Introduction
In early modern Spain, as elsewhere in early modern Europe when printed books became widely accessible, strong measures were taken to prevent access to “dangerous” books. The Spanish Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books determined which books – and it listed a great many – were to be banned. Enforced by the Inquisition and its tribunals, the Index proved to be relatively effective in suppressing “forbidden” knowledge. But as scholars have recognized, even an institution as terrifying as the Spanish Inquisition could not prevent curious and disaffected people from gaining access to forbidden knowledge, gleaned from both prohibited and permitted books. The document presented here throws light not only on the channels of access to such knowledge, but on the approaches to reading that were adopted by curious and disaffected people. It is one of five summaries sent to the supreme body of the Spanish Inquisition (the Suprema) by the local inquisitorial tribunal in Valladolid, offering ongoing annual accounts of the trial of Don Lope de Vera y Alarcón. (These summaries constitute the only documentation of the trial that has survived.)
In the late 1630s, Lope de Vera had been a candidate for the chair in Hebrew at the University of Salamanca – the only university in Spain, at the time, where Hebrew was taught. He possessed no known Jewish ancestry. Arrested in 1639 on suspicion of judaizing, he was burned alive at the stake in 1644 for that crime. From the trial summaries, it is obvious that books were not his only source of information and intellectual support. Witnesses against him – and the defendant himself – testified to theological conversations he had had with “Portuguese” students and a “Portuguese” physician, undoubtedly conversos. However, his reading of texts was crucial in persuading him that Catholicism lacked credibility.
Among the texts he possessed, inventoried by the Inquisition when his belongings were sequestered, were a translation of the Book of Haggai into Latin and Aramaic, a collection of treatises by the Calvinist Johannes Drusius, and a manuscript copy of the Hebrew diary of David Reuveni. (Other books are listed but are difficult or impossible to identify positively.) In his testimony, Lope de Vera praised for their exceptional learning Erasmus (whose Annotations on the New Testament he had read), the Hebrew author Ibn Ezra (probably Abraham ibn Ezra), and Johannes Drusius. He had also gleaned information from at least two anti-Jewish works: Fortalitium fidei by Alonso de Espina,1 and a work by Pietro Colonna Galatino, presumably his De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis. In addition, he confessed to reading some treatises in Arabic, without identifying them.
Understanding how these texts informed Lope de Vera’s thinking on the basis of the Inquisition summaries is not easy. The summaries were hastily written, with many careless errors. And they are doubly removed from the actual interrogations, since they are summaries of equally hastily written notarial transcripts. Moreover, the works they mention represent only a small fraction of those Lope de Vera must have read, given his career and his access to the rich collection of the University of Salamanca.
The diary of David Reuveni is mentioned many times, and may have held special signficance for Don Lope. As a Hebrew manuscript text written by a diaspora Jew, it was certainly a highly privileged object (one wonders how Don Lope acquired it). It must have made for heady reading, offering the young Hebraist a glimpse of the wider early modern Jewish world in Muslim and Christian lands as well as distant lands with exotic populations. However, we do not know how close Lope de Vera’s manuscript was to the text of the work that we possess. (We know mainly that his text contained the word “Sambation,” as does the extant text). This makes even speculation difficult.
Despite these obstacles, there are characteristics of Lope de Vera’s reading, including his Bible reading, that we can identify - characteristics that place him in the company of a certain type of early modern European truth-seeker. He clearly did not doubt that God addressed mankind in revealed texts. But his reading of Erasmus, among other things, convinced him that the Gospels were not among these texts. He was attracted to Hebrew in a way that was perhaps more typical of sixteenth-century humanists: He valued it for its antiquity and its status as the authentic sacred language. As a person of superior reason and learning (how many Spanish bishops knew Hebrew?), he felt entitled and impelled to explore beyond the boundaries of the permissible set by the Church. But he did not read forbidden literature with a cold, critical eye. By the time his inquisitorial interrogations took place, he had become a man whose reading was almost entirely dominated by subversive impulses and a highly emotional attraction to the “Law of Moses.”
Bibliography
Bodian, Miriam. Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World. Bloomington, 2007.
Coudert, Allison, and Jeffrey Shoulson, eds. Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia, 2004.
Kagan, Richard. Students and Society in Early Modern Spain. Baltimore and London, 1974.
Popkin, Richard. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Dordrecht and Boston, 1994.
Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim. From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics. Seattle, 1971, esp. 271-301, 350-412.
[^1] This work is mentioned in another of the summaries of the trial, not the one translated here. Lope de Vera confessed, according to the summary, that it was from Alonso de Espina’s work that he had learned that the Jews regarded Jesus as a fraud.
Source 1 Translation
Inquisition file of Lope de Vera y Alarcón Expediente inquisitorial incoado contra don Lope de Vera y Alarcón
1639-1644
FROM AN INQUISITION SUMMARY OF THE TRIAL OF LOPE DE VERA
Don Lope de Vera, a student in Salamanca and candidate for a chair in Hebrew at the university of that city, a native of the town of San Clemente in La Mancha, nineteen years old, was deposed by seven adult male witnesses - two eyewitnesses and the others hearsay witnesses.
One of the eyewitnesses, a minor, [testified] that the said Don Lope de Vera had said to him that during the five years he was in Salamanca he had had no rosary or prayer beads, and that he was a Jew, and that [once] when he was on the bank of the Tormes River he had removed a small book from his pouch, saying that it was in Hebrew, and he read it in reverse [i.e., from right to left, or from “back” to “front” of book], saying that what he was reading was the language of God. [And he said] that the Law of the Jews was the most dear to God and the Hebrew people, supporting this with many arguments. [He further said] that God did not command the worship of images or crosses, and that the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ was a fraud, and he tried to persuade the witness that the best people in the world were the Jews. Moreover, he said that he would “kill those Christian dogs who pursue [or persecute] me with a cutlass,” and that “if Our Lord Jesus Christ was God, why did He have to make himself man and earth?” and “what signs did He make in heaven when He was resurrected?” He also said to the witness that if he knew the prayers of the Law of Moses he would at once convert to their Law, and that the messiah had yet to come and would come as a Jew,[^1] and that the Christian dogs worshipped a crucified [man] who had died a fraud. The said Don Lope also said that if they came to take him, he would kill [them] with a cutlass if he could, and that he did not care a cent whether he died, because he greatly regretted that all of his blood was not Jewish, which was the most noble in the world.
The other eyewitness said that when the said Don Lope was with other students in a group**,** he said that our Holy Catholic Faith had many things that were difficult to believe and that in terms of natural reason there were other religions with articles of faith that were less difficult and seemingly closer to reason. He also said to the witness that he should realize that he professed the Law of Mohammed or that of Moses, and that he [the witness] should tell him what these laws containedthat did not seem very much in conformity with natural law. Placating him, the witness did not contradict him, so that the said Don Lope would calm down.
Six calificadores evaluated this testimony and in conformity [with regulations] they declared that this prisoner was an apostate from our Holy Catholic Faith, a judaizer and a heretic. They voted on the case without unanimity (en discordia) on May 16, 1639. Your Highness [the Inquisitor General] instructed by your order of May 21 that this prisoner be imprisoned in the secret cells with the sequestration of his belongings and the gathering together of his books and papers. He entered the secret cells on June 24. He was given a first audience on June 30, 1639, at which he said that all of his parents and grandparents were Old Christians, and that he was a baptized and confirmed Christian. Concerning the reason for his arrest, he confessed to a certain quarrel that he had with a cousin, understanding that this was what led to his excommunication; he had not heard mass on required days for four months, and he read prohibited books like the Anotaciones of Erasmus[^2] and La enbajada de Raví David,[^3] and other Arabic works, and during this time he had ceased to confess and comply with the precepts of the Church. And he had said to a few people that he was a Jew and a Moor, and that he had to go and apostatize in Algiers or Constantinople. [He also confessed] that he had communicated with Portuguese students about the Hebrew language, and told them that it was the best in the world, the most ancient, the mother of all languages, taught by God to Adam before he [Adam] sinned, and that in [this language] God had spoken to the patriarchs and prophets. And [he had said to them that] he [himself] was a Jew and a Moor, and would willingly go and apostatize from Our Holy Faith in Algiers. But he had said this [to the Portuguese students] without the intention of apostatizing; it was only that he had a particular desire to converse with Jews and Moors. He would willingly go and read the Koran of Mohammed, and if he went to Constantinople the Grand Turk would have to make him the alfaquí of the mosque for understanding so well the Hebrew language [sic], and he could easily follow the Law of the Jews or the sect of the Moors. And he and a Portuguese student had discussed certain articles of faith of the Roman Church, criticizing some of them - in particular concerning the Trinity, it seeming impossible that God was three and one, and that He had been incarnated, and that He was in the consecrated host. And there was no obligation to worship images, God having commanded in the Law of Moses the prohibition of making images. And it was a bad thing to have religions that contradicted natural law (el precepto y bendición natural), and the miracles performed by the images [of saints] and the people who made them were fraudulent. He also discussed killing a chicken in the Jewish way [i.e., according to the laws of ritual slaughter].
He had also said to another person that the Jews were not wrong to say our Lord Jesus Christ was a fraud, and to be still awaiting the messiah. And during an argument he insisted that he [the messiah] had not come; but even though he said this insistently he did not actually believe this, but only had the desire to propose such arguments. Indeed everything that he had said was not [said] with the intention of believing it. But he had a nature that was very fragile and variable, because knowing the Hebrew and Arabic languages he could easily incline toward following the Law of the Jews or the sect of the Moors, and he had been so confused with the various interpretations (lecturas) that if he would reside among Moors he didn’t know if he wouldn’t follow their Law and leave that of Christ, seeing that he was already excommunicated (por el de verse excomulgado).
In an audience of July 4 he said that, having discussed a certain case with a Portuguese student whom he named, and afterwards, in an argument [with him] over a passage in the Bible in which God conveys the way in which the people [of Israel] should distinguish the true prophet from the false one, [namely,] that if the prophet says that you should live in the Law, this is a true prophet, and if he says that you should abandon the Law, you should not believe him – [at the close of this discussion] this prisoner said, having seen the passage in question, that he could discover no solution or understanding of it. And going out [and meeting this student] on another day, he returned to the subject and offered as a rejoinder that he [the student] was wrong, because there was no reason why they should have abandoned the ceremonies and punishments of the Law of Moses, since Christ had said that he had not come to abolish this Law but to fulfill it. And he knew about this student that he was a Jew and that he had the intention of leaving Spain to judaize, and Don Lope gave him to understand that he had the same intention of leaving Spain to judaize. And they discussed what destination would be best, and agreed that he would see about it and advise him. And on this and other occasions they discussed certain ceremonies and articles of faith of the Roman Church, rejecting some of them, in particular [their conviction] that it seemed impossible for God to be three and one, and that He had been incarnated, and that He was in the consecrated Host. And to support this the said accomplice cited a passage in psalms that says no lise fijeri sicut equs et mulus in quibus no est Intelectu,[^4] which he explained, saying that God said that we must not subject our understanding sicut equs et mulus[^5] to things that seem impossible to the understanding, and the two of them discussed this, and he [the prisoner] didn’t notice whether he or the accomplice had proposed this first. They also discussed [their conviction] that one must not worship images, God having prohibited making them, and that it was a bad thing to have monastic orders, etc., and they discussed [their conviction that] miracles and the people who performed them were fraudulent.
And in an audience of the 4th of the same month, in the afternoon, he said that taking a walk with the said accomplice, he had said that he wanted to kill a chicken in the Jewish manner and eat it, but they did not do it because it would have been dangerous. But he did desist from eating meat, in order not to violate the Law of Moses, since it was not slaughtered in the manner that had been commanded, and he did not hear mass or confess, in order to comply with the Law of Moses.
And when the prisoner went down with the said accomplice to the bridge of Salamanca [over the Tormes River] on the Sabbath (un día de sabado), the said Don Lope said that the Jews did not cross rivers on the Sabbath. So both of them turned back and did not cross the bridge in order not to violate the Law of Moses. And the said Don Lope said this because he had read in the Licionario de David Rabid tahuien the word “sanbation.” And in the Itinerario de Ravi David Sarraceabat [he had read] that the Jews who inhabited the other side of the river Sanbation, wanting to cross to the other side, and being able to do so on the Sabbath (because miraculously [the river] became still on the Sabbath, whereas on other days it was rapid), declined to cross [on the Sabbath] so as not to violate the Law of Moses.[^6]
And [he said] that a student proposed to him certain arguments concerning the faith that were not consistent with the Law of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And the said Don Lope said to a Portuguese physician that for the understanding of Holy Scriptureit was necessary to assume different things [i.e., arrive at different understandings],and afterwardsthe physician said he had some doubts [about this]. The said Don Lope responded that different nations had different understandings [of it]: Christians held that the Old Law of Moses was not eternal, but a prefiguration of the New [Law], while Jews understood Scripture literally and [believed] that their Law must be eternal and that Christ was a fraud, and they continued to await the messiah. And the Jews were not lacking reason to say all of this. And if he had not said it [these things] explicitly, he had said it in equivalent, allusive terms.
In an audience of July 5, 1639, he said that in July 1638, being a candidate for the chair in Hebrew [at the University of Salamanca], he had entered into an argument with a priest of the minor order as to whether the messiah had come. Don Lope had argued that he [the messiah] had not come, based on a passage of the prophet to which Pedro Galatino referred, citing an argument the rabbis made.[^7] But even though he had argued in this way, he had not truly believed this; rather, he enjoyed proposing such arguments recklessly.
On July 8, he said that he had praised certain prohibited authors, like Abraham ibn Ezra, the heretic Juan Drusio,[^8] and Erasmus, for being learned, and he read the book of Ravi David in the Hebrew language. He could not deny the doubt and confusion in which he had found himself. And conversing with the accomplice, he condemned certain articles of faith of the Roman Church, and he doubted for about two months that God was three and one, that He had been incarnated, and that He was in the consecrated Host. And at that time he had experienced a certain confusion and vacillation as may happen, and he desired that God would perform some miracle to [cause him] to get out of it, and he went into the countryside imagining this [happening].
He had said to the accomplice affirmatively that there must be no worship of images, but privately, although he had doubts, he was not certain. And now he believed with certainty that they [images] must be worshipped.
In an audience of July 12 he added that he had been in doubt for about a month that God performed miracles by means of images of the saints, having read this in Erasmus, who says that miracles were concocted to revive the faith of Catholics. But at the end of that month he was freed of his doubt and held and believed that God performed miracles by means of holy images, and the basis for this was his reading at the time in Holy Scripture that God performed miracles by means of the bronze serpent, which is the prefiguration of our Lord performing a cure for other serpents. And he had not performed any ceremony, but had only refrained from crossing a bridge on the Sabbath, as he had said, but he did not do this in observance of that Law, but rather because he assumed that the complice observed it.
On July 15 he was given the second admonition, on July 18 the third, and on the 29th he identified the books found in his possession which were:
_hipachivi tini in arati eterodoxi
_an Aramaic translation of the prophet Haggai, in Latin and Aramaic[^9]
an opuscule of Johannes Drusius
a [book] written in Greek
a [book] _venundatur parisis apud
_a manuscript in Hebrew which he said was the Itinerario de Ravi David
Egidio Gour [?]
and other books.
And he acknowledged them as being his and those in his possession at the time of his arrest.
Endnotes
1 This summary reads “volver por el estado eclesiastico,” but this is clearly a notarial error; two earlier summaries, from one of which this was copied, read “volver por el estado judaico.”
2 The reference is to the Annotaciones in Novum Testamentum, first printed in 1516, which Erasmus successively expanded in four subsequent editions. This work pointed out the errors in the Latin translation of the Greek text of the New Testament.
3 Literally, The Embassy of Rabbi David, referred to elsewhere in this text in somewhat different terms. This is apparently a manuscript copy of David Reuveni’s so-called “diary.”
4 Vulgate, Ps. 31:9: “Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding.” (The actual verse in the Vulgate: “nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus quibus non est intellectus.”)
5 “like a horse or a mule.”
6 It is unclear whether Don Lope is referring to two distinct works here, or what the meaning might be of the words transcribed by the notary as “tahuien” and “Sarraceabat.” Certainly the latter title would seem to refer to the diary of David Reuveni.
7 The reference is to Pietro Colonna Galatino, whose popular work De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis (1516) had been printed in several editions.
8 The Protestant theologian and Christian Hebraist Johannes Drusius (van den Driesche) (1550-1616).
9 This is very likely Jean Mercier, Chaldaea translatio Haggaei prophetae, recens Latinitate donata, cum scholiis haud infrugiferis (Paris 1551). My thanks to Theo Dunkelgrun for bringing this work to my attention.