| Summary: | The waves of violence against Jews and the corresponding Jewish conversions to Christianity that occurred in the Spanish kingdoms from 1391 to 1416 produced a dramatically altered religious landscape that led many to reframe ancient questions such as who was a Jew and who a Christian. In 1449, a violent uprising in Toledo against the king of Castile turned against the converso population, and an insurgent government established what is often considered a prototype of the purity of blood laws that would proliferate in the coming centuries, barring all converts from Judaism and their descendants from religious and civic offices in the city and its surrounding region. The Sentencia-Estatuto and its aftermath present a problem for the study of Christian history in their departure from what we tend to identify as established Christian doctrine regarding baptism and the irrelevance of fleshly descent to the reception of divine grace.
Through an analysis of works by opponents of the conversos such as the bachelor Marcos Garcia de Mora, and by the conversos' forceful defender Alonso de Cartagena, this study investigates the potentials of Christian thought by asking how Christian scripture and beliefs could motivate and justify discrimination based on lineage, and how defenders of the conversos countered those arguments with competing constructions of genealogy, theology, and history. Religious and theological questions often become entangled with social and political ones; the debate over the conversos was also a contestation over the nature of the Christian community. As such, the study traces that debate into fifteenth-century political theology, exploring its implications for the pressing questions of nobility and developing notions of Spanish political and religious identity.
This dissertation finds that the debate over whether and how to map Christianity onto flesh and further, that the arguments out of which our modern notion of race developed, took place within a debate over how to interpret scripture. The final chapter reflects on how these fifteenth-century contestations can help to illuminate twenty-first-century negotiations of religious traditions and national histories, and on the intellectual limitations and real-life implications of framing our questions with ideas about Jews and Judaism.
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