"The Tribunal of the Inquisition" by Francisco de Goya (1812)
Introduction
Eugen Fischer, the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, did studies that
focused on racial purity during Germany's Second and Third Reichs.
However, the views of racism held by Fischer and others that
characterized the Third Reich may be viewed as an extension of
the Spanish concept of Limpieza de Sangre.
Spain was the first nation to create a colonial empire (in the
New World). Positions of power, residence and citizenship in the
Spanish Empire, and travel often required probanza (certification)
de Limpieza de Sangre.
To some degree, the Nazi theories of racial hygiene borrow from
and extend the rascist views propounded in Spain during the Holy
Inquisition [founded in 1480]. 1, 2
.
Was there a relevant relationship between Germany's Second and
Third Reichs and the Spanish Empire? German colonial expansion
meant a concern "... over the future of such 'dying' empires
as the Dutch, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese. When they collapsed,
Germany was determined to have her share." 3
Since the dismemberment of these dying empires caused Germany to
gain colonies (especially in Africa), did German leaders also
(perhaps unconsciously) borrow ideologies from these dying
empires? Ideologies such as racism? If this indeed happened,
could the policies of the Third Reich (although new to Germany)
have recapitulated the Holy Inquisition? More: considering the
involvement of the Jesuits in the Alfred Dreyfus Affair, might those
policies have in fact been a continuation of the Holy
Inquisition? 4
.
While there were differences between German racism and the racial
theories of raza and casta, many may view the differences
as not being that significant.
Racism and Limpieza de Sangre
Beginning in the late fourteenth century, a very close relationship
was forged between the racial ideologies of raza in Spain,
and casta in Portugal. Raza was a racial ideology
that differentiated between people based on the "heresy" in their
lineage: it held that the "heresy" of Jews and Muslims was inherited by
blood in humans, just as various characteristics were inherited by
blood in animals. Raza developed in Spain in opposition to
conversos (Jews who were forced to convert Christianity, thus
becoming New Christians) and moroscos (Muslims who were forced
to Christianity, also called New Christians). The Portuguese
sistema de casta was a racial ideology that
differentiated between people based on skin pigmentation, inherited
through blood. Casta developed in opposition to the indigenous
peoples in the New World, who populated the soon-to-be-discovered
colonies of Spain and Portugal.
.
“Linked to sin and heresy, the word raza tended to be applied to
communities — namely, Jews, Muslims, and sometimes Protestants —
deemed to be stained or defective because of their religious histories.” 5
These communities were generally segregated: Jews lived in juderías,
Moors lived in morerías.
.
Spain and Portugal expelled or killed "heretics" both on the Iberian
Peninsula (Jews, Moslems, Protestants, and communards) and in their
New World colonies (Jews, Indians, mestizos, and Protestants) from
the early fifteenth century until well into the eighteenth century.
"The Spanish crown pursued a more aggressive limpieza policy in the
colonies. ... His majesty would not allow New Christians in the Indies
because of concerns that the indigenous people would unite with them
and follow their ways. ... Emigrants to the Americas were required
to present certificates of purity of blood, along with royal
licenses to travel, at Seville’s Casa de Contrataćon (Royal
House of Trade)." 6 As time goes
by, the use of racism (raza and casta), supported by
probanza de limpieza de sangre, has gradually been forgotten. Thus,
researchers now have difficulty finding documentary evidence of these
activities, even though the records still exist and may even be
readily in hand. This parallels the difficulty in accessing censored
Max Planck Society Archive records that expose the relationship between
Germany's Second Reich and its Third Reich. It can be expected that the
memory of these records at the Max Planck Society Archive will also
slowly be forgotten and recede into the past. 7
Raza8
"This naturalization of a religious-cultural identity coincided with
the emergence of a lexicon consisting of terms such as raza
(race), casta (caste), and linaje (lineage)" that was
informed by popular notions regarding biological reproduction in the
natural world and, in particular, horse breeding. It was also
accompanied by an emergent Old Christian preoccupation with avoiding
sexual, reproductive, and marital relations with converts and their
descendants — with protecting the 'pure' Christian lineages
from converso (understood as 'Jewish') blood. 9
.
There was a tremendous preoccupation with and sale of probanzas in
order to prove nobility, purity of blood, etc. 10
.
“[P]olicies regarding heretics and their descendants were all based
on the belief that people who deviated from church dogma were likely
to ‘infect’ the family members with whom they came into contact. ...
[T]he three-generation prohibition (three after the heretic) was a
legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, both of whom had
written that a sinner bequeathed his sins to his great-grandchildren
but no more." 11
.
“The main physiological theories of the Middle Ages, heavily influenced
by ancient Greek science and medicine, tended to accord semen, breast
milk, blood, and food a part in the creation and function of life. Food
had a role in the generative process because, at least according to the
Aristotelian tradition, it was supposed to transmute to blood after
consumption. Blood, in turn, changed into sperm in men and into milk in
women, the first helping to create life, the second to sustain it.
Because body, mind, and soul were seen as connected, the physical
constitution of the parents, their bodily fluids, were thought to
contribute to the child’s physiology and to his or her moral and
psychological traits.” 12
.
“The Holy Office’s persecution of conversas and moriscas as key
agents in the reproduction, respectively, of Jewish and Muslim
identities roughly coincided with the shift to a dual-descent model
of classification, that is, with the modification of previous
genealogical formulas and full extension of notions of impurity to
women. ... [T]he imagery of contamination was ubiquitous in
sixteenth-century Spain, and the female body was undoubtedly in the
center of it. [There was concern] that the milk of ‘impure’ wet nurses
(nodrizas) would contaminate Old Christian children ... Various
authors of Spain’s Golden Age of literature wrote that Old Christian
infants raised on the milk of conversas would judaize, and popular
belief similarly held that even if pure by the four corners [cuatro costados,
or four sides of lineage 13],
children who were raised and suckled by morisca wet nurses would be
‘Islamized’ (amoriscados).” 14
.
“The main physiological theories of the Middle Ages, heavily
influenced by ancient Greek science and medicine, tended to accord
semen, breast milk, blood, and food a part in the creation and
function of life. Food had a role in the generative process because,
at least according to the Aristotelian tradition, it was supposed
to transmute to blood after consumption. Blood, in turn, changed
into sperm in men and into milk in women, the first helping to
create life, the second to sustain it. Because body, mind, and soul
were seen as connected, the physical constitution of the parents,
their bodily fluids, were thought to contribute to the child’s
physiology and to her or her moral and psychological traits.”
15
.
“The logical conclusion of this environmental and physical
determinism was that, whether they ‘mixed’ with the indigenous
people or not, Spaniards would with time become more and more
like them.
"Theories that posited that the children of Europeans in the
colonies underwent a physiological and moral decline sometimes
attributed the process not just to the effects of the American
physical environment and skies but also to the use of native or
black wet nurses by creole families. Spaniards degenerated in
the Indies, argued the theologian José de Acosta,
because of the constellations and because they had been
nourished by the breasts of Indian women. Just as in early
modern Spain breast milk figured prominently in notions of
social contamination — as a metaphor for exposure to
certain cultural and religious practices and for the biological
transmission of all sorts of qualities to the child — so
too in Spanish America. ... [A]nxieties over converso and
morsico wet nurses were displaced onto the African and
indigenous women in charge of raising Spanish children ...
“Another and related dimension of the emerging discourse of
creole degeneration revolved around charges of biological
‘mixture,’ which at first were made primarily against the
children of conquerors and first colonists (a good number of whom
were the products of unions, mostly informal, between Spaniards
and indigenous women). Already by the 1570s, religious and
secular authorities started to express concerns that some people
who claimed to be Spaniards had traces of native, or in some cases
black, ancestry and were therefore inferior in quality to persons
who were born in the Peninsula and ineligible for public and
religious offices.” 16
.
There is concern about the differing views held by historians, as
opposed to social scientists. "All racisms are attempts to ground
discriminations, whether social, economic, or religious, in
biology and reproduction. All claim a congruence of 'cultural'
categories with 'natural' ones. None of these claims ... reflect
biological reality." 17
.
"Iberian history has long served as a focal point for arguments
about pre-modern race because, as it is well known, large populations
of Muslims and Jews made the peninsular kingdom the most religiously
diverse in medieval Western Europe. The last fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries witnessed massive attempts to eliminate that diversity
through massacre, segregation, conversion, Inquisition, and
expulsion. ... [T]he old boundaries and systems of discrimination
... were replaced by the genealogical notion that Christians descended
from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos,
conversos, marranos) were essentially different from
'Christians by nature' (Cristianos de natura, cristianos
viejos, lindos, limpios.) ... [T]he ideological
underpinning of these new discriminations claimed explicitly to be
rooted in natural realities, as is most evident in what came to be
called the doctrine of 'limpieza de sangre.' According to this
doctrine, Jewish and Muslim blood was inferior to Christian; the
possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and
moral corruption; and therefore any descendent of Jews and Muslims,
no matter how distant, should be barred from church and secular
office, from any number of guilds and professions, and especially
from marrying Old Christians." 18
.
"Already in the early fifteenth century 'raza,' 'casta,' and
'linaje' (race, caste, lineage) were part of a complex of closely
associated terms that linked both behavior and appearance to
nature and reproduction. Some of these words, like the word
'lineage' itself, had long been used to tie character to
genealogy, and the history of that usage was largely independent
of 'Jewish' questions ... for example, the chronicler/historian
Gutierre Díez de Games explained all treason in terms of
Jewish 'linaje': 'From the days of Alexander up till now, there
has never been a treasonous act that did not involve a Jew or
his descendants. 19, 20
.
"The Castilian word 'raza,' however, was much newer, and it seems
to have come into broad usage as a term in the animal and the human
sciences more or less simultaneously. ...'[R]aza' quickly came to
mean ... something like 'pedigree.' Thus Manuel Dies's popular manual
on equine care (written c. 1430) adminished breeders to be
careful in their selection of stock:
.
"'For there is no animal that so resembles or takes after the father
in virtues and beauties, nor in size, or coat, and similarly for their
contraries. So that it is advised that he who wishes to have a good
race and caste of horses ... seek out the horse or stallion that he
be good and beautiful and of good coat, and the mare that she be
large and well formed and of good coat.'
.
"At more or less the same time in Castilian poetry, 'raza' emerged
as a way of describing a variety of defects linked to poetic speech,
to sexuality, and especially to Judaism. Francisco Imperial, whose
Italianate verse had an important impact on the Castilian lyric
tradition, addressed an exhortatory poem to the king in 1407 which
provides an ambiguous but early example of this last ... Scholars
have not seen in this early use an association of 'raza' to
'lineage of Jews.' But the poet's condemnation of the 'bestia
Juderra' a few lines before ... suggests otherwise, as does his
echo of the exhortation, commonly addressed to Trastamaran kings
of Castile, that they defeat the Jewish beast.
.
"In any event, the 'Jewishness' of the defects encoded in 'raza'
soon became more obvious, and as they did so they were enriched
with meanings drawn from the more agricultural corners of the
word's semantic field. Alfonzo Martínez de Toledo,
writing around 1438 in the midst of an evolving conflict over
converso office-holding in Toledo ... provides a clear
example of the developing logic. You can always tell a person's
roots, he explains, for those who descend from good stock are
incapable of deviation frmo it, whereas those of base stock
cannot transcend their origins, regardless of whatever money,
wealth, or power they may obtain. The reasons for this, he asserts,
are natural. The son of an ass must bray. ..." 21, 22
.
As reflected "in the famous definition of the word 'raza' that
Sebastian de Covarrubias provided in his Spanish dictionary of
1611: 'the caste of purbred horses, which are marked by a brand
so that they can be recognized ... Race in [human] lineages is
meant negatively, as in having some race of Moor or Jew."
23 This was not limited to Spain.
.
"[W]ords like raza, casta, and linaje (and their
cognates in the various Iberian romance languages) were already
embedded in identifiably biological ideas about animal breeding and
reproduction in the first half of the fifteenth century. Moreover,
the sudden and explicit application of this vocabulary to Jews coincides
chronologically (the 1430s) with the appearance of an anti-converso
ideology (already encountered in the example of Alfonso Martínez
de Toledo) which sought to establish new religious categories and
discriminations, and legitimate these by naturalizing their reproduction.
... By 1470 the word 'race' was so common in poetry that Pero Guillén
included it (along with other useful words like 'marrano') in his Gaya
ciencia, a handbook of rhymes for poets." 24
.
"Pero Sarmiento, [Toledo's] ambitious alcalde mayor (chief
magistrate) and leader of a group of rebels who accused Alvaro de
Luna (the king’s minister) of being partial to the conversos, took
advantage of this control of the government and, along with other
local officials, drew up a decree that made converted Jews and their
descendants permanently ineligible for public offices and all municipal
appointments..." 25 "[The]
'Sentencia-Estatuo' [1449] banning descendents of converts from holding
public office for at least four generations: the first of what would
soon be many Spanish statues of 'purity of blood.'"
26
.
Conversos had three methods of seeking security:
Conversos sought exile in the lands of neighboring aristocrats (nobelmen) where
feudal jurisdiction might protect them from the Office of the Holy Office of the
inquisition. After the passage of time, they might be forgotten. 27
Conversos could claim to be of foreign origin, such as from France, Portugal, or
Flanders. Thus investigations of Limpieza de Sangre origins (geneology) might be
avoided. 28
Conversos with names that might be recognized as not being Christian (or which
were indicated humble trader origins) often changed their names. Names were often
chosen with a zoomorphic base. 29 Examples:
Spanish
English
Bicha
Snake
Caballo or Caballero
horse or knight (horseman)
Gato
cat
Gavilán
sparrow hawk
Pichón
young pigeon
Garibito
market stall
Garivito
fruit and vegetable market stall
.
Thus, just as Castas were often given zoomorphic names as a way to show low
status —click here for examples—
Lutheran and Morisco origins were similarly hidden.30
Sistema de Castas
The Portuguese, under Vasco de Gama, were the first Europeans to
sail around Africa. (Herodotus mentions an earlier trip to Punt
by sailors sent by Necho II of Egypt, who returned by sailing through
the Pillars of Heracles — now known as Gibraltar. However, this
was never confirmed.) Vasco da Gama captured a Moslem navigator on
the Swahili coast and found out how to travel to India. The story is
celebrated in Camões "Os Lusiades". In India, the Portuguese
encountered Hindu castes.
These Hindu castes were effectively a way to stratify society by
estates. The Portuguese modified this idea of castes to become a
system based upon skin color. Both Spain and Portugal then used
castes in the New World, another way to deal with the ideology of
racism, but different than raza (discrimination based upon religion).
Was this racial infection limited to skin color, or did it extend to
an impurity of blood? In the New World, there was intermarriage
between castas and different raza, and between castas and Europeans;
thus the Inquisition in the New World extended limpieza de sangre
to include casta. 31 See also
Ilona Katzen, "Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century
Mexico", Yale Univ. Press, 2004, pp. 49-50.
.
By 1702, casta became entirely associated with color. “By the time this
discussion took place [1702], few institutions, religious or otherwise,
questioned the association of black blood with impurity, and black skin
color had become a marker of impure ancestry. ... In the course of the
seventeenth century, the concept had gone from being mainly associated
with having old Christian ancestry to being connected to whiteness.
This link would become stronger in the eighteenth century.”
32
.
How did this come about?
.
With the introduction of the Spanish into the New World, it is
estimated that up to 95% of the original indigenous population was
destroyed. There is no question that the Spaniards destroyed large
numbers of people through violence, but many have said that the
largest percentage of the indigenous population was destroyed by
diseases carried over by the Europeans, such as typhus, smallpox,
measles, etc., that they had never encountered and to which they
had no resistance. In any case, it is clear that, as there was no
census, it can never be established exactly how many people died,
nor whether it was due to Christianizing genocide or disease.
The Spanish Crown realized that it faced three problems simultaneously:
.
●
How could the Spanish crown keep Hernán Cortés
and the conquistadores from establishing their own independent
kingdom in the New World?
.
●
How could extending the Spanish Episcopal Inquisition to the
New World keep the Protestants (England) out of the New World,
promote Christianity among the indigenous Indian population,
and prevent a resurgance of the indigenous paganism? Lastly,
how could this Inquisition help prevent indigenous rebellions?
.
●
How could the Spanish crown keep the indigenous population
of Indians from being utterly destroyed (thus eliminating a
needed labor supply)?
.
The 1550 debates in Valladolid between Sepúlveda and de las Casas created
a legal basis for the fuero Indiano (1614), which
offered the indigenous population some legal protection.
.
As the indigenous population had been reduced so drastically
(80% to 95%), Spain imported African (Black) slaves (initially
under the control of Portugal), to introduce a new labor supply
that could withstand disease as well as be profitable business.
(NOTE: Initially, black slaves were first imported by Hérnan
Cortéz to work on the first Sugar planation in Nueva
España at the Marquesado del Valle, due to the low
population of indigenous Indians.) 33
.
Finally, the creation of the two-republics model, whereby the
Spaniards would be kept separate from the indigenous Indian
population was also intended to help preserve the indianos;
however, this model was a rather crude social experiment.
After the Inquisition started to destroy the Indian
population that it feared would revert to paganism after
having being forcibly converted to Christianity, the Spanish
Crown passed a law that the New World Inquisition could no
longer try Indians.34
Moreover, Spaniards exploited Indian labor and there was no
way the contact between the two "pure" separate republics
could be eliminated. Thus, the "two republics" model fell
apart as a large class of mestizos and other castas
were unavoidably created.
The racist doctrine of raza (in Iberia), as opposed to casta
(in the New World), is sometimes ignored, forgotten or conflated. One
way this has occurred is by historians or social scientists focusing on
the metropolitan centers of empires and ignoring the colonies. For example,
in France in 1713 the claim was made that there were no slaves in the
French Empire; that any slaves brought into France were instantly
emancipated. (This nicely avoided the issue of the slaves in French Haiti,
who after all were not on the mainland.) Similarly:
.
"A much wider detour will be necessary in order to include in future
historiography the positive and decisive presence of the Moorish and
Jewish castes (not races!). Because the resistance is notable to the
acceptance that the Spanish problem was of castes, and not of races,
[a term] today not only applicable to those distinguished, as
the Dictionary of the Academy has it, 'by the color of their skin and
other characteristics'." 35
The author here claims that race only refers to skin color, based on
' the dictionary's definition, which includes the phrase "and other
characteristics" because if he includes it, the assertion fails. Such
a viewpoint could only be maintained by a person who chooses to
ignore not only history, but also the views expressed by some historians
(such as caste being based on a "pigmentocracy" 36).
Castas were based on color gradiations, while raza was
based on religious differences. To ignore this also means to ignore
the history of how the Portuguese borrowed the concept from the Hindus.
37
.
.
1
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008.
.
2
See Hannah Arendt's discussion about the relationship
between the Jesuits using Limpieza de Sangre in France
during the Dreyfus Affair, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism",
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1970. p. 102,
footnote 45, and p. 116.
.
3
Paul M. Kennedy, "The Samoan Tangle: A Study in
Anglo-German-American Relations, 1878-1900",
Harper & Row, 1974, p. 303.
.
4
See Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism",
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1970.
"During the period of the Dreyfus crisis it was not [the Catholic
Church's] regular clergy, not her ordinary religious orders, and
certainly not her homines religiosi who influenced the
political line of the Catholic Church. As far as Europe was
concerned, her reactionary policies in France, Austria, and Spain,
as well as her support of antisemitic trends in Vienna, Paris, and
Algiers were probably an immediate consequence of Jesuit influence.
It was the Jesuits who had always best represented, both in the
written and spoken word, the antisemitic school of the Catholic
clergy." p. 102.
"Originally, according to
the Convention of 1593, all Christians of Jewish descent were
excluded. A decree of 1608 stipulated reinvestigations back to
the fifth generation; the last provision of 1923 reduced this to
four generations. These requirements can be waived by the chief of
the order in individual cases." p. 102, footnote 45. This is a clear
extension of the idea of limpieza de sangre.
"In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws with their distinction
between Reich citizens (full citizens) and nationals (second-class
citizens without political rights) had paved the way for a
development in which eventually all nationals of 'alien blood'
could lose their nationality by official decree; only the outbreak
of the war prevented a corresponding legislation, which had been
prepared in detail." p. 288.
Did limpieza de sangre, and the involvement of the Jesuits in the
Dreyfus Affair, have anything to do with the subsequent creation of
the Nuremberg racial laws during Germany's Third Reich? The Nuremberg
Laws made it necessary for the Nazis to define who was a "Jew". They
defined a full Jew as a person with three Jewish grandparents. Those
with less were designated as Mischlinge (mixed race) of two degrees:
First Degree: two Jewish grandparents; Second Degree: one Jewish
grandparent.
.
5
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 54.
.
6
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 128-129.
.
7
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, pp. 7-10, 12.
.
8La raza (or simply raza), literally "the race", is a
term which many people from Central and South America use to denote
mestizo ancestry. While the intentions of these people are
not negative, the use of raza confuses a group of people
with the acceptance of a racial theory. In simple terms, one need
not be a racist when referring to any particular group of people.
"La raza" has been shorn of his historical roots; raza means
"race" and "racist ideologies", and the term was used in the
Holy Inquisition to root out heresy. The modern use of "raza"
to promote social cohesion does not in fact produce social
cohesion but enforces racism — which is used only to
differentiate or separate people.
.
9
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 28.
.
10
As limpieza began to be used more within society, distinctions began
to be made between degrees of converso, degrees of morisco. For a
description of the extent to which this was carried out, and an
example of the calculation, click here
and follow the link to "How Limpieza de Sangre Was Calculated".
.
11
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 47.
.
12
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, pp. 47-48.
.
13
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p.50.
.
14
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 55.
.
15
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 48.
.
16
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 138.
.
17
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 235.
.
18
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 241-242.
.
19
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 248.
.
20
Raza had its origin in horse breeding. A few centuries
later, the concept of different "races" of dogs (a hierarchy
of dogs, used to support a hierarchy of people), came into
modern aristocratic societies. One example of this was in
English art at the time of Charles Dickens.
See:
http://www.esthermlederberg.com/EImages/Extracurricular/Dickens%20Universe/Dickens%20and%20Dogs.html
.
21
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 249-250.
.
22
It should not be too surprising that Jews were likened
to beasts, as anti-Jewish propaganda based on the
Al Boraique was already part of the raza environment.
The Al Boraique was a monstrous mythological beast. The
Jews were likened to this beast. The Al Boraique functioned
much as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" did in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to focus hatred against
Jews. See David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 255-256.
.
23
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 251.
.
24
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 253.
.
25
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre,
Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press,
2008, p. 29.
.
26
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 255.
.
27
Ruth Pike, "Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century",
Cornell University Press, 1972, p. 46.
.
28
Ruth Pike, "Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century",
Cornell University Press, 1972, p. 49, footnote 47.
.
29
Ruth Pike, "Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century",
Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 42, 43, p. 56, footnote 58.
.
30
Ruth Pike, "Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century",
Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 56, 57.
.
31
Magnus Mörner, "Race Mixture in the History of Latin
America", Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1967, pp. 53-54.
.
32
María Elena Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions:
Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial
Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 224.
.
33
Ward Barret, "The sugar hacienda of the Marqueses del Valle",
Minneapolis, 1970
.
34
Franciscans and others who were irked that Indians could not
be prosecuted by the Holy Inquisition, sought to equate the
Indians' refusal to relinquish their old religion, with the
Jews, who had similar difficulties. These people reasoned that
if it could be shown that the Indians were not 'pure' but actually
one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the Indians could then be
tried, just as the 'other' Jews were tried. See María Elena
Martínez, "Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion,
and Gender in Colonial Mexico", Stanford Univ. Press, 2008
“[T]he sistema de castas ... was inseparable from rising
concerns (and mendicant pessimism) over the persistence of
pre-Hispanic religious practices and beliefs. Although the
Holy Office did not receive permission to prosecute native
people, the discourse of indigenous idolatry ... that
surfaced after the mid-sixteenth century fed the Spanish
interest in determining the origins of the Indians and in
studying theories about the pre-Columbian inhabitants
descending from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Many of
these theories linked the two groups by arguing that both
had a predisposition to idol worshipping and that they had
similar traditions of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.” (p. 148)
“The Spanish colonial discourse of idolatry, which drew
heavily from anti-Semitic thought and tropes, had implications
not only for the native people but for mestizos and other
casta categories ... a 1576 letter written by Mexican
inquisitors to the Suprema ... stated that Spaniards in New
Spain avoided the company of ‘indios, mestizos or castizos’
because they generally considered them ‘vile and despicable’
and incorrigible liars. ...The issue was not resolved, the
inquisitors noted, but there was ‘persuasive evidence’ linking
the two populations, such as similarities between Hebrew words
and indigenous ones, and their ‘likeness in habits, rituals,
sacrifices, dress, blankets [and] long hair’..." (pp. 148-149)
“[T]hey see the name Indio, and presume that is has been
altered, and that the N should be joined at the bottom so that
it says Judio." (pp. 148-149)
“These and other wrongdoings ... were common in New Spain but
could not be dealt with properly because the Holy Office could
not try Indians. The officials pointed out that if in Europe
the Inquisition had been given authority to deal even with
‘infidel Jews and Moors,’ when they carry out their rituals
and ceremonies on Christian lands ... with more reason should
it be able to try a population that had been baptized." (p. 150)
“The Mexican historian Francisco Morales believes that the
first Spaniard to explicitly link the indigenous people to both
the ancient Jews and the issue of purity of blood was the
Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta [in his Historia
Eccelesiástica Indiana]." (p. 151)
.
35
David Nirenberg, "Was there race before modernity? The
example of 'Jewish' blood in late medieval Spain," in
Ben Isaac, Yossi Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Eds.,
The Origins of Racism in the West, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 244.
.
36
Magnus Mörner, "Race Mixture in the History of Latin
America", Little, Brown and Company, Boston, pp. 53-54.
.
37
"When the Portuguese became acquainted with the peculiar social
system of Hindu India, they used the word [caste] to describe
it and the name stuck. The semantics did not, of course, remain
the same when the word was used in the New World." In India, a
caste designated an estate or class, while in the New World, it
designated the person's social stratification based on skin color.
See Magnus Mörner, "Race Mixture in the History of Latin America",
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1967, pp. 53-54.