Selections of St. Francis Xavier’s Writings on the Jews

Compiled from Henry James Coleridge, S.J., The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier**, 2 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1881–1886). All passages are direct quotations from the scanned texts. The letters of St. Francis Xavier are reproduced in Coleridge’s English translation from the original Latin and Portuguese.**

Preface: The Shape of the Corpus

St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552), born Francisco de Jaso y Azpilicueta in the Kingdom of Navarre, was one of the original companions of St. Ignatius of Loyola and a co-founder of the Society of Jesus. Sent by King John III of Portugal as Apostolic Nuncio to the East, he laboured for eleven years across Goa, the Fishery Coast, Travancore, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, the Moluccas, and Japan, and died on the island of Sancian within sight of the coast of China. He was canonised in 1622 and proclaimed Patron of the Missions in 1748.

His surviving letters — most extant only in Latin translation, with some Portuguese originals — together with the catechetical and instructional documents he composed for his Indian missions, are the primary sources for his thought. The biography by Henry James Coleridge, S.J., published in 1881–1886, embeds translations of those letters and documents within a continuous narrative and editorial commentary, itself constituting a secondary layer of Catholic reflection on Xavier’s legacy.

The adversus Judaeos material in these two volumes operates in six registers:

  1. Deicide and collective guilt — Xavier’s catechetical instruction for his Indian converts describes the Pharisees, “moved by the fury of hellish envy,” as the prime agents of the Crucifixion; Pilate is portrayed as a weak instrument of their “crafty machinations,” and the Jews are named as demanding the Crucifixion “with savage clamour.”
  2. Theological condemnation and eternal fire — Jews are explicitly enumerated alongside Muslims and Gentiles as those who “have refused to believe” and who will be “given up to everlasting fire, from which there will be no redemption.”
  3. Supersessionism and the reprobation of the Jews — Coleridge frames St. Paul’s cry of wonder in Romans xi. 33 as addressed specifically to “the reprobation of the Jews,” invoking the patristic doctrine of Jewish caecitas.
  4. Jews as active opponents of Christian mission — Xavier’s letters repeatedly identify Jews (alongside Muslims) as a dangerous presence actively impeding conversion: they are “very influential” among the Indian native populations, they “dispute for the possible converts” against the Christian preacher, and the absence of Jews in Japan is cited as one of its chief advantages as a missionary field.
  5. Exclusion of Jewish blood from the Society of Jesus — Xavier’s own instruction to a superior explicitly repeats the Ignatian limpieza de sangre rule, ordering the absolute rejection of all candidates “of Jewish extraction.”
  6. New Christians, Crypto-Judaism, and the Inquisition — The texts document Xavier’s personal ministry to prisoners of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon, record the murder of his colleague Miguel Vaz by conversos seeking to suppress the prosecution of their Judaising, and note the conversion of Jewish rabbis as signal trophies of his apostolate.

Twelve verified passages are presented below, ordered thematically. Each entry includes the source identification (volume, page, and letter or document reference where applicable) and a contextual note.

I. “Moved by the fury of hellish envy” — The Pharisees Conspire Against Christ

Source: Vol. I, pp. 327–328. From Xavier’s catechetical instruction composed for his Indian mission converts.

“The great fame of Jesus and of His disciples having spread throughout Judea, came to the notice of the chief men of the nation, men full of a vain opinion of themselves, and of those especially who were called Pharisees, supercilious despisers of everything excellent, who used to be angry if any party or any sect except their own obtained even a slight renown for learning: and so it may easily be imagined what a bitter pang it must have been for these proud persons to find Jesus Christ, Who censured their doctrine, listened to with applause by the people, and so highly esteemed and considered in the enthusiasm of the multitude, that it seemed almost to be imminent that they themselves would be thrust out of the highest place in authority and reputation which they had so long held, and the new Teacher raised to their place with the handful of fishermen who formed his train. Moved, therefore, by the fury of hellish envy, they determined to put in motion all the artifices of calumny in order to take away both the reputation and the life of Jesus Christ.”

Note

This passage opens Xavier’s formal catechetical account of the Passion, composed in Latin for translation and use among his newly baptised Indian converts. The psychological motive assigned to the Pharisees is not religious blindness but deliberate malice driven by envy and the fear of losing social dominance. The phrase furor infernalis invidiae in the Latin original is rendered faithfully here. The Pharisees are thus positioned not as tragically mistaken figures but as conscious agents of evil, a framing that Xavier sustains throughout the account that follows.

II. “The crafty machinations of these men” — The Pharisees Suborn Pilate

Source: Vol. I, p. 328. From Xavier’s catechetical instruction.

“With this intention they beset with artful words those who were at the head of affairs, and also persuaded Pilate, at that time governor of Judea, after having plied him with entreaties, suggestions of suspicion, and direct charges, to grant them the arrest of Jesus, which they clamoured for as necessary for the public peace. The foreign governor allowed himself to be so far gained over by the crafty machinations of these men; not that he was ignorant that their allegation of the public good was only a veil to cover their own envy, but either from weariness of resisting their importunate demands or from a desire to win favour with the more powerful of the people, he thought it worth while to purchase his own tranquillity or the favour of others at the cost of an illustrious man.”

Note

Xavier explicitly exonerates Pilate as a man who knew the charges were fraudulent — “their allegation of the public good was only a veil to cover their own envy” — but yielded from political weakness rather than conviction. The full moral responsibility for the Arrest is therefore concentrated on the Pharisees, whose manipulation of the Roman governor is characterised as a sophisticated and deliberate conspiracy. This is the classical adversus Judaeos construction of the trial narrative as found in Justin Martyr, Origen, and Chrysostom.

III. “His enemies out of their own malice” — The Passion as an Act of Jewish Cruelty

Source: Vol. I, p. 328. From Xavier’s catechetical instruction.

“Jesus being thus taken prisoner by the authority of the government, His enemies out of their own malice went on further to insure themselves that He should be treated with all possible cruelty and ignominy by their own servants. He was dragged through the ways and principal places of the city, in the midst of a crowd who offered Him every sort of outrage, hurried with violence from one house to another before different tribunals, mocked, reviled, spit upon, and beaten with blows, and so at last brought before Pilate, with false witnesses against Him, amidst the furious clamours of the excited mob, who cried out for His death and for His death upon the cross. Nevertheless the judge hesitated, knowing the innocence of the accused; until they suggested to him that he would lose Cæsar’s favour if he set free a man designated King of the Jews and Who would soon raise a revolt; and thus he was made to yield to the wishes of the accusers, and gave up Jesus. After he had caused Him to be inhumanly torn by scourges over His whole body from head to foot, he delivered Him up to be crucified by the Jews, who demanded this with savage clamour.”

Note

The phrase “delivered Him up to be crucified by the Jews, who demanded this with savage clamour” constitutes an unambiguous deicide charge: the act of crucifixion is attributed directly and collectively to the Jews, with Pilate serving merely as the passive instrument of a demand made by Jewish savagery. The Latin original uses ferox clamor — “savage clamour” — a phrase of deliberate rhetorical force. This is the passage Xavier intended his Indian catechumens to memorise as part of their basic Creed instruction.

IV. “The emissaries of the Pharisees” — The Mocking of Christ Before the Crucifixion

Source: Vol. I, pp. 328–329. From Xavier’s catechetical instruction.

“But before they crucified Him, the emissaries of the Pharisees, having dressed Him in mockery with the robes of a king, with a crown of thorns on His head, a reed for a sceptre in His hand, made sport of Him, bowing the knee before Him in ironical homage, and hailing Him King of the Jews, and then spitting in His face, striking Him on the cheek again and again, and snatching the reed from His right hand to strike Him with it on His head crowned with thorns. At last they nailed Him to a cross on Mount Calvary, near the city of Jerusalem.”

Note

Xavier identifies the tormentors at the mocking specifically as “the emissaries of the Pharisees” — making the priestly leadership institutionally responsible not merely for procuring the death warrant but for personally directing the physical degradation of Christ. The detail is not present in the Gospel text (which attributes the mocking to Roman soldiers in Matthew 27:27–30 and Mark 15:16–20) but belongs to the adversus Judaeos homiletic tradition in which the Pharisees are held to have supervised the very torments they engineered.

V. “Those who have refused to believe, as Mussulmans, Jews, and Gentiles” — Jews Consigned to Everlasting Fire

Source: Vol. I, p. 334. From Xavier’s catechetical instruction.

“Those who have done this will be admitted into the glory of Paradise; those who have refused to believe, as Mussulmans, Jews, and Gentiles, will be given up to everlasting fire, from which there will be no redemption; and those who have professed the faith, as bad Christians have done, but have neglected to obey the commandments of the Decalogue, those in like manner will be condemned by the irrevocable sentence of Jesus Christ to flames which are to burn for ever.”

Note

This passage forms part of Xavier’s eschatological instruction to his Indian converts on the Last Judgement. Jews are classified in a single category with Muslims and pagans as those who have “refused to believe” — the verb is deliberate, implying not ignorance but wilful rejection — and are assigned “everlasting fire” as their irrevocable sentence. The passage was designed for catechetical repetition and formed part of the theological formation Xavier considered indispensable for new converts across his entire Indian mission.

VI. “The reprobation of the Jews“ — St. Paul’s Wonder at Divine Judgement

Source: Vol. II, p. 331. Coleridge’s biographical narrative.

“…there will always remain that inadequacy in our conceptions of both which leaves us much to adore without attempting fully to explain it, in that reverential spirit which made St. Paul exclaim, after unravelling one great difficulty of this kind, the reprobation of the Jews: ‘O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His judgments, and His ways how unsearchable!'”

Note

This passage is Coleridge’s own commentary, not Xavier’s text, but it constitutes an important doctrinal frame for the entire biography. By identifying the subject of Romans xi. 33 — Paul’s great doxology — specifically as “the reprobation of the Jews,” Coleridge invokes the classical Augustinian and Thomistic doctrine that the Jewish people as a whole were providentially rejected (reprobati) in consequence of their rejection of the Messiah. The word “reprobation” carries the full weight of its technical theological sense: not merely unbelief, but the positive divine act of setting aside a people who have forfeited their election.

VII. “No Jews or Mussulmans to dispute for the possible converts” — Japan Praised as a Mission Field Free of Jews

Source: Vol. II, pp. 101–102. Coleridge’s biographical narrative, summarising Xavier’s reasoning for the Japan expedition.

“The Japanese were intelligent, noble, manly, liberal, anxious to learn and ready to be convinced of the truth. The field was open, and free from many of the obstacles which were felt so fatally in India and elsewhere. There were no Cosmo de Payvas, no rapacious slave robbers, no Portuguese settlers who might outdo the [pagans] themselves in licentiousness and fraud, no Jews or Mussulmans to dispute for the possible converts with the Christian preacher, or to add their own errors, vices, and dishonesties to the native corruptions of the manners and tenets of the pagans.”

Note

Coleridge here summarises Xavier’s strategic reasoning as the Jesuit himself expressed it in his letters. The Jews are placed in a list of active obstacles to Christian conversion alongside corrupt officials and slavers, but as theological adversaries of a distinct and more dangerous kind. The framing implies that the Jewish presence in a mission territory is not neutral but actively harmful — a competitive spiritual force working against the Gospel. This is not a casual aside but a considered missionary-strategic judgement reproduced sympathetically by Coleridge.

VIII. “Quite untouched by Mussulmans or Jews“ — Xavier’s Own Account of Japan

Source: Vol. II, p. 71. Letter of St. Francis Xavier to St. Ignatius of Loyola (Letter XLIX).

“…as I have learnt from good authorities that there is a country near China called Japan, the inhabitants of which are all heathen, quite untouched by Mussulmans or Jews, and very eager to learn what they do not know both in things divine and things natural, I have determined to go thither as soon as I can.”

Note

This is Xavier’s own text, in his direct voice, from a major letter to Ignatius. The absence of Jews and Muslims from Japan is named as a positive missionary recommendation: a territory “untouched” by their influence is one where the Gospel can be planted without competition. The formulation reveals the degree to which Xavier understood his apostolate as operating not in a religious vacuum but in active contest with Jewish and Islamic presence across Asia.

IX. “Mussulmans and Jews, who were in great numbers and very influential” — Jewish Influence as an Obstacle to Indian Converts

Source: Vol. I, pp. 231–232. Coleridge’s biographical narrative.

“Nor did the external dangers to their faith or to their Christian practice lie only in the suspicion with which every convert, much more every convert community, must have been regarded by the remainder of the Indians, and by the Mussulmans and Jews, who were in great numbers and very influential in the country, in the tyranny of their own magistrates, or in the danger from foreign marauders.”

Note

Coleridge here analyses the missionary environment of the Fishery Coast and Travancore where Xavier worked in the 1540s, identifying Jews as one of the principal dangers facing newly baptised Indian converts. The phrase “in great numbers and very influential” reflects the historical reality of established Jewish mercantile communities along the Malabar Coast, but the context frames their influence entirely as a threat to Christian community stability.

X. “Reject absolutely those that you know belong to… Jewish extraction” — The Exclusion of Jews from the Society of Jesus

Source: Vol. II, p. 459. Letter of St. Francis Xavier (Instruction to a Superior).

“When people seek admittance to the Society, do not, I advise you, hasten to receive them, however fit, at too early an age; reject absolutely those that you know belong to any of those classes which our Father Ignatius has by name excluded for ever from entrance into our Order. One of these is, as you know, to be of Jewish extraction. Be careful also not to admit any one unless he is eminently gifted with the qualities suitable to some one of the special ministrations of our Institute.”

Note

This is Xavier’s own instruction, in his own words, to a superior of one of his colleges. He is transmitting and confirming the limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statute of the Society of Jesus, which Ignatius had established as a permanent constitutional rule. The phrase “excluded for ever” (in perpetuum exclusi in the Latin original) leaves no interpretative ambiguity: Jewish descent is an absolute and permanent disqualification from the Society, not a temporary pastoral caution. Xavier communicates this as settled law requiring no further argument.

XI. “Tratava incorruptamente de la punicion de sus Judaismos” — Conversos Murder Miguel Vaz to Prevent Prosecution of Their Judaising

Source: Vol. II, p. 5, footnote 2. Coleridge citing Faria y Sousa, Asia Portuguesa (t. ii, p. 2, cap. 6).

“Faria y Sousa… seems to hint that, though the blame was laid on some heathen converts lately received, the true culprits were Portuguese. ‘Este murió de ponzoña dada por Christianos nuevos [Portugueses poderosos en Goa] porque con poderes de Inquisidor tratava incorruptamente de la punicion de sus Judaismos.’“

[Translation of the Spanish: “He died of poison given by New Christians [powerful Portuguese in Goa] because, wielding the powers of Inquisitor, he was incorruptibly prosecuting their Judaising practices.”]

Note

Miguel Vaz was the Vicar-General of Goa and one of Xavier’s closest collaborators in the Indian mission. This footnote, drawing on the seventeenth-century Portuguese historian Faria y Sousa, records that Vaz was murdered by conversos — Jews who had received nominal baptism — in order to silence his Inquisitorial prosecution of their continued Jewish practices. The document thus directly connects Xavier’s apostolic circle to the suppression of crypto-Judaism in Goa, and frames the martyrdom of Vaz as the direct consequence of converso resistance to Christian discipline.

XII. “We visit them every day” — Xavier’s Ministry to Prisoners of the Inquisition

Source: Vol. I, p. 81. Letter of St. Francis Xavier to St. Ignatius of Loyola (Letter from Lisbon, 1540).

“The Prince Don Henry, Grand Inquisitor of the Kingdom, and the King’s brother, has often urged on us to take spiritual charge of the persons in the prisons of the Holy Inquisition. We visit them every day, and apply ourselves to make them understand how great a favour God has done them in placing them in this school of penance. Once a day we give them all together an exhortation, and we also give them the Exercises of the first weeks, to their great comfort and advantage. A large number of them tell us that they acknowledge it as a singular favour of God that they now hear as they do from us, what they have never heard before, so many truths, the knowledge of which is necessary for their salvation.”

Note

Before sailing to India, Xavier spent time in Lisbon where the newly established Portuguese Inquisition — overwhelmingly concerned with converso Judaising — was already filling its prisons. The prisoners to whom Xavier ministered daily under the direction of Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Henry were in the great majority cristãos novos (New Christians) accused of secretly practising Jewish rites. Xavier frames their imprisonment as a providential spiritual opportunity — “how great a favour God has done them” — and his pastoral work among them as the communication of truths “necessary for their salvation,” truths they had been denied by their Jewish formation. The letter reveals the organic connection between Xavier’s formation as a Jesuit and the institutional machinery of the Iberian Inquisition.

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