Who is a Jew?

In June​ 1391, an anti-Jewish riot broke out in Seville, prompted by the incendiary preaching of a local priest. Four thousand Jews were murdered, and the violence soon spread to more than ninety Iberian cities. The events of 1391 remain the largest massacre of Jews in Iberian history. Over the following two decades, more than half the Jews of Aragon and Castile converted to Christianity, though these conversions were hardly freely chosen. A new community emerged, the conversos or New Christians (long known also as ‘marranos’, a word now avoided because it was originally a slur).

Jews and Christians had lived in a state of interdependence for centuries. A Jewish presence is attested in the Iberian peninsula since late antiquity, probably established after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Jews lived in Iberia under Roman, then Visigothic, then Muslim rule. The Muslim period – the era of al-Andalus, beginning in 711 ce – has come to be remembered as a golden age of Jewish-Muslim relations. The great Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides, for instance, was born in Muslim-ruled Córdoba, though he was eventually forced to emigrate. By the late Middle Ages, Christian rulers had made significant inroads: the Castilians conquered Toledo in 1085, Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. By the time of the 1391 massacre, the Jews of Seville had been living under Christian rule for nearly a century and a half. While many Jews worked as craftsmen, the Jewish elite was involved in trade and finance: they extended credit to the royal purse, won contracts for the right to collect taxes and served as royal treasurers and accountants. Following the wave of conversions after 1391, many of these roles were taken over by New Christians.

Conversion also opened access to positions New Christians could not have attained as Jews, including as municipal councillors, holders of ecclesiastical offices and royal advisers. Predictably, there was soon a backlash. Riots targeting New Christians took place in Toledo in 1449; in their aftermath, the city instituted the first ‘purity of blood’ statute, prohibiting any descendant of converts from holding public office for at least four generations. This rejected the understanding of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th century, as Francisco Bethencourt writes in his new history of the converso mercantile elite, the New Christians made up around 5 per cent of the Iberian population. Almost all of them lived in towns, accounting for between 60 and 65 per cent of the peninsula’s urban population.

While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches and cathedrals, and married Old Christians. Some sought additional protection by acquiring Old Christian status through forged genealogical documents. Yet despite such efforts, there were suspicions that the new converts still practised Judaism in secret; nominal conversion could be forced, but converts’ inward beliefs resisted control. The Spanish Inquisition, formally known as the Tribunal of the Holy Office, was founded in 1478 with the intention of rooting out these ‘Judaisers’. Pope Sixtus IV wasn’t immediately persuaded of its benefits and resisted its establishment; later popes sought to protect the converted Jews of Portugal, where the Inquisition arrived in 1536. Bethencourt points out that ‘the first generations of inquisitors, even at the highest level, themselves had several conversos or converso relatives.’ Yet the Inquisition prevailed. Suspicion fell not just on converts but on their descendants, so the number of suspected Judaisers increased with every generation.

In 1492, a century after the riots that forced the initial wave of conversions, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile ordered the expulsion of all practising Jews from their domains. Facing the dilemma of emigration or conversion, many Jews chose to remain. Others went to Portugal, where, in 1496, King Manuel I ordered that all Jews convert. Any Jew who became Christian lost more than their official faith. With the destruction of rabbinic Judaism, they were no longer anchored in textual tradition; ‘there was no study of the scriptures, no renewal of culture, no guidance.’ Many converts continued to avoid eating pork or fish without scales, fried food in olive oil rather than lard, fasted on certain days, respected the Sabbath by gathering on Friday evenings and not working on Saturdays, observed traditional funerary rituals and even celebrated the Passover seder. It was for evidence of such acts that the Inquisition scrutinised the lives of conversos. Bethencourt cautions against taking the inquisitors’ words at face value: it was possible, he argues, to feel Christian and at the same time sustain ‘cultural practices inherited from [one’s] ancestors’.

Persecution defined the New Christian experience. Wealth didn’t guarantee protection: in 1506, during an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in which as many as three thousand New Christians died, a mob in Lisbon killed João Rodrigues Mascarenhas, a merchant with close ties to the Portuguese king. Some New Christians made an effort to defend their rights. In the 1530s Duarte de Paz, the former customs administrator of Porto, campaigned in Rome against the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition. When it was introduced all the same, he was granted an exemption for his family. Having made too many enemies in Portugal and Rome, however, he had to flee to the Ottoman Empire, converting first to Judaism and then, after even the Jews of Istanbul shunned him, to Islam.

Conversos often returned to Judaism after fleeing Spain for other parts of Europe. Sometimes, as in Venice and Livorno, they were encouraged in this by local authorities, who preferred the clarity of Jewish status to the ambiguity of converso identity. Others remained New Christians (at least officially) even after migrating. Yet others would appear as Jews in one country and Christians elsewhere. All this has made it hard for historians to agree on what New Christians really believed. Very few left an account of the way they saw themselves, so we often have to rely on the transcripts produced by inquisitors. Some have questioned whether Inquisition records, produced by men with an obsessive enmity towards Judaism, can be trusted as records of Jewish belief. But, as Bethencourt points out, Inquisition trials generated an eclectic range of sources: genealogical inquiries, property inventories, declarations by the accused.

The problem of converso belief exposes a tension at the heart of historical interpretation. Should we privilege the categories of identity used by historical actors – even when we are uncertain about the way they understood themselves – or can we impose our own analytical categories? Any study of the New Christians forces a confrontation with a particularly thorny question: who is a Jew? Reasonable people can disagree over whether the rabbis get to decide, or whether persecutors’ definitions should be taken into account, or whether lineage confers Jewish belonging, or whether cultural traditions, however distantly remembered, count. As prudent as it is to avoid generalising statements, it’s hard to write a history like this without employing a clear definition. Bethencourt threads the needle by calling the conversos a group ‘defined by diaspora’ rather than community. He also refers to them as an ethnicity, by which he means ‘a social group with shared ancestry’. Whatever their beliefs, and no matter how long ago their family had converted, ‘their ancestry … was a permanent threat,’ something that could always be used against them. The historian must attend to lineage because it was the operative notion at the time. Yet there is something uncomfortable about defining people not on the basis of what they claimed or believed themselves to be, but on their purported genealogy.

Bethencourt’s task is made trickier by his focus on a delicate subject: the New Christian mercantile elite and its role in early European global expansion. The idea that capitalism is somehow intrinsically Jewish, or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance trade was made possible by international banking and new financial institutions such as the joint-stock company and the stock exchange. As overseas commerce transformed the European economy, new myths circulated alongside old ones to implicate Jews in the rise of modern finance. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu claimed that the bill of exchange, which enabled remote transfers of money, was a Jewish invention. As Francesca Trivellato has shown, this false assertion originated in a treatise published by the French lawyer Étienne Cleirac in 1647. Cleirac lived in Bordeaux, which had been home to a Portuguese New Christian community since the mid-16th century. Trivellato sees Cleirac’s accusation as a reaction to a changing social order: he associated the slipperiness of modern financial instruments with the slipperiness of converso identity. A decade earlier, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo had imagined an international conspiracy of Jews and New Christians ‘who declare themselves atheists and worshippers of the god money and who are all engaged in ruining Christian countries through perfidious financial tricks’. To devote six hundred pages to the entrepreneurial zeal of the New Christian elite is to enter charged territory.

The speed of the New Christians’ rise was as remarkable as the geographical extent of their interests. According to Bethencourt, elite New Christians controlled ‘most of the slave trade in the Atlantic until the late 17th century, a good part of the trade from Asia until the first quarter of the 17th century, and the sugar trade from Brazil until the early 18th century’, as well as part of the trade in silver and dyes from the Americas, textiles from South Asia and porcelain and lacquer from East Asia. In other words, they were at the forefront of the major commercial innovations that brought profit to Europe in the early centuries of global expansion – a violent and logistically ambitious effort to extract profit on a new scale.

Bethencourt offers several explanations for the New Christians’ success. They inherited their Jewish ancestors’ role in the Iberian economy while enjoying freedoms those ancestors had been denied. What’s more, their emergence in the 15th century coincided with the rise in Portuguese trade along the African coast and on islands such as Madeira, where sugar was already intensively cultivated. By the early 16th century, New Christians held the royal contracts for trade with West Africa. As the Portuguese expanded their presence in South Asia and Brazil, and the Spanish in the Americas and the Philippines, New Christians migrated there, working as merchants, craftsmen and plantation owners.

By the end of the 16th century, New Christian investments supported three-quarters of the Indian Ocean trade with Asia and almost a third of the Pacific trade from Manila to Mexico. New Christian financial operations – loans to merchants, the transfer of money from Asia to Europe – smoothed the functioning of Portuguese global commerce. Individual tradesmen ventured far and wide. The merchant Pedro de Baeça spent his early years in India, South-East Asia, Macau and Nagasaki. On his return to Portugal, he invested in the Indian trade, which brought pepper to Lisbon, as well as ‘Indian cloth, precious stones and other spices’. After he moved to Madrid following the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, he continued to supply the Lisbon galleys and collect the customs duties at Portuguese ports. He died on his way to serve as royal factor in the Moluccas, in present-day Indonesia.

Other Portuguese New Christians moved to Seville. This gave them access to commerce with the Spanish Americas, including the growing trade in enslaved people. The slave trade had narrow margins but was made profitable by transporting other forms of contraband, such as textiles that could be exchanged for silver and American goods. The Spanish king made money by selling contracts for the slave trade to the Americas, almost all of which were bought by New Christian merchants. While the trade was not yet at the levels it would reach in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was far from insignificant: between 1595 and 1610, almost 500 slave ships transported 75,000 registered enslaved people.

Bethencourt provides rich detail about some of the New Christians involved in the trade. Gonzalo Núñez de Sepúlveda was born in Lisbon and worked in Luanda on behalf of a New Christian who had contracts for trading enslaved labourers in the Spanish Americas, Cape Verde and Angola. After making his fortune he moved to Seville, where he joined the military Order of Santiago and endowed a cathedral chapel to honour the Immaculate Conception. Duarte Dias Henriques had wider interests still: he held a contract for slave trading from Angola, underwrote sugar plantations in Pernambuco, exported goods to Amsterdam, and invested in customs duties and loans to the crown in Spain.

In spite of their contribution to the Spanish and Portuguese economies, however, the conversos continued to be persecuted even across oceans. The Inquisition followed them to the New World and to Asia: tribunals were established in Goa in 1560, Lima in 1570, Mexico City in 1571 and Cartagena de Indias in 1610. (Brazil, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Lisbon tribunal four thousand miles away, was less repressive.) By the 17th century, Iberian primacy in the Atlantic was being threatened by the Dutch. Yet that didn’t stop the Portuguese and Spanish undermining their commercial class with a wave of inquisitorial prosecutions in the 1630s and 1640s. The persecution of New Christians reduced ‘Portuguese capacity for investment and trade in Asia’ and ‘disrupted significant networks of trade’ in Spanish America, causing ‘the collapse of the slave trade to that area for several decades’ – to the benefit of the Dutch and English. The motives for persecution varied – sometimes the goal was merely the seizure of New Christian property – and so did the outcomes, which ranged from absolution (which was relatively rare) to ‘reconciliation’ (a plea for forgiveness) to auto-da-fé. Their experience of injustice didn’t make the conversos more compassionate towards those whom they enslaved. ‘New Christians resisted and protested against their own inferior condition,’ Bethencourt writes, ‘but they did not question the status of the Black people they were transporting and selling into forced labour.’

By the 18th century, New Christian merchants no longer dominated Iberian and Spanish American trade. In part this was the outcome of decisions that backfired, such as their support for the losing side in the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1714. The persecution of New Christians by a viciously revived Portuguese Inquisition and the gradual recall of their privileges as royal financiers brought an end to their involvement as contractors in the slave trade. New Christians fared better in other parts of Europe – Rome in particular but also Florence, Antwerp and across France – and were often assimilated into local elites through matrimonial alliances. Even so, the conditions of global trade came to favour national mercantile classes working closely with increasingly centralised states: being part of an ethnic diaspora, whether New Christian, Sephardic or Armenian, no longer conferred the advantages it once had.

Meanwhile, converso identity had steadily weakened, as many New Christians blended into society at large through name changes and intermarriage. This process was sped up by the end of persecution: in Portugal, the legal distinction between Old Christians and New Christians was abolished in 1773; in Spain, blood purity inquiries were banned outright only in 1865. ‘The withdrawal of the Inquisition led to (nearly) full integration,’ Bethencourt writes, ‘as critical voices had always asserted it would.’

What​ distinguishes Strangers Within from other accounts is its scale. Bethencourt pursues his subjects across the globe, drawing on original archival material from Belgium, Britain, Italy and Peru, as well as Spain and Portugal. Even more impressively, he tracks the conversos over four centuries, from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. But this method has its drawbacks. A global history ranging from Aragon, Castile and Portugal to Goa, Manila, Lima and Pernambuco will always be at risk of fraying. This isn’t helped by Bethencourt’s insistence on the plurality of New Christian identities and experiences. A historian who seems to distrust storytelling, he divides his book into sections and subsections that assemble reams of material and lists of names. Sometimes repetitive prefatory and concluding remarks seek to organise the sprawl.

Some of the most successful uses of Inquisition records have been microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) is the most celebrated example – and, more recently, historians have tackled global history by narrowing their focus to individual people, objects or ideas. Bethencourt’s broader approach has certain advantages: it enables us to see vast perspectives and repeated patterns. Yet it gives us little of the texture of the past. Bethencourt rarely quotes from primary documents or lingers on a specific example. For all his empathy for the victims of centuries of persecution, he keeps his protagonists at arm’s length.

Regarding the conversos through the lens of social history does afford one major benefit: it puts to rest the idea that they were a kind of vanguard. The Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel argued that the conversos’ ‘split identity’ made them modern: caught between two worlds, they were supposedly the first to experience identity as protean and individual rather than fixed and collective. Bethencourt grants that the ‘liminality’ of conversos made them open to new religious movements such as alumbradismo, a spiritualist form of Christianity with egalitarian tendencies. But he prefers to treat the New Christians as ordinary people. Even alumbradismo, which attracted a significant number of conversos, ‘did not by any means involve most of them’; the majority ‘led a normal life in their parishes’. And he never loses sight of how exceptional the mercantile elites were: ‘the vast majority of New Christians were shopkeepers, pedlars, working artisans and people without property or economic status.’ There was no single New Christian experience, but rather a range of strategies for dealing with a bad hand: some brave and some cowardly, some more committed to Jewish tradition than others, some fortified by wealth, others at the mercy of naked circumstance.

In 2015 Spain and Portugal announced the intent to extend citizenship to descendants of expelled Jews and conversos. At a ceremony celebrating the new legislation, King Felipe VI of Spain exclaimed: ‘How we missed you!’ As of 2024, some 72,000 applicants have received Spanish citizenship by descent, mostly from former domains of the Spanish Empire: Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina. Last year, Spain’s public broadcaster, RTVE, aired a programme that suggested Christopher Columbus was probably a Spanish converso. This wasn’t based on documentary evidence, much less on what Columbus took himself to be, but on analysis of a DNA sample of Columbus’s supposed remains in Seville Cathedral, as well as those of his son and brother. The programme was broadcast on 12 October, Spain’s ‘national day’ (the revisionist view of Columbus as a génocidaire doesn’t seem to have reached the Spanish media). If for centuries Jewish ‘blood’ was a barrier to being Spanish, now it is grounds for inclusion. However, the Spanish statute expired in 2021, and the Portuguese one, which yielded a roughly equivalent number of new citizens, has been curtailed. Even when it comes to reparative justice, restrictions apply.