 limpia” (clean, pure blood), i.e. purely Christian blood. In practice, it was a fiction; as Spain had the biggest Jewish community of medieval Europe and inter-ethnic marriages and conversions were common, very little people had really "pure" blood. Torquemada himself was a grandson of anusim, (forced converts) but he didn’t let this detail bother him; he decided to purify the country. He developed a methodical, cold and merciless work of pursuit to the cripto-judeus that resulted in the death of thirty thousand victims.
To stimulate the accusations, the Inquisition published a set of directions to teach the Catholics how to watch their neighbors and to recognize possible traces of Judaism. Torquemada wrote the instructions from 1484 to 1498, in which the Spanish Inquisition’s organizational and procedure of the regulation was fixed.
Torture was widely used when the Jew was accused of contradiction or if he denied confessing his heresy.
And from the tortures to extract confessions originated the expression “to swear with joined feet” (non-existent in English but equivalent in meaning to “cross my heart”), used to emphasize the truth of something said. In Portugal it is common to say “to swear on joined feet” and “to deny on joined feet”. In Spain, the expression is used in the sense of believing blindly in something (“to believe with the joined feet”).
The suspect of heresy against the Church had his hands and feet tied (or nailed in wooden poles or lifted in the ceiling by the feet). In this position, the accused promised quickly to say nothing but the truth. He was widely tortured until confess himself heretic or denied the charges – what was not even useful, since he would end in the dungeon for the rest of the life or in a bonfire in public square. As a matter of fact, to “deny with joined feet” also hardly would move the impassive agents of the Holy Office.
There are reasons to believe that Kol Nidrei which is a solemn plea for the divine redemption from the vows taken by Crypto-Jews in their forced conversion. Kol Nedrei was composed much earlier but it is reasoned that it became popular at this time. Many people frequented the synagogue secretly, risking their lives and used the text of Kol Nidrei like a formula of giving up the vows imposed by the Inquisition.
Still inside macabre ironies of the History, in 12th of October of 1535, Pope Paul III granted general pardon to the Crypto-Jews creating, in the following year, the Inquisition in Portugal. It was also in October, of 1765, the last public “auto de fé” carried out in Lisbon, which condemned Judaism.
While remembering the history and the past sufferings, Jewish people must proclaim, with the conviction of a surviving humanism, amid fire and blood: Torture, never again!
Published in Visão Judaica # 96,December 2010(In Portuguese)
* Jane Bichmacher de Glasman is a writer, Ph.D. in Hebrew Language, Jewish Literatures and Culture, Creator and former-director of the Program of Jewish Studies at State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Professor and coordinator of the Department of Hebrew Studies at UERJ and UFRJ (retired).
from the December 2010 Edition of the Jewish Magazine
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