UNIVERSITY

CALIFORNIA

INTRODUCTION.

IN the autumn of 1888 I was entrusted with a mission to proceed to Spain in order to ascertain the extent and quality of the manuscript materials relating to the History of the Jews of that country. As the time at my disposal was not long, it did not enter into my plan of campaign to transcribe all or many of the documents I should chance to hit upon; I desired rather to bring back with me a list of the documents that existed, so far as this could be ascertained from the manuscript catalogues of the various archivists who kept charge of the documents themselves. By keeping rigidly to this self-denying ordinance, I was able to bring back with me a list of some 2,500 documents relating to the History of the Jews in Spain, and have printed a rough calendar of some 1,800 of them with their library press marks attached, so that anyone interested in the subject could, with little trouble, have any of the documents copied on the spot. I propose here drawing attention to the more interesting of these, treating of the various archives in the alphabetical order of their geographical position, and attaching in brackets the number of the item in my calendar.

ALCALÁ DE HENARES.

It was not in my original plan intended to collect materials about the History of the Inquisition in Spain, or even with regard to that portion of it which related more strictly to Jews. But on paying a visit to Alcalá de Henares I found the only documents among those housed

in the magnificent palace of Cardinal Ximenes in that city which had reference to Jews, dealt with the Inquisition. As the railway arrangements of Spain obliged me to stay several hours in the town before a return train could be taken, I selected from the descriptive slips of the Inquisition papers a number of items of Jewish interest.

There are two sets of Legajos, or packets relating to the Inquisition at Alcalá, bearing upon the trials of those who are accused of "Judaism." Sixty packets (Leg. 130-189) contain some 806 trials on this charge held before the Inquisition of Toledo, while thirteen other packets (Leg. 34-46) treat of 280 similar trials at Valencia. Some 900 descriptive slips give the names and particulars of the Toledo cases1; those of Valencia have not yet been calendared. From the former I selected specimen cases illustrating various aspects of the Inquisition's work, or interesting for other reasons. Thus, it was curious to find an Indian slave of Don Diego Alvarez de Coto accused of Judaism (38). Again, in several instances, the unfortunate victims were subjected to the tender mercies of the Holy Office several times (6, 35, 45, 46, 58, 61), in one case, that of Isabel Nunez (45), no less than six times. In other cases, proof of the accused having been subjected to torture caused me to select it for description (2, 61). The tender age of Inez Gonzalez and Isabel Ortolan (30, 31), each ten years of age, caused me to include them in the list. Some cases included those of members of religious orders, as the Licentiate Don Miguel Doliz (18), and Friar Juan (37). In one case (52) the trial was interesting, as there was attached to it evidence that an appeal was lodged against it 150 years after it had been decided. This was doubtless in order to settle the heraldic pretensions of the descendants of the accused to "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre). In the seventeenth century it became quite usual to have trials before the

1 From these Don Fidel Fita selected the items relating to the fifteenth century in the Boletin for 1889.

Inquisition for this purpose, and we shall see when we come to Simancas that large materials exist for ascertaining the truth of the statement often brought forward that a large portion of the nobility of Spain have Jewish blood in their veins. In several instances at Alcalá a genealogy was attached to the trial in order to prove Jewish descent, and whenever this was mentioned in the descriptive slip, I included this in my selection as likely to be of use to those who have, like my friend, Mr. Lucien Wolf, been studying the genealogy of Jewish families. Such tables of descent are, e.g., attached to Nos. 2, 14, 16. In the same interest it was useful to give the many aliases contained in the lists. Nos. 6, 29, 39, 47, 56, were prominent examples; above all, it was interesting to find in these lists so many names which lend a lustre to the early annals of the Sephardic Jews in this country, e.g., Brandon (9), Caceres (10), Diaz-MendezBrito (15), Pereira Enriquez (19), Espinosa (21), Fonseca (23), Garcia (24-26), Andrade (35), Machado (36), Matos (40), Mendez (41-43), Rodrigues de Seseña (52), Sosa (60, 61), Cohen Villareal (63). There is obviously here ample materials for one of the great desiderata of Jewish literature, an adequate history of the Marranos or secret Jews of the Peninsula. I know of no subject more fascinating, more full of romantic episodes and interesting sidelights on international history.

One set of papers, contained in packet 189 and numbered 889, was specially interesting in this connection, as it included some twenty lists of various persons examined before the Inquisition at Cordova, Granada, Murcia, Seville, Saragossa, and other places; and it would be highly desirable that the whole of these lists, numbering some 1,500 names, should be copied out and published. One of them (67) was of peculiar interest, as it contained a reference to the wide spread commercial transactions of the Gradis family, the Rothschilds of the seventeenth century.1 This

1 See Graetz, "Die Familie Gradis" in Monatsschrift. Neue Folge,

vii. and viii.

"Memoria" even gives some pages from the ledger of the Gradis. Other papers (86-91) give evidence of the terrible power that might reside in a single person's hands, referring to several hundred persons who are suspected on the testimony of Amanda Pimentel and her sister.

In the case of the Valencia denunciations, as there were no descriptive slips, I had to have out three of the packets of cases and go through them. This brought out one curious result, since one case, the process of Galavandrez Adret (94), probably a descendant of Solomon Adret, filled a whole manuscript volume, which was bound together by a strip of parchment from a scroll of the Law. Indeed, most of the processes seem to extend to a volume, and it was the custom, at Valencia at any rate, to decorate volumes with serrated flames like those which covered the robe of a San Benito (98). One of these trials, that of Bonorsi Brianda is a "cause célèbre "; similarly in the Toledo cases, one packet is devoted to the celebrated case of El Cristo de la Paciencia (13). It was noteworthy how wide was the field of employment among these victims of religious intolerance. In many cases the occupation of the accused was mentioned, and I noticed carpenters, tailors, jewellers, apothecaries, silk merchants, hatters, tobacco merchants, and parchment sellers, among those given.

It is obvious that there are sufficient materials at Acalá alone to occupy one man's lifetime in the study of the transactions of the Inquisition; no less than 1,200 cases exist here with full details and testimonies and witnesses on the conduct of the Jews; a mass of information could be here obtained as to the traces left of the Hebrew nation, as it is so often called, after the more steadfast portion of it had been driven forth from Spanish soil.1

The latest and most elaborate History of the Inquisition, that of F. C. Lea (New York, 1889, 3 Vols.), does not even touch upon the trials for "Judaism," though Mr. Lea repairs the omission in his later work.

BARCELONA.

Few European States can possess such a magnificent set of archives as those of Aragon, now lodged in one of the former palaces of the kings of Aragon in Barcelona. Here every deed that issued from the Royal Chancery from 957 up to the consolidation of the Spanish Monarchy in 1492 exists in a copy made in one of the four thousand "Registros" dealing with that period. These form practically a huge copy letter book, in which all the kings' correspondence is given in full. I reckon that there could not be much less than twenty thousand State papers referring to the Jews of Aragon contained in this collection; but the full number could only be ascertained by going through page for page each of the Registros, a work which will occupy a trained observer at least ten years of his life. To copy them all might easily fill up the lifetimes of five enthusiasts. In the scant time at my disposal in the former Capital of Aragon I could merely extract from the indexes of the Registros those items which were stated to refer to Jews. Now these indexes have been drawn up with various degrees of thoroughness, becoming more and more scanty as time goes on; for the first forty Registros, dealing with the twenty years 1257-76, they are very full of abstracts of the contents of almost each page. Then from Registros 200 to 860-that is, from 1290 to 1340-the entries become very much more scanty, while for the remaining 150 years of the stay of the Jews in Aragon, there exists only an alphabetical index which gives but little clue to the contents of the entries indexed. For I feel sure that thousands and thousands of documents are not indexed at all for that part of Aragonese annals. I have, therefore, only been able to give few references, selected almost at hazard from the Rubric "Judios" in this last index. But for the earlier period, 1257-1340, I have a detailed account of some eleven hundred documents, containing a skeleton history of the Jews of Aragon during those eighty years. Skeleton is the proper word to employ in such a case, for it