jews and christians in fifteenth-century spain

18 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 174
‘when he came from so honourable a lineage as those of Illescas’.
It was there, too, that he lost his sight and decided to return,
first to Naples, then to Valencia, and finally Toledo, where he
voluntarily confessed to the Inquisition.39 Such movement across
geographic and religious space would characterize the experience
of many Sephardim well into the seventeenth century. The classification
of these ‘travellers’, and the fixing of their identities,
would require new forms of memory and written record.40
Confronted by these displacements, problems of intermediacy
and crises of classification, Jews, Christians, and conversos turned
more or less simultaneously to lineage as one means of reestablishing
the integrity of religious categories of identity. In
doing so, each group drew largely upon its own traditions, but
each was also aware of, and responding to, the changes taking
place in the others’ genealogical imaginations. In the interest of
narrative clarity I will treat each of these groups separately,
beginning with the Jews. But in so doing I do not intend to imply
any priority of invention, nor to give the impression that the
responses can be adequately understood independently of each
other.
The Sephardic rabbinate responded to the crisis by adapting
two closely related genealogical strands long present, but largely
neglected, in rabbinic tradition. Both strands are already evident
in a legal opinion written by Adret nearly a century before 1391,
responding to a question about why the Talmud had made no
provision for divorcing a Jewish woman from an apostate (meshumad
l-[avodah zarah). Adret emphasized that even in the extreme
case where an apostate woman gives birth to a gentile son, the
son is nevertheless Yisra]el kasher u-mezuham, that is, kosher,
but loathsome.41 Both the ideas implicit in this ruling, (1) that
an apostate’s child is still Yisra]el kasher, and (2) that the child’s
lineage is nevertheless in some sense flawed, were amplified in
rabbinic reaction to the mass conversions. But both, it should
also be stressed, assign a place of vital importance to genealogy.
This importance is easiest to see in the case of post-1391 writers
who came to emphasize genealogy as a way of guaranteeing a
39 Fidel Fita, ‘El judío errante de Illescas’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia,
vi (1885).
40 The Inquisition archives from which accounts such as that of Luis de la Isla are
drawn were themselves a response to that challenge.
41 Adret, She]elot u-teshuvot, no. 1162.