The Massacres of 5151 in Spain, Mass Conversions and the Disputation of Tortosa
In the summer of 5151 a wave of massacres sweeps Spain; tens of thousands accept baptism to survive, giving birth to the anusim, and twenty years later the long disputation of Tortosa breaks what remained.
In the summer of 5151 a mob roused by the preaching of Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez broke into the Jewish quarter of Seville. Within months the wave had crossed all Spain: Cordoba, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, Palma. Communities seven hundred years old vanished in a single summer. Thousands were killed; but the crucial difference from the Rhineland of 4856 was that here very many accepted baptism — by various estimates a hundred thousand and more.
A new class appeared: conversos, 'new Christians,' known in Hebrew as anusim, 'the coerced.' Some left sincerely; others secretly kept Shabbat and kashrut, lighting candles behind closed doors and passing it to their children for generations. Their position proved worse than that of the Jews who remained: legally Christians, they could not return, and society never accepted them.
In 5173–5174 the antipope Benedict XIII staged a disputation at Tortosa that lasted nearly twenty-one months and sixty-nine sessions. The Jewish delegates, among them Rabbi Yosef Albo, author of Sefer HaIkkarim, faced the convert Yehoshua HaLorki, now Jerónimo de Santa Fe. The rabbis were held far from home month after month while their communities went unled, and Vincent Ferrer preached through the towns, after which whole quarters were baptised.
Spanish Jewry survived 5151, but it was broken. A century later this would lead to the Inquisition and the expulsion.