The Marranos were Jews originally living in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) who converted or were forced to convert to Catholicism before the Spanish Inquisition. But some kept practicing Judaism in secret, and became known as Crypto-Jews—with small communities still in practice across the world today.
The Marranos, generally estimated at 100,000 converts in the 15th century, existed long before the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. Before 1391, anti-Semitic riots resulted in the conversion under duress of some 200,000 Jews in Spain. It is for this reason that the term “anousim,” meaning “forced” or “coerced ones” in Hebrew, is sometime preferred over the pejorative Marrano, which in Spanish took on the meaning of “swine.”
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were three types of Marrano Jews. The first were “those who, devoid of any real affection for Judaism who, and indifferent to every form of religion, gladly embraced the opportunity of exchanging their oppressed condition as Jews for the brilliant careers opened to them by the acceptance of Christianity. They simulated the Christian faith when it was to their advantage, and mocked at Jews and Judaism.” These types of converts “persecuted their former coreligionists, writing books against them, and denouncing to the authorities those who wished to return to the faith of their fathers.”
The second category of Marranos was on the other end of the spectrum, cherishing “their love for the Jewish faith in which they had been reared. They preserved the traditions of their fathers; and, in spite of the high positions which they held, they secretly attended synagogue, and fought and suffered for their paternal religion.”
The third category was still more zealous than the second, and comprised by far the largest number of Marranos. These converts remained Jews in their home life and “did not voluntarily take their children to the baptismal font; and if obliged to do so, they on reaching home washed the place which had been sprinkled. They ate no pork, celebrated the Passover, and gave oil to the synagogue.”
As we have seen, the forced conversion of Spanish Jews began long before Ferdinand and Isabella’s infamous edict of 1492, which required that Jews choose between conversion and exile.
According to Tablet magazine, that edict was “actually the conclusion of a century-long process. The Marranos’ ordeal began in 1391, when a popular preacher named Ferran Martinez instigated a massive pogrom in Seville. About four thousand Jews were killed in that city alone, and the attacks soon spread.”
But even conversion did not spare the Neo-Christian Marranos. As Tablet explains, “New Christians posed a major theological and social challenge to Catholic Spain. The Jews, along with the Muslim Moors, had long been the ‘Other’ against which an increasingly militant Spanish Catholic identity defined itself. Now that they were themselves Catholics, however, the Marranos became an ‘Other Within:’ nominally part of the nation, they in fact remained socially, economically, and religiously distinctive.”
For this reason, some 500 years before the Nazis, Spain established blood purity laws that qualified Judaism as a genetic taint. In so doing, the Spanish distinguished the Jews who had been converted to Catholicism—Marrano “New Christians”—from the “Old Christians.”
According to Tablet, “this kind of discrimination between Old Christians and New Christians went directly counter to traditional Catholic dogma. But then so did the institution of the Inquisition, which was created in 1480 as an arm of the Spanish state, not of the Papacy... Jews were never under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, because they were never part of the Church (though they were very much vulnerable to popular hatred and pogroms, and were eventually forced to flee the country altogether). It was only the conversos, who converted specifically to avoid persecution, who could be persecuted for backsliding or ‘Judaizing.’”
Essentially, Spanish Christians wanted nothing to do with their converted brethren. So much so that some historians insist that the Inquisition was established in 1481 not to convert the Jews, but to extirpate the surreptitiously still-Jewish families among the converted Jews, both those who were forced and who chose willingly.
Thus some of the Marranos fled the peninsula for somewhat more hospitable European locales—The Netherlands and Greece, for example, had relatively large Sephardic communities until The Holocaust. Turkey and North Africa also became new homes for those fleeing persecution. Still some Marranos fled to Spanish imperial possessions in the New World. These Jews generally became known in Hebrew as Sephardim—“of the Iberian peninsula.” (In modern Hebrew, “Sepharad" means “Spain.”)
Meanwhile, scholars continue to discuss the importance of the Marranos, relatively small in relation to the overall European population of their time but symbolic of the ever-wandering nature of Diaspora Jewry. Yirmiyahu Yovel’s "The Other Within: The Marranos" proposes that the Marranos represent the social changes conventionally referred to as the Reformation and the Renaissance. According to Tablet:
“In the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, Yovel contends, the Spanish and Portuguese Marranos... were much more than curiosities. They were nothing less than the vanguard of modernity—the first people to experience the fractured identity, social displacement, and spiritual homelessness that would become the universal European fate. Yovel assembles a whole catalog of ‘attitudes and patterns of the Marrano experience that pre-illustrate or anticipate main features and claims of Western modernization:' cultural and religious restlessness; the breakdown or mixture of legitimizing traditions; being at variance with accepted social modes, values, and routines; religious skepticism and heterodoxy; the rise of a secular urban culture; rationalism and universalistic tendencies.”
Now, some six centuries later, Spain is trying to make amends with the Marranos. In November 2012, Spain announced that it would offer citizenship to Jews of Sephardic descent whose ancestors had been expelled in 1492. However, there is one catch: Spain’s offer applies only to those who identify as Jewish; those who are secular, or of another religion, would have to convert. In this way, “It does not apply... the descendants of Jews who were compelled by the Spanish Inquisition to convert to Roman Catholicism... Secular anousim must... undergo formal conversion to Judaism before they can obtain Spanish citizenship,” according to the Gatestone Institute.
The new legislation is also not Spain’s first time reaching out to Sephardic Jews. According to the Gatestone Institute, “Spain first began granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews—on an individual basis, not en masse—in 1988, when the government of Felipe González modified the Spanish Civil Code. The concessions were halted in 2009 by the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but the procedure has now been revived and amended by the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy.”
Sephardic Jews already benefit from preferential naturalization procedure, since they are required to live in Spain only for two years before claiming citizenship. However, the change means that Jews seeking Spanish citizenship will have to present only a certificate confirming their ancestry. At present, there are 25,000 to 45,000 Jews in Spain in a population of 47 million—a fraction of those who lived there before the Inquisition. While a Spanish passport isn’t necessarily attractive in its own right, it would afford holders the opportunity to find work elsewhere in the European Union.
But the move hasn’t been universally viewed as a gesture of reconciliation from the Spanish government. For example, just one week after the announcement, Spain voted to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority at the United Nations; some think that the “Right of Return for Sephardic Jews” was actually a gesture to minimize the impact on bilateral relations with Israel. Still, others view the move as a way to help jumpstart Spain’s economy, which has suffered some of the highest unemployment rates in Europe during the financial crisis.
As the Gatestone Institute explains, “Just days before welcoming Sephardic Jews back to Spain, the government announced on November 19 that it would offer residency permits [the equivalent of a US green card] to foreigners who buy houses priced at more than 160,000 euros [$200,000] as part of its efforts to revive a collapsed real estate market and divest itself of hundreds of thousands of unsold homes.” Thus the move to offer citizenship may have been a way to indirectly prop up the Spanish economy.
Other critics of the measure include descendants of the Muslims who were similarly exiled from Spain along with the Jews. The “Moriscos” are demanding that they, too, be granted citizenship in the same way as Sephardic Jews. According to the Gatestone Institute, “From 1609 through 1614, the Spanish government systematically forced an estimated 350,000 Moriscos to leave Spain for Muslim North Africa. Today there are an estimated 5 million descendants of the Moriscos living in Morocco alone; there are millions more living in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Tunisia and Turkey.”
Whether Spain will establish a similar measure for the Moriscos, or whether Sephardic Jews will take up their own new offer en masse, remains to be seen.
