Los jesuitas españoles expulsos: Su imagen y su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del siglo XVIII

On February 27, 1767, Charles III issued a royal decree that represented a cultural sea change in Spain and its extended empire: “…moved by very grave causes relative to the obligation under which I find myself placed of maintaining my people in subordination, tranquility, and justice, and other urgent, just, and necessary reasons, which I reserve in my royal mind; making use of the supreme economical authority, which the Almighty has placed in my hands for the protection of my vassals, and the respect of my crown; I have ordered that the Jesuits be expelled….”[1] During the following months in Spain and into 1768 in the Americas, members of the Society of Jesus were assembled and exiled from Spanish lands, sending cultural, political, and social reverberations throughout. Since Miguel Batllori published his monumental book La Cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos: Españoles-Hispanoamericanos-Filipinos (1767-1814) in 1966, much well-articulated scholarship has investigated this historical moment, addressing questions ranging from the reasons for the expulsion to its local effects across a greatly varied geographical context. This compendious collection of essays—published in 2001 and edited by Manfred Tietz with collaboration by Dietrich Briesemeister—makes an indispensible contribution to the scholarly dialog organized around this theme as it explores the “necessary reasons,” the diverse contexts, the cultural production, and many other implications of expelling the Spanish and Spanish American Jesuits. Based on a colloquium held in Berlin at the Instituto Ibero-Americano in 1999, the essays presented in Los jesuitas españoles expulsos represent a fundamental contribution to the scholarly work on Hispanic Jesuits. In the tradition of Batllori’s earlier work, this book lays a more extensive foundation for any scholar whose work engages the Hispanic Jesuits’ expulsion.

The book’s greatest contribution is found in the sum of its narratives articulated from the perspectives of various disciplines—including history, literary criticism, philology, linguistics, musicology and art history—woven together in a surprisingly coherent whole. With the majority of essays being written in Spanish, several appear in French and one in Italian. In the introduction, Tietz and Briesemeister organize the twenty-seven essays into four categories: presuppositions and implications of the expulsion, the implementation of the expulsion, the cultural activities of the expelled Jesuits, and the thematization of the expulsion. An underlying argumentative thread of the book, as acknowledged by its secondary title, is to explore how the Jesuits contributed to the production of knowledge about Spain and Spanish America for a European public. Of the exiled Jesuits, the editors state, “They were practically the only ones, due to their origin and their long stays in Spanish and overseas lands alike, who held such an ample, first-hand base of knowledge about the Hispanic world. This knowledge was of great importance for enlightened Europe” (8).[2] In many cases the book also seeks to contextualize the Society’s Hispanic expulsion vis-à-vis other its eviction from other nations such as Portugal, France and later Russia.

The bulk of the articles published explore the individual cultural production of specific members of the Society, ranging from the erudite study by Pedro Álvarez de Miranda on the Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes, written by Esteban de Terreros y Pando, to the elucidatory presentation and study by David T. Gies of previously unknown letters by Juan Clímaco de Salazar about his tragedy Mardoqueo. Helmut C. Jacobs explores the novel Don Lazarillo Vizcardi by Antonio Eximeno y Pujades in the context of this Jesuit author’s work on music theory. Johannes Meier takes a more generalized approach in his essay on the history and production of Jesuits expelled from Chile. Manfred Tietz studies the work by the Catalonian Jesuit Juan Nuix y Perpiñá titled Reflexiones imparciales sobre la humanidad de los Españoles en las Indias, contra los pretendidos filósofos y políticos, a text that engaged the well-studied debates about the natural history of the Americas and Spain’s colonial history. Other essays in this broad category intersect with themes such as natural history, the translation of texts, and how the Jesuits participated in the larger Republic of Letters from their place of exile, among other topics.

The set of essays that considers presuppositions and implications of the expulsion range from the broadest questions of why Charles III mandated the expulsion, in an intervention by José Andrés-Gallego, to some of the specific consequences in Paraguay, a query addressed by José A. Ferrer Benimeli. Enrique Giménez López studies the political, social and cultural climates in Spain and Portugal in the years leading up to the expulsion. Rolf Reichardt explores the social imaginary of the exiled Jesuits as they built new networks and communities in Italy. Marian Skrzypek traces how the Jesuit “Republic of the Guaraní” was treated as a topos of the French Enlightenment.

Three essays address the practical concerns of executing the order of expulsion, beginning with Moiséi S. Alperóvich’s analysis of how the event reverberated in the Russian court of Catherine II. Along similar lines, Bohumail Bad’ura examines the diplomatic implications of expelling a group of Austrian Jesuit missionaries from Spanish America. Turning her full attention to the political theatre in the Americas, Markéta Křížová studies how the expulsion was carried out in northern New Spain, a place where the Jesuits had struggled to establish well-grounded missions in the face of the Franciscans’ relative success. Two essays engage the more panoramic phenomenon of how the expulsion of the Society of Jesus itself became a theme for certain writers and historians. Francisco Aguilar Piñal’s carefully crafted study of the Comentarios para la historia del destierro by Alonso Pérez opens the book as its first essay. Jesús Pradells Nadal and Inmaculada Fernández Arrillaga examine how Spain is portrayed in the personal journals of Manuel Luengo between 1798 and 1801.

Besides the often-innovative arguments made in the book, the critical apparatus of Los jesuitas españoles expulsos is a valuable resource. The bibliographies and footnotes offer an archive of textual references enriched by the diversity of theoretical and disciplinary frameworks. This encyclopedic book also includes a well-developed onomastic index. Tietz and Briesemeister have assembled and presented an excellent book that will prove relevant for years to come to scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines and interests.

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[1] Translation by Bernard Moses, from Bernard Moses, Spain’s Declining Power in South America, 1730-1806 (Berkeley, Calif., 1919), p. 105.

[2] The English-language translation is my own. The introduction reads, “Eran ellos prácticamente los únicos que debido a su origen y sus largas estancias en tierras tanto españolas como ultramarinas disponían de un amplio ‘saber’ de primera mano sobre el mundo hispánico. Este saber era de gran importancia para la Europea ilustrada” (8).