Limpieza de sangre
Limpieza de sangre, also known as limpeza de sangue or neteja de sang, literally 'cleanliness of blood' and meaning 'blood purity', was a racially discriminatory term used in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires during the early modern period to refer to those who were considered to be Old Christians by virtue of not having Muslim, Jewish, Romani, or Agote ancestors. In both empires, the term played a major role in discrimination against suspected crypto-Jews or crypto-Muslims. Over the years it manifested into law which excluded New Christians from almost every part of society.
Description
The statutes of blood purity were a legal discrimination mechanism in the Crown of Castile, Crown of Aragon, and Kingdom of Portugal directed against the "New Christians," a group comprising Jewish converts and Morisco minorities. These statutes required individuals seeking entry into certain institutions to prove they were descendants of Old Christians. They emerged following the revolt led by Pero de Sarmiento in Toledo, which resulted in the "Sentencia-Estatuto." They were contested by ecclesiastical sectors, as they implied that baptism was insufficient to erase sins or ensure spiritual equality, contradicting Christian doctrine.The statutes of blood purity were based on the belief that "the body's fluids, and especially blood, transmitted a certain number of moral qualities from parents to children" and that "Jews, as a people, were incapable of change despite their conversion." As stated by Friar Prudencio de Sandoval regarding the "holy and prudent" blood purity statute of the Toledo Cathedral of 1555, which served as a model for all subsequent ones:
Who can deny that in the descendants of Jews persists and endures the inclination to the evil of their ancient ingratitude and ignorance, just as in Black people the inseparable accident of their blackness? A Jew may descend on three sides from gentlemen or Old Christians, but a single bad lineage infects and ruins him, because by their actions, in all respects, Jews are harmful.On the other hand, it remains a subject of debate whether the Iberian statutes of blood purity were the origin of modern European racism. According to Jean-Frédéric Schaub, "the contribution of Iberian blood purity statutes to the formation of racial categories lies at the intersection of personal exclusion and collective stigmatization." According to Max Sebastián Hering Torres, "for the first time in European history, the criteria of 'race' and 'blood' were used as a strategy of marginalization. A moralist like Torrejoncillo does not hesitate to assert that Judaism is defined based on 'blood,' regardless of whether conversion to Christianity had occurred twenty-one generations earlier."
According to historian José Manuel Nieto Soria, the statutes of blood purity were the materialization of the racism in anti-converso propaganda, which held that "the intrinsic wickedness of converts" was due to the Jewish blood running through their veins.
Context
According to beliefs inherited from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, blood—one of the "four humours of the human body"—was thought to have the capacity to transmit the qualities of individuals from generation to generation—through internal processes it took on the appearance of maternal milk and paternal sperm. Consequently, in ordinary and legal language, "blood" denoted "heritage"—understood both as 'lineage' and as 'succession of goods' —and also had a spiritual dimension, related to the blood shed by Jesus Christ on the cross, sealing the new covenant with the Creator. In this way, "blood" was "attributed the faculty of transmitting the physical and psychic characteristics of individuals within hereditary lines." Hence, for example, the interest of social groups enjoying privileges in establishing genealogies "to root their status in an immemorial and natural superiority."As highlighted by Max Sebastián Hering Torres:
fame and honor were principles that determined inclusion and exclusion within the framework of the estamental order. Honor derived from lineage, occupation, and estate and functioned as symbolic capital. However, honor was not innate, immutable, or perpetual: it had to be guarded and protected. Honor was not a closed category and could vary: criminals, vagabonds, magicians, executioners, gravediggers, and prostitutes—all were perceived as dishonored—of course—without forgetting heretics and Jews.These latter "represented a detested minority"; but when the forced conversions following the pogroms of the late 14th century occurred, "the otherness of the Jews—visible through their clothing, housing, religious rites, and dietary practices—passed into invisibility. Invisibility meant bringing cultural practices into illegality, into the subordinate and cryptic."
Jean-Frédéric Schaub agrees with Hering Torres:
before conversion, Christians already had difficulty identifying Jews. This is at least suggested by the regulations on clothing imposed on them to make them recognizable. But from the moment Jews received the water of baptism, their invisibility was complete.The British Hispanist Henry Kamen has also emphasized the importance of the concept of "honor" in estamental societies. In its simplest sense, it was based on the opinion neighbors had of a person and was compromised by a crime or inappropriate conduct. It was, therefore, a social concept. The marginalized had no honor. Nor did those who professed another religion, such as Jews and Muslims. In the 15th century, with the mass conversions of Jews following the massacres of 1391 and the social ascent of these New Christians, "what began as social discrimination turned into social antagonism and racism," Kamen asserts. The idea spread, especially in Castile, that "Old Christians possessed honor merely by not carrying Jewish blood in their veins 'Though poor,' says Sancho Panza, 'I am an Old Christian and owe nothing to anyone'."
"The main argument was as follows: in the bodies of Judeoconversos, despite their belonging to Christianity, Jewish blood had a negative impact on their morality and conduct. According to Old Christians, the blood of neophytes influenced their being to such an extent that, being Christians, they continued to behave like Jews. In other words, the connection between blood characteristics and conduct persisted and manifested in the Christian body when a Jewish origin was evident," Hering Torres has explained.
History
By the end of the Christian reconquest of Iberia and the forced conversion or expulsion of Muslim mudéjars and Sephardi Jews in Spain, the populations of Portugal and Spain were all nominally Christian. Spain's population of 7 million included up to a million recent converts from Islam and 200,000 converts from Judaism, who were collectively referred to as "New Christians". Converts from Judaism were referred to as conversos or Marranos and converts from Islam were known as Moriscos. A commonly leveled accusation was that the New Christians were false converts, secretly practicing their former religion as Crypto-Jews or Crypto-Muslims. After the Expulsion of the Jews in March 1492, with the Alhambra Decree, the charge of insincere conversion against Jews brought before the Spanish Inquisition only grew.The concept of purity of blood came to be focused more on ancestry and "blood", rather than on personal religion and beliefs.
Origins: The "Sentencia-Estatuto" of the City of Toledo (1449)
The first instances of marginalization of Judeoconversos appeared in the early decades of the 15th century: in 1436 the city of Barcelona prohibited converts from serving as notaries; and in 1446 Villena obtained a privilege from the king of Castile whereby converts could not reside within its territory. However, it was in the mid-centuries, during which both the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon experienced a severe political and social crisis, that discrimination against converts gained greater significance. The most notable case was the Toledo anti-converso revolt of 1449, led by, during which the so-called "Sentencia-Estatuto" was approved. And on August 13, 1451, the king formally approved the Sentencia-Estatuto. This text stated that all Conversos or individuals whose parents or grandparents had converted to Christianity may not hold public or private office and cannot testify in a court of law. Although this was not an official law, many institutions in Toledo started to enforce the practice of blood purity tests and set the precedent on what it meant to be a true Christian.The Sentencia-Estatuto of Toledo was the first statute of blood purity. It established the following:According to Kamen, the rejection the Sentencia-Estatuto elicited among jurists and ecclesiastics shows that the idea of discrimination against New Christians was not yet widespread. The jurist Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo argued that a baptized Jew could not be treated differently from a baptized Gentile. The king's secretary, Fernán Díaz de Toledo, of converso origin, drafted an Instruction addressed to his friend Lope de Barrientos, Bishop of Cuenca and chancellor of the king, highlighting the converso origins of the main noble families of Castile. The Dominican cardinal Juan de Torquemada also criticized the Sentencia-Estatuto in his Tractatus contra Medianitas et Ismaelitas. But the most significant refutation came from Alonso de Cartagena—Bishop of Burgos and son of the converso Pablo de Santa María—who in his Defensorium Unitatis Christianae stated that the Catholic Church was the natural home of Jews; an argument continued by, also a converso and general of the Hieronymites, in his Lumen ad revelationem gentium. In some cases, the statute of blood purity was even considered heretical because it denied the sacramental power of baptism. Américo Castro traced the origin of the idea of "blood purity" to the Jewish tradition itself:
Those who truly felt the scruple of blood purity were the Jews. Thanks to the translations of A. A. Neuman , we know the legal opinions of rabbinical courts, which allow us to discover their previously veiled intimacy. There appears a meticulous concern for family purity and what others might say, for the "honor concerns" so characteristic of 17th-century literature. The minority Jew lived defensively against the dominant Christian, who incited or forced conversions in which the personality of their caste vanished. Hence their religious exclusivism, which the Christian did not feel before the late 15th century, though later it became a collective obsession.The French historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub, however, has attributed the statutes of blood purity to the competition for access to positions and dignities that New Christians—finally freed from the numerous restrictions they suffered as Jews before conversion—represented for Christians, who soon began calling themselves "Old Christians." Moreover, "ecclesiastics and magistrates feared the weakening of Roman Catholic orthodoxy" that the entry of these new members into the Christian community might entail.
This stratification meant that the Old Christian commoners might assert a right to honor even if they were not in the nobility. The religious and military orders, guilds and other organizations incorporated in their by-laws clauses demanding proof of cleanliness of blood. Upwardly mobile New Christian families had to either contend with discrimination, or bribe officials and falsify documents attesting to generations of Christian ancestry.