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"Jews Conversion to Christianity Spain."
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Between Christian and Jew
In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months.Between Christian and Jewclosely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity-and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions-during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony. The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.
eBook
The Conversos of Valencia
Since the nineteenth century, conversos have been among the most prolific lines of research for medievalists and early modern historians. The persecution they suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, the veracity of the claims that attributed to them a clear tendency to remain Jewish in secret long after they were baptized, and their role as cultural agents and active contributors to Spanish culture, particularly in the field of literature, have appealed greatly to researchers. However, in contrast to the vast amount of academic research focusing on Jews from a social perspective, our knowledge of the first generations of conversos is limited. In this article, we present the results of prosopographical research devoted to the converso collective of Valencia from July 9, 1391—the year of the violent and massive conversion of the city’s Hebrew population—to 1420. In particular, we discuss the methodological obstacles presented by such research; evaluate whether the converted population in Valencia can be considered a community after 1391; analyze the socio-professional structure and general economic activities of conversos; and study the social dynamics and interpersonal conflicts that developed both within the group and with Old Christians during this thirty-year period.
Journal Article
Testing Boundaries: Jewish Conversion and Cultural Fluidity in Medieval Europe, c. 1200–1391
Claims about the history of Jewish conversion to Christianity have long been central to key narratives in medieval Jewish historiography. Most famously, they have served to illustrate an alleged cultural contrast between Sepharad, or Spain, and Ashkenaz, or northern Europe. According to this classic view, which was given its fullest expression by Yitzhak Baer in the 1930s and 1940s, the mass conversions of Jews to Christianity that swept Spain in 1391, in the context of the most extensive anti-Jewish violence in medieval history, were the result of Spanish Jews’ engagement with Greek rationalism, their political ambition, and their “passion for erotic experience,” all of which led Spanish Jews to neglect their Jewish heritage. The Jews of northern Europe, by contrast, resisted conversion in the face of violence and instead favored martyrdom (most famously in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade) on account of their single-minded piety. Conversion, in other words, was the outcome of acculturation, and the conversions of 1391, whose scope was unprecedented, attested to Spanish Jews’ excessive cultural openness.
Journal Article
The Conversos and Moriscos in late medieval Spain and beyond.: (Displaced persons)
Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity in large numbers and usually under duress in late Medieval Spain. The Converso and Morisco Studies publications will examine the implications of these mass conversions for the converts themselves, for their heirs (also referred to as Conversos and Moriscos) and for Medieval and Modern Spanish culture. As the essays in this collection attest, the study of the Converso and Morisco phenomena is not only important for those scholars focused on Spanish society and culture, but for academics everywhere interested in the issues of identity, Otherness, nationalism, religious intolerance and the challenges of modernity.Contributors include Mercedes Alcalá-Galan, Ruth Fine, Kevin Ingram, Yosef Kaplan, Sara T. Nalle, Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Ashar Salah, Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Claude Stuczynski, and Gerard Wiegers.
eBook
From Forced Conversion to Marranism
This article traces the history of the forced conversion of Jews to Islam in al-Andalus and Morocco from the Middle Ages to modern times. An account is given of the various discriminative measures and even persecution to which Jewish converts were exposed. Indeed, even though they became with time sincere and learned Muslims, just as the Marranos in Christian Spain, the sincerity of their conversion was doubted and they were constantly accused of the negative traits attributed to the Jews. The article also discusses a recently discovered defence of the New Muslims authored by an Islamic scholar of Jewish origin which throws new light on the fate of these converts.
Journal Article
Vivencias, emociones y perfiles femeninos
Las mujeres que transitan por estas páginas –cuyas biografías y procesos se vierten en otros dos libros que profundizan en sus bitácoras vitales y la narratividad de los textos– ejercen el liderazgo de sus vidas, donde libre albedrío y tradición se conjugan, lo que no impide que habite en ellas el temor a la soledad. De ahí que busquen la hospitalidad y acogida en las redes parentales y vecinales –donde la sororidad juega un papel determinante–, y que las prácticas judaizantes constituyan un factor de socialización y anclaje afectivo de su identidad. A través de las declaraciones de sus protagonistas, y de sus círculos más próximos, se reconstruye la microhistoria de unos perfiles de personas triplemente marginadas por su condición de mujeres, conversas –por lo común de segunda generación– y viudas.
A tal fin se han analizado veinticuatro procesos inquisitoriales incoados por el Santo Oficio en Aragón en su primera etapa (1484-1492), custodiados en diversos archivos nacionales y europeos. En suma, y desde la her-story y la cogmotion, se traza, a modo de un palimpsesto, la historia de sus sentimientos, sensibilidades y emociones. Así, su génesis, perfiles y nostalgias; los escenarios, tiempos y confines femeninos; los círculos de convivialidad; el laberinto de la herejía; el simbolismo de ceremonias, ritos y observancias; los descreimientos y disfraces; las voces, la gestualidad y las memorias femeninas. [Texto de la editorial]
eBook
Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain
Sephardim (that is, the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain) and Spaniards share an unusually heightened concern with lineage and genealogy in the early modern period. Nirenberg argues that the conversion to Christianity of many thousands of Jews caused by the massacres, forced disputation and segregations that marked the period between 1391 and 1415 produced a violent destabilization of traditional categories of religious identity and that in the face of this destabilization Jews, Christians and \"conversos\" created new forms of communal identity by engaging in a dynamic and dialogic process of rereading their own traditions and those of their rivals.
Journal Article
Polemical Encounters
This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious
plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and
northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics-works that attack
or refute the beliefs of religious Others-this volume aims to
challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews,
Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups.
From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century,
Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim
efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts
of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to
the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a
wide variety of case studies that expose how the current
historiographical focus on the three religious communities as
allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing
ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers.
Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines,
this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and
intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among
these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and
beyond.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i
Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais,
Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J.
Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van
Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.
eBook
The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond
Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity (mostly under duress) in late Medieval Spain. Converso and Moriscos Studies examines the manifold cultural implications of these mass convertions.
eBook