Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

that made it psychologically easier to treat them with the
brutality that the slave trade often necessitated. 27 The conversions
of the last pagan Slavs of eastern Europe and Russia
meant that there were virtually no European populations
available for enslavement under the religious
sanction. If there had been, would they have toiled alongside
Africans on New World plantations? Quite possibly, but
of course it is impossible to prove a counterfactual. What
seems clear, however, is that the initial purchase and transport
of African slaves by Europeans could easily be justified
in terms of religious and legal status without recourse to
an explicit racism.
Closer to modern racism, arguably its first real anticipation,
was the treatment of Jewish converts to Christianity
in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. Conversos were
identified and discriminated against because of the belief
held by some Christians that the impurity of their blood
made them incapable of experiencing a true conversion. In
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Spain was, by medieval
standards, a tolerant plural society in which Christians,
Muslims, and Jews coexisted in relative harmony under
Christian monarchs who accorded a substantial degree of
self-government to each religious community. 28 But in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries an intensification
of the conflict with the Moors heightened religious
zeal and engendered an increase in discrimination against
Muslims and Jews. For Jews the growing intolerance turned
violent in 1391, when a wave of pogroms swept through
the kingdoms of Castille and Aragon. As in earlier pogroms
in northern Europe, Jews were given the choice of conversion
or death, but unlike the Jews of the Rhineland at the
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