MAUROY, HENRI. Apologia.

(INQUISITION).

Vivant Gaultherot

Paris

1553

FIRST EDITION. Two parts in one volume. On title, printer's device and two lines in Hebrew. On f. 217 a few words in Hebrew from Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed.

A French Franciscan Theologian Decries Spain's Racial Purity Statutes. In the 16th-century, the most formidable attack on the Statutes of Purity of Blood (limpieza de sangre) came from Henri Mauroy, a French Franciscan doctor of theology. Mauroy was protesting the recent imposition of these statutes by the Archbishop of Toledo. Mauroy accused Archbishop Siliceo of being personally responsible for the heinous sin of persecuting "the poor Jewish people. " He wrote that in doing so, the Spanish bishops "persecute the Christian religion, " which Christians indeed owe to the Jews (see Apologia, Pt. I, f. 13r.) Mauroy is most outspoken in his attack, at one point comparing the Spanish bishops to "pigs and dogs" (ibid., f. 19v.) He exhorts them to: "honor the Hebrews" (ibid., f. 223r.) In this vein, the Hebrew quotation on the title page should be noted: "Honor they father and thy mother. " Evidently, Mauroy sought to convey that Christianity, as the daughter religion of Judaism, must show respect for its parent religion. See J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500-1700: The Formation of a Myth (2000) pp. 200-201. Prof. Netanyahu devotes several pages of his magisterial work to Cardinal Juan Martinez Pedernales, better known as Siliceo, who as Archbishop of Toledo from 1546, was at the forefront of the drive for "limpieza, " designed to keep "New Christians" (i. e., Christians of Jewish stock) out of Spain's religious orders, military and universities. Netanyahu describes the Cardinal as "a man of peasant stock, who inherited from his ancestors their hatred of the Jews and their prejudices against the conversos. " See B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995) pp. 1064-67. There is an interesting aside to this story: Maryks has written that in 1547, when the most authoritative expression of the purity-of-blood legislation was issued by the Inquisitor General of Spain and Archbishop of Toledo, Siliceo—Ignatius Loyola. The converso successor Diego Laínez (1512-1565) vigorously opposed the Inquisitor's attempt to preclude conversos from joining the Jesuits! See Robt. A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order As a Synagogue of the Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (2010) Introduction, pp. XX-XXI. Through WorldCat, five copies of Mauroy's work were located: Univ. of Valladolid (Spain), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, University of Cambridge, Bavarian State Library Munich and Columbia University.