The Canonization of a Myth: Portugal's "Jewish Problem" and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Canonization of a Myth: Portugal's “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629 Bodian Miriam Martin A. Cohen . The Canonization of a Myth: Portugal's “Jewish Problem” and the Assembly of Tomar 1629. Hebrew Union College Annual Supplements 5. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2002. Pp. 108. Portuguese Jewish history exists for most informed people as a kind of afterthought to Spanish Jewish history. To an extent, this view of Portuguese Jewish history is even reasonable. There is, after all, a set of common threads running through the history of the Jews of the Iberian kingdoms—all of them—in the late medieval and early modern periods. Between 1391 and 1540, the following events took place: the Jews either fled from these kingdoms, were expelled from them, or were forcibly converted to Catholicism; the large population of converts did not (or was not allowed to) assimilate fully into Catholic society; inquisitorial tribunals were established to prosecute crypto-Jews; and "purity of blood" statutes were instituted, discriminating against the descendants of converts. At least from a generalized point of view, Portuguese Jewish history wasn't so distinct from Spanish Jewish history in this period. For decades, scholars of converso history, Spanish and Portuguese alike, have wrestled with a set of questions arising out of these common developments. Was crypto-judaizing really a widespread phenomenon among the conversos, they have asked, or was it mainly a fabrication of the Inquisition? To the extent that it did exist, was crypto-judaizing an expression of deep-seated Jewish loyalties or a form of resistance provoked by the activity of the Inquisition? Was the agenda of the Inquisition religious or political? Were the "purity of blood" statutes imposed to relieve anti-Jewish anxieties or to establish sociopolitical controls? The scholars who have participated in the debate have fallen into two broad (but by no means uniform) camps. Yitzhak Baer, I. S. Révah, and Haim Beinart are among those ranged on one side, recognizing crypto-judaizing as a real phenomenon rooted in Jewish loyalties—a phenomenon that provoked a Catholic response in the form of the Inquisition. Ranged on the other side, among others, are Antonio Saraiva, Henry Kamen (in his earlier work), and Benzion Netanyahu, who have discerned, underlying the activity of the Inquisition, an unarticulated sociopolitical or racial program that targeted a largely assimilating converso population. In recent years, however, the center of gravity of research on conversos has moved away from these questions. Scholars have become more attuned [End Page 738] to the nuances of time and place, which they have brought into relief with detailed microhistories as well as with broader works that seek to analyze rather than generalize. As a result, it has become increasingly clear what common sense might suggest: namely, that an institution as complex and long-lived as the Inquisition never served a single, consistent purpose, and that the society that brought it into being was as diverse and conflicted as any human society. Yet the old debates have persisted. Martin Cohen's Canonization of a Myth is a case in point. While the centerpiece of the book is an important unpublished document, the analysis of the document belongs to a polemical genre of scholarship that appears increasingly unrealistic in light of a growing body of evidence and more sophisticated methods of analysis. Let us first turn to the document the author presents. It is a formal report on the Portuguese "converso problem" produced by an assembly of ecclesiastical authorities in Tomar, Portugal, in 1629. A forty-five page summary of this 137-folio manuscript document constitutes the core of this slim volume. The report is of unquestionable importance, and the reader can only echo the author's regret that space considerations precluded publication of the full document and/or a translation. The report of the Assembly of Tomar was at least in part a response to repeated efforts of Portuguese conversos to persuade Philip IV of Spain (who was also king of Portugal) to reform inquisitorial procedures and revoke certain laws that discriminated against them. The report argued for the rejection of these petitions. But it went much further, prescribing a...