[ChicagoHebrew]

To the Church's or the Inquisition's eye, it didn't matter what the circumstances were of their "conversions." By the way, this doesn't exactly seem to be true, if I read that article's summation of Pope Paul right. He said that people who were forced to convert could not be regarded as Christians. Whether that was private opinion of his, or whether that was reflected in bulls/legislation of the time I don't know--I'm not a historian of the period. But it does seem at least that there was no automatic assumption that those forcibly baptized were full Christians.

It may have been Pope Paul's opinion. But it was NOT the opinion of the Inquisition in Spain or Portugal. Indeed, if anything, the POINT of the Inquisition was to ferret out, try, and frequently torture insincere converts. Not surprisingly, that population consisted overwhelmingly of Jews who had been forcibly converted, or who had been raised by parents who were forcibly converted.

[Claud]

I am not disputing that was the point of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. That’s what the Inquisition did...ferret out heresy.

And I am not a historian of the era, but I’m a bit wary about a claim that *most* Jews were forcibly converted, especially since forcing a person to accept Baptism has *always* been against the canons of the Church. If you have hard numbers on that, I’d certainly like to see them.