A Special Case: The Holy Spring of Matarieh

The selection of the texts is thus primarily determined by the main topics of the book, the three physical markers. I also orient myself on the referential networks found in the writings. The central theme is therefore the explicit reference to other authors, who are often found in the glosses of the publications, but also to argumentative traditions that are implicit and must be traced. However, the consequence of this approach – both in the thematic focal points and in the referential networks – is that the bodies of sources can be very different from chapter to chapter.

In the chapter on New Christian wet nurse’s breast milk, for example, both legislative texts and late medieval employment contracts serve as sources. However, it is precisely the legislative texts that primarily provide information about the norms and ideals and less about the actually prevailing customs. Unfortunately, it is hardly possible to make substantiated statements about the practice of hiring wet nurses in the royal household. The sources in the Royal Palace Archive of Madrid on wet nurses⁹⁹ do not provide any information, for example, about the exact criteria according to which wet nurses were selected. However, it is repeatedly mentioned in a potential hiring that initially

“information” is to be obtained,hacer las informaciones.¹⁰⁰Here, the same terminology is used as in the practice of the purity of blood statutes and the genealogical investigations associated with this.

Often, however, the focus of the sources on the royal wet nurses is more on their payment or on the doctors who were responsible for proposing and selecting the wet nurses.

The theme of “Jewish male” menstruation is based on a multitude of very different literary and exegetical motifs, of which Willis Johnson¹⁰¹has provided a good summary. Consequently, I have confined myself primarily to the motifs discussed in the debate on the ideology of blood purity in the Iberian region. It would have been interesting to draw on Francisco de Andrada’s Inquisition file for a comparison, as the text by Juan de Quiñones is based on the course of that trial and the disorder of monthly blood flow was evidently claimed. However, it seems that the file is no longer preserved, and there is no mention of menstrual disorder in the case of the accused person, even in the various reports on the auto-da-fé of 1632 where the accused people are listed. The only information we receive about the accused person is his place of birth, his age, the reason for the accusation and the ruling. This is what is said in one report:

“Francisco de Andrada, Portuguese, from Alcobaça, archdiocese of Lisbon, 28 years old, was dragged out with sanbenito for practicing Judaism, was sentenced to wear the sanbenito and be eternally imprisoned, and distanced himself from itde vehementi.”¹⁰²

99 The work of Luis Cortés Echanóve is largely based on this body of sources and therefore offers an interesting overview: Luis CORTÉS ECHÁNOVE: Nacimiento y crianza de personas reales en la corte de España 1566 – 1886, Madrid 1958.

100 AGP: Amas de lactancia. Felipe IV. Relaciones de amas de pecho y respuesto con sueldos y gajes durante todo el reinado, 1651 – 1655.

101 Willis JOHNSON: The Myth of Jewish Male Menses, in: Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998), 273– 295, URL:

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4181(98)00009-8 (visited on 27/02 /2019), Table 282.

102 “Francisco de Andrada, Portuguès, natural de Alcobaz, Arçobispado de Lisboa, de edad de veinte y ocho años, fue sacado con sambenito por Iudaiçante, fue condenado à habito, y carcel perpetua, y jurò de vehementi.” AHN:

Relación del auto de la fee que se celebro en la villa de Madrid Corte de su Magestad domingo quatro de Jullio de mill y seiscientos y treinta y dos años, s.a. [1632?] (see n. 81), 13v; in regard to the importance of the ruling, also see chapter3. 4.3 The Special Case of Juan de Quiñones.

In other reports, the description is even more sparse. In a handwritten report, Andrada is listed as Accused Person No. 23, with only the following stated: “Francisco de Andrada, Portuguese, resi-dent of Madrid, [accused] of observance of Mosaic law: sanbenito and eternal imprisonment”¹⁰³. In another report he is listed as Accused Person No. 14 and it is stated that he was also accused of sor-cery, “por hechiçero, y Judio.”¹⁰⁴Whether the alleged blood flow disorder in the case of Francisco de Andrada was actually discussed and interpreted accordingly, as Juan de Quiñones claims in his exposé, cannot be examined as a result.

In general, the discussion about physical markers of New Christians is hardly found in the In-quisition files that I examined randomly. I focused my review on the InIn-quisition trials of accused Converso physicians, as I suspected that their medical knowledge would cause them to be more likely to deal with the idea of physical markers. My assumption was confirmed to the extent that the physicians used their knowledge to assert themselves in the hearings before the Inquisition court.

This can be seen, for example, in the previously mentioned case of Juan Nuñez.¹⁰⁵ An allusion to the alleged physical markers was found only indirectly in the file of Phelipe de Najara.

In the case of the physician Najara, his cell mate Julio de Toledo testified against him several times and put words in his mouth. Julio de Toledo, himself a physician and, according to his own statements, 25 years old and a descendant of an early converted Morisco family,¹⁰⁶evidently tried to obtain better conditions for his own hearing by denouncing Phelipe de Najara. He repeatedly asked for an audience in the Inquisition court to testify against his cell mate. In one of these conversations, he talks about the subject of breast milk:

“He [Julio de Toledo] also said that he had heard the mentioned licentiate Najara say that the Portuguese imbibe Judaism from breast milk […].”¹⁰⁷

Here, the idea of passing on religious convictions through breast milk and thus one of the physical markers is adopted. Whether Phelipe de Najara really made this claim or whether it originated from Julio de Toledo’s imagination must remain open at this point. The passage at least shows that the breast milk argument was also common among the New Christians. Julio de Toledo evidently relied on the fact that he could defame his cell mate by putting such words in his mouth. That he was also familiar with the particular skepticism and conspiracy theories surrounding Portuguese Converso merchants living in Madrid can be seen in his subsequent statements, which he in turn claims to have heard from Najara. Allegedly, Najara said that the Portuguese Conversos only came to Madrid and other regions of the Spanish kingdom to make quick and big profits, and then leave for France out of fear of the Inquisition. This passage also reveals that Julio de Toledo was familiar with the

103 “Francisco de andrada portugues vecino de Madrid por obserbante de la ley de moysen. havito y carcel perpetua”

BNE: Relación del auto de la fe que se celebró en Madrid Domingo a quatro de iulio de MDCXXXII (see n. 82).

104 BNE: Papeles Varios. 7. Autos generales y particulares celebrados por la Inquisición en los años 1555 – 1721, 60r, former pagination 42r.

105 AHN: Causa de fe de Juan Nuñez, 1678 – 1681 (see n. 64).

106 AHN: Causa de fe Phelipe de Najara, 1605 – 1610, 172r – 172v.

107 “Iten dixo que este le a oido deçir al dicho licenciado de Naxara que los portugueses maman en la leche el ser Judios […].” Ibidem, 173v – 174r.

classical arguments against the Portuguese Conversos. Apart from this short passage, which was not discussed any more during the course of the trial and which was already known in research due to Julio Caro Baroja (1914 – 1995),¹⁰⁸ I did not find any further discussion, at least in my random samples, of the alleged physical markers of the Conversos in the Inquisition records.

Body topics are certainly discussed, and this is also done in light of medical aspects. For example, the physician Najara argued that the reason he does not eat bacon has nothing to do with the fact that he avoids pork for religious reasons, but is due to the fact that he suffers from gout.¹⁰⁹However, the question of the physical markers of the Conversos was apparently not addressed by the accused physicians and perhaps even deliberately avoided since they may have been aware that, for example, the attempt at rebuttal as an argumentation strategy in court was by no means promising and that they would thus generally move into uncertain territory.

With regard to the chapter on the New Christian stigma of smell, literary sources also become central, as could already be shown above in the passage from Quevedo’sBuscón. Consequently, this last chapter contains a genre of text that did not play a role in the other two chapters. Especially the literature of the Spanish Golden Age, theSiglo de Oro, provides a good indicator, however, of how well known and widespread the idea of a New Christian stigma of smell was on the Iberian Peninsula since allusions were usually sufficient for the readership.

Thus, different source texts as well as different approaches are used for the individual physical markers that the Conversos and in part the Moriscos allegedly had. These different texts and ap-proaches are due to the various traditions that these physical attributions can be traced back to. The theoretical discussions are the focus of the book, but it is also possible to shed light on practical everyday experiences through wet nurse contracts, Inquisition records and patient reports published by physicians such as theCenturiaeby Amato Lusitano (1510 /11 – 1568).

1.6 Body, Gender, Senses and “Race”

In order to analyze the three physical attributions in the sources and to check for possible biologiza-tion, it seems sensible to clarify in advance how the body is understood in the texts. The history of the body proves to be a helpful approach because it assumes a historicity of the body. This means that both conceptions of the body and experiences of the body change throughout history, con-fronting us with a multitude of competing models – both during a specific period of time and over the course of time in general. Maren Lorenz puts it in a nutshell drastically when she says:

“‘Mankind,’ statically as man, at best as neuter, historically mostly conceived of as an anony-mous mass, never existed as such except as a fictional stereotype. Even within a society at a certain time, there is an infinite variance of ‘forms,’ which are distinguished from each other in appearance alone, e.g. roughly by gender, skin color, age, social class or degree of physical integrity.”¹¹⁰

108 Julio CARO BAROJA: Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, vol. 2, Madrid 1962, 201.

109 AHN: Causa de fe Phelipe de Najara, 1605 – 1610 (see n. 106), 173v – 174r.

110 Translation by Henry Whittlesey Schroeder; “‘Der Mensch’, statisch als Mann, bestenfalls als Neutrum, historisch

With regard to the question of physical attributions, it is even possible to speak of a double fiction since it is not the New Christian body itself that is considered, but the conceptions and ideas that were rumored to exist in the New Christian body and differentiate such a body from the Old Christian bodies, according to the ideologists of blood purity. Simultaneously, these fictitious body images were documented and attributed to really existing bodies “in the flesh,” so to say, as could be seen in the example of Francisco Andrada.

Barbara Duden proposed to differentiate between the concepts of flesh and body, i.e. between the really existing body and the culturally constructed body. To this end, she refers to a fierce debate over the history of the body at the end of the 1990s, which moved between the extreme positions of essentialism and constructivism. That many researchers find access to the body (Körper) as a socio-cultural construction easier than to the flesh (Leib) of matter and blood is, according to her, also due to the fact that our current understanding of the body strongly promotes this perspective.¹¹¹ Such positions show, above all, the concern that the flesh-body could be negated and the body could be perceived exclusively as constructed linguistically and culturally.

Similar objections can also be found with regard to the subject of gender, which is closely tied to the body just as the history of the body is closely tied to the history of gender. According to Judith Butler, gender can also be distinguished here between the biologicalsex and the culturally constructedgender. In her book Bodies that Matter, Butler uses the concept of materiality, how-ever, to refer to the permanent interaction betweensexandgender, which makes a strict separation between the two areas impossible:

“[…] there will be no way to understand ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex. Rather, once ‘sex’

itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm. ‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility.”¹¹² Just assex cannot simply be defined as the tangible really existing biological form of gender, on which the cultural construction has been superimposed in the form of thegenderconcept, the flesh (Leib) cannot be defined as preceding the body (Körper). Both body and gender prove to be far less understandable for analytical purposes than one would initially assume. However, this does not mean that the idea of linguistic and cultural constructions will fundamentally negate the material

meist als anonyme Masse gedacht, hat außer als fiktives Stereotyp so nie existiert. Selbst innerhalb einer Gesellschaft zu einer bestimmten Zeit gibt es eine unendliche Varianz von ‘Formen’, die von den jeweils anderen schon allein äußerlich, z. B. grob nach Geschlecht, Hautfarbe, Alter, sozialer Klasse oder Grad an körperlicher Unversehrtheit unterschieden werden.” Maren LORENZ: Leibhaftige Vergangenheit: Einführung in die Körpergeschichte, Tübingen 2000, 15.

111 Barbara DUDEN: Das “System” unter der Haut: Anmerkungen zum körpergeschichtlichen Bruch der 1990er Jahre, in: österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 8 (1997), 260 – 273, here 262, 272.

112 Judith BUTLER: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, London and New York (first edition 1993) 2011, xii.

reality and truthfulness of flesh (Leib) andsexor wants to deprive biologists and physicians of their core business, as Ferdinand Knauß¹¹³fears. Instead, it is simply a matter of becoming aware of our own limitations imposed on us by our own socialization and by the medium of language. In light of the interplay between language and body, Judith Butler states:

“To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body.”¹¹⁴

The medium of language and one’s own socialization and cultural influence cannot be denied in an analysis of body and gender. This also applies to the realm of the senses, which has recently come into focus through anthropology and cultural history of the senses.¹¹⁵ In contrast to the history of the body and gender, however, no attempt was made here to distinguish between the purely physiological and the culturally defined sensory perceptions by introducing corresponding concepts.

For olfactory perception, which is analyzed in more detail in the chapter on the New Christian stigma of smell, such a differentiation can be found in the concept of hedonics, however in the medical field. This is what Hannes Hatt’s introduction to sensory physiology says:

“The ability to smell is influenced by various physical factors such as temperature and humidity as well as by physiological parameters, e.g. hormones. The subjective assessment of a fragrance as pleasant or unpleasant is called hedonics. This assessment is not genetically determined, but shaped by educational and cultural influences over the course of life.”¹¹⁶

Since all three categories – body, gender and senses – are highly influenced by culture, these peculiarities must be taken into account through socialization because they are precisely the ones that are subject to historical changes. At the same time, it is not possible to distinguish precisely between flesh and body,sexandgenderor the physiological sensory perceptions and their hedonic assessment since they are closely interrelated with each other. However, one should be aware of these interrelationships during an examination.

113 Ferdinand KNAUß: Das Tabu der Gender-Theorie: Geisteswissenschaftliche Geschlechterforschung und die Biologie, in: Helmut FINK/Rainer ROSENZWEIG (eds.): Mann, Frau, Gehirn, Paderborn 2011, 115 – 131.

114 BUTLER: Bodies that Matter (see n. 112), xix.

115 See Wolfram AICHINGER: Sinne und Sinneserfahrung in der Geschichte: Forschungsfragen und Forschungsansätze, in: Wolfram AICHINGER/Franz X. EDER/Claudia LEITNER (eds.): Sinne und Erfahrung in der Geschichte, Innsbruck et al. 2003, 9 – 28; Constance CLASSEN: The Senses, in: Peter STEARNS (ed.): Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000, New York 2001, 355 – 364.

116 Translation by Henry Whittlesey Schroeder; “Das Riechvermögen wird von verschiedenen physikalischen Faktoren, wie Temperatur und Luftfeuchigkeit, ebenso wie von physiologischen Parametern, z. B. Hormonen, beeinflusst. Die subjektive Bewertung eines Duftes als angenehm oder unangenehm wird als Hedonik bezeichnet. Diese Bewertung ist nicht genetisch bedingt, sondern wird durch erzieherische und kulturelle Einflüsse im Lauf des Lebens geprägt.”

Hanns HATT: Kapitel 19. Geschmack und Geruch, in: R. F. SCHMIDT/F. LANG/M. HECKMANN (eds.): Physiologie des Menschen mit Pathophysiologie, Heidelberg 2007, 422–436, here 436.

In regard to the question of how we approach historical bodies, gender definitions and sensory perceptions, we must first overcome our own disgust.¹¹⁷In the case of the explanations given by the ideologists of blood purity, it is even possible to speak of a double disgust factor: on the one hand, it is the disconcerting definitions of the body; on the other, the clearly racist component of the definitions that prompt a defensive reaction. However, if I want to grasp not only the strategies, but also the way these self -proclaimed Old Christians thought and the convictions behind them, I must not devalue their statements as mere fantasies, but rather admit that they were valid in their time.

Only in this way can I understand how the body-centered exclusion mechanisms of the ideology of blood purity functioned.

If disgust, though perhaps not overcome, is at least kept in check, it is followed by the question of how to deal with historical bodies, definitions of gender and sensory perceptions against the background of one’s own body, one’s own definitions of gender and one’s own sensory perceptions.

Barbara Duden emphasizes that with her body she could not establish a connection to the histor-ical female bodies she studied.¹¹⁸ And David Howes, who can be described as one of the founders of the anthropology of the senses, formulates the following premise for dealing with the sensory

Barbara Duden emphasizes that with her body she could not establish a connection to the histor-ical female bodies she studied.¹¹⁸ And David Howes, who can be described as one of the founders of the anthropology of the senses, formulates the following premise for dealing with the sensory