Why Did Spanish Jews Convert to Christianity?: How Iberian Jews Responded to Persecution

The mass conversion of Iberian Jews to Christianity in the late 14th and 15th centuries was catastrophic for the Jewish community. Possibly up to a third of the Jewish community converted. There are many reasons why such large-scale conversions occurred. The widespread violence which spread across Castile and Aragon was unprecedented. Violence was the immediate cause for the mass conversions, and the debilitated state of Jewish communities following these attacks was also a factor in subsequent waves of conversion.The crisis, however, is also seen as the consequence of an absence of spiritual unity within the Spanish Jewish community. A widespread view is that a rupture developed between ordinary Jews and the wealthy learned Jews serving in royal court positions. The latter are described as unconcerned with Jewish law.According to this reasoning, some of these individuals were influenced by rationalist philosophy popular within Arabic culture. A class of Jewish courtiers had developed in the scholarly atmosphere of Andalusia under Islamic rule during the tenth and eleventh centuries. When the intellectual heirs of this tradition eventually fell under Christian rule, they progressively quarreled with established Jewish leaders. The latter were ill deposed towards their philosophical tendencies. There were growing circles of mystics known as Kabbalists, whose obscure readings of Jewish texts were, in part, a reaction to the philosophical leanings of those Jews serving the royal court.The scholar Kevin Ingram has argued that these differing scholarly and mystical tendencies within the Jewish elite unsurprisingly shaped a measure of diffidence in Jewish communities which was eventually exploited by the Franciscan and Dominican monks. These mendicant orders initiated vigorous evangelizing activities during the fourteenth century and continued to do so immediately after the catastrophe of 1391. Despite this assault, the majority of those who relented to the pressure of conversion believed that they were not genuinely c