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Home , Spanish Inquisition

CHAPTER TWO

CASTILIAN AND IN PORTUGAL C.1480−C.1495

In the early summer of 1391, a wave of anti-Jewish violence shook much of the and engulfed the principal Jewish com- munities in Castile and . Thousands of Jews converted to Chris- tianity to escape slaughter at the hands of the mob. This disaster was compounded by an aggressive preaching campaign led by Saint Vin- cent Ferrer and the disputation of Tortosa which resulted in many more conversions, both voluntary and unwilling.1 The most important conse- quence of the calamitous period of 1391 to 1416 was that the converts and their descendants, who became collectively known as the conversos, emerged as a distinct social group that was integrated into mainstream Christian society although not assimilated. The exact number of Jews who converted during this period will never be known but it was suffi- ciently high for those that did to retain their own group identity.2 Large- scale conversion did not result in increased social harmony but rather the contrary. There was widespread suspicion amongst Old Christians that the conversos were not sincere Christians but continued secretly to practice their old faith. By way of illustration, the author of the Albor- cayco, an anti-Jewish polemic written in the or possibly even earlier, asserted that “in the kingdoms of Toledo, , Andalucía and you will hardly find any of them [conversos] who are true Christians.”3 There was a widespread belief amongst certain sec- tors of population that judaizing conversos were working to undermine the church from within and even that “Jewishness” was

1 Y. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian , 2, 95−243; P. Wolff, “The 1391 in Spain. Social crisis or not?”, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 4−18; See also E. Benito Ruano, Los origenes del problema (, 1976). 2 On the number of conversos in fifteenth-century Spain see B. Netanyahu, The Mar- ranos of Spain from the late XIVth to the early XVIth Century, According to Contempo- rary Hebrew Sources (New York, 1973), 238−248. 3 B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Spanish in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), 853. castilian CONVERSOS and jews in portugal 85 transmitted by blood.4 This resentment against conversos was further fuelled by the fact that many of them, now unrestricted by a distinct religious identity, attained positions of power and influence in society. An uprising against the Crown in Toledo led to a violent anti-converso riot in 1449 and there was another wave of bloody riots directed against conversos in the towns of Andalucía in 1473.5 Jews were widely sus- pected by Old Christians of actively assisting judaizing conversos and this allegation led Isabel and Fernando to order the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon in 1492.6 These terrible events have generated a vast body of historical literature and a heated debate still focuses on the real extent of crypto- amongst the conversos.7 One aspect of these momentous developments that has received much less attention, however, has been their impact upon the neighbouring kingdom of Portugal. Recently, a few histori- ans have started to perceive this event as a key to the sudden decline of Portuguese Jewry. As we have seen in the introduction, Tavares has described the arrival of the Castilian Jews in Portugal as a “destabilizing element” that was crucial in bringing about the of 1497. Another scholar has gone even further and made the following devastating assessment: Contemporary sources tell us that in the early summer of 1492 Portugal was flooded with 90,000–120,000 Castilian Jews. The admission of such an influx was contrary to reason. This country, whose population num- bered barely one million, could not afford such a move that would create chaos from socio-economic, health, and religious perspectives.8

4 J. Friedman, “Jewish conversion, the Spanish pure blood laws and : a revisionist view of racial and religious anti-Semitism”, The Sixteenth Century Jour- nal, 18 (1987), 3−29; J. Edwards, “The beginnings of a scientific theory of Race? Spain, 1450−1600”, From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture, ed. Y. K. Stillman and N. A. Stillman (Leiden, 1999), 179−196. 5 A. Mackay, “Popular movements and in fifteenth-century Castile”, Past and Present, 55 (1972), 33−67. 6 M. Kriegel, “La prise d’une décision: l’expulsion des juifs d’Espagne en 1492”, Revue historique, 260 (1979), 49−90. Haliczer has contended, without much solid evidence, that Christian urban oligarchies were responsible for the expulsion of 1492: S. H. Haliczer, “The Castilian urban patriciate and the Jewish expulsions of 1480−1482”, The American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 35−62. 7 See B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Spanish Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995) and N. Roth, Conversos, Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison, 1995). 8 A. Gross, Iberian Jewry from Twilight to Dawn, The World of Abraham Saba (Leiden, 1995), 7.