Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

When the Castilian crypto-Jewish writer Antonio Enríquez Gómez was in exile in France during from the late 1630s to the late 1640s he published works such as the Política Angélica, which openly criticized certain practices of the Spanish Inquisition (the automatic confiscation of goods and property, the use of spies and informers, genealogical investigations, and a society that favored “blood” over virtue). In unpublished works, circulated in manuscript, he went so far as to criticize the Inquisition’s public autos de fé and confer the status of martyr to its victims. It should not be surprising that such open criticism of the Inquisition disappeared when he returned to Spain incognito and began writing for the theater again under the pseudonym Fernando de Zárate (c.1650-1661). Some modern critics believed the works of “Zárate” and Enríquez Gómez could not have been penned by the same person; and since the identity of Zárate was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt several decades ago (on the basis of Inquisition case files), one critic has even gone so far as to suggest that the apparently “sincere” Christianity of the Zárate plays suggests a late conversation to Catholicism. This paper explores scenes in several Zárate plays in which religious persecution, torture, and secret prisons/tribunals make appearances. Though necessarily oblique, Enríquez is nevertheless able to level criticisms against the Inquisition and Spanish society’s anti-Semitism while writing for a Spanish Christian audience.