By the end of the
Christian reconquest of Iberia and the forced conversion or expulsion of Muslim
mudéjars and
Sephardi Jews in Spain, the populations of
Portugal and Spain were all nominally Christian. Spain's population of 7 million included up to a million recent converts from Islam and 200,000 converts from Judaism, who were collectively referred to as "
New Christians". Converts from Judaism were referred to as or and converts from Islam were known as
Moriscos. A commonly leveled accusation was that the New Christians were false converts, secretly practicing their former religion as Crypto-Jews or Crypto-Muslims. After the Expulsion of the Jews in March 1492, with the
Alhambra Decree, the charge of insincere conversion against Jews brought before the
Spanish Inquisition only grew. The concept of purity of blood came to be focused more on ancestry and "blood" (lineage), rather than on personal religion and beliefs.
Origins: The "Sentencia-Estatuto" of the City of Toledo (1449) The first instances of marginalization of
Judeoconversos appeared in the early decades of the 15th century: in 1436 the city of Barcelona prohibited converts from serving as notaries; and in 1446
Villena obtained a
privilege from the king of Castile whereby converts could not reside within its territory. However, it was in the mid-centuries, during which both the
Crown of Castile and the
Crown of Aragon experienced a severe political and social crisis, that discrimination against converts gained greater significance. The most notable case was the Toledo anti-converso revolt of 1449, led by , during which the so-called "Sentencia-Estatuto" was approved. And on August 13, 1451, the king formally approved the Sentencia-Estatuto. This text stated that all Conversos or individuals whose parents or grandparents had converted to Christianity may not hold public or private office and cannot testify in a court of law. Although this was not an official law, many institutions in Toledo started to enforce the practice of blood purity tests and set the precedent on what it meant to be a true Christian. around 1570. It was in Toledo where the first statute of blood purity was approved in response to the anti-converso revolt of 1449. The Sentencia-Estatuto of
Toledo was the first statute of blood purity. It established the following:According to Kamen, the rejection the Sentencia-Estatuto elicited among jurists and ecclesiastics shows that the idea of discrimination against
New Christians was not yet widespread. The jurist Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo argued that a baptized Jew could not be treated differently from a baptized
Gentile. The king's secretary,
Fernán Díaz de Toledo, of converso origin, drafted an
Instruction addressed to his friend
Lope de Barrientos,
Bishop of Cuenca and
chancellor of the king, highlighting the converso origins of the main noble families of Castile. The
Dominican cardinal
Juan de Torquemada also criticized the Sentencia-Estatuto in his
Tractatus contra Medianitas et Ismaelitas (1449). But the most significant refutation came from
Alonso de Cartagena—Bishop of Burgos and son of the converso
Pablo de Santa María—who in his
Defensorium Unitatis Christianae (1449–1450) stated that the Catholic Church was the natural home of Jews; an argument continued by , also a converso and general of the
Hieronymites, in his
Lumen ad revelationem gentium (1465). In some cases, the statute of blood purity was even considered heretical because it denied the
sacramental power of
baptism.
Américo Castro traced the origin of the idea of "blood purity" to the Jewish tradition itself:Those who truly felt the scruple of blood purity were the Jews. Thanks to the translations of A. A. Neuman [
The Jews in Spain], we know the legal opinions ("responsa") of rabbinical courts, which allow us to discover their previously veiled intimacy. There appears a meticulous concern for family purity and what others might say, for the "honor concerns" so characteristic of 17th-century literature. The minority Jew lived defensively against the dominant Christian, who incited or forced conversions in which the personality of their caste vanished. Hence their religious exclusivism, which the Christian did not feel before the late 15th century, though later it became a collective obsession.The French historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub, however, has attributed the statutes of blood purity to the competition for access to positions and dignities that New Christians—finally freed from the numerous restrictions they suffered as Jews before conversion—represented for Christians, who soon began calling themselves "
Old Christians." Moreover, "ecclesiastics and magistrates feared the weakening of Roman Catholic orthodoxy" that the entry of these new members into the Christian community might entail. This stratification meant that the Old Christian
commoners might assert a right to honor even if they were not in the
nobility. The religious and
military orders,
guilds and other organizations incorporated in their
by-laws clauses demanding proof of cleanliness of blood. Upwardly mobile New Christian families had to either contend with discrimination, or bribe officials and falsify documents attesting to generations of Christian ancestry.
Spread Role of the Inquisition (1480–1555) '' by
Pedro Berruguete (c. 1500), depicting two penitents of the
Spanish Inquisition, probably
Judeoconversos, wearing their respective
sambenitos. For
Henry Kamen, "it was undoubtedly the
Spanish Inquisition that, from 1480 onward, gave the greatest impetus to the spread of discrimination [against converts]."Precisely the first institution to adopt a statute of blood purity, the
Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé, in Salamanca, did so in 1482, the same year the Inquisition began operating in the city. Around that time, the College of San Clemente in
Bologna, which hosted many Castilians, excluded those who had fled Seville in 1480, when the Inquisition began operating there, for not being "Old Christians." In 1488, it extended the prohibition to all converts after the murder of the inquisitor
Pedro Arbués in Zaragoza in 1485, who had graduated from the college. Other major colleges also adopted discriminatory statutes, such as Santa Cruz of Valladolid in 1488 or San Ildefonso in 1516. Some ecclesiastical institutions likewise adopted them, such as the monastery of Santo Tomás de Aquino in Ávila—a request formulated to the pope in 1496 by the inquisitor general
Tomás de Torquemada—or the
chapters of the cathedrals of
Badajoz (1511) and
Sevilla (1516). These statutes were condemned by the monarchy and the Church; however, in that year,
Pope Alexander VI approved a purity statute for the
Hieronymites. One example of how laws were applied is found in a legal brief composed on behalf of Pedro Francisco Molines concerning his betrothal to Maria Aguiló. This brief argues that he cannot, should not, and will not, marry Maria. It claims that Maria is not of "pure blood," and because of this Pedro has no legal obligation to marry her, and can refuse to do so as not to dirty his clean blood, "being that the aforementioned Aguiló has proven to be the descendant of Jews, and these being disgraced, by said infamy, even if they had been engaged, said Molines should not marry her; because he is of clean blood..." This insistence of the purity of blood not only squelched many familial lines that were established over centuries but also prevented many upward-moving Spaniards of "dirty lineage" from establishing themselves and their families in the socio-economic system of the times. These families were thus pushed to the sidelines of society due to a perceived impurity. This cultivated a connection between ancestry and impurity, values that would consolidate into racism as we understand it today, which was only beginning to form at this time. The last page of the brief also notes that the judge has the right even to imprison Pedro until he finds a more suitable woman of "pure blood" to marry. The brief then closes with the signatures of 15 men agreeing with the clauses and arguments found in it. Many of the signatories are either friars or scholars of canon law, which demonstrates the staunch religious support the statutes found. The statutes were not without their dissenters, however, as they potentially challenged the social status of every segment of the population, including and , the aristocracy who stood to lose standing, the agricultural workers who farmed their lands, and Catholic reformers who saw it as a challenge to the efficacy of baptism and a perversion of Christ's
Millennialism. While these statutes were broadly supported by the highest echelons of power, some of the Spanish population was not in favor of legislated segregation by blood. Many religious leaders condemned the laws, such as
Pope Nicholas V in 1451,
the Bishop of Cuenca after the initial laws in 1449,
Archbishop Carrillo of Toledo,
Pope Paul IV of Rome, and many others. However, there were just as many voices who supported the statutes.
Testing and eventual decline By 1530, tribunals of the Inquisition were urged to make registers of genealogies for each town. Every married man had to submit their genealogies, which registered them and their family as Old Christian or New Christian, as pure or impure. Investigations and trials would begin if one could not submit proof of a pure bloodline or there was suspicion that the individual was lying. Tests of had begun to lose their utility by the 18th century; by then, only rarely did persons have to endure the gruelling inquisitions into distant parentage through birth records. However, laws requiring were sometimes maintained even into the 19th century. For example, an edict of 8 March 1804 by King
Ferdinand VII resolved that no knight of the military orders might wed without having a council vouch for the of his spouse. Official suppression of such entry requirements for the Army was enacted into law on 16 May 1865, and extended to naval appointments on 31 August of the same year. On 5 November 1865, a decree allowed children born out of wedlock, for whom ancestry could not be verified, to be able to enter into religious higher education (canons). On 26 October 1866, the test of blood purity was outlawed to determine who might be admitted to college. On 20 March 1870, a decree suppressed all use of blood purity standards to determine eligibility for any government position or licensed profession. The belief among Basque intellectuals of the 19th century that the "
Basque race" was free of foreign miscegenation became one of the bases of the racism in
Sabino Arana's
Basque nationalism. The discrimination was still present into the 20th century in some places such as Majllorca, where no
Xueta (descendants of the Mallorcan conversos) priests were allowed to say Mass in a cathedral until the 1960s. During the
Spanish Civil War, when
Fascist Italy occupied Mallorca in alliance with the
Nationalist faction of Spain. Nazi authorities requested lists of persons with Jewish ancestry, planning to deport them to
camps in France and
in Italy, but the intervention of the
bishop of Mallorca Josep Miralles blocked their delivery. The mixing of German troops and the
Corpo Truppe Volontarie with locals led some Palma women intending to marry foreign soldiers to obtain from Mayor
Mateo Zaforteza Musoles certificates of not having Jewish ancestry. Although all those laws were suspended by the end of the 19th century, they set a precedent which allowed for a new form of religious discrimination based on blood.
Procedure to judge purity of blood The earliest known case judging comes from the Church of Cordoba, which explained the procedure to judge the purity of blood of candidates as follows: kneeling, with the right hand placed over the image of a crucifix on a Bible, the candidates confirmed themselves as being of neither Jewish or Moorish extraction. The investigation process is as follows: commissioners and secretaries with notaries would be sent to the tribunals from which the individual under investigation claimed to have originated. They would then gather eight to twelve elders from the tribunal as witnesses and have them testify. The information would then be sent back while the individual awaited trial. Having collected all the reports, the secretary or the notary had to read them all to the council, and a simple majority vote would decide whether the candidate was approved; after approval the candidate had to promise to obey all the laws and customs of the Church. If the court identified them as of Jewish descent, the individual and their children would be socially outcast and labeled impure The man from the Church of Cordoba was able to prove his ancestry was free of Jewish or Muslim blood.
Criticism and opposition to the Statutes The statutes of blood purity were criticized by certain sectors, as in the case of the Toledo Cathedral or the University of Salamanca. One of the most resolute opponents of the statutes was
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the
Society of Jesus, who once stated that he would have liked to descend from Jews because it would make him "a relative of Christ Our Lord and of Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary." He described the cult of blood purity as "the Spanish humor." Thus, the Jesuits admitted converts, of whom the rector of the Jesuit college in Alcalá wrote in a letter to Ignatius of Loyola: "more virtue is found among them than among Old Christians and nobles." The successor to Ignatius of Loyola as general of the Society in 1556 was a convert,
Diego Laínez, which provoked opposition from certain Church sectors.
Francis Borgia, Laínez's successor and an Old Christian, wrote in a letter that for the Lord "there is no acceptance of persons nor distinction between Greek and Jew, between barbarian and Scythian." Pressures on the Jesuits increased, sometimes portraying them as a group of Jews, until in 1593 they approved the exclusion of converts. However, the measure was repealed fifteen years later when it was agreed to allow entry to converts who had been Christians for five generations ("by that date, most converts in Spain had, in fact, been Christians for five generations as a result of the forced conversions of 1492," so converts could be readmitted to the Society). Shortly before, the Jesuit
Juan de Mariana had written in his treatise
El rey (1599) a harsh critique of the statutes of blood purity, arguing that "the marks of infamy should not be eternal, and a deadline must be set beyond which descendants should not pay for the faults of their ancestors." That same year of 1599, the most resounding plea ever written against the statutes was published, causing great commotion because its author had been a member of the Inquisition and was also a prestigious 76-year-old Dominican theologian. This was Agustín Salucio, who in his
Discurso presented two criticisms of the statutes: that they were no longer relevant because there were no longer converts Judaizing, and that they had brought more harm than good—"they say peace cannot exist with the republic divided into two factions," he stated. He concluded: "Great wisdom would be to ensure the kingdom's peace by limiting the statutes, so that from Old Christians and
Moriscos and converts, all might form a united body and all be Old Christians and secure." Salucio's book, which received support from many civil and ecclesiastical authorities, triggered a major crisis within the Inquisition. The first reaction of the was to ban the book, but they could not stop its circulation because Salucio had sent copies to the procurators of the , who demanded the intervention of King
Philip III to resolve the issue, noting that "in Spain we value a man and 'clean' more than a
hidalgo who is not 'clean.'" The king's
valido, the
Duke of Lerma, commissioned a report from the
Grand Inquisitor, who praised Salucio's book, but despite this, the book remained banned. The claim to universal (lowest nobility) of the
Basques was justified by intellectuals such as Manuel Larramendi (1690–1766). Because the
Umayyad conquest of Hispania had not reached the Basque territories, it was believed that Basques had maintained their original purity, while the rest of Spain was suspect of
miscegenation. The universal hidalguía of Basques helped many of them to positions of power in the administration. This idea was reinforced by the fact that, as a result of the Reconquista, numerous Spanish noble lineages were already of Basque origin. Following Salucio's book, others criticizing the statutes were written, some by prominent Inquisition members. However, it was not until the rise to power in 1621 of the
Count-Duke of Olivares, after the accession of
Philip IV, that action was taken to change them. In 1623, the Junta de Reformación decreed new rules modifying the practice of the statutes. Proofs of purity were eliminated each time someone was promoted or changed jobs, rumors were disregarded for determining blood purity, and oral testimonies unsupported by solid evidence were prohibited, as was the dissemination of works listing families of Jewish origin, such as the "." However, the "councils, courts, major colleges, and communities with statutes" to which the reform was directed seem to have ignored it, despite a member of the Junta de Reformación writing that they wereIn 1626, the Council of the Supreme Inquisition, at the behest of the Count-Duke of Olivares, published, according to Henry Kamen, "the most extraordinary document ever to emerge from its bosom." It was a frontal critique of the statutes, stating among other things:However, only two years later, the Council of the Supreme declared by majority vote that "we hold it certain that the observance of the statutes of purity is just and laudable." For his part, the poet
Francisco de Quevedo accused the Count-Duke of Olivares of being an agent of the Jews, simply because he had resorted to networks of "Portuguese bankers" of
Marrano descent (at that time the
Kingdom of Portugal was part of the
Hispanic Monarchy). Thus, the statutes continued despite all the criticisms reiterating that "it is absurd and greatly prejudicial."
Persistence in the 18th century and 19th century Tests of had begun to lose their utility by the 18th century; by then, only rarely did persons have to endure the gruelling inquisitions into distant parentage through birth records. However, laws requiring were sometimes maintained even into the 19th century. For example, an edict of 8 March 1804 by King
Ferdinand VII resolved that no knight of the military orders might wed without having a council vouch for the of his spouse. The statutes of blood purity were abolished by a royal order of January 31, 1835, within the framework of the
Spanish Liberal Revolution that ended the
Old Regime, although they remained in place for army officers until 1859. A law of May 1865 abolished blood purity proofs for marriages and certain civil and military positions. That same year, those whose "purity of blood" could not be established (i.e., those born out of wedlock) were allowed to enter higher religious education, and a year later, the blood purity examination was eliminated as a condition for admission to secular higher education. As late as 1870, "purity of blood" ceased to be a criterion for admission to professorships or public administration positions. ==Society of Jesus==