Jewish history and gentile memory: The expulsion of 1492

Abstract

During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Christian kingdoms and principalities in northern Iberia extended their power southward. They acquired territory and people that, since the first quarter of the eighth century, had been under Islamic rule. The kingdoms of Leon-Castila, Aragon, and Portugal (especially the former two) contained greater numbers of non-Christians - Jews and Muslims - than any other Christian territory in western Europe. Until the late fourteenth century the kind of public life led in these states was termed convivencia, "peacefully living together," and in Jewish usage Iberia was termed Sefarad (Obadiah 20: literally the farthest northern point of Jewish migration in Syria; figuratively, a refuge remote from Palestine). Jews played a subordinate but crucial role in these kingdoms, which have been termed sociologically incomplete societies, i.e., requiring the presence and service of non-Christians for some governmental functions - chiefly financial and professional - that Christian subjects could not or would not perform. Although Jews were needed, they were also excluded from high public office, as were Jews elsewhere in Christian Europe. In 1391 a number of riots broke out in different parts of Iberia, directed against Jews. As a result, about half the Jewish population of Iberia converted to Christianity. This was an event unprecedented in history - and one for which the Iberian church and society, indeed any contemporary Christian church and society, were utterly unprepared. A generation or so later, in the 1440s, new anti-Jewish movements began again, directed this time also against the "New Christians," or conversos, as they were called. The reasons for some of this resentment against conversos as well as