Humanizing the Conversos: Recent Research on the Descendants of Baptized Jews in Iberian Lands

Scholarship on the conversos (descendants of forcibly baptized Jews in Iberian lands) has been a particularly contentious area of Sephardic studies. Jewish scholars with a nationalist agenda have frequently idealized conversos (whom they have often conflated with the much smaller population of crypto-Jews); among these scholars, Cecil Roth, Yitzhak Baer, and Haim Beinart stand out. Others, for ideological reasons of their own, have argued that crypto-Jews were either fabrications or creations of the Inquisition, and that the great mass of conversos assimilated early on; prominent among them are Antonio Saraiva, Benzion Netanyahu, and H.P. Salomon. Scholarship in recent decades, however, drawing from trends in current historical scholarship, has contributed to producing a more complex view. This paper will assess the role of current historical theory and practice in humanizing the conception of this fractured and variegated population.