, February 12, 1486, and we see that it was a restrained occasion:
All the reconciled went in procession, to the number of 750 persons, including both men and women ... from the church of St. Peter Martyr ... the men were all together in a group, bareheaded and unshod, and since it was extremely cold they were told to wear soles under their feet which were otherwise bare; in their hands were unlit candles. The women were together in a group, their heads uncovered and their faces bare, unshod like the men and with candles. Among these were many prominent men in high office. With the bitter cold and the dishonour and disgrace they suffered from the great number of spectators (since a great many people from outlying districts had come to see them), they went along howling loudly and weeping and tearing their hair, no doubt more for the dishonour they were suffering than from any offence they had committed against God. Thus they went in tribulation through the streets along which the Corpus Christi procession goes, until they came to the cathedral. At the door of the church were two chaplains who made the sign of the cross on each one's forehead saying, "Receive the sign of the Cross, which you denied and lost through being deceived." Then they went into the church until they arrived at a scaffolding erected by the new gate, and on it were the father inquisitors. Nearby was another scaffolding on which stood an altar at which they said mass and delivered a sermon. After this a notary stood up and began to call each one by name, saying, "Is -- here?" The penitent raised his candle and said "Yes." There in public they read all the things in which he had judaized. The same was done for the women. When this was over they were publicly allotted penance and ordered to go in procession for six Fridays, disciplining their body with scourges of hempcord, barebacked, unshod and bareheaded; and they were to fast for those six Fridays. It was also ordered that all the days of their lives they were to hold no public office such as alcalde, alguacil, regidor or jurado, or be public scriveners or messengers, and that those who held these offices were to lose them. And that they were not to become money-changers, shopkeepers or grocers or hold any official post whatever. And they were not to wear silk or scarlet or coloured cloths or gold or silver or pearls or coral or any jewels. Nor could they stand as witnesses. And they were ordered if they relapsed, that is if they fell into the same error again, and resorted to any of the aforementioned things, they would be condemned to the fire. And when all this was over they went away at two o'clock in the afternoon.
Henry Kamen, one of the best historians of the Inquisition, has pointed out that two o'clock is the traditional Spanish hour for lunch, and that 750
transgressors "reconciled" back into the ways of righteousness was most certainly a good morning's work. As the Inquisition progressed, and the number of penitents grew, the autos-da- fe became longer, often stretching into the night and sometimes going on for days. Burnings, however, seldom took place in public in the centers of town, and were performed in the outskirts of cities, away from the eyes of the morbid or curious. Also, since so
many prisoners died in confinement before being sentenced, a good proportion of the victims were burned in effigy only.
"Scourging" was a more popular form of punishment. The prisoner was ordered to "discipline his body" with whips, or often given added discipline by being lashed to a mule and "whipped through the streets" by the executioner. In these cases, the public was urged to participate by pelting the victim with stones and garbage. How grateful the prisoner must have been to have returned to the True Faith. Children and old people were subject to identical punishment -- a teen-age youth sentenced to the same number of lashings as a seventy-year-old woman. The number of lashings prescribed varied according to the offense, but a hundred was the usual minimum and two hundred the maximum.
An even more bizarre -- though effective -- device of punishment was the sanbenito, a corruption of the words saco benito, or "holy bag." An odd garment, cut rather like a poncho, the sanbenito fitted over the head and hung to the knees. It was usually of yellow, the color of cowardice, and decorated with crosses, flames, devils, and other reminders of torture. With the sanbenito was worn a tall pointed headpiece, similar to a dunce's cap. A reformed heretic might be required to wear this strange-looking outfit for anywhere from a few months to the rest of his life, and any relapse to his old Judaizing ways while condemned to the sanbenito meant, instantly, the stake. In addition to the humiliation the sanbenito inflicted upon its wearers, there was the further disgrace that when a penitent was permitted to remove his sack it was displayed, with his name attached to it, in the cathedral "in perpetuity."Tomas de Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General of the Inquisition, was himself of Jewish descent. He was among those who urged Ferdinand and Isabella to establish the Inquisition in the first place.
Both monarchs held him in high regard. The queen consulted Torquemada often and sought his advice on religious matters. He visited her frequently at her palace in Segovia in the years before she took the throne, and he became her personal confessor. Later, he became Ferdinand's as well, and must have listened to some startling accounts if Ferdinand confessed all. Torquemada was known for his thoroughness and single-mindedness. He was called "a scourge of heresy, a light of Spain, the saviour of his country, and an honor to his Order," which was the
Dominican. Popes Sixtus IV and Alexander VI praised Torquemada for his dedication to ridding Spain of Jews and Moors, and spoke admiringly of the smooth efficiency of his courts.
A strange, austere, overpowering figure of a man, he comes down through history to us as a compound of myths and contradictions.
It was said that he never traveled unless he was accompanied by 250 armed guards and fifty horsemen, that he was pathologically afraid of the dark and could not sleep unless an attendant was at his side to rouse him from his terrible nightmares. It was also said that he never ate unless the horn of a unicorn and the tongue of a scorpion were placed beside his plate. Considering the supply of unicorns' horns in fifteenth-century Spain, he must have dined little. He was praised for his extreme asceticism, yet a portrait of him by a contemporary painter depicts him as a full-faced, dark-complexioned, oddly worldly-looking bon vivant. One could describe his face as decidedly Semitic in cast, and this may have had something to do with his attitudes.
It was he, whose own blood was "impure," who first introduced the doctrine of limpieza into a Dominican monastery, the one that he built in Avila and dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas. This cold and beautiful building, addressing serene courtyards and gardens, built with money extracted from the victims of his Inquisition, is a major tourist attraction in Avila today.
From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent....
Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves! ... There were six divisions in the apartment, and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to itself--and these decorations were in every instance formed of human bones! There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails. Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in these intricate designs ... and there was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that betrayed the artist’s love of his labors as well as his schooled ability. I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this? And he said, “We did it"--meaning himself and his brethren up stairs....
“Who were these people?”
“We--up stairs--Monks of the Capuchin order--my brethren.”
“How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?”
“These are the bones of four thousand.”
“It took a long time to get enough?”
“Many, many centuries.”
“Their different parts are well separated--skulls in one room, legs in another, ribs in another--there would be stirring times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull... You can not tell any of these parties apart, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, I know many of them.”
He put his finger on a skull. “This was Brother Anselmo--dead three hundred years--a good man.”
He touched another. “This was Brother Alexander--dead two hundred and eighty years. This was Brother Carlo--dead about as long.”...
This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I hardly knew whether to smile or shudder.
-- Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain
Torquemada's standards were said to be utterly unimpeachable. In 1484 his pope, Sixtus IV, wrote a letter congratulating him for having "directed your zeal to those matters which contribute to the praise of God and the utility of the orthodox faith."
He had a violent temper, and was not even afraid of speaking imperiously to his king and queen. According to one account, Ferdinand and Isabella were offered a ransom of 30,000 ducats by a group of Jews. The king and queen were tempted, and summoned Torquemada for an opinion. When he heard what they suggested, Torquemada is said to have tom his crucifix from his breast, flung it on the table in front of their majesties, and shouted, "Will you, like Judas, betray your Lord for money?"As the Inquisition progressed over the tortured centuries, it was not always so incorruptible. If the amount of the bribe sufficiently exceeded the amount that could be obtained through simple confiscation, the king was usually willing to listen.
In 1602, a group of ex-Jews offered Philip III a present of 1,860,000 ducats, plus handsome cash gifts to each of the royal ministers, if a pardon was issued to "judaizers of their nation for all past offences." And there was more, the king was told, where that came from. The Conversos openly admitted to a hoard of wealth amounting to over 80 million ducats held in a secret hiding place. This offer, more than sixty times the amount that enraged Torquemada, resulted in the issuance of a papal decree of pardon, and 410 prisoners were released from the Inquisition.Torquemada ruled that those who steadfastly refused to renounce their Judaism and to reembrace the Church must die by fire. Only the penitents were given lesser punishments. The results were some extraordinary cases of martyrdom. One of the greatest was that of Don Lope de Vera, who appears to have become actually unhinged by his zeal to be a Jew even though he had not a drop of Jewish blood in him. He had studied Hebrew and become a pro-Jewish fanatic. Denounced and turned over to the Inquisition by his own brother, Don Lope repeatedly declared to the Inquisitors that he wanted to become a Jew. He circumcised himself in his prison cell and stated that he had renamed himself Judah the Believer. While being led to the stake he chanted Hebrew prayers. He was burned alive.
Torquemada's successor as Grand Inquisitor was Diego Deza. Until he took his post he had been known as a quiet and scholarly man, a friend and patron of Columbus. Like Torquemada, he was of Jewish extraction. He far outdistanced his predecessor when it came to savagery, and under his leadership the Inquisition became more wanton and ferocious than ever before. In 1500 a Marrano woman "of exalted rank" who considered herself a prophetess was arrested at Herrera. Immediately this was seized upon as an excuse for an enormous auto-da-fe. After months of planning, it was held at Toledo and the woman and thirty-eight of her followers -- all of them women -- were burned. The next day, sixty-seven more -- again all women -- suffered the same fate.
Under Diego Deza, possession of a trace of Jewish blood was enough to call for execution. The archdeacon de Castro, whose mother was from an ancient Old Christian family, was sentenced, made to perform public penance, and had his considerable fortune confiscated, simply because his father had been a Converso.
At one point, 107 people were burned alive; they were said to have been in a church while a sermon containing pro-Jewish sentiments was being preached.The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American party, because Americans so much wonder, and deal so much in sentiment and emotion before any relic of Columbus.... He said:
“Come wis me, genteelmen!--come! I show you ze letter writing by Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!--write it wis his own hand!--come!”
He took us to the municipal palace. After much impressive fumbling of keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread before us. The guide’s eyes sparkled....
“What I tell you, genteelmen! Is it not so? See! handwriting Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!”
We looked indifferent--unconcerned. The doctor examined the document very deliberately, during a painful pause.--Then he said, without any show of interest:
“Ah--Ferguson--what--what did you say was the name of the party who wrote this?”
“Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!”
Another deliberate examination.
“Ah--did he write it himself; or--or how?”
“He write it himself!--Christopher Colombo! He’s own hand-writing, write by himself!”
Then the doctor laid the document down and said:
“Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that."
“But zis is ze great Christo--”
“I don’t care who it is! It’s the worst writing I ever saw. Now you musn’t think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out!--and if you haven’t, drive on!”
We drove on. The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more venture. He had something which he thought would overcome us. He said:
“Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me! I show you beautiful, O, magnificent bust Christopher Colombo!--splendid, grand, magnificent!”
He brought us before the beautiful bust--for it was beautiful--and sprang back and struck an attitude:
“Ah, look, genteelmen!--beautiful, grand,--bust Christopher Colombo!--beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!”
The doctor put up his eye-glass--procured for such occasions:
“Ah--what did you say this gentleman’s name was?”
“Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!”
“Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?”
“Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!”
“Discover America. No--that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo--pleasant name--is--is he dead?”
“Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!”
“What did he die of?”
“I do not know!--I can not tell.”
“Small-pox, think?”
“I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!”
“Measles, likely?”
“May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings.”
“Parents living?”
“Im-poseeeble!”
“Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?”
“Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!”
“Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed. Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"
That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties of the American joke.
-- Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain
The excesses of the Inquisition were reaching such heights that the captain of Cordoba complained that the Inquisitors "were able to defame the whole kingdom, to destroy without God or justice, a great part of it, slaying and robbing and violating maids and wives, to the great dishonor of the Christian religion."
Complaints of atrocities began to reach royal ears and, in 1505, Philip and Juana -- the daughter of Isabella -- ordered Inquisitional activities halted until they should return from Flanders. Then Philip suddenly died, leaving things in Juana's somewhat unsteady hands. Known as Juana la Loca, or Joan the Mad, she stayed, mute and uncommunicative, beside her dead husband's casket during a long macabre journey back across the face of Europe to Madrid. Periodically, Juana would order the casket opened and she would embrace the decaying corpse. While succession was being disputed, the Inquisition was resumed and continued on its dismal course.
Since "reconciled" heretics were being given, they were assured, the gift of eternal life, it was frequently argued that the kindest thing that could be done for a fresh Christian convert was to speed him, with as little to do as possible, out of this world and into the next before he had had a chance to change his mind. From the pen of an Inquisitor who witnessed the auto-da-fe of Logrofio in 1719 we have this chilling account of an accused Judaizer who "with perfect serenity," said:
"I will convert myself to the faith of Jesus Christ," words which he had not been heard to utter until then. This overjoyed all the religious who began to embrace him with tenderness and gave infinite thanks to God . . . a learned religious of the Franciscan Order asked him, "In what law do you die?" He turned and looked him in the eye and said, "Father, I have already told you that I die in the faith of Jesus Christ." This caused great pleasure and joy among all, and the Franciscan, who was kneeling down, arose and embraced the criminal. All the others did the same with great satisfaction, giving thanks for the infinite goodness of God. . . the criminal saw the executioner, who had put his head out from behind the stake, and asked him, "Why did you call me a dog before?" The executioner replied, "Because you denied the faith of Jesus Christ, but now you have confessed, we are brothers, and if I have offended you by what I said, I beg your pardon on my knees." The criminal forgave him gladly, and the two embraced.
And desirous that the soul which had given so many signs of conversion should not be lost, I went round casually behind the stake to where the executioner was, and gave him the order to strangle him immediately. . . . When it was certain that he was dead, the executioner was ordered to set the four corners of the pyre to the brushwood and charcoal that had been piled up . . . it began to bum . . . the flames rising swiftly . . . when the cords binding the criminal had been burnt off he fell through the open trap-door into the pyre and his whole body was reduced to ashes....
Such demonstrations of "the infinite goodness of God" had, over the years, their desired effect.
Even Converso families who had been converted with extreme reluctance became, after three or four generations, thoroughly Christianized. An elder might privately consider himself still a Jew, and continue secretly to practice his religion and honor its holy days. But there was a reluctance to pass Judaism on to children for fear of placing them in the Inquisition's relentless path. Often, by the time a child was old enough to be safely told that he was Jewish, he had already been educated to the dogma of another faith and another ritual. Thus the Conversos became, gradually, what they were supposed to be: Christian converts.
But the Inquisition was never able to stamp out completely the Jewish faith in Spain and Portugal. Marranos continued to meet in secret places, clearings in woods or cellars of houses, to celebrate the Sabbath and holy days. Their lives involved continuous stealth and deception and fear. How many were there? There is no way of telling. Throughout the provinces of Toledo, Estremadura, Andalusia, and Murcia, it was said in 1488 that of the converts "hardly any are true Christians, as is well known in all Spain," and Hernando de Pulgar, himself a Converso, testified that there were "thousands" of secret Jews practicing their religion in Toledo alone. Three hundred years later, in 1787, Joseph Townsend reported after traveling through Spain:
Even to the present day both Mahometans and Jews are thought to be numerous in Spain, the former among the mountains, the latter in all great cities. Their principal disguise is more than common zeal in external conformity to all the precepts of the Church; and the most apparently bigoted, not only of the clergy, but of the inquisitors themselves, are by some persons suspected to be Jews.
The Marranos gradually altered certain aspects of their ritual. After all, for the appearance of things it was necessary that they attend Catholic masses, and over the years Catholic practices made their inevitable way into Marrano Judaism. For instance, Marranos knelt rather than stood in prayer, and prayers were recited rather than chanted. No prayer books were kept, for they could be used as evidence, and Talmudic doctrine and lore were passed along verbally from one generation to the next. Marranos generally abstained from pork. They had secret Biblical names, which they used only among each other. Catholic wedding ceremonies were required, and a private Jewish wedding would be held afterward. More emphasis was placed on fasting than on feasting, and
elaborate measures were resorted to in order to keep a Marrano's Christian servants from discovering that a fast was going on. Servants might be sent out on sudden errands at mealtimes; in their absence, plates were greased and dirtied to make it appear that the meal had taken place. A favorite device was to stage a family quarrel just before mealtime. By prearrangement, one member of the family would run out into the street in a feigned fit of rage, and the others would run after him to try to cajole him. When the quarrel was over, everyone would be too emotionally exhausted to eat anything.
The ancestors of Lewis Gomez, New York merchant and advertiser of "good Stone-Lime," appear to have been somewhat luckier than most Inquisitional Jewish families. Because of their services to a series of Spanish royal houses, Gomezes had been able successfully to remain in Spain long after Ferdinand and Isabella's Expulsion Edict. The Gomezes were connected by marriage to the great Santangel family, Marranos who, before their claimed conversion, had been named Ginillo. The Santangels, with their wealth and power and vast land holdings in Aragon, were natural targets of the Inquisition. Jaime Martin de Santangel was burned in 1488; Donosa de Santangel six months later. Simon de Santangel and his wife, Clara, betrayed by their own son, were burned in Lerida in 1490. A more understandable betrayal occurred when one of the daughters of Luis de Santangel, along with her lover, was turned over to the Inquisition by her husband. A particularly grisly Inquisitional episode took place in
Granada in 1491 when Alfonso Gomez, his wife, the former Violante de Santangel, and her brother, Gabriel de Santangel, were all posthumously condemned of heresy and their families exhumed and burned in public.Perhaps the Gomez tradition of being men of deeds and few words helped them survive the Inquisition for as many generations as they did. As a family, the Gomezes over the centuries have been both industrious and brainy. It appears to have been Gomez brain power, rather than real estate, that made Gomezes so popular and useful to a series of Spanish kings and queens. In any case,
Isaac Gomez, born in Madrid in 1620, had developed such a skill with deeds -- particularly money deeds -- that he was made financial adviser to the king, following a family tradition. He was one of the king's great favorites.
The king at this time was the melancholy Philip IV, three-time great-grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, and great-great-grandson (on both his father's and his mother's side) of Juana la Loca, who, through the entanglements of royal intermarriage, turned up three more times in the king's family tree as his great-great-great grandmother. A heavy inheritance of her madness had fallen to him. This king was the father of the pathetic incompetent who was to be the last Hapsburg king, Carlos II, called Carlos the Bewitched. Philip himself was once suspected of being the victim of black witchcraft.
This also is the king we see in so many Velazquez portraits regally astride his horse or standing imperiously in lace and ruffles, clutching his huge plumed hat, with a look of disdain on his far from handsome face with its heavy-lidded eyes, large nose, handlebar moustache, and
the inevitable underslung Hapsburg jaw, which his son inherited to such an extreme extent that he could not chew his food. The king was a profligate and relentless womanizer, and his court was haunted by furies, real and imagined, from his frail and mentally retarded son to his belief that devils crept frightfully into the royal bedchamber and had secret intercourse with the queen. Quite obviously, the king was a man who needed a financial adviser, and Don Isaac Gomez (who must have used another Christian name in public) filled the bill perfectly.
It is an indication of the persistence of the Gomez family that they had been able to survive nearly a century and a half of Inquisition since the Expulsion Edict as secret Jews.
It is also clear that the king, and probably others of his court, knew the Gomez secret. In any case, it suited Philip to protect Gomez from the Inquisition, and in return Gomez honored his king in faithful fashion. When Philip's sister married Louis XIV of France, Isaac Gomez named his first-born son Louis Moses Gomez, in honor of his monarch's new brother-in-law. Though Philip's own son would one day preside over one of the most ferocious autos-da-fe in history, Philip himself was of a gentler nature, tortured by self-doubt, convinced that his adulteries and promiscuity -- over which he felt he had no control -- were to blame for the ills that beset Spain. He once wrote: "These evil events have been caused by your sins and mine in particular. I believe that God our Lord is angry and irate with me and my realms on account of many sins, and particularly on account of mine.... "
King Philip had promised Isaac that if the officers of the Inquisition ever seemed to have come too close for comfort, and if -- the king heard of it before Isaac, the king would issue him a coded warning. At dinner he would say to him, "Gomez, the onions begin to smell."
The day came. Unfortunately, by the time the King's message reached him, there was time only to get Isaac's wife and son smuggled out of the country. Remaining behind to wind up his affairs, Isaac was arrested and thrown into prison. It was several years before he was able successfully to bribe his way out, and by then his friend the king was dead. He was forced to take a familiar route, over the Pyrenees into France, where he joined his family.
In 1685 the Edict of Nantes was revoked, there was an outbreak of religious disturbances in France, and a new mood of reaction was spreading across the Continent. Isaac prudently decided to move on to England, where he also had friends and family. In London, thanks to his connections, Isaac Gomez was granted a "letter of denization," which literally made him a denizen, or free man of the country. It was an important document for an alien to have, and one not customarily given to Jews. It indicated that Gomezes were persons of privilege, with full rights of British citizenship, except that of holding public office. Despite these advantages, however, Isaac's son Louis -- a young man now -- decided that he wanted to seek his fortune in America.When word reached New York that a member of the exalted Gomez clan was on his way, there was a considerable stir within the little community of Sephardim -- particularly among the mothers of unmarried and eligible daughters, who immediately began receiving instructions on how to treat a Gomez.
It was said that the Gomezes were so grand that they still used their titles, and had to be addressed as "your grace," and "your ladyship." (This was true; they did.) Young Louis Gomez, however, disappointed the mothers by stopping enroute in Jamaica, where he met, by a prearrangement with her family, the daughter of another high-placed Sephardic family, Esther Marques, and married her. The young couple arrived in New York in 1696.
Louis Gomez (in America he anglicized his first name to Lewis) set himself up in a small store in Lower Manhattan selling general merchandise. But soon he saw how important wheat was becoming to the young colony. Wheat, grown in what is now suburban Westchester County, as well as in the West Indies, was being traded back and forth across the Atlantic and was a highly profitable item. Concentrating on the wheat trade, Louis was soon able to write back to his father in London that he was trading wheat "on an enormous scale." He was becoming a rich man.
In 1705, Louis Gomez was numbered among the freemen of the city, and in 1710 a "memorial," which may of course have been in some ways a bribe, from Louis Gomez persuaded the New York City Council to give him permission to ship wheat to Madeira, even though a number of petitions by others had been denied. In 1728, he was elected parnas of the Shearith Israel congregation, an unusual honor since he was, after all, an immigrant and newcomer to the community, among families that had been in New York for two and three generations. It was under his presidency that funds were raised to build New York's first synagogue, in Mill Street. Louis Gomez was as broad-minded in his philanthropies as the Levys: his name also appears on the list of those who contributed to the building of the steeple on Trinity Church. When Louis Gomez died, in 1740, he bequeathed "a pair of silver adornments for the five books of Moses, weighing 39 ounces," to his oldest son. The bequest has become a tradition in the family, and the silver ornaments, worn smooth by age, have been passed from eldest son to eldest son through seven generations.
Daniel, the third of Louis Gomez' six sons, was even more enterprising than his father. At the age of fourteen, Daniel joined his father in the wheat business and West Indies trade, and in the course of his wanderings he, like his father, met and married a member of an ancient and redoubtable Jamaican family, Rebecca de Torres. When she died in childbirth five years later, Daniel married another West Indian lady, Esther Levy of Curacao.
From Daniel's first entry into it, business was good. Starting with such commodities as wheat and West Indian sugar, he expanded into other goods and commodities. Soon he was trading not only with Madeira but also with Barbados, Curacao, London, and Dublin. In 1751, an advertisement in the New York Gazette offered a new shipment of Daniel's wares from Liverpool, including:
... earthenware in casks and crates, Cheshire cheese, loaf sugar, cutlery ware, pewter, grindstones, coals and sundry other goods too tedious to mention.
The blase tone of the last phrase is an indication of the advertiser's success.
The list of names of men with whom Daniel Gomez did business reads like a Who's Who of Colonial America, and his customers included George Clinton, Walter Franklin, Robert Livingston, Myndert Schuyler, Isaac Sears, John de Peyster and Cornelius Ten Broeck of Albany; the Vallenburghs of Kinderhook; the Kips of Dutchess County; the Abeels, Brinckerhoffs, Beekmans, Barrons, Bogarts, the Rutgerses, the Van Cortlandts, the Van Wycks. His correspondence and bills went to such then-remote towns outside the colony as New Town, New Rochelle, Brunswick, Goshen, Huntington, Bushwick, Albany, the Hamptons, and Oyster Bay. He traded with other colonies as well, and his dealings extended to Boston, New Haven, Norwalk, New London, Allentown, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Princeton, Maryland, and South Carolina.
Though he concentrated on wheat, Daniel bought, sold, and traded nearly every other imaginable commodity, including stockings, suspenders, ginger, buttons, nightshirts, gunpowder, swords, preserved goods, silk, and sailcloth. But through all this diversity of business he still seems to have been searching for some product, some area of trade, that would consume him utterly, to which he could devote himself single-mindedly. Suddenly, in 1710, he found it.
Most people know that the great Astor fortune in America is based upon the fur trade. Only a few people know, however -- the few including the old Sephardic families -- that
the first John Jacob Astor was preceded in the fur trade -- and by many years -- by a Sephardic Jew, Daniel Gomez. Daniel was, in fact, one of the very first to consider the vast wilderness of the continent that lay on all sides of him, and the numbers of fur-bearing animals that lived there.
Daniel was an American pioneer in a business that has consumed adventurers and merchants since the days of the Golden Fleece.
He was also the first in America to see how the native Indians could be used in this trade as trappers and skinners.
When, in 1710, Daniel Gomez began buying land in what is now Ulster County, his friends thought he was crazy. He was buying wilderness. Before long, he had acquired nearly 2,500 acres, including most of what is the present-day city of Newburgh, on the west bank of the Hudson River. He was able to buy this land cheaply only because no one else wanted it. It was also said, of all things, that the region was haunted. At the northwestern head of Newburgh Bay there is a rocky point of land which thrusts craggily into the river, and on a misty evening this peninsula, in profile, can indeed acquire an eerie look, as if possessed by spirits. And
on this point, for untold hundreds of years before the arrival of the white man, the Algonquin tribes of what are now the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania regions would meet at certain seasons of the year to worship, dance, and commune with their tribal gods and with the Great Spirit. This was a sacred place to the Indians, and before any hunting expedition, or any war, they traveled here in great numbers, often over hundreds of miles, to conduct the ceremonies that, they hoped, would improve the outcome of whatever task was at hand.It has been said that when Henry Hudson sailed up the great river in 1609 he anchored off this point and watched the Indians performing one of their mystic ceremonies, dancing around a tall fire. In the minds of the Dutch settlers, the point quickly became associated with all sorts of dark deeds and, as Christians horrified at the heathen and mysterious evil rites that were said to be performed on the rocky headland, they renamed it De Deful's Dans Kammer (The Devil's Dance Chamber). An old ditty, designed to frighten adventuresome children from visiting the area, went:
For none that visit the Indians' den
Return again to the haunts of men.
The knife is their doom, oh sad is their lot.
Beware! Beware of the blood-stained spot!
All this served to depress local real estate values, and to Daniel Gomez' advantage. He had learned that the "blood-stained spot" also marked the convergence of a number of well-traveled Indian trails, and
he selected the Indians' den as a strategic place to establish a trading post.Attempts had been made since earliest Colonial times to identify the American Indians with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and long lists of similarities between Indian and Judaic ritual had been drawn up, in an effort to prove this thesis. It was pointed out that, like the Jews, the Indians tabooed certain animals as "unclean." Like Jews, they had a sense of personal purity; they worshiped a great spirit called Yohovah; they had high priests; they had puberty rites. The Indians had important holy days in spring and fall, corresponding to Passover and Succoth, and a two-day fasting period corresponding to the Day of Atonement. The Indians had a lunar calendar, a similar counting system, and there are superficial similarities between the Hebrew and Indian tongues (both Hebrew and Indian languages make use of hyperbole and metaphor, and possess no comparative or superlative degree).
Anthropologists have since dismissed these likenesses as coincidental, but in Daniel Gomez' day they were the subject of serious study. In the early Sephardic community of New York, these matters were discussed at the synagogue. Just in case they should turn out to be distant brethren, the rabbis had enjoined their congregations against mistreating or exploiting the local Indians. In any case, Daniel and the Indians got along famously right from the beginning. "I am able to understand the Indian thought," Daniel wrote to a friend.
For his post, Daniel Gomez selected a site that was near a spring where the gathering tribes regularly stopped for water, and he began, in 1717, to construct a massive stone blockhouse. Trading with the Indians was not without certain obvious hazards, and his trading post was also a fortress. The walls were two feet thick in the front and in the back, from which direction an attack was considered likelier, they were three feet thick. The house contained two vast cellars which were to serve as vaults to store the goods -- knives, hatchets, trinkets, and of course guns and whiskey -- that Daniel intended to sell, as well as the furs he intended to acquire.
He was building in the middle of virgin forest, seven miles from the nearest hamlet, Newburgh, which had been settled only eight years earlier. Trees had to be felled for timber, and stones had to be lifted from the ground for walls. The house took six years to build, but when it was finished
Daniel Gomez had built an oasis of strength and also of comfort in the wilderness. In the main parlor Daniel had placed a huge fireplace, eight feet wide and six feet deep, designed for business entertaining during the winter months.
Twenty to thirty Indians could gather around the fire's warmth to trade and haggle over the prices of lynx, beaver, otter, black fox, go mink, and muskrat. In a smaller room, another fireplace, equally large, had the same hospitable and commercial function. Contemporary reports describe Mr. Gomez' house as furnished in "the ultimate luxuries which Gomez brought up from New York." Here he and his two sons -- and eventually his second wife -- spent the winter fur-trading season. It must have been a lonely life, but Gomezes had always been self-sufficient types, more interested in deeds than in words.
In 1624 4,700 beaver pelts were transported to Holland, fetching around 27,125 guilders when sold. (Trelease 43) As time progressed so too did the amount of beaver pelts traded. In 1626 a record of shipment from the Dutch West India Company reported an overwhelming 7,246 beaver pelts. (Leach 21) By 1636, that number had more than doubled, with 16,304 pelts shipped to Holland. In that ten year time span the price per pelt rose from 5.77 to 8.21 guilders. (Trelease 43) While the beaver trade increased, it was slowly becoming clear that trade at this volume could not continue forever. Already beavers had begun vanishing from the Hudson Valley region and trappers were pushing west into the territories of other tribes to collect beaver skins....
Tribes found themselves encroaching on each other’s land while trapping resulting in often bloody conflicts. The Mohicans and Mohawks were consistently at war for this, as each longed for the goods that beaver pelts could buy. Native American tribes found themselves devoting more time to their wars over land rather than the actually trapping....
While tribal wars and shrinking demand played a role in the decline of the fur trade, the greatest factor was the disappearance of beavers from the Hudson Valley and surrounding areas. Unlike other hunted animals, beavers do not breed as often and as such the source of beavers in the Hudson River Valley was not replenished. Additionally, Beavers are not traditionally migratory animals, traveling around only 6 miles to find a new home, so once they had been hunted there was little hope of another group moving in (The Humane Society of the United States). It became necessary for Native Americans to push west in effort to find greater sources of beaver, but by 1640 there was little to no sign of beavers from the Hudson River west to the Genessee River. (Leach 98)...
When the fur trade eradicated beavers from the Hudson Valley it disrupted entire ecosystems such as this, creating a chain of events that put several other species at risk and forced to find new habitats. The woodpecker example is just one of dozens, in fact beavers are known as a keystone species, a title given to species that provide the basis of support for an ecosystem. (The Humane Society of the United States) Environmentalists believe that the ponds and wetlands created by beaver dams can be useful in regard to climate change, by providing natural water storage during hot, dry summers.
-- Environmental Impacts of the Hudson Valley Fur Trade in Regard to Beavers, by Gina Figler
The lonely fort became known as "the Jew's house," and local records refer to Daniel only as "Gomez the Jew." Until recent years the stream that ran by Daniel Gomez' house (and that was once navigable, and doubtless transported some of Daniel's goods for barter) was designated on local maps as "Jew's Creek." For thirty years, Daniel Gomez operated his trading post, at the same time keeping close personal and business ties with New York. Like his father, he was elected parnas of Shearith Israel, pledging the then lordly sum of fifteen pounds a year to the synagogue. As early as 1727, he was listed among the "freemen" of New York, but though the title of freeman, or burgher, permitted its owner certain rights, there were others -- including the right to vote -- that could be obtained only through naturalization.
In 1737, in a notorious contested election, the right of Jews to vote for the general assembly had been challenged. Daniel Gomez was among the Jewish voters whose rights were in question, and the outcome was later called by William Seward "a stain in the annals of New York which the friends of rational liberty would wish to see effaced." The objection was upheld, and the Jews' rights were denied. Three years later, however, a Naturalization Act was passed. Daniel Gomez was among the first to take advantage of it and become a voter.
At the outbreak of the Revolution, with the arrival of British and Hessian troops in New York, Shearith Israel closed its doors and most members of the congregation moved to parts of the East held by the Revolutionary cause. Only a few Tory-minded Jews remained. These did not include the Daniel Gomezes. Daniel took his family to Philadelphia, the center of the American patriotic movement. He was an old man now, but he nonetheless became one of the founders of a new Sephardic congregation, Mikveh Israel.
He continued to keep track of his affairs in Newburgh, where one of his sons held the fort. It wasn't long before his son was able to write Daniel that he had hired a teen-age German immigrant as an apprentice, and was teaching the youth to pound the pelts of beaver, otter, and mink that were making their way down Jew's Creek in Indian canoes. The young man's name was John Jacob Astor -- then spelled Ashdor -- and the Gomez firm was paying him a dollar a day. Certainly this early association with the Gomezes accounts for the recurring rumor in New York that the Astors are of Jewish descent. There is no proof of this, but there is plenty of evidence of what young Gomez thought of young Astor -- a butcher's son with a heavy south German accent, a wildly indecipherable handwriting, and atrocious manners (after meals, Astor would wipe his hands on his shirt). Moses Gomez was, after all, a third-generation American and had no taste for this vulgarian. Soon Moses Gomez could take no more of him and, in dismissing him, explained to his father in a letter: "The fool has no head for this business absolutely" -- a remarkably poor appraisal of the man who would found the American Fur Company, and become America's first monopolist.The Newburgh house still stands. Far from seeming haunted by evil spirits, the house and the lands around it have, over two and a half centuries, had a happy history. There have been a number of owners since the house passed out of the Gomez family, and all have treated it tenderly. One added a second story of brick which contrasts handsomely with the gray stone walls Gomez built -- built without mortar, fitted so perfectly that even today the walls stand straight and smooth. Now, though the acreage around it has been reduced to only twenty-seven, the blockhouse is still an elegant country home furnished in "the ultimate luxuries." The present owners, who have lived in it for over twenty years, speak of it with affection. In 1968, Mrs. Jeffrey Starin, wife of the owner, told a reporter from the New York Times: "The children talk about the house as having great roots. It gives them a feeling of strength and security. It has stood up in all kinds of weather and, a few years ago, when there was all that talk about bombs and shelters, they used to say, 'Our house will still be standing.'''
But alas, the Gomez name -- which withstood so many generations in Spain -- has died out in the United States. It decorates, of course, the higher branches of many Sephardic family trees, including the Nathans', but the last male Gomez, we learn from Malcolm Stern's extraordinary book, died in Franklin, New York, in 1926, without issue. He, Joseph Edwin Gomez, Jr., would have been Daniel's great-great-great-nephew. He was one of five children, and Dr. Stern notes above their names: "Children converted with mother, Feb. 3, 1871." If Daniel's ghost was pacing the house in Newburgh when this news was received, there must have been outraged noises in the night.