ABSTRACT
In 1492 the Spanish kingdoms expelled all their Jewish residents but a sizeable proportion of Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants – known as conversos – continued to live in the Iberian Peninsula and were widely suspected of continuing to secretly practice Judaism. The Spanish Inquisition was created to hunt down secret-Jews and early modern society Spanish became obsessed with the perceived threat that these secret Jews represented. Numerous institutions, including within the church, sought to exclude anyone with ‘Jewish blood’. In the second half of the sixteenth century, two forged letters appeared purporting to be an exchange of correspondence between the Jews of Spain and those of Constantinople around 1492. The Jews of Constantinople advise those of Spain to take advantage of their position as converts to infiltrate Christian society and the Church in order to destroy them from within by becoming doctors, lawyers and churchmen. Much like the later and more infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, these forgeries played upon existential fears among Spain’s population. They were reproduced as ‘evidence’ of a Jewish plot in nearly all early modern Antisemitic polemics printed in Spain and are mentioned even later in nineteenth and twentieth century Antisemitic propaganda.
