The Future of Studying Jewish Conversion in Renaissance Italy

Abstract

IN 2018, a leading journal of early modern studies dedicated a special issue to the phenomenon of religious conversion, defining the period from around 1400 to 1700 as “the age of Conversion” in European history. For the Christian population, the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century ushered in a period of collective conversions of a scale comparable to that which had characterized the Christianization of Europe in late antiquity and the first centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet as far as the Jewish minority in Europe was concerned, the age of conversion began even earlier, with the mass conversions that occurred in Iberia in the late fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century. Believed to form a crucial part of the divine plan for the salvation of humankind, the conversion of the Jews traditionally held a unique significance for Christian authorities. Judaism was regarded as Christianity’s closest parallel and as its nearest and most theologically threatening Other. Thus, the conversion of the Jews was deemed more important than the conversion of any other non-Christian group. Nonetheless, the mass conversions from Judaism that took place in the kingdoms of Iberia in the face of pogroms and threats of expulsion were extraordinary, both in their magnitude and in their far-reaching and complex implications. Ordered to convert toCatholicismor else leave the country, numerous Spanish Jews (possibly 35,000–40,000) went into exile in 1492. Many of those who left for Portugal were forcibly baptized there just a few years later.