CHAPTER VI - POGROM V: TORQUEMADA

The Spanish Inquisition was instituted on November 1st, 1478. Of its kind it was unique because the sovereign was given power by the Pope to establish it. The Inquisitors were Dominicans. Within five years of its establishment Sixtus IV must have regretted the absolute power he had given to the sovereigns of Spain. The two Dominicans King Ferdinand appointed were charged by Pope Sixtus with:

(1) The unjust imprisonment of many;

(2) cruel torture of them;

(3) declarations that they were heretics;

(4) the sequestration of the property of those executed.

Their Majesties of Spain accordingly nominated another Dominican, Tomas Torquemada, who was confirmed in office as Grand Inquisitor.

The essence of the Spanish Inquisition is that it was Spanish rather than Catholic. The universal term “Catholic”, like the universal term “Jew”, is a concept woven out of similarities. You cannot form a universal idea out of differences. But there are differences among Catholics as there are among Protestants and as there are among nations. The Spanish Inquisition belongs to the sphere of national differences—to the exclusiveness, latent cruelty, pride and severity of the Iberian temperament.¹ Its Catholicism and its culture has many wonderful characters, but Spanish Catholicism is essentially the deposit of faith after that deposit has gone through the cultural and specific filter of the Spanish character. In the practice of the Inquisition we see the negative and repelling side of Spain, but it has, too, its positive and attractive strengths. To those who love Spain the Inquisition was a bastion against heresy; to those who do not, the Inquisition was a degradation of human dignity.

It is hard to discuss the Inquisition dispassionately. The very term is a loaded one. Its aims, at least, were noble, and this is more than can be said of the brainwashing inquisition of Allied counter-espionage when it changed the personalities of captured spies during the last war. Its methods and cruelties were no less than the cruelties of Calvin’s soul-washers in Geneva. The whole principle of it was to try to save a man’s soul at the expense of his body, and, as such, it is in a separate class from the personality-changers of Russia and China, to whom man has no dignity and no soul. It must, too, be judged by the standards of the times—standards in which the length of life you lived did not matter so much as now, nor the amount of pain you were called on to endure, standards when treason was often heresy and heresy often treason because of the unity of Faith and the close alliance of Church and State. Even by these standards it must be condemned, not so much for what it tried to do as for the way in which it tried. It was this body in Spain who launched the Torquemada pogrom. Some remarks are necessary, however, as to the problem the Inquisition tried to solve.

For many centuries under the Moslems and later under the Christians, Jews in Spain had been left in peace. Unlike Jews of other countries they were cultivators and owners of land. Alone in all of Europe they were relatively enlightened in medicine. They were, too, usurers and wealthy. And they were outsiders. They did not belong essentially to their adopted country’s culture, in which Catholicism and patriotism were so identified that it was difficult to say where the one ended and the other began.

Sooner or later trouble was inevitable because of the arrogance of the Spaniard on one side and the exclusiveness of the Jew on the other, because of two separate cultures which could not intermingle since in each race and religion were identified. Throughout the early part of the fifteenth century repressive legislation was introduced against them, while more and more discontent grew among those heavily bound to them by mortgages and by debts. Pogroms of various sorts raged in Seville, Cordova, Valencia and Majorca in which the only hope for a Jew was to embrace baptism. As a result there were a large number of conscript converts whom the Spaniards called Marranos. The Marranos were outwardly conforming. They went to Mass; they took part in the processions, but some of them kept their own Sabbath as well and followed the usages of the Law.

The first of the Inquisitors (whom Sixtus IV ultimately deposed) took up their headquarters in Seville and set about the crude brain-washing which they hoped would make the Marranos total conformers—for the good of their souls and for the good of the nation. The end-point of pogrom was the burning of Jews in fours. This was a public spectacle, the Jews being bound to four statues called quemadoros and burned alive before the populace.

The procedure was as follows. A month’s term of grace was declared by the Inquisitor when he arrived in a given area. This was to allow heretics to confess, in which case they were absolved, given a penance such as pilgrimage and that was the end of the affair. The local inhabitants were summoned, too, during the month’s grace and from them were gathered sources of heresy and evidence against heretics. These were then cited before the judges and charged. If they recanted, again that was the end of the matter. But if they did not recant, crude brain-washing was attempted. This went in four stages.

Since it was realised that fear heightens suggestibility and makes the accused malleable he was threatened with the stake unless he confessed.

Secondly, he could be confined closely and his food curtailed. In those days confinement was the equivalent of being buried alive. Prisoners condemned to perpetual imprisonment were thrown into blind dungeons, which were in effect their tombs. Serov’s Communists use the same principle. They induce a model psychosis by degrading the subject and isolating him from external stimuli of any kind.

Thirdly, interrogators could be sent into the dungeon full of friendliness, as persuaders. This step has been very much refined in modern brain-washing where the model psychosis is deeply built in and the confession is elicited by an interrogator who assumes the stature of a psycho-analyst and effects a transference.

Lastly there was torture. Modern brain-washers do not employ this technique. They discovered that it stiffened morale and resistance.

We should realise that these methods of eliciting confessions were practised upon captured spies by ourselves during the war. Under the Defence of the Realm Act, too, plenary powers were given to the State to arrest citizens without any of the safeguards that were imposed on the Inquisition. At least the victim in Spain had from the system justice of a sort. Unlike the unfortunate sufferers under DORA, witnesses could be called for their defence and the trial was public.

The weakness of the trial system was this. It was not enough for the victim to declare his innocence and to assert his total acceptance of the faith. He had to acknowledge his heresy and confess his guilt. Hardly anyone would appear as a witness in his defence since they too would come under suspicion. Witnesses for his prosecution had only to be two in number. They could themselves be heretics. In either case there was for a time no revelation of their identity. And even when the accused was told their names he could not confront them.

In normal times the system did not work too badly. But in times of pogrom all sorts of things could happen. The biggest weakness of all was that torture was a legitimate weapon for the extraction of truth. It was this, and not a punishment, in the minds of the Inquisitors. Originally it was a last-resort technique to be given only once and then not to a degree which would imperil life or limb.

In practice what would happen would be this. The Inquisitors continued the interrogation in the torture chamber. For every new piece of “evidence” uncovered the rack, the boot, the thumb-screw—whatever it was—could be legitimately employed. Or—with a distinction which would have delighted a Pharisee—all the tortures of successive days could be regarded as a continuation of the one torture.

Under this stress the victim confessed to anything. If he then repudiated his confession after he was released from torture, he could be put back again on the rack until he made “a true and free confession”. Even then it was not the end. Back on the rack he could go for more torture until all his accomplices were named.

Apart from the degradation of human dignity of such performances, one must ask why a victim was cruelly punished before it was known whether or not he was guilty, and why, anyway, a sensible Inquisitor would place credence on testimony produced under duress, and even why a man should be forced to incriminate himself at all? The reluctant answer has to be that whenever these methods were employed—and there were many instances when they were not—there was that acceptance of cruelty for its own sake which we call sadism.

It is in this dimension of excess and sadism that the Torquemada pogrom took place. The minimal agreed figure of persons burned by Torquemada is two thousand² in fourteen years. There were many other punishments too—such as walling them up and starving them. It is said, with reason, that the Spanish Inquisition was unique because its excesses proceeded from its civil rather than its ecclesiastical constitution. It is said, rightly, that the State carried out the corporal punishment,

but this does not absolve the sadists who baptised their cruelties under the cloak of religion and of the civil law.

The pogrom arose from a previous mistake—a mistake constantly made in Europe throughout all the time of pogrom. The mistake was in believing that forced baptism made a Catholic out of a Jew who did not believe in Christianity and who accepted his Christian baptism as an alternative to the sword or to the stake.³ Many of the Marranos fell into this category. They were Jews at heart under the Christian cloak, conforming not out of belief but out of necessity. In their minds the crime was in accepting baptism and in being apparent apostates to their faith. Many of them who refused baptism genuinely thought that they were dying for the faith of their fathers.

Now it is one thing to say a man is wrong, that he is in error, that he is in heresy, and another that he knows his error, persists in it and wants to be a heretic. It is one thing to condemn the error and another to hate the errant, to condemn the sin and despise the sinner. Subjectively the man may be in good faith and believe his error. To accept that good faith and condemn the mistaken belief is what we call tolerance. But to the Middle Ages man, conditioned by the all-or-nothings of a decadent scholasticism, tolerance was both approval and active encouragement. True zeal demanded not only the extermination of heresy but the burning of heretics, the curing of the headache by lopping off the head, the dissolving of enmities by the killing of enemies, the eradication of Judaism by the ritual and periodic butchering of Jews. Reformation Protestants thought in exactly the same way. They considered it their duty to kill heretics. Protestants and Catholics were the children of their times, but for Protestants there was less excuse. The principle of private judgment makes heresy impossible. The most that can be said for Catholic countries then was that heresy and treason were indistinguishable.

In a non-religious context the same punishments were handed out with greater barbarity and greater frequency by civil authorities on treason-hunts. The canonical procedures laid down for the Inquisition marked a distinct evolution in the administration of justice at that time. That time was a time of barbarity. With the memories of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and of the pogroms of Hungary and the slave mines of Siberia, we cannot be over-optimistic. Barbarity is, however, less frequent in well-nourished populations who are fortified against stress by advanced technologies.

In 1492 the last chapter was written in the history of the Torquemada pogrom. Unconverted Jews⁴ were banished from the kingdom on the old charges of profaning the Host and crucifying Christian children. Some went to African seaports and were decimated by starvation, others to Italy where they died of famine, and some bought their way into Portugal where after a lapse of eight months they automatically became slaves. A succeeding king enfranchised them but then deported them. Before deportation a secret order was given that children under fourteen were to be forcibly seized from their mothers, scattered throughout the kingdom, baptised and brought up as Christians. There was yet another turn of the screw. Two of the embarkation ports were closed at the last minute so that the statutory eight months would pass for the Jews concerned. They were now offered the choice between slavery and receiving their children back if they themselves would undergo baptism.

A fortunate few reached Turkey. There, beneath the green banner of the Prophet they received the tolerance that was denied them beneath the shadow of the Cross.