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Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
Conversos Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain Author:Norman Roth The Jewish community in Spain was the largest and most important in the West for almost a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Christian and Muslim neighbors. Norman Roth traces the chain of events that led to mass conversions of Spanish Jews to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, t... more »he rise of animosity against them, the establishment of the Inquisition, and finally, the 1492 Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Citing evidence from his extensive research of medieval documents, he firmly refutes the traditionally accepted story of "crypto-Judaism," which contends that the conversos were forced publicly to abandon their faith, while continuing secretly to maintain their Jewish traditions. Roth argues persuasively that the conversos were, in fact, sincere Christians. He contends that the majority of Spanish Jews converted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a period of declining Jewish leadership, and that these new Christians then encountered hostility from both Jews and "old" Christians. Faithful Jews saw their community reduced drastically in numbers and their positions as officials and in the royal court occupied by men they now considered gentile idolators. The Inquisition, already concerned with the danger of heresies, falsely viewed the new converts as crypto-Jews. Roth's impressive command of the primary materials enables him to cast in a new light the workings of the Inquisition, the motives of monarchs Fernando and Isabel and of Spain's various social classes, and the escalating events that led to the Expulsion. "Norman Roth is an outstanding historian of medieval Spanish Jews, who has spent toilsome decades among the Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin records. I find this a work of challenging originality, a revisionist opus that both carries forward much recent work and strikes out boldly on its own."Robert I. Burns, S.J., University of CaliforniaLos Angeles« less