In contrast to some other countries in the rest of Europe, where Jews continued to practise their religion and were clearly recognisable, from the late fifteenth century on there were, officially at least, no Jews in Spain or Portugal. The conversions to Christianity amongst the vast Jewish communities said to have inhabited the Iberian peninsula since time immemorial had gathered pace with the pogroms of the late fourteenth century and had reached a peak after the fall of Granada in 1492 when the Spanish Jews were faced with conversion or exile. Those who sought refuge in Portugal were given the same choice five years later. Some of the conversions, especially the earliest ones even before the pogroms, may have been sincere, but many of the later ones can probably be attributed to expediency. The converts, at all events, formed a new social category, the conversos, also known as Cristianos nuevos or New Christians (as opposed to the category of Old Christians), or even Judeoconversos to distinguish them from the Moriscos, the converts to Christianity from Islam. It was mainly in order to test the sincerity of their conversion and to establish whether or not they continued to ‘Judaize’ that the Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478. In reality the situation of the conversos was highly complex and hardly lends itself to generalisations. Many of the converts had married into Old Christian families, some of which came from the highest nobility. The conversos, who could frequently count on the protection of the aristocracy and the Crown, distinguished themselves in trade, the liberal professions and the arts, ‘accumulating’, as H. C. Lea, the greatest historian of the Spanish Inquisition, wrote, ‘honours, wealth and popular hatred’. The reaction of resentful Old Christians was to introduce the estatutos de limpieza, statutes of purity of blood, on which certain religious orders as well as military and secular foundations could insist as a condition of preferment or even of admission.

François Soyer shows that the measures adopted against the conversos were accompanied by an intense defamatory campaign intended to inform the Old Christian population of the Iberian pensinsula of the dangers entailed by the ‘elusive enemy’. Arguing against Karl Popper, who regarded conspiracy theories as a product of the eighteenth century, ‘a new, secular, form of superstition’, Soyer insists convincingly that they started far earlier, in the early modern period. In Spain, he writes in his introduction, the theories of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy ‘were part of a conscious and sustained effort by some members of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities … to foster a “moral panic” about conversos’. The campaign was the work of numerous individuals, who, at different times, endeavoured to prove that the converted Jews had a hand in every disaster that had afflicted Iberia and its empires.

A considerable number of the charges made against the New Christians are familiar to us from anti-Jewish propaganda in the Middle Ages – child murder, the desecration of ritual objects and particularly of the host, the administration of poison by Jewish doctors – but to these the campaign against the ‘elusive enemy’ in the early modern period added others and appealed to more recent sources. There were both tendentious interpretations of earlier records and a number of forgeries. The most influential falsification, to which frequent reference would be made over the years, was the correspondence between the Jews of Toledo and the Jews of Constantinople first printed in the 1580s but probably concocted earlier in the century. The Jews of Constantinople advised their Spanish co-religionists to infiltrate Spanish society and to do everything in their power to ruin the Old Christians financially, to injure their health, to relieve them of their property and to destroy their churches. The fear of murderous converso doctors became so intense that efforts were made to prohibit Old Christians from consulting them and to prevent conversos from studying medicine. The conversos were also associated with Protestant attempts to enter Spain and, with references to the myth according to which it was Jews who were responsible for the fall of Toledo to the Muslims in 711, they were blamed for countless incidents of military defeat. Their alleged treachery was confirmed by the presence of converso exiles from Spain in the Netherlands, and it was both to the converso community in Brazil as well as to the exiles that the Spaniards attributed the fall of Bahia to the Dutch in 1624. This, it was suggested, would be followed by a Dutch invasion of Portugal itself and of all the Iberian overseas territories.

This book is the result of the most thorough research and contains a wealth of fascinating information. Some of the details are disheartening. One of Spain's greatest poets, Francisco de Quevedo, who was indeed sceptical about the fake correspondence between the Jews of Spain and Constantinople, took an active part in the anti-semitic campaign. In a letter to his daughter in 1558 after the discovery of heretical conventicles in Seville and Valladolid, the emperor Charles v, whose court was full of conversos, linked conversos to Protestantism and applauded the sentences to the stake. The role of the conversos themselves in the entire campaign, moreover, was ambivalent. The hostility to Jewish doctors was intensified by the use of attacks written by two conversos, Alfonso de Valladolid in the early fourteenth century and Alfonso Chirino a century later. In Portugal in the early seventeenth century we find another convert, João Baptista d'Este, polemicising against Judaism and crypto-Judaism. And even more chilling is the fact that the estatutos de limpieza were observed by the Spanish army until 1870 and that Soyer can detect a virulent anti-semitism in Spanish clerical circles to this day. But perhaps the most disenchanting point of all is how few Old Christians dared to protest against the anti-semitic campaign. Soyer discusses the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira, who advocated intermarriage between Old Christians and New in order to complete the conversos' conversion to Christianity in 1646, as well as the Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro who, in the 1770s, expressed some scepticism about the accusations levelled against the conversos. These figures, however, were isolated.