The idea of a Christian commonwealth.

It is well known that three important events happened in the year 1492: the fall of Granada, the last Moslem territory in the Iberian peninsula, to the Spanish Latin Christian monarchy; the expulsion of the professing members of the Jewish religious community; and the first transatlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus. The deadline for exodus of the Jews and the beginning of the Columbian voyage occurred only one day apart. Granada fell half a year earlier. Five hundred years later it is worth contemplating the historical significance of these events and their possible meaning.

The Moslems--an ethnically mixed group of Arabs, various Near Eastern peoples, and North African Berbers---conquered most of Iberia in 711 with help from the Jewish population, who for half a century had been experiencing severe persecution by the Spanish Visigothic kings at the behest of Catholic bishops. Between 900 and about 1125 Moslem Spain flourished intellectually and economically, perhaps more remarkably than any other segment of the vast Moslem world that stretched from the Atlantic to India. It was an extremely diversified society ethnically and religiously, under the firm control of Arabic princes and united culturally by the Arabic language and by philosophic and scientific learning. Then after the renewed invasion of the Iberian peninsula by Berber tribes from the North African Magrib, who were fundamentalist in religion and race-conscious, internal deterioration of Moslem Spain set in during the late twelfth century.

The Christian princes in the north of the peninsula had been pursuing a reconquista--a military crusade to push the Moslems back--since the early eleventh century. In 1212 the Arab armies suffered as decisive a defeat as the Visigothic Christians had experienced in 711, and by 1265 of labled Andulasia only Granada, in the deep south, remained in Moslem hands. It fell to the Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

The conquest of Granada was the first important event of 1492.

The Jewish population of Sefarad (Iberia) had flourished culturally under Moslem rule until the fundamentalist reaction after 1100. The greatest works of Jewish philosophy and theology produced in the Jewish Diaspora since Alexandria in the first century A.D., and the most impressive corpus of Jewish poetry, some written in Arabic and some in Hebrew, between the writing of the Hebrew Scripture and the late nineteenth century, were the products of Moslem Spain. Jews became important ministers of finance and ambassadors for Moslem rulers. But even before the decisive Christian victory in 1212 there was a northward movement of the Jews into the expanding Christian kingdoms. The Moslems under Magrib rulers had become intolerant and their kingdoms unstable. The Christian rulers, in spite of contrary advice from the clergy, were highly tolerant of the Jews because they wanted their capital investment, their banking and commercial skills, and like the Moslem rulers before 1100 they employed aristocratic and 1earned Jews in high administrative positions.

This situation changed in the fourteenth century with the second great event of 1492, the expulsion of the Jews. The Jews of Spain and Portugal in the late fourteenth century--characteristically in the medieval world and still perhaps today--were polarized, on the one side, into a mass of artisans and small shopkeepers and, on the other side, an elite of wealthy businessmen, courtiers, scholars, and rabbis who married within these prominent families to form a closed caste. Increasingly, the rich Jews, even the scholars among them, lost enthusiasm for traditional doctrines and observances. Rabbinical court records of the fourteenth century show a Jewish propensity to adapt the lifestyle of Moslem society. Among the Sefardim polygamy, concubinage, adultery, and wife-beating were common. Disenchanted by rationalistic philosophy and science after 1250, the Sefardi elite were intellectually attracted to the Kabbalah which is usually defined as Jewish "mysticism," but which also involved Gnostic dualism, astrology, magic, and demonology. Between 1391 and 1420 there were Christian physical attacks upon Jews on religious grounds, some of them spontaneous mob assaults, some organized attacks led by popular church leaders such as Saint Vincent Fencer.

As a result of these persecutions as well as a decline of enthusiasm for traditional (Talmudic) Judaism, by the second quarter of the fifteenth century more than half of the Jewish elite and an unknown proportion of the Jewish masses--at least 100,000 people--had converted to Christianity. These included great merchants, government officials, and rabbinical scholars. Some of the latter advanced to important roles in the clergy. A prominent fifteenth-century bishop of Burgos in Castile, Pablo de Santa Maria, was a former rabbi, and his son became a bishop as well.

The Spanish laity who had been jealous of the Jews because of their favorable economic and political positions were anguished to see the Jews, with their civil disabilities alleviated, now prospering even more as New Christians. The response was twofold: the idea was advanced that membership in the leadership ranks of the Iberian community demanded "purity of blood" as well as religious correctness. Secondly, the New Christians were charged with being crypto-Jews (Marranos, pigs) who were secretly practicing their religion (observing the Saturday Sabbath, for example) and were therefore the worst kind of heretics and betrayers of Christ who ought to be pursued by the religious court of the Inquisition.

In 1480, Pope Sixtus IV reluctantly authorized the establishment of an Inquisition in Spain to be directly under the control of the Spanish crown. There were two special motives involved in establishing the Spanish Inquisition. First, it was an instrument of centralizing royal power against the nobility, of whom the New Christian (converted Jewish) elite was an important segment. The state-controlled Inquisition was a way of attacking the wealth, autonomy, and self-confidence of the nobility, among whom by the sixteenth century, as a result of conversion and intermarriage, about a third was at least part ethnically Jewish. Second, the Inquisition in Spain in the late fifteenth century, like the Inquisition in Southern France in the thirteenth, involved a fratricidal conflict within the Jewish population itself--between the Jewish converts to Christianity and those who had remained loyal to the old faith. In the later Middle Ages, Jewish converts to Christianity condemned their former faith in public disputations with rabbis. After 1480 clergy from New Christian families were prominent among the inquisitors in the first generation of the Inquisition (as they had also been, though proportionately and numerically less so, among the inquisitors in France in the early thirteenth century). Again the Jews had split and were devouring each other while the Christian state and the gentile clergy urged them on. King Ferdinand, the most determined advocate of the Inquisition, had a Jewish grandmother.

The number of people actually executed by the Inquisition in its whole history down to 1700 was relatively modest. We are not at all dealing with a Nazi Holocaust. After all, the inquisitors didn't want in theory to kill anyone who sincerely confessed to being a crypto-Jew, accepted a punishment which could be light (public confession) or heavy (confiscation of property), and were not again convicted of being Marranos. No one would claim that the Spanish Inquisition was distinguished by sensitivity to civil liberties. It used torture to obtain evidence and it did not reveal to defendants the names of their accusers or allow the defendants to confront their accusers in open court. But use of torture to obtain evidence was standard procedure in all continental (civil as well as ecclesiastical) courts until the eighteenth century. And defendants could give the inquisitors a list of their known enemies, who were supposed to be removed from among their accusers. As for the use of the death penalty, that was common in the Middle Ages for the crime of heresy, used by Jews as well as Christians. The Jewish community in Cordoba and Seville in the eleventh century had also executed heretics with permission of the Moslem ruler.

The Marranos after 1480 suffered execution ("released to the secular arm") by burning if they persisted in being loyal to Judaism or were repeatedly convicted of secretly being Jews. Probably half of these were strangled before being burnt. The inquisitorial records are fragmentary but historians estimate between two and four thousand crypto-Jews were executed by the Spanish Inquisition between 1480 and 1520 and very few thereafter. As these figures indicate, most of the New Christians were sincere converts or at least behaved as conventional Christians, and both the paranoid claims of some inquisitors and the myths propagated by modern Jewish historians that most Jewish converts were actually Marranos (crypto-Jews) are fanciful. Whether because of conviction or fear, the great majority of New Christians were unquestionably apostates, and within a generation or two rarely different in their religious commitments from the rest of the population.

Indeed the great majority of Jewish converts were more than sincere. From among learned and aristocratic New Christian families came some of the greatest names in early sixteenth-century Spanish ecclesiastical and cultural history: the Erasmian humanist Juan Luis Vives; the apostle to the Native Americans and nemesis of the reckless conquistadors, Bartolome de Las Casas; Saint Teresa of Avila (the teacher of Saint John of the Cross); as well as some leading bishops of the time such as Hernando de Talavaro, the first bishop of Granada, formerly Queen Isabella's confessor. It is not an exaggeration to see the role of the scions of converted Jewish families as central to the Spanish Renaissance of the early sixteenth century as were Jews in the modernist cultural revolution of the early twentieth century. In both cases complete access to general culture induced an explosion of intellectual creativity. The Jewish New Christians and their children in the early sixteenth century embraced Christian thought and learning with the same kind of creative enthusiasm that assimilated Jews contributed to modernism in literature and theory between 1900 and 1940.

The demand for expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s was justified on grounds that as long as there were observant Jews around in Spain, converts to Christianity would be tempted to return secretly to their religion, would be corrupted in their faith and betray Christ. Seizure of Jewish property by the crown was also a motive--as it had been in the expulsion of the Jews from England and France around 1300. Here again we run into conventional myth--about the vast numbers of Jews who supposedly departed rather than underwent baptism in 1492. Some prominent ones did depart, particularly Don Isaac Abarbanel, one of the two leading Jewish ministers of the crown. The other, Abraham Seneor, who helped finance Columbus's first voyage, converted. Rather than the 100,000 to 150,000 customarily cited, the number of Jews who departed in 1492 was probably around only 40,000, about half the practicing Jews in the country. And initially the great majority of them did not go far. They crossed over into Portugal. Although an expulsion or conversion order was issued by the Portuguese crown in 1497, it was loosely enforced until the mid-sixteenth century. Later in the century Portuguese Jews moved in large numbers to Protestant Amsterdam (and from these a handful went to England, to which Jews were readmitted in 1653). The Spanish Jews who suffered the 1492 exodus, if they did not go with the majority to Portugal, went to Italy, particularly to Venice, Leghorn, and of all places Rome (the popes usually protected them--an old tradition on the Tiber and still in effect in the 1940s), and to Turkey. The Ottoman sultan was eager to import Jews to boost the economy of his empire, and a significant number of the Jews who left Portugal in the sixteenth century found comfortable refuge in Turkish domains, particularly in Greece. The Salonika community which the Nazis eliminated in the early 1940s were descendants of these Sefardim.

Of the descendants of the 150,000 to 200,000 Jews who had lived in the Iberian peninsula in 1390, 80 percent were still in Sefarad in 1520, but they were now Christians. If Spain declined economically with the sixteenth century--a controversial proposition--it wasn't because of the exodus of the Jews. There is no more prominent and persistent myth about 1492 than that the expulsion of the Jews ruined the Spanish economy and thus retribution fell upon the Catholic monarchy. Among the significant outcomes of the Iberian expulsion, the alleged economic decline of Spain was not one.

The Jews who fled Sefarad appear to have done as well or better abroad. Jewish capitalists, usually of Sefardi origin, became extremely important in North Italian, Turkish, and Balkan commerce and industrial development after 1550. The Hapsburg Austrian cousins of the Spanish rulers in the seventeenth century made great use of these Jewish capitalists to finance the Thirty Years' War against Protestants in Central Europe and to supply the Hapsburg armies. Jewish businessmen played a major role in the rise of the international mercantilist (state-controlled) form of capitalism in the early modern period. There is a definite Sefardi or Marrano ingredient in the rise of mercantilist type capitalism, especially in Central Europe and in the Adriatic region.

Another outcome of 1492 was stimulation of the Jewish Reformation. Beginning in Palestine, Greece, and Turkey there was a violent emotional reaction against the imagined Iberian expulsion from Eden. It came to symbolize a time of shoah (destruction) as the prophet Isaiah called it, or zimzum as the Kabbalists called it--when God contracts his shekinah (power, shadow) in the world so that the anti-divine forces of kellipah (satan) might momentarily triumph. Since this could be viewed eschatologically as the ultimate disaster preceding the coming of the messiah, there was a riotous outburst of pseudo-messianism in the Jewish world of the seventeenth century, led by Nathan of Gaza in Palestine, Sabbatai Zevi in Turkey, and Joseph Frank in Poland. The hostility of the Jewish masses against the international Jewish capitalist-rabbinical-courtier elite definitely was an ingredient of this messianic upheaval, and spilled over, after the collapse of messianism, into the eighteenth-century social democratic Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe.

The third great event of 1492, much celebrated and debated this past year, was the Columbian enterprise. It was, first of all, a direct outcome of the other two changes, the Moslem and Jewish ones. The Portuguese had already tried to undermine Arab wealth and power in the Eastern Mediterranean by opening up a route around South Africa to India, the source of the silks, spices, and jewels that the Turks imported from East Asia and sold at great markups to the Western European nobility. The Portuguese were also trying to tap into the Arab dominance of the black African slave trade. They had success in the latter, and five years after Columbus's first voyage, they rounded South Africa and opened the sea route to India, later establishing a great commercial center in the Goa which they held until very recent times.

Columbus was also trying to override Moslem commercial wealth. He offered to the Spanish crown another route to India across the Atlantic. The outcome of Portuguese and Spanish seafaring was the decline of the Arabic Mediterranean world by the early seventeenth century. However, the Catholic powers were forced, in the seventeenth century, to share the wealth of India and the African slave trade with the rising Protestant powers of Holland and England.

Columbus's voyages were related also to the Jewish experience in Spain. He too was descended from a Jewish convert family, as he indicated in his will. He was, however, not trying to find a home for exiled Jews. He was trying to bring all history to a conclusion. There was a powerful messianic movement in the Spanish church at the end of the fifteenth century. It was an old idea that history would end and Christ would return only when the church was fully triumphant in the world. Conversion of the Jews was one important sign of that totalization of Christianity. Another was the conversion of the peoples of the East, for which Columbus's voyages were intended to establish the basis. He took with him on his first voyage an Arabic-speaking Jewish New Christian to spread the faith in the Orient.

Wasn't this a conflation of religion and imperialism? Of course it was; that was central to Western civilization until 1945. Wouldn't this lead to massacring the Native Americans? Not necessarily if enlightened churchmen like Las Casas could have gotten control of the conquistadors, which they didn't. Yet most of the appalling loss of life among the Native Americans (19 out of 20 million in Mexico) came from disease--immune deficiency-rather than the sword and gun, although there was plenty of that terror too. Didn't Columbus and his successors ravage the delicate ecology of the New World? Of course they did. Europeans had been ravaging their own environment for half a millennium so persistently that by 1500 they had deforested much of Western Europe and were running out of both wood for fuel and the game that had provided the staple of their high-protein, red-meat diet. America saved the European food supply by providing the potato for human consumption and maize (Indian corn) as fodder for cattle. Fuel was obtained in the sixteenth century by opening up coal mines, although burning of soft coal began the pollution of the European atmosphere.

Fourteen ninety-two illustrates the nature of a Christian commonwealth that emerged out of the European experience in Spain as much as anywhere else. Moslems and Arabs had to be beaten on the battlefield and bypassed and superseded commercially. Jews were one way or the other to be brought into the church. Their separation was an impediment to the Second Coming and the end of history, a barrier to realizing eschatological hopes. So Jews had to be converted. Mind you, their blood was not as pure as the blood of old Christian families (Judah Halevi, the Spanish Jewish thinker in the early twelfth century, similarly said converts to Judaism were not equal to the old Jews). In the Christian commonwealth Jews were not to be allocated a first-class status. But in spite of much rustling of genealogical lists among the Spanish nobility, this was a provision usually impossible to enforce, after two or three generations, what with total assimilation. Empire was there for the taking, to serve the monarchy, the church, and the nobility. This was the idea of the Christian commonwealth that 1492 signifies.

We are taught in our egalitarian and multiethnic culture to anathematize this whole set of ideas and behavior patterns. Yet both North and South America are its legacy. Many today bewail this history. They seem to prefer that the Christian commonwealth should not have exercised its power, enterprise, and learning. They would have left the Americas and its edenic green climes to the aborigines. It is a moral thought, perhaps a spiritual epiphany, to feel that way. But that is not what 1492 was all about. It happened and we are its products and have to make the best of 1492's consequences.

The Spain that was a Christian commonwealth in 1492 and is heavily condemned today had obvious authoritarian, intolerant, racist, and violent characteristics. Put in a positive light, the argument on behalf of the Christian commonwealth of 1492 comes down to the following. First, it was the product of a very long development stretching back through the Middle Ages into antiquity. It was the product of experience. It had been shaped by centuries of thought and action. This past had been embossed in philosophy, theology, literature, music, and art. It was a very thick, expressive, richly cultivated, and ornately elaborated and aggressively exhibited culture. The Spanish Christian commonwealth was not the creation of murdering conquistadors-- mostly underemployed petty nobility and mercenary soldier riffraff--nor of slave traders. These were not its leaders and spokesmen, its thinkers and innovators; they were its marginal consumers and occasional instruments, and its parasites. The humanism of Vives and Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (the greatest gentile biblical scholar up to that time), the painting of El Greco, the spiritual expressions of Saints Teresa and Ignatius Loyola, the universal social compassion of Las Casas-- these were central to the Spanish Christian commonwealth. Where and when have men and women done better?

Spanish Christian culture aimed at the baroque which is layered and developed elaboration, which values the complex and longitudinally (diachronically) developed. Today's anthropological polemic gives all value to the antibaroque--the simple, the underdeveloped, the primitive, the synchronic (nonhistorical). Anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century emerged in service to imperial powers and colonial administrations and used a hierarchic Darwinian evolutionary model. Today, in guilty revulsion, anthropology has swung ideologically in the opposite direction. Now it gives no credit to complexity, development, historical sequence, cultural accretion, elaboration of thought and art. Therefore Spanish Christian culture of the sixteenth century was slated to be denigrated by historians loyal to recent anthropological assumptions.

We may choose to say with Claude Levi-Strauss that structurally the savage and baroque minds are the same and that the savage mind in its closeness to authentic humanity is preferable; or we may choose to live with and participate in the consequences of history so that the layered and developed differences between the savage and baroque minds are deemed intrinsically important, leading to valorization of the Christian commonwealth.

What began in the academic world in France in the 1950s has now come to dominate the universities in Europe and the Americas and has penetrated deep into general culture as expressed in the media: synchronic anthropology has prevailed over diachronic history. The idea of a Christian commonwealth as realized in sixteenth-century Spain and its layered baroque, imperial culture is denigrated and the American aborigines extolled. There is a direct line from Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (1955) to Kirkpatrick Sale and the other polemicists who now condemn Columbus and the Spanish Christian culture he represents.

The denigration of the idea of a Christian commonwealth goes back to the 150 years following 1492. A rationalist, scientific, antitraditional frame of mind, skeptical about the core of religious culture, arose among some of the Marrano families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emergence of a post-Christian commonwealth secular mentality can be traced to a handful of Marrano families that found themselves caught between Judaism and Christianity, bouncing back and fourth between the two faiths and two cultures, until they became disoriented and disenchanted equally with priests and rabbis.

We can see this secularization, I think, with the Spanish New Christian Fernando Rojas, the creator of the subversive picaresque novel (La Celestina) in the early sixteenth century, and the forerunner of Cervantes's critique of decaying medieval culture. We can see it in the skeptical humanism of Montaigne who was also of Marrano lineage. We can see it in the writings of two Dutch Jews of Portuguese extraction in the third quarter of the seventeenth century--Uriel de Costa, who condemned rabbinical Judaism and was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and Baruch Spinoza, who turned away from the whole theistic tradition toward a new kind of scientific naturalism and universalism and was also excommunicated from the Jewish community.

What generated this postmedieval secular rationalism was essentially two things. First, the idea of a Christian commonwealth is an extremely difficult and complex one, in which many components have to be held in balance. Under the circumstances of sixteenth-century war, imperialism, and ideological conflict, such a balance became too hard to sustain. It required humanistic idealists like Vives and Las Casas (or Erasmus and Thomas More), but there weren't enough of them to do so effectively. Second, the Marrano descendants who were buffeted about in the sixteenth century from one religion to another became alienated from both, and turned first to moneymaking in international mercantilist capitalism and then to secular, scientific rationalism. They were immensely successful in these endeavors. A parallel can be drawn with the Jewish immigrants to America after 1890 from the traditionalist and Hasidic shtetls of Eastern Europe. They too abandoned devotion to their old faith and did extremely well in business and science and embraced doctrines of radical seculansm.

The great weakness of late medieval Judaism was its finite, static quality. Its only innovative wing was in hazardous theosophic irrationalism. It could not offer a durable response to persecution and discomfort or a comprehensive social theory. At the same time, those many Sefardic Jewish intellectuals who after 1390, and for whatever initial motive, proceeded to cross over into Christianity found in Latin Christian culture a much more complex and vibrant culture than their own. They eagerly embraced it and themselves pushed it in obsessive eschatological directions. But this high idealism soon ran into the realities of sixteenth-century politics and economics. The reach of the Spanish state toward world power, abetted by the intensely exploited wealth of America, made the heavily conversos-shaped, humanistic Iberian Christianity of around 1500 incapable of practical realization.

Catholic Iberia and Protestant Holland were not the only crucibles of a new European culture. Off in England in 1492 or there about something was happening that is immediately significant for us in the United States today--the emergence of yet another culture, an alternative both to the Christian commonwealth and scientific universalism: the juristic state founded upon English common law. By 1492 the new Tudor dynasty had overcome its shaky and illegitimate start and secured its continuity. The quiet monarchy of Henry VII did not believe in world conquest to stimulate the advent of the messiah and was too poor for grandiose enterprises. All Henry Tudor could finance overseas was an expedition to the Newfoundland fisheries--dried codfish instead of gold and silver.

England was a country that enclosed other aspects of life, politics, economics, and culture within a framework of procedure developed by the medieval common lawyers. It was the legal profession that took over the leadership of English government and society, and placed the ambitions and idiosyncrasies of kings and queens, the demands of prelates and the visionary pronouncements of preachers and scholars within a tightly defined mediating juristic framework. Legislation through the high court of Parliament became a contrived mechanism for change, and was at the same time absolutely, incontestably sovereign. Deliberate, slow-moving, and limited in its scope and imagination, common law was central to the late sixteenth-century England of Elizabeth I, the juristic queen who ruled through lawyers and parliaments, and who said she did not wish to make windows into people's minds (unless they were civil trouble-makers). The Christian commonwealth of Philip II of Spain tried to conquer England but failed in the defeat of the Armada in 1588.

The year 1588 completed the era 1492 began. It solidified the common law regime, which was transmitted to North America in the seventeenth century. In the English-speaking world all the facets of the Christian commonwealth were normally to operate within the orb of due process and parliamentary government. The new rationalism and skepticism of the Newtonian and Lockean heirs of the Marranos of reason were also to find opportunity for their intellectual quests within com - When I speak of the triumph of 1588 over 1492 I may sound as though I am reverting to the main thesis of one of the two historical bestsellers of Victorian England-James Anthony Froude's antiCatholic history of sixteenth-century England, which thumped the victory of the allegedly beneficent modernizing forces of Tudor Protestantism over the putative obscurantist medieval forces of Catholic Spain. I am not endorsing this view because the common law culture of a juristic continuum and the due process of a legal parliamentary system in which politics, religion, and science would all function were themselves products of the Catholic Middle Ages. By 1400 the common law system as we know it today was substantially complete. You could transport a London barrister of 1400 "back to the future" of New York City in 1992 and all he would need was six months of brush-up training at NYU Law School and he would be ready to practice either civil or criminal law in New York courts.

The common law idea no less than the theory and practice of a Christian commonwealth was a product of the Catholic culture of the Middle Ages. No less than the enigmatic Columbus and the notorious conquistadors, the barristers at the Inns of Court who conceived and institutionalized the protomodern juristic state stopped to offer a prayer at a Catholic chapel on their way to work.

That is one conclusion that rises from contemplation of 1492. Another is that while the expulsion of the Sefardic Jews was a cultural and moral shock to the Jewish world, sending it into a kabbalistic and messianic spin that took centuries to play itself out, 1492 was not at all parallel to the Nazi Holocaust. A handful of Jews lost their lives as a result of the 1492 expulsion. Around 40,000 Jews were displaced into exile but some of these and many of their descendants greatly prospered in other countries-the Austrian and Turkish empires, Holland, and Venice. The overwhelming majority of the Iberian ethnic Jews, as a result of 1492 and of the events of the previous century, further integrated themselves into Catholic Spanish culture. They not only contributed importantly to its efflorescence but also were powerful agents in shaping its character in idealistic and missionary directions. An additional paradoxical outcome of 1492 was the emergence in the following 150 years of a post-medieval Marrano rationalism and naturalism that challenged Counter-Reformation Catholicism and rabbinical and kabbilistic Judaism alike.

Fourteen ninety-two's great events were overwhelmingly the consequence of religious idealism. The principal actors were suffused with eschatological and messianic expectations. The three great events of 1492 were meant to be signals of the end of time and the conclusion of history. Yet indirectly the events of 1492 moved society and culture toward materialistic and rationalistic outcomes that contravened religious idealism. These outcomes were the Iberian exploitation of America and the rise of overseas empires; the strengthening of monopolistic capitalism and state power; and the rise of secular rationalism and science. The Spanish humanists of the early sixteenth century dreamed (as did Erasmus and Thomas More) of a refined and learned Christian commonwealth but what emerged instead was the absolutist state, the exploitive empire, commercial capitalism, and scientific naturalism. Everything was different from what Las Casas, Vives, and Ximenes hoped for and to which many intellectuals among the Jewish converts were passionately committed. This new world taking shape in the seventeenth century was the expatriate Marranos' revenge on the idea of a Christian commonwealth, and it was a cultural and political structure as removed from rabbinic Judaism as from medieval Catholicism.

Only the liberaljuristic polity that developed in England could circumscribe the dynamic materialistic and rationalistic forces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only the common law doctrines of due process and parliamentary sovereignty could at the same time provide a framework within which capitalism could be contained and a social ethic that science could endorse. Not the admiral, the saint, the inquisitor, the conquistador, or the philosopher but the lawyer was to be moral arbiter of the postmedieval order.

NORMAN F. CANTOR is professor of history and sociology at New York University. His most recent book, Inventing the Middle Ages (Morrow, 1991), received a 1991 National Book Critics Circle nomination for criticism. He is writing a history of the Jews to be published by HarperCollins.