A modest contribution to the ongoing polemic about the Jewishness of the Sephardic conversos during the formative period of the Spanish Inquisition, denied by the radical Zionist Benyamin Netanyahu but affirmed by other scholars (including the author), this work boasts a solid documentary base in various trial records of the early Aragonese tribunal, preserved at Zaragoza and Paris but not hitherto examined for whatever light they can shed on this problem.
D'Abrera's documentary hoard consists of 120 procesos held in the Inquisition section of Zaragoza's provincial archive and 22 more in the Fonds espagnol of France's national library. Together, they constitute a sizable minority of the more than six hundred inquisitorial defendants from this tribunal between 1484 and 1502 (3, 44–45), counted by Henry Charles Lea from a manuscript in his possession, still preserved at Philadelphia but unavailable to the author. Only eleven trials—less than one-twelfth of her sample—involved defendants who had converted after the notorious conversion-or-expulsion decree of 1492.
Various details suggest the representative nature of her Aragonese sample, which generally fits well with our evidence about conversos arrested by Castilian inquisitorial tribunals during their first years of activity. In one way, Aragon was unique: one of the two “new” inquisitors sent there in 1485 was promptly assassinated, and the plotters were hunted down with ferocious thoroughness. However, this aspect is almost completely absent among the trials studied here. Similarly, as the author acknowledges, Aragon had an unusually prominent cadre of conversos occupying the highest tier of royal officials in the 1480s (35); but they also virtually disappear from this sample. Minus Aragon's assassins and its “untouchable” royal officials, these defendants seem an unremarkable lot. For example, 43 percent were female; a plurality came from artisan households, with a strong sprinkling of merchants; most defendants were second- or even third-generation converts. A group of ten defendants with the same Christian surname (“Santangel”), coming mainly from one small town (46–47), testifies to the webs of kinship among conversos. All Jewish religious practices connected with reading sacred texts involved men; all those concerning Jewish dietary practices involved women.
Although the author mistakenly asserts that “a great majority of the [early] inquisitors were Dominicans” (55), her chapter on inquisitorial procedure bolsters her argument that inquisitorial testimony generally provides reliable information about the religious customs of late fifteenth-century Aragonese conversos. As elsewhere, torture was unimportant; it was employed in only ten of 94 cases (68–70), and confessions made under torture were often successfully repudiated. It was verbal testimony about their religious practices, presented by witnesses whose identities were concealed from the prisoners, that inquisitors weighed when judging the fates of these imprisoned conversos. As d'Abrera's conclusion insists (190–191), this early inquisitorial testimony from Aragon coincides almost perfectly with the earliest Castilian evidence.
However, in my opinion, the book's most interesting dimension lies in the remarkable congruence between inquisitorial testimony presented by two diametrically opposed groups, namely “Old Christians” and Jews. Although practicing Jews lay outside the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition, their testimony could be admitted (62–65). Since over 90 percent of these Aragonese trials predate 1492 (see 45), enough testimony survives from local Jews to corroborate evidence from Old Christian servants and neighbors about converso observance of the Jewish Sabbath, dietary habits, fasting on Yom Kippur, and similar matters. When representatives of opposed communities agree with each other, they should be believed: such was the common-sense attitude of the inquisitors, and it still seems sensible today—despite Netanyahu's dogmatic assertions that all inquisitorial testimony was tainted.
The book concludes with a useful set of 53 summary biographies (197–228), which appear to provide a representative sample of her archival evidence. For example, slightly less than half were women; over 40 percent came from merchant or professional families (including two priests, one of whom was burned); and slightly more than 10 percent had been tortured. Although d'Abrera's text pays little attention to inquisitorial punishments inflicted on “Judaizers,” this sample suggests a considerable degree of severity, since 26 of them were handed to secular authorities to be executed. However, a closer look reveals that those who suffered capital punishment included two converso couples who had previously been executed in effigy at Seville, and that thirteen others were executed in effigy, generally because they had already died or else because they had fled to avoid arrest, like those four unfortunate Castilians who were caught before they could reach safety in France. Torquemada's second set of instructions, promulgated while most of these trials were being held, insisted that “trials of the living must never take precedence over trials of the dead,” and this evidence not only confirms that his guidelines were being followed in Aragon as well as Castile but also demonstrates precocious bureaucratic efficiency, since the Aragonese tribunal quickly obtained copies of previous trials from its colleagues in Seville.
