CATHOLICISM AND RACE AS AN ANTINOMY IN THE WEST
Any study of the expansion and subsequent universalization of citizenship, which is the focus of this paper, must examine the contradictions that emerged between universalist ambitions and three historical processes: categorization, segregation, and extermination.
In studying the societies of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern era, the question arises of the incompatibility between, on the one hand, Saint Paul’s message (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” [Galatians 3:28]) and the effectiveness of grace (“if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” [Galatians 3:29]), and rules of segregation founded upon an assertion of natural inferiority and the inability of people to change, on the other. The most salient case in Early Modern Europe was the fate of the descendants of converts in Iberian societies, branches of families that had been Jewish or Muslim before those faiths were outlawed. Holding on to one’s faith more dearly than the land in which one had been born had meant departure. The alternative was to stay and convert. These dual movements of exile and conversion created a situation in which families that had previously been denied all access to statuses, offices, and advantages reserved for Christians alone, could integrate into society as converts. The success of this socio-political transformation, however, provoked a counter-reaction from the social majority. This took the form of institutions of various kinds - universities, schools, religious and military orders, brotherhoods, courts, municipalities, etc - adopting statutes of blood purity. The purpose of these rules was to deny access to Christians descended from converted Jews or Muslims, no matter how far back the conversion of their ancestors.It was then that certain men of letters denounced the blood purity statutes. The application of these rules, they argued, rested on the postulate that the sacrament of baptism was null and void and that grace was ineffective.[358] Most of the accounts of how these blood purity statutes were implemented suggest that their drafting and enforcement were possible only because these processes were launched by societal institutions and bodies individually, without the involvement of the monarchy, or even the Church, except when they came to accept them a posteriori. This was a movement that was therefore both particular and generalized, and its structure indicates that the desire for exclusion and segregation was widespread in Iberian societies, outside of any pressure from the higher political and spiritual authorities.[359] If a royal decree had marked the descendents of converts with a specific and degrading status within the Christian communion, then the monarchy would have been decreeing a general rule that belied the efficacy of baptism. Far from undermining the hypothesis of the precocious development of racial politics, the fact that blood purity statutes were never, and could never have been, inscribed in either a royal law or pontifical document, actually reinforces it. In effect, it was precisely because these statutes rested on the idea that a bad nature, transmitted by heredity, could never be erased by the sacrament of baptism that they could never have taken the legal form of a decree by the king. The royal decisions adopted by the crowns of Castille, Aragon, and Portugal were of a wholly different nature. They rested on two types of complementary decisions: the expulsion of the infidels and the conversion of those who refused to leave the Iberian Peninsula.[360]
The blood purity statutes, in effect, categorized and excluded individuals a priori upon the basis of their genealogy alone. And they did so independent of any investigation into the moral and religious convictions of the descendants of converts, as they were not designed to judge the sincerity of conversions.
A systemic suspicion of the spiritual reality of all conversions, and of all neophyte baptisms, lay behind these statutes, but always at the scale of particular institutions or bodies that established these rules of access based upon the criteria of blood purity. As local and particular as they may have been, these blood purity statutes were no less built upon a theory that was, from the perspective of Roman Catholic dogma, heresy. These measures entered into ideological contradiction with the religious framework in which they inscribed themselves and which they claimed to serve better than any other rule.This contradiction would seem to correspond to the thesis defended by a number of historians, in both Portugal and Spain, according to which many descendants of converts were in practice able to integrate the bodies and institutions that were in principle forbidden to them. In other words, these statutes would have been contestable in theory and circumvented in practice. For many historians, uncovering numerous transgressions constitutes proof that these statutes did not have a significant impact on the mechanisms of social regulation.[361] Without entering here into a rather lively debate between early modern historians, I will simply put forward two considerations. First, these statutes were not initially adopted to prevent converts from being admitted to certain bodies or institutions, but rather because many of them had already joined them. In other words, these measures were a counter-reaction designed to halt a process of integration that was already underway. This explains why it is not surprising to find among the members of these bodies individuals who belong to families of reprobate origins. Second, the fact that a certain number of the candidates for admission to these institutions and bodies managed to achieve their goals despite the regulatory obstacles does not imply that these rules did not shatter the aspirations of other candidates affected by the same shameful origins. What is more, it would be important to figure out under what conditions these transgressions were possible: did it take longer, was it necessary to build up a weightier network of patronage, to pay more disguised bribes, etc. when one bore the label of bad family origins? Without wishing to cut this discussion short, for the time being it seems reasonable to continue to take the blood purity statutes quite seriously, and not to lose sight of the extent to which they remained antinomical with respect to the theology of grace taught by the Roman Catholic Church.
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