Aragonese and catalan Jewish converts at the time of the expulsion

Abstract

Historians of fifteenth-century Spanish Jewry have had to grapple with few problems as controversial or complex as that of Jewish conversion to Christianity and its implications for both Jewish and Christian societies. The forced conversion of Jews on a massive scale during the pogroms of 1391, and the subsequent voluntary conversions in the wake of the Disputation of Tortosa and the preaching of the Dominican Vicent Ferrer (1412-15) gave rise to the converso problem, that of nominal Christians whose relationship to their new faith covered a broad spectrum of stances, ranging from zealous adherence to outright rejection in favor of the Jewish faith of their ancestors. In any case, it is probable that the presence of this new socioreligious group that bridged the gap between Christian and Jewish societies was an important factor encouraging and facilitating the continual trickle of Jewish conversions after the traumas of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The dilemma presented by the existence of a large body of New Christians evoked varied responses from Jewish and Christian authorities, and eventually led the Catholic monarchs, Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, to establish the Spanish Inquisition (1478-83) in order to eradicate the judaizing conversos from Christian society. Once inquisitorial investigations revealed clearly what many already suspected or knew that Jews actively abetted those conversos so inclined in their maintenance of a Jewish life Fernando and Isabel in 1492 took the decisive step of expelling all Jews from Castile and Aragon in the hope of protecting the New Christians from further Jewish contamination.1 Yet the expulsion itself served only to compound the converso problem, for many Jews and it is unlikely that historians will ever know how many opted for baptism instead of exile from what had been their homeland for well over a millennium.2