Iberians Before the Venetian Inquisition

CHAPTER 2 Iberians before the Venetian Inquisition

Gretchen Starr-LeBeau

Recently, scholars have turned their attention in a more focused way to the Converso diaspora—the spread of Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants across Europe and the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic.1 The experiences of this far-flung group—dispersed across the early modern world but linked by ties of religion, language, commerce, and Iberian ancestry—are not only fascinating in their own right, but are also revealing of the diversity of attitudes of the various communities that hosted them. This is particularly true in regard to the experiences of Iberians before early modern Inquisitions. A number of Inquisition courts, some connected institutionally, others borrowing techniques and procedures of institutionally distinct courts, spread across the early modern Mediterranean, into northern Europe through Spanish control of the Low Countries, as well as across the Atlantic and into Asia. An examination of Iberians tried in inquisitorial courts abroad promises to shed light on the expatriate Iberian community, even as it underlines the dis- tinctiveness of various Inquisition courts. This essay focuses particularly on one of the best-documented Inquisition courts in the Italian peninsula: the

1 See for example Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Oxford, 2007; Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World of Maritime Empires, 1540–1740, Leiden, 2002; and Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in an Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, Baltimore, 2008. Also use- ful is the special issue of Jewish History, vol. 25, no. 2 (2011) on Portuguese New Christian Identities, 1516–1700, edited by David Graizbord and Claude B. Stuczynski. For a discussion of a sense of Iberian identity among Portuguese Conversos in Amsterdam, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam, Indianapolis, 1999; Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period, Princeton, 2008; Kim Siebenhuner, “Conversion, Mobility, and the Roman Inquisition in Italy around 1600,” Past & Present, no. 200 (2008), pp. 5–35; Federica Ruspio, La nazione portoghese. Ebrei ponentini e nuovi cristiani a Venezia, Turin, 2007; Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et nouveaux-chrétiens au Brésil: le nordeste XVIIe et XVIII siècles, Louvain, 2003. The author would also like to thank the American Philosophical Society for a Sabbatical Fellowship in 2011 that gave her the time necessary to write this essay.

Holy Office of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. An examination of trial records there demonstrates that Iberians and those of Iberian descent found in the Venetian Inquisition an institution that identified Judaizing as a more peripheral concern. Furthermore, the context in which this Inquisition court operated was different from Iberian Inquisitions, since the Holy Office shared the city with an active Jewish community, which could provide comfort to people of the “Portuguese Nation” and was itself only indirectly under the juris- diction of the Roman Inquisition. As a result, Iberians found Venice to be a place where the concerns of the inquisitors varied from those of the officials and institutions that they might have known on the Iberian peninsula, often to their benefit. A brief note may be in order to explain what, precisely, is meant by “Iberians.” Although some of these Iberians were natives of Spain and Portugal, others considered themselves Iberians even though they were natives or longtime residents of Pisa, Florence, Venice, or Antwerp. These people explained their connections to Iberia through their common language, customs, and religious beliefs. This was particularly true of the self-titled “Portuguese Nation,” a nação, Portuguese converts from Judaism to Christianity and their descendants, who had begun to flee Portugal in the 1530s as the Portuguese Inquisition began to target them in particular. Most Iberians in Venice were part of this inter- national Portuguese émigré Converso community, recently well studied by Federica Ruspio. But Venice also welcomed other Iberian merchants and so-called “Old Christian” immigrants.2 In this regard, Iberian immigrants in

2 Judging by the nineteenth-century index of the Venetian Holy Office, only one of the Iberians tried by the Holy Office in Venice was not a Portuguese Judaizer (see index 303 at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia [ASV]). Indeed, the association in the minds of many between “Portuguese émigré” and “Judaizer” was as true in the Venetian Republic as it was throughout the Mediterranean and the Low Countries (see for example Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, and David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700, Philadelphia, 2004. The lone exception was an immigrant from Spain, not Portugal, who was tried and penanced with a priest companion for reciting healing prayers, collecting alchemical recipes, and divin- ing answers to questions about the past, present, and future. (See ASV Santo Uffizio busta 31, fascicolo originally numbered 15, trial of Alfonso Spagnuolo). He differed from the other Iberians brought before the Venetian Holy Office, not only in country of origin, but also in occupation; he had no connections to the trade activities that marked Portuguese Converso activity across Europe and the Mediterranean. Alfonso also seemed to have had less educa- tion than most Judaizers brought before the Holy Office. Finally, neither the Venetian inquisitors nor the Spanish consular officials who interviewed him about his background accused him of being a Converso.