New Christian (; ; ; ; ; ) was a socio-religious designation and legal distinction referring to the population of former Jews and Muslims converts to Christianity in the Spanish Empire and Portuguese empires, and their respective colonies in the New World.
Because these conversions were achieved in part through coercion and also with the threat of expulsion, especially when it came to the Jews, the Catholic Inquisition and Iberian Union suspected a number of the "New Christians" of being Crypto-Judaism.
According to António José Saraiva, a Portuguese historian and professor of Portuguese literature, "When Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516) and Isabella of Castile (1451–1504) married in 1469 they ascended the throne of a Iberian Union. Among their roughly 7,000,000 subjects, some 150,000 were remote descendants of converted Jews, known as New Christians, Conversos or, pejoratively, Marranos; a still sizeable minority estimated at 90,000 were Jews and another estimated 150,000 Moslems. Between the New Christian bourgeoisie of recent vintage and the old Jewish bourgeoisie there was intense rivalry. In fact, the most energetic and relentless anti-Jewish propagandists were New Christians."
New Christian as a legal category
Although the category of New Christian is meaningless in Christian theology and
ecclesiology, it was introduced by the Old Christians who claimed that "pure unmixed" Christian bloodlines distinguish them as a unique group, separated from ethnic Jews and Iberian Muslims.
The Old Christians wanted to legally and socially distinguish themselves from the (converts to Christianity)
In practice, for New Christians of Jewish origin, the concept of New Christian was a legal mechanism and manifestation of racial antisemitism rather than Judaism as a religion. For those of Moorish origin, it was a manifestation of racial anti-Berberism and/or anti-Arabism. Portuguese New Christians were alleged to have been partners with an English factor in Italy in a notable 17th century marine insurance swindle.[Kadens, Emily. “A Marine Insurance Fraud in the Star Chamber.” Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records, edited by K. J. Kesselring and Natalie Mears, University of London Press, 2021, pp. 155–74. JSTOR website Retrieved 29 Apr. 2023.]
Cleanliness of blood and related concepts
The related Spanish development of an ideology of
limpieza de sangre ("cleanliness of blood") also excluded New Christians from society—universities, emigration to the New World, many professions—regardless of their sincerity as converts.
Other derogatory terms applied to each of the converting groups included (i.e. "pigs") for New Christians of Jewish origin,
Discrimination and persecution
Aside from
social stigma and
ostracism, the consequences of legal or social categorization as a New Christian included restrictions of civil and political rights, abuses of those already-limited civil rights, social and sometimes legal restrictions on whom one could marry (anti-miscegenation laws), social restrictions on where one could live, legal restrictions of entry into the professions and the clergy, legal restrictions and prohibition of immigration to and settlement in the newly colonized
Hispanic America, deportation from the colonies.
In addition to the above restrictions and discrimination endured by New Christians, the Spanish Crown and Church authorities also subjected New Christians to persecution, Prosecutor, and capital punishment for actual or alleged practice of the family's former religion. After the Alhambra Decree in 1492 and a similar Portuguese decree in 1497, the remaining Jewish population in Iberia became officially Christian by default. The New Christians, especially those of Jewish origin, were always under suspicion of being Judaizers ("judaizers"); that is, apostatizing from the Christian religion and being active Crypto-Judaism.
Emigration
Jewish "New Christian" emigration
Despite the discrimination and legal restrictions, many Jewish-origin New Christians found ways of circumventing these restrictions for
emigration and settlement in the Iberian colonies of the
New World by falsifying or buying
limpieza de sangre ("cleanliness of blood") documentation or attaining
Perjury affidavit attesting to untainted Old Christian pedigrees. The descendants of these, who could not return to Judaism, became the modern-day Christian-professing Sephardic Bnei Anusim of
Latin America.
Also as a result of the unceasing trials and persecutions by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, other Jewish-origin New Christians opted to migrate out of the Iberian Peninsula in a continuous flow between the 1600s to 1800s towards Amsterdam, and also London, whereupon in their new tolerant environment of refuge outside the Hispanophone they eventually returned to Judaism. The descendants of these became the Spanish and Portuguese Jews.
Muslim "New Christian" emigration
Although Iberian Muslims were protected in the treaty signed at the fall of Granada, and the New Christian descendants of former Muslims weren't expelled until over a century later. Even so, in the meantime, different waves of Andalusian Muslims and New Christians of Moorish origin left the Iberian Peninsula and settled across North Africa and in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
History of New Christian conversions
Over a hundred thousand of Iberian Jews converted to Catholicism in Spain as a result of pogroms in 1391.
Those remaining practicing Jews were expelled by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the
Alhambra Decree in 1492, following the Catholic
Reconquista of Spain. As a result of the Alhambra Decree and persecution in prior years, over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled.
Following the Catholic
Reconquista of Spain, 200,000 of the 500,000 Muslims had been converted to Christianity.
There is no universally agreed figure of Morisco population, but Christiane Stallaert put the number at around one million
Moriscos (New Christians and their descendants) at the beginning of the 16th century.
Inquisition
The governments of Spain and Portugal created the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 and the Portuguese Inquisition, including the
Goa Inquisition, in 1536 as a way of dealing with social tensions, supposedly justified by the need to fight heresy. Communities believed correctly that many New Christians were secretly practising their former religions to any extent possible, becoming crypto-Jews and
Crypto-Islam.
[Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas; the intellectual and social landscape of "La Celestina", Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972, .]
See also
Further reading
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Böhm, Günter. "Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile." In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, 203–212. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
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Costigan, Lúcia Helena. Through Cracks in the Wall: Modern Inquisitions and New Christian Letrados in the Iberian Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
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Novinsky, Anita. "A Historical Bias: The New Christian Collaboration with the Dutch Invaders of Brazil (17th Century)." In Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Jewish Studies, II.141-154. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1972.
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Novinsky, Anita. "Some Theoretical Considerations about the New Christian Problem," in The Sepharadi and Oriental Jewish Heritage Studies, ed. Issachar Ben-Ami. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1982
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Pulido Serrano, Juan Ignacio. "Plural Identities: The Portuguese New Christians." Jewish History 25 (2011): 129–151.
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Quiroz, Alfonso W. "The Expropriation of Portuguese New Christians in Spanish America, 1635-1649." Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 11 (1985): 407–465.
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Rivkin, Ellis. "How Jewish Were the New Christians?," in Hispania Judaica: Studies on the History, Language, and Literature of the Jews in the Hispanic World, vol. 1: History, eds. Josep M. Solà-Solé, Samuel G. Armistead, and Joseph H. Silverman. Barcelona: Puvil-Editor, 1980.
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Rowland, Robert. "New Christian, Marrano, Jew." In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, 125–148. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
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Salomon, H.P. Portrait of a New Christian: Fernão Álvares Melo (1569-1632). Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982
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Uchmany, Eva Alexandra. "The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in the Conquest, Colonization, and Trade of Spanish America, 1521-1660." In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, 186–202. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
External links
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A history of the Marranos, by Cecil Roth
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Dramatic episodes of the Portuguese Inquisition, volume 1, by Antonio Baião, in Portuguese
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Dramatic episodes of the Portuguese Inquisition, volume 2, by Antonio Baião, in Portuguese
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Trial of Gabriel de Granada by the Inquisition in Mexico, 1642–1645, according to Cecil Roth, 'it gives a remarkably graphic impression of a typical Inquisitional case'
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A history of the Marranos, by Cecil Roth
