Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg: Limpieza de Sangre

Limpieza de Sangre

"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

Raza ⁸

"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 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.

Two republics

Casta

How Limpieza de Sangre was calculated

Obscurantism

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.

⁸ La 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.

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