Jewish Loyalty

Ties Abroad: The context and causes of Jewish immigration from 1881

In a previous essay I discussed the causes of the Jewish immigration wave that began in 1881 and the role of the existing Jewish population and their supporters in Britain. Here I expand on the situation of Jews in Britain before 1881, their influence on British foreign and domestic policy, the reasons for the mass immigration from 1881 onwards and the initial reactions of the more settled population to the arrival of the new, drawing on the works of Jewish historians.

Jews in Britain before 1881

A mixture of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, amounting to 50–60,000 people, lived in Britain before the inundation from the east began, and they were remarkably free and prosperous compared to their co-religionists elsewhere.1 Todd Endelman tells us that

“The great mass of Jews, who could hardly aspire to sit in Parliament or hold a naval commission, suffered little from legal inequality. There were no restrictions on the trades they might follow, the goods in which they might trade, the areas in which they might live. Nor were they subject to special taxes, tolls, levies, or extortions. The statute book simply ignored their presence…”.2

Some legal disabilities did apply to Jews in statute but had long been enforced inconsistently. As Geoffrey Alderman describes, “professing Jews were prohibited from voting in British parliamentary elections until 1835”, after which they were on par with native Britons, but before that date “the returning officers who supervised constituency election arrangements had the right to demand the swearing of a Christian oath by all intending voters. … [T]his was not a right they were obliged to exercise,” and some chose not to:

“In May 1830 Sir Robert Wilson told the House of Commons that Jews habitually voted in parliamentary elections in Southwark (south London) because no one bothered to insist that they take the Christian oath. In December 1832 Rabbi Asher Ansell of Liverpool was clearly able to vote in the general election without hindrance.”3

After gaining the right to vote, British Jewry was still eluded by

“…full political emancipation – meaning the right of professing Jews to stand as candidates for, and be elected to, the House of Commons. Jews were not the only religious group to be denied this right. Catholics had only won the right in 1829. Unitarians did not then enjoy the right, nor did atheists.”4

Emancipation was achieved largely thanks to the propinquity of wealthy Jews to powerful Britons. The campaign for it, as Endelman says, was “the work of a handful of ambitious, well-connected City men, whose close government contacts allowed them to put the question of Jewish disabilities on the national agenda.”5 Common British folk, and presumably the enemies of Jewry, lacked such contacts or campaigned less effectively; the successful demonstrations against the Jew Bill of 1753 were not replicated.

Overrepresentation in politics followed immediately. As Alderman describes,

“Lionel de Rothschild’s ceremonial entry into the House of Commons to take his seat (28 July 1858) was an occasion of great communal rejoicing, but it also brought into the open a worry. … Jews were overrepresented in the social strata from which the political classes were drawn, and there were enough of them with sufficient private wealth to make their candidatures an attractive proposition regardless of their religious backgrounds. So the Jewish presence in the legislature grew with embarrassing speed. … After the general election of 1865 no less than six Jews sat in the Commons; a further two were returned at by-elections during the lifetime of the 1865–8 Parliament.

Compared with the proportion which Jews comprised of the total population of the United Kingdom, they were already ‘overrepresented’ in the Commons, a state of affairs that has persisted ever since.”6

The Liberal Party was identified as the vehicle for Jewish interests. By the late 1860s,

“[w]ithout exception all the Jewish MPs at this period were Liberals. The first Jewish Conservative MP, the obscure Nottinghamshire coal-owner Saul Isaac, did not make his appearance at Westminster till 1874. Until then the parliamentary Jewish lobby was a Liberal lobby, one which had, moreover, developed during the decade (1859–68) when the Liberal party had taken on a definite form and substance, under the leadership of, first, Lord John Russell and then Gladstone. The triumphs of Liberalism and Jewish emancipation thus seemed to go hand in hand, as products of the same political ethos. On Saturday, 28 April 1866 there was a remarkable demonstration of this fact, when Russell’s Parliamentary Reform bill passed its second reading in the Commons by a majority of five votes; all six Jewish MPs voted for it, the sabbath notwithstanding.”7

Endelman shows that a degree of formal exclusion from the City of London (the financial centre) did not stop Jews trading there.8 Certainly long before 1881, Jews like the Rothschild and Mocatta families were prominent in finance, spanning bond and commodity trading to every sort of brokerage. The Rothschilds in particular were uniquely important in enabling states to borrow and, as they worked as an international partnership, their role in financing wars made their approval a factor in deciding which states could afford to fight and when.

No Jewish family, and no other family, was as rich as the Rothschilds, but Jews in general were ascendant in wealth. As Endelman says,

“At the start of the nineteenth century, most Jews in England were immigrants or the children of immigrants—impoverished, poorly educated, dependent on low-status street trades and other forms of petty commerce, popularly identified with crime, violence, and chicanery, widely viewed as disreputable and alien. Over the next three-quarters of a century, the social character of the Jewish community was transformed dramatically. Poverty ceased to be its defining characteristic. On the eve of mass migration from Eastern Europe, the majority of Jews in Britain were middle class. They were native English speakers, bourgeois in their domestic habits and public enthusiasms, full citizens of the British state, their public and personal identities increasingly shaped by the larger culture in which they lived—even if their gentile neighbors viewed them as less than fully English.”9

Geoffrey Alderman’s description is similar. In 1883,

“Over half London Jewry [the bulk of British Jewry] was now located within the middle‑classes; in 1850 the proportion had been about a third. Moreover, we know from Jacobs’ painstaking examination of commercial directories and other records that within these middle‑classes the greatest single occupational group was to be found within the financial sector—pre-eminently the Stock Exchange—followed by general merchants (over half the dealers in military stores were Jews) and certain manufacturing sectors (cigars, pipes, slippers and boots, furniture, furs, jewellery and watches, and diamonds). Jews still accounted for only 6% of London’s tailors and only 5% of London Jewry was engaged in the professions—barristers and solicitors, surgeons, dentists and architects.”10

Jews were well-positioned to influence British policy in favour of their own tribe, and they did so. They were, however, also forced to adapt to the effects of the far larger numbers of Jews entering from 1881, and in some ways were altered by it. Subsequent essays will show that British history over the subsequent century and a half has been characterised by the part-confrontation, part-collaboration of the older, more settled, wealthier Anglo-Jewry and the later incomers from eastern Europe.

Modern Jewish Politics and foreign policy

The burgeoning of the Jewish population even before 1881 resulted in ever-growing pressure on British politicians to divert British policy in favour of Jewish interests. There has never been a body that speaks for all Jews, but several institutions constitute communal leadership with at least the tacit acceptance of a large majority of Jews in Britain. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is the most ‘central’ of these, and as early as 1836, “the Board notified the chancellor of the exchequer that it was the only official channel of communication for the secular and political interests of the Jews.”11

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Board and the leading families that controlled it increasingly concerned themselves with the interests of Jewry worldwide. The historian C. S. Monaco has described their practices as ‘the rise of modern Jewish politics’ and has shown how they set the pattern for the present and the past century.12 From the 1840s, Jewish interventions in foreign affairs were usually led by Sir Moses Montefiore, the long-standing president of the Board of Deputies, who famously travelled to petition for Jewish interests in several countries.

Moses Montefiore

From 1871, the Board faced competition from the Anglo-Jewish Association. As Alderman describes, “[t]he Association might indeed have become a rival to the Board of Deputies”, and “[a]t first the Board of Deputies held aloof from it. But after its very effective intervention during the Balkan crisis of the late 1870s … the Board came to terms with it, and agreed in 1878 to the formation of a Conjoint Foreign Committee, consisting of seven representatives from the Board and seven from the Association.” The collaboration was productive. Jews thereafter had “an Anglo-Jewish ministry of foreign affairs” whose deliberations “were conducted in secret” and whose “conclusions were reported to neither of its constituent bodies.”13 In addition to the “close contacts” that won Jews the right to enter Parliament, the “overrepresentation” that immediately followed and the proclivities of some powerful Britons to put Jewish interests first, the secret “ministry” ensured that Jewish interests worldwide would be represented immediately and insistently in a way that had never applied to the British people or Christians.

It had become advantageous to be an ethnic minority in Britain. While Jews’ assertive internationality was rewarded, no such ministry for the native British would have been suffered to exist, let alone given any audience by the powerful. As Endelman approvingly describes,

“In Victorian Britain, at least before the end of the century, the pressures that caused Jews elsewhere to abandon traditional notions of peoplehood, collective fate, and mutual responsibility were muted. British Jews were free to express their ties to Jews abroad without fear of endangering their own struggle for civil equality and social acceptance. In this sense, the diplomatic activities of Montefiore and the Board of Deputies … testify to the confidence of communal leaders about their own status. It is important to stress this, for the contrary has been argued … Only toward the end of the century, with classical liberalism under attack and nationalism and antisemitism on the rise, did fears [of emancipation being reversed] gain ground and begin to shape communal policy—especially in regard to the newcomers from Eastern Europe.”14

Earlier in the century, Jews openly tried to steer policy their way. Later they gained reasons to hew closer in their overt conduct to the gentile elite, whose receptiveness to them was already in evidence.

Jewish foreign policy

The first professing Jewish member of Parliament, Lionel de Rothschild, probably the richest man in the world, and others of his family, used their influence in favour of the Ottoman Empire and against Europe, as did their friend and beneficiary Benjamin Disraeli. In 1876,

“Disraeli’s Eastern policy had the warm approval of most British Jews. In the first place Jews had considerable investments in Turkey, and were loath to see them thrown away because of Gladstone’s conscience. Beyond that, British Jews, in common with their co-religionists in Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and America, looked at the situation from the point of view of Balkan Jewry. Turkish rule had allowed these Jews ‘a degree of tolerance far beyond anything conceded by Orthodox Christianity’. A. L. Green, minister of the prestigious Central Synagogue in London’s West End and ‘a Liberal in politics all my life’, instructed the Liberal Daily News ‘The Christian populations of the Turkish provinces have held, and continue with an iron hand to hold, my coreligionists under every form of political and social degradation.’”

As Alderman describes, “With very few exceptions … British Jews did not merely refuse to be associated with Gladstone’s Bulgarian Agitation; they actively opposed it.” Jewish allegiances in Britain were decided by the perceived interests of Jews at the other end of Europe. The Rothschilds became Tory supporters. “The Daily Telegraph (owned by the Jewish Levy-Lawson family) swung its influence behind Disraeli’s policy.” Then a “conference of European and American Jewish organizations” met to discuss “the reopening of the Eastern Question to improve the lot of Balkan Jewry” and soon afterward the Anglo-Jewish Association lobbied the government to amend British foreign policy. That the Ottoman forces had verifiably slaughtered thousands of Bulgarians while the Jewish organisations were merely vaguely presaging crimes against their co-religionists made no difference. “When war broke out between Russia and Turkey the following year, Sir Moses Montefiore made no secret about where his sympathies lay; he contributed £100 to the Turkish Relief Fund.”15

Alderman complains that “[i]t never occurred to Gladstone to consider the position of Balkan Jews, whom Turkish rule had allowed ‘a degree of tolerance far beyond anything conceded by Orthodox Christianity’.”16 Why that would occur to Gladstone is unexplained. Were Jewish interests already so sharply divergent from British ones, and on major issues? If so, was it Gladstone’s duty to side against his own people? And were Jewish politicians not loyal to Britain first? Evidently not. Then as now, Jewish politicians, activists, journalists and historians openly sided with their own tribe, wherever located, against the host nation, with scarcely any reproach, and no threat of expulsion.

The Rothschilds’ pre-eminence as financiers of states enabled them to be represented by the two main powers at the Congress of Berlin. As Alderman describes,

“While the Anglo-Jewish Association (later in collaboration with the Board of Deputies) petitioned the British Government on the need to secure the civil and political rights of Jews in newly independent Balkan states, the aged Lionel de Rothschild mobilized the considerable resources of his extended European family, and those of his German-Jewish banking associate Gerson von Bleichröder (Bismarck’s banker and adviser) to influence proceedings at the Congress of Berlin called to resolve the crisis, and of which Bismarck was President. The result was that the western European delegates at Berlin refused to sign a final treaty until Jewish anxieties had been allayed. The Treaty of Berlin, when signed in July 1878, thus contained definite guarantees of civil and political rights for the Jews of Romania, Bulgaria, and the Danubian principalities.

For British Jewry this represented a very considerable victory; it was little wonder that when Disraeli returned in triumph from Berlin, Moses Montefiore (despite his ninety-four years) was the first to greet him at Charing Cross railway station.”17

“A very considerable victory” it was, over anyone more sympathetic to Christians than to Jews, as in the common folk of Christendom. The Congress of Berlin is spoken of by derivative historians today as a ‘triumph for Disraeli’, and it was, but for Disraeli as a Jew, not as the Prime Minister of Britain. Establishing the paradigm wherein British interests are treated as the automatic inverse of Russian (and Eastern Christian) ones was also a victory for Disraelites that continues to pay dividends today.

The Liberal Party lost Jewish electoral support, funding and candidates:

“[T]he secession of the Rothschilds had turned a great many City Jews into Conservatives, and seems to have acted as a green light to provincial Jewries also to demonstrate their support for Conservatism. This happened at Liverpool in 1876 and three years later at Sheffield, where the Conservative candidate won the support of Jews specifically because of issues of foreign policy.”18

An Impression of the Congress of Berlin

The loss was fruitless. Disraeli had his way at Berlin anyway, the Conservative Party was accommodating, and Gladstone and the Liberals resisted Jewish demands only to the extent of causing anger, not defeat. As Alderman describes,

“the Bulgarian Agitation had had unpleasant anti-Jewish overtones, in which Disraeli’s own ethnic origins were exploited to the full, particularly by Liberal members of the intelligentsia such as Gladstone’s friend and future biographer, John Morley. Worse still, Gladstone himself had unleashed the full fury of his oratorical powers against Jews and Jewish influence. ‘I deeply deplore’, he told Leopold Gluckstein, author of a pamphlet on The Eastern Question and the Jews, ‘the manner in which, what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism, are now acting on the question of the East.’”19

Gladstone’s deploration only amounted to a campaigning stance while in opposition. His own conduct of foreign policy, after he became Prime Minister in 1880, is generally agreed to have been aimless and ill-informed. And though, as Alderman notes, Gladstone refused “to become moved by the plight of Russian Jewry, or to get up an ‘agitation’ on its behalf,” it was under his premiership that the westward flood of eastern European Jews began, which led to the Jewish population of Britain quintupling by the First World War. The effects of ‘Judaic sympathies’ were multiplied in intensity by Gladstone’s own passivity toward the composition of the demos.

William Gladstone

Reasons for mass migration

Still, it would be misleading to single out Gladstone for condemnation. Jewish immigration on a smaller scale preceded 1881. According to Endelman, “In addition to middle-class immigration from Germany, there was also a small but steady trickle of impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe—contrary to the popular myth that the pogroms of 1881 inaugurated immigration from Poland and Russia.”20 Alderman notes that “The famine in north-east Russia in 1869–70 had brought some migrants to Britain; young Jewish men, seeking to escape service in the Russian army during the war with Turkey in 1875–6, also made their way to England” before ‘the pogroms’.21 Before 1881, chain migration was underway: “as Professor Gartner has noted, a high proportion of Jewish immigrants to Britain before the 1870s appear to have been single men, without family responsibilities.’ But by 1875 this pattern had broken down.”22 Simply, as Lloyd Gartner says, “emigration did not begin on account of pogroms and would certainly have attained its massive dimensions even without the official anti-Semitism of the Russian Government.”23 Endelman’s explanation is worth quoting in full:

“The most fundamental cause of emigration from Eastern Europe was the failure of the Jewish economy to grow as rapidly as the Jewish population. Between 1800 and 1900, the Jewish population of the Russian empire shot from one million to five million persons, exclusive of the one million who emigrated before the end of the century. (The Jews of Galicia, who enjoyed Habsburg tolerance but contributed to the migration current nonetheless, increased from 250,000 to 811,000.) During this same period, tsarist policy toward Jews oscillated between schemes to coerce their russification (through military service or education in state schools, for example) and measures to accomplish the reverse, that is, to isolate them from contact with sections of Russian society considered too weak to resist their alleged depredations—the peasantry, in particular. Measures with the latter goal in mind constricted Jewish economic activity and caused increasing immiseration over the course of the century. As the number of Jews exploded, the government repeatedly imposed limits on their ability to support themselves. With the exception of certain privileged persons, Jews were forbidden to live outside the Pale of Settlement, Russia’s westernmost provinces, and thus were denied access to those cities and regions where industrialization was creating new opportunities. At the same time, the government undertook steps to remove Jews from border regions and the countryside and concentrate them in the Pale’s overcrowded cities. There artisans and petty traders faced mounting competition from each other and, in the case of the former, from factory production as well. General conscription of Jewish males, imposed in 1873, as well as countless arbitrary acts of cruelty, made material immiseration seem even more unbearable.

In this context the pogroms of 1881 and the repressive legislation that followed were more catalyst than cause. Spreading fear and despair throughout Poland and Russia, they convinced the young that they had scant hope for a better future under tsarist rule. They accelerated a decades-old movement, causing migration to assume a momentum and life of its own. Personal exposure or immediate proximity to mob violence was not necessary to set people in motion. The first waves of immigrants to Britain came disproportionately from northern districts in the Pale, which were hardly touched by the pogroms of 1881. In Habsburg Galicia, which remained relatively free of pogroms throughout this period, a higher proportion of Jews migrated than in Russia. Here economic backwardness propelled migration—to Britain, the United States, and the Habsburg capital, Vienna.”24

Susan Tananbaum places more emphasis on Jews’ plight and notes that “pogroms, such as the one in Kishinev in 1903 and elsewhere, and the failure of the 1905 Revolution, provided additional impetus to leave” but agrees that “population increases and poverty had the greatest impact” and says that “[f]or several million Jews, the opportunities of the industrializing West offered their best hope for the future.”25 As Alderman says,

“most emigrants from eastern Europe were not, in the narrow sense, political refugees or, in the narrow sense, the victims of persecution. Most came from Lithuania and White Russia, where there was comparatively little anti-Jewish violence. Of course, the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II [in 1881], and which were renewed and intensified between 1882 and 1889, and again between 1902 and 1906, turned the trickle of Jewish refugees from Russia that had been observed before 1880 into a flood; restrictions imposed by the Russian authorities on Jewish residence, the forcing of Jews off the land while they were prohibited from living in cities, the expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891, all made it virtually impossible for most Russian Jews to participate in normal economic life.

In the west, pogroms and persecutions were regarded as the basic causes of Jewish emigration. In truth the picture was much more complex. The overriding reason for Jewish emigration from eastern Europe to England was economic. During the nineteenth century the Jewish population of the Russian Empire increased from one to over six millions. Given the ever more onerous restrictions on Jewish life, this burgeoning population sought better prospects elsewhere. But the towns to which they were drawn could not support them; the flow was driven further west, and, eventually, overseas. Nor did this flow originate only in Russia or Russian Poland. The Jews of Galicia (then part of the Habsburg Empire) were politically emancipated in 1867 and were relatively persecution-free thereafter; but Jews emigrated from Galicia in greater proportion than they did from Russia. From Romania, in 1899–1900, came a stream of fusgayers (walkers), a spontaneous march across Europe by young Jews searching to escape from persecution, famine, and hopelessness.”26

Fusgayers from Romania

Gartner describes the escalation of the migration wave:

“The turn of the century brought a decade of turmoil. In almost consecutive order, East European Jewry underwent the Rumanian ‘exodus’ of 1900, the Kishinev outrage of 1908, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the Revolution of 1905, and its trail of pogroms lasting into 1906. Under these hammer blows, the semblance of orderly movement which had been preserved for some ten years vanished. Waves of Rumanian wanderers, fleeing conscripts, pogrom victims, and above all, Jews who simply despaired of improvement in Russia streamed into the British Isles in proportions which bewildered those who tried to organize the flow. An added magnet was the dissolution of the “Atlantic Shipping Ring’ and that price war upon the high seas, the Atlantic Rate War from 1902 to 1904. Previously, English shippers had agreed with Continental firms that they would not sell their cheaper trans-Atlantic tickets to transmigrants. The connivances used by immigrants to outwit the shippers were abandoned and the fare dropped precipitously. Furthermore, a recognizable number of Jews from South Africa sought refuge at the commencement of the Boer War. By 1907, the great waves had spent themselves, and the Aliens Act [of 1905] erected a barrier to uncontrolled torrents.”27

Gartner characterises the easterly flood as “a spontaneous movement of people which flowed unencouraged by outsiders.”28 Yet Jews in America at the time, concerned with limiting immigration as well as helping those who had already immigrated settle, noted that “many of the refugees had been lured by extravagant promises of assistance and ‘glowing accounts of America given them by persons interested in inducing them to emigrate”.29 Many of those who settled in Britain had been in transit to America but found reasons to stop partway. Gartner himself describes how British officials in Odessa “always warned those who are proceeding to England to settle there that England is over crowded with unemployed workmen and that it is most undesirable that people should proceed there… but they invariably insist on going as their friends send them glowing accounts and also money to pay their passage.’”30

Lures

Immigration was also encouraged by and profitable for organised criminals and predators. According to Nelly Las, in large cities in Eastern Europe, “prostitution took place in certain sections known to be controlled by the Jewish underworld, to which the authorities turned a blind eye… In 1908, the American consul in Odessa reported that ‘All the business of prostitution in the city is in the hands of the Jews’.” Amid mass migration, “Jewish criminals … exported prostitution to distant lands.” Some prostitutes chose to move to wealthier countries in the expectation of earning more. Others were trafficked: “To entice their victims, Jewish sex traffickers used newspaper advertisements for jobs, the promise of an immigration certificate, and marriage proposals, all the while taking advantage of the parents’ naiveté and poverty.”31 As Tananbaum describes, “immigrants, particularly women, found travel precarious… Dishonest agents overcharged immigrants, promised them a marriage partner at the end of their journey, tricked them into the white slave trade or raped or harassed them en route.”32 Jewish women entering Britain could also be trapped into prostitution on arrival. “In the chaos of landing, the recruiter could too easily entice some friendless bewildered girls to accept hospitality at a place which would turn out to be a brothel”, according to Gartner.33

Jewish communal leaders were aware that Jews were over-represented in slavery both as victims and as perpetrators. Constance Rothschild co-founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women in 1885 to address the “mixture of Jewish traffickers and Jewish victims”.34 The latter were thought unlikely to seek help from Christian organisations. The JPGAW observed that “the girls have been lured from their parents and natural protectors, to be taken for immoral purposes to lands strange to them where a language they cannot understand is spoken.” According to Tananbaum, “[t]he founders soon learned that local prostitution was only a small part of a worldwide sex slave trade involving a number of Jews and extending from Eastern Europe to South America” and that “[w]hile small in total number, Jews made up a significant proportion of white slavers.”35 “The principal ‘contribution’ made by Jews was the supply of girls to the entrepôts of the system in Buenos Aires, Bombay, Constantinople, and elsewhere, fresh from the East European Pale and London also”, according to Gartner. As Las describes, “Jewish sex traffickers were prominent in major transit points from Europe to Latin America, such as Berlin, London, and Hamburg. In the latter, for example, of 402 sex traffickers caught by police in 1912, 271 were Jewish.”36

Numbers of immigrants

The immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe into Britain and America should be thought of less as a great flight of innocents from persecution and more as a great transposition of a large part of the Jewish population and its ways of life into the receiving countries. The larger the Jewish population in the West grew, the easier it was to avoid adapting or assimilating, even if the setting had changed for some from rural to urban, and some old trades were unviable in the West. The years from 1870 to 1914 “witnessed a phenomenal growth” of the Jewish population “both quantitatively and qualitatively” according to Immanuel Jakobovits. Gartner says that the population movement “was of vast proportions”.37 As Alderman describes,

“On the eve of the Russian pogroms the number of Jews living in London was, as we have seen, about 46,000, and in the country as a whole around 60,000. By 1914 these totals had been dwarfed by the arrival of about 150,000 immigrants; most found their way to London. Merely from a demographic viewpoint this amounted to a revolution. [B]etween 1881 and 1900 London Jewry expanded to approximately 135,000 [and] of these, it was estimated in 1899 that roughly 120,000 were living in the East End.”38

Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews lived in Britain by the time of the Great War. “Merely from a demographic viewpoint this amounted to a revolution”, says Alderman.39 The inflow also had other revolutionary effects. Assimilation was a threat that was successfully headed off, as Jakobovits describes:

“[T]his influx was no doubt responsible for the intensity of the religious and Zionist commitment, the diversity, and indeed the sheer survival of the community as we know it today. Without this enormous transfusion of new blood, very few descendants of those resident in this country in 1870 would now maintain their Jewish identity, let alone sustain a vibrant Jewish community.”40

Reaction of settled Jews

The position of the older Jewish population was transformed. Through the Jewish Board of Guardians or ad-hoc relief efforts many aimed to help those who had arrived survive and, as seen, avoid being drawn into criminality or slavery, but did not typically encourage more to come. Although, according to Robert Henriques, the influence of the Board of Deputies “had been largely responsible for the liberal immigration policy which had doubled or trebled the numbers of Anglo-Jewry after 1880”41 and, as Gartner says, the “leading families like Rothschild, Montefiore, and Mocatta… would have kept the gates of England always open to all”, they “would give no encouragement and as little aid as possible to immigrants”.42 A typical view was that the “Jewish community could best protect itself from the charge of fostering immigration by ignoring the immigrant.”43 Aid could be expected to beget the demand for more aid. The Jewish Chronicle observed as early as 1880 that “over ninety per cent of our applicants to our Board of Guardians have been subjects of the Czar, and the larger proportion of our poor are invariably immigrants from Russia or Poland.”44 With whatever reluctance, though, aid and other kinds of communal uplift were provided. A typical view at the time was that “[t]hey will drag down, submerge and disgrace our community if we leave them in their present state of neglect”.45 Alderman summarises:

“Jews already settled in Britain objected to foreign-born Jews coming to Britain because these foreign Jews drew attention to themselves, and brought political controversy in their wake, so that the public mind became focused upon Jews as foreigners and a cause for concern at the very time at which the established Jewry was trying its hardest to blend itself, chameleon-like, into its non-Jewish environment… Jews became news.”46

Blending in became impossible, the more so as newcomers brought new ideas and advanced them with vigour and disregard for any pre-existing consensus. The immigrants, unlike the Rothschilds and the cousinhood, were “Poor (for the most part), Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox, socialist and Zionist”.47 As James Appell describes, the immigrants into London also “resented an attitude towards them from their co-religionists which placed low value on the character of the immigrant.”48 There was unanimity on two points, though: “[t]he Yiddish press kept a prudent distance from contentious social and economic questions, except the defence of Jews against anti-Semitism and in favour of free immigration to England.”49 The newcomers outnumbered the older Jewish population manifold, and today “[t]he vast majority of British Jews are third- or fourth-generation descendants of working-class migrants from eastern Europe”, according to Alderman.50 As will be seen in future essays, Britain was altered by the incomers in unprecedented ways. As Alderman says,

“The Jewish immigrants changed the shape of the British polity as surely as they changed the structure of British Jewry: the Jewish experience and the British experience merged and affected each other in a manner far more central than that offered by emancipation itself.”51

My people were refugees, goy

That ‘mass immigration’ into Britain began in 1997 or later is a myth convenient to those who condone the smaller numbers that came before. First as immigrants themselves, then as advocates, instigators and facilitators, Jews have been inseparably involved with mass migration into white countries. Their own movement through Europe, sometimes marching in columns, prefigured that of Muslims in the decades since the Second World War. Angela Merkel, who proudly opened Germany to the entry of more than a million Africans and Asians per year from 2015, has been lavishly acclaimed by Jewish activists and the state of Israel. Vaguely the advocates of immigration speak as though her importees were all refugees, a tactic that continues to work. Except in Israel, Jewish organisations, including the Board of Deputies, routinely cite the experiences of their ancestors to justify their pro-immigration stance. While British electors and leaders continue to respond cravenly, they will do nothing for their own nation. Repudiating the myths may help revive it.


References

1

Modern British Jewry, Geoffrey Alderman, 1992, p117

2

The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, Todd Endelman, 2002, p73-4

3

Controversy and Crisis, Geoffrey Alderman, 2008, p274

4

Geoffrey Alderman in Leeds and its Jewish Community, edited by Derek Fraser, 2019, ch1

5

Endelman, p106

6

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p63-4

7

The Jewish Community in British Politics, Geoffrey Alderman, 1983, p31. The sabbath was to become more withstanding when it came to the controversy over Sunday trading laws, to be covered in a later article.

8

Endelman, p36, 101, 277 (note 36)

9

Endelman, p79

10

Controversy, Alderman, p234

11

Endelman, p106. Endelman adds parenthetically that the Board “continued to make this claim throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although there was no legal basis for it.” For more on the question of the extent to which the Board speaks for Jews, see The Communal Gadfly, Geoffrey Alderman, 2009, p15-28.

12

See The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics, C.S. Monaco, 2013. Today, similar practices are continued by the likes of the World Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League, though Jews’ situation has been transformed since the 1880s.

13

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p96

14

Endelman, p123-4

15

Jewish Community, Alderman, p37-8 and Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p99. See also Alderman, MBJ, p98-9: “[M]ost British Jews supported Disraeli’s Eastern policy.”

16

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p98-9

17

ibid., p99-100

18

ibid., p99-100

19

ibid., p99-100]

20

Endelman, p81. See also p128: “Contrary to popular myth, East European immigration did not begin with the pogroms that swept through Bessarabia and Ukraine in 1881.”

21

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p112. ‘Pogroms’, referring varyingly to organised riots against Jews or to more spontaneous inter-communal violence, had occurred before 1881, but the term ‘the pogroms’ is sometimes used to refer to the violence of 1881-2 and the subsequent mass emigration.

22

ibid., p82

23

The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914, Lloyd Gartner, 1973, p41

24

Endelman, p128-9. See also Gartner, p41. As Gartner says of the population increase, “The economic structure of Jewish life failed to expand with the needs imposed by this unprecedented increase.” See Gartner, p21. “Economic backwardness” was a cause of broader trends in rural-to-urban migration at the same time. According to Gartner, “[b]etween the earlier years of the nineteenth century and 1930 occurred the heaviest voluntary migration of people known in history… 62,000,000 persons… crossed international frontiers in this age of relative ‘free trade’ in human movement… migration, even of such dimensions, was itself partly an aspect of such pervasive nineteenth century trends as industrial development, urban growth, and strivings for personal freedom. Under the heading of migration one may well include tens of millions more who crossed no political boundary, yet traversed an economic frontier by pulling up stakes from a farm or village community and settling in an industrial city within their own country.” Gartner, p270

25

Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880-1939, Susan Tananbaum, 2014, p22

26

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p111-2. Columns of African and Asian ‘fusgayers’ marched through Europe in 2015.

27

Gartner, p46-7

28

Gartner, p12

29

Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-2, John Doyle Klier, 2011, p373. In the 1940s, the Jewish-owned Gleaner used similar methods to entice Afro-Caribbeans to move to Britain.

30

Gartner, p29. He cites the example of a villager seeing the volume of money being sent from Britain to his neighbours and deciding to move too.

31

White Slavery, Nelly Las, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2021. Jewish Women’s Archive

32

Tananbaum, p19

33

Gartner, p183. “In 1910, the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW) called a conference in London to discuss the issue. It was attended by representatives from all over the world and focused on Jewish women from Russia and Romania leaving Europe and becoming involved in prostitution in South America. The editors of Anglo-Jewry were concerned that white slaving was seen as a Jewish issue and that more than just Jews were involved in the trafficking of women. At a Yorkshire level, the Hull Jewish community were sufficiently concerned that they monitored all single Jewish girls who came through the port as lone travellers and checked that they safely reached their destination.” Grizzard in Leeds, edited by Fraser, ch7

34

Constance Rothschild, Lady Battersea, Linda Gordon Kuzmack and Ellery Gillian Weil, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, 2021. Jewish Women’s Archive

35

Tananbaum, p132-3

36

Las, 2021

37

Preface by Immanuel Jakobovits to The Jewish Immigrant in England by Gartner, p1, and p45

38

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p117-8

39

Controversy, Alderman, p196-7

40

Jakobovits in Gartner, p1. Endelman concurs with Jakobovits: “[W]ithout this infusion of new blood, the small, increasingly secularized, native-born community, left to itself, would have dwindled into insignificance, as drift, defection, and indifference took their toll.” Endelman p127

41

Sir Robert Waley Cohen, 1877-1952: A Biography, Robert Henriques, 1966, p353

42

Gartner, p50-1

43

ibid., p55-6

44

ibid., p41]

45

James Appell in New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History, edited by Geoffrey Alderman, 2010, p31-2

46

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p120

47

Alderman in Leeds, edited by Fraser, ch1

48

Appell in New Directions, edited by Alderman, p31-2

49

Gartner, p260

50

Controversy, Alderman, p313

51

Modern British Jewry, Alderman, p102

 

The Sentencia-Estatuto of 1449

The Sentencia-Estatuto of 1449: Translated from Spanish to English and with an Introduction by Wilhem Ivorsson

Translator’s Notes:

The reader should keep in mind that this text is 575 years old. Many of the political titles and legal concepts referenced do not have modern equivalents, and the document was written in period-specific legal language, style and custom. The text is not very accessible even for a modern Spanish-speaking audience let alone an English-speaking one. Such being the case, I took a few liberties to increase the readability. This involved slightly rewording certain conjunctive phrasings and adding periods to delineate some tracts that otherwise would not sensibly translate to English; adding qualifying particles between brackets; and periodically omitting a redundant word. I also maintained English grammar rules regarding cases; I always capitalize “Catholic” and “Lord King” whereas the original does not. Aside from these changes, I have strived to retain the original semantic value, tone and structure. For the source text, I primarily used the reproduced copy found in Eloy Benito Ruano’s Toledo En El Siglo XV published by the University of Madrid in 1961. I also consulted the reproduced copy in Antonio Martín Gamero’s Historia de la Ciudad de Toledo published in 1862. Below is a longform translation, but I have also provided a simplified translation that omits less important elements and takes more liberties to achieve greater accessibility. You can read it here. You can also view the original Spanish text here.

Preface 

The Sentencia-Estatuto has been highlighted as one of the foundational documents of Spain’s Limpieza de Sangre policies. It was written in June of 1449 during Toledo’s rebellion against the crown. In January the Castilian constable Alvaro de Luna demanded the city provide a loan of one million maravedis to Juan II’s court. The loan was advertised as a means to confront the kingdom’s mounting military threats from Aragon to the Northeast and the Moors to the South. To procure the money for the loan, the city treasurer, Alonso Cota, a converso of Jewish heritage,1 imposed a tax on the commoners at the rate of dos doblas. Many believed that Alvaro de Luna and Alonso Cota “had devised the loan for their own personal gain; Cota was to reap his profit as tax farmer, and Alvaro was to get his bribe from Cota.”2 When Alonso’s men forcefully took the dos doblas from a lowly leather worker,3 the city erupted in protest. Enraged citizens ransacked Alonso Cota’s multiple homes. Afterwards they attacked and pillaged the Magdalena quarter4 where all the wealthy conversos and Jews were known to reside.

A nobleman, Pedro Sarmiento, took charge of the agitated masses and assumed effective control over Toledo. A few conversos took up arms against the rebels and were killed. Others were banished from the city and their homes and property confiscated. Over the next several months Juan II’s and De Luna’s forces undertook a siege campaign against the city. As the Sentencia-Estatuto stated, the royal court waged “a cruel war of blood and fire, of crop destruction and pillaging” against the citizens of Toledo. Periodically, Sarmiento engaged in negotiations with the king for the safe return of the city. One of the stipulations was that Alvaro de Luna be removed from Juan II’s court. As Spanish historian Eloy Benito Ruano explains, it was believed that De Luna had sold a number of public offices to the conversos and that he had “taken over the will of the King” and protected many “heretics and Judaizers.”5 Regarding converso overrepresentation in Juan II’s court, the late Jewish scholar Benzion Netanyahu (Benjamin Netanyahu’s father) said that:

…there can be no doubt that the influence of the conversos in the royal secretaryship was one of the factors determining the appointments of the cities’ chief authorities…the crowning achievement of the conversos in government was attained through their membership in Castile’s royal Council…Toward the end of [Juan II’s reign] they probably comprised no less than a third of its members, reaching at that time the zenith of their influence in determining the actions and policies of the state.6

The Sentencia-Estatuto explicitly stated, referring to the public notaries, that it was “well known to all, that the majority of said notary positions, said conversos tyrannically held and possessed, as much by the purchase with money as by favors and other clever and deceptive means.” The document emphasized that conversos should “especially” be barred from these offices and their “exemptions” which probably involved immunities from certain taxes and related financial obligations.

The Sentencia-Estatuto also rendered conversos ineligible to act as witnesses in court against old Christians. Many modern commentators view this as a historical novelty, but long before the Sentencia-Estatuto, Christians were not allowed to testify against Jews in Rabbinic courts,7 and Talmudic Mesirah laws often forbade Jews from denouncing fellow Jews to non-Jewish authorities. In addition, the Talmud sometimes forbids Jews from testifying against other Jews in secular courts.8 Even today, there is evidence that Jews still culturally adhere to these laws. For example in 2006, Israeli-American real estate investor Solomon Dwek was convicted of felony fraud after trying to steal $50 million from PNC Bank in a check-kiting scheme. Subsequently, he became an FBI informant and his father, Rabbi Dwek, famously denounced him from the pulpit at his synagogue, citing the Talmudic law of moser.9 His father even reportedly said that he would be sitting shiva, a week-long morning ritual, because he considered his son dead.10

While the Sentencia-Estatuto is not explicit on the matter, its statements easily lend themselves to a supposition that conversos would testify in secular courts against old Christians on behalf of fellow conversos in an ethnocentric fashion. With this in mind, the Sentencia-Estatuto outright accused the conversos of systematically taking over Toledo’s government, running it into the ground, and purposefully dispossessing many old Christian nobles:

…through cunning and deceit, [the conversos have] taken and carried off and stolen large and innumerable amounts of maravedis and silver from our king the lord and from his rents, rights, and taxes, and they have destroyed and ruined many noblewomen, knights and hidalgos. Consequently they have oppressed, destroyed, robbed and ravaged all the most ancient houses and estates of the old Christians of this city and its land and jurisdiction and all the realms of Castile, as is well known and as such we regard it. Furthermore, during the time that they have held public office in this city, and its management and administration, the greater part of said city’s centers have been depopulated and destroyed; said city’s own land and centers [have been] lost and alienated. Beyond all this, all the maravedis of said city’s income and property have been consumed in their own interests and properties, in such a manner that all of the country’s wealth and reputation have been consumed and destroyed.

All this said, the Sentencia-Estatuto is sometimes viewed as a post-hoc justification for the Toledans to rob and pillage the city’s wealthy conversos. Benzion Netanyahu claimed that Sarmiento lacked the support of the upper class nobles, and so he seized on the commoners’ animosity toward conversos in order to undermine Alvaro de Luna. He argues that Sarmiento was “a second-rate nobleman, with mediocre estates and moderate income”11 who felt entitled to greater monetary compensation for his past services to the king. In Netanyahu’s view, the rebellion was not an organic event, and Sarmiento premeditated and orchestrated the entire affair because of “hurt feelings” and a fear of “an impending disaster,”12 after he became convinced that De Luna had begun to see him as a political enemy.

I don’t think Netanyahu’s accounting of Sarmiento’s motives holds up under scrutiny. The converso overrepresentation in Juan II’s court and Alvaro de Luna’s support base by his own admission was a very real thing. The nobles were likely just as aware of it as the commoners, if not more so. In the years leading up to the rebellion, Alvaro de Luna and Juan II had been alienating their rivals, perceived or otherwise, by imprisoning them and seizing their assets. It was not the case that aside from Sarmiento and the commoners, all was well and good in Castile.13 It seems rather unlikely that Castilian nobility hadn’t begun to notice any patterns in terms of who was and wasn’t among De Luna’s and Juan II’s support base. Moreover, similar displays of ethnic strife between conversos and old Christians occurred in Ciudad Real a mere 15 days following the outbreak of the Toledan rebellion. “The [converso] tax collector Juan González (later burned by the Inquisition) and three hundred other men of said ancestry armed themselves and took to the streets, threatening to burn down the city before anyone decided to attack them.” This too was all apparently in a “dispute over the possession of the public notaries which it was said were bought by Judaizers and New Christians.”14 Even if Sarmiento orchestrated the rebellion in Toledo, as Netanyahu argues, he didn’t invent the larger ethnic conflict that was brewing in the region, nor did he invent converso overrepresentation in the notaries, which seems to have been ubiquitous throughout the region.

Many modern academics and commentators might argue here that such overrepresentation in the notaries could be attributed to an intelligence advantage rather than an ethnocentric in-group strategy. The evidence at hand, however, doesn’t support such a conclusion. Richard Lynn’s notable book, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement, states that the bulk of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 moved to the Balkans, (p. 335) where the Sephardic IQ is currently 98. (p.298) In Lynn’s The Intelligence of Nations, the Spanish national IQ was rated at roughly 94. (p. 145) While statistically significant, a four point difference isn’t very compelling to support the former hypothesis. Moreover, another paper by Lynn, North-South Differences in Spain in IQ,15 reports that the average IQ in Northern Spain is 101 while the average in the South is 96. The average IQ for Catalonia and Valencia in Lynn’s paper was 102.

There is another paper, Numeracy of Religious Minorities in Spain and Portugal in the Inquisition Era, (Juif et al 2019)16 that attempts to compare the numeracy rates of “Jewish-accused” conversos with those of the broader Catholic masses during the Inquisition. The goal was to find evidence of “Jew’s human capital relative to the non-Jewish majority’s.” The study never discusses IQ directly, but it seeks to correlate rates of numeracy with education level which in turn can be correlated with IQ. The study’s finding was that Jewish-accused individuals had higher numeracy rates compared to the broader population, but the study also states that “Catholic priests and other groups of the religious elite who were occasional targets of the Inquisition had a similarly high level of numeracy.” This would suggest that, regardless of ethnicity, there was a high rate of numeracy within the higher socioeconomic rungs of Spanish society. The Inquisition does not appear to have targeted individuals of lower socioeconomic status.

If we consider that, by virtually all accounts, the sephardic Jews were not peasants, but rather a monied class of relative high socio-economic status,17 it may well be that the average converso indeed had a higher IQ than the average old Christian peasant. Even so, there is no evidence that the conversos were significantly more intelligent than the old Christian nobility such that one would expect the conversos to dominate the notaries. People have produced various estimations for the population of each major ethnic bloc in medieval Spain. None of them are particularly convincing, but with that caveat in mind, the total population in 1492 is generally said to have been around three million. The Jews, it is said, were around 300,000. Supposedly, there were half a million Muslims. If those figures are accurate, it would be informative to ascertain how many of the 2.2 million old Christians were of the noble classes. It may be that the old Christian noble classes numerically comprised a similarly small figure relative to the larger population of commoners. In effect, there may have been two relatively small but high socioeconomic rungs of Spanish society roughly of equal intelligence and size in the ‘resource competition theory’ that Kevin MacDonald has forwarded in his book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone. In such a setting, the conversos would be at an advantage only if they had adopted a group strategy against the old Christian nobles who in contrast had remained relatively individualistic until the implementation of Limpieza de Sangre policies.

It also appears to be the case that in none of the contemporary documents that sought to condemn Sarmiento’s rebellion does anyone counter the basic idea that conversos were indeed overrepresented in the manner Sarmiento and others described. Critics simply accused the rebels of having acted without proper cause and justification.

As far as Sarmiento’s motives go, they appear to have gone well beyond personal interests and ambitions. It is far more likely that he was sincerely motivated by a moral and religious conviction—perhaps even an emergent ethnic awareness—to protect his fellow old Christians from what he saw as their abuse and exploitation on the part of a hostile outgroup. If Sarmiento was only interested in political expediency, it was not a wise move for him to take up a stance that burned all possible bridges with the converso power base in such an exceedingly dangerous setting. Once the Toledan rebellion began, Juan II officially revoked and seized Sarmiento’s titles and properties, and sought to bring him and all his supporters to justice. Even Pope Nicholas V condemned the rebellion. He excommunicated Sarmiento along with over 500 others for their actions, and declared the entire city in “entredicho” which essentially barred all its inhabitants from participating in various ecclesiastical affairs.18 He then published the document Humani generis inimicus, (Enemies of the human race) in which, as Benito-Ruano put it, “he affirmed the unity of the Christian flock, regardless of the ancestry of its members in the faith, as well as their equal rights to obtain ecclesiastical and civil jobs or benefices.”19

As remarkable as this opposition to anti-converso sentiments was, plenty of other local nobles supported Sarmiento and the rebels’ cause. Curiously, prince Enrique had not been on good terms with his father, and there is reason to think that he clandestinely supported the rebellion’s anti-converso aims. During the rebellion, the prince was welcomed into the city by the rebels, and he had agreed to all of their demands. None of the rebels would be tried for their crimes, none of the property stolen would be returned to the conversos, and none of the conversos banished from the city would be allowed to return. It does appear that after a series of political intrigues, Enrique may have had a falling out with Sarmiento, but the details that the Crónica de Juan II provides seem strange.

The chronicle tells us20 that in November of 1450, with the rebellion still ongoing, the prince learned and disapproved of certain excesses Sarmiento had been engaged in.21 He left his stronghold in Segovia and made his way to Toledo to remove Sarmiento, whom we are also told was plotting to hand over the city to the king.22 This doesn’t make much sense. The prince had been amenable to Sarmiento’s aims while the king had not. The chronicle also states that the prince didn’t take any action against Sarmiento when he first entered the city. In fact, it expressly states that the prince participated in a series of games for “eight to ten days” before finally getting around to summoning Sarmiento. He then asks Sarmiento to hand over his positions to Don Pedro Giron, the Maestre de Calatrava.23

Supposedly, a few days after this, the bishop of Cuenca spoke to Sarmiento on behalf of the prince. He told Sarmiento that the prince wanted him to leave the city.24 The bishop then gave a scathing critique and condemnation of Sarmiento’s behavior. The chronicle condemned Sarmiento for having rebelled against his king, but Enrique, the king’s own son, was no less guilty of this. The same chronicle discusses how the prince impeded several plots on the part of disillusioned rebels to hand the city back over to his father. Moreover, Enrique did not arrest Sarmiento. Instead he granted Sarmiento safe passage to his power center in Segovia. He even allowed Sarmiento to leave the city with all his possessions and wealth, including what the same chronicle accuses Sarmiento of having plundered from the conversos.

The chronicle has several characters pleading with the prince to stop Sarmiento from leaving Toledo with “mas de treinta cuentos.” This presumably means “more than 30 million maravedis.” While maravedis don’t indicate actual coins here, the amount of money here seems absurd and fantastical. Beyond it being 30 times the original loan that instigated the rebellion, the amount would likely have been so physically large and heavy that Sarmiento could not possibly have carried it out of the city. Even Benzion Netanyahu stated that “this does not seem possible.”25 Assuming Sarmiento had 15 million doblas weighing around four grams each, the treasure would probably have weighed over 130,000 lbs. Technically though, the chronicle tells us that Sarmiento left “without the gold and the silver he had stolen” and instead much of what he carried out of Toledo were tapestries, rugs, fancy underwear, bed spreads, silk fabrics, and fine gems. It doesn’t seem any more likely that Sarmiento carried off the equivalent value of 30 million maravedis in these items.

The text does assert that Sarmiento’s caravan had “close to two hundred” beasts of burden, but even if this is true, that wouldn’t have sufficed. Assuming that each animal weighed around 1000 lbs and could carry 20% of its own weight, the maximum carrying capacity of Sarmiento’s caravan would’ve been about 40,000 lbs. And there is still the consideration that once outside the city, such an amount of wealth would’ve required a small army to defend, which Sarmiento, a minor noble, clearly did not possess. Indeed, after Sarmiento’s caravan leaves Toledo, the chronicle has his servants steal his belongings and abandon him over the course of several days. He is robbed by bandits on the road and the very cities he approaches seeking refuge. Even the king at one point confiscates part of what Sarmiento supposedly stole, when the latter is forced to abandon it at a former residence, and yet curiously the king doesn’t give the property back to its rightful owners.26 The account appears purposefully tailored to vilify Sarmiento in a caricatured fashion. Benzion Netanyahu notes that the dialogue between Sarmiento and the bishop of Cuenca is not present in the Crónica del Halconero; it’s only found in the Crónica de Juan II. He calls the account in the latter chronicle, a “tendentious story, which might have been produced by some admirer of Barrientos (in all likelihood, a converso author)…”27

It’s entirely possible that Sarmiento had aggravated the prince by imprisoning certain noblemen whom the prince felt were honorable, but elements of the chronicle are clearly histrionic in nature. It seems more likely that the prince asked Sarmiento to leave the city after Pope Nicholas’s bull against the rebels had been locally issued. The prince may have been concerned with optics and felt that Sarmiento’s departure would ease tensions.28 Either way, the rebellion continued without Sarmiento’s direct participation for over another year, and when it was over, it had effectively accomplished all that he and his followers had set out to achieve.

On March 21st of 1451, Juan II saw fit to pardon all the Toledan rebels. No one was to be punished for their actions, and even more amazing, none of the property taken from the conversos was to be returned.29 It can be deduced from a letter dated to August 13th, 1451 that Juan II also upheld the rebellion’s measure to remove conversos from public office in Toledo.30 On November 20th of the same year at Juan II’s request, the Pope removed the excommunication status from the city.31 Even Sarmiento was eventually pardoned in 1452, and all his former titles and estates were restored. Although Juan II never allowed him to return to court, Sarmiento became a member of Enrique’s court once he succeeded his father to the throne. Sarmiento died naturally in 1463, probably due to parkinson’s disease, having successfully passed on his mayorazgo to his son.32 Alvaro de Luna on the other hand, following another set of attempts at power grabs, was arrested in 1453 by Enrique who had the former constable convicted for usurping royal functions and subsequently beheaded.33

By 1478 the Inquisition was established in Castille via a papal bull with the goal of combating the Judaizing practices of the conversos. By 1483, it was established in Aragon. The former reluctance on the part of the papacy to engage in prejudicial actions against persons of Jewish ancestry had evaporated. In 1492 at the culmination of the Reconquista, Spain enacted the Edict of Expulsion (Decreto de la Alhambra or Edicto de Granada) which expelled all practicing Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. Those who rejected conversion were given six months to sell their assets, conclude their affairs, and move abroad.34 Although thousands of Jews left, it’s generally believed that the bulk of them opted to convert, and following the historical pattern since the times of the Visigoths, these conversions were in all likelihood mostly insincere. Many of the new converts continued to practice Judaism in secret and maintain old ethnic ties and allegiances and intermarry among themselves. It was in this setting that Limpieza de Sangre became official state policy in Spain.

Benzion Netanyahu asserted that the Spaniards had adopted “the principle of race to discriminate against all conversos” and asked why the Spaniards being so “constitutionally dedicated to the defense of Christian cult and doctrine [would] adopt a policy so alien…so opposed to its laws, teachings and traditions?”35 Perhaps we can find an ironic answer to this question in chapter four of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents:

The Inquisition was fundamentally a response to failed attempts to force genetic and group assimilation. The real crime in the eyes of the Iberians was that the Jews who had converted after 1391 were racialists in disguise, and this was the case even if they sincerely believed in Christianity while nevertheless continuing to marry endogamously and to engage in political and economic cooperation within the group. Those who had voluntarily assimilated prior to 1391 were not targets of the Inquisition, since such individuals were implicitly viewed as being free from the crime of racialism. It was not the extent of Jewish ancestry that was a crime, but the intentional involvement in a group evolutionary strategy. In this sense, the Inquisition was profoundly non-racist. Rather, it was concerned with punishing racialism.36

Some of MacDonald’s assertions may appear odd, since the Inquisition later developed an entire racial caste system in the Americas. But the historical evidence strongly indicates that the emergent Spanish attitudes toward conversos were formed in response to ethnocentric converso collectivism against old Christians. It should be considered here that the tendency of Christianity in Spain had been to dissolve older ethnic distinctions. The Visigoths had forbidden intermarriage between themselves and local Hispano Romans until the mid 7th century when Recceswinth dissolved the old law in order to promote cultural unity.37 To be clear, these observations are not intended to imply that the Jews of Spain bore responsibility for the Spaniards’ subsequent implementation of their racial caste system in the Americas. As MacDonald also states in his work, “evolutionary theory must also suppose that these tendencies are in no way exclusive to Judaism…”38 My intent here is to discourage academics and others from viewing the emergence of Limpieza de Sangre policies as the progenitor of modern racism.

Beginning of the Translated Text:

In the very noble and very loyal city of Toledo, five days into the month of June, in the year of the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ, one thousand four hundred and forty nine; on this day, standing present in the house and hall of said city of Toledo, the very honorable and noble gentleman Pedro Sarmiento, repostero mayor39 of our Lord the King and his council, and alcalde de las alzadas40 in said city of Toledo and its realm, boundary, and jurisdiction by way of said Lord King, and [standing present] the judges, sheriffs, knights and squires, commoners and people of said city of Toledo, assembled according to habit and custom, especially to hear, discuss, negotiate and provide in the administration and good governance of said city and in other things pertaining and convenient to the service of our Lord God, of said Lord the King and of the public welfare of said city and its residents and inhabitants, and in the presence of myself, Pasqual Gómez, public scribe in Toledo and scribe of the councils of said city, and [in the presence] of the witnesses listed below, Esteban García de Toledo personally appeared in said council in name, and as the representative that he is, of said judges, sheriffs, knights, squires, commoners and people of said city, whose power of attorney passed before me, the aforementioned scribe. [Esteban García de Toledo] spoke with the gentlemen named above, who well know how on many days and in different councils they had discussed and understood about the universal wellbeing of said city, and of the privileges, exemptions and freedoms given and granted to it by the kings of very glorious memory, progenitors of our Lord the King, and by their highness [said privileges, exemptions and freedoms were] confirmed and sworn.41 Among these [privileges, exemptions and freedoms, Esteban García de Toledo] says there was a privilege given and granted to said city by the Catholic of glorious memory, Don Alfonso, king of Castile and Leon, whereby, among other graces, freedoms, and immunities given and granted by him to said city, following the spirit and letter of the law and the holy decrees, [Don Alfonso] ordered and decreed that no converso with Jewish lineage could hold or keep any office or benefice in said city of Toledo, nor in its land, boundary and jurisdiction, for being suspect in the faith of our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and for other causes and reasons contained within said privilege.

The aforementioned lords had deliberated a few times on the public notaries of said city, which were and are offices that consist in the service of said Lord King and a great part of the benefit of all public things of said city. They had seen and heard, and it was well known to all, that the majority of said notary positions, said conversos tyrannically held and possessed, as much by the purchase with money as by favors and other clever and deceptive means. This was done in contempt of the royal crown of our Lord the King, of said privileges, exonerations, freedoms and immunities of said city, and of the old Christians proper.42 About all this and other things pertaining to the service of God, of said Lord King, and of the public welfare of said city, [the aforementioned lords] had agreed to make a pronouncement and declaration beyond their mercy to date. Consequently, in name of said city, its commoners and people, and in the best manner [Esteban García de Toledo] was able, and was compelled by law to do so, he requested and did request, he demanded and did demand, that [the aforementioned lords] declare and pronounce on all that they understand to be in service of God our Lord and of said Lord King and of the common interest and advantage of said city.

And promptly the aforementioned Pedro Sarmiento and the aforementioned judges, sheriffs, knights and squires, commoners and people of said city, stated that they had already seen and deliberated about what the aforementioned Esteban García stated, and [that] they had ordered him to see his lawyers, intending to be compliant in the service of God, of said Lord King, and of the public welfare of said city. Consequently, above and beyond everything else declared and pronounced by them in the trial that said city brings against its enemy residents for the offenses and crimes committed and perpetrated by them against the service of God, and of said Lord King, and of the public good of said city, the aforementioned lords agreed to make a certain declaration, and they promptly gave another judgment, and they made me, the aforementioned scribe, read it, the tenor of which, with what happened later, is what follows:

«We, the aforementioned Pedro Sarmiento, repostero mayor of our Lord the King and of his council, and his asistente43 and alcalde mayor de las alzadas of the very noble and very loyal city of Toledo, and the judges, sheriffs, knights, squires, citizens and people of said city of Toledo, named above, pronounce and declare that, inasmuch as it is well known by law both canonical and civil, that conversos of Jewish lineage, for being suspect in the faith of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the faith which they frequently profane by judaizing, may not hold such offices or benefices public or private through which they might inflict shame, damages or abuses on old Christians proper, nor may they qualify as witnesses against them. For this reason, privilege was given to said city and its residents by Don Alfonso of glorious memory, that these conversos not hold nor be able to hold said offices or benefices under pain of severe and grave punishments, and because against a very large part of this city’s conversos, descendants from the lineage of its Jews, it is proven, and it seemed and evidently seems, that they are persons highly suspect in the holy Catholic faith, holding and believing profound errors against the articles of the holy Catholic faith, guarding the rites and rituals of the old law, and saying and affirming that our Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ is a man belonging to their lineage whom the Christians adore as God. And furthermore, [because] they affirm and say that there is a God and a Goddess44 in heaven. And furthermore, [because] on Holy Thursday, while the holiest oil and chrism are consecrated in the Holy Church of Toledo, and the Body of our Redeemer is placed on the Altar, said conversos slaughter lambs and eat them and make other kinds of burnt offerings and sacrifices judaizing. [This is] according to what is contained at length in the inquiry conducted for this reason by the vicars of said Holy Church of Toledo. By virtue [of its findings], the royal justice, following the letter of the law, proceeded heartedly against some of them, and from there, as the holy decrees have deduced, it turns out that most of said conversos do not think well of the holy Catholic faith. Said inquiry we have included here and ordered it to be placed in the archives of Toledo. Additionally, because beyond what has been said above is well known in this city, and as such we have declared it as fact and well known that said conversos live and act without fear of God. And furthermore they have shown and show themselves to be enemies of said city and its old Christian residents, and that notoriously at their petition, insistence and solicitation, a royal tax was placed on said city by the constable Don Alvaro de Luna45 and his henchmen and allies, our enemies, waging a cruel war of blood and fire, of crop destruction and pillaging, as if we were Moors, enemies of the Christian faith.

Such damages, evils, and wars, the Jews, enemies of our holy Catholic faith, have always caused, manifested, and even implemented since the passion of our Savior Jesus Christ. Even the Jews who lived in this city long ago, according to our ancient chronicles, when it was surrounded by the Moors, our enemies, led by their captain Tariq, after the death of the king Don Rodrigo,46 made a deal and sold said city and its Christians and gave entrance to said Moors. In this deal and contract it was decided that three hundred and six old Christians of the city were to be beheaded, and more than one hundred and six were taken from the cathedral and from the church of Santa Leocadia and carried off as captives and prisoners among whom were men and women, children and adults. Consequently, they have, and they do so every day said conversos, descendants of the Jews, through cunning and deceit, taken and carried off and stolen large and innumerable amounts of maravedis47 and silver from our king the lord and from his rents, rights, and taxes, and they have destroyed and ruined many noblewomen, knights and hidalgos.48 Consequently they have oppressed, destroyed, robbed and ravaged all the most ancient houses and estates of the old Christians of this city and its land and jurisdiction and all the realms of Castile, as is well known and as such we regard it.

Furthermore, during the time that they have held public office in this city, and its management and administration, the greater part of said city’s centers49 have been depopulated and destroyed; said city’s own land and centers [have been] lost and alienated.50 Beyond all this, all the maravedis of said city’s income and property have been consumed in their own interests and properties, in such a manner that all of the country’s wealth and reputation have been consumed and destroyed. They are made lords to destroy the holy Catholic faith and the old Christians who believe in it. In confirmation of this, it is well known to this city and its residents that here a short time ago said conversos rose up, assembled, and armed themselves, and as is public knowledge and well known, they set out with the intention and purpose to destroy all the old Christians and myself, the aforementioned Pedro Sarmiento, first and foremost among them, and to throw us out of said city, and to take it over and deliver it to our enemies. What has been said [here] is public and well known, and as such we hold and regard it, and thereby, pronouncing on this as a notorious case and fact, we find:

«That we must declare and pronounce, establish and order, and we do declare, pronounce, establish and order, that all said conversos, descendants of the perverse lineage of the Jews, to any extent, as much by virtue of canon and civil law that rules against them on the things declared above, as by virtue of the aforementioned privilege given to this city by the aforementioned Lord King of very glorious memory, Don Alfonso of Castile and Leon, progenitor of the King our Lord, and by the other Lord Kings his progenitors, and by their highness, [the aforementioned privilege was] sworn and confirmed, [and] as much by reason of the heresies and other offenses, insults, seditions and crimes committed and perpetrated by them to date, that they are to be regarded, just the law regards them, unable and unworthy to hold any office or benefice, public or private, in said city of Toledo, and in its land, boundary and jurisdiction, with which they can hold lordship over old Christians of the holy Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ or cause them damages and offenses. Additionally they are to be regarded as unable and unworthy to give testimony and faith as public scribes or as witnesses, especially in this city. By this judgment and declaration of ours, following the spirit and letter of the aforementioned privilege, liberties, and immunities of said city, we deprive them, and order them to be deprived, of any offices and benefices that they hold, and have held, in any manner in this city. And inasmuch as it is well known to us, and for such we pronounce it, those who follow are to be especially held and regarded as conversos of Jewish lineage:

López Fernández Cota.—Gonzalo Rodríguez de San Pedro, his nephew.—Juan Núñez, bachelor.—Pero Núñez y Diego Núñez, his brothers.—Juan Núñez, promoter.—Juan López del Arroyo.—Juan González de Illescas.—Pero Ortíz.—Diego Rodríguez el Albo.—Diego Martínez de Herrera.—Juan Fernández Cota.—Diego González Jarada, alcalde.—Pero González, his son, and every one of them.»

«Therefore we declare them to be removed from, and we remove them from, any notaries and other offices that they have and have held in this city and its boundary and jurisdiction, and we dictate to the aforementioned conversos, who live and dwell in it and its land, boundary and jurisdiction, that henceforth they may not testify in or benefit from said offices, especially the aforementioned public notaries and their exemptions, neither publicly nor secretly, neither directly nor indirectly, under pain of death and confiscation of all their goods by the walls of said city and its republic. Furthermore, we find that we must order, and we do order, the public scribes of the number51 of said city, Christians old and proper, to whom it belongs the election of said public notaries, that being vacant said notaries that the aforementioned conversos, descendants of Jewish lineage and breed,52 held and hold among themselves, to choose [new] public scribes of said number in accordance with the privilege and judgment granted to them by the Lord King Don Alfonso, named above, and by customary use, and guarding within said elections the form and the oath that must be made. We order that this judgment and its effect be publicly proclaimed in the usual public squares and markets of this city. And by this judgment and declaration, pronouncing and declaring as in well-known fact, we pronounce, declare, and order it in and by these writings.»

And thus given the aforementioned judgment, and read, in the manner that it is, by myself, the aforementioned scribe, Pasqual Gómez, and by the aforementioned Esteban García, attorney of said city, [who read it] in its name, and by Fernando López de Sahagún, public scribe of Toledo, [who read it] in name of himself and of the other public scribes of said city, [the aforementioned lords] stated: that they requested and did request that I, the aforementioned scribe, give it to them as public testimony as many times as they required for safeguard and conservation for the aforementioned parties and themselves. And I, the aforementioned scribe, by order of said gentlemen named above, gave to the aforementioned public scribes this public instrument, according to and in the manner that passed before me in said city of Toledo, on the day, month, year and place named above.

Furthermore, the aforementioned lords of Toledo stated that they wanted, and they ordered, that this judgment and lawsuit of theirs should have the force of a judgment or declaration, statute, or ordinance, or the best form that would be and is valid, and that it was to be, and that it is, issued in favor of the proper old Christians against the aforementioned conversos, and that it was to be understood, and is understood, that it was to be extended and is extended against the conversos past and present and future; but not in the proceedings and rulings,53 that to date they made into deeds or were presented by witnesses. Those should be valid as much as they legally will have to be and be able to be.

Witnesses who were present to this: Periáñez de Oseguera, knight commander of Toledo, of the Calatrava order, and Sancho de Fuelles, and Per Alvares de la Plata, and Fernán López de Sahagún, public scribes in said city. For this, they were especially summoned and requested.

And I, the aforementioned Pasqual Gómez, public scribe of Toledo, of the number and of the councils of said city, was present with the aforementioned witnesses to what has been declared. And by order of the aforementioned Pedro Sarmiento and said city, and by request and claim of the aforementioned Esteban García, the city’s attorney, I wrote this public instrument, and consequently I made here this seal of mine that is such in testimony of truth.—Pascual Gómez, public scribe.

End of the Translated Text


Endnotes

  1. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori. “Algunas noticias nuevas acerca de Rodrigo de Cota”. Boletín de la Real Academia Española, XIII. 1926.

 

  1. Benzion Netanyahu. The Origins of the Inquisition. Random House. 1995. (p.310) Netanyahu cites the Historia Eclesiástica de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo y Su Tierra by Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, which I do not have access to. His citation on page 1225 says the following:

Higuera, op. cit., lib. 28, cap. y, f. 222v, says that the común suspected Cota to have been the originator of the idea of the loan and that he influenced Alvaro to accept it. See Crónica, año 1449, cap. 2, pp. 661b-662a; Halconero, cap. 372, pp. 511-512

I also do not currently have access to the Crónica del Halconero, but the Crónica del Señor Rey Don Juan II cited states the following:

é porque oviéron sospecha, que un mercader muy rico é honrado vecino de la cibdad de Toledo, que se llamaba Alonso Cota, habia seydo movedor deste enprestido…

  1. Crónica del Señor Rey Don Juan II. Año 43, Capítulo I.:

Y el primero movedor del escándalo fué un odrero vecino desta cibdad de Toledo , é á su voz é apellido se juntó todo el común : é hallóse escrito en una piedra en letras góticas de gran tiempo, que decia así : Soplara el odrero , y alborotarseha Toledo.

Juan de Mata Carriazo. Refundición del Halconero. Espara-Calpe, S.A. Madrid, 1946. (p.CXCII):

…e como abaxaron a coger dos doblas a gente comun, que no las podian dar, por esta causa se ovo de levantar el comun. E fué causa un odrero, que le pusieron dos doblas; por esto decian: sopló el odrero, e levantóse Toledo.

  1. Juan de Mariana. Obras del padre Juan de Mariana. M. Rivadeneyra. Madrid. 1854. (p.130):

Cargaron sobre las casas de Alonso Cota y pegáronles fuego, con que por pasar muy adelante se quemó el barrio de la Madalena , morada en gran parte de los mercaderes ricos de la ciudad.

  1. Eloy Benito Ruano. Toledo en el siglo XV. Madrid. 1961. (p. 42) Ruano cites La Crónica del Halconero pages 520-526.
  2. Benzion Netanyahu. (p.962)
  3. There are several instances of Jewish law where this is stipulated, but some examples are: Bava Kemma 3:1 and 15a; The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume Five, in the article EVIDENCE (p.277) states that “The witness must be an Israelite. The Talmud seems to take this for granted.”
  4. Bava Kamma 113b and 114a state that a single Jew may not testify against another Jew in a secular court, but that two or more Jews meet the requirements of Jewish law. There is debate within Jewish scholarship about the exact nature of this law, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that on more than one occasion, crypto Jews and conversos gave false testimony for the benefit of their coethnics.
  5. Kate Sheehy. “Stoolie is ‘Dead’ to His Daddy”. www.nypost.com. Published July 28, 2009, 6:59 a.m. ET
  6. Ami Eden. “Disowning Dwek?”. www.jta.org. Published July 28, 2009 7:10 PM. This Orthodox Jewish blog claimed that Rabbi Dwek never actually invoked the Talmudic laws of moser nor did he begin sitting shiva, however, the blog reported the following:

Rabbi Dweck delivered a very emotional sermon in which he strongly denounced the phenomenon of a Jew informing on other Jews, said that he is also a victim in this saga together with Klal Yisroel, and asked for prayers from the entire Jewish community for his terrible suffering.

  1. Benzion Netanyahu. (p.301)
  2. Ibid. He makes his case in Chapter III on pages 301-313. The quotes are on page 303.
  3. Eloy Benito Ruano gives a good outline in Chapter Two of his book.
  4. Ibid. (p.49-50)
  5. Richard Lynn. North-South Differences in Spain in IQ, Educational Attainment, per capita Income, Literacy, Life Expectancy and Employment. Mankind Quarterly, Vol 52, No. 3. March 2012. (p. 265-291)
  6. Juif et al. Numeracy of Religious Minorities in Spain and Portugal in the Inquisition Era. Revista de Historia Economica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 38(1):1-38. November, 2019.
  7. Salo Baron. Ghetto and Emancipation; shall we revise the traditional view?. The Menorah Journal. New York. 1928. (p.1-4)
  8. Ibid. Ruano discusses this on page 70 and cites the declaration from the pope, a copy of which he has included on page 201. See “1449. Septiembre, 24. Fabriano”
  9. Ibid. (p.53)
  10. Crónica del Señor Rey Don Juan II. Año 44, Capítulo I.
  11. …por quanto era informado quel dicho Pero Sarmiento no contento de los males que había hecho, todavía perseveraba en hacer otros mayores…
  12. …é aun que trataba con el Rey para entregarle la cibdad…
  13. …é pasáron allí en Toledo en correr toros é jugar cañas ocho, ó diez dias, en fin de los quales el Príncipe enbió á decir á Pero Sarmiento, que le rogaba que le entregase el alcázar, y dexase el Alcaydía mayor de la cibdad…
  14. …é díxole como la voluntad del príncipe era que le desenbargase la cibdad de Toledo…
  15. Benzion Netanyahu. (p.1108)
  16. Crónica del Señor Rey Don Juan II. Año 44, Capítulo I. The original text reads:

E desque el Rey, que estaba en Valladolid, supo como aquella hacienda que Pero Sarmiento habia robado en Toledo estaba gran parte della en Gumiel de mercado, embió allá á un Escribano de Cámara que se llamaba Fernán Alonso de Toledo, para que todo lo tomase por ante Escribano, é lo truxese al Rey, lo qual así se hizo.

  1. Benzion Netanyahu. (p.1107-1108)
  2. Ibid.
  3. Eloy Benito Ruano. (p.216) “1451. Marzo, 21. Torrijos”
  4. Ibid. (p.76) See also “1451. Agosto, 13. Santo Domingo de la Calzada” on page 222.
  5. Ibid. (p.76) See also “1451, Noviembre, 20. Roma” on page 223.
  6. Laura Canabal Rodríguez. “Pero Sarmiento.” www.rae.es.
  7. Vicente Ángel Álvarez Palenzuela. “Álvaro de Luna”. www.rae.es.
  8. Andrés Bernáldez. Historia de los reyes católicos. (p. 332)
  1. Benzion Netanyahu. (p.xvi)
  2. Kevin MacDonald. Separation and Its Discontents. (p. 124-125)
  3. See Book III, Title I, Section II of the Visigothic Codex. The law negates the former Gothic forbiddance of exogamous marriages. Here is Samuel Parsons Scott’s translation:

It shall be as Lawful for a Roman Woman to Marry a Goth, as for a Gothic Woman to Marry a Roman. The zealous care of the prince is recognized, when, for the sake of future utility, the benefit of the people is provided for; and it should be a source of no little congratulation, if the ancient law, which sought improperly to prevent the marriage of persons equal in dignity and lineage, should be abrogated. For this reason, we hereby sanction a better law; and, declaring the ancient one to be void, we decree that if any Goth wishes to marry a Roman woman, or any Roman a Gothic woman, permission being first requested, they shall be permitted to marry. And any freeman shall have the right to marry any free woman; permission of the Council and of her family having been previously obtained.

  1. Kevin MacDonald. A People That Shall Dwell Alone. (p.16)
  2. The Diccionario del Castellano del Siglo XV (hereafter DCS XV) defines repostero as a “royal official tasked with the care of the palace’s domestic items.” Some have translated the word as “butler,” but Pedro Sarmiento was not Juan II’s “butler.” It may just be an honorific title of sorts.
  3. Today acalde usually translates as “mayor,” but the acalde mayor de las alzadas was more akin to a “chief judge of appeals.” Pedro Sarmiento was not the “mayor” of Toledo. The DCS XV states some of the following:

Tomado del árabe andalusí alqádi, ‘juez’, derivado del verbo qádà, ‘juzgar’. Nebrija (Lex1, 1492): Praetor primus. el alcalde dela alçada. Praetro. oris. por alcalde o corregidor. Propraetor. oris. alcalde extraordinario. Rudis rudis. por la vara del alcalde. Uindicta. ae. por la vara del alcalde.

  1. In case it is unclear, the text is stating that the “highness” of the old kings is what confirmed the “privileges, exemptions and freedoms.”
  2. The original phrasing here was “los christianos viejos lindos.” Today, the word lindo is usually translated as ‘beautiful’ but at the time, the word was more akin to its Latin root legitimum. From the DCS XV:

Del latín LEGITIMUM, ‘legítimo, conforme a la ley’, derivado de LEX, ‘ley’.

Nebrija (Lex1, 1492): *Legitimus .a .um. por cosa de lei.

Nebrija (Voc1, ca. 1495 y Voc2, 1513): Linda cosa. nitidus .a .um. elegans .tis.

  1. This literally translates as “assistant” but the exact nature of the position is unclear. The king had many asistentes, and Sarmiento was his asistente in Toledo.
  2. Kenneth Baxter claims in his partial translation (see his footnotes) that this is “a concept connected to the cabalist movement within medieval Iberian Judaism. The idea of a female counterpart to God—known as Shekhina—may have been influenced by Latin Christian devotion of Mary which intensified in the twelfth century.”
  3. This is a reference to the initial tax imposed on the city that led to the outbreak of the rebellion.
  4. 46. This is a reference to the Visigothic king Roderic who died in battle against the Moorish invaders led by Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711.
  5. Originally this was a type of physical coin, but by the 15th century a maravedis was an abstract counting unit. The DCS XV defines a maravedis as having a value of two blancas in Castile. Six of the latter would’ve been worth one silver real.
  6. This is another Spanish and Portuguese term for nobility. It is a condensed form of hijo de algo or ‘son of something’. Hijo derives from the Latin filium meaning ‘son’ and algo derives from the Arabic aliquod meaning ‘a part of something larger.’ The word essentially describes ‘landed gentry.’ The DCS XV defines hidalgo as a “person belonging to a privileged social class, who does not live from his work but rather from his properties over which he has limited power.”
  7. The original Spanish is “los lugares de la dicha cibdad.” Lugar is usually translated as ‘place’ but the DCS XV defines “lugar” as a “núcleo urbano, particularmente cuando no es de gran extensión.” Given the context, I think the author is discussing urban commercial centers and properties.
  8. The original Spanish word is “enajenados.” The concept conveyed is that the ownership of the properties had been transferred to others. The DCS XV defines the word as “pasar <una persona> la propiedad de [algo] o un derecho sobre ella a [alguien].”
  9. Even today in many Spanish-speaking countries, public notaries are numbered, but perhaps an explanation is warranted to avoid confusion. The Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish explains this as follows:

[A] council officer who could only exercise his office in the town or district to which he was assigned. They are called ‘of the number’ because generally in each locality or district there was a certain number of them, which could not be exceeded.

  1. The word used here was “ralea” which the DCS XV defines as “naturaleza o clase a que pertenece una persona o una cosa.”
  2. The phrase here was “las causas e cosas.” I think given the legal context, “cosa” is short for “cosa juzgada” which the DCS XV defines as “efecto de la sentencia firme que hace indiscutible la resolución judicial.”

 

Starlets of David: Two Vicious Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in the Jewish Chronicle

As I’ve described in the articles “Free Speech Must Die!” and “Trashing the Torah,” Jews across the West are promoting a ludicrously vague definition of anti-Semitism devised by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The definition is designed to end free speech about Jewish power and runs like this:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. (What is Antisemitism?, The Campaign Against Antisemitism)

The alleged priorities of Jews

The definition has been adopted “in full” by the British Conservative party, the Florida House of government, and many other Western institutions and organizations. It’s accompanied by a long list of “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” one of which runs like this:

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations. (What is Antisemitism?)

And yes, anti-Semites certainly do accuse “Jewish citizens” of disloyalty to the gentile nations in which they currently live. For example, in “A Shameless Shabbos Shiksa,” I said that Stuart Polak, a former director of Conservative Friends of Israel, was concerned only about Israel and Jewish interests, not about Britain. But it isn’t only hate-sites like the Occidental Observer that promote this horrible stereotype of Jewish disloyalty. You can also find the stereotype promoted in Britain’s oldest and most successful Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle.

More loyal to Israel

How is that possible? Very easily, it appears. The Jewish Chronicle has recently reported that the all-Jewish soccer team Maccabi London Lions F.C. sent some of its junior players to an all-Jewish soccer tournament in Holland called Jom Ha Voetbal, or “Day of Football” (Jom Ha means “Day (of) the” in Hebrew and Voetbal means “Football” in Dutch). In celebration of their success at the tournament, a junior Maccabi team and its two adult supervisors posed on the playing field with a Maccabi F.C. flag like this:

Starlets of David: Maccabi London F.C. pose with an Israeli flag

As you can see, eleven Jewish citizens of Britain chose to celebrate by posing proudly not with a British or English flag, but with an Israeli flag bearing the Star of David. Are these Jewish citizens “more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nation”? Well, what other conclusion can you draw? And when the Jewish Chronicle ran that photo in July 2019, it did so under the approving headline “Maccabi London starlets sparkle on European stage.” In other words, the Jewish Chronicle is very happy to promote a “contemporary example of antisemitism.” The Jewish Chronicle takes primary loyalty to Israel as a given among British Jews, while simultaneously condemning all gentiles who point out this primary loyalty. Read more

Kissinger’s role in gaining U.S. acceptance of Israeli nukes a case study in Zionist manipulation

On August 20 PressTV carried an article titled “Kissinger tried to curb Israeli nukes: State Dept. documents.” The article starts by stating “The US State Department has released documents that show the administration of former president Richard Nixon had sought to curb Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.” In fact, the documents were released in 2006, but they are fascinating and certainly relevent to the Iran nuclear deal in that they show the unbelievable double standard that is being applied to Iran compared to Israel.

The title of the article is also misleading, as it becomes apparent upon reading the documents that while the gentiles in the administration wanted to halt Israel’s nuclear weapons development, Kissinger (the National Security Advisor and the administration’s most high-profile Jew) actually restrained the administration from using its considerable leverage to halt the Israeli nuclear program and instead successfully championed the policy of accepting Israel as a de facto nuclear weapons state as long as it made no public declarations of its possession of nuclear weapons and allowed the United States to maintain plausible deniability of knowledge of Israeli nukes.

The PressTV article specifically quotes from a July 19, 1969 memo from Kissinger to Nixon (available here from the Nixon Library). Kissinger told Nixon that “while we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact,”

Kissinger, as National Security Advisor, was head of a small task force made up to handle the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons program that was made up of himself, Under Secretary of State Elliott Richardson, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler. Read more

Holy warriors and Jewish Jihad: Diaspora Jews in the IDF

It was while on a school visit to a Nazi concentration camp site in Poland that a north London schoolboy called Max Compton underwent the religious awakening that would change his life.

Filled with Zionist enthusiasm, eighteen-year-old Max decided to leave England and join the Israel Defence Force and defend his homeland and his people.  His strongly Jewish family backed him all the way and as his mum recounted later, his swearing-in ceremony at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was “an extremely emotional and proud experience”.

And so it was that young Max was recruited into one of the most notorious units in the Israeli army, the Givati Brigade. The “Givatis’” are one of Israel’s most aggressive front-line combat units, and proud of their hard-line reputation. Their name often comes up in connection with contentious and unjustified actions such as the shootings of Palestinian teenagers. Read more

The ZBT Media Blackout

When one thinks of fraternities, the usual associations are all wrong from the viewpoint of the left. This is presumably why the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia was targeted by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. After all, she described UVA students as “throngs of toned, tanned, and overwhelmingly blond students” — doubtless incipient Nazis in Erdely’s overactive ethnic imagination.

So it’s quite odd to find a fraternity that does things like spitting on wounded U.S. military veterans and throwing beer bottles at them. Or tearing American flags off cars of military veterans and urinating on them.

But that’s what some members of the Zeta Beta Tau chapter at the University of Florida did, with the result that the chapter has been shut down. No students were expelled from the university.

The media was up in arms about the UVA story until reality intruded. However, the ZBT incident received no national news coverage, although it was covered by some local media. This is quite unlike the case where students at the University of Oklahoma were videotaped singing a song derogatory to Blacks — a major national story with articles in the NYTimes, LATimes, etc. In the OU case, the students involved were expelled, despite high-profile ponderings on whether the expulsions violated students’ free speech rights.

There has also been no mention of this incident in the Jewish press. The Forward and JTA have had several stories on ZBT over the years, and in December, 2014 a Forward article distributed  by JTA noted that ZBT is one of several “historically Jewish Greek houses.” The story was occasioned by the UVA rape allegations, and highlighted the role of ZBT in combating rape on campus, including a quote from a rabbi that is intended to place the story in context: “The prevention of suffering is what we do as Jews, and making pathways for people to heal if they’ve been traumatized is also what we do.” No word if ZBT is reaching out to the wounded veterans.

Andrew Joyce has written about the very old  Jewish  reputation, dating from Roman times, of Jews avoiding military service in the Diaspora. Such behavior obviously feeds into the loyalty issue — that Jews have no loyalty to the nations of the diaspora — given the contempt shown for the symbols of American  patriotism. Joyce cites an academic work on Jews and the military by Derek Penslar who wrote, regarding the numbers of Jews serving in the U.S. military in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Jews “were decidedly underrepresented. … American Jews and the U.S. military are still not a natural fit” — this despite the very clear and decisive role of the Israel Lobby in promoting the Iraq war.

In any case, Penslar’s statement seems to be borne out by the actions of the ZBT chapter of the University of Florida.

Advance Ethnic Warfare. Chill Criticism: The Moral and Political Fraud of Anti-Semitic Theory

Jewish gatekeepers are concerned. And for good reason. Anti-Semitism is once again ‘on the rise’.  Even new strains of anti-Semitism are threatening to break loose. This is where the scientific study of anti-Semitism comes in.

One scholar that’s devoted to this subject is Dr. Charles Ascher Small, founder and director of the New York based Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP).  ISGAP now has offices on college campuses in Canada, Europe and the US.  Recently, the Jerusalem Post interviewed Dr. Small who, not surprisingly, sees himself an expert on this subject. Small offered these provocative insights:

[Anti-Semitism] is inherently genocidal, because when the dominant way of perceiving reality was through the lens of religion, the Jews were the wrong religion and they were blinded by evil for not accepting the Christian notion of the messiah, so in order for the individual Jew to redeemed he or she had to accept the Christian version of the messiah.

Small, like virtually all of the world’s ‘experts’ on anti-Semitism (including the bizarre Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin whose profundities were recently reviewed in TOO by Andrew Joyce), happens to be Jewish. Acknowledging that Muslims and atheists can also be ‘anti-Semitic’, Dr. Small nuances his analysis by saying that other groups mistakenly tar the Jews unfairly by viewing them through the lens of racial (impurity) or other xenophobic avenues.

‘”In contemporary times, says Dr. Small, “Israel, as the Jewish nation-state, has become a stand-in for the Jew in this regard.
“Now people in governments in the Western world, in the United States and Europe, say that for the world to be saved the stubborn Jew has to change. Not only to they have to change to protect their own society, but if only the stubborn Israelis would change, jihadism and radical Islam will dissipate.
The world will be saved.
And this is a very dangerous aspect of anti-Semitism that is irrational,” he asserted.’

Dr. Small has given the world a very concise and multi-purpose theory. It reveals a lot. Mostly, it reveals the self-serving mission of Jewish theories of Anti-Semitism. Dr.Small’s familiar storyline goes this way:

Jews are continuously persecuted but always blameless. This is because ‘anti-Semitism’ is a disease. And for murky reasons, Jews are the only target of this unique sickness. Key axioms baked into anti-Semitic theory include: (1) Jewish innocence, and (2) eternal and unjustified outside hostility which Small says is ‘irrational’.

How shall we explain this to the Palestinians? Read more