jews and christians in fifteenth-century spain

12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 174
ence in 1412, that ‘many are thought to be the children of Jews,
but are really Christian, and vice versa’.24
St Vincent Ferrer and his sponsors sought to reinstate the
necessary distance between Christian and Jew in two ways: first,
by converting as many Jews as possible to Christianity; and
second, by sharpening the boundaries between Christians and
those (ideally few) Jews who would inevitably remain in Christian
society until the end of time. The programme, in a word, was
segregation.25 With the aim of separating Christian from non-
Christian, Muslims and Jews were to be moved to segregated
neighbourhoods and severely restricted in their market and economic
activities.26 These measures clearly advanced the goal of
evangelization by encouraging beleaguered non-Christians to convert.
But we should not forget that they also reflected, and
justified themselves by invoking, increased anxiety about the
stability of group boundaries after the mass conversions of 1391.
Whatever the motivations of this segregation, its effects were
clear. Entire communities converted to avoid being barred from
their trades and expelled from their homes. Others found shelter
in caves and huts, ‘with boys and girls dying from exposure to
the cold and the snow’. Writing years after these events, Abraham
24 ‘And above all there should be no communication with them in the home, for
Christian and infidel should not dwell together in the same house, for it is an evil
which is contagious, that is, luxury, for many are thought to be the children of Jews,
but are really Christian, and vice versa. And therefore just as Jews and Muslims are
different from Christians in law, they should be different from them in habitation’:
Colegio del Corpus Christi de Valencia, MS 139, fo. 113; in Cátedra, ‘Fray Vicente
Ferrer y la predicación antijudaica’, 30–1.
25 Contemporaries understood themselves to be responding to St Vincent’s call for
heightened segregation. The Crónica de Juan II (Biblioteca Colombina, MS 85-5-14,
fo. 176r), for example, presents the edict of Valladolid as Queen Catherine’s response
to his preaching on the subject. At a more local level, numerous surviving letters
from municipal authorities allow us to perceive how the sermons stimulated segregation
in the towns St Vincent visited: see, for example, A. Floriano, ‘San Vicente
Ferrer y las aljamas turolenses’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, lxxxiv
(1924).
26 Royal edicts ordering the segregatory measures can be found in, for Castile: Baer,
Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, ii, 263–70, from Escorial, MS Z.1.6, fos. 139v–141v;
and for Aragon: ACA, Chancery MS 2416, fos. 60v–63v (20 Mar. 1413). See also Pope
Benedict XIII’s bull of 11 May 1415 and its confirmation (for the Crown of Aragon):
ibid., MS 2395, fos. 122r–176v, published in F. Vendrell de Millás, ‘En torno a la
confirmación real, en Aragón, de la pragmatica de Benedicto XIII’, Sefarad, xx (1960).
For a Castilian example of the implementation of residential segregation, see Fontes
Iudaeorum Regni Castellae, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, 8 vols. (Salamanca, 1981–98),
i, 30–1, on Alba de Tormes. For an Aragonese example, see ACA, Chancery MS
2370, fo. 109r–v (12 June 1414), where the violence of the process is acknowledged
(and reprimanded) by the king.