thumb|right|230px|St. [[John of the Cross (1542–1591), a notable Carmelite friar, Christian mystic, and New Christian of Converso ancestry]]

New Christian (; ; ; ; ; ) was a socio-religious designation and legal distinction referring to the population of former Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and their respective colonies in the New World. The term was used from the 15th century onwards primarily to describe the descendants of the Sephardic Jews and Andalusian Muslims that were baptized into the Catholic Church following the Alhambra Decree of 1492. Sometimes "New Christians" travelled to territories controlled by Protestant enemies of Spain, such as the Dutch Empire, the early English Empire, or Huguenot-influenced areas of the Kingdom of France such as Bordeaux, and openly practiced Judaism, which furthered suspicion of Jewish crypsis. Nevertheless, a significant number of those "New Christians" of Converso ancestry were deemed by Spanish society as sincerely Catholic and they still managed to attain prominence, whether religious (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of Ávila, St. Joseph of Anchieta, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Tomás de Torquemada, Diego Laynez, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, and others) or political (Juan de Oñate, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, Hernán Pérez de Quesada, Luis de Santángel, and others).

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 united and almost wholly reconquered Spain. 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 Muslims. 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." By law, the category of New Christians included recent converts and their known baptized descendants with any fraction New Christian blood up to the third generation, the fourth generation being exempted. In Phillip II's reign, it included any person with any fraction of New Christian blood "from time immemorial". In Portugal, in 1772, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquess of Pombal decreed an end to the legal distinction between New Christians and Old Christians.

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 (Limpieza de sangre) distinguish them as a unique group, separated from ethnic Jews and Iberian Muslims.

In practice, for the New Christians of Jewish origins, the concept of New Christian was a legal mechanism and manifestation of racial antisemitism, rather than Judaism as a religion, while for those of Moorish origins 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, as reported in a notable 17th-century marine insurance swindle.

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 marranos (i.e. "pigs") for New Christians of Jewish origin, Those remaining practicing Jews were expelled by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the Alhambra Decree in 1492, following the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. 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 Reconquista, 200,000 of the 500,000 Muslims had been converted to Christianity. There is no universally agreed figure of Moorish population, but Christiane Stallaert put the number at around one million Moriscos (New Christians and their descendants) at the beginning of the 16th century.

Catholic 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-Muslims.

See also

  • Apostasy in Christianity
  • Apostasy in Islam
  • Apostasy in Judaism
  • Baal teshuva
  • Jewish outreach
  • Jewish schisms
  • Proselytization and counter-proselytization of Jews
  • Black Propaganda against Portugal and Spain
  • Converso
  • Crypto-Islam
  • Taqiyya
  • Crypto-Judaism
  • Sabbateanism
  • Dönmeh
  • Frankism
  • Sephardic Bnei Anusim
  • Heresy in Christianity
  • Limpieza de sangre
  • Marrano
  • Morisco
  • Jewish assimilation
  • Jewish emancipation
  • Aliyah
  • Homeland for the Jewish people
  • Napoleon and the Jews
  • Ottoman–Jewish millet
  • Jewish identity
  • Israelites
  • Jewish peoplehood
  • Twelve Tribes of Israel
  • Old Christian
  • "Who is a Jew?"
  • Matrilineality in Judaism
  • Patrilineality in Judaism

References

Further reading

  • 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.
  • Costigan, Lúcia Helena. Through Cracks in the Wall: Modern Inquisitions and New Christian Letrados in the Iberian Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Pulido Serrano, Juan Ignacio. "Plural Identities: The Portuguese New Christians." Jewish History 25 (2011): 129–151.
  • Quiroz, Alfonso W. "The Expropriation of Portuguese New Christians in Spanish America, 1635-1649." Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 11 (1985): 407–465.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Salomon, H.P. Portrait of a New Christian: Fernão Álvares Melo (1569-1632). Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982
  • 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.
  • Dramatic episodes of the Portuguese Inquisition, volume 1, by Antonio Baião, in Portuguese
  • Dramatic episodes of the Portuguese Inquisition, volume 2, by Antonio Baião, in Portuguese
  • 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")