Download PDF | Cecil Reid - Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile_ Breaking with the Past, Routledge (2021).
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Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile
Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile examines the ways in which Jewish-Christian relations evolved in Castile, taking account of social, cultural, and religious factors that affected the two communities throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms in Iberia that followed the reconquests of the mid-thirteenth century presented new military and economic challenges. At the same time the fragile balance between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Peninsula was also profoundly affected.
Economic and financial pressures were of over-riding importance. Most significant were the large tax revenues that the Iberian Jewish community provided to royal coffers, new evidence for which is provided here. Some in the Jewish community also achieved prominence at court, achieving dizzying success that often ended in dismal failure or death. A particular feature of this study is its reliance upon both Castilian and Hebrew sources of the period to show how mutual perceptions evolved through the long fourteenth century. The study encompasses the remarkable and widespread phenomenon of Jewish conversion, elaborates on its causes, and describes the profound social changes that would culminate in the anti-converso riots of the mid-fifteenth century.
This book is valuable reading for academics and students of medieval and of Jewish history. As a study of a unique crucible of social change it also has a wider relevance to multi-cultural societies of any age, including our own.
Cecil Reid completed his PhD in 2018 at Queen Mary, University of London. He was formerly a medical researcher and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Clinical Haematology at Imperial College, University of London.
Introduction
The millennium of Jewish settlement in the Iberian Peninsula ended with the expulsion in 1492 and it continues to fascinate students of Jewish history and of medieval societies. The uninterrupted presence of the Jewish communities there was in contrast to France and to England from where Jews had been banished at the end of the thirteenth or at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 Even more remarkable was the extent to which the Iberian Jews were able to thrive and to contribute to the economy, to the administration, and to the cultural life of the kingdoms.
There were several seismic changes in the fabric of Iberian society throughout the Middle Ages. Visigothic rule was followed, in the eighth century, by 600 years of Muslim domination. From the early thirteenth century Christian hegemony expanded rapidly to include the provinces of Valencia, Murcia, and most of Andalusia. Finally, in 1492, with the capture of the Kingdom of Granada in 1492 the whole of the Peninsula came under Christian rule. This book focuses on just the last 200 years of Jewish life in the Spanish kingdoms that followed the thirteenth-century Christian reconquests. The historical literature on Jewish Iberia is very extensive and there have been a number of excellent publications in the last few decades, since Yitzhak Baer’s classic and comprehensive two volumes that dealt with the Jews of Christian Spain.2 This volume, however, diverges from recent treatments of the subject in its endeavour to highlight the way in which the lives of many Jews were dramatically transformed over the two centuries that preceded expulsion. My intention has been to trace the transition of Iberian Jewry from a relatively homogenous social group that clung to its faith and tradition to one that was fractured not just by violence but also by doubt and despair.
The special interest of this period, I argue, lies in this transition and in the resulting social changes that were unparalleled in the history of European Jewry. By drawing on both Jewish and Christian sources, my aim has been to document the course of these changes as they affected the economic, cultural, and religious lives of the Jewish communities. Aragon and Castile were separate kingdoms until the latter part of the fifteenth century and the majority of this book deals with the Jews of Castile. Addressed in the first chapter, however, are the lives of a small Jewish elite at the court of Aragon; the lives of these administrators, scribes, and diplomats show similarities but also differences to those of their counterparts in Castile, though the heyday of their activity was of much shorter duration. The privileges they received and the offices they performed attest to the special economic and political circumstances that prevailed in Aragon at the end of the thirteenth century. In documenting change, the records of individual interactions of Jews within and outside of their own communities, of their economic welfare, and of their faith and religious doubt all have a bearing. Social attitudes shifted over time and this was the case not only of Christians towards the Jewish minority but also of Jews to each other, to their faith, and to the wider society in which they lived. In this regard, the examination of polemical and secular literature of poetry, ballad, and performance is integral and is considered in the later chapters of the book.
The acquisition of the Muslim provinces meant that many more Jewish communities were now incorporated into the Christian realms. The rapid southward expansion accomplished by Jaime I of Aragon and by Fernando III and his son, Alfonso X of Castile, has been rightly characterised as a major catalyst to the social integration of the Jews.3 The historical record supports this contention and it is for this reason that the mid-thirteenth century is the point of departure for this volume. In Castile this period coincided with the reign of Alfonso X (El Sabio), a monarch whose political priorities and legal codifications would have a long-lasting impact on the lives of his Jewish subjects. The final chapter of the book concerns the rebellion in Toledo in 1449 and its consequences. This event, although it was not the final chapter of Iberian Jewish history, was a turning point that was freighted with significance for both the Jewish and Christian communities. It was an uprising that was accompanied by violence and rhetoric not against Jews but against those who had converted from Judaism, the conversos and their descendants, and it was unprecedented in the Peninsula. The turmoil of 1449 marked a novel social awareness of difference between New and Old Christians and it was transformative for the Jews as well as for wider society. It was, after all, a harbinger of the Inquisition and of the eventual expulsion of the Jews that would end a millennium of their existence in Iberia. The objective here has been, through a fresh appraisal of the two centuries that separated the reconquest and the rebellion, to reach an understanding of the choices that faced Jews, as individuals and as members of their close-knit communities, the aljamas. Their dilemma, at its starkest, was framed by the choice between death and survival and between submission to baptism and tenacious adherence to the faith of their fathers.
More subtle and largely unperceived at the time was the dilemma of how to engage with a permeable cultural frontier, a permeability that held benefits but also risk for the individual and his family. The benefits were material but the risk was to the preservation of the religious and cultural identity of the individual and of the group. The nature of this predicament and its resolution are central to virtually all that is described here and both are visible at many points throughout the chapters that follow.
For modern historians, the concept of convivencia has been fundamental to the discussion of cultural interactions between the three faith communities which populated medieval Iberia.4 The concept first proposed by Américo Castro seventy years ago has come to be understood as depicting a relatively harmonious social interaction between Muslim, Christian, and Jew that fundamentally influenced Spain’s later social and cultural development.5 In the 1950s Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz denied the cross-cultural influences inherent in convivencia: his emphasis was on the persistence of the Visigothic legacy that ran as a thread throughout the Peninsula’s history.6 Although this latter approach has not found general acceptance, Castro’s original representation of convivencia has been much criticised and refashioned by more recent scholarship as being too simple and idealistic. Yet, however it may be viewed today, it is a concept that still provides a valuable context for much of what occurred and for the events that are depicted throughout this book. Of course, the connotations of convivencia were just as important in the history of Muslims in Christian Spain (mudéjares) as it was for Jews, though it is only the Jews who are the subject of this study. Thomas Glick emphasised the more stratified nature of Jewish society that permitted some individuals to ‘step out of their ethnic roles’ in a way that was less feasible for the Muslim minority.7 His analysis contrasted Castro’s perception of social evolution with a largely immutable ‘temperamental inheritance’ as posited by Sánchez-Albornoz. Rejecting this latter biological model, he provided a useful elaboration of the concept of convivencia that posited a ‘struggle between cultural norms’ and stressed the role of conflict as well as of harmony between groups in cultural exchanges. Tolerance and susceptibility to minority cultural influence, he believed, were affected by the fluidity of peninsular politics up to the twelfth century. His view was that a gradual crystallisation of Castilian identity followed the reconquest. This resulted in a greater resistance to cultural exchange and a growing intolerance that characterised late medieval Castile.8 The term convivencia means literally no more than ‘living together’. Modern historical literature has either been inclined to discard the term altogether or else has sought to unpick from it those elements of social interaction helpful in understanding the cultural pluralism prevailing in the medieval Iberian kingdoms. Although the more neutral term coexistencia has been proposed as a substitute, this does little to advance understanding of complex communal relationships.9
Two present-day historians, Maya Soifer Irish and Jonathan Ray, have criticised the binary definitions of tolerance and intolerance as concepts inappropriate for the late Middle Ages.10 Convivencia, they argue, was an idealised construct, better replaced by a modern understanding of acculturation and cultural diffusion. Tolerance was predicated on a perception of mutual benefit, primarily by the Crown, and a king might be disinclined to curtail Jewish privileges if that were not in his best interest. Such enlightened self-interest is repeatedly seen in a close study of the historical record; the documentation presented in later chapters of this book amply justifies this more sceptical understanding of communal relations in the late medieval period. It has been particularly helpful to distinguish clearly between the processes of integration, acculturation, and assimilation of social groups. In what still remains a major contribution to an understanding of the situation of minorities in Iberia, Glick and Pi-Sunyer proposed a stabilised pluralism. That pluralism may have safeguarded the discreteness of the minority communities; yet it was not stable over time.11 Where the cultural boundaries between communities were permeable, as was the case of the Jews in Iberia, acculturation and eventual assimilation to the majority culture, they argued, would become inevitable.12 Furthermore, it cannot be assumed that the nature of relations between the communities was homogenous at all times.
Social polarisation reflected different levels of dialogue between the three cultures. On the one hand, as suggested by Ron Barkai, this could result in an intellectual and even spiritual closeness and, on the other hand, in a rejection based upon hatred of difference.13 Yet, as will be seen from the evidence presented in many of these pages, economic, political, and environmental pressures cannot be ignored in this equation. In times of crisis and unstable royal regencies, it has been proposed, hatred of the Jews and later of conversos would inevitably increase and result in persecution and violence. Moreover, some have argued that the economic decline of the early fourteenth century together with the attempts by the Crown to increase its authority over the municipalities (concejos) only served to increase anti-Jewish sentiment.14 Whether this was actually the case can be judged from what follows. Did the civil war that erupted in the mid-fourteenth century mark the beginning of a new hostility to the Jews; was this a ploy of the rebellious Enrique Trastámara in his bid to replace his brother Pedro on the throne of Castile?15 These and other related questions will be re-addressed here in the light of the very different circumstances that prevailed as the fourteenth century drew to its close.
As many historians have suggested and as I will argue here, the Jews of late medieval Castile were not an ‘alienated minority’. They did not only prosper or suffer at the whim of royal decree or murderous pogrom as Kenneth Stow so memorably characterised the fate of the Jews of Latin Europe.16 The distinction between the status of Jews in Iberia and those in England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire has been made by Norman Roth and more recently by Ray. Roth’s contention was that we lack evidence for popular animosity against Jews on account of the privileged status they mostly enjoyed in Iberia. This, however, is hard to reconcile with Nirenberg’s portrayal of an endemic culture of violence against and between the Jewish and Muslim minorities in Aragon.17
Yet another interpretation holds that the problem for Jewish community leaders in Iberia was not so much that of exclusion but rather of acceptance. Ray has depicted a particularly permissive society in Iberia, one that allowed acculturation to occur relatively unhindered, but that thereby constituted a threat to social cohesion.18 Until 1391, pogroms were uncommon or were small-scale in Iberia in comparison with the Rindfleisch (1298) and Armleder (1338) massacres in Franconia, or with the murders following accusations of well-poisoning in the wake of the Black Death.19 But even if widespread violence were not a quotidian feature of Jewish life in Iberia, there was always hostility. Nirenberg has described a background ‘static’ of violence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Kingdom of Aragon. This was often ritualised, as during Holy Week, and there was a chronic fear of miscegenation, a crossing of sexual boundaries that had both religious and racial overtones.20 Nirenberg believes that the ever-present tension between hostility and coexistence was integral to the maintenance of convivencia. In a similar vein, group interactions may be viewed as ‘entanglements’ that may have reflected both connection and social separation.
The complexity of these interactions could result in both hostile and tolerant encounters and Elisheva Baumgarten has proposed a synthesis whereby convivencia may incorporate acculturation, cultural overlap, and hybridity.21 A simpler model has also been proposed, wherein Jews might adopt norms of the majority culture without sacrificing their identity as Jews. Ivan Marcus has termed this ‘inward acculturation’ in opposition to ‘outward acculturation’ that blurred the individual’s affiliation to the group and which may be viewed as a prelude to full assimilation.22 The debate by historians over a terminology that seeks to define or set limits on the behaviour of individuals or groups reveals the usefulness but also the limitations of this approach. As will be shown, both Jews and Christians sought to minimise or to prevent the crossing of group boundaries. There were many stages, however, between completely separate development and the full assimilation of conversion.23 Moreover, disagreement could occur about where the demarcation between one social group and another was to be determined.
The most damaging manifestation of this was the conflict between the Old Christians and the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity, outlined in the final chapter of this book. The Toledo rebellion provides an example of how a cultural boundary was redefined by one of the parties (Old Christians) in response to the new social reality of widespread conversion. Although on one side of the conflict, those descended from converts (conversos) saw themselves as fully assimilated into Christian society, the rebels opposing them thought otherwise. The Jews of Sepharad should be viewed as owners of more than a single identity, and they were not solely defined by their religious affiliation.24 They were artisans, shop-keepers, even possessing small agricultural plots and vineyards. As is discussed in Chapter 3, they had close commercial contacts with their Christian and Muslim neighbours. They paid their taxes and owed their allegiance to the Crown of either Aragon or Castile, though even this could be mutable.25 In some cases their dues were paid to the Church: in others their primary loyalty was to the local lordship, as Thomas Barton has elegantly shown to be the case of the Catalonian Jews of Tortosa in the thirteenth century.26 There is also evidence, albeit mostly indirect, of social interactions of Jews with Christians whilst at the same time remaining faithful and religiously observant members of their communities. Jews were not confined within a ghetto but often lived and worked alongside both Christians and Muslims.
They had identities that belonged to the localities in which they lived and were able to travel, not being subject to restrictions on their movements around the kingdom.27 A favoured few moved within the King’s court as an intellectual elite. The fate of such men is discussed in the first chapter: in some cases, they were proficient in Arabic as well as in Hebrew and the vernacular. They formed alliances with the nobility or were recipients of extensive privileges that involved them in affairs of state or of a particular locality. The need for Jews to manage the money economy of the kingdom is a reflection of the poorly developed royal administration, especially so in thirteenth-century Castile. Castilian society was ‘organised for war’, whether in continual campaigns against the Muslims or against the other Peninsular kingdoms.28 Only with the efforts of Alfonso XI to establish a clerical class of educated, literate administrators (letrados) in the fourteenth century would the preeminent position of Jews at court be threatened: henceforth they would begin to be supplemented and eventually supplanted by Christian or, later, by converso appointees.
With the main focus of this book being on the economic and cultural aspects of Jewish life, the legal status of the Jews is not considered here in great detail. However, the civic status of Jews following the reconquest is pertinent to their perceptions of their rights, their freedom to move, to trade and earn a living, and to obtain justice. Alfonso VIII’s fuero granted to the town of Cuenca in 1189–1193 stated that Nam judei servi regis sunt et semper fisco regio deputati (‘The Jews are servants of the King and always belong to the King’s treasury’).30 Roth has dispelled the notion that servi implied that the civic status of Jews in the kingdom was anything other than that of free citizens, vecinos. 31 The meaning was not pejorative, but rather reflected the ambiguity of a frontier society, whereby Jews ‘could easily combine servitude (to the King) with citizenship’.
The freedoms extended to the right, granted by Alfonso X in the Siete Partidas and confirmed by subsequent monarchs in the Leyes del estilo, to have autonomy in judging legal actions between Jews in their own courts and according to Jewish law. Only in cases that were between Jews and Christians was it necessary for judgements to be made in a Christian court and even then, by a judge appointed specifically for this purpose by the Crown, an alcalde apartado. 32 The municipalities (concejos) resented the King’s prerogative to interfere in local affairs through the appointment of these judges. However, despite frequent interventions by the concejos, the legal status of Jews in Castile changed little over the centuries before the expulsion. Confirmation of this comes from a Hebrew record of a convention of the leaders of the aljamas in Valladolid in 1432. They met in order to discuss and codify many aspects of communal administration and their deliberations over the collection of the kingdom’s taxes are considered in more detail in Chapter 2. This document shows that the rabbis also debated the appointments of Jewish judges (dayanim) and that local juridical autonomy was conserved in the Jewish communities well into the fifteenth century.
Juridical independence and the high-level appointments of Jewish officials to the court are but two aspects of Jewish coexistence in Castile. The contribution that was made by the Jews to the Crown’s revenues has usually been considered to be disproportionate to their numbers, but it has been insufficiently studied. Baer’s view of the Jews of Aragon as a ‘sponge to be squeezed dry’ is an oversimplification of the situation, both there and in Castile.34 There is ample evidence in both kingdoms of the high value placed by the Crown on maintaining the integrity and financial autonomy of its Jewish communities. The particular challenges of warfare and a poor agrarian economy made the exchequer reliant to an extraordinary degree on its income from the Jews.35 Just how great was this income from the aljamas is revealed in Chapter 3. The comprehensive publication of taxation records by Francisco Hernández has now provided invaluable information about the late thirteenthcentury tax revenues for Castile. It has facilitated an exploration of the relative revenue contributions of all the three faith communities in Castile in greater detail than has hitherto been possible.36 Understanding this reliance is critical to an explanation of the protection afforded to the Jews by successive monarchs in Castile. The revenues of the Jews also had wider implications for the extent and manner of financial self-administration that was permitted to the aljamas, and this aspect of community self-governance will also be considered.
The day-to-day relations between Jews and their Christian neighbours are not easy to gauge from the records. On the one hand we may study the documentation of settlement in order to infer the degree of separation or of physical closeness that prevailed in any defined community. On the other hand, there is the highly speculative issue of popular imagery and a consideration of how much weight should be given to the views of Jews to be found in literature, recital, or display. In Chapter 3, the demographic of Jewish and Muslim dwelling in two large Castilian towns, Ávila and Segovia, is contrasted with that of a small settlement in the Rioja region of north-east Castile: the record shows how disparate these relations could be. They were certainly not uniformly cordial; yet personal interactions in the market, in the street, even in a neighbour’s home would potentially have moderated (or possibly aggravated) relations between the communities.
The prosperity of the aljamas, indeed of any of the communities of Iberia, depended at the very least on periods of relative peace and the absence of violence. As has already been mentioned, a common view of historians has been that hostility to the Jewish minority was linked to economic decline and civil unrest. On this view the anti-Jewish stance adopted by Enrique Trastámara in the civil war in mid fourteenth-century Castile led to an altered perception of Jews; this, it has been argued, radically transformed their status vis-à-vis the Crown and in the eyes of the population.38 These assumptions are challenged in Chapter 4. That the communities suffered physically and financially throughout the first half of the fourteenth century is not in doubt; it is reflected in the diminished revenues from these communities evident in a cuaderno de cuentas provided to Enrique II following the civil war and detailed in Chapter 2. However, the rhetoric and civil disturbances must be viewed within the political and economic context of that period. This shows that the Jews suffered together with all of the wider population from famine and violence.
What is clear is that the Jews, as the wealthiest sector of the population, suffered the greatest financial loss and one from which many communities never fully recovered. The relations between communities would not have been improved by the negative perceptions that each had of the other, disseminated by legend, ballad, or public performance. These may have been as influential on the townsfolk as any political propaganda by one side or the other of the warring parties.39 It is possible to discern a change in tone from the Cantigas de Santa María and Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora of the thirteenth century to later popular balladry and the verses of Ayala’s Rimado de Palacio or the self-mockery of late fourteenth-century converso poetry.40 This literary progression is traced in Chapter 5. It is apparent how the tales of Satanic Jews and of the redemptive power of conversion in the earlier canon were to be replaced by more worldly, though equally negative, stereotypes of Jews throughout the fourteenth century. It is impossible to know for certain whether changes in popular perceptions of Jews by the Christian population contributed to the violence and mass conversions of 1391. It is not difficult, however, to understand how the stark choice between martyrdom and conversion would have appeared to the Jewish victims. Rather overlooked in the past, desperate and courageous sacrifices of self and of family are well documented and are discussed in Chapter 5. Martyrdom, al kiddush ha-shem (sanctifying God’s name) was not, it seems, the rarity among Iberian Jewry that has sometimes been portrayed in modern historiography. A greater challenge for historians, however, has been to explain the tide of conversions which started even before the disturbances and gathered pace in the following decades.
The procurement of conversions by the friars-preacher from the thirteenth century onwards may have been less successful than had previously been thought and scepticism of the Jewish population towards the friars is well documented.41 Nevertheless, the threat of apostasy was considered a serious challenge by rabbinical leaders as was illustrated by their passionate debate discussed in Chapter 6. How Jewish scepticism to Christian missionising changed to a submission to baptism in the early decades of the fifteenth century is examined from a number of standpoints in that chapter. Assumptions have been made previously about differences in the mental outlook of Ashkenazi Jews in the north of Europe and the Sephardi Jews of Iberia.
The view of some historians has been that the simple religiosity and rightness of belief amongst Ashkenazi Jews that generally favoured martyrdom over baptism were not shared by the Jews of Sepharad.42 However, this judgement has been challenged recently, notably by David Malkiel and by Paola Tartakoff. Citing records of conversion amongst Ashkenazi Jews, both sincere and venal, Malkiel has suggested that apostasy amongst them was a ‘part of everyday life’.43 Even though a re-assessment of long held opinions has highlighted a more than negligible incidence of Ashkenazi conversion, the evidence for the many thousands of conversions in Iberia is incontestable; they point us to conversion on a scale that still lacks a full explanation.
The polemical background to the wave of conversions is reviewed, drawing on the works of Jewish missionising apostates and of those faithful Jews who opposed their vision. It is reasonable to assume that individuals who converted of their own volition and who integrated successfully into society would have set an example to others in their communities. The few well documented cases of such conversos that are examined in Chapter 6 provide an insight into how the lineages of these families were established, often achieving a prominence that was denied to them before their conversion. Yet, even such ambition cannot have accounted for the large tide of conversions attributed to the preaching of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer in the early decades of the fifteenth century. His sermons and the attempts by the Crown, under his influence, to segregate the habitations of Jews, conversos, and Old Christians were further disturbing signs of the rupture of convivencia in the kingdoms of both Castile and Aragon.
The resulting establishment of a completely new stratum of society of New Christians in the first decades of the fifteenth century represented the absorption of a large sector of the minority culture into that of the majority. The rebellion in Toledo discussed in the final chapter raises the issue of identity of these assimilated ‘New Men’.44 Just as their religious affiliation was challenged by their opponents, so modern historians have disagreed as to whether their conversion constituted a perfect assimilation to Christian society, or even a new and hybrid identity of ‘Jewish Christians’.45 A brief overview of the converso literature that sprang from the events of 1449 and which ends the book still leaves the issue unresolved. Nevertheless, the contested identity of the protagonists that it portrays would acquire overwhelming significance in the following decades of Inquisition and expulsion.
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