In the shadow of history

The mass conversion, to a great degree forced, caused the emergence of a vast class of Conversos who reinforced the Spanish and Portuguese intelligentsia. Nevertheless, the Conversos remained aliens, if not enemies, in the eyes of Iberian society, because the criteria for belonging to society were in fact racial. The rise of a group within the Converso community who were in their hearts neither Jews nor Christians (e.g. Spinoza) resulted in the process of secularization of European society. Discusses, also, the factors (apart from the coercion of the Church and the persecution of the Inquisition) which brought about the mass conversions of Jews of the Iberian peninsula in the 14th-15th centuries. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)