Take for instance the example the events after the great anti-Jewish riots of the 1350s the crown of Aragon gave the Jews who had been forced to convert the chance to revoke their assumed Christianity and go back to the the Jewish community, many did, but a lot remained Christian, some joining the Church, and the government, which before they would not have had access to. Indeed it was not even uncommon for the crown to ennoble conversos who had been "lords in their former community." Can you imagine how that would have made the lower class feel? Do you realize what kind of resentment that would cause?
So persecution is warrented to because some of the poor fealt betrayed by an extentions of rights?
Many of the most important Church leaders at the time were conversos or descendants of conversos (Torquemada for one).
And this is where I had no problem with inquisititions.
By the 1490s virtually all the noble families of Spain had some converso blood, or were related to conversos by marriage. Taken in that light, the accusation that someone was a crypto Jew was a serious claim. Before the Inquisition it was an excuse to strip someone of their power or worse, for the mob to kill you. Once the Inquisition took over these cases, you needed evidence against someone to make the claim, and it was more believable if it came from an open Jew. This was one of the reasons why some of the conversos themselves pushed for the expulsion.
So, Jews should not have been deemed Spaniards?
The idea that all, or even most of the conversos were crypto Jews is not born out by the facts. If they were, shouldn't the Inquisition have found them guilty?
I never said that most Conversos were Crypto-Jews (or Crypto Muslims for that matter).
Of course the Crusades were misused as propoganda by Protestant states (many of who have much anti-Catholic violence to atone for). However, I find it hard to seperate the Inquisition from the anti-Jewish violence of the period.
I never said there was a nefarious goal. Just that because of the nature of their background it was easy for certain people to make up stories about them. I'm not saying that those stories were true, just that they created a problem.
So persecution is warrented to because some of the poor fealt betrayed by an extentions of rights?
I also never said persecution was warranted in any circumstance. My point was that the persecution pre-dated the Inquisition, and that to a large measure, the formation of the Spanish Inquisition was a response to the violence committed against conversos by greedy competitors and the mob. It's not just that rights were extended to Jews who converted, it's that before they had less power, in theory, than the Christian peasantry, and afterwards they had a lot more. This was a horrible problem socially long before the Inquisition. The Inquisition salved some of the problems, not all of them. That it did so with a method that we now today find repugnant I'm not contesting. I'm not making a moral judgment on the Inquisition one way or another, I'm simply saying that most of the information out about it's motives, power, and methods is either exaggerated, or completely false.
So, Jews should not have been deemed Spaniards?
Regardless of what Jews should have been deemed, the fact is they were not considered equal subjects next to Christians, converso or otherwise. It is true that St. Bernard of Clairvaux had said it is not the duty of the Christian princes to make the plight of the Jews more difficult to bare, for their punishment is that they have no princes of their own, but must pity them and protect them; and this was in many cases the attitude adopted by the princes of western Europe with some notable exceptions. But if the question comes up "who do you choose?" things become morally difficult. As Christian princes they have a greater responsibility to their Christian subjects. Expulsion was an overly harsh choice but at the time it was viewed as the best solution to a serious problem. Ferdinand himself admitted that he stood to lose a lot of money doing it, but he and his wife felt they had a greater duty to the conversos.