Book Reviewed: The Spanish Inquisition by Henry Kamen (originally published in Jan 2024)

There is a movie I recall seeing years ago. It is your typical Hollywood cookie-cutter production as far as movies go, but the last scene is memorable. The leader of a team of assassins (played by Samuel Jackson, if I am not mistaken) is confronted by his crew. The assassins, who are supposed to take out targets provided by a faceless machine, have realized they are no longer following the machine’s orders but are carrying out arbitrary assassinations. Cornered by his team, the leader drops a bomb: for some time, the machine has been spitting out the names of the team members. All of them are supposed to have been eliminated — to the extent that the executioners represent the machine, the machine has turned on itself.

I have always thought the scene is a decent metaphor for the Spanish Inquisition. While the Inquisition was originally designed to protect the populace from heresy, in a way it aimed at itself, like some autoimmune disorder. This view would not be to everyone’s liking, and I imagine that the historian Henry Kamen, an expert on Spanish history, would strongly object to it. After all, the machinery of the Inquisition was efficient and had a logic of its own; its longevity, at nearly four centuries, suggests it was well integrated into Spanish society; its reach was never absolute, since the monarch was untouchable; finally, insofar as its primary objective was concerned, the Inquisition succeeded. But, having read The Spanish Inquisition, Kamen’s study of the phenomenon, I am not quite ready to part ways with my metaphor.

Published in 1965, The Spanish Inquisition was meant to be, in the author’s own words, a “tentative interpretation of its place in Spanish history.” This means the book was a work of revisionism, though it would have to wait some thirty years before Kamen published an updated version he explicitly called that (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 1995). The impetus behind the updated version came from an evolution of Kamen’s view of the Inquisition, which had apparently become more favorable. I have not read the more mature work, but the original text is not something anyone would call a damning indictment, either. Far from being a protracted nightmare in which ghoulish monsters assailed the sleep of Spanish history, Kamen’s Inquisition simply didn’t have a good PR team, and he proceeds to dismantle popular misconceptions surrounding the “Black Legend.” The Inquisition was nowhere near as bloodthirsty as is commonly believed, and it claimed fewer victims than witch hunts in Germany. It also treated witches more leniently than other contemporary juridical systems, as it did homosexuals. Its prisons were more comfortable than the secular prisons of Europe, and there were known cases of prisoners who actively courted charges of heresy in order to be transferred from secular prisons to those run by the Inquisition. The use of “advanced interrogation techniques” that made the Inquisition so famous was milder when compared with what criminals could expect from European criminal courts; torture was a means and not an end in itself, and was always performed judiciously — whether this was much of a consolation for the tortured can only be guessed. The notorious burnings at the stake, one of the first things one thinks about when thinking of the Inquisition, were not the centerpiece of autos de fe and often took place outside the city. For those condemned to be executed in an auto de fe, the stake was reserved for the most unrepentant; those who had seen the errors of their ways were “only” strangled. The Inquisition was not at all a lucrative operation, and its tribunals often ran up deficits. It was not regarded as an organ of oppression by the Spanish population and was in fact widely supported by it. The Inquisition was not the cause of Spain’s golden age in the 16th century or its subsequent downfall, but a result of prevailing circumstances. In the end, it was just there, part of the societal ecosystem. Think of it as a historical epiphenomenon.

Kamen claims that the Inquisition owed its sinister reputation to embittered émigrés and foreign propaganda. The Protestant nobility of the Netherlands glossing over their own oppression of heretics and the Italians resisting Spanish imperialism in Italy went out of their way to blacken the Inquisition’s name in order to exaggerate its threat. For Kamen, the Inquisition was principally a “class weapon, used to impose on all communities of the peninsula the ideology of one class — the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy.” In practical terms, this meant a redistribution of national wealth. Those who fell into the clutches of the Inquisition had their goods seized and, once convicted, their property permanently confiscated. While investigations were ongoing, any assets owned by the suspects were used to finance their upkeep. If the Inquisition was not a profitable enterprise, it was at least in part because the spoils went to the Crown, but the loot obtained through this legalized racket was considerable. Not that the Inquisition can be reduced to a cash grab. On the contrary, it could act in ways prejudicial to the country’s finances. The expulsion of non-Christians (or those the Inquisition considered to be faux Christians) was very disruptive to the Spanish economy. In the case of the Jews/conversos, it meant a flight of capital and talent elsewhere; in the case of moriscos, it meant a significant loss of labor. The Inquisition accepted these economic costs. While some of them were offset by the colonization of the Americas and the exploitation of its resources, the Inquisition was about a lot more than money.

To a more significant degree, it was about anti-Semitism. The story of the Spanish Inquisition is inextricably bound with Spanish Jewry — or those considered to belong to it. By the end of the 15th century, Spain was home to a sizable converso community. As the name suggests, the conversos were Jewish converts to Catholicism (they were also called marranos but, as I have learned thanks to Kamen, this was a derogatory term). The royal edict of 1492 that made it impossible for Jews to stay in Spain unless they were baptized into Catholicism gave the converso population a further boost. Whether the new converts could actually be considered Catholic is questionable — conversion against one’s will did not qualify as a legitimate conversion. But the Inquisition, which only had jurisdiction over those who were baptized, argued that there was no coercion: a choice between baptism or death was still a choice, and free will was exercised. But the Inquisition’s casuistry did not mean some of the conversos stopped practicing the Jewish faith, and it certainly did not mean they were no longer suspected of doing so. Once the country’s Jews — those, that is, who wanted to stay in Spain and remain alive — had been forced into Catholicism, a need arose for a system that would separate true converts from fake ones. Here, too, religious concerns over limpieza (purity) went hand-in-hand with economic considerations. The converso community was wealthy, and its contribution to Spanish culture and its economy was massive. The conversos invited envy and resentment, and since those found guilty of heresy lost their property, the Inquisition was a good vehicle for satisfying the envious and enriching the royal coffers. Kamen is unwilling to overemphasize the economic dimension of the Inquisition, and he concludes that the post-1492 history of the Inquisition was connected with problems arising from “the continued presence of Jews in Spain.” Yet he goes on to write that the class aspect of the Inquisition was the dominant one: “Essentially, however, the problem was caused . . . by the feudal classes who, in alliance with the common people, disputed the key role played in the towns by the middle sections of society among whom the Jews and conversos were the most distinctive and flourishing.”

But the conversos were not confined to the middle sections of society. Wealthy conversos were very much part of the establishment. They had intermarried with Spanish nobility to an extraordinary degree, to the point where a 1449 petition claimed that “all the noblest families of Spain were now of Jewish blood.” One of those noblemen was a certain Henríquez — a progenitor of Ferdinand the Catholic, the future king of Aragon no less. In Aragon, almost every noble house had some Jewish ancestry, and half the important offices at the court of Aragon were held by conversos. According to an early 16th-century document tracing the lineage of Aragonese noble families, most of them had conversos in the closet. The first Inquisitor General, the notorious and much dreaded Torquemada, was of Jewish descent; so was the second Inquisitor General, Diego de Deza. Gradually, to counter what was seen as a “contamination” of the Catholic body, the Inquisition took aim not only at Judaizing conversos, but conversos in toto. The doctrine of limpieza was extended to include purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), with the result that the most sincere allegiance to the Church no longer offered sufficient protection to Spaniards of Jewish origin. As the 16th century wore on, ethnic limpieza became a requirement for entry into the military orders, higher places of learning, and, of course, the religious orders. The demand for ethnic purity at the institutional level proved to be as durable as the Inquisition itself, and remnants of it still existed in the 19th century.

But a system such as the Inquisition could not have been erected without the support of the nobility, which, as discussed, had plenty of converso blood. Kamen mentions a 17th-century inquisitor who, attacking the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, argued that the only Spaniards who could boast of racial purity were plebeians. The question, then, is how Spain’s most powerful families could have backed a system that so obviously threatened at least some of them directly. Kamen never answers this question, and the reader must fall back on conjecture. Perhaps the Inquisition was a result of what Peter Turchin calls the overproduction of elites, a phenomenon that, in his analysis, is historically at the heart of political discord; and indeed, the Inquisition represented the interests of the top echelons of the Old Christian community and of conversos sufficiently far removed from their Jewish ancestors to pass the purity test, while the victims counted among them prominent new conversos. Whatever the case, the metaphor of the machine in the Samuel Jackson movie should now make more sense.

Not that the apparatus of the Inquisition ever went haywire the way the machine does. It was actually quite organized, “calculated to achieve the greatest degree of efficiency with the least degree of publicity.” The inquisitors were meticulous record keepers and left a vast body of evidence behind them (including torture proceedings, down to the minute detail), making it easy for historians to study the history of the Inquisition and, presumably, more difficult to distort it. To catch heretics, the Inquisition relied on denunciations, and Spaniards lived in a climate of espionage and censorship. Anyone could be denounced, often for a trifle — changing the sheets at the end of the week was enough to be accused of being a Judaizer. Petty denunciations, Kamen writes, were the rule and not the exception, and anyone unfortunate enough to be denounced faced an uphill battle. The Inquisition had something of a witness protection program in place — to avoid identifying witnesses, the inquisitors concealed vital details pertaining to their cases, leaving the accused guessing when and where the act of heresy might have taken place, and what the exact heresy was. In this atmosphere of fear, neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends, and family members denounced family members. Heretics also denounced themselves, if only to preempt those who could denounce them. There must have been a fair amount of settling of scores as well. All of this should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with the history of the 20th century. The Inquisition anticipated the playbook used by totalitarian regimes last century, and no effort to place the Inquisition in its proper context will change the fact that the Spain of the Inquisition was, as Kamen writes, a “closed society.”

The conversos were not the only target. The Inquisition played a role in the expulsion of moriscos (Moorish converts to Christianity) from Spain in the early 17th century, and ensured Protestant ideas never took root in the country. In the 18th century, it sought to protect the traditional order from the corrosive influence of the Enlightenment, mainly through the use of censorship. The Inquisition adapted itself to its times and faithfully served the governing classes. It suited the nobility because it represented feudal interests as well as those of the Old Christian community. It suited the monarchy because, aside from the income stream generated by the confiscation of property, it provided a counterweight to papal power in Rome. And it suited the hoi polloi for any number of reasons, not the least of which, perhaps, was the spectacle of public autos de fe — everyone loves a good show.

But nothing lasts forever. Even as it resisted the onslaught of the Enlightenment, the Inquisition was turning into a scarecrow. By the 19th century, it was all but impotent — more of a lightning rod for Spain’s cultural wars than anything else. It fell out of disuse for the usual reasons, the same ones that forced Franco to steer Spain towards gradual liberalization in the 1960s, when the prevailing economic and political circumstances made the fascist regime an anachronism. Unless Spain wanted to turn into a European backwater, it had to open up. In 1834 the Inquisition was formally abolished. But its legacy continued to live on. Kamen mentions the view, held by some Spanish historians, that the existence of the Inquisition revealed the existence of “Two Spains.” One was African, isolationist, and reactionary; the other, European, international, and liberal. The Inquisition was abolished, but the “Two Spains” were never reconciled, and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath corroborate this view. En passant, let’s note that there is another country on the periphery of Europe that is often regarded as a country of two. Ever since Peter the Great opened his window on Europe, Russia has been said to have two opposing identities that have continuously clashed. This overlap between Spain and Russia is echoed in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, a book I discussed last year. The polymathic Barzun writes about “curious parallels” that exist between Spain and Russia, countries he calls “the two appendages of the Occident.” But that is a story for another time.

Engaging and persuasive, The Spanish Inquisition is an interesting read. The trouble with it is that, though the reader walks away knowing a lot more about the Inquisition, he does not get to understand it any better. I wonder if Kamen, for all his deep knowledge of the subject, really understands it. Kamen opens one of the chapters (“The Last Days of the Conversos”) with a rather peculiar statement, and it is worth quoting him at length: “This recrudescence of persecution [of conversos] shows clearly that they were unable as a body to become assimilated into society. This perennial weakness of the Jewish community contributed to the isolation and destruction of the conversos. More than this, it was a destruction that they brought on themselves.” What these few sentences do show clearly is the author’s own strange bias. I say “strange” because this victim-blaming not only contradicts the way Kamen ends the chapter, holding the Inquisition responsible for the “tragedy of a hunted people”; it also contradicts much of what precedes it. We will set aside the ease with which one could be accused of heresy and that heresy could mean as little as eating bacon on a day of abstinence. The fact that the first two Grand Inquisitors were of converso heritage, along with myriad other Spanish worthies, indicates that the conversos were actually very well assimilated, so much that many of them were indistinguishable from Old Christians. In her book about the Inquisition, which has the same name as Kamen’s and incorporates his scholarship, Helen Rawlings writes that only a small proportion of conversos came into contact with the Inquisition; the majority of conversos were “well integrated into Spanish society and accepted its values and traditions.” The bigotry of the Inquisition was not a factor of the converso presence in Spain, something Kamen admits towards the end of the chapter: “The fact remains that Judaism continued to be an issue in Spain long after the last heretic had died at the stake.” And so there it is.

If the Jews had not existed in Spain, they would have had to be invented, though whether the Inquisition would have been invented without them is impossible to say. The royal edict of 1492 was issued only after the Reconquista had been completed, the Moorish foe had been ejected from the Iberian peninsula, and a new enemy had to be found. The lamentable fact of history is that societies constantly need enemies, and the Jews have always been assigned this role. Why the Jews have been singled out cannot be explained solely by the cohesion and success of Jewish communities. Unlike other forms of hatred, anti-Semitism — and this is an argument that has dogged my recent pieces — is a metaphysical phenomenon. It is not directly related to the physical presence of Jews; places where there are no Jews to speak of can still have considerable reservoirs of anti-Semitic sentiment. Perhaps unwittingly, Kamen lends weight to this argument. Once again, it is worth quoting him at length. Writing about the Inquisition in its mature stages, by which time it had stamped out its heretics, he notes: “The Jew, who had now become a myth and no more, became identified in certain minds with all that was hostile to the tradition represented by the Inquisition. To be a Jew meant not being a Catholic, therefore not to be a Catholic meant being a Jew . . . all that was hostile and sinister became personified in the Jew who was on the other side. But this is a matter of myth, not of history, and does not concern us directly.”

Kamen is wrong there. It should concern us directly because the Inquisition, much like its primary obsessions, was not free of metaphysics. Anti-Semitism is a bastion of godlessness; it is a revolt against God and a rejection of Judeo-Christian values. In its fanatical hatred of the Other, particularly of a people without whom Christianity would have never come about, the Spanish Inquisition was the apotheosis of godlessness. The more enlightened minds understood that. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order and an implacable critic of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, once told his friends that it was a divine favor to be descended from Jews. “What! To be related to Christ Our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary?” But such minds were a feeble minority, powerless against the inquisitors and their tribunals. The Inquisition came to an end, but its spirit has survived and continues to live on, in one form or another, adapting to the demands of the times — including, sadly, those of our own.