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The demographic factor was certainly one of the decisive arguments in favour of expulsion employed by Juan de Ribera in three memoranda to Philip III in 1602. He warned the King that, unless he took swift action, Christian Spaniards would soon find themselves outnumbered by Muslims, as all Moriscos married and had large families, whereas a third or a quarter of all Christians remained celibate after taking Holy Orders or for other reasons; many, for example, entered military service and died in battle, while others travelled to the Indies. The Moriscos, Ribera said, think only of reproducing and savings their skins; and their temperance in food and drink gives them a high life expectancy (cited in Fonseca, pp. 161-62). Ribera’s fears were prompted by a census of the Valencian population that he himself had supervised in this same year, which revealed that the Morisco population had increased by one-third. The Comendador de León, who spoke at the Council of State on 30 January 1608, attributed the decline of the Old Christian population to their reluctance to shoulder the financial burden of marriage at a time of rising costs. He warned his listeners that soon the Moriscos would be able to achieve their objective simply by means of their high population growth, without either taking up arms or receiving help from abroad.[19] He added that, with Turkey distracted by war and with Persia and North Africa weakened by plague, drought and civil war, it was an opportune moment to take firm action. The Count of Alba de Liste then said, in a further twist of the demographic argument, that if the King, in his clemency, were to send the Moriscos to North Africa, it would be a form of death sentence because, if they did not die of drought and starvation, they would become sexually impotent (Boronat, II, p. 473). In the minds of many of the apologists for expulsion, the fertility of the Morisco population was associated with the myth of Islamic sensuality and licentiousness. The failure of the Church in its missionary efforts was attributed to this alleged aspect of Islam that offered—so they said—carnal delights both here and in the hereafter. Like the figure of the Negro in the Unites States of America, the Morisco came to personify the sins of the flesh, such as lechery and idleness, later romanticised in visions of oriental harems. But the Moriscos were considered equally susceptible to what Gordon Allport calls ‘the sins of the superego,’ such as pride, hypocrisy, cunning, avarice and grasping ambition, all features traditionally ascribed to the Jews. Allport has observed that prejudiced people will not hesitate to use mutually exclusive stereotypes to justify their dislike,[20] and this is certainly true of many Spanish writers in the seventeenth century: the Moriscos are lazy, yet industrious; abstemious, yet lascivious; miserly, yet extravagant; cowardly, yet belligerent; ignorant, yet anxious to acquire learning in order to rise above their station. It is interesting to observe how nowadays the tables have turned: Muslims tend to criticise Western culture for promoting hedonism and sexual promiscuity, while Muslims have become the sexual puritans. There were, as we have seen, genuine grounds of fearing and envying the Moriscos: their numbers were increasing rapidly; some had become successful merchants and shopkeepers, despite attempts to exclude them from these occupations; they exemplified in their conduct the virtues of thrift, frugality and hard work; the majority outwardly conformed to the religious requirements imposed on them, but by subterfuge continued to celebrate their own festivals and practise the basic rituals of Islam. It was this refusal to renounce their religious and cultural identity that many Old Christians found offensive. There was no serious attempt to understand Morisco culture and religion. Any slanderous anecdote, any insulting remark, any distortion of the truth was acceptable if it served what these Christians considered to be the laudable aim of denigrating Islam. Cultural diversity was an alien concept and assimilation was equally unacceptable. This paradoxical situation illustrates the truth of Allport's pronouncement: ‘A prejudiced dominant majority will favour neither cultural pluralism nor assimilation. It says in effect, “We don’t want you to be like us, but you must not be different”’ (Ibid. p. 240). It needs to be said that the experience of the Moriscos varied enormously from one region to another. This makes it difficult to generalise. In some parts of Spain there were exceptionally good relations between Old and New Christians. Trevor Dadson, who discovered a bundle of letters written by Moriscos in a private Spanish archive, some posted on the French frontier, is writing a detailed study of Villarubia in La Mancha where the Moriscos comprised 20% of the population, owned the best farmland and were well integrated within the community, so much so they were protected by their Old Christian neighbours when they received unwelcome visits from government inspectors. The letters reveal that many of those expelled managed to slip back into Spain and travelled many hundreds of miles to reach their homes.[21] The full tale of the sufferings endured by the Moriscos has never been told: how those who survived the journey arrived at their destination starving and destitute because the bare necessities and money that they were permitted to take with them had been extorted from them by thieves and swindlers; how those travelling overland to France were forced by farmers to pay whenever they drank from a river or sat in the shade of a tree; how thousands of those who resisted and survived ended their days as galley-slaves; how those waiting to board ship were starved so that they would agree to sell their children in exchange for bread; how it was the official policy of the Church to separate Morisco children from their parents. The fate of the Morisco children, which has never been studied, is worth discussing in more detail. It was certainly Juan de Ribera’s original intention, approved by the Council of State on 1 September 1609, that all children aged ten or under should remain in Spain to be educated by priests or trustworthy persons whom they would serve until the age of twenty-five or thirty in return for lodging, food and clothing, and that even suckling babes should be given to Old Christian wet-nurses on the same conditions (Boronat, II, pp. 522-27). Later in the month the age limit was reduced from ten to five years or under. The embarkation lists show that this cruel policy was at least partially executed. Among the Moriscos who embarked at Alicante in Andalusia between 6 October and 7 November 1609, there seem to have been nearly 14,000 children missing. This is on the assumption that the average number of children per family was 2.5 (which is a conservative figure). According to a document dated 17 April 1610, there were 1,832 Morisco boys and girls aged seven or under in the Kingdom of Valencia, all of whom, against the wishes of their guardians, were to be sent to Castile to serve the prelates and other notables of the realm (Ibid. II, p. 575). In July 1610 the Church recommended that all Morisco children above the age of seven in the Kingdom of Valencia should be sold as perpetual slaves to Old Christians. These included the orphans of rebels, children seized by soldiers and others concealed and cared for by people who believed they were doing an act of charity. The five theologians who signed this document argued that slavery was not only morally justifiable (‘lícito en conciencia’) but spiritually beneficial: these children would be less likely to become apostates, since their masters would ensure that they remained Roman Catholics for fear of forfeiting their right to retain them, and, as slaves rarely married, this would be another method of ridding Spain of ‘this evil race’ (Ibid. II, p. 544). What was the significance of the age limit? It was thought that above the age of six or seven a child begins to lose his innocence and becomes more difficult to indoctrinate, whereas a younger child would have no real knowledge of his Muslim origins. The policy was justified on the theological grounds that innocent children baptised as Christians should not be punished for the sins of their fathers, although, paradoxically, the principle of hereditary guilt was found quite acceptable as a justification for expelling all adults, whether or not they were practising Christians. Furthermore, it was said that to banish children with their infidel parents would be to guarantee their confirmation as Muslims and their consignment to hellfire in the hereafter. In the words of Juan de Ribera, ‘We cannot entrust the lambs to the wolves’ (Ibid. II, p. 707). But it was repeatedly emphasised that young Morisco children should not be educated above their proper station: apart from pupils preparing for the priesthood, they were to be brought up by artisans and farm labourers, otherwise there was a danger that they might aspire too high; and they should certainly not be allowed to study literature (‘cosas de letras’). In this way it was hoped that all memories of Islam in Spain would be wiped out forever. This point was much appreciated by Philip III (Ibid. II, p. 523). Much has been written about the exodus of the Spanish Jews in 1492 and about the plight of the many Jewish conversos who suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, but the Spanish Arabs or Moors—an equally significant minority whatever one’s criteria (demographic, economic or cultural)—have still not received the kind of attention they deserve. In most people’s minds, the Spanish Inquisition is associated with the persecution of Jews. It is not so widely known that Muslims were terrorised by this institution and that they too were the victims of an anti-Semitic ideology. About 12,000 Moriscos were charged with apostasy by the Inquisition, 50 per cent of them in the last thirty years before the expulsion.[22] That Muslims and Jews should have been tarred with the same brush is in a way appropriate when one considers how much—both existentially and theologically—they have in common. As we have already shown, racial and religious intolerance is nowhere more evident than in the reports of some of the meetings of Philip III’s Council of State and in works written to justify the need for a policy of expulsion. In these works, most of them by frustrated Dominican missionaries, one finds not only the typical racist remarks discussed earlier but a highly unorthodox racist theology, supported by biblical precepts and precedents: there was an attempt to judaise Islam and to depict the Christian Spaniards of old Christian stock as the new Chosen Race engaged in a crusade to recover their Promised Land from the Antichrist Muhammad. One author, for example, claims that the Prophet was the offspring of an incestuous relationship between his mother and his uncle, both, he says, Jews, in fulfilment of the prophecy that the Antichrist would be born of a dishonest woman.[23] It is indeed ironic that those same Old Testament passages which have been used to support the theory that Palestine is the Jewish promised land from which the native Palestinians should be deported were not only cited by apologists for a policy of mass expulsion for the Moriscos but were cited by anti-Jewish theologians, such as Diego de Simancas and Balthasar de Porreño, in advocating the need for statutes of purity of blood. ‘No Ammonite or Moabite, even down to the tenth generation,’ they said, ‘shall become a member of the assembly of the Lord’ (Deut. 23: 3). These authors regarded the Spanish Old Christians as the spiritual heirs of the Children of Israel and compared Philip III with Abraham, Moses or King David. They called him a second Abraham because, they said, he was obliged to banish his illegitimate son, that is to say the Moriscos, the descendants of Hagar, the Egyptian slave-girl. One of their favourite biblical passages was God’s message delivered by Moses to the Israelites as they were about to enter the Promised Land: In the cities of these nations whose land the Lord your God is giving to you as a patrimony, you shall not leave any creature alive. You shall annihilate them—Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites—as the Lord commanded you, so that they may not teach you to imitate all the abominable things that they have done for their gods and so cause you to sin against the Lord your God. (Deut. 20: 16-18) The above passage has been cited by Jewish zealots campaigning for a Greater Israel stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea and was used by the Puritans in North America in the seventeenth century to justify massacring the native American Indians.[24] Following the Jewish-Morisco analogy, one contemporary poet presented the expulsion of the Moriscos as a reversal of the Hebrew Exodus: No ha de abrir para vos el mar camino, (The sea will not have to open up a way for you, / nor will you be in the holy and sacred land, / but on planks of oak and coarse pine, / bound for miserable and infernal Egypt.) The Portuguese Dominican Damián Fonseca, who published a treatise justifying the Morisco expulsion in Italian in 1611, translated into Castilian in 1612, even suggested that God expected a burnt offering from His Catholic Majesty to appease His divine wrath. The unfortunate phrase that he used was ‘el agradable holocausto’ (‘the agreeable holocaust’).[26] In the minds of these Spanish anti-Semites, the Jews were descended from Judas, who betrayed Christ, not Judah, son of Jacob. It was conveniently forgotten that it was Pilate who permitted the Crucifixion, that Christ’s executioners were Roman soldiers, and that the mob of bystanders was not entirely Jewish. Nor would they have admitted that Jesus himself was a Jew sent by God to preach to the ‘lost sheep of the House of Israel’ (Matthew 10: 5-6; 19: 9-10). As a result of the role that God had apparently predestined them to play in His plan of human redemption, the Jews ceased to be God’s Chosen People and inherited the sin of deicide for which, in popular mythology, they were condemned to wander the earth. It is only against this theological background that the peculiar virulence of European anti-Semitism becomes explicable. The Holocaust or Shoah, when the Jews became a scapegoat for the ills of Germany, seemed to vindicate the Zionist argument that, to be secure, the Jews needed a national homeland. The guilt generated by the Nazi atrocities, committed in the name of a doctrine of racial superiority, gave the Jews the moral authority and sympathy that they needed to establish a Jewish state in Israel. It is indeed paradoxical that the victims of a racist ideology should themselves take refuge in a narrow nationalistic interpretation of God’s Promise to the Children of Israel, seeing themselves still as victims, yet sometimes behaving like oppressors. Nationalist Zionism, which relies on a selective reading of the Bible, is obviously contrary to the spirit of both Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians who are guilty of racism need to be reminded that there is a very different biblical traditional of peaceful coexistence, which is even expressed in the Book of Deuteronomy: ‘You too must love the stranger, for you once lived as strangers in Egypt’ (Deut. 10: 19; cf. Exod. 22: 21, and Lev. 19: 33-34). And, to quote the Book of Exodus: ‘One law shall be to him that is homeborn and unto the stranger that dwells among you’ (12: 49). God warned Moses that the Israelites could not claim rights of ownership to the Promised Land; all of us are merely tenants, temporary lodgers in the land which we have to share as best we can: ‘The land shall not be sold forever: for the land is Mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me’ (Leviticus 25: 23). Similarly, according to the Qur’ân, no single people can claim a monopoly of the revealed truth since every people has been blessed with prophets and messengers. The simplest method of vilifying the last remnants of Arab Spain was to depict Islam as a form of pseudo-Jewish heresy. The Royal Chaplain Jaime Bleda, the chief anti-Morisco polemicist and a Dominican in the service of Juan de Ribera, even suggests that the Moorish invasion of Spain was a divine punishment for the pro-Semitic policies of the Visigothic King Wittiza (698-710), who had revoked the decrees of his father by liberating the Jews from slavery and restoring to them their lands and privileges. This was cited as a legal precedent applicable to the Moriscos at the Council of State held on 30 January 1608. However, the immediate historical precedent was, of course, the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. In a letter dated 10 April 1605, Bleda urged Philip III to follow the example of his royal predecessors Ferdinand and Isabella, who had been persuaded by Fray Thomás de Torquemada to banish the Jews from their realms and would have done the same to the Moors had they refused baptism. God, he says, rewarded the Catholic Monarchs for their Christian zeal by giving them the New World. By this analogy Bleda was clearly emulating the example of the Grand Inquisitor. Much of the vituperation that he and other polemicists levelled against the Moriscos had previously been levelled against the Jews. Of both peoples it was said that they were inherently sinful and inferior, that they were incorrigible in their obstinate infidelity, and that their heretical depravity was a contagion or leprosy that would have to be removed.[27] Philip III is even described as a Catholic Galen charged with the task of purging the poison and corruption of heresy from the mystical body of Christian Spain.[28] Thus Christianity, with its universalistic creed and its doctrine of the brotherhood of man, became a repressive racist ideology. It was in the name of this perversion of Christianity, and in the alleged interests of the state, that the Jews and the last Muslims of Spain were persecuted, segregated and finally expelled. Spain has paid a heavy price for denying so long the Jewish and Muslim components of its cultural identity in order to be accepted as part of Europe. Since the death of Franco in 1975, freedom of worship has gradually been established in Spain. There are now more than 30 million Muslims in Europe and about 1.5 million Jews. Given the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and increasingly inter-connected world of today, it is obvious that a new and more truthful version of European history needs to be written, which will include an account of the achievements and tribulations of European Jews and Muslims. This would show Jews and Muslims that not only in their experience of prejudice and persecution but even in their beliefs, rituals and cultural values they have much more in common than they realise. Such an account might generate better understanding between people of the three Abrahamic faiths. The Vatican might perhaps do more to admit the atrocities done in the name of the Church. It is hard to believe that the decision to canonise Juan de Ribera was taken as late as 1960.[29] At least we should be grateful that a proposal to canonise Queen Isabella was recently dropped. The real saints were those who risked their lives to protect people who were persecuted because of their beliefs or the beliefs of their ancestors, those who died because they refused to betray their friends and neighbours to the Inquisition, those who would not renounce their faith and died in armed resistance. These people were engaged in what Muslims call jihâd, which means both the inner struggle, the duty to resist evil and strive in the mystical path, and the outward struggle, the duty of those who are oppressed, or who have been unjustly driven from their homelands because they refuse to renounce their faith, to fight in self-defence and in defence of their people. For, paraphrasing the Qur’ân, ‘If people did not have this right to defend themselves, monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques, in which God’s name is much remembered, would surely have been destroyed by now’ (22: 40).
This paper, based on my contribution to a festschrift for Professor Pat Harvey (see fn 16), was first given in a joint lecture with David Abulafia, in the 7th Jewish-Muslim Annual Lecture Series, sponsored by Leo-Baeck College and the Maimonides Foundation, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, on 25 Oct. 2000. It was also given at the Historians of Medieval Spain Conference, at Pollock Halls, Edinburgh, on 17 Sept. 2002, and at a meeting of the Association of Muslim Researchers, London, on 18 Jan. 2003. An abridged version of the paper, without footnotes, was published in History Today, vol. 52, no. 4 (April 2002).
Notes [19] Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión, 2 vols (Valencia: Real Colegio de Corpus Christi, 1901), II, p. 464. [20] The Nature of Prejudice, 25th anniversary edition (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 194-95. [21] He read a paper about this at a Colloquium in Memory of Professor Roger M. Walker at Birkbeck College, University of London, 21 Oct. 1999, entitled ‘Co-existence and Co-operation: The Practical Realities of Convivencia.’ [22] Ricardo García Cárcel, ‘The Course of the Moriscos Up to Their Expulsion,’ in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, ed. Angel Alcalá (Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Monographs, 1987), p. 81. [23] Jaime Bleda, La corónica de los moros de España (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1618), p. 5. [24] Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 347. [25] Juan Méndez de Vasconcelos, Liga deshecha por la expulsión de los moriscos de los Reynos de España (Madrid: Alonso Martín, 1612), fol. 44v. [26] Justa expulsión, p. 169. [27] See the Aragonese Decree of Expulsion, 31 March 1492, in Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, La expulsión de los Judíos de la Corona de Aragón: Documentos para su estudio (Saragossa: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1991), pp. 41-44. [28] Cardona, Expulsión iustificada, fols 62v-63r. [29] Francisco Márquez Villanueva, El problema morisco (desde otras laderas) (Madrid: Lebertarias, 1991), p. 201.
© Roger Boase, 2003
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