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  • Were God’s People Destined to be Ruled by a Mortal King? A Judeo-Converso-Christian Tradition

    While the use of Old Testament imagery and biblical tropes was quite common in public representations of medieval monarchies, the ancient Israelite kingship played only a minor role in the new political science—which rested primarily on Aristotelian and juristic languages—that evolved in the late Middle Ages. Moreover, since most Christian readers of the Bible believed that biblical kingship was founded as a sinful act of rebellion against the rule of God (as described in 1 Samuel 8), promonarchical thinkers tended to discard its relevance to scientific political theory, resorting to the principal hermeneutic, legal, and moral divide between the histories of the Old Testament and the Christian realities under the new covenant. This paper seeks to examine one channel through which the “converso phenomena” and the massive entry of Jewish converts to the forming ranks of letrados in the 15th century challenged this division and stimulated new biblical readings that broadened Hebraic-political horizons. Focusing on the biblical commentaries of the famous convert Pablo de Santa Maria (c. 1352–1435), who served at both papal and royal courts, the paper follows his attempt to level the hermeneutical field between biblical monarchy and Christian political theories. As will be demonstrated, these ideas, which echoed the Hebraic traditions that Pablo had mastered as a Jewish scholar, struck a chord with their Christian audience, stimulating a variety of responses among scholars of the following generations, among them Alonso de Cartagena (1384–1456),  Alonso Fernández de Madrigal (c.1410–1455), and Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508).

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  • The Dutch Occupation and Defense of Brazil: The Question of the Support of Jews and Conversos

    Documents preserved by the Portuguese Inquisition, travelers’ tales, contemporary chronicles, and writings left by local priests provide information concerning the Brazilian conversos. Taken together, the documents permit reconstruction of important aspects of Lusitanian American socioeconomic history. Still, these must be read and used with extreme caution, as the sources always reproduce what the inquisitors wanted to prove: the persistence of Jewish heresy. According to traditional historiographers (among others: Robert Southey, Ignacio Accioli de Cerqueira e Silva and Braz do Amaral, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Lucia García Proodian, and Eduardo D’Oliviera França), most of the cristãos-novos (New Christians) in northeastern Brazil had apparently helped the Dutch invaders. This assumption, however, has not been corroborated by the evidence, which shows that only some of the New Christians carried out acts of war on the side of the Dutch in the initial stages of the conquest, during which they served as guides, advisers, translators, and soldiers. It will be shown that the New Christians were not a homogeneous group, nor did they behave as a coherent unit at any time in Brazil’s colonial period. In the years the Dutch occupied parts of northeastern Brazil (1624–1625 and 1630–1654), there were Christians, both Old and New, who sympathized with the invaders. At the same time, many of the New Christians born in Brazil were already integrated into colonial life and society, contributing money, fighting against the Dutch, and taking part in Portugal’s defensive plans. Examples in this updated survey on the topic illustrate that those New and Old Christians who supported either the Dutch or the Portuguese side did so mainly for economic reasons rather than out of political or religious motivations.

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  • Mercantilism, Statebuilding, and Social Reform: The Government of the Marquis of Pombal and the Abolition of the Distinction between New and Old Christians

    The 1773 law abolishing the distinction between New and Old Christians put an end to an extremely resilient foundation for discrimination that had been embedded in the Portuguese social order for more than two centuries. Although the New Christian community had long been eroded by emigration, statutes of blood purity still upheld that discrimination. The Marquis of Pombal, the powerful secretary of state, was atypically cautious in suppressing such an entrenched social barrier, only taking the decision to do so after a full institutional procedure. The decision is associated with both the government’s regalist offensive, which aimed at the church’s subordination, and with a set of measures designed to give the Crown a monopoly over the legitimate system of social classification. Among such measures, the onslaught on a clique of aristocratic families and their pretensions to blood purity in 1768 is most revealing, as it represents a positive claim to that monopoly.

    Suppressing the distinction served to reinforce state power in other ways. Although a reformer, Pombal based his policies on the principles of seventeenth-century mercantilism and raison d’état. To end foreign ascendancy over Portuguese colonial trade and secure the Portuguese monopoly of that trade, he had to eliminate contraband, which could be partly accomplished by abolishing the discrimination against the Jews, who would otherwise, Pombal felt, be contraband’s most redoubtable agents. It would also facilitate the promotion of a group of merchants who could run the trade with the colonies. In this way they would no longer be concerned about their profession being associated with a reviled ethnic ancestry, and they could be more confident of their respectability. The abolition of the distinction between New and Old Christians was thus an instrument of statebuilding through social reform.

     

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  • Emancipating the Chuetas: From Enlightened Despotism to Radical Liberalism

    The article analyzes two attempts to emancipate the Chuetas in Spain: the enlightened (1773–1789) and the liberal (1810–1840). The Chuetas, a pious Christian group reputed to be descendants of Jews, lived secluded and discriminated against in the city of Palma, Majorca, because of their Jewish origin. In February 1773 the Chuetas decided to appeal directly to the king for the rights enjoyed by the other inhabitants of Palma’s third estate. The appeal triggered a dispute between supporters and opponents that exposed the rift existing in Spanish society between enlightened reformers and conservatives interested in maintaining the status quo at all cost.

    The result was unsatisfactory for the Chuetas, whose emancipation was only partial and conditioned by the economic interests of the absolutist state. Only the resurgence of Spanish liberalism would bring some hope to the Chuetas. The liberals, who aspired to completely demolish the hierarchal structure of the old regime, building on its ruins a classless society composed of Spanish citizens, were not in favor of any status, privileged or unprivileged, that would divide the citizens of the new liberal Spanish state. Only thus would all the Chuetas receive complete legal emancipation.

    These two attempts, however, failed to achieve their goal because of the tenacious refusal of the Old Christian population of Palma to consider the Chuetas as their equals. The solution to the problem was to be reached only in the twentieth century.

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  • Crypto-Judaism in Post-Pombaline Portugal: Legal and Social Remnants

    One of the most difficult topics to study regarding the history of the Portuguese New Christians is the decline in the number of Judaism cases tried by the Inquisition. Related to that issue, the alleged end of crypto-Judaism in Portugal is also polemical, since both in and outside of the academic world, twentieth-century “Marranos” are said to have maintained not only a specific identity but also habits and ceremonies. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how the descendants of Jews forcibly converted in 1497 were seen and treated in both daily life and during the exceptional experience of a trial for heresy after the Pombaline reforms. This study is based on two previously unnoticed cases of Judaism tried by the Portuguese Inquisition after the apparently in-depth institutional reforms took place between 1765 and 1774.

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