Much has been written about different aspects of the history and fate of New Christians in Spain and (to a lesser extent) in Portugal, in particular about their encounter with the Inquisition and the emergence of the blood purity laws as well as their economic activities. In his substantial volume, Francisco Bethencourt unfolds a detailed panoramic view—based on archival material—of the history of this religious and ethnic subgroup that emerged following the forced conversion of Jews in Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and disappeared as a conscious group in the second half of the eighteenth century. More precisely, he asks how the New Christian mercantile elite, to which of course not all New Christians belonged, assumed a crucial role in intercontinental trade. The book follows a global approach, considering New Christian commercial activities across the world. The author likewise brings scholarship on New Christians into conversation with Jewish, Catholic, and Sephardic historiographies.
Following a conceptional and methodological introduction, Bethencourt divides his volume in four parts that, depending on the interest of the reader, may also be read separately. The first part deals with the emergence of New Christians from the end of the fifteenth century to the 1540s. In the second part, Bethencourt details the developments of the second half of the sixteenth century, which he describes as the expansion of New Christian networks throughout Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and likewise to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The chapters provide a general background of the relevant historical developments and then follow selected New Christian actors in their commercial endeavors, usually several generations of the same families throughout different chapters. One focus is, for example, the financial hub of Simón Ruiz in Medina del Campo, his relations to North Africa, different forms of investment, partnerships, and relations with Old Christians.
Despite the continuation and even further expansion of New Christian mercantile networks, Bethencourt describes the first half of the seventeenth century as a time characterized by the constant struggle and resistance against the Inquisition and at the same time artistic expressions of New Christian identities. He details both developments in the third part of his book. In the fourth and last part, he deals with the 120 years following the mid-seventeenth century that are usually neglected when telling the history of New Christians. Here, he describes the slow decline of their visibility and their identity as an ethnic group. Throughout the book, he understands ethnicity here “as a fluid set of features that contribute to identifying a social group with shared ancestry” (6), without assuming that all New Christians were crypto-Jews, while at the same time the shared experience of persecution could bridge the religious divide between New Christians and Jews.
In a short review, it is impossible to detail all arguments that the author brings forward throughout the book. However, at the center is the “expansion of this [New Christian] elite” and how it “was related to the inheritance of Jewish economic position and to a radical enlargement of business opportunities during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (4). New Christians were able to close contracts in tax farming and money lending, enlarge their dealings with the nobility and dignitaries of the Church, and at the same time increasingly invested in new intercontinental trade and distribution circuits in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In economic terms, he supports the argument Francesca Trivellato has brought forward regarding Jewish commercial networks: namely, that partnerships were never exclusively based on ethnic trust and composed of New Christians alone. Rather, one can discern an “interconnected system of trade in which the New Christians participated” (105), and expertise, professional skills, and merit were often of equal importance. This included close networks with Jewish commercial networks up to the mid-seventeenth century, the time Bethencourt identifies as the peak of New Christian activity in business following a shift from commerce to finance and into banking. He likewise emphasizes the importance of women in these mercantile endeavors.
Moreover, members of the New Christian elite generated innovative artistic and literary expressions of their identity. The decline of such a perceived shared ethnicity had numerous causes: most prominently, according to Bethencourt, were the backlash that followed the pope’s suspension of Portuguese Inquisition in the late seventeenth century, the War of Succession in Spain, and structural changes in international trade—a parallel with Sephardic economic activity, for which Jonathan Israel came to similar conclusions. Eventually, the abolition of discrimination in Portugal in 1773 accelerated this process in the case of the New Christians.
Though the blood purity statutes and the Inquisition were central to the formation and the further fate of New Christians, Bethencourt reminds us that they were not a unanimously accepted rule of law but a field of fierce debate between those who supported a racial argumentation to break the economic, political, and social influence of New Christians and those who rejected the statutes as an idea that hurt the claim of universal Christendom. In this discourse, New Christians were intensely involved and emphasized the idea of the purity of Virgin Mary and the “regenerative qualities of her milk for all believers” (319) that implied the inclusion of all minorities.
