Anti-Semitism

The largest Jewish community in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries existed on the Iberian Peninsula, the southern half of which was then controlled and ruled by Muslim states and the central and northern half by Christians. Jews were a significant minority in both these regions of Spain. They were especially important to the Christians who wanted to force them to convert and thus strengthen the Christian majority in the region. At the end of the fourteenth century, the Christians did succeed in forcing Jews to convert by the tens of thousands. In a century or so, the number of such converts grew until the climax in 1492, when the combined kingdom of Aragon and Castile, under the joint rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, confronted the Jews with a stark choice: either convert to Christianity or leave the land of their Christian majesties. A quarter million Jews then still remained in all the lands of Christian Spain; the larger half accepted conversion, and the rest left, hoping to find some refuge in places where Jews were allowed to live openly, or semiopenly, as Jews.

There were many forces that led to this decree of conversion or expulsion, but the economic motive was dominant. Many of the Jews in Spain had made their way into the middle class and even beyond, so their Christian competitors presumed that the increasingly prominent Jewish role in Iberian commerce could be ended by forcing them to become Christians. The Jews would redistribute themselves in such fashion that they would no longer be dominant in trade and commerce. None of this happened. On the contrary, the "new Christians" used their new privileges to become not only more major figures in banking and the ownership of land; they also intermarried, quite rapidly, with high figures in the nobility and rose to predominant positions in the state, the army, and even in the Church. Some Jews thought it would be safer to move to the Spanish colonies in the New World. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Spain had developed its rule in South America through the viceroyalty of Lima in Peru. At one moment in those years the viceroy and the archbishop were both descendants, at least in part, of "new Christians," and so, Lima was known mockingly as La Juderia. The Inquisition redoubled its efforts in Peru and Mexico, the main centers of Spanish rule, to suppress Marranos (that is, new Christians who actually or supposedly practiced Judaism in secret).

But the "new Christians" remained powerful. The way had to be found to make these converts from Judaism into second-class citizens or worse. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the doctrine was invented of Limpieza de Sangre (purity of blood). It first became law in Toledo in 1449 and restrictions were widely adopted: those who could not prove that all four of their grandparents were "old Christians" were denied roles in government or in the Church. The taint that Jewish blood now brought with it was not different from Manetho's insistence nearly two thousand years earlier that Jews were lepers and thus infectious beings. Anti-Semitism had changed on the surface, but its basic thrust had remained the same. The Jews are a lasting danger to the majority.