The “Rabbi”
20 October 2006 by Eve
For Sean, who among many other things, loved history and understood so well why we need to remember it
The Story Thus Far: In 1490, bishop’s vicar Pedro de Villada reports Converso Benito Garcia’s “confession” under torture to Jewish Ritual Murder directly to Inquisitor General Tomas de Torquemada (See The Vicar).
His name, from the old Roman fortress-town of his ancestors, meant “Burnt Tower.”
And just like “The Tower,” the 16th card in the Tarot deck’s Major Arcana, which traditionally depicts a crumbling medieval tower in flames from a lightning strike, figures helplessly falling from it, he brought his enemies collapse, systemic shock, and bad luck at best – and pointless misfortune, disaster, and destruction at worst.
Born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1420, he followed his well-known uncle Cardinal Juan de Torquemada into the Dominican Order but not into high ecclesiastical office, remaining prior of Segovia’s (see pic) Santa Cruz monastery his whole life. He also parted company with his uncle on the subject of Spain’s Jews, whom he fervidly believed to be influencing the Conversos’ supposed backslide into Judaism; in contrast, the Cardinal had written a defense of the Conversos as True Christians ™ in the mid-1400s, and may even have had a Conversa grand- or great-grandmother.
Although not instrumental in the creation of the first Spanish Inquisition, in Seville, Torquemada assumed command of the entire organization in 1483.
After fragmenting the Conversos as a united power in 1486, he had set his sights in earnest on those evil, corrosive Jews, even though he technically had no jurisdiction over anyone except Christians. In 1483 he had persuaded the Crown to order the Jews’ expulsion from the province of Andalusia, and in 1485 had decreed that all rabbis report any contact between Jews and Conversos to the Inquisition on pain of death for failing to do so. These edicts plus the rising tide of anti-Semitism helped break up the time-honored integration of Jews into Spanish society, forcing more of them into juderias (ghettoes).
Nevertheless, the Andalusian expulsion had achieved only limited success, since the Jews often bribed local governments into letting them stay put, and he could never really know how much interaction between Jews and Conversos never got reported.
So when de Villada’s report crossed his desk, his mouth must have watered. Benito’s story, painstakingly extracted with blood, sweat, and tears, represented Torquemada’s long-awaited chance to deliver a hopefully killing blow to the heart of Spanish Jewry.
He quickly transferred the case from its proper seat at Toledo, the major city that had jurisdiction over the town of La Guardia where Benito “claimed” the ritual murder had occurred, to his power base in Segovia, where in addition to the city’s two regular Inquisitors, he appointed as investigators his buddy friar Fernando de Santo Domingo and his two assistants, physician Antonio de Avila and friar Alonso Enriquez. De Avila and Brother Alonso had collaborated on the writing of Censure and Confutation of the Talmud, a manual on detecting Jewish practices among the Conversos that Brother Fernando had dedicated to the Inquisitor General, making the three professional Jew-detectors.
By July 1, 1490, officials had rounded up seven additional suspects Benito had fingered when forced to name his “co-conspirators,” five other Conversos and two Jews, one of whom fell deathly ill upon his incarceration in Segovia. When Dr. de Avila examined Juce Franco, the sick Jew begged him to allow a rabbi to visit him; the tricky trio sent in “Rabbi Abraham,” actually Brother Alonso in disguise, to hopefully extricate a detailed deathbed “confession” from him. But all Franco would “confess” to the fake rabbi was that the Inquisition was accusing him of a Jewish Ritual Murder.
When “Rabbi Abraham” saw the Jewish prisoner again the following week, the healthier – and much more suspicious – Franco kept his mouth shut.
He needn’t have bothered. He, Benito, and the others implicated had fallen into the cogs of a monstrous machine with a mission – and its operators had no intention of letting them go until they had ground them down into their smallest usable bits.
Deciding the stalled investigation of the supposed murder needed his own special personal touch to progress, Torquemada once again transferred the case and detainees, this time to the new Dominican monastery he was building in the city of Avila complete with spacious, well-lit dungeons – and a fully-equipped torture chamber.
Naturally.
Next: The Jew
20 October 2006, on 8:54 pm
A nice write up of the history of the Inquisition. The Inquisition is a perfect example of xenophobia at its worst.
This kind of parallels the way our gov’t is heading. Delusional about a higher power in the universe, with a combination of the fear of terrorism. Using torture to extract infomation from detaines, doing away with habeas corpus.
The more I think about it our gov’t is heading back to the dark ages. Fear is the key to keep people in line.
RB
20 October 2006, on 9:03 pm
Personally, I’m looking forward to a return to the feudal system, where I can happily serve my Lord and offer him first dibs on my betrothed’s hymen- provided Lord Chimpy isn’t suffering from whiskey dick.
20 October 2006, on 11:52 pm
Nice narrative Eve.
[Or perhaps, as in the lecture/demonstration scene from Young Frankentein: "Nice Hopping!" ?]
Hmmm…The Tower card, of the Tarot deck, could very appropriately represent the Bush Administration. Or maybe…the REVERSED “Hanged Man” Card! Should we do a Tarot reading?
[Im Kidding!]
21 October 2006, on 4:26 am
Thank you for another history lesson Eve, they are really enjoyable. I wish you were a history teacher in Australia, as you would inspire our kids and make history interesting. It was rivetting reading. It was truly an appalling time in our history.
I hope you are wrong Rick (even though I doubt you are). I guess the events in Guantanamo Bay are proving you and Raindogzilla right. I just hope that we come to our senses in Australia and vote our Howard. With the ineffectual opposition we have I think my hopes will be in vein.
21 October 2006, on 10:30 am
Please, Eve, correct me if I am wrong. I thought that Andalucia (and then Granada) belonged to the Moors until 1492. If so, how could the Christians order the Jews expelled from the region?
21 October 2006, on 3:56 pm
Eve
Good story as usual. I’ve said it before, This is beginning to make me think that the current xians in power in the US are getting nostalgic for the good old days of torture. Bush’s signature on the bill to disregard Habeus Corpus sets it all in action. In fact they begin salivating when they read words like this;
…”Avila complete with spacious, well-lit dungeons – and a fully-equipped torture chamber.”
21 October 2006, on 4:32 pm
Good catch, Zipi; most of Andalucia (Andalusia in Spanish) fell to Ferdinand and Isabella by the 13th century - except for the Kingdom of Granada, which was still fighting for its life in 1490 when the events in my story started happening. That’s why the Inquisition could claim jurisdiction over the Christians in the region; Torquemada (and other anti-Semitic theologians; he wasn’t the first) successfully argued with the monarchs that Jews represented a threat to the newly-”liberated” region.
He claimed that not only did they encourage Conversos to backslide, but that the Jews also had collaborated with the Moorish (Muslim) enemy and would continue to do so, thus constituting a source of political instability in Andalusia. Given that the victory there was so relatively recent - and they were trying to conquer Granada - the very Catholic King and Queen issued the 1483 edict expelling the Jews from that area.
It was most definitely a sign of bigger things to come - but I’m getting ahead of the tale.
21 October 2006, on 7:53 pm
Thanks for the explanation, Eve. So, to clarify, was the current region of Andalucia (minus the Moor Granada) already called Andalucia back in 1483? I thought not, but maybe my memories from history courses are fading! (I am a Spaniard, by the way). I also did not know that the Jews were expelled from Andalucia years before they were expelled from the rest of Spain.
23 October 2006, on 1:31 pm
Good question, Zipi; all my sources so far simply say “expelled from Andalucia,” and answers.com doesn’t specify when people started calling the region in general by that name.
Timothy Rush’s article “Torquemada, the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews” in the National Executive Review reads:
In 1483, Torquemada succeeded in getting the Crown to issue an order expelling all Jews from Andalucía, on these grounds. There is evidence that this indeed occurred in the case of Seville. In most other areas, it was of limited effect, in many cases simply the occasion for a bribe to a local official.
I’m going to dig some more to see if I can shed more light on it…
23 October 2006, on 2:26 pm
Some more on the attempted expulsion of the Spanish Jews from the Andalusian region:
Norman J. Finkelshteyn in his article “Spain before the Expulsion” on the Jewish Warriors website says, “Seville was the first site of an Inquisition Tribunal in 1481, and the Jews were finally exiled in 1483.”
23 October 2006, on 9:42 pm
Thanks for the research, Eve. I am a bit embarrased, because I should know these things myself, but it is always nice to learn.
23 October 2006, on 9:56 pm
Zipi, please don’t be embarrassed; European history is long and often convoluted! How even those of you born and bred over there keep it straight most of the time, what with all the monarchies and such, I don’t know… One of my grandmothers was Scottish, and she couldn’t remember half the kings and queens of Scotland, let alone the rest of Britain - and she admitted it, too.
26 October 2006, on 8:47 pm
[...] The Story Thus Far: In 1490, Spanish Inquisitor General Tomas de Torquemada transfers Converso Benito Garcia’s case from Toledo to Segovia and finally to Avila (see pic) so that he can personally conduct the stalled investigation (See The “Rabbi”). [...]
6 November 2006, on 7:04 pm
[...] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 15 Responses to “The Vicar” 1 Stardust says: October 18th, 2006 at 7:43 pm Great post Eve, You have an awesome storytelling ability. This “saga” is both intriguing and depressing at the same time. How humans can do the things they do to each other, I cannot understand. It’s not only in the past, it’s now…in this day and age when we think we are so modern and sophisticated. Superstition and greed rules the planet and makes human beings do the most horrible things to each other. 2 King Retard says: October 18th, 2006 at 9:14 pm Wonderful, as usual Eve. I want to reiterate everything Stardust said before me. Also, from History of the World, Part 1 [...]