ABSTRACT
The primary aim of the institution of Friars Preacher was to counter Christian heresy, but it soon turned its attention to the task of Jewish conversion. All four of the men whose journeys to conversion are examined were formerly of high standing in their own Jewish communities. Crescas's description of the massacre of rabbis in Toledo is confirmed by a fifteenth-century elegy by a Sephardi poet, ibn Albeneh, found in a book of prayers for the fast of the Ninth of Av. The emergence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries of a converso elite and of whole neighbourhoods of New Christian families cannot be attributed to the one hundred years of listening to forced sermons of the Friars Preacher. Nevertheless, the demography of Jewish and converso settlement in Toledo already described suggests an uneven implementation of royal policy.
