ABSTRACT
One of the assumptions one has to make about the difficult relationships that have existed for many centuries between Jews and Christians is that most Jews found Christianity to be a profoundly unsatisfactory alternative to Judaism. After all, for much of that time it was very advantageous for Jews to convert, and indeed converts as a whole often find they have engaged on an entirely new career, a career on which they are immediately placed on the fast track. Sometimes converts were treated with some suspicion, and the Spanish Inquisition was initiated in order to weed out those who had not really converted but were just pretending to be Christians in order to stay in Iberia and hold onto their property. One of the interesting phenomena of the Inquisition is that it put Jewish ethnicity to the fore, the assumption being that Jews who converted were never really the same as other Christians, but that there was something still “in the blood” that made them a dangerous and dubious group in society.
