Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Jewess of Venice: Tolerance, Interfaith Sexuality and Converso Culture

Abstract

Four years before being made responsible for the opening sessions of the Council of Trent in 1545, the Imperial ambassador, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza had spent the summer frolicking with his Jewish lover on Murano, island retreat of the Venetian patriciate. While this may seem surprising, the letters he wrote back to the imperial secretariat, detailing his affair, are even more so, casting a fascinating light on the possibility of tolerant religious and sexual attitudes in the Spain of the early 1540s. A consideration of these letters calls into question the consecrated picture of conversos as a largely endogamous group. Research on Toledo has suggested that all the children in certain converso families married into other families with similarly recognizable converso surnames. It has also been convincingly argued that the estatutos de limpieza de sangre, which excluded the descendants of Jews from municipal office, military orders and various areas of the Church ‘drove the conversos to become, in a fairly high degree, an endogamous group holding itself apart from the Old Christians, and forming its own associations and clubs’. Sexual relations between men and women of different religion or ethnicity certainly attracted harsh condemnation in the early modern period from certain quarters, and concerns about the possibility of liaisons between Jews and Christians found frequent expression in a rash of legislation imposing the wearing of a distinguishing mark or badge on Jews that stretched back to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 – the first of innumerable attempts to enforce prohibitions designed to make religious difference visible: ‘et omni tempore qualitate habitus publice ab aliis populis distinguantur’ (‘and that at all times they might be distinguishable from the rest of the population by some aspect of their dress’). Despite the obvious anti-Semitism of certain sectors of Spanish society this is not the whole story. This chapter suggests that at least in the first half of the sixteenth century, interfaith and interracial marriages were a far more common and widely accepted occurrence in Spain than has previously been thought.