Mediterranean Jews, Crypto-Jews and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta
by Carmel Cassar,
published by Midsea Books Ltd, Malta University Press, 2024
As a lawyer, I find it inspiring to read the transcript of the very first criminal trial in Malta of which parts of the file still survive – and this earliest legal pleading relates to Jews. A Maltese boat was crossing over from Sicily in 1486 when one of those frightful Mediterranean storms broke out without warning, threatening to sink the boat and drown all those on it.
A terrified passenger shouted: “This is divine punishment! Five Jews are on board! They have brought God’s curse on our boat. Let’s throw them overboard.” The crafty Jews replied: “No! Baptise us! We want to embrace the Son of God!” The passengers baptised the Jews, the tempest calmed down and they all reached Malta safely.
Was this the end of the story? Not by a stretch. Back in Malta, some observed the ‘converted’ Jews still taking part in Jewish rituals and following Hebrew customs. That amounted to apostasy, one of the most heinous offences in the criminal code, punishable by death. The sbirri instantly arrested the culprits and brought them to trial. The accused engaged the leading criminal lawyer of his times: Dr Leonardo Calavà.
The archives still preserve his desperate strategy to save his clients’ lives – devalue the standing of the prosecution evidence. “How can you give credibility to a witness who farts shamelessly on the public road?” Calavà asked. Aren’t we lawyers proud that our nation’s very first recorded outburst of legal rhetoric is all about flatulence? Bdejna tajjeb.
Carmel Cassar has spent over 40 years researching and writing this book, tapping every archive he was granted access to, but mostly the amazing one at the Mdina cathedral – the only virtually intact archive of the Inquisition in the whole world. Plentiful crops rewarded the author beyond measure.
The book’s coverCassar has not been the first to write about the intriguing Jewish communities in Malta over time. Mgr Alfredo Mifsud, Cecil Roth, Godfrey Wettinger, Derek Davies, Frans Ciappara and others made important contributions to our knowledge of this distinctive minority which often hovered in the background of Maltese society.
Even I, in 2002, put in my ha’penny worth in a longish paper, concentrating on the direct contacts of the Hospitallers with Jewish captives and merchants, their obsessive quests to discover if faint traces of Hebrew DNA polluted the noble ancestry of any knight or candidate to the knighthood. And how a most hurtful insult to outrage a knight was to call him a Jew. And how some of those convicted of serving as Ottoman spies against the Order were Jews – apparently the Hospitallers perceived Hebrews as siding with Muslims rather than with Christians.
In pleasant, often elegant, prose, Cassar positions his huge harvests of micro-, even nano-, history against the wider background of European events and tendencies and, hey presto, he is hurling fully-fledged barrages of macro-history at you.
Unlikely as it may sound, the yellowed inquisition papers end turning up fabulous records of everyday humanity – loves, greed, envy and evil, sex, magic, deceit and defeat, vendetta, violence, the agonies and the ecstasies, the lure of the mystic and the mysterious – those manuscripts record plenty of everything, and then some more.
Mostly, the inescapable realisation that only technologies have changed – the basic passions today simmer exactly the way they boiled over centuries ago. These papers lend eloquent voices to the voiceless.
Of the two Inquisitions, the Roman and the Spanish, Malta was relatively fortunate to have been under the more benign jurisdiction of the Roman incarnation.
The sadistic Spanish Inquisition served as a state institution, not a religious one; though manned by a religious order, it was run in the name and on behalf of the king.
Symbol of the menorah carved on entrance of one of the catacombs at St Paul’s Catacombs, Rabat, Malta.The Jews in Europe constituted a minority, with the obligation to remain identified as a minority, coupled with a ban on trying to blend in. Slaves had to shave their heads except for one long lock – the bizbuza.
Jews had to wear distinctive clothing with a red roundel or a yellow star or hat. This identifying apparel reinforced the great taboo – the absolute ban against sex between Catholics and Jews, Muslims or slaves. Society viewed this taboo as an ultimate protection of precious legal, social and religious values.
In Malta, the Roman Inquisitors invariably came from highly aristocratic backgrounds with refined cultural baggage. Very few cases, if any, of excesses are recorded. They worked according to established and, for the times, reasonable codes of procedure. Yes, they used torture as a last resort, but which civil and enlightened jurisdiction in Europe didn’t? Cassar has established that, out of countless snitches against Jews, in the course of two long centuries, only 10 turned into prosecutions and trials.
The aim of the Inquisitors was to preserve the purity of the Roman Catholic faith from its contamination by heretics and by those aligned to different creeds or to no creed at all. It had no ambitions to prevent non-Catholics from holding on to or manifesting their beliefs; it only drew the line at ensnaring others.
The clients of saħħara ranged across the widest spectra – from gullible ignorant peasants to priests, from lovesick Lotharios to addicted gamers.
And, if success is to be measured by results, the Roman Inquisition emerges as the mother of all success stories. The Council of Trent succeeded in halting the avalanches of the Protestant Reformation which were sweeping throughout Europe, apparently unstoppable, and the capture of Christian minds by schismatics, atheists and infidels.
The Inquisition had no function to punish those born and bred in non-Christian, Protestant and Muslim creeds. It only feared and combated their expansionism in the Roman Catholic world. And this justification, by the way, hardly makes me a fan of any Inquisition, Roman or otherwise.
The authorities targeted massed expulsions of the Jewish communities in Malta at least twice – in 1492, by Malta’s Aragonese rulers, and again in 1572, by Grand Master La Cassiere.
On both occasions, several families avoided being kicked out by ‘converting’ to Christianity. And yet, something untypical happened when the city of Avignon, France, in 1567, decreed the most inhumane anti-Jewish measures, virtually forcing Jews to leave the city, followed shortly later by formal expulsion.
Grand Master Del Monte sent two knights to provide safe conducts for one year to the persecuted Jews on their way to the Levant and to offer the able-bodied among them employment in the construction of the new city of Valletta.
Detail from theDormition of the Virgin with the Resurrected Christ and the Archangel Michael(Catalan Romanesque School late 14th to early 15th century) at the Cathedral Museum, Mdina.There are various records of Jews in Malta excelling in the medical arts – apothecaries, physicians and paramedics. The ransoming of rich Jewish captives, a bye-product of corsairing, turned into a thriving business opportunity in Malta, regulated by structures and conventions, like any other meat or fodder market.
Cassar really goes to town with his accounts of the clandestine reliance by many Maltese on sorcery, magic, philtres, spells and incantations sold matter-of-factly by Jewish slaves and neophytes. They had a spell on offer for everything – for making a person fall in or out of love, for winning money from gambling or lotteries, for discovering secret treasure troves, cures for serious illness and others to train ill-fortune on your enemies.
The clients of saħħara ranged across the widest spectra – from gullible ignorant peasants to priests, from lovesick Lotharios to addicted gamers. So transparent were the frauds that one resists any sympathy for the victims – serves them right for being so naïve.
Sorcery fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisitor, who generally only meted out lightweight penalties to those who participated in this deceptive magic. He probably considered the victims’ stupidity to be punishment enough. But he made sure he recorded the clients’ names and foolishness for posterity.
The rationalised but inconsistent intolerance by the Order against most things Jewish is to be seen as going hand in hand with the irrational prejudice widespread in the more ignorant populace.
There are no records in Malta of pogroms against the Jews, widespread in Europe after the Black Death and other calamitous events, where natural disasters and pestilences could be snugly written off by blaming them on the Jews. But, as late as 1805, after a small number of Jews relocated from Gibraltar to Malta, violent demonstrations broke out.
An angry mob of some 2000 rowdy protestors, many of them women and children, gathered in front of the former Grand Master’s Palace to demand their expulsion, accusing them of stealing infants and sacrificing them during their religious rites. They crowned their racist bravura by running through the streets of Valletta, invading shops run by Jews, jeering and insulting the owners.
Front page of a public lecture on ‘The Jews of Malta’ by Cecil Roth delivered to the Jewish Historical Society of England on March 28, 1928.The British arrested and charged the ringleaders. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander Ball’s secretary, appeared in the trial and pleaded on behalf of the Jewish shopkeepers – he spoke Italian quite fluently – only to be faced by the chief justice’s incredulity that anyone could even think of defending the Jews, and even accusing the poet of reading from a heretical book when he was actually quoting the 11th epistle of St Paul, which exhorts the Romans to treat the Jews with kindness.
Coleridge boasts of preventing widespread massacres of the Jews in Malta by taking extreme measures, including the exile of three of the Maltese ringleaders.
He witnesses the virulent anti-Semitic prejudice prevalent in the island and issued an official Bando prohibiting harassment of Jews by the Maltese populace. Though the Jews openly supported British colonialism in Malta, for a long time they were not allowed to build their synagogue, presumably for fear of popular uprisings.
Cassar’s latest venture into the tormented histories of minorities does not claim to be a first. But it pioneers the study of the vicissitudes of the Jews in Malta by being predominantly an X-ray of humanity, rather than of a statistical phenomenon.
It is human suffering, degradation, survival, adaptation, mostly of faces the reader can identify with, that stand out, rather than anonymous classifications.
All the people discussed have long been dead, but we can love them, empathise with them, resent them or hate them. This, not less than scholarly erudition, remains an achievement that not many historians can tuck under their belt.
