Published by Maney Publishing (c) Queen Mary, University of London Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 3, No.2, June 2002, 107-122 Anti-Semitism, Class, and Lope de Vega's El Nifio Inocente de la Guardia ALEXANDER SAMSON University of Warwick This article examines the development of concepts of race and ethnicity in early modern Spain, through an analysis of both literary and historical texts. The conceptualization of religious faith as a historical condition, which arosefrom an identification of fidelity with lineage, foregrounded the problems of recognizing dissimulated conformity amongst the large converso population. In view of the association of miscegenation with the hidalgo class and nobility, making belief a function of race called into question traditional class hierarchies. In practice estatutos de limpieza de sangre were more often bound up with factional struggles and class politics than with institutionalized discrimination. Whilst colonists in the New World were encouraged to intermingle with Indians, severe pro- hibitions were imposed in Spain by certain institutions against the admission of conversos. Lope de Vega's play reflects this tension between a dominant order defining conversos as representatives of infidelity and the humanist scrutiny of direct equations of nobility and virtue. The prohibition of henna, public baths, Moorish dress and jewellery, Arabic literature and language in early modem Spain reduced Moorish cultural identity to a set of dietary, cosmetic, and sanitary practices (cf. Root 1988: 126), and such definitions of religious heterodoxy transformed seemingly innocuous activities such as squatting or eating with one's hand into markers of heresy. This conflation of religious and ethnic identity was clearly discernible in the debates surrounding limpieza de sangre. When Juan Martinez Siliceo imposed an estatuto de limpieza de sangre on the Cathedral chapter of Toledo in 1548, for instance, it sparked off a controversy, played out in epistolary appeals by both sides to Charles V, his son and regent Philip, and the pope. Siliceo justified the statute in his letter to the pope, by arguing that the admission of conversos would transform the primatial see into' another SYnagogue'.1 The letter he wrote canvassing Charles V's support, marshalled the rhetorical resources of Medieval anti-Semitism and invoked Pauline 1 lS i hunc seminum nostra Ecc1esia susciperet in Canonicum, dabitur omnibus causa quamlibet turpibus hominibus obtinendi huiusmodi ec1esiasticas sedes l cui rei in V. S. providerit brevi futura erit Ecc1esia Toletana (quae Princeps est in Hispaniis) altera Sinagoga i (BN5: fo1. 134 r ). Address Correspondence: Alexander Samson, 370 Crystal Palace Park Road, London SE26 6UR, UK. © Hispanic Research Ltd, 2002