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This study pays careful attention to the ways in which Latin and Castilian terms for ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ are employed in the converso debate centered on the anti-converso uprising at Toledo in 1449. It considers how those terms are used... more
This study pays careful attention to the ways in which Latin and Castilian terms for ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ are employed in the converso debate centered on the anti-converso uprising at Toledo in 1449. It considers how those terms are used —or not used— to conceive of human relationship to one another and to Christ as well as how they convey moral and spiritual status in terms related to purity and impurity. This microscopic look at a particular moment
in Castile will enrich telescopic studies that aim for synthesis across disciplinary, chronological, and geographic boundaries. In the more immediate term, this essay demonstrates that, although Iberian historiography has tended to frame the exclusion of conversos from
religious and civic life in terms of blood criteria, purity of blood was not a central category in the converso debate of 1449-1450. Rather, the dominant concerns whose relationship to blood and flesh, purity and impurity, faith and heresy, class, king, and country was at stake were honor and lineage itself.

Este estudio presta especial atención a las formas en que los términos latinos y castellanos para “sangre” y “carne” se emplean en el debate converso centrado en el levantamiento anticonverso en Toledo, en 1449. Considera cómo se usan o no esos términos para concebir la relación humana entre sí y con Cristo, además de cómo transmiten el estatus moral y espiritual en términos relacionados con la limpieza y la impureza. Esta mirada microscópicaa un momento particular de Castilla enriquecerá los estudios telescópicos que apuntan a la síntesis a través de fronteras disciplinarias, cronológicas y geográficas. En el plazo más nmediato, este ensayo demuestra que, aunque la historiografía ibérica ha tendido a enmar-
car la exclusión de los conversos de la vida religiosa y cívica en términos de criterios de sangre, la limpieza de sangre no fue una categoría central en el debate converso de 1449-1450. Más bien, las preocupaciones dominantes que estaban en juego eran el honor y el linaje mismo, pese a la relación de estos con la sangre y la carne, la limpieza y la impureza, la fe y la herejía, la clase, el rey y el país.
In the decades before Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon marched their Christian forces against the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilian bishop Alonso de Cartagena was reviving and revising a... more
In the decades before Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon marched their Christian forces against the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilian bishop Alonso de Cartagena was reviving and revising a historiography that linked the contemporary Castilian monarchy genealogically to the Visigoths. This genealogical continuity supported the argument that Castile should complete its unfinished but divinely-ordained mission to conquer the Moors of Granada and unite the lands of Spain under Christian rule. As Cartagena’s intellectual successors took up this cause, they employed discourses of masculinity and virility to uphold a vigorous Castilian Christianity against the perceived effeminacy of its depraved infidel enemies. However, while Cartagena praised acts of bravery and urged Christian knights to fight with manful courage and boldness against the peninsular forces of Islam, the bishop also warned that the nobility tended to pursue these manly qualities to ruinous excess. By contrast, he argued that Jewish nobility, when washed of the stains of faithlessness through baptism, possessed the mildness of King David preferred by God. Contesting the notions of virility and manliness that had come to characterize Castilian knighthood as well as so-called Old Christian identity, Cartagena argued that the only way for the Castilian nobility successfully to pursue its God-given mission to expand and defend the holy Catholic faith was for the masculine gentile flesh of Old Christian nobility to join with the baptized, Jewish, feminine flesh of the conversos. This essay explores the way Cartagena used notions of Judaism, femininity, and theology to critique contemporary alignments of Spanishness and Christianity with an excessively warlike conception of masculinity. Engaging modern scholarly conversations about universalism and particularism, the essay argues that this cluster of texts by Cartagena provides a fruitful point of entry into current conversations about the intersection of conceptions of gender with those of race and class and their relationship in turn to questions of faith and the construction of religious and national identities.
From its earliest days, Christianity has viewed Judaism and Jews ambiguously. Given its roots within the Jewish community of first-century Palestine, there was much in Judaism that demanded Church admiration and praise; however, as Jews... more
From its earliest days, Christianity has viewed Judaism and Jews ambiguously. Given its roots within the Jewish community of first-century Palestine, there was much in Judaism that demanded Church admiration and praise; however, as Jews continued to resist Christian truth, there was also much that had to be condemned. Major Christian thinkers of antiquity - while disparaging their Jewish contemporaries for rejecting Christian truth - depicted the Jewish past and future in balanced terms, identifying both positives and negatives. Beginning at the end of the first millennium, an increasingly large Jewish community started to coalesce across rapidly developing northern Europe, becoming the object of intense popular animosity and radically negative popular imagery. The portrayals of the broad trajectory of Jewish history offered by major medieval European intellectual leaders became increasingly negative as well. The popular animosity and the negative intellectual formulations were bequ...
In the decades before Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon marched their Christian forces against the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilian bishop Alonso de Cartagena was reviving and revising a... more
In the decades before Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon marched their Christian forces against the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilian bishop Alonso de Cartagena was reviving and revising a historiography that linked the contemporary Castilian monarchy genealogically to the Visigoths. This genealogical continuity supported the argument that Castile should complete its unfinished but divinely-ordained mission to conquer the Moors of Granada and unite the lands of Spain under Christian rule. As Cartagena’s intellectual successors took up this cause, they employed discourses of masculinity and virility to uphold a vigorous Castilian Christianity against the perceived effeminacy of its depraved infidel enemies. However, while Cartagena praised acts of bravery and urged Christian knights to fight with manful courage and boldness against the peninsular forces of Islam, the bishop also warned that the nobility tended to pursue these manly qualities to ruinous excess. By contrast, he argued that Jewish nobility, when washed of the stains of faithlessness through baptism, possessed the mildness of King David preferred by God. Contesting the notions of virility and manliness that had come to characterize Castilian knighthood as well as so-called Old Christian identity, Cartagena argued that the only way for the Castilian nobility successfully to pursue its God-given mission to expand and defend the holy Catholic faith was for the masculine gentile flesh of Old Christian nobility to join with the baptized, Jewish, feminine flesh of the conversos.
This essay explores the way Cartagena used notions of Judaism, femininity, and theology to critique contemporary alignments of Spanishness and Christianity with an excessively warlike conception of masculinity. Engaging modern scholarly conversations about universalism and particularism, the essay argues that this cluster of texts by Cartagena provides a fruitful point of entry into current conversations about the intersection of conceptions of gender with those of race and class and their relationship in turn to questions of faith and the construction of religious and national identities.
This essay explores a range of works by Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos from 1435-1456, and places them within the context of fifteenth-century debates about Conversos, nobility, and Castilian and Spanish national identities.... more
This essay explores a range of works by Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos from 1435-1456, and places them within the context of fifteenth-century debates about Conversos, nobility, and Castilian and Spanish national identities. Through careful attention to the role of Jews and Judaism within Cartagena’s thought, it shows that the bishop worked to forge a Judeo-Christian identity for Spain in which Conversos were not simply included or tolerated but required, precisely because of their Jewish lineage, for the Church Militant and the Spanish “nation” to fulfill their divinely-ordained missions. To counter the developing racial logic of opponents to Conversos’ integration, Cartagena distinguished between the relative roles of lineage and will in the Jews’ fall from theological nobility. However, the logic of this approach entailed the exclusion of observant Jews, along with “pagans” and Muslims, from the civil and religious community that Cartagena envisioned.
On 4 Shvat, which fell on 10 January this year, the small town of Netivot in the Negev becomes a pilgrimage destination for those who venerate Rabbi Israel Abu-Hatsera, better known as Baba Sali, who died in 1984. While the Moroccan saint... more
On 4 Shvat, which fell on 10 January this year, the small town of Netivot in the Negev becomes a pilgrimage destination for those who venerate Rabbi Israel Abu-Hatsera, better known as Baba Sali, who died in 1984. While the Moroccan saint is popular among Sephardi Jews, the hillulah-the commemoration of his death-draws Israelis from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds to his grave. A German anthropologist and an American historian of Christianity, both non-Jewish members of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC), had jumped at the chance to participate in this excursion to the Negev town of Netivot sponsored by CSoC along with the departments of Jewish history, sociology and anthropology, and Middle Eastern studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).
This article investigates the manifestations of anti-Judaism that informed fifteenth-century debates over the religious and civic status of the conversos. Insurgents in Toledo supported the persecution of the conversos and their exclusion... more
This article investigates the manifestations of anti-Judaism that informed fifteenth-century debates over the religious and civic status of the conversos. Insurgents in Toledo supported the persecution of the conversos and their exclusion from public life by insisting on their continued Jewishness despite baptism. Documents such as the “Petition” and the “Sentencia-Estatuto” issued by the rebel regime, the “Appeal and Supplication” written by Marcos García de Mora, and the anonymous “Privilege,” show that the conversos’ opponents developed a hermeneutic of the flesh founded in a reading of the epistles of Paul and informed by their own particular historical context. This hermeneutic afforded the conversos’ opponents a theological basis for shutting certain baptized Christians out of Spanish society based on their carnal descent, weaving race into Christian theology. So useful a conceptual and rhetorical tool was anti-Judaism, however, that even converso defenders employed it as a weapon against their opponents.
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