Pious Cruelty

On April 9, 1609, King Philip III, leader of the most powerful nation in Europe, secretly signed a decree to expel all Spaniards of Muslim descent—anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people, or about 5 percent of Spain’s total population—from his territory. This decision was the culmination of centuries of putting into effect restrictive measures against religious minorities, first the Jews, then the Moors, and sometimes the two together. The Jews had been disposed of in 1492 with the Edict of Expulsion, promulgated on March 31, less than three months after the transfer of Muslim Granada to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. As in Christian provinces in the past, where Mudéjarism (the acceptance of Muslim minorities) had been barely tolerated, Jews were given the option of conversion or exile. The “crypto-Jews” who chose conversion to save their lives and stay home would become Marranos (pigs), but those who stuck to their faith—anywhere between 40,000 and 50,000, according to recent estimates by Henry Kamen—were forced to leave in dreadful conditions.1 The Santa Hermandad, a sort of national police force established in 1476 out of a vigilante order, was charged with the logistics. One witness describing the exodus of the Jews of Segovia to Portugal wrote, “Over the fields they pass, in much travail and misfortune, some falling, others standing up, some dying, others being born, others falling sick, that there was not a Christian but felt sorrow for them.” Another wrote of those leaving by sea, “Half dead mothers held dying children in their arms. . . . I can hardly say how cruelly and greedily they were treated by those who transported them. Many were drowned by the avarice of the sailors, and those who were unable to pay their passage sold their children.”2

The Moors of Granada had been given a solemn promise of total protection and the exercise of their full rights as Muslims by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella the previous November, even though Abu Abdullah, better known as Boabdil, Granada’s last Muslim king, was warned by his general, Musa Ben Abil, that Christians didn’t keep their word and that such protections were futile in a country where the Inquisition, that “burning pile of the bigot,” was gaining ground.3 To no avail: on January 2, 1492, Boabdil rode out of Granada and gave his ring of authority to León don Gutierre de Cárdenas, the Count of Tendilla, the new ruler from the Mendoza family, while the monarchs watched in splendor, Isabella wearing a Moorish caftan. Four days later, on the day of Epiphany, Ferdinand and Isabella entered Granada to the tune of Te Deum laudamus, performed by the royal chapel choir. In March of that year, Peter Martyr, described by James Reston Jr. as the author of “the first major work on the discoveries of the New World,”4 wrote, “This is the end of the calamities of Spain. This is the term of the happiness of this barbarous people [the Muslims], which, as they say, came from Mauritania some 800 years ago and inflicted its cruel and arrogant oppression on conquered Spain!”5 Juan de Padilla, a popular religious author, praised the monarchs for cleansing “weakened Spain of a thousand heresies.” Three years later, Dr. Hieronymous Münzer, of Nuremberg, told the Catholic Monarchs—a title conferred on them by Pope Alexander VI, a notoriously corrupt Spaniard, in 1494—that their glory was so complete that the only thing left was to reconquer the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Without a doubt, the defeat of Muslims and the conquest of Granada were far more significant events for contemporaries than the discovery of America that ensued from such victories.6

The interlude of tolerance under the archbishopric of Hernando de Talavera, the Hieronymite friar of Jewish lineage who praised the Moors’ integrity and industriousness and learned Arabic to better proselytize, was quickly eclipsed by the arrival of the archbishop of Toledo, the Franciscan Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, in 1499, the same year when Granada was incorporated into the district of Córdova and subjected to the Inquisition, and Talavera was accused of being an agent of Judaism. On December 18 of that year, Jiménez de Cisneros forced three thousand Moors into baptism and burned five thousand religious books (saving only medical treatises), leading to the first Moorish uprising in the mountains of Alpujarras. It was an insurgency that was crushed with even more violent measures, as mosques harboring women and children were blown up by Catholic forces and Moors from elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula were denied entry into Granada to shield the new faith of the converts (conversos) from Muslim contamination.7 (For his assiduousness, Jiménez de Cisneros would be appointed grand inquisitor of Castile in 1507.)

In Aragon, the northern kingdom that had merged with the larger and more powerful Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, Moors continued to enjoy their ancient liberties, or “laws and privileges” known as fueros; but about a year after the ban on Lutherans in 1521, Pope Clement VII released Charles V from Ferdinand’s solemn oath to protect his Muslim vassals.8 From then on, Spain would not tolerate the presence of unconverted Moors in its territory. Bathing, cleanliness, dietary choices, the use of henna, fasting during Ramadan, and the possession of books in Arabic, as well as what was called fautorship, or the favoring or defending of heretics by Christians (butchers and midwives were considered examples of fautors), became prosecutable crimes. The list of Morisco illegal activity kept mounting, in effect making Islam a crime against the state. As doctrineros, or catechizers, were dispatched to convert and baptize Moriscos, the morerías (Moorish quarters), like the old juderías for Jews, were destroyed. The mingling of races and intermarriage were forbidden. No Moorish names or surnames, dress, or musical dances known as zambras and leilas were allowed. Marriage between cousins was invalidated. The Moriscos were also prevented from bearing arms, leaving them defenseless and vulnerable in a country rife with banditry. They couldn’t be butchers and couldn’t slaughter animals. Civil ceremonies, such as marriage, birth, and death, were scrupulously monitored for signs of deviance or heresy. Scattered throughout the country, the Moriscos, confined to their residences, endured life “under perpetual surveillance.”9 Even after they converted to Catholicism, the Moriscos were denied full membership in the community, because the limpieza de sangre (purity-of-blood) statute of 1449 had turned faith into a racial category. (The pope initially objected to the statute, as it contravened the evangelical mission of the Roman Catholic Church.) The Moors had no genealogical claims to Catholicism, making their conversion suspect and incomplete in the eyes of Spanish authorities.

Although they were persecuted, harassed, and discriminated against, the Moriscos soon prospered again, producing anxieties real enough for Old Christians (Christians with no Jewish or Muslim lineage) to worry about their enslavement to the Moors. Not all Catholics shared such sentiments. A few faint voices recommended more love and kindness for a people who had once been rulers and masters, but freedom of conscience was “forbidden by all the canons”; it was a “Protestant heresy” that could endanger the faith and state.10 Moreover, by fighting back tenaciously, the Moriscos were seen as traitors, even though it was the Catholic Monarchs who had reneged on their vow to protect the Moriscos. “Taking up arms,” L. P. Harvey wrote, “was the last resort of desperate men, a forlorn attempt to arrest the process whereby their religion was being suppressed.”11

No power—European or Muslim—came to the Moors’ defense, for although they asked the Mamluk ruler of Egypt, and later the Ottoman sultan, to threaten retaliation against Christian minorities in their realms, neither could do it (the Mamluks were threatened with retaliation by Peter Martyr, who was dispatched to Egypt to explain the Christian point of view; and Bayazid II, the Ottoman sultan, could not contravene his millet policy of coexistence). Thus, short of mass exile, the only option left to the Moors in Spain was “insincere and nominal conversion,” allowed by the remarkable fatwa, or religious opinion, obtained from the grand mufti of Oran as early as 1504. Nonobservance of religious obligations and hiding one’s true faith under duress (taqiyya) were allowed, thereby condoning a sort of Muslim marranismo.12 Other local imams, like the mufti Ice de Gebir, from Segovia, produced Islamic manuals, such as the Brevario Sunni; or, Kitab segoviano, in the Romance language of the Moors, aljamía. The Young Man of Arévalo (el Mancebo de Arévalo), a boy rumored to be a prophet, recorded accounts of encounters with Moorish leaders such as the Mora de Ubeda in Granada and Yunes Benegas, the owner of a large farm employing more than a hundred people, a man who survived the Catholic mass murder of his family and coreligionists during the first Alpujarras uprising. Benegas’s is a moving tale that testifies to the sort of coexistence (however difficult it may have been for non-Muslims) that prevailed in Granada before the final defeat of the Moors. After recounting to the Young Man of Arévalo the horror of losing his wife, three sons, and two daughters, he stoically added this:

Son, I do not weep over the past, for there is no way back, but I do weep for what you have yet to see, if you are spared, and live on in this land, in this peninsula of Spain. May it please Allah, for the sake of the nobility of our Koran, that what I am saying be proved empty words. May it not turn out as I imagine. Even so, our religion will so decline that people will ask: What has become of the voice of the muezzin? What has become of the religion of our ancestors? For anybody with feelings it will all seem bitter and cruel. What troubles me most is that Muslims will be indistinguishable from Christians, accepting their dress, and not avoiding their food. May God grant that at least they avoid their actions, and that they do not allow the [Christian] religion to lodge in their hearts. . . .

It must appear to you that I am saying all this because I am overwrought. May Allah, in His infinite love grant that what I am saying is as far from the mark as I would desire, for I would not wish to know anything of such weeping. If we say that the Children of Israel wept, is it any great matter that we too should weep? . . . If now after such a short space of time we appear to have difficulty in keeping our footing, what will those in years to come do? If the fathers scant the religion, how are the great-grandchildren to raise it up again? If the King of the Conquest fails to keep faith, what are we to expect from his successors? I tell you more, my son, that our decline will continue. May His Holy Goodness direct His pity towards us, and support us with His divine grace.13

Although this account poignantly illustrates a request for help sent to the Ottoman sultan, it also testifies to the close relations Muslims had with Jews, as there are references to the Jews’ plight throughout the account: “If we say that the Children of Israel wept, is it any great matter that we too should weep?” About Yunes Benegas, the Young Man of Arévalo further reported, “I never saw anybody with his facility for reading and explicating the Koran, and any Arabic or Hebrew work of commentary.”14

The Moriscos, including women, fought valiantly when, in 1567, Philip II renewed an edict making Arabic and the entire Moorish culture a crime. During this second Alpujarras uprising (1568–1570), also known as the Second Granadan War, the Moriscos got some help from Turkish and Moroccan volunteers; but by the spring of 1571, they were defeated. The besieged village of Galera was razed to the ground by John of Austria (known as Don John), the illegitimate son of Charles V, after its people, including women, children, and the elderly, were massacred and their bodies sprinkled with salt. Rebels were smoked out of caves; many, including children and women, were asphyxiated.15 Some 100,000 Moriscos from Granada were deported under very inhumane conditions (with the death rate reaching 30 percent), and Old Christians from northern Spain resettled on their lands.16 As brutal as his actions were, Don John did not remain unmoved by the deportation of the Moriscos; it was, in his own words, “the saddest sight in the world, for at the time they set out there was so much rain, wind and snow that mothers had to abandon their children by the wayside and wives their husbands. . . . It cannot be denied that the most distressing sight one can imagine is to see the depopulation of a kingdom.”17

According to the Granada-born Luis de Marmol y Carvajal, author of Historia del rebellion y castigo de los moriscos del reyno de Granada, a letter found on Aben Daúd, a Morisco captured near the coast of Almería, details the sufferings of the beleaguered Moriscos and their call for help, probably from Muslim rulers:

You must know, our lords, that the Christians have ordered us to abandon our Arabic language. He who loses his Arabic tongue loses his faith. We must uncover our faces and we can no longer greet each other, even though such greetings are the noblest of virtues. They have forced us to open our doors so that we may suffer misery and sin. They have increased their exactions and our drudgeries, and wanted to change our attire. They settle in our homes and unveil our honor and our shame and demand that we not complain from the pain in our hearts. All of this after they had taken our property, captured our people, and expelled us from our villages. They have thrown us in despair and they separate us from our brothers and friends.18

Many disinterested intellectuals and caring nobles objected to the persecutions of Moriscos and their deportation. One Sancho de Cardona, admiral of Aragon, was condemned to a life sentence and to wearing the sambenito, the dress of shame, for having allowed his Morisco vassals to keep their traditions and honor their ancestral faith by taking care of their mosque. In 1606, Pedro de Valencia wrote a treatise on the Moriscos, trying to understand their violent reactions and calling for integration through dispersion, mixed marriages, and better living conditions. Similarly, Mateo López Bravo and Fadrique Furió Ceriol, the latter of whom wrote Concejo y consejeros del principe (1559), fought hard against racial discrimination and arbitrary religious divisions.19

But such voices were in the minority. Because the Moriscos were often suspected of being fifth columnists for the Turks or other foreign powers, a permanent solution had to be found, for, as the scholar Mary Elizabeth Perry notes, they represented a “counteridentity” that was just too risky in a nascent state and polyglot empire.20 No option for the elimination of this “homegrown” threat was out of conceptual bounds. The castration of Morisco infants was contemplated and rejected. The Dominican Jaime Bleda, “the most hateful, the most violent detractor of the Moriscos,” suggested that all Moriscos be massacred in a single day, that such an act “would be a work of great piety and edification to the faithful and a wholesome warning to heretics.”21 (Bleda would die in the midst of the expulsion, which fulfilled his last wish to see the memory of the Moriscos erased from his country.) In 1582, the inquisitors of Valencia proposed shipping their Moriscos to Newfoundland. All these measures were rejected by Philip II, but when he died, on September 13, 1598, his much weaker and less experienced son, Philip III, fell under the sway of Morisco detractors, chiefly Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, better known in the annals of history as the Duke of Lerma, a rich, powerful, conniving landowner and the monarch’s main adviser in the Royal Council.

By the first decade of the seventeenth century, Spain was no longer the rich, confident nation it had been in the late fifteenth, and, as history repeatedly shows, times of crisis and doubt always lead to the rise of intolerance and the persecution of minority groups. The defeat of the Spanish armada led to a new fundamentalist wave across the country, with talk of purification and fighting heresy. A big and constant worry during this time was the increasing number of Moriscos and therefore growing diversity within the nation, both of which threatened the interests of Old Christians. Because Moriscos were excluded from the army and the priesthood, they had no impediments to sexual reproduction, giving rise to the fear that they might someday become the majority. And the multiple and constant attempts to convert the forcibly baptized Moriscos into the true Christian faith led to frustration and despair, as the case of Juan de Ribera dramatically illustrates.

In 1568, Philip II appointed the thirty-six-year-old Ribera archbishop of Valencia (the same year Pope Pius V bestowed on the young prelate the honorary title of patriarch of Antioch, given that the ancient town of Antioch was held by Muslims), mostly to speed up the conversion of the Moriscos in that province. The energetic archbishop, however, quickly realized that the Moriscos had no intention of abandoning their ancestral faith. When Francisco Zenequi, an elderly Morisco, was tried in 1583 by the Inquisition for practicing Islam, the defendant simply bemoaned the fact that, “unlike the Turk, who recognizes the three laws of Moors, Jews, and Christians, the king of Spain does not allow each one to live by his own law.” Such exhortations, however, had no effect on his accusers. For his obstinacy, Zenequi was sentenced to three years’ seclusion.22

The Moriscos, who remained confident in their better way of life and the liberalism of their faith, thought that the king of Spain was unwise to alienate his Morisco subjects and not follow the better example of Turkish rulers. And they were not alone in holding such views. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the anonymous author of Viaje de Turqía implicitly chastised the rulers of his own nation for not following the Turkish model:

Suppose . . . Turkey is not called Turkey because all of its people are Turks, because there are more Christians who . . . practice their faith than there are Turks, although they are neither subjects of the Pope nor of our Latin church but have their own patriarch who [sic] they consider as their pope.

Then why does the Turk consent to them?

What does it matter to him, as long as they pay him his tribute, if they are Jewish or Christian or Moslem? In Spain, weren’t there once Moors and Jews?23

Moreover, the fair treatment of Moriscos could give the Spanish monarchs added support in their wars against Spain’s enemies. As one Muslim leader commented on Philip II’s attempts to add Portugal to his domains after 1578, “If His Majesty wants to win Portugal he should arm the [M]oriscos and let each live according to his own law; they would win it for him.”24

When Ribera despaired of converting the Moriscos, he wrote a letter in 1582 to Gaspar de Quiroga, the grand inquisitor, calling the Moriscos enemies of the state and recommending their expulsion. Gradually, the Moriscos were recast as dangerous Moors and fifth columnists for the Ottoman sultan and Spain’s Protestant enemies, threatening the completion of the Reconquista of 1492 and impeding the “religious unity” of the new nation. In a twenty-eight-page letter drafted in 1602, the archbishop described the Moriscos as “the sponge of all the wealth of Spain,” hoarders of gold whose expulsion would allow the king to confiscate their wealth and enrich the state’s coffers. Paraphrasing the Bible, Ribera argued that the only solution was “to pull them up by the roots, so they will not cause damage nor send out new shoots that quickly grow into trees.” He also blamed the Moriscos for the rising wave of banditry in Valencia. And, if this were not enough to sway the monarch, he added that the Moriscos were members of a different race, therefore making them all guilty, regardless of their degree of assimilation.25

Thus, during his tenure in Valencia, Ribera “developed a series of arguments, economic, religious, historical, and racial, to depict the [M]oriscos as a diaspora community of the dreaded Moors living in the heart of Spain.”26 His views would resonate through much of modern history, as racializing religious minorities led to unimaginable horrors and the quest for assimilation continued to motivate minority groups to resist oppressive systems. Benjamin Ehlers, the author of an excellent study on Ribera, thinks that the predicament of the Moriscos “prefigured the challenges faced by Muslim societies in the modern era of Western expansion, forced to choose among accommodation, survival, and resistance.”27 This is true, but I find the situation of Muslim minorities in European societies even more poignantly relevant, as I will show in the course of this book.

In late January 1608, the Royal Council assembled to discuss the case of the Moriscos. Slaughtering all adults was, once again, proposed as an option, but expulsion was ultimately seen as the better solution.28 Thus, on April 4, 1609, the Royal Council, led by the Duke of Lerma, reiterating the same fears about the Moriscos, decreed the expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain.29 The cessation of hostilities with England and the United Provinces (Netherlands) “made possible the concentration of land and maritime forces indispensable for the success of the operation.” And so, just as the discovery of America was considered the divine compensation for expelling Jews in 1492, so was the Twelve Years’ Truce (with the United Provinces) thought to be a reward for the expulsion of the Moriscos from the holy body of Christian Spain.30 The expulsion would be “one of the greatest events in the history of Spain and the Mediterranean,”31 draining enormous state resources and requiring a very elaborate military preparation, including chartering hundreds of English, French, and Italian vessels.32

Soon after the Edict of Expulsion was first publicly announced in Valencia, in September 1609, Ribera gave a sermon explaining that the Moriscos had conspired with the Turks to invade Spain. The entire discourse of classical anti-Semitism was deployed against the Moriscos, making the two minority groups in Europe—the Jews and the Muslims—almost interchangeable in the Catholic imagination. In 1611, as the expulsion was under way, the Portuguese Dominican Damián Fonseca used the phrase “agreeable holocaust” (el agradable holocausto) to describe the burnt offering God expected from the king. Meanwhile, squads of Christians robbed and murdered the exiles. “Pedro Aznar Cardona, whose treatise justifying the expulsion was published in 1612, stated that between October 1609 and July 1611, over 50,000 died resisting expulsion, while over 60,000 died during their passage abroad, either by land or sea at the hands of their co-religionists [fellow Muslims] after disembarking on the North African coast”; others, such as Bleda, estimated that 75 percent of Moriscos perished during this ordeal.33 Many Moriscos were abused in the Muslim lands they landed on, such as Oran and Tlemcen in present-day Algeria. In the Moroccan town of Tetouan, they were treated as Christians, refused entry to mosques, and even “lapidated or put to death in other ways.”34

In his seminal study The Moriscos of Spain (1901), the American historian Henry Charles Lea estimated that “half a million” Moriscos, out of a general population of 8 million, were ultimately expelled in the five-year period of 1609–1614.35 (Some remained in the country undetected, others as slaves, although the Inquisition never relaxed its vigilant eye.) On February 20, 1614, more than nine hundred years after Islam had entered Spain, the Royal Council “advised the king that the Expulsion might be deemed to be complete.”36 Philip III then declared the expulsion successful and warned “all Moriscos who have not left or have returned must leave under the pain of slavery in the galleys and confiscation of goods. If it be a woman or very old to be whipped with 200 lashes and branded.”37 The monarch didn’t have to worry, for “the operation must be accounted as much as an administrative success as was the gruesome organization by the Nazis of the emptying of Europe’s ghettos,” commented L. P. Harvey. “Careful records were kept of those expelled, and these figures provide not just estimates but highly reliable statistics (often susceptible to checking and cross-checking).”38

The expulsion of the last Morisco, in 1614, was greeted with great joy. Bleda, whose book Defensio fidei in causa neophytorum sive Morischorum regni Valenciae, totiusque Hispaniae was described by Henry Charles Lea as a treatise “calculated to excite horror and detestation,”39 declared it “the most glorious event for Spain since the resurrection of Christ and its conversion from paganism,” announcing a new golden age of riches. Once again, the recapture of Jerusalem was seen as imminent. Unfortunately, no new golden age appeared on the horizon of an already fraying empire. Depopulation precipitated the decline of production and revenues for both nobles and churches in many areas. The Inquisition, without a major enemy and revenues, suffered. Agriculture and industry were seriously affected. Because so many Christians were in the army (foreign wars, New World conquests), busy with matters of faith (in convents), or employed by the state, they paid no taxes. With no Moriscos to fill state coffers, a “terrible atrophy . . . fell upon Spain as the seventeenth century advanced.” Arabia Felix became Arabia Deserta. “History offers few examples of retribution so complete and so disastrous,” commented Lea, “as that which followed on the fanatic labors of [Jiménez de Cisneros].” Although there had been no problems with Mudéjars when Christians were still fighting Moors—such as the Almoravids and Almohads from Morocco—to say that scattered and beaten Moriscos in a Christian nation posed a threat “was self-evidently the merest illusion, born of intolerance.”40 Still, Lea concluded, had Ferdinand kept his promise, Spain, and probably the world, would have known an altogether different future:

Had these agreements been preserved inviolate the future of Spain would have been wholly different; kindly intercourse would have amalgamated the races; in time Mahometanism would have died out, and, supreme in the arts of war and peace, the prosperity and power of the Spanish kingdoms would have been enduring. This, however, was too foreign to the spirit of the age to come to pass. Fanaticism and greed led to persecution and oppression, while Castilian pride inflicted humiliation even more galling. The estrangement of the races grew ever greater, the gulf between them more impassable, until the position became intolerable, leading to a remedy which crippled the prosperity of Spain.41

Despite routinely expressed fears of Morisco fertility rates, “the final expulsion was a cruel coup de grace to a community long in decline, not a measure of self-defense taken by Christian folk in any real danger of being demographically overwhelmed and outbred.”42 As Spain was forced to sign peace treaties with its European rivals, the state’s muscle turned on the hapless Moriscos, leading Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) to write in his memoirs that the expulsion of the Moriscos was “the boldest and most barbarous [act] recorded in human annals,” and the French writer Voltaire (1694–1778) to comment that “Philip III could not get the better of a few Dutchman [sic], and unfortunately he could drive out 700,000 Moors from his dominions.”43 But such moral preoccupations were of little interest to Castilian leaders bent on uniting a diverse peninsula with multiple traditions and allegiances. National homogeneity mattered more than convivencia; conformity was better than dissent. Centuries later, in 1889, the Spanish historian M. Dánvila y Collado, in his La Expulsión de los moriscos españoles, considered the fate meted out to the Moriscos to be “part of . . . a religious war, a war of extermination of the opposite race,” one that had near-universal support among the Spaniards:

The expulsion of the Spanish Moriscos was carried out without regard to young and old, fit or unfit, guilty or innocent. The question of political unity was a sequel to the necessity of church unity. It was initiated by the Catholic kings. Charles V and Philip II attempted to accomplish it, but it had to fall back in the face of its consequences. Philip III, exercising the power through his favorites, made it easy through the combination of religious and political power. The religious war was much alive against the Moorish race, and the sweetest sentiments of the soul came face to face with the political question. Humanity and religion fought, but religion emerged victorious. Spain lost its most industrious sons; children were separated from the lap of their mothers, and from paternal love. There was no pity or mercy for any Morisco, but religious unity appeared radiant and luminous in the sky of Spain. Happy is the nation that is united in all its sentiments.44

It was this quest for national unity, considered to be essential to national greatness, that made a large portion of the Spanish population expendable. Of course, the ethnic cleansing of Spain did not result in the unified nation so many Castilians dreamed of. The nation remained a patchwork of precariously connected kingdoms that would retain their cultural autonomy, more or less, to the present period. Perhaps, just as England managed to metamorphose into the United Kingdom or Great Britain, so did Castile manage to subsume other kingdoms and provinces into the grand but misleading title of Spain. It remains to be seen whether the “solvent of globalization,” as Raymond Carr puts it,45 will finally erase strong regional distinctions or exacerbate them, as Basques and Catalans, for instance, seek a total breakaway from the long stranglehold of Madrid.

As is often the case, the quest for religious unity across the land was not really about religion (as Lea himself knew) but about national ideology and political power. While King Ferdinand was engaged in stitching together a peninsula of diverse cultures and kingdoms and unifying his subjects around the Catholic faith, the Florentine diplomat, citizen, and astute student of politics Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) noted the genius of the Spanish monarch but saw nothing ethical about his behavior at all. Machiavelli made it clear, in The Prince, that King Ferdinand’s attack on Granada was “the cornerstone of his reign.” By taking his time to reconquer the last Moorish citadel, he was able to marginalize and assume power over the country’s nobility. “Money from the Church and the people enabled him to recruit big armies, and in the course of this long war to build a military establishment which has since won him much honor,” Machiavelli wrote. Ferdinand’s “great” and even “extraordinary” actions gained him the esteem of his people and made him the “the first prince of Christendom.” But Machiavelli knew that religion was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Ferdinand, he wrote, “made use of the pretext of religion to prepare the way for still greater projects, and adopted a policy of pious cruelty in expelling the Moors from his kingdom and despoiling them; his conduct here could not have been more despicable nor more unusual.”46

As the Spanish state, through the Inquisition and other instruments, was making life intolerable for the Moriscos, another Italian scholar, the Jesuit Giovanni Botero (ca. 1544–1617), published a book titled Della ragion di stato (The Reason of State, or, as the expression is commonly known in French, raison d’état) in 1589, making the case for infusing Christian ethics into the system of government by positing religious unity as the main guarantor of stability and good governance. In Botero’s formula, conversion of the infidels, particularly the worst kinds—the Muslims and Calvinists—is of the essence: “These, wherever they go, carry war in place of peace announced by the angels and preached by Christ; and it is the extreme of folly to trust them in affairs of state.” To grant such religious minorities rights is counterproductive, because “liberty of conscience” is only a “pretext” for them; their “business is to foster seditions, foment rebellion, offer bait to malignity, hope to the ambitious, arms to the desperate,” among a multitude of mischievous and evil acts. A state has no option but to force them out of the country, as did Pharaoh with the Jews; to inflict menial tasks on them, as did the Jews with the Gibeonites; or simply to confine them in low occupations, such as agriculture and the manual trades.47

Although Machiavelli and Botero disagreed on the reasons driving the call for unity of faith, both knew that such a policy was instrumental in forging a strong nation. About half a century ago, the historian José Antonio Maravall argued that the structure of the modern state emerged in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and the first one of the sixteenth. The Spanish monarchy developed a new ideology of sovereignty that was inseparable from territorial unity and communal homogeneity. The old medieval order of shifting alliances and antagonisms and respect for “feudal seigneurial claims” gave way to a royal system associated with citizenship and, as Alonso Ortiz, a contemporary of the Catholic Monarchs, put it, “the rights of the republic.” In this emerging nation, the vassal of old became the free subject living, rather paradoxically, in an absolutist regime. “Absolute monarchy” and “fundamental laws” were thus synthesized into a new regime of rights and obligations. Like any imperial nation, Spain relied on an efficient bureaucracy; but what really distinguished it was its ruthless pursuit of homogeneity and the “feeling of community”—which meant not only annexing the kingdom of Navarre (another act of Castilian aggression underlying the elusive unity across the peninsula) but also banning foreigners from management positions (even while it welcomed them into the country) and expelling Jews and Moors, alien elements in the body politic.48

This is perhaps what Charles Tilly, the expert on nationalism, meant by saying that “national revolutionary situations before 1800 resulted overwhelmingly from state attempts to subordinate, expel, or eradicate imperial minorities, as when the conquering Spaniards began to persecute the conquered Moors, then to persecute those who had been nominally Christianized, the Moriscos.”49 But Maravall didn’t merely talk about national unity; he showed us that the new regime, based on exclusion, somehow promised liberty to the king’s subjects, and thus foreshadowed contemporary Western models of liberal democracy. Whatever the case, it is clear that what Heather Rae calls “pathological homogenization,” or the elites’ construction of “the bounded political community of the modern state as an exclusive moral community from which outsiders must be expelled,” is “intimately bound up with the development of the international system of states.” The eminent historian Joseph Pérez rightly notes that the title of Catholic Monarchs not only allowed Isabella and Ferdinand to rule as-yet-unnamed territories but also enshrined the principle of making the prince’s faith the official religion of the state, an idea that would be the main assumption of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.50 National unity under such a regime is necessarily maintained through real or symbolic expulsion of outsiders, those who are different, even though difference can never be eradicated. The consequences of this arrangement, as we shall see, can be bloody indeed.51 It is not for no reason that Aristide Zolberg, the renowned scholar on migration and exile, described the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 as a “startlingly modern measure.”52

Indeed, the similarities between sixteenth-century Spain and the United States of America today are striking. The title of “the first prince of Christendom” is akin to the current notion of “leader of the free world.” As I am writing this, in 2008, the United States is undertaking a process that is similar to Ferdinand’s: waging wars in the Middle East and debating the fate of 12 million illegal (mostly Hispanic) immigrants in the country. Just as the European Union is frantically trying to come to terms with its Muslim population, so the United States is struggling with a growing Hispanic presence. What is at stake is more than a question of lawful immigration; both Europe and the United States are attempting to make sense of how such dramatic demographic and cultural shifts will affect their long-held position of power around the globe. In other words, as the concept of nation that King Ferdinand inaugurated is reaching the end of its life cycle and is coming apart in the process of globalization, politicians and rulers are still seeking to consolidate their power by invoking foundational myths, whether in religion, race, or culture, to justify the exclusion and expulsion of those who don’t fit the ideal profile and by waging wars against foreign countries. Yet the world has now become too mixed and complex for such purist theories to hold.

The paradox of minorities in any national unit is that their presence is practically indispensable to shaping national identity, yet their vilification inevitably escalates into calls for expulsion or deportation—measures that rarely, if ever, produce the sort of tranquillity imagined in the early phases of intolerance and persecution. To cite two of the most famous examples in history: The expulsion of Moriscos in Spain and the deportation and annihilation of Jews in Germany did not strengthen either nation; on the contrary, both nations were weakened and, in the case of Germany, even defeated by such pathological measures. Spain gained nothing at all from expelling Jews in 1492 and Moriscos in 1609, whereas Germany’s extermination of millions of Jews led to the occupation and dismemberment of the state. No glorious races emerged from such cruelty and barbarism, only humiliated states and troubled nations.

Today, the mounting calls to deport illegal aliens or to force Muslims or Hispanics to assimilate better into European and American societies are indexes of anxiety over rapidly changing economic conditions that would not be ameliorated by the successful execution of both policies. Similarly, the attempt to spread American values around the globe is implicitly an ambivalent gesture, for to succeed in Americanizing the world would also be to lose the driving ideology that allows the United States to justify its hegemony. Protecting national essences and spreading American ideologies around the world are both, therefore, impossible missions, because they would lead to militarized fundamentalisms on both ends of the spectrum and would never achieve the goal for which they were deployed. Yet these hegemonic drives have been indispensable to maintaining a certain degree of liberalism in the United States and western Europe. Max Weber was well aware that, much as the closing of the American frontier required a policy of global hegemony in order for the United States to maintain its culture of freedom, the West’s liberal tradition depended on the conquest of other lands and people.53 The erosion of civil rights in Western liberal societies today—often in the name of combating terrorism or unassimilated immigrants—may very well be an outcome of this shifting global reality.

That democracy could be founded on such violent beginnings has not been lost on Anthony W. Marx, who, writing in the heat of the clash-of-civilizations environment of 2003, noted that discrimination against African Americans and apartheid policies in the United States were “central to the process of uniting whites across regional antagonism as a nation,” because Spain, “forged in the white heat of conflict with the Moors,” provided a “template for those countries that came later to similar experiences.” Before 1492 came to an end, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had created the pillars of a new world order based on a strong national (religious) identity, the exclusion of difference, and imperial quests. The monarchs had captured Granada, expelled Jews, invested in Columbus’s voyage to India, and taken possession of the newly discovered American colonies. They had also approved the printing of the “first vernacular grammar book in Spain [Castile].” It was out of this violent culture of absolutism and exclusion that Western liberalism eventually emerged, one of the most conveniently overlooked facts of modern history:54

At the very heart of liberalism is an ugly secret: Supposedly inclusive nationalism was founded on the basis of violent exclusion, used to bound and forge the nation to whom rights would then be selectively granted. Democracy itself was so founded also on exclusions in demarcating the unit to which rights of citizenship would be granted. Founded on this basis, liberal democracy would then eventually serve as cover, with gradual enfranchisement hiding past exclusions and obfuscating that at the heart of liberalism is an illiberal determination of who is a member of the incorporated community and who is not.55

Indeed, such attitudes continue to prevail today, given that “the cohering effect of exclusion and intolerance is still reflected in the West’s views of the rest of the world.” The Moor, in other words, continues to haunt nations and drive them into violent outbursts of intolerance because “Muslims in India, Tutsis in Rwanda, or Muslims in much of southeastern or Balkan Europe are the Jews, Moors, Huguenots, or Papists of our day.”56

Unity of faith was thus essential to this nascent form of nationalism. “Between 1478 and 1502,” Joseph Pérez emphasizes in the opening lines of his history of the Inquisition, “Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon took three complementary decisions. They persuaded the pope to create the Inquisition; they expelled the Jews; and they forced the Muslims of the kingdom of Castile to convert to Catholicism. All these measures were designed to achieve the same end: the establishment of a united faith.”57 The Catholic Monarchs, Charles V, Philip II, and Philip III all pursued this policy of ethnic cleansing as a political principle, partly because they had the support of common subjects. Under the limpieza de sangre statute—understandably rejected by the pope because it cancelled the possibility of sincere conversion, but sanctioned by the Spanish monarch in 1501—it was the nobility (including the Jewish converso Tomás de Torquemada, the grand inquisitor who pushed for the expulsion of the Jews in 1492) who were genealogically suspect, whereas the sedentary peasants, attached to their land for centuries and unmixed with the foreign blood of the Moors, were considered the racial prototype, the ideal citizens of this emerging polity. (Sancho Panza in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote proudly declares himself to be of pure blood.)58 In this sense, then, the eradication of cultural and, presumably, racial difference also meant the elimination of dissent and contending political centers in the realm. It is not surprising, in this context, that more than 50 percent of those targeted by the Inquisition were Old Christians, not Moriscos,59 nor, even more remarkably, that the Inquisition displayed a reasonable attitude toward accusations of witchcraft (even going so far as to see witches as victims!) when the persecution of witches was all the rage in neighboring European countries.60

There is no doubt at all that political and religious unity, or national consensus, was based on exclusion: the “establishment of a durable internal peace” went hand in hand with “the imposition of religious unity, the construction of a national State, and the putting together of an imperialist policy.”61 All these measures had the effect of distancing Spain from the medieval world and giving rise to a golden age, a renaissance of sorts. Intellectual and cultural production often mirrored the new ideology. In 1492, when the Jews had been expelled and hundreds of thousands of Moors left Granada (among them Al-Hassan ben Mohammed al-Wazzan ez-Zayati, who would be educated in Fez, Morocco, and would later write as a baptized Moor named Leo Africanus),62 the great humanist Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522) published Gramática de la lengua castellana, symbolically connecting the Crusades and human civilization, the defeat of the enemy through the return to pure faith and the unity and prosperity of Spain. The University of Alcalá de Henares, northeast of Madrid, was founded by Jiménez de Cisneros in 1499, the same year when he forcibly baptized Moors who rose up in revolt. When it opened its doors to students, in 1508 or 1509,63 it became Spain’s foremost center of humanism and Hellenism. Its scholars, including many Jewish conversos, supervised by Antonio de Nebrija, eventually produced the first Polyglot Bible, in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, thereby transferring Jewish exegesis to Christianity. (Another Jiménez de Cisneros project was a Greek and Latin edition of Aristotle’s complete works, but the project was abandoned after three books.) Charles V created the University of Granada in 1526, blessed by a papal bull in 1531, to accelerate the Christianization of Moriscos. In fact, the sixteenth century in Spain was the golden age of higher education, with a rush to establish universities across the country.64

Some, however, saw through the glitter of orthodoxy. In 1543, a correspondent from Alcalá wrote to the Erasmian Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), the “greatest Spanish humanist of the century,” a converso from Valencia who chose to live abroad: “It is true what you say, that our fatherland is envious and proud: add that it is barbaric. For it is certain for them that no one modestly imbued with letters can be free of heresies, errors, and Judaism.”65 Philip II’s adviser Fadique Furió Ceriol called for moderation, arguing that “in the whole world there are only two nations: that of the good and that of the bad. All the good, whether Jews, Moors, Gentiles, Christians, or some other sect, are of the same nation, family and blood; and the bad likewise.” In his Introduction to the Creed (1582), Luis de Granada, Philip II’s “own preacher and chaplain,” was so moved by the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 that he condemned all religious persecution, whether directed at the “Moors or Jews or heretics or Gentiles,” for to persecute “unbelievers” was a “much graver” sin, because it only made them more stubborn. A confidential report to Philip II also condemned violence in religious matters as counterproductive.66

Although writers such as Lope de Vega congratulated Philip III for the expulsion of the Moriscos, and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo and Vicente Espinel despised them (Cervantes was more charitable),67 the Moriscos were sometimes redeemed in sixteenth-century literature, as when they appear as heroes in the last days of Muslim rule. This “literary Maurophilia,” the critic Francisco Márquez Villanueva explained, “is the voice of a coalition of forces and groupings engaged in a struggle against the policy of duress and violence. This coalition was made up of the nobility, the Moriscos, the bourgeoisie, the [Jewish] conversos, the ‘political’ intellectuals, clerics of an irenic persuasion, ‘liberals’ as we would say nowadays. It is a whole opposition contingent that we would hardly expect to come across if we were to judge solely from the bibliography available to us.”68 Sometimes, the Moriscos were given a voice, as when a corsair once expelled from Valencia explains in Vicente Espinel’s Vida del escuedro Marcos de Obregón (1618):

I felt hurt, like all the others, because I could not aspire to honors or to appointment as a magistrate or higher dignities, and because I realized that such deprivation of honor (infamia) would be everlasting, and that being a Christian, whether in outer appearance or inner truth, would never be enough. Some fellow who, whether by birth, inheritance or acquired qualities did not stick up above ground level more than two fingers’ breadth could still dare to call a very Christian man and a true gentleman by insulting names. Above all, I saw how far distant was the hope of any remedy to all this. What have you got to say to me about all this[?]69

As I indicated earlier, despite the terror inflicted on the Moriscos, Castile has never succeeded in rallying the rest of the Iberian Peninsula to its imperial banner. No matter how extreme and even genocidal the measures perpetuated against the Moors and Moriscos were, the unity Castile sought has eluded kings and presidents to this day. Spain’s 1978 constitution, the most “decentralized” in Europe, still maintains the autonomy of the Basque and Catalan regions. “The Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, did not create, as we used to learn at school, a modern nation state,” Raymond Carr argues. “The union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon was a personal union created by their marriage in 1469.”70 This is not to deny that religious unity has been a major leitmotif of Spanish history, at least since the conversion of the Visigoth king Recared to Catholicism in 589. As Eva Borreguero has shown, by 754, the expression pérdida de Hispania appeared to denote the “dispossession of a geographical and cultural unity,” thereby, for all intents and purposes, establishing the idea of a unified nation that had already started reclaiming its lost lands in the Battle of Covadogna, only seven years after the Muslims landed.71 But whether the notion of a lost Hispania served to rally Christians against the invading Muslims as early as the eighth century (Iberian Jews were already being treated as fifth columnists)72 or the Reconquista consolidated a sense of nationhood that simply did not exist before 1492 (at least not in its modern sense), Spain never became as unified as its Castilian rulers hoped. After traveling two thousand miles in Spain, Richard Ford, the noted author of Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1844), concluded that Spain was “a bundle of local units tied together by a rope of sand.” This view was echoed a century later by Gerald Brennan, in The Spanish Labyrinth: “In what we may call its normal condition Spain is a collection of small, mutually hostile or indifferent republics held together in a loose federation. At certain great periods (the Caliphate, the Reconquista, the Siglo de Oro) these small centres have been infected by a common feeling or idea and have moved in unison: then when the impetus given by this idea declined, they have fallen apart and resumed their separate and egoistic existence.”73 In fact, in 1640, not long after the Moriscos were expelled, the Catalans revolted and tried to secede when Castile tried to increase their tax burden to sustain an already flailing empire.74

Castile, in short, may have devised “a political framework which worked for a while,” as the eminent historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto argues, but it did not create a “unified nation-state.” It may well be that Spain’s unity was elusive not because of the presence of Judaism and Islam but because of “the infinite variety of Catholic tradition itself” and the country’s “pervasive localism.” The saints of the patria chica (little country) were the real “demons” that thwarted any attempt at religious homogenization by the established universal church.75 It was probably for this reason that Spain, even after 1492, was not considered sufficiently Christian. According to Borreguero, when “Cardinal Cisneros invited the famous scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam to the Iberian Peninsula, Erasmus rejected the offer, saying ‘Non placet Hispania.’” Borreguero goes so far as to claim that the Inquisition was a response to the widespread view that Spain was barely a Christian society.76

By the eighteenth century, even Spaniards themselves could note that the unity of their nation was more myth than reality. For Olivares, a civil servant, Spain was “a body composed of other smaller bodies separated, and in opposition to one another, which oppress and despise each other and are in a continuous state of civil war. Each province, each religious house, each profession, is separated from the rest of the nation and concentrated in itself. . . . Modern Spain can be considered as a body without energy . . . a monstrous Republic formed of little republics which confront each other because the particular interest of each is in contradiction with the general interest.”77 That so many human lives were wasted and a vibrant multicultural society was brutally amputated for an idea that was never realized is tragic enough, but when the same impulse for unity continues to drive nations, including our own, in the modern age, we must wonder whether the very idea of “nation,” at least in the modern sense bequeathed to us by the Catholic Monarchs and their heirs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not one whose time has long passed. We now know that the ultimate horror of the Holocaust would not have been conceived without the tradition of racism initiated by Spain in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Of course, Spain did not invent the Christian persecution of non-Christians, but it did give Christian intolerance added power by infusing it with the toxic notion of race.

The expulsion of Moriscos in 1609 may have been used by Spanish detractors as part of the Black Legend (the widely circulated notion in sixteenth-century Europe that Spain was a despotic, bloodthirsty, and intolerant nation),78 but there is no doubt that other European powers had either practiced or learned from Spain’s politics of exclusion—what Rodrigo de Zayas called “state racism.” Pope Paul IV eventually relented and sanctioned the purity-of-blood statute, in 1555, thereby adding further tools to the power of the Inquisition, for the Inquisition as Zayas saw it was “not an isolated phenomenon but an essential part of the grand European state between 1481 and 1820.” This is, in fact, Spain’s contribution to universal, particularly modern, history. The Spanish Inquisition (born on September 27, 1480) survived long after the Moriscos were deported and would be abolished only on March 9, 1820, in the reign of Ferdinand VII (although aspects survived until 1834). The purity-of-blood doctrine was eliminated in Article V of the constitution of 1845, which opened state employment to all qualified people. A May 16, 1865, law would finally suppress any requirement to prove purity of blood for marriage or to have a political career. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church would officially distance itself from this bloody past only on October 28, 1965, during Vatican II (although the Vatican declaration Nostra aetate: De ecclesiae habitudine ad religions non-Christianas remained quiet about certain aspects of Islam).79

As Zayas looked back at the Morisco question in Spain, he saw striking similarities between Adolf Hitler’s state racism and that of Philip III. More interesting, however, is the case of Vichy France, which, in close collaboration with the Catholic establishment, resurrected another purity-of-blood doctrine, applied this time to “unassimilable” immigrants, most particularly Jews. In 1938, France was no longer willing to take in Jewish refugees because, as the president of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Senate, Henry Béranger, indicated, France’s capacity to welcome strangers was long saturated. After Maréchal Pétain assumed power, on July 10, 1940, French anti-Semitism was encoded in a series of laws restricting government employment and access to the liberal professions to French nationals whose fathers were also French, gradually revoking those privileges to Jews. The “status of Jews” (statut des Juifs) became an official concern, complete with an office named the Commissariat général aux questions juives (General Commissariat for Jewish Issues), headed by one Xavier Vallat, who at a 1942 conference wondered about the solution to this intractable problem. For Vallat, baptism was not sufficient to take Judaism out of a Jew and France was in direct conflict with an unassimilable Jewish tradition. He even thought that the government ought to confiscate Jewish property in order to eliminate “any Jewish influence on the national economy.” Of course, it would be left to Germany to devise a “final solution.”80

In fact, by racializing faith though limpieza de sangre statutes and thereby turning the genealogically multicultural Moors and Moriscos into a darker, irredeemable race—even though the immense majority, as the illustrious Spanish historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz noted, in La España musulmana, were descendants of Spanish converts and had been living in the Iberian peninsula for nine hundred years or so—Spain gave birth to “the first racist State in history.”81 Not to be forgotten, too, is the fact that the term race is of Spanish origin. As defined in Sebastian de Covarrubias’s dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), race had negative connotations associated with the lesser human groups of Jews and Moors, because both were defiled by the mancha (taint). Although the term had not yet acquired the strict nineteenth-century biological meaning that gave rise to modern racism, its meaning extended beyond classic religious differences, because it grounded faith in an unchanging human essence. This is why the pope opposed the purity-of-blood statute in the first place, for to conflate faith with ethnicity was to negate the very raison d’être of the evangelical mission. Neither an expression of age-old forms of discrimination nor the sharpened biological concept of later centuries, Spain’s notion of race nevertheless didn’t preclude a natural connection, however tortuous, with the new etymology that arose in modern Europe. L. P. Harvey, the prominent historian of Muslim Spain, gives us a sense of the itinerary of this concept from its medieval Iberian context to the modern one:

The word “race” (Spanish raza) first came into existence in Spain, and wherever it is used in the modern world it is in origin a Hispanism. It is not only in Nazi and Fascist terminology that it can have a positive connotation (as witness French chien de race, “pedigree dog”), but in Spain in the later Middle Ages, where it started out, it certainly carried a negative charge. Raza (raça in medieval spelling) meant a “defect” or “blemish” in the weaving of a piece of cloth. A bolt of cloth sin raça (“without any defect,” “with no snags”) was naturally worth more, and so by extension the ethnically pure were, for the purpose of the Inquisition, “sin raza de judíos/moros”: “with no Jewish/Moorish blemish on their pedigree.” The transition of this word from being an objectively negative commercial term in the late Middle Ages to its shamefully positive sense in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is one of the most curious semantic migrations.82

Associating the Moors and Moriscos with the Arab and Berber conquerors of 711, many Christian Spaniards claimed direct descent from the Visigoths, thereby cleansing their blood lineage of some nine hundred years (711–1614) of shared existence on the peninsula. Of course, such distinctions were nearly impossible to make, which is why the Inquisition had to resort to examining men’s foreskins, looking for the indelible circumcision that would identify men as non-Christians (Jews or Muslims) or recent converts. Yet this view of the Moriscos persisted until our time, for, as late as 1973, Vox, the Spanish-language illustrated dictionary, related the term Morisco to “a descendant of a mulatto man and a European woman, or a mulatto woman and a European man.”83

Scholars such as Rodrigo de Zayas, L. P. Harvey, and Joseph Pérez, who have studied the Moriscos and the Inquisition, often compare the situation in the centuries following the fall of Granada to the policies of Nazi Germany or the secret police of the twentieth-century Communist regimes in Europe. Moreover, this passion génocidaire (passion for genocide), a phrase with which Georges Bensoussan, the historian and chief editor at the Holocaust museum in Paris, titled his 2006 book, is a uniquely European phenomenon, born of the amalgamation of religion and politics (a fact shrewdly noted by Machiavelli, as indicated earlier). Bensoussan refuses to accept the dismissals of the Holocaust as a mere aberration, a dark, inexplicable moment in European history, and shows it to be part of an enduring culture of Christian anti-Judaism and conspiracy theories attributing evil and the quest for world domination to all Jews. “It is the Church that has taught us that Jews are a terrible danger,” said the chief Italian Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, in 1938. For how can one understand the Nuremberg laws of 1935 without knowledge of Spain’s fifteenth-century limpieza de sangre statutes or the fact that the Nazis relied on the Protestant Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic ideology? The Holocaust may have shocked only because, as Aimé Césaire put it in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955), what had long applied to colonized natives came back to haunt Europe itself. The British, for instance, had annihilated the entire native population of the island of Tasmania in the nineteenth century.84 Because of such wanton European atrocities against non-European people, the humanist European bourgeois, in Césaire’s opinion, shared more of Hitler’s traits than he dared to admit:

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa.85

It is this long, archaic genealogy of violence at the heart of European culture that explains the phenomenon of the Holocaust, so to say that the event is a parenthetical one in Europe’s culture of reason is to preempt the acknowledgment of its genealogy and roots, which might possibly be the only way to prevent it from happening again, although “cultural and political regressions are an integral part of our possibilities.”86

Given that the contempt, vilification, demonization, and dehumanization of Jews were an inextricable part of Christian Europe’s history, and that Jews had been treated as the enemy within—associated since the Middle Ages with the plague, ritual murders, nauseating odors (eliminated only through baptism, and even then, as the case of Spain shows, not really), and the anti-Christ—one might consider the Holocaust to be “the violent resurgence of the most archaic part of Christian Europe’s repressed.”87 The Jew, in fact, is at the heart of the eschatology of Christian apocalyptic messianism, because her conversion is essential to the coming of Christ’s reign on earth. Here, as has happened throughout European history, Muslims are connected to Jews, as seventeenth-century English millenarianism shows. In his Revelations of the Apocalypse, Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) explained that the collapse of the papacy, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and the conversion of Jews were essential to the heralding of the new millennial order. In fact, the London Society of Promoting Christianity among the Jews was created in 1809 in this spirit, advocating the return of the Jews to the Holy Land (a view shared by Isaac Newton), as expressed in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917. Jews were either vilified or idealized, and rarely treated as mere human beings. “In this universe,” concludes Bensoussan, “the image of the Jew remains ambivalent. He has killed the Savior, but his redemption (his disappearance as a Jew) heralds the end of misfortune for the whole of humanity.”88

With the exception of making these brief connections, Bensoussan’s study doesn’t address the long history of European violence against the Moors, for it was often in the larger context of the Muslim-Christian clash that the Jews got labeled allies of the Muslim enemy. Moreover, it is quite conceivable to consider the expulsion of Spanish Moriscos from their native land a genocidal act.89 One might understand the hesitation to highlight Muslim suffering in light of recent Muslim Judeophobia fueled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wider West-versus-Islam conflict—a tragic development, as we shall see, in the common suffering of Jew and Muslim in Europe’s exclusivist traditions. For, at least in the case of Spain, the Jew and Muslim suffered equally. “Whose situation was the most abominable, that of the Jew or of the Moor?” asked Henry Méchoulan in his lyrical study Le Sang de l’autre; ou, L’Honneur de Dieu (1979). There were differences, to be sure, but these differences were a matter of degree within a common consensus that the treatment of both, unlike that of Indians and blacks (for whom the purity-of-blood statutes didn’t apply), was equally despicable. The Old Testament Jew was a theological challenge to the Bible-believing Christian, despised and accused but part of the church’s corpus nevertheless. The Jew’s conversion could be (and evidently was) sincere, if one were to count the number of conversos who denounced Judaism. The Moriscos, who had no one like the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas to defend their cause, were merely a barbaric people in comparison to Indians. Their faith made them aggravated Jews, so to speak. They were suspect members of a heretical religion with threatening military powers in the region. They engaged in pleasures of the flesh, practiced sodomy and bestiality, and proliferated. Salvatierra, the bishop of Ségovia, like many others we encountered earlier, considered Moriscos to be “far worse than the Jews and proposed a solution for them that the Nazis would try to apply”: he proposed deportation accompanied by the castration of men and the sterilization of women.90 To Joseph Pérez, the Moriscos were the victims of a “strikingly modern racism, one that is aimed at a population that everyone knows is indispensable to the country’s economic life and yet is hated not because of its religious difference but because it represents a different, and therefore suspect, kind of civilization.”91

In a later article, Méchoulan listed the many ways in which Jews and Moors or Moriscos suffered the same fate. They both tried to maintain their faith, and both were subjected to the Inquisition. Purity-of-blood statutes excluded both communities from public service, branding them with the permanent taint of impurity. Like the Jews who converted to Christianity, the Moriscos were not accorded the privileges of conversion, as baptismal waters were not enough to remove the taint of infidelity. Just as Jews were associated with bad odors, suffering from permanent cases of hemorrhoids and anal bleeding, the Moriscos were accused of being shameless sex maniacs who copulated even with animals.92

Today, the status of the Jew has improved considerably within European culture. Old Christian and racial condemnations, still espoused only a few decades ago by conservative and nationalist parties, have been discarded. The Jew, in fact, has become the ideal prototype for the new European citizen, one who can live comfortably with at least two major identities. As Matti Bunzl argues in what is certainly one of the most insightful and articulate examinations of the differences between Jews and Muslims in modern European history, if anti-Semitism defined Europe’s culture of exclusion prior to the mid-twentieth century, “Islamophobia is a phenomenon of the current age.”93

Thus, Islamophobia can be included in the genocidal impulse that Bensoussan alludes to. By asserting that Muslims, including the nation of Turkey, cannot fit into European civilization, the European Right (traditionally the hotbed of anti-Semitism) and other detractors of Islam are in fact repeating an old tenet of anti-Semitism: that no matter how successfully a Jew might be integrated into European culture, he or she will always remain an outsider. Such views have been so widely held that even progressive intellectuals have taken them for granted. The nineteenth-century French utopian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for instance, had no problem declaring the Jews enemies of humanity and wanted them sent back to Asia or exterminated.94 The following statement by the English writer Joseph Banister, in his 1901 book, England under the Jews, is also a good indication of the very long road Muslims have had to travel to be treated as an integral part of Europe’s population: “It is only when [the Jew] insists upon posing as a European, and being judged as a European, that one realizes what an obnoxious creature he is, and how utterly out of place in a European country and in European society.”95

Despite political differences that separate many Jews and Muslims today, the Jew, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 3, was long the Moor within European civilization—the dark, anti-Christian menace that threatened the unity of pure nations, a notion, as Bensoussan noted, that was reactivated in modern Germany but was widely shared across the continent. For most of modern history, Jews and Muslims have been cultural allies and fellow victims of the European social order. Indeed, when given the opportunity, many Jews proudly embraced their kinship with their fellow Semites and Orientals. This brings us to a surprising twist in the Moors’ journey, one in which Jews, like African Americans in the New World, proudly (re)claimed their Moorish identity as a token of cultural superiority over barbarous Europe, even as they paid a horrible price for doing so. I will return to this intriguing moment in Semitic bonding after I trace the survival of Moors and Moorishness in the New World that Spain created across the Atlantic.