The Anusim אנוסים

In the summer of 1391 a wave of massacres swept Spain: the first disturbances in Seville, then more than seventy towns in Castile and Aragon. Very many were baptised; the estimates differ and scholarship does not know the exact figure — the usual range is one to two hundred thousand.

On the words. Anusim — "the coerced" — is a term of Jewish law and is neutral. Conversos is the neutral historiographical term. "Marranos" carries a pejorative colouring and is now avoided in scholarship. The usual explanation that the word simply means "pig" is a simplification: that is the modern sense of the Spanish word, while its etymology as applied to crypto-Jews is disputed, with Arabic and Portuguese derivations also proposed.

The central question — whether the conversos kept Judaism in secret — is not settled in scholarship either. Benzion Netanyahu argued that the overwhelming majority were sincere Christians, that the Inquisition's records are unreliable, and that they were persecuted for non-religious reasons. Haim Beinart, working from the same records, argued the opposite. Today the middle ground is more usual: secret practice was real, was fading by the mid-fifteenth century — and flared again after the expulsion of 1492.

Jewish law answered in its own way: an anus remains a Jew, and one who returns is received without conversion. Much grew out of that ruling: whole families returning generations later, the Portuguese communities of Amsterdam and Salonica, and through them Safed and later upheavals such as Shabbetai Tzvi.