220px-Rabbi-CaroTo Hirsch Loeb Gordon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 2, 1951

Dear Dr. Gordon,
It was a happy thought on your part to send me your book on Caro, which I have read through with special interest, as I have never come across any such vivid picture of what the life and mind of orthodox Jews has been until recent times in Europe and the Levant. It was evidently far more severe and studious, far less a life “in the world” than that of the secular Christian clergy was during the same ages. I feel clearly for the first time how little of the “merry” life of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance affected the Jewish population. Naturally, being a minority, they could not have preserved their moral and cultural heritage if they had mingled more with the Christian majority. And they did, as you know better than I, cut a great figure as merchants, bankers, and physicians; but they must have drawn the line sharply, as Shylock does in Shakespeare, against any festive or friendly association with Christians. With Moslems things naturally went on better for both parties: the two religions were similar and simple, the observances of both less public and noisy than the Catholic, and less pagan. Your indignation at the persecution of the Jews is natural and just: but it has not been confined to Spain or to Catholic governments or to tragic times, somewhat like our own, such as the 16th and 17th centuries. Nationalities and Great Powers were then being consolidated, as now they are being challenged and perhaps dissolved; and the need, as well as the pride, of the rulers was to have a homogenous and united people to lead and to aggrandise. In Spain, just when a single monarchy had been established and the whole territory finally reconquered, this homogeneity was particularly requisite; and the expulsion of Moors and Jews not willing to be Spanish and Catholic was a political necessity. You mention once, but without indicating its political ground, that only Marranos, that is Jews who had pretended to be converted, so as not to have to migrate, were subject to the Inquisition. This was, and still is, a tribunal to judge any reported heresy or moral perversion arising within the Catholic fold; the accused being assumed to be pledged to support Christian faith and morals. The “people” are supposed to be unanimous, as in the present Communist countries; and torture was applied, as now in those countries, to extract confessions of guilt from the accused. Nobody was condemned who had not confessed sin, and fire, following on self-accusation, was calculated to burn the corruption away. I once read the verbatim reports of the trial of the Cenci family on the charge of having murdered their husband and father. The judge would say: “the Court knows,” and would retail the crime as discovered or imagined by the agents of the “Holy Office”: the prisoners all began by denying and all ended by confessing; and they were condemned to various punishments: the son to be branded with hot irons and then quartered; the wife and daughter to be beheaded, and the boy to be sent to the galleys for life. Horrible glimpses of hell, by which actual endless hell was avoided. There was a sort of rationality in this religious madness; and it is impossible not to be impressed by the overwhelming force of the moral tyranny asserted to rule the world.

As to Caro, you know how entirely I agree with you on the importance of his familiar Spirit’s concession that all its words are but reflections of his own thoughts. A man’s past or his native potentialities are the source of such visions, revelations, or strokes of genius as he may come to have. Did these not have their roots within, in his primal Will, they would not be illuminations but information, such as he might have found in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. But does not the religious importance attributed to such phenomena disappear if they do not come from above? Do not they all become poetic fictions? This implication satisfies me and seems to me to make them interesting, instead of wretched delusions, as they would otherwise be: but I am a constitutional sceptic, and wish to believe in nothing except that which, in action, I find that I am assuming and verifying. Fictions, from those involved in sensation to those generated in play and in the liberal arts, seem to me the best of things and signs, when clear and beautiful, of a life being led in harmony with nature.

Best thanks for your book and best wishes from
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown