jews and christians in fifteenth-century spain

30 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 174
characters, moreover, are not Jews, but a friar and a ‘Gothic’
King of Spain whose dynasty’s claims to expertise in such matters
were frequently and loudly asserted throughout Europe.74 What
better dramatization of the dynamics behind the formation of
Sephardic genealogical pretensions, and of the interdependence
between the genealogical imagination of Christian and Jew?
For the conversos, the confrontation with the exclusionary
genealogical arguments of the Old Christians was rather more
complicated. Some converso writers, for example, objected that
nobility was to be found more in an individual’s deeds than in
his ancestry. Others, like the leading expert in chivalry and
heraldry of the age, Mosén Diego de Valera, asserted that non-
Christians too (whether pagan, Muslim, or Jew) had their noble
lineages, and that a non-Christian aristocrat’s nobility only
increased when he accepted the true faith. In the specific case of
converts from Judaism, Valera was prepared to add a further
argument: they could stress the collective honour of their lineage
and boast of descent from God’s chosen people.75 As he wrote in
his Mirror of True Nobility (1441): ‘God chose this lineage for
His own as the most noble’, by which he meant both that God
had chosen the Jews as His people and that Christ had chosen
this lineage to provide His flesh.76 The offspring of mixed mar-
(n. 73 cont.)
1998). Ferrante’s policies were characterized as philo-Semitic by some contemporaries:
see Alexander Marx, ‘The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain: Two New Accounts’,
Jewish Quart. Rev., original ser., xx (1908), 251.
74 See, for example, the claims made by the converso Bishop Alonso de Cartagena
on behalf of the king of Spain at the Council of Basel: Alonso de Cartagena, Discurso
sobre la preeminencia (Biblioteca de autores españoles, cxvi, Madrid, 1959), 208. By
the sixteenth century similar claims were made, not just about the king’s lineage, but
about that of the entire ‘nation’. Cf. the king’s words in Shevet1 Yehudah with those
of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who wrote that, thanks to Spain’s purity of blood
laws, there was no Christian nation ‘where it was easier to recognize who was noble,
and of good and clean caste [that is, without Muslim or Jewish ancestry], and those
who were of suspect faith, which in other nations is obscured’: Gonzalo Fernández
de Oviedo, Quinquagenas de la nobleza de España (Madrid, 1880), 281, cited in Américo
Castro, Los Españoles: cómo llegaron a serlo (Madrid, 1965), 105.
75 See, for example, the words attributed to Alonso de Cartagena by Juan de Lucena,
De vita beata, inOpúsculos literarios de los siglos XIV–XVI, ed. Antonio Paz y Melía
(Madrid, 1892), 147–8. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos en
Castilla en la edad moderna (Madrid, 1955), 159, and Américo Castro, The Structure
of Spanish History (Princeton, 1954), 558, quote the same passage. Castro, of course,
uses the passage as evidence for the Jewish origins of purity of blood and the obsession
with genealogy, ‘something different from the Castilian Christian’s awareness of
seigniorial grandeur and the urge to attain it’.
76 Mosén Diego de Valera, Espejo de la verdadera nobleza, inProsistas castellanos del
siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna (Biblioteca de autores españoles, cxvi, Madrid, 1959), 103:
(cont. on p. 31)