The Statutes of Purity of Blood

To meditate upon the statutes of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) requires recalling two major historical events, in 1391 and 1449. They arose in a Spain worked over by the Catholic clergy, one of whose great preoccupations was to make the descendants of the deicide people vanish through conversion. It was indeed unbearable to observe that the people of God refused to recognise His Son. By his very existence and his perverse obstinacy, the Jew was a threat to the Catholic faith, whose universality he called into question. Having witnessed the birth of the first religious racism in the world, we shall see its development and its social, economic, and political consequences in a Spain drunk on its conviction of being the sword of God, the new chosen people. We shall then take note of a few lucid oppositions to this racial madness. Finally, we shall observe that Spain rejoined the concert of European nations — is this mere chance? — only once the requirement of the statutes of purity of blood, already falling into desuetude, was definitively abolished.

As early as 303, the all-too-cordial relations between Jews and Christians worried the Church, and the Council of Elvira forbade Jews to bless the harvests of Christians. Over time, many trades were forbidden to the Jews, who were confined to economic activities that aroused popular animosity. The Church would know how to mould these two facts to the profit of a hatred that served it in its ever more violent process of identity-building. But this process was poorly mastered, and one may say that the statutes of purity of blood have as their indirect origin the massacres of Jews in Spain at the end of the fourteenth century — massacres whose starting point was Seville and the south of Spain. They multiplied and wiped out many communities.

For fifteen years, Ferrán Martínez, archdeacon of Écija, inflamed the popular passions, and his work found its fulfilment in June 1391 in Seville. On the occasion of an exceptionally violent pogrom, streams of Jewish blood ran through the streets of the city. “These were atrocities that neither humanity nor the Gospel, in whose name they were committed, could absolve. And yet there have been authors enough to bestow the title of saint upon the said archdeacon.”¹

Vincent Ferrer, later officially canonised, reaped the benefits of these pogroms and, with cunning, offered the Jews of Valencia the choice between baptism and death. According to Albert A. Sicroff, between seven and eleven thousand Jews — some put the figure at a hundred thousand — clung desperately to the cross to escape the knife.² In this context of violence, conversions abounded. For the moment, the question of race had not yet appeared. The disappearance of the Jews through identification was sought, and obtained.

But the bride was too beautiful. The converts, who were called “new Christians,” now had the right to accede to all the offices, all the honours, all the functions hitherto reserved for the “old Christians.” How was one to stem a competition that, within half a century, proved catastrophic? Conversion was no longer sufficient. The miraculous effects of the baptismal water proved counterproductive for the threatened Christians, and conversions came to be regarded as gestures of circumstance. Henceforth the problem of the convert, the converso, weighed far more heavily than that of the Jew.

In 1449, an anti-converso uprising in Toledo would spread like an oil stain. Born of a local rebellion, the new mayor of that city proclaimed the sentencia estatuto, which denied all sincerity to conversion. Conversion, it held, had no other object than to allow former Jews to infiltrate a pure Christian society and to seize privileges and important posts. Henceforth one would have to plead an impeccable ancestry — that is, one devoid of Jewish blood, that defilement, at whatever level one traced it back along a genealogical tree — in order to accede to ecclesiastical offices or hierarchy, to make a career in the army, to enrol in a college or a university, or to belong to a military or religious order.

Within a century this local requirement became national, and in 1536 Philip II, strong in the pope’s endorsement, gave the force of law to what became the statute of purity of blood. Henceforth all those who wished to rise in the social hierarchy had to furnish proof of the purity of their origins. Interminable inquiries ensued, leading, in the most favourable case, to an attestation of purity of blood. Take the case of an honoured and respected father of a family whose religious zeal is recognised. One of his children wishes to enter a religious order. He must furnish proofs of purity of blood. A long disquisition then begins at the petitioner’s expense. During it, a mere rumour, even a false one, suffices to exclude the candidate and to cast suspicion upon the whole family. This is why few people risk the venture, for they always fear the slander, the murmuración, which very quickly becomes a social scourge. Veritable teams of blackmailers run rampant among those entrusted with the inquiries. Woe to him who does not pay the price demanded. Conversely, wealthy converts could buy themselves impeccable genealogies. Everyone spies on and watches everyone else, seeking in his neighbour the flaw that will rid him of a rival or a nuisance.

Juan Enríquez de Zúñiga lets us discover the world seen from above: “The man you see so busy poring over papers at a writing desk is drawing up the genealogy of his neighbour, who is seeking proofs of his honour so as to lay claim to a certain office, and his jealousy multiplies his strength tenfold.”³ Libros verdes (green books), veritable genealogical registers, made it possible to trace the origins of suspects, and the sambenitos,⁴ hung up in the churches with the names of their wearers, indicated to whoever wished to know the ancestry of this or that person.

Roger Labrousse brings out very well the specific link between the religious and the political in Spain: “the Church seems to wish to imbue the secular institutions with its spirit, so that the end of the State and its own end come to be, as it were, associated and indissolubly bound together in fact… An enormous juridical heritage, born of these exchanges between the two powers, takes shape… On the side of the State, one sees clearly the motives that prompted it to contract such an alliance: it already existed in souls; it was natural that it should also exist in law.”⁵ The problem of race is henceforth officially carried to the baptismal font. The Jewish defilement becomes not only the rampart against competition, but also a biological anxiety that would be shared only by Nazism. For having crucified Christ, the Jews bear an indelible stain that defiles the body and the spirit of the converts; they perpetuate their vices and their flaws even after the baptismal lustration. Nothing can fight against the resistant infection, arising from an incurable malady that spreads to the whole race, not even the omnipotence of the king. This is what Melchor Peláez de Mieres affirms, for instance: “Despite the ennoblement conferred by the prince, the macula remains entire; he cannot efface the defilement, which propagates itself through the seed and clings to the bones. It is something natural and immutable.”⁶ The new Christian is a being who transmits all the flaws inherent in his former race. From the moment the source that transmits the blood is vitiated, the vice flows into the descendants, even to the tenth and the hundredth degree, just like a bad seed that has been sown. All that is born of it is but infection, and concurs in the same disease.

When, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, Diego García, panic-stricken by the powerful and malign cunning of the Jews turned against the republic of Christians, wrote a work to preserve Spain from their noxiousness, one must not see a mere literary image in the “milky propagation” of the evil he describes. And Juan de Pineda concurs with him when he calls on the old Christians to be vigilant: “The milk of wet-nurses of doubtful origin, all laden with noxious influences, can transmit to the children the perversity it carries.”⁷ The crime — that is, belonging to an infected race, Jewish or Moorish — is hereditary. The malignant humour circulates from the trunk into the branches, whose fruits are contaminated forever.

In 1637, it fell to Escobar del Corro, in a folio of five hundred pages, to have the merit of synthesising all these recommendations and giving them a doctrinal unity founded on anatomical and characterological considerations drawn from the essence of the Jew. His nature is perverse, his seed is bad and engenders toward Christians a natural propensity to hatred. It is an invisible stain carried by the blood, transmitted from parents to children in the form of a disposition to evil and to depraved morals. But this mode of propagation does not seem damning enough for the author. So he specifies that it is at the moment of conception that there are determined in the foetus its sex, all its physical qualities, and the natural impulse to do good or evil. Armed with these considerations, he will level the most terrible accusation against the Jews by stripping the deed of its efficacy in favour of heredity. He affirms, indeed, that the act in a criminal’s conduct has, in the last analysis, only a relative importance: it is the examination of his origin that is decisive.

After Escobar del Corro, never again will such a degree of hateful dread be attained — a dread that gives no chance not only to the Jews, but also to the new Christians. These beings of defiled blood, just like the Jews, are a permanent threat to the republic of the pure, that is, the republic of Christians. Diego de Simancas, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, sums up the problem: “These Spaniards whom we are accustomed to call Marranos, descendants of Jews and baptised, are false Christians.”

One can well imagine that such a vision of the new Christian brought about the greatest upheavals in Spanish social life. To measure its extent, it is fitting to specify the meaning of the two terms signifying “honour” in Spain: honra and honor. Honra may be defined as the excellence of the noble recognised by his peers and founded on virtue. Honour — honra — is therefore reserved for certain elect beings. Everything is set in motion to obtain it, for this honra, this honour-as-renown, is acquired. It cannot remain static, on pain of tarnishing. It is the exclusive property of a social class, the nobility. Now, from the end of the sixteenth century, this social class would undergo the triumphant assaults of the lower class, which found in the statutes of purity of blood an unhoped-for opportunity to take its revenge on the nobility and to drape itself, if not in honra, then at least in honor.

Calderón, in his Alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea), poses the problem of honour in an entirely new light. Honour-honor becomes “the inalienable patrimony of the soul,” and the soul, the playwright reminds us, “belongs only to God.” Honor is the interiorisation of honra-renown. The duality of any consciousness suffices, for here the “I” is the sole judge of the “me” to which it awards praise and blame. Honor no longer needs external confirmations; it is a definitive belonging that one must take care not to lose, but that there is no need to acquire. The most representative example is doubtless that of Archbishop Silíceo, one of the fiercest partisans of the statutes of purity of blood, who was born of very humble parents. In finding others lower than themselves, the lowly raised themselves up; this is why the anti-Judaism that fed the statutes of purity of blood flourished.

This change of perspective is thus explained by a social and psychological phenomenon that obeys the great law of compensation: for having been kept apart from the honra-renown proper to the great alone, a social class is in search of the honor that will put it on an equal footing with the aristocracy. The honor of racial purity becomes the revenge of the long-despised commoner. González de Ribera insists on the role of the statutes, which soften social inequality among his compatriots by offering those at the bottom of the ladder hatred of the Jew as a stepping-stone: “The plebeians live consoled by the fact that they can become familiars of the Holy Office and obtain other offices granted to the latter. If by chance they were deprived of this distinction which they share with the nobles, the most destitute would feel their condition unbearably. To maintain the statutes of purity of blood is to create a fistula for the resentment of the lowly.”⁸ Thus racial discrimination presents many advantages that religion confirms.

The racist phobia found in Jiménez Patón an author who roots it in the requirements of divine providence, the notions of order and hierarchy being inscribed in the very plan of that providence. Social inequality does not discourage the good Christians who accept their lot “because they piously consider that this inequality and this difference suit the good order and the splendour of the Catholic Church. They intelligently realise that there is no worse inequality than to make everything equal.” This author, who knows the texts well, stresses that, on the plane of the law, no discrimination ought to exist, but that, on the social plane, Peter made it well known that it was not the same. And he adds, with regard to the new Christians, those barely improved Jews, that the end of the Christian religion does not lie in the pursuit of honours. Let the new Christians content themselves with true humility, and God will not forget them. We see here how the statutes of purity of blood are providentially justified so as to maintain and reserve honorific and lucrative situations for the old Christians alone.

Even if the practice never quite rose to the level of the theory, for various reasons, a few voices in Spain refused to accept this discriminatory institution, and the racial madness, with its consequences, was perceived very early by certain lucid minds. As early as 1599, ecclesiastics, the most famous of whom is Friar Agustín Salucio, rose up against the statutes. The latter wrote a Discurso advocating their revision. He did not attack their principle in it, but wished to limit their application in time. He speaks far more as an economist than as a theologian, barely alluding to the decrees of the popes. He is in haste to pass to a more urgent problem: the disorders and the paralysis into which Spanish society is plunged. He underscores the harm represented by the existence of second-class citizens in a Spain that distorts distributive justice. It is scandalous that a person of obscure but pure origin should be preferred to a person of quality. But, let us repeat, it is a matter of a limitation and not an abolition of the statutes of purity of blood. The Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Guevara, consulted by the king, likewise approved Salucio’s arguments. Philip II himself became aware of the danger represented for the structure of Spanish society by the abusive application of the statutes of purity of blood that he himself had instituted for the whole of the kingdom.

Sicroff teaches us that between 1596 and 1599 the monarch convened a council under the presidency of the Grand Inquisitor Portocarrero to study the means of reducing the rigour of the statutes. At the close of the deliberations, a plan was proposed providing that the inquiries into purity of blood would bear only on a hundred years of the lineage of any person claiming the title of cristiano limpio, clean Christian. The king did not live long enough to finalise this reform, and it was only under Philip IV that the first steps in this direction were taken.

The Society of Jesus too had to suffer from the statutes. Its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, did not share the obsession of his compatriots. Loyola had as a companion a new Christian, Diego Laínez, and to succeed him at the head of the Society he chose Juan de Polanco, another converso who was part of his entourage. Gracián, one of the most illustrious members of the Society of Jesus, wrote in 1653, in his Oráculo manual (The Pocket Oracle), these lines that pillory with mordant wit those who wish to ferret out the stain in others: “It is a sure sign of doubtful renown to concern oneself with the infamy of others. Some would like to conceal or even wash away their own stains with those of others… their mouth is fetid, for they are the sewer-men of the social latrines. And in these matters, the more one digs, the more one befouls oneself.”⁹

It is not possible to draw up an exhaustive list of all those who perceive the dangers of this new evil, foreign to the rest of Europe. Indeed, many are those who mock the anti-Jewish psychosis in Spain, casting upon it a reproving or contemptuous gaze. Fernando de Matute, attempting to rouse his contemporaries, permits himself to write: “The statutes have the consequence of disinterring the dead and sometimes of burying the living. They offer foreigners the occasion to despise us… They must be abolished or largely limited”;¹⁰ he also wishes that the distinctions should cease, so that the true nobility of his country might be recognised. Self-interested lucidity or the interest of lucidity? A French Franciscan, André Mauroy, in a hefty work,¹¹ qualifies as impious the decrees establishing the statutes of purity of blood. He threatens their defenders by affirming that they have profaned the temple of God. He recalls that God knows no racial discriminations and judges each according to his deeds. And Mauroy goes on to deliver an apology for the learned, the scholars, and the rabbis. He keeps a formidable weapon in reserve: the argumentation and even the vocabulary of the Spanish fanatics, which he subtly turns against them: “If you remain incurable… we shall avoid your society, so as not to be infected, stained, and contaminated by the contagion of your disease, until you return to health.”

All these denunciations, all these attacks against the statutes of purity of blood, had in fact begun as early as the mid-sixteenth century with a work of exceptional audacity that earned its author, Fadrique Furió Ceriol, to be persecuted. He, indeed, offers the prince numerous pieces of advice, and among them he writes what no Spaniard would ever again dare to affirm thereafter: “There exist no more than two countries in the world, that of the good and that of the wicked. All the good, whether they be Jews, Moors, Gentiles, Christians, or of another sect, form part of one and the same country, one and the same house, one and the same blood.”¹² The famous University of Salamanca had doubtless understood this, since it was the only one never to demand proofs of purity of blood from its students. Cardoso, the future physician and philosopher in Amsterdam and then in Venice, author of Las excelencias de los hebreos (The Excellences of the Hebrews), benefited from this freedom. Moreover, the meshes of the net of universities with racist requirements let through students of impure blood, and among them famous figures such as Baltasar Orobio de Castro, a student at Alcalá de Henares who would later return to Judaism and whose written polemic in Amsterdam against another physician and philosopher, formerly a student at the same university — Juan de Prado — is well known.

The statutes of purity of blood contributed largely to the decline of Spain, a decline perceived even as the country seemed to be at the apogee of its glory. Spain lives on the gold of which it implacably and bloodily strips the Americas. It forgets work and investment as it awaits the fleet of the Indies. Indeed, all work, all commerce is suspect in the eyes of this immobile Spain, frozen in admiration of its own grandeur. The Jew being held to be a man of money and trade, every enterprise awakens suspicion. An activity other than military or religious is regarded as the mark of the Jewish macula. So, outside the Church or the profession of arms, it behoves an old Christian to undertake nothing that might lay him open to suspicion, and to remain in contemplation before the purity of his genealogy. In 1600, Martín González de Cellorigo makes a pitiless diagnosis in which he shows that the two great evils responsible for the decadence of his country are depopulation and the contempt attached to work and commerce. Spain, through its disdain for activity, grows numb and sinks into a magical world that makes the error of taking gold and silver for synonyms of wealth. The fascination with honour engenders “a republic of enchanted men who live outside the natural order.”¹³

How is one to explain this madness of purity if not by the fanatical belief that Spain is destined by God to purify the world through an exemplary catholicity? This obsessional belief literally petrifies Spain and leads it to its ruin, as Pierre Chaunu writes: “The obsession with purity of blood contributes to the demographic decline by curbing nuptiality, and hence to the most insurmountable of sterilisations; it contributes to blocking social osmosis, it therefore condemns economic growth, and, through the inquisitorial apparatus, it ends by freezing mental structures in an archaic mould. The Spain of the statutes of purity of blood necessarily misses the Cartesian revolution. In the last analysis, no consequence is more serious in the long term than that one.”¹⁴

Nothing is more pertinent than this observation in the form of an indictment. Spain must wait long centuries before belonging to Europe. The stammering attempts at liberalism that the Cortes of Cádiz tried to impose in 1811 were swept away by the return of Ferdinand VII, restored to the throne thanks to the French intervention of 1823. Little by little, however, the requirement of proof of purity of blood fades away. In 1835, it is no longer demanded for posts depending on the Ministry of the Interior. The constitution of 1837, in its article 5, declares that all Spaniards shall be admitted to public employments or offices according to their merits and their capacities. This article seems to have had little efficacy, since it has to be reiterated in 1845 and 1857. The effective suppression of the proof of purity of blood for the whole range of State careers, and for contracting marriage, is due to Isabella II by virtue of a law dated 15 May 1865, but it remained theoretically required until 1869 by the Military Academy.

One must therefore wait until the mid-nineteenth century before the voice of Spain is faintly heard in the European concert of culture. To be sure, Spain shone with all its fires between 1550 and 1650, the Golden Age. Its theatre, its literature, its painting represent a universal acquisition, but it superbly ignored the notion of social and intellectual progress. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century barely illuminated a fringe of society, and even today this country lacks many links that one does not do without with impunity.

Contagion was a watchword in the form of a scarecrow that the obsessives of purity brandished for several centuries. Philosophers, jurists, theologians — all were haunted by the notion of purity, persuaded that the grandeur of Spain passed by way of the negation of otherness. Unamuno grasped well what Spain lacked: “the integration of differences, the harmony that springs from mutual clashes, the accord of dissonances.” The Spanish people was not much of a musician; what it wanted was that all should sing in a single voice, in a single choir, the same song.

Notes