Background to Spinoza: The Inquisition in Portugal

I came across this amazing video on Facebook this Shabbat, which shows you a Portuguese synagogue and gives you a brief history of how the Portuguese Jews suffered and had to hide their Jewish identity for centuries after the Inquisition started (1536-1821) and this suppression of Jewish identity and way of life persisted right up until the 1980's and 1990's. 

The Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism so had to continue all aspects of their Jewish heritage, culture and Judaism in secret are termed Crypto-Jews (also sometimes referred to as Conversos or Marranos). 

Take a look at their educational video here and read their entire post I shared to my personal Facebook page and to see some extra photos here. 

This is an important, tragic background to Spinoza, since his family were forced to flee their Portuguese homeland to escape the Catholic Inquisition. 

This video tells the moving story of a Jewish Portuguese community which the Catholic Inquisition tried to erase. The Jews there fell silent outwardly but inwardly they stayed Jewish. It explains that it wasn't until the late 20th century that the Jewish community  slowly revived in the area and finally, by 1996, it had a synagogue of its own. 

It's a shocking story of how Catholics have constantly tried to eradicate the Jews. And since there are far too many Catholics in the world it can feel as though a tidal wave is against you. So Jews can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

After watching the video, I read this informative academic piece on the Portuguese inquisition, available to read here. It explains that, while the Catholic inquisition was branding itself as being full of mercy and justice, it was actually a disgracefully violent movement, full of extreme and shocking human rights abuses. It was a bloody era that was obsessively antisemitic. Countless Jews were mercilessly and viciously persecuted for centuries. 

Nevertheless, the Catholic inquisition also hounded other social groups to whom they took a dislike, such as gays, healers, 'witches', and other types of Christians, for instance, Erasmians, and Lutherans. The ideology behind the Catholic Inquisition was exclusionary and racist (with an obsession for their statutes about 'purity of blood'). The inquisition was particularly violent in Portugal during Spinoza's era of the 17th century. This could have influenced Spinoza's insistence he didn't want the Pope to obtain copies of his works.

So I think it's important to not only bear in mind the historical setting of 17th century Amsterdam where Spinoza lived but also to look across at what was happening in Portugal to truly understand where he's coming from.