Replies

Clarification, at least as regards Spain. (Full disclosure, apparently there was a Dominican Inquisitor in France who was a real bad guy.)

The deal is “Catholic Spain” finally beats the Muslims. Though Jews had to pay the jizaya and labored under other impediments, they got on okay with the Muslims (as well as at least SOME Catholics.

But the victory after centuries of conflict was not all that secure. Fear (whether justified or not) of spies and of divided loyalties was great. Surely prejudice played a role, but, as is often so, unreasoned prejudice had a few facts around which to crystallize.

Hence the expulsion of the Jews. Maybe some clergy supported this, but it’s not really the Church’s department.

Except that expulsions are unjust — and expensive, ruinous, for the expellees. So there were many false conversions.

Now THAT’s the Church’s business. So if a family is rumored to be keeping Kosher yet has been baptized, there’s an issue.

I baptized a guy once who later told me that he came to me to get baptized so that he could get close (if you know what I mean) to some dame. I was “locum tenens” for a pastor on Sabbatical. His congregation had some real on fire Christians, and they pretty much love bombed him. So his cynical resistance was overcome, and his tears at his baptism were, well wonderful.

But this is about how even today people will fake it.

Anyway, the idea of perjured communicants was horrifying to he Church, and frightening to the King.

So if you put your head where their heads were, you can understand, a little, where they were coming from.

Thank you for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ, and your testimony about the guy who was faking it!

Here's an interesting point of view with a quote from Peters:

Antisemitism and the "conversos"

Antisemitic attitudes increased all over Europe during the late thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth century. England and France expelled their Jewish populations in 1290 and 1306 respectively (Peters 1988: 79). At the same time, during the Reconquista, Spain’s anti-Jewish sentiment steadily increased. This prejudice climaxed in the summer of 1391 when violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in Spanish cities like Barcelona (Peters 1988: 82). These mob riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. To distinguish them from non-converted or long-established Christian families, new converts were labeled conversos, or New Christians. These distinctions formed part of the limpieza de sangre ("blood purity") doctrine.

Peters writes,

“From the mid fifteenth century on, religious anti-Semitism changed into ethnic anti-Semitism, with little difference seen between Jews and conversos except for the fact that conversos were regarded as worse than Jews because, as ostensible Christians, they had acquired privileges and positions that were denied to Jews. The result of this new ethnic anti-Semitism was the invocation of an inquisition to ferret out the false conversos who had, by becoming formal Christians, placed themselves under its authority” (Peters 1988: 84). It was a heated mixture of this racial and religious prejudice against the conversos that ignited what later became known as the “Spanish Inquisition.”

Historical Revision of the Inquisition (wiki)