April 19, 1998

A Kinder, Gentler Inquisition

A new revisionist study of the Spanish tribunal asserts that it wasn't as bad as previously thought.

Read the First Chapter

By RICHARD L. KAGAN

THE SPANISH INQUISITION

A Historical Revision.

By Henry Kamen.

Illustrated. 369 pp. New Haven:

Yale University Press. $35.



t the start of this century Henry Charles Lea, a Philadelphia businessman turned historian, published his monumental ''History of the Inquisition in Spain.'' The Spanish Inquisition had been studied before, primarily by Protestant scholars for whom it had become the archsymbol of religious intolerance and ecclesiastical power. William H. Pres-cott, the great Boston historian, likened it to an ''eye that never slumbered,'' a malevolent Argus assisted by legions of spies on the lookout for deviance. His disciple, J. L. Motley, thought similarly, and so did Lea, although the Philadelphian was determined to document the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation. Lea described it as ''an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress.'' For him the Inquisition also exemplified ''theocratic absolutism'' at its worst, a power that had so weakened Spain that it was helpless in the face of Yankee might to defend what little remained of its vast overseas empire during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Starting in the 1920's, Jewish scholars took up where Lea left off. Although the Inquisition was created exclusively for the purpose of dealing with the problem of Judaizing among Spain's large population of conversos (Jews converted to Christianity), for centuries it had been associated primarily with the persecution of Protestants. Nineteenth-century historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Rios, helped changed this perception. So too did Yitzhak Baer's ''History of the Jews in Christian Spain,'' Cecil Roth's ''History of the Marranos'' and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, an Israeli scholar, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos.

Throughout it all, the Inquisition remained the Spanish antecedent of the K.G.B. Among the first books to challenge this view was ''The Spanish Inquisition'' (1965), a pioneering study in which Henry Kamen, a young British graduate student, argued that the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as powerful as commonly believed, let alone an institution capable of precipitating Spain's decline. That book, though controversial, was partly responsible for a surge of quantitative studies, starting in the 70's, that attempted to classify and measure the extent of the Inquisition's activities from 1480, the year its first tribunal began work in Seville, until 1834, when it was abolished. These studies indicated that following an initial burst of activity against conversos suspected of relapsing into Judaism and a mid-16th-century pursuit of Protestants, the Inquisition served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners and, in Aragon, homosexuals and horse smugglers.

This new scholarship also confirmed Kamen's contention that the Inquisition had relatively little impact on Spanish intellectual life. In fact, during its last two centuries, other than persecuting hundreds of Portuguese conversos who emigrated to Spain in the 17th century, the Inquisition busied itself mainly with cases designed to protect its authority and to exempt its notorious henchmen, the familiares -- laymen who served as the institution's supporters and occasional spies -- from the jurisdiction of civil courts. Kamen incor-porated these findings in a revised version of his original study published as ''Inquisition and Society in Spain in the 16th and 17th Centuries'' (1985).

In ''The Spanish Inquistion: A Historical Revision,'' to my mind the best general book on the Spanish Inquisition both for its range and its depth of information, Kamen restates his original argument, supporting it with additional evidence derived from many new monographic studies by other scholars. He reaffirms his contention that an all-powerful, torture-mad Inquisition is largely a 19th-century myth. In its place he portrays a poor, understaffed institution whose scattered tribunals had only a limited reach and whose methods were more humane than those of most secular courts. Death by fire, he asserts, was the exception, not the rule. He further argues that, beyond a few well-publicized autos de fe staged in 1559, the Inquisition was not the principal reason the Reformation did not take hold in Spain. Kamen believes the failure of Lutheran ideas in Spain had less to do with the Inquisition than with the populace's indifference to Protestantism. As for the Inquisition's much-vaunted role as Big Brother and its responsibility for intellectual decline, Kamen rejects this hypothesis out of hand, arguing that it was ineffective as a censor and that it failed even to prevent the importation of items listed on its own Index of Prohibited Books. The Inquisition, more interested in religion than science, did little to prevent the circulation of works by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.

Kamen also dismisses the notion that the Inquisition enjoyed widespread popular support. People grudgingly accepted it, he avers, as an institution they employed to torment their enemies. Similarly, the monarchy, despite complaints that the Inquisitors regularly interfered with the administration of royal justice, supported it as a useful means of getting political opponents out of the way, as it did in 1590 when Philip II turned to this tribunal and its tradition of secret proceedings to silence Lucrecia de Leon, a prophetess in Madrid who had criticized the King and his policies.

More controversial is Kamen's interpretation of its handling of converted Jews, especially during the 1480's, when, as a ''crisis instrument'' created especially to deal with apostasy among conversos, the Inquisition was, by Kamen's own admission, out of control. ''There is,'' he writes, ''no systematic evidence that conversos as a group were secret Jews,'' although the evidence for that assertion is ambiguous. Nor does he believe these conversos were persecuted solely out of racial enmity. He admits conversos suffered from a rising tide of anti-Semitism during the 1480's that eventually led to the expulsion of Spain's much diminished Jewish community in 1492. The conversos' troubles, he asserts, were partly self-inflicted: the result of claims to be a ''nation'' apart, neither Christian nor Jewish, a reluctance to assimilate (a similar attitude, he claims, contributed to the expulsion of the remnants of Spain's Muslims in 1609), and also from personal enmities among the converso community, a situation that led to thousands of unwarranted denunciations and trials. Despite this fury, Kamen believes that most conversos escaped unharmed and led a ''relatively undisturbed'' life by the close of the 16th century.

One weakness of this argument, and indeed of the whole book, is that Kamen, anxious to counter the 19th-century conception of the Inquisition as a monster that ultimately consumed Spain, fails to get inside the belly of the beast and to assess what it actually meant to individuals living with it. Little is said, for example, about the Inquisitors themselves, and what they sought to achieve beyond a confession of a guilt. Recent studies suggest that they were not faceless bureaucrats but law graduates with varying interests and career aims. Some were even capable of fraternizing with the people they investigated. Nor does Kamen lead the reader through an actual trial. Had he done so, a reader might conclude that the institution he portrays as relatively benign in hindsight was also capable of inspiring fear and desperate attempts at escape, and thus more deserving of its earlier reputation. More too might have been said about the lawyers who intervened in the trials and manipulated its procedures, along with the ploys, like bribes and pleas of insanity, that defendants used to bring the inquisitorial machinery to a halt.

In the end, Kamen's Inquisition is the Inquisition seen from afar, and, despite his attempted revision, his survey is essentially one whose agenda was set long ago by Prescott, Lea and the others that he set out to refute. To make sense of it, a new, more nuanced evaluation is necessary, one that not only gives the Inquisition more of a human face but also examines it from the perspective of its times. Also necessary are studies that actually use its archives -- for all its infamy, it kept excellent records -- to reconstruct the world of the individuals, converso or otherwise, who became entangled in its net. Otherwise, it is likely that the Spanish Inquisition will forever remain, as Lea conceived it, ''an engine of immense power.''