The Expansion of tolerance

These ideas circulated widely. They were certainly current in the Sephardic
community in Amsterdam. A case in point is that of Juan (Daniel) Prado and
Isaac Orobio de Castro, two Sephardic converts who had originally met in
1635 when both were studying theology at the University of Alcalá. They
had become good friends long before either had left Spain or professed
Judaism. Later, under examination by the Inquisition, Orobio had reported
that Prado had told him on that earlier occasion that ‘all men are entitled to
redemption, each in virtue of his own religion – Jews, Muslim and Christian
are entitled to eternal happiness, because all three religions have political
aims, the source of which lies in natural law, which in Aristotle’s philosophy
is styled the causa causarum’.
Later Prado also told Orobio that all religions have the capacity to bring
their followers to salvation. Prado at that time was apparently still a loyal
member of the Church. Later in Holland, the two friends were to become
bitter intellectual rivals, Prado representing a skepticism about Judaism’s
exclusive validity and Orobio a defender of that religion’s messianic role.
Some have argued that Prado’s universalism shared roots with Spinoza’s
scepticism and that all of these ideas were an outgrowth of the converso
experience and situation. But such ideas were also circulating widely among
the Old Christian population of Spain as well, and even though Prado had
mentioned the philosophical basis of such ideas, he had done so in the
traditional popular formula, that ‘each can be saved in his own law’. 15
While such attitudes could be found throughout the Iberian world, we
know more about them in Spain and its colonies than in Portugal and its
dominions. The Portuguese Inquisition was primarily oriented toward the
prosecution of New Christians as crypto-Jews and around eighty percent of
all its prosecutions were for that crime. Thus other offenses like these heretical
propositions received far less attention and left far less evidence than those
in the Spanish tribunals.
The Portuguese Inquisition conducted a consistent campaign to extirpate
Judaism and to denigrate the New Christians among the general population,
but not everyone agreed. Of course, there was the famous case of the Jesuit,
Padre António Vieira, who opposed the persecution of the Jews for primarily
mercantilist reasons and who actually had the Inquisition suspended for a
short period (1674-81) but Vieira was not alone. 16
In 1623, André Lopes, known as ‘The Harp’, an Old Christian wool
merchant but married to a New Christian, was arrested by the Inquisition
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