Was Saint Teresa of Avila Jewish?
Saint Teresa of Avila is a rather fashionable Christian philosopher in both Catholic and Feminist spheres given that she was arguably the originator of Descartes’ famous maxim ‘cogito, ergo sum’ and was a major female Catholic figure in the Counter Reformation of the sixteenth century.
In addition to this, she – along with her contemporary and associate Saint John of the Cross – have also fulfilled a major function within Catholic circles as so-called ‘jewish saints’ since the end of the Second World War and especially since the publication of Nostra Aetate during Vatican II. This is arguably due to the fact that the Catholic church was trying to quietly sever the connection to its anti-jewish clergy and religious (as well as the often-violent anti-Semitism of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church) while promoting its ‘new way’ as being aligned with the philo-Semitism which has increasingly been the rule in the Catholic church and the Western political order since the Second World War.
Teresa wasn’t originally believed to have been jewish and evidence that is alleged to support this was only discovered in 1946, but it is worth quoting the historian Anna Foa who summarized the case for Teresa being jewish in her 2nd March 2015 article in ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ that I quote at length for the sake of completeness and transparency.
She writes that:
‘Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Avila in 1515. Her father’s family came from Toledo and her grandfather, Juan Sánchez, was a rich wool and silk merchant of a conversa family (that is, converted from Judaism to Catholicism] who moved from Toledo to Avila at the beginning of the 16th century. The wealth of the house in Avila in which Teresa was born shows that the family had fully preserved its previous economic and social status. In 1485 Juan Sánchez had been tried by the Inquisition of Toledo, accused of practising Judaism and had been condemned to wear in procession for six weeks the sanbenito, the yellow garment of those condemned by the Inquisition. Later the sanbenito was, as customary, hung in the cathedral as a perpetual sign of disgrace.
However, Juan Sánchez had sought to be rid of this stain that indelibly marked his lineage by purchasing a certificate of limpieza de sangre [cleansed blood] and by moving to Avila in order to have the episode forgotten. Moreover, he succeeded, since no member of the family was ever again subjected to trial by the Inquisition, an institution, the Spanish one, that did not easily loosen its hold on those who had passed under its jurisdiction or their descendants.
Until 1492, the date of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, both Toledo and Avila had been characterized by a strong presence of both Jews and conversos. In Avila during the 14th century the percentage of the Jewish population was close to 30 per cent of the overall population. The acts of violence and the wave of conversions at the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th had unravelled the fabric of the Jewish community in most of Spain, both in Aragon and in Castille, and had encouraged a large number of more or less forced conversions. The integration of the converted into Spanish society, very extensive, had however been blocked in the middle of the 15th century by the laws of limpieza de sangre, norms that were introduced for the first time in Toledo itself in 1449 and that barred the access of the “new Christians”, namely, the conversos and their descendants, to universities, religious and military orders and confraternities. This was a true and proper shutting down as regards he integration of the conversos, which divided Spanish society between “old” and “new Christians”, subjecting the latter to the constant control of their orthodoxy by the Inquisition.
Juan Sánchez, Teresa’s grandfather, was in fact not only a converso, that is, a descendent of converted Jews. He was also a marrano, that is a converso condemned for having returned to the faith of his fathers. In all likelihood this was a false accusation, as were many others of the kind, as is proven by the successive route taken by Juan Sánchez, bent on recovering credibility as an “old Christian”, and that sufficed to conceal the disgrace of the man and his descendants. Hence his move to Avila, his acquisition of false certificates of cleansed blood and his successful attempt to have his past forgotten. His son Alonso, Teresa’s father, married for the second time Beatrice de Ahumada of a noble lineage of “old Christians”. Teresa’s numerous brothers went to the Americas, as was customary among the descendants of conversos. Her brother Rodrigo died fighting there, so that Teresa considered him a martyr of the faith, whereas her brother Lorenzo became treasurer at Quito in Peru and on his return to his homeland financed the convent Teresa founded in Seville.
The tainted blood was truly buried in oblivion in that it was only in 1946 that documents discovered in the Valladolid Archives, which mysteriously disappeared until the end of the 1980s, restored the irrefutable proof of the saint’s Jewish origins.’ (1)
This seems like a pretty solid case: doesn’t it?
Foa is right in that we now know that Teresa’s paternal grandfather Juan Sánchez was tried by the Inquisition in Toledo for being a Judaizer and while that looks damning. Foa doesn’t relate the whole story in that while we know Juan Sánchez was indeed tried and condemned as a Judaizer; he did so to take advantage of the Edict of Grace in Toledo and Sánchez actually accused himself of ‘crimes of undermining the Church’ and was subsequently tried and convicted. (2)
This additional context should already be setting off alarm bells in your head because Foa – good scholar though she is – leaves that information out as well as what Sánchez actually confessed to. She likely does so because it rather detracts from ‘irrefutable proof of the saint’s Jewish origins’ because it means that Sánchez seems to have turned himself in to the Inquisition in Toledo and accused himself of ‘crimes of undermining the Church’.
Now this charge meant spreading false doctrines (i.e., undermining the teaching of the Church) which could mean spreading Marrano Judaism for example, but could also mean having one or some Protestant belief(s) or having doubted Christ’s divinity but not the veracity of the Old Testament among other things.
After all we know that early Protestants were often thought of as being Judaizers by Catholic authorities and theologians (3) and that non-jewish Christians did sometimes become what the Catholic and later Protestant authorities referred to as ‘Judaizers’. (4)
Further there is no evidence that Sánchez wasn’t engaging in the self-interested conduct that Foa and others attribute to him regarding his alleged conversion to Christianity – but studiously ignore when it comes to his Inquisition trial - and that he simply took advantage of the Inquisition’s Edict of Grace in Toledo to clear his name of any potential charge against him. Then gotten his penance out of the way and moved a few miles north to the city of Avila.
The move to Avila Foa styles as being ‘to ensure the episode was forgotten’ but this is nonsensical since the city of Avila is only circa 80 miles north of Toledo and is the next major city travellers, merchants and pilgrims would come to from Toledo if they travelled north. So therefore, it cannot be to ‘escape’ Toledo that Sánchez travelled to Avila because news of what had occurred in Toledo with the Inquisition would naturally have travelled north with the trade and pilgrimage routes.
The truth is the reason that Sánchez moved his family to Avila from Toledo was because he had a relative there who had a business in silks and woollens and could thus introduce him to his contacts and allow him to build a profitable business there. (5)
This is indeed what happened and thus the move to Avila has absolutely nothing to do with Sánchez’s encounter with the Inquisition in Toledo. Proponents of the claim that Sánchez (and thus Teresa) was jewish merely use this speculation – which runs counter to the available evidence and the human geography of Spain – to bolster their weak case for Teresa being of jewish origins.
A major problem for the proponents of the ‘Teresa was jewish’ theory is the fact that Sánchez acquired a certificate that he was an ‘Old Christian’ (aka that he was not a Marrano nor had any jewish ancestry) while he was in Avila with Foa stating he’d applied for and acquired a certificate of limpieza de sangre (6) and Medwick stating he didn’t apply for (or acquire) a certificate of limpieza de sangre – which she uses to try and argue that Sánchez was jewish because he ‘couldn’t apply or get’ one – (7) but then states that Sánchez won a legal petition for the status of a hidalgo (i.e., gentleman) – a ‘pleito de hidalguia’ – that exempted himself from taxation and allowed him to collection certain revenues for the crown and that the conferred status of hidalgo meant much the same thing in practice as a certificate of Sánchez. (8)
To get around this Foa implies that Sánchez bribed someone to get his certificate of Sánchez by using the term ‘purchased’ – technically accurate but it has bribery connotations in English as Foa well knows – while Medwick simply ignores the acquisition of hidalgo status because it doesn’t fit her argument and treats it – much like Foa does – as if it was acquired illicitly and falsely without having evidence to support such a contention (other than the fact that it necessarily sinks the whole claim of Sánchez’s and thus Teresa’s alleged jewish ancestry).
We can thus see that Foa’s case is weak and easily rebutted, but Medwick provides further arguments for Teresa’s alleged jewish origins by claiming that Sánchez was a common surname adopted by jews who had ‘converted’ to Christianity since at least the 14th Century. (9) She further claims that this was the reason that Sánchez appended his brother’s wife’s surname Cepeda to his own as another sign of him ‘escaping jewishness’. (10)
The problem with this claim is that there is a good reason why – as both Foa and Medwick style him that way (Williams also agrees) (11) and the evidence we have broadly supports such an interpretation – Sánchez would wish to the append his brother’s wife’s surname of Cepeda to his own: the Cepeda family had an illustrious ancestor who was a well-known Spanish hero of the Sieges of Gibraltar. (12)
Thus, we can see that the name change of Sánchez to Cepeda was not motivated by any desire to ‘hide’ the Sánchez’s family alleged ‘jewish ancestry’ but rather to claim relation to the famous Cepeda family who Sánchez was related to by marriage.
Medwick also claims that because – as part of Sánchez’s newly acquired hidalgo status – he collected some taxes for the Spanish crown and collecting taxes was a profession long associated with jews and collecting such was still seen as the sign of a jew that therefore this is evidence that Sánchez was of jewish origin. (13)
This in many ways typifies the desperation of the proponents of the ‘Teresa was jewish’ theory in that they try to use Sánchez’s newly acquired hidalgo status – which directly contradicts the idea of his being of ‘New Christian’ (i.e., jewish and/or a Marrano in this case) origin and argues for his actually being an ‘Old Christian’ (i.e., not jewish and/or a Marrano in this case) – against Sánchez because it was a ‘profession associated with jews’ but yet he was supposedly trying to ‘escape his jewishness’.
This is obviously a contradiction in terms, but the use of such arguments suggests how weak the arguments for Sánchez’s (and thus Teresa’s) jewishness really are.
The last of Medwick’s arguments for Sánchez’s jewishness relates to his son (and Teresa’s father) Alonso’s first marriage to a farmer’s daughter – Catalina del Peso – of Avila as a conspiracy to acquire ‘Old Christian’ status but offers no actual evidence of this other than surmise. (14) The problem with this – while it is possible – is that it is simply an invention of Medwick’s and rests on no documentation whatsoever, so we have absolutely no reason to suppose that ‘acquiring Old Christian status’ was anything to do with Alonso’s marriage to Catalina del Peso.
Thus, we can see that the ‘arguments’ for Teresa of Avila being of jewish ancestry are based almost entirely on surmise and assumption rather than working through and documenting the reality of Teresa’s ancestry. The one bit of evidence which is solid is Sánchez’s condemnation by the Inquisition in Toledo for being a ‘Judaizer’ and ‘undermining the Church’, but the details of this Inquisitorial condemnation are rarely brought up because they contradict the Marrano theory and also show that Sánchez was probably not jewish/a Marrano (since he could also simply have been one of Spain’s rather eclectic Protestants of the time), while evidence that directly contradicts Sánchez being jewish (his successful acquisition of hidalgo status/a certificate of limpieza de sangre in Avila) is simply ignored/treated as if it were falsely acquired and various other non-sourced arguments are thrown into the mix by proponents of the ‘Teresa of Avila had jewish origins’ theory.
Indeed, the more you look at the work of proponents of this theory then you’ll notice that essentially, they are making a lot of self-referential (i.e., circular) arguments which create evidence by assuming that Teresa had jewish origins and then use that ‘evidence’ to argue that Teresa had jewish origins.
Good examples of his are found in both Medwick (15) and Williams (16) biographies of Teresa, while Foa avoids this but omits key points to make her case seem stronger than it actually is. (17)
Despite claims that Teresa ‘knew’ she had jewish/Marrano ancestry (18) we are also told that it was a ‘closely guarded secret’ (19) which somewhat contradicts itself with the claim that it was ‘known’ in the family, but no one else knew it despite the fact that if this had been true Avila and Toledo are close enough to each other than the information would have been known.
Indeed, as Rowe has alluded to; Teresa’s alleged converso/jewish background was never known in her lifetime (20) despite the fact that if it were so then it should have been especially as if it were true then Teresa’s paternal grandfather’s family must have been ‘converted’ during the mass baptism and violent anti-jewish riots that shook Spanish cities in 1391 as a popular uprising against the jews took hold before it was put down by the local authorities. (21) So, it would have been well-known to the populace of Toledo who were jewish converts to Catholicism and who were not.
So how then did the citizens of nearby Avila not similarly know that Juan Sánchez and his family were jewish converts to Catholicism if it were true?
Maybe because they weren’t?
References
(1) https://web.archive.org/web/20171117124326/https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/teresas-marrano-grandfather
(2) Catherine Medwick, 2000, ‘Teresa of Avila: The Progress of the Soul’, 1st Edition, Duckworth: London, pp. 11-12
(3) For example, we can point to the Hussites (https://www.shcsj.org/brief-history) and the Luther and his friends in Germany were specifically accused of this by Catholic theological opponents like Johann Eck. Also see A. Gordon Kinder, 1994, ‘Protestantism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: Doctrines and Practices as Confessed to the Inquisitors’, Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 4, pp. 73-80
(4) For example: Robert Michael Smith, 1983, ‘Christian Judaizers in Early Stuart England’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 125—133 and my article on the Judaizer Hersey in 15th Century Russia: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-judaiser-heresy-in-fifteenth
(5) Medwick, Op. Cit., p. 12
(6) https://web.archive.org/web/20171117124326/https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/teresas-marrano-grandfather
(7) Medwick, Op. Cit., p. 12
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid., p. 11
(10) Ibid., p. 12
(11) Rowan Williams, 2003, [1991], ‘Teresa of Avila’, 1st Edition, Continuum: London, pp. 35-36
(12) Medwick, Op. Cit., p. 11
(13) Ibid., p. 12
(14) Ibid., p. 13
(15) Ibid., pp. 11-14
(16) Williams, Op. Cit., pp. 19-23
(17) https://web.archive.org/web/20171117124326/https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/teresas-marrano-grandfather
(18) Medwick, Op. Cit., p. 14
(19) Ibid.
(20) Erin Kathleen Rowe, 2011, ‘Saint and Nation: Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain’, 1st Edition, Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, p. 49
(21) Cf. David Nirnberg, 2003, ‘Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, And Converts in Medieval Spain’, Common Knowledge, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 137-138