jews and christians in fifteenth-century spain

8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 174
ridiculed.14 In the early fourteenth century, Rabbi Shelomo ben
Abraham ben Adret of Barcelona, the leading rabbinic authority of
his day, made clear just how little halakhic (legal) weight genealogical
investigations should have. Responding to a case in which
litigants attempted to bar two brothers from giving testimony on
the grounds that they had a slave ancestor, Adret responded that
‘all Jewish families must be held as fit and emanating from the
children of Israel’; and, he added, ‘if we take seriously the authors
of such libels, there will not remain a single family [in Israel] that
will be considered fit from the standpoint of ancestry’.15
Among the Christian European nobility genealogy had long
played a more important role than it had done amongst the Jews,
one that for a variety of reasons became critical (as well as better
documented) in the fourteenth century. In Western Europe this
period saw the widespread adoption of armorial bearings, the
development of heraldry, and the dissemination of the ‘family
tree’ as a standard way of representing lineage.16 Also, within
each of the peninsular kingdoms specific pressures contributed to
the particular flavour of genealogical concerns. In Aragon, for
example, the growing pressure of taxation led to an explosion of
procesos de infanzonía in the first half of the fourteenth century,
by which thousands of people attempted (generally successfully)
to show their descent from tax-exempt minor nobility. In Castile,
on the other hand, the civil wars of mid-century had resulted in
a new royal dynasty which drew its grandees from an (almost)
entirely new circle of families. In that kingdom, it was the high
nobility who displayed the greatest genealogical creativity as it
attempted to establish its bona fides.17
14 As a descendant of the Kalonymide dynasty wrote c.1320 in Catalonia, about a
man who boasted of his lineage, ‘yet perhaps his family was the youngest from among
those of whom it is written: “they ravished the women in Zion” on the bitter day,
in the time of oppression’: R. Kalonymos, Even Boh1an (Lemberg, 1865), 24 ff., 35
ff., cited in Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia,
1961), ii, 19. The quotation is from Lam. 5:11; Kiddushin 71b.
15 B. Netanyahu, ‘The Racial Attack on the Conversos: Américo Castro’s View of
its Origin’, in Netanyahu, Toward the Inquisition, 34, citing RaShbA, responsum,
no. 386. RaShbA may have been alluding to Maimonides, who went further, suggesting
ironically that anyone given to making such accusations was himself suspect
of mixed ancestry, because a true Jew would not make such a charge: see Mishneh
Torah, Sefer Qedushah, ch. 19 (V.17).
16 The literature on all these topics is vast. For a recent and particularly illuminating
example, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, L’Ombre des ancêtres (Paris, 2000).
17 For Castile the classic work is Salvador de Moxó, ‘De la nobleza vieja a la nobleza
nueva: la transformación nobiliaria castellana en la baja edad media’, Cuadernos de
historia, iii (1969). See also Adeline Rucquoi, ‘Être noble en Espagne aux XIVe–XVIe
(cont. on p. 9)