Was Saint John of God Jewish?

Continuing on with my series of articles addressing the claims that several important Spanish and Portuguese Roman Catholic Saints and Doctors of the Church of the Counter Reformation were converted jews or conversos rather than ‘Old Christians’. They are then used to claim a ‘jewish contribution’ to the Spanish and Portuguese Golden Age as well as to imply that the Roman Catholic Church owes much to the jews.

Another good example of the sort of nonsense reasoning used to make these kinds of claims is the assertion that Saint John of God – often known as Juan de Dios and the founder of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God – was of jewish ancestry.

Antonio Dominguez Ortiz provides a simple summary of the basis of the claim in his book on Spanish conversos where he writes that:

‘There is no reasonable doubt about two other saints of that century with such rich spirituality: Saint John of God and Saint John of Ávila. Juan de Dios was actually called Juan Ciudad, "a common surname among Jews," according to Caro Baroja.’ (1)

The basis for the claim that Saint John of God was of jewish origin was because Caro Baroja – who was a quirky twentieth Spanish anthropologist who focused on the study of witchcraft and the ‘occult’ rather a historian per se – claimed that ‘Ciudad’ was ‘a common surname among the jews’ and that because Saint John’s original surname was ‘Ciudad’ therefore he was of jewish origin.

The problem with this claim starts almost immediately with the fact that Saint John of God’s real name was Joao Duarte Cidade with ‘Cidade’ just meaning ‘City’ or ‘Town’ in Portuguese – since Saint John was Portuguese not Spanish - where-as ‘Ciudad’ is simply the rough Spanish equivalent.

Baroja and Dominguez Ortiz’s argument is very weak at best and is a bit like claiming every individual surnamed ‘Green’ in the Anglophone world is actually jewish in origin because some jews changed their names from ‘Gruenberg’ to ‘Greenberg’ to ‘Green’.

It simply isn’t logical nor reasonable.

Further as Michael Waas has observed this is poor logic and more driven by a need to ‘find’ a jewish ancestor than anything in general as regarding possible Sephardic surnames he writes how:

‘When Spain and Portugal approved their “Right of Return Citizenship” laws in 2015 for descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492 from Spain, who converted to Catholicism in the preceding century beginning with the persecutions in 1391, or who were forcibly baptized in 1496 and 1497 by rule of the Portuguese King Manuel I, interest in Sephardic genealogy grew. Many people, interested in the possibility of an EU passport, started to ask questions about if they were eligible or not by looking into their genealogies. Along came a list that purported to be an authoritative register of all Sephardic surnames, claiming that anyone who had a name on this list would be automatically eligible for Spanish citizenship through this pathway.

Problem solved, right? “Was my ancestor Sephardic?” could be answered by this expert list, stating conclusively that your family’s surname had belonged to known Sephardic communities.

However, there was one slight issue: that list was fraudulent and a poor copy of indexing work done by the late Harry Stein, who didn’t claim that all of the surnames he indexed were belonging to Sephardic families; just that the books he consulted on Sephardic genealogy and history, had some kind of reference to the surname. Furthermore, not all of the surnames he indexed even belonged to Jews or were in exclusive use by Jews.

In genealogy, history, anthropology, and archaeology, it is always critical to ask questions of the sources you are reading, even if it is a primary source.

Unfortunately, because of lists like that, myths perpetuated by heritage tourism (“Jews forced to convert took the names of fruit trees, Catholic themes, and plants in order to ‘hide’” being one such popular legend routinely sold by tour guides and books in Spain and Portugal), and, quite frankly, inadequate teaching about the history of Sephardic Jewry, a lot of confusion exists today about Sephardic genealogy and history.’ (2)

Then in summary states that:

‘What’s important is that New Christian surnames are indistinguishable from non-Jewish, Old Christian surnames because they are the same.’ (3)

Waas’ point is that a lot of the attempts to identify such and such a person as Sephardic – which remember were/are the jews of the Iberian peninsula – are quite frankly pretty poor in that they take what they do – often mistakenly or fraudulently – is take a ‘Sephardic surname’ in this case ‘Ciudad’ (although it should be ‘Cidade’ because Saint John was Portuguese not Spanish) and then claim this means they are necessarily of jewish (or converso) origin. Despite the fact that many (if not most) of those using said ‘Sephardic surnames’ will probably not have been either Sephardi or even remotely jewish.

Thus Baroja and Dominguez Ortiz’s argument simply doesn’t hold up to any kind of serious scrutiny and when we note that we actually have a contemporary life of Saint John – which is our principal source of information about him – by Francisco de Castro - the chaplain at Saint John’s hospital at Granada – that was first published in 1585 and that Castro had known Saint John personally as a young man so is a primary (and likely fairly reliable) source of information.

And further that Castro’s life is quite specific about Saint John’s origins and the occasionally invoked ‘mystery’ of his father when Castro writes that:

‘Andre Cidade and Teresa Duarte, a once-prominent family that was impoverished but had great religious faith. One day, when John was eight years of age, he disappeared. Whether he had been deliberately kidnapped, or whether he had been seduced from his home by a cleric who had been given hospitality in the home, is not clear. According to his original biography, his mother died from grief soon after this and his father joined the Franciscan Order.’ (4)

Here Castro makes it very clear that there is no ‘mystery’ at all about Saint John’s parentage and that his father Andre Cidade left his mother – willingly or not is unclear – to go into the Franciscans and his mother Teresa Duarte had died soon after this ‘from grief’.

This is further demonstrating that Castro does reference jews once in his life of Saint John and that reference is generally held to be to a lapsed converso who Saint John counsels and reconverts to Christianity, (5) which shows that Castro had no issue with referencing conversos in regard to Saint John when it was warranted and the fact he never did so in the context of Saint John personally indicates that Saint John was almost certainly not of ‘converso’ or ‘New Christian’ ancestry.

We can thus see that there is no evidence whatsoever that Saint John of God had any jewish ancestry at all and further that what evidence we have suggests that he was of ‘Old Christian’ (i.e., completely non-jewish ancestry).

References

(1) Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, 1992, ‘Los Judeoconversos en la España Moderna’, 1st Edition, Editorial Mapfre: Madrid, p. 262

(2) https://www.hollander-waas.com/blog/on-sephardic-surnames

(3) Ibid.

(4) Francisco de Castro, 1585, ‘History of the Life and Holy Works of John of God’, 1:1; available at https://www.ohsjd.org//Objects/Pagina.asp?ID=714

(5) Ibid.; 24:4