Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [64]
In 1378 Archdeacon Ferrán Martinez, of Ecija near Seville, began to deliver a series of popular sermons directed against the Jews. They were well attended. In 1391, he encouraged the Seville mob to attack the Jewish quarter and raze “the houses of the devil,” the synagogues. It is hard to find any direct cause for new animosity toward the Jews, but the eminent Castilian statesman Perez Lopez de Ayala reflected a general prejudice when he wrote of the Jews as “ready to drink the blood of the oppressed … The Jews divide up the people, who die undefended.”43 In 1412 the Valencian Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer castigated the Jews, but he also made explicit their connection with the Muslims. Both Jews and Moors should be isolated from contact with Christians. As he put it, “Just as prostitutes should live apart, so should Jews.” Muslims should be confined to their morerias, where they could not contaminate Christian Spain.44
Increasingly vicious attacks prompted many Jews to accept baptism. As “New Christians,” or conversos, there was nothing in law to prevent their intermarriage with other, “Old Christian” families, and both among the “Old Christians” and among Jews who had kept their faith, old fears of consanguinity and sexual mingling across the boundaries of the castes once more came to the fore. A sixteenth-century Jewish writer blamed the persecutions themselves on this cause: “These sufferings were a just punishment of divine wrath. For many had taken Gentile women into their homes; children were born of these illicit unions and they later killed their own fathers.”45 The process of mass conversion, however, also changed the whole pattern of relationships between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. During the fifteenth century, the dominant Christian states in Spain began to develop a new theory of the infidel. In this view, Judaism and, by extension, Islam carried a genetic taint and thus no convert of Jewish or Muslim stock could ever carry the true faith purely, as could someone of “untainted” Christian descent.
No doubt these views had long been embedded in Christian society within the peninsula, where sexual deviance could carry a stigma that extended down the generations (“son of a whore,” hijo de puta was and is a classic Castilian imprecation, but one that was once upon a time severely punished if uttered publicly). This latent tendency within Hispanic society was elaborated into a body of law from the mid–fifteenth century, but emerging from below rather than by royal decree. The first instance was in 1449, when Pero Sarmiento—the leader of a rebellion in Toledo against royal support for Jewish converts—issued a declaration that no one except an Old Christian of untainted blood could ever hold public office. In front of a large gathering in the city hall of Toledo, Sarmiento catalogued all the evil deeds that the Jews were said to have committed. The first was that the Jews of Toledo had opened the gates of the city to Tariq’s Moors in 711, thereby ensuring centuries of Muslim domination; and their descendants, the “New Christians,” were continuing their “intrigues” against true Christians.46 Within living memory, they had conspired with the enemies of Toledo to “wage a cruel war with armed force, with blood and fire, inflicting theft and damage as if they were Moors, enemies of the Christian faith.”47 Even when the rebellion was suppressed in 1451, Sarmiento’s decree continued to be observed. Over the next forty years, more and more institutions adopted requirements that “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) should be a prerequisite for membership of a guild or any similar body. The vocabulary that was used is particularly significant: the “Old Christians” described themselves as the “pure” (limpios); they were “fine Christians,” and the assumption was that the converts were impure and coarse.
The fresh attack against “New Christians” that began in the