Who is a Jew?
Alexander Bevilacqua: Converso Identities, 10 July 2025
Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite
by Francisco Bethencourt.
Princeton, 602 pp., £38, May 2024,978 0 691 20991 3 Show More
by Francisco Bethencourt.
Princeton, 602 pp., £38, May 2024,
“... pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th century, as Francisco Bethencourt writes in his new history of the converso mercantile elite, the New Christians made up around 5 per cent of the Iberian population. Almost all of them lived in towns, accounting for between 60 and 65 per cent of the peninsula’s urban ... ”
