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The debate over a crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico: The role of ethnographic allegory and orientalism
Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Michael P. Carroll
The CJNM Hypothesis as Ethnographic Allegory
Over the past two decades there has been a historiographical revolution in the study of both the Spanish Inquisition, which operated in Spain and in Spanish colonies, and the Roman Inquisition, which operated in Italy. Any number of scholars have now established that in most instances the punishments meted out by these institutions were not especially severe by the standards of the time; that the use of torture, however abhorrent it might seem to the modern mind, was a standard practice in all legal proceedings, both ecclesiastical and civil; that Inquisitors were generally skeptical of many things (allegations of witchcraft, for example) that were taken far more seriously elsewhere in Europe; and that Inquisitors were often as much, if not more, concerned with reform of the individual than with his or her punishment (see Kamen 1997; Hudon, 1996; Tedeschi 1997). This revised view of the Inquisition has brought along with it a revised view of the links between the Inquisition and crypto-Judaism.
Jewish scholars writing prior to the mid-1970s on the Spanish Inquisition -- including well-known historians like Yitshak Baer, Cecil Roth, Seymour Leibman, and Salo Baron -- gave the impression that the Inquisition was a ruthless and all-powerful organization whose primary goal was rooting out and extirpating crypto-Judaism. Baer's (1992:333) comment that the Inquisition sought nothing less than "the destruction of Spanish Jewry" is typical of the conclusions that these scholars reached. In retrospect, as both Stan Hordes (1980:1-29) and Henry Kamen (1997:312) suggest, it seems clear that this view of the Inquisition was clearly influenced by the Jewish experience in the twentieth century, and more specifically, by the Holocaust. The Inquisition, in other words, was constructed as a sort of prelude to the Holocaust. It is precisely this older "Inquisition-as-proto-Nazism" view that has been undermined by the more recent scholarship on the Inquisition, mainly because it now appears that the Inquisition's att ention to crypto-Jews exhibited far more geographical and temporal variation than those earlier commentators had acknowledged.
In Spain itself, while the Inquisition was primarily concerned with rooting out crypto-Judaism in the first four decades or so after it was established in 1478, it was -- in subsequent decades -- far more concerned with such things as heresy, blasphemy, bigamy, etc. In the case of Mexico, Stan Hordes's (1991) already-cited work suggests that the Inquisition's persecution of crypto-Jews was limited to two very precise and delimited periods (1585-1601 and 1642-1649), and that in between these two periods the Inquisition paid little attention to the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico. Generally, the best evidence available (see Gitlitz 1996:76; Henningsen 1977:564) suggests that only 10-11 percent of the cases brought before the Tribunals of the Inquisition between 1540 and 1700 -- including those operating in Spain itself, the Americas (at Mexico City, Cartagena, and Lima) and Sicily -- involved people accused of Judaizing (and remember that not all of these individuals were necessarily crypto-Jews).
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