the unyielding fortitude so often manifested by the Jews under trial. In many places they did not wait for a rising of the Christians but, at the first menace, or even in mere anticipation of danger, they came eagerly forward and clamored to be admitted into the Church. In Aragon the total number of conversions was reckoned at a hundred thousand and in Castile as certainly not less and this is probably no great exaggeration.[328] Neophytes such as these could scarce be expected to prove steadfast in their new faith.
RISE OF THE CONVERSOS
In this tempest of proselytism the central figure was San Vicente Ferrer, to the fervor of whose preaching posterity attributed the popular excitement leading to the massacres.[329] This doubtless does him an injustice, but the fact that he was on hand in Valencia on the fatal 9th of July, may perhaps be an indication that the affair was prearranged. His eloquence was unrivalled; immense crowds assembled to drink in his words; no matter what was the native language of the listener, we are told that his Catalan was intelligible to Moor, Greek, German, Frenchman, Italian and Hungarian, while the virtue which flowed from him on these occasions healed the infirm and repeatedly restored the dead to life.[330] Such was the man who, during the prolonged massacres and subsequently, while the terror which they excited continued to dominate the unfortunate race, traversed Spain from end to end, with restless and indefatigable zeal, preaching, baptizing and numbering his converts by the thousand—on a single day in Toledo he is said to have converted no less than four thousand. It is to be hoped that, in some cases at least, he may have restrained the murderous mob, if only by hiding its victims in the baptismal font.
The Jews slowly recovered themselves from the terrible shock; they emerged from their concealment and endeavored, with characteristic dauntless energy, to rebuild their shattered fortunes. Now, however, with diminished numbers and exhausted wealth, they had to face new enemies. Not only was Christian fanaticism inflamed and growing even stronger, but the wholesale baptisms had created the new class of Conversos, who were thenceforward to become the deadliest opponents of their former brethren. Many chiefs of the synagogue, learned rabbis and leaders of their people, had cowered before the storm and had embraced Christianity. Whether their conversion was sincere or not, they had broken with the past and, with the keen intelligence of their race, they could see that a new career was open to them in which energy and capacity could gratify ambition, unfettered by the limitations surrounding them in Judaism. That they should hate, with an exceeding hatred, those who had proved true to the faith amid tribulation was inevitable. The renegade is apt to be bitterer against those whom he has abandoned than is the opponent by birthright and, in such a case as this, consciousness of the contempt felt by the steadfast children of Israel for the weaklings and worldlings who had apostatized from the faith of their fathers gave a keener edge to enmity. From early times the hardest blows endured by Judaism had always been dealt by its apostate children, whose training had taught them the weakest points to assail and whose necessity of self-justification led them to attack these mercilessly. In 1085, Rabbi Samuel of Morocco came from Fez and was baptized at Toledo, when he wrote a tract[331] to justify himself which had great currency throughout the middle ages. Rabbi Moses, one of the most learned Jews of his time, who was converted in 1106, wrote a dissertation to prove that the Jews had abandoned the laws of Moses while the Christians were fulfilling them.[332] It was Nicholas de Rupella, a converted Jew, who started the long crusade against the Talmud by pointing out, in 1236, to Gregory IX the blasphemies which it contains against the Savior.[333] We have seen the troubles excited in Aragon by the disputatious Converso, Fray Pablo Christía, and he was followed by another Dominican convert, Ramon Martin, in his celebrated Pugio Fidei. In this work, which remained an authority for centuries, he piled up endless quotations from Jewish writers to prove that the race was properly reduced to servitude and he stimulated the bitterness of hatred by arguing that Jews esteemed it meritorious to slay and cheat and despoil Christians.[334]
OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS
The most prominent among the new Conversos was Selemoh Ha-Levi, a rabbi who had been the most intrepid defender of the faith and rights of his race. On the eve of the massacres, which perhaps he foresaw, and influenced by an opportune vision of the Virgin, in 1390, he professed conversion, taking the name of Pablo de Santa María, and was followed by his two brothers and five sons, founding a family of commanding influence. After a course in the University of Paris he entered the Church, rising to the see of Cartagena and then to that of Burgos, which he transmitted to his son Alfonso. At the Córtes of Toledo, in 1406, he so impressed Henry III that he was appointed tutor and governor of the Infante Juan II, Mayor of Castile and a member of the Royal Council. When, in the course of the same year, the king died he named Pablo among those who were to have the conduct and education of Juan during his minority; when the regent, Fernando of Antequera, left Castile to assume the crown of Aragon, he appointed Pablo to replace him, and the pope honored him with the position of legate a latere. In 1432, in his eighty-first year, he wrote his Scrutinium Scripturarum against his former co-religionists. It is more moderate than is customary in these controversial writings and seems to have been composed rather as a justification of his own course.[335]
Another prominent Converso was the Rabbi Jehoshua Ha-Lorqui, who took the name of Gerónimo de Santafé and founded a family almost as powerful as the Santa Marías. He too showed his zeal in the book named Hebræomastix, in which he exaggerated the errors of the Jews in the manner best adapted to excite the execration of Christians. Another leading Converso family was that of the Caballerías, of which eight brothers were baptized and one of them, Bonafos, who called himself Micer Pedro de la Caballería, wrote, in 1464, the Celo de Cristo contra los Judíos in which he treated them with customary obloquy as the synagogue of Satan and argues that the hope of Christianity lies in their ruin.[336] In thus stimulating the spirit of persecuting fanaticism we shall see how these men sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
Meanwhile the position of the Jews grew constantly more deplorable. Decimated and impoverished, they were met by a steadily increasing temper of hatred and oppression. The massacres of 1391 had been followed by a constant stream of emigration to Granada and Portugal, which threatened to complete the depopulation of the aljamas and, with the view of arresting this, Henry III, in 1395, promised them the royal protection for the future. The worth of that promise was seen in 1406, when in Córdova the remnant of the Judería was again assailed by the mob, hundreds of Jews were slain and their houses were sacked and burnt. It is true that the king ordered the magistrates to punish the guilty and expressed his displeasure by a fine of twenty-four thousand doblas on the city, but he had, the year before, in the Córtes of 1405, assented to a series of laws depriving the Jews at once of property and of defence, by declaring void all bonds of Christians held by them, reducing to one-half all debts due to them and requiring a Christian witness and the debtor’s acknowledgement for the other half, annulling their privileges in the trial of mixed cases and requiring the hateful red circle to be worn except in travelling, when it could be laid aside in view of the murders which it invited.[337]
This was cruel enough, yet it was but a foretaste of what was in store. In 1410, when the Queen-regent Doña Catalina was in Segovia, there was revealed a sacrilegious attempt by some Jews to maltreat a consecrated host. The story was that the sacristan of San Fagun had pledged it as security for a loan—the street in which the bargain was made acquiring in consequence the name of Calle del Mal Consejo. The Jews cast it repeatedly into a boiling caldron, when it persistently arose and remained suspended in the air, a miracle which so impressed some of them that they were converted and carried the form to the Dominican convent and related the facts. The wafer was piously administered in communion to a child who died in three days. Doña Catalina instituted a vigorous investigation which implicated Don Mayr, one of the most prominent Jews in the kingdom, whose services as physician had prolonged the life of the late king. He was subjected to torture sufficient to elicit not only his participation in the sacrilege but also that he had poisoned his royal master. The convicts were drawn through the streets and quartered, as were also some others who in revenge had attempted to poison Juan de Tordesillas, the Bishop of Segovia. The Jewish synagogue was converted into the church of Corpus Christi
