Ron E. Hassner's "Anatomy of Torture"

Ron E. Hassner is Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include War on Sacred Grounds, Religion in the Military Worldwide, and Religion on the Battlefield.

Hassner applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Anatomy of Torture, and reported the following:

Anatomy of Torture uses evidence from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to explore the nature of torture. I read and analyzed many hundreds of hand-written manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries. These manuscripts show that the Inquisition succeeded in using cruel torture to extract reliable information. But they also show that the process of doing so was lengthy, costly, and that the information extracted was not new: It was used to confirm existing suspicions, not to produce new leads. The Inquisition treated evidence extracted by means of torture with suspicion. Both of these findings – the nature of torture and the reliability of evidence – have implications for current U.S. torture policy.

Page 99 is a good representation of one type of evidence that I use in the book: detailed testimonies that allow me to look closely at who was and was not arrested and tortured, who collaborated, and whether their evidence was truthful. This page summarizes the misfortunes of twelve individuals from the secret Jewish community in Mexico in the 16th century. Because these were Jews pretending to be Christians, they were persecuted as heretics. The goal of the Inquisition was not to find out what they believed (which could not be proven one way or another) but to show that they secretly participated in Jewish customs: they lit Shabbat candles, kept kosher, fasted on Yom Kippur, etc.

The trials summarized on page 99 are sorted in chronological order and show who condemned whom among the twelve. Two things become immediately obvious. First, the dates show that the Inquisition did not torture until very late in the process, after most of the members of this community had collaborated with the courts. Second, those tortured had already been identified by multiple others prior to their torture. Torture provided no new names. It confirmed names that had been offered by other witnesses in the absence of torture.

For example, Violante Rodríguez was a marginal figure in the community, an aunt of Manuel de Lucena. Arrested in April 1595, she refused to name other conversos in her community. Yet, as table 1 illustrates, the court had heard about her Judaizing from Antonio Henríquez, Manuel de Lucena, and Catalina Henríquez even prior to Rodríguez’s arrest. Further witnesses testified against her during the first nine months of her imprisonment. Only then, in January 1596, after she met several reprimands with silence, was she tortured with three turns of the rope. I quoted from her torture at length in chapter 1. She incriminated five fellow Jews, including her own daughter, Isabel.

Learn more about Anatomy of Torture at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: War on Sacred Grounds.

The Page 99 Test: Religion on the Battlefield.

--Marshal Zeringue