ABSTRACT
As early as the fi rst decades of the seventh century, when Visigothic kings in Iberia adopted Catholicism as their offi cial religion, local Jewish-Christian relations deteriorated to the point where one ruler, Sisebut (612-21) issued an order for Jewish conversion, or exile from his kingdom. The Spanish (non-Jewish) author and Sephardic studies scholar, Paloma Diaz-Más, sees this as the fi rst precursor to mass conversions which followed ‘an extensive wave’ of pogroms throughout Spain in 1391.1 Haim Beinart confi rms that 1391 saw the real emergence of ‘a new kind of population-the converses, a population which had ceased to be Jewish by faith and in theory should have been assimilated into the Spanish (or Portuguese) Old Christian population’.2 Beinart’s renowned archival work in Spain reveals instead that New Christians found few professional or social entrées into their old blood surroundings, and so ‘remained an “in-between” or “intermediate” society’3 throughout three periods of liminal existence and Inquisitorial persecution, from 1480 into the eighteenth century.4
