The Lost Mirror. Jews and Conversos in Medieval Spain

Christians and Jews inhabited a shared space with permeable religious boundaries. Despite the differences between the two communities, Jewish artists produced works for Christians and Christian masters executed pieces for Jews. Transfers and exchanges were often encouraged by the patrons themselves. In a display of acculturation, the Jewish elite commissioned illuminated manuscripts—notably haggadot—similar in format and type to Christian codices. For their part, some Christian painters and patrons drew on their intimate knowledge of Jewish customs and rituals to devise portraits of various kinds: from positive depictions of traditional environments and practices to scenes designed from a clearly polemical perspective. The images show that for Christians no religious adversary was more familiar—and therefore more difficult to ignore—than the Jews.

A varied anti-Jewish iconography began to develop in the late 13th century in a context of systemic violence against the Jews. It ranges from portraits based on caricatures and distinguishing signs (clothing and round badges) to scenes portraying the Jews as enemies of the Christian faith. As in the rest of Western Europe, besides expressing intolerance and prejudice, these degrading images often stemmed from strategies for asserting the Christian identity. We need only look at the scenes showing acts of desecration of cult images and the host, or at the Passion cycles. From a Christian viewpoint, many of these representations were regarded as an effective means of ratifying beliefs that had sparked heated controversy within the Church—for example, the cult of images and of the Eucharist— or of spreading Christocentric devotions. The distorted image of the Jews as desecrators and deicides was a reflection returned by the Christian mirror—an expression of the beliefs, fears and anxieties of the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church.

Following the pogroms that devastated many of the Jewish quarters on the Iberian Peninsula in 1391, large numbers of Jews were forced to embrace Christianity. Far from putting an end to the tensions, the mass conversions fuelled unease that Christianity was now under threat from Judaism from within. Accusations of Judaising caused fears and anxieties to be redirected towards New Christians—that is, conversos and their descendants. In this situation, unique in Europe, images were an active and powerful means of expressing a wide range of desires and concerns. On the one hand, Christians in favour of evangelisation used them to stress the need for all those who remained faithful to the Law of Moses to convert. On the other hand, the growing climate of mistrust prompted many conversos to commission religious images to allay suspicions of Judaising. In both cases, images were at the centre of the controversy.

During the 15th century animosity towards conversos grew and eventually led to the establishment of the Inquisition (1478). Specific to the kingdoms of Spain, this institution was founded to persecute new Christians suspected of Judaising. Religious suspicions were joined in 1449—the date the first statutes on purity of blood were enacted in Toledo—by racial prejudice: the idea that conversos were corrupt because their blood was impure. Religious images once again played a prominent role in this atmosphere of persecution and suspicion. Accusations of their desecration became one of the most common arguments levelled against people prosecuted for Judaising heresy. Images were also the means of designing rhetorical programmes justifying and glorifying the Inquisition’s repressive agenda. Lastly, the creation of an iconography that stigmatised Judaising conversos paved the way for a new and shameful visual otherness. This intense production process reached its peak around 1492, when the expulsion of the Jews was decreed.