New Christian
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 Moors that were baptized into the Catholic Church following the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was an anti-Jewish law made by the Catholic Monarchs upon the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. It required Jews to convert to Roman Catholicism or be expelled from Spain. Most of the history of the "New Christians" refers to the Jewish converts, who were generally known as Conversos, while the Muslim converts were called Moriscos.
Because these conversions were achieved in part through coercion and also with the threat of expulsion, especially when it came to the Jews, the Catholic Inquisition and Iberian monarchs suspected a number of the "New Christians" of being crypto-Jews. Subsequently, the Spanish Inquisition and then the Portuguese Inquisition was created to enforce Catholic orthodoxy and to investigate allegations of heresy. This became a political issue in the kingdoms of the Portuguese–Spanish Union itself and their respective empires abroad, particularly in Spanish America, Portuguese America, and the Caribbean. 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 or political.
According to António José Saraiva, a Portuguese historian and professor of Portuguese literature, "When Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile 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 Moslems. 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.
''New Christian'' as a legal category
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 distinguish them as a unique group, separated from ethnic Jews and Iberian Muslims.The Old Christians wanted to legally and socially distinguish themselves from the conversos, whom they considered being tainted by their non-Spanish bloodlines—even though the overwhelming majority of Spain's Muslims were also indigenous Iberians, descendants of native Iberians who earlier converted to Islam under Muslim rule.
In practice, for New Christians of Jewish origin, the concept of New Christian was a legal mechanism and manifestation of racial antisemitism rather than Judaism as a religion. For those of Moorish origin, 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 in a notable 17th-century marine insurance swindle.
Cleanliness of blood and related concepts
The related Spanish development of an ideology of limpieza de sangre 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 for New Christians of Jewish origin, and moriscos for New Christians of Andalusian origin.
Discrimination and persecution
Aside from social stigma and ostracism, the consequences of legal or social categorization as a New Christian included restrictions of civil and political rights, abuses of those already-limited civil rights, social and sometimes legal restrictions on whom one could marry, social restrictions on where one could live, legal restrictions of entry into the professions and the clergy, legal restrictions and prohibition of immigration to and settlement in the newly colonized Spanish territories in the Americas, deportation from the colonies.In addition to the above restrictions and discrimination endured by New Christians, the Spanish Crown and Church authorities also subjected New Christians to persecution, prosecution, and capital punishment for actual or alleged practice of the family's former religion. After the Alhambra Decree of the expulsion of the Jewish population from Spain in 1492 and a similar Portuguese decree in 1497, the remaining Jewish population in Iberia became officially Christian by default. The New Christians, especially those of Jewish origin, were always under suspicion of being judaizantes ; that is, apostatizing from the Christian religion and being active crypto-Jews.
Emigration
Jewish "New Christian" emigration
Despite the discrimination and legal restrictions, many Jewish-origin New Christians found ways of circumventing these restrictions for emigration and settlement in the Iberian colonies of the New World by falsifying or buying limpieza de sangre documentation or attaining perjured affidavit attesting to untainted Old Christian pedigrees. The descendants of these, who could not return to Judaism, became the modern-day Christian-professing Sephardic Bnei Anusim of Latin America.Also as a result of the unceasing trials and persecutions by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, other Jewish-origin New Christians opted to migrate out of the Iberian Peninsula in a continuous flow between the 1600s to 1800s towards Amsterdam, and also London, whereupon in their new tolerant environment of refuge outside the Iberian cultural sphere they eventually returned to Judaism. The descendants of these became the Spanish and Portuguese Jews.