Sephardic Spanish Nationality

The FCDE - the organisation of Spanish Jews - has published a statement on Sephardim receiving Spanish citizenship. Effectively they are saying that everything is provisional and that they are waiting instructions from the Spanish government on how to judge whether someone is eligible for a passport.

The Spanish Government seems to be confused. They believe:

• There are 3.5 million Sephardim. I would guess there is a fraction of that number assuming we classify 'Sephardim' as Jews of Iberian origin who belongs to a Sephardic synagogue of that origin. If we are being more lax, then I have seen estimates that there are 17 million Brazilians of Sephardic origin.
• There are Sephardic surnames. Not true. There are Spanish and Portuguese surnames used by Sephardim.
• That Sephardim come from Spain. Yes, people did, but a Sephardic identity only developed after 1492. Prior to that, Jews will have identified with their city or region.
• That Sephardic history in Spain ended in 1492. There is a whole tourist industry now re-vamping the old Jewish Quarters of cities. The 16th to 18th Centuries - the main Inquisition period - is erased from their consciousness.
• That 21st Century morality must be applied to people living in the 15th Century.
• Sephardim speak or spoke Ladino. Not true. Ladino was a language that evolved amongst the Eastern (Ottoman) Sephardim. Portuguese was the lingua franca of the Western Sephardim, although many also spoke Spanish.
• That it is possible to prove genealogy. I am probably unusual in having genealogy back to Spain, but this is to ancestors who escaped in 1700. 
• That Sephardim are a cohesive group originating in Spain. Not true. Other Jewish communities were absorbed by the Eastern Sephardim.
• There is a difference between Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Probably most Jews in Portugal in 1493 had recently arrived from Spain, but a substantial number were Portuguese natives.
• That the history is clean cut. It isn't. Perhaps a proportion of the ancestors of the Western Sephardim DIDN'T leave Spain in 1492. They kept their assets, and slipped out later.
• Sephardim have been yearning for Spain. Not true. It's a foreign country. Many of our ancestors were actively involved in fighting the Spanish Empire and undermining its economy.
• Sephardim can be identified. Well, no. Is someone - like me - with a Spanish surname, born into a Sephardic congregation but also with Ashkenazi ancestors, considered Sephardi by their terms? There is a famous Sephardic family called Eskenazi ('Ashkenazi'). Do we count them? What about descendants of Sephardim who later settled in eastern Europe, for example a branch of the Mendoza family who changed their name to Mendelevitch?
• In a simple 'Exodus'. Yet the descendants of many 1492 exiles later returned to Spain.
• Somehow the modern Spanish - probably most of whom now have some Sephardic ancestry - should apologise to us, many of whom probably have some non-Jewish ancestry
• One group of people who weren't alive or involved in the event should apologise to another group of people who weren't alive at the time, or involved (or, in some cases, aware that these events had happened).

I have seen it suggested that there is Sephardic DNA. This is not true. For example, I have impeccable Sephardic lineage, family members burnt alive etc, but my DNA is probably indistinguishable from most Spaniards or west Europeans.

Part of me wonders if even Spanish philo-Semitism springs out of the ferocious anti-Semitic tradition of the Spanish Catholic Church. Maybe Prime Minister Rajoy and his friends believe we are all rich and own America! Some (admittedly stupid) Spaniards on Twitter are suggesting Sephardic visas are an indication of Israeli hegemony. Why Israel would want Jews to live elsewhere is not discussed. Lets see if the initiative stokes anti-Semitism in Spain.

Spain has about 25% unemployment and is facing the richest region declaring independence. Surely they have more serious priorities than nostalgic fantasies. Presumably the outcome of all this nonsense will be several thousand Israelis and Turkish Jews getting passports so they can settle in Britain or Germany, if they choose.

And, of course, what about descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain? 

The Jews and the Slave Trade

Some years ago the Nation of Islam, a Muslim-ish African-American group, published a book claiming that “the Jews” had dominated the slave trade. I think the point was to say that the alleged activity of one group of people in the 16th-19th Centuries says something about another group of people in the 20th-21st Centuries. The book was shredded by scholars, but they did say that for a moment Jews were significant in the Brazilian and Caribbean slave trades.

I am no expert, but have been reading a little around that period. Of course, the “Jews” in question were baptised Christians of Jewish origin. We don’t know what they believed. The strong probability is that all or most of them had never seen an Ashkenazi Jew and – if we focus on the mid-16th Century – it would be another two hundred and fifty years before any of their descendants who returned to Judaism might have considered an Ashkenazi Jew as belonging to the same “tribe”, someone they might consider marrying.

My impression is that a few New Christian families were involved in the Atlantic slave trade for a period starting in the mid-16th Century. I keep seeing the Dias name. I suspect that one or some of them had been involved in the Portuguese trade with India, and had seen an opportunity along the way.

Some of the Dias’ presumed relatives owned sugar plantations in Brazil, so will have owned slaves. These Brazilian relatives fought for the Catholic Portuguese against the philo-Jewish Protestant Dutch in the 1640s. A few decades later a slave-trader in Cartagena, in Spanish Latin America, was accused of “judaising”. I suspect he was somehow related to or connected to the Dias family, and possibly also to my own ancestors.

With hindsight, the African slave trade is a unique phenomenon. At the outset – and I am speculating – maybe it was no different from other forms of 16th Century slavery. Muslims enslaved Christians, including prisoners of war. There were Algerian slave raids as far north as England and Ireland. In Iberia and elsewhere, Christians enslaved Muslims and Jews. Criminals could become galley slaves.

Christians, Muslims and Jews were all clear that their adherents could not enslave other adherents, but people of other religions did not merit human rights. Before it developed onto an industrial scale, the African slave trade seems to have involved members of one African tribe traded by another tribe for European products.

But what about the Dias and other families involved in slavery? Confessionally they were Catholics of Jewish origin and, as far as I can tell, their descendants seem to have been overwhelmingly Catholic. The probability is that their parents or grandparents would have been Jewish. My first thought is that how can someone whose family has been exiled and persecuted then commit the same crime to other people. Historians would tell us that we should not use our values to judge people from another age, but still… Aren’t basic values unchanging?

Perhaps a psychologist would tell us that these people had been severely traumatised and therefore were willing and able to objectify other people, especially when they might have benefitted from the crime (and it was a crime).

Of course, to blame one group of 21st Century people for the actions of an unconnected group of 16th Century people is silly. Arguably it requires the same mentality as the slave traders: to dehumanise people in their imagination, and then draw unethical conclusions.

The Inquisition - An Overview

To dismiss the Inquisition as a bunch of reactionary religious nuts is too simplistic. The Inquisition was a church body with the task of suppressing heresy, meaning beliefs other than those sanctioned by the Catholic Church. It is worth noting that the early Church tolerated diversity of opinion and used persuasion to bring people back to orthodox beliefs.

The first significant outing of the Inquisition was the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, a sect in what is now southern France who advocated a purer form of Christianity. The Pope outsourced control of the local Inquisition to the King of France. The Kingdom of France was then one territory amongst several in what we now call France. By the end of the crusade, when the Cathars had been crushed, France had absorbed huge amounts of new territory in the Languedoc, often replacing local aristocrats with Frenchmen.

Catholic monarchs earned their legitimacy through Papal recognition so had an interest in suppressing theological opposition to the Papacy. The Medieval Catholic church was morally and financially corrupt and saw frequent outbursts of opposition from people wanting to purify the institution. Some of these, such as the Hussites, were serious challenges. The Papacy more or less kept the lid on dissent until many northern German princes supported the Reformation of Martin Luther.

In Italy, the Popes used the Roman Inquisition as a weapon in their fight for political supremacy against the [Holy Roman] Emperor.

In 1453 the Turkish army captured Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, creating the possibility of an Islamic conquest of Christendom. In the far west of Europe, the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian peninsula had slowly conquered their southern Islamic rivals, forcing many Muslims and Jews to convert. The two main Christian kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, joined together in a dynastic marriage. The monarchs had limited power over the autonomous cities and regions, and aristocrats with their own private armies.

I think maybe Spain was different from much of Europe in that it had three significant religious groups – Christian, Muslim and Jewish – and that national identity was fused with religious identity. The mob demanded discrimination against converted Jews and their descendants – the idea of purity of blood – which had no place in Catholic doctrine, but was accepted. The Inquisition only had authority over those who had converted to Catholicism (although later it implicitly recognised Protestant baptism as legitimate, so it could prosecute foreign-born Protestants).

The Inquisition in Spain was outsourced by the Papacy to the Monarchy, and was about the only national institution. I do not know the degree to which the Inquisition followed the Monarchy’s political agenda, but clearly a Spanish national identity emerged. Despite a number of eye-wateringly large bribes to the Vatican, the Inquisition was also established in Portugal. 

Within the Catholic Church the Inquisition came under the control of the Dominicans (an order of monks) who used it to bash their Franciscan rivals. The Inquisition controlled doctrine, so was immensely powerful in internal Church politics. Inquisitors – appointed by the Monarchy in Spain and Portugal - had some power over local bishops, often appointed by local aristocrats.

The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition were self-funding out of property confiscated from their prisoners. Outside Iberia the Inquisition was clearly seen as unjust (for example, the secret denunciations and people not being tried in open court) and its officials experienced a number of popular revolts. I have the impression that the “Old Christian” majority in Spain and Portugal felt the Inquisition was on their side.

To be descended from heretics was itself a cause for suspicion of heresy, so New Christians (descendants of converted Jews) were an obvious and easy target. New Christians tended to be in commerce or the professions, the importance of which was not understood in a mercantilist economy. Targeting them was probably popular with ordinary people, who could feel superior to the ‘other’, while appearing to support Church doctrine and making a little money for the Monarchy. I sense there was also a political element, especially when Portugal broke away from Spain. The Portuguese identity of the victims was stressed.

Were the prisoners of the Inquisition authentic heretics in Catholic eyes? I suspect some were and many weren’t. Actually, I don’t think the “Jews” were a homogenous group. Maybe we can differentiate between the mega-wealthy who left Iberia around the turn of 16^th Century, those who were what me might describe as “middle class” and as tradesmen. I note that many New Christians remained in Spanish and Portuguese territory – or returned to it – when it was possible for them to live elsewhere. It may be that they had no choice, or that the Inquisition was seen as a risk of the job. I wonder if – as with the drug industry today – it was the less important people who got caught. Of course, once someone had been despoiled of their property and remained in Spain, they might be targeted again.

I note that when they had the opportunity, very many New Christians chose to assimilate into the general Catholic population.

The Inquisition was an organisation of individuals. I suspect some were sadistic and had mental health issues. Some probably genuinely believed they were helping their prisoners achieve salvation, a goal so important that the means justified the ends.

I plan to expand these thoughts on my Sephardic Genealogy website.