The Accepted Other: Tolerance Towards the Jews in Medieval Galicia

1
The accepted other:
Tolerance towards the Jews
in Middle Ages Galicia*
Carlos Barros
University of Santiago
The Latin term tolerantia, which was used in the Middle Ages1
in its
ethimological sense of suffering and patience, will later take on, specifically from the
Enlightenment onwards, a second, more positive meaning referred to the otherness,
where tolerance connotes accepting the other.
It is our intention, by taking medieval Galicia as an example, to study Christian
tolerance towards the Jewish minority, more as a conscious practice of the Christian
* “The Accepted Other: Tolerance Towards the Jews in Medieval Galicia”, Troubled Souls. Conversos,
Crypto-Jews, and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth
Century, Edited by Charles Meyers and Norman Simms, Hamilton, 2001, pp. 8-31.
1
Tolerare is to endure, to bear, to withstand, to sustain, "Universal Vocabulario" de Alfonso de
Palencia. Registro de voces españolas internas (1490), John M. Hill ed., Madrid, 1957, p. 185; this
same sense is expressed when people claim not to bear intolerable damages, C. BARROS,
Mentalidad justiciera de los irmandiños, siglo XV, Madrid, 1990, pp. 96, 113-116.

2
society than as an intellectual conception. Thus, we will attempt to rebalance the
traditional approach by researchers, which -not without motives- has so far been
excessively focused on the anti-Semitic constant. By questioning history from the
perspective of current problems2
, by learning today from the experiences of the past, in
our case, from the irregular medieval historical process which led , after a century-long
coexistence , to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496.
In psychological terms , tolerance, the conceptual tool for our anlysis, could be
defined as an attitude and a behaviour based on flexivility an self-control in response
to external stimuli which contradict our own beliefs and opinions. A predisposition -
and the subsequent behaviour - to peaceful coexistence with those who are different or
hold diverging opinons as regards religion, race, nationality, social status or ideology.
The tolerant self implies acceptance and respect towards the other . We are , therefore,
speaking of an identity, whose foundations are to be found in the otherness. A tolerant
attitude does not, therefore, entail the renounce to one’s own convictions. It maintains
the discrepancy with opposing beliefs , and implies persuading the other through
dialogue and not through violence . The resort to violence to impose any given belief or
ideology, by getting rid of those who do not share it, establishes the moment of
hememony of intolerance, that is to say , the predisposition to exclude the other, often
physically through banishment, torture and death.
A postponed issue
‘t
The rebirth of racism, of anti-Semitism , and of nationalism,as well as the spread of religious
fundamentalism bring to the foreground the issue of tolerance / intolerance towards those who are
different as regards their religion , race or nationality. For a historical analysis of the recovered notion
of tolerance as opposed to the increase of the phenomenon of intolerance,as ideology and practice
of the non-acceptance of diversity see L'intolleranza: uguali e diversi nella storia, Bolonia, 1986, p.
9 (Proceedings of the International Conference that took place in Bolognia between December 12-14
1985 in collaboration with Amnisty International); that same year there was a similar colloquium in
París: La tolérance, 13e Colloque International de Recherches sur les civilisations de l'Occident
moderne (1985), París, 1986.

3
The relative exceptionality - sometimes a prolonged one - of tolerance as a
collective attitude has its explanation in the fact that it often advocates an egalitarian
treatment amidst unequal social groups as regards their number or political influence3
,
in the context of a very polarised society. Eventually, the logic of power and exclusion
tends to impose,pushing into the background, as a consequence, tolerance as a
historiographical theme to the benefit of a violent and triumphalist anti-Semitism . The
final solution of forcing the conversion and/ or the expulsion of medieval Jews, first in
Europe and much later in the Iberian Peninsule, has- in many cases - made many
historians consign into oblivion the periods of peaceful coexistence - which indeed were
never free from a conflictive dimension- but which, strictly speaking, occupy most of
Spanish Middle Ages.
Jewish-Muslim-Christian coexistence,and the attitudes underlying it, have
therefore been considered secondary issues in recent Spanish historiography4
. This
cannot be even justified on the necessity to reconstruct from a professional and
democratic ideological stance a history of Spain which had just undergone an
ideological manipulation by Francoism because the latter did not vindicate the three-
culture Spain but rather the contrary, as it is well known . It is for this reason that the
3
However Joseph Pérez justifies medieval tolerance in Spain - the tolerance of the élites and the
anti-Semitism of the people - as he puts it - on the objective impossibility for Christian power to
convert or terminate the Jews minority until the completion of the Reconquest in 1492, interpreting
as a consequence the ‘idealised’ image of three-culture, Medieval Spain as the modern consequence
of Morisco and Sephardic nostalgy, "Chrétiens, juifs et musulmans en Espagne, le mythe de la
tolérance religieuse (VIIIe-XVe siècle)", L'Histoire, nº 137, 1990.
4
An example: out of the 436 bibliographic references listed by Enrique Cantera Montenegro in
1986 ("Los judíos en la Edad Media hispana", Cuadernos de Investigación Medieval, nº 5) only one
makes an explicit referecence to the issue under discussion : Fernando DIAZ ESTEBAN, Aspectos de
la convivencia jurídica desde el punto de vista judío en la España medieval, II Congreso Internacional
"Encuentros de las Tres Culturas", Toledo, 1985, pp. 105-116.

4
First International Conference ”Encuentro de tres culturas”, held in Toledo in 1982,
acquires for some authors relevance as a legitimate search for medieval historical
predecents of “the coexistence of different cultures” in the context of the fledgling
Spanish democracy5
.The Renaissance and Humanist image of a barbarian Middle Ages
obscured the fact that it was at the time of both the protestant Reform and the Catholic
Contrareform in Europe when religious intolerance was taken to its ultimate
consequences. The religious wars in the second half of the sixteenth century are a good
paradigm of it. Popular pogroms in Late Middle Ages Castile were a child’s play in
comparison to the persecutory violence of the Inquisition throughout the Modern Age
against anyone who believed - and especially practiced- in a way other than that of the
State religion.
The undervaluing of the tolerant part of reality derives from the characteristic
conception of anti-Semitism as a social mentality of long duration which bursts in
some given social, political and mental environments, periodically reaching
increasingly more extreme levels . It is not surprising , therefore, that ever since the
Jewish genocide and that of other minorities during the Second World War the
pesimistic image of tolerance and coexistence have been stressed as historical and
historiographical byproducts.
Historians, nonetheless,should transcend the hindrance posed by the length of
time to analyse the Jewish issue on a middle and a close perspective, being oblivious
to the romantic idealisation of a medieval context free from conflicts. Rather, historians
should always seek to reproduce history in full, that is to say, a dialectic history, by
looking at complementary, and even antagonical views -in the case under discussion- of
the exclusion and/or acceptance of the other.
The scientific aim of objectivity must therefore seek to complete and confront -
5
Mikel EPALZA, "Pluralisme et tolérance, un modèle tolédan?", Tolède XIIe-XIIIe. Musulmans,
chrétiens et juifs: le savoir et la tolérance, pp. 242-243.

5
something which is not always feasible- the majoritary, Christian point of view, based
on Christian sources and the minoritary, Jewish point of view based on Hebrew sources.
A previous and necessary step for this necessary assessment of Jewish specificity is the
understanding of the changing Jewish-Christian relationship as a mobile, complex
system of tolerance and intolerance, even of intellectual controversy for and against
Judaism6
.
Double tendency
The recovery of tolerance as a research topic may not be possible or may prove
fruitless unless we leave behind the old historiograpic controversy - intensified around
the Fifth Centenary- that took place forty years ago between Américo Castro and
Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. The former posited that Spain was the consequence of the
blend of three cultures, namely the Christian, the Jewish and the Muslim7
, while the
latter denied it by branding as ‘supposed’ such medieval coexistence of Christian, Jews
and Muslims 8
. Needless to say , there is documental evidence to support both stances.
Tolerance and anti-Semitism are, in actual fact, compatible and complementary
attitudes and behaviours. They justify and need each other. They do not exist in
isolation. Strickly speaking, then, the controversity is proven false from the moment
we define tolerance as coexisting with the other9
: " without suspending our views on
6
Bernard VINCENT, 1492: "El año admirable", Barcelona, 1992, pp. 37-38.
7
Américo CASTRO, España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948), Barcelona, 1983
(2ª ed.).
8
Claudio SANCHEZ ALBORNOZ, España, un enigma histórico (1957), 2 vols., Barcelona, 1985
(10ª ed.); El drama de la formación de España y los españoles, Barcelona, 1977, pp. 55-62.
9
We are not convinced by the notion that medieval tolerance is based on hypocresy given that
Christians accepted other religions on the belief that theirs was superior and the rest should not exist ,

6
our beliefs and behaviours, but renouncing to use them as justification for
persecution"10
. In fact, in Medieval laws , the Partidas in particular, we find protective
rules as well as discriminative rules coexisting together establishing a feedback
relationship, which defines a unique framework of tolerance among Chistians, Moors
and Jews . It is for this reason that we are going to find in each class or group both
hostility and respect towards the Jewish communities, in variable proportions according
to the social background, the moment and the place.
Underlying the tolerant coexistence there is a dichotomy of interests, beliefs and
images at work, in which mutual relationships go from acceptance to exclusion,
depending on the situation, the social group and / or the places . In other words, we find
in the tolerant attitude traces of anti-Semitism , obviously in a moderate form; its
opposite would not be intolerance but philo-Judaism, a phenomenon althogether
marginal in Medieval Spain11
, and which, in any case, springs to the surface only in
periods of persecution, when those who were tolerant in the past are forced to choose
between the hostigating and the protecting sides, between those opposed to and those in
favour of Jews ( or converts for that ).
The value of tolerance could be defined as a theoretical balance point between
the anti-Semitism of some and the anti-Christianism of the others... If forces were on
a level , but that is not the case, and consequently the tolerance/ intolerance alternative
while today we have a ‘higher’ understading of religious tolerance (Mikel de Eepalza, "Pluralisme et
tolérance, un modèle tolédan?", pp. 247, 149, 250); the truth is that each religion , today like yesterday,
considers itself the true one , without that making peaceful coexistence any harder. As pertains the
present , despite the laicism of States and Western civil societies, intolerance is widespread . We have
nothing to envy the Middle Ages on this respect.
10
Fernando SAVATER, "La tolerancia, institución pública y virtud privada", Claves, nº 5, 1990, p.
30.
11
José María MONSALVO ANTON, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social. El antisemitismo
en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media, Madrid, Siglo XXI, 1985, pp. 114-117.

7
becomes , more than anything, a prerogative of dominating Christian society rather than
an option of the Hebrew minority.
A double, contradictory and inseparable tendency is found across Middle Ages
Europe: the accepted other versus the excluded other ( the bridge between both is the
invented other). The subjetivism of the historian, who has the privilege of knowing the
final outcome ( the expulsion in 1492) must not lead us to deny or ignore the prolonged
coexistence which made that , for the people of the time, the coexistence between
Christians, Jews (and Moors), was the alternative they were more acquainted with and
desired the most ; the most stable and feasible among both communities . What today
seems like a precarious balance bound to result in persecution and banishment, might
not have been interpreted by contemporaries up to 1492 as a reality of coexistance which
was episodically broken by outbursts of violence and intolerance?
This double medieval tendency, a mixture of friendship and detachment , of
permissiveness and discrimanation, whose surprising and prolonged stability is
accounted for by the fragmentation of power and the weakness of the State in feudal
times, is materially generated by a daily and economic life to a great extent shared ,
especially in medieval cities. Its intellectual correspondence is to be found in a religious
relativism, more widespread than it is usually believed, which divided the truth of God
amidst the three “book -based religions”.
The tolerance towards Jews and Moors was markedly religious ( but also legal,
socio-economic and mental ). Its relativist content is mirrored in eurdite and courtesan
culture in a number of ways, for instance, when it comes to establishing the different
forms of swearing for Christians, Jews and Moors , each according to their beliefs and
in their religious buildings (Christian church, synagogue or mosque )12
. This religious
diversity , admitted by the laws, has a correspondence in a popular and oral vision. Such
12
Partidas III, 11, 19-21.

8
vision was expressed in in late fifteenth century Castile by converts and cristianos viejos
( priests included ) in the following way: " it was believed that each was salved in their
law "; "three laws hath God made and I could not say which is the truest "; “fellow
man,God made three laws. And it is unknown to man which is the truest"; "the good
Jew would salve and so would the good Moor in their law"; "none of them knowst which
is that God loves the most"13
. Obviously enough , the “everything-is-equally-true
mentality” of common people surpasses the tolerant intentions of the elite culture, which
does not renounce to conversion in the future. Thus writes the jurist, on behalf of
Alfonso XI (1348): "and it is our will that Jews remain in our domain ; and the Holy
Church thus orders because although they have not converted to our faith nor obtain
salvation according to the profecies, being able to honestly procure a living and
sustenance in our domain, we consider fair that they may own and purchase properties
"14
. This sort of earthly purgatory - official version of what we call here double
tendency- in which written culture confined the Jews, is in deep contrast with the oral
culture which ensured the same heaven to the observant Jew.
The very Jew minority was interested in a certain degree of separation - if not the
enjoyment of certain legal privileges - in relation to the Christian majority, and above
all, it longed for self-rule, which would enable them to maintain and practice their
religion and abide by their law. It favoured, therefore, a certain segregation materialized
in the existence of the Jewry (with its synagogue, its burial ground and sometimes its
walls), location and physical identification of the other- also present in the obligation,
usually flouted- of wearing an emblem or distinctive garments - which in general
13
José María MONSALVO ANTON, "Herejía conversa y contestación religiosa a fines de la edad
Media. Las denuncias a la Inquisición en el Obispado de Osma", Studia Historica, II, 1984, pp. 125-
126, 131.
14
Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, I, Madrid, 1861, p. 533.

9
focalised a tolerant attitude and also, in given instances, the brutality of a majority.
Were not the Jews , on the other hand, a necessary part of Medieval Western
society? It would be a serious antimaterialist mistake if we considered that anti-
Semitism had its only source in the economic basis of feudal society15
. The production
conditions were shared by both Christians and Jews. The importance of the economic
and professional function of Jews where Christians could not collaborate efficiently (
loans, tax collection, administration, medicine), especially on the urban, finantial and
courtesan scene reinforced their economic integration in a social system which, at the
same time, structurally segregated them by definition, because Christians could not
assimilate Jews in the main productive feudal relationship, neither as vassals nor as
lords16
. Jews, consequently, were organised according to a unique statute as a private
possession of the King , servi regis: "Jews belong to the King; although they have the
power of wealthy men"17
. Kings, in some occasions, delegated this exceptional power
over the Jews on lay and eccesiastic lords, who, like the king, received them in their
lands, leving taxes on them and benefiting from their knowledge 18
.We shall mention
below one of such cases in the territory of Ourense in Galicia.
15
It was a Marxist, Russian Theoritisian , Ber Borojov- who met an early death in 1917- that set
the foundations for a Marxist conception of the Jewish problem , and the national issue at large , by
bringing together the explanation of communitary facts, the notion of production conditions and the
notion of production , Nacionalismo y lucha de clases, México, 1979; we have dealt with this issue in
depth in "A base material e histórica da nación en Marx e Engels", Dende Galicia: Marx. Homenaxe
a Marx no 1º centenario da súa morte; Carlos BARROS, J. VILAS NOGUEIRA edits., A Coruña,
1985, pp. 139-207.
16
Jacques LE GOFF, La civilización del Occidente medieval, Barcelona, 1969, p. 425.
17
Galo SANCHEZ, ed., Libro de los Fueros de Castilla, Barcelona, 1924.
18
Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, I, Madrid, 1981, pp. 68, 71-72; on
European Jews as royal serfs, see R.I. MOORE, La formación de una sociedad represora. Poder y
disidencia en la Europa Occidental, 950-1250, Barcelona, 1989, pp. 52-56.

10
The invented other
Jacques Le Goff pointed out the ambivalent character of medieval Christianity
between the closed religion of the Old Testament and the open religion of the New
Testament, although the latter had a particularist and hostile tendence towards the other
religions: "Your God is unique.Thou shalt not take the name of thy God in vain"19
. This
ambiguity leads Christians to both hate and admire Jews - and other segragated
minorities, cutting off- at the same time- any dialogue with them through persecutions
and carnages throughout the Middle Ages20
. A double sense which concerns- in different
degrees- all classes and groups in medieval society, depending on time and space
coordenates.
The paradoxical basis of the attitude of the Christian society towards medieval
Jews makes the anthropological notion of otherness21
a key tool for the understanding
of a relationship which, not doubt, is more contradictory for us than it was for medieval
people, and one which, if we are to properly comprehend, the classical criteria for
approaching the quantitative ( majority/ minority) or the spatitial ( central/marginal)
problem prove insufficient. We must go deeper into the psychosocial relationship with
the other, regardless of their number22
, since it is one of markedly quantitative nature .
19
Jacques LE GOFF, La civilización del Occidente medieval (1965), Barcelona, 1969, pp. 215-216.
20
ídem, pp. 423-424.
21
Anthropology can be defined as the science of the other, Marc AUGE, "Qui est l'autre? Un
itinéraire anthropologique", L'Homme, nº 103, 1987, pp. 7-26; see as well Eloy BENITO RUANO,
De la alteridad en la historia, Madrid, 1988; T. TODOROV, Nous et les autres, Paris, 1989.
22
Numeric inferiority was usually compensated for by their greater political and economic
influence.

11
This notion of otherness is expressed through an affective, imaginary and unconscious
mentality, which explains the mentioned paradoxical behaviour23
- along with the
economic contradictions on which it is based . Likewise, this mentality also accounts
for the known function of the Jew as scapegoat in moments of serious social, political
and /or mental crisis.
The violence which characterizes the passing from the near, accepted, tolerated
other to the far, excluded and persecuted other is inseparable from -thus giving rise to
an unconsious projection in search for an scapegoat - what Marxism appropriately calls‘
false conscience’, the aprehension of reality as something invented , imaginary . With
the notion of otherness, social imagination enters the picture , especially when we go
from peaceful acceptance to refusal, in search of the extermination of the other . Then,
the accepted other is radically transformed into the invented other ; the diverse becomes
the opposed ; the difference turns into the opposite: the difference becomes alienation
and, strickly speaking, otherness turns into alienidad24
. It is then the time of false
accusations, of the antisemitic stereotype, of the deformed image of the Jew as an enemy
,a long-lasting latent image, which as we mentioned above, is brought to the foregound
or pushed into the background depending on the mental circumstances . The mental
change from the acceptance to the fiction of the other acts as a bridge , paves the way
and sets the environment for the great outburst of sublimating violence against the bouc
émissaire, ultimate representation of the invented other.
Tolerant Galicia
23T
The paradox is not such when we move outside that rational side of the mental that plays such
an important role in medieval mentalities.
24
Y. A. DAUGE, Le barbare. Recherches sur la concepcion romaine de la barbarie et de la
civilisation, Bruselas, 1982. p. 32.

12
It has been a general norm of the authors 25
who have studied the Jews in Medieval
Galicia to stress the predominance of tolerance over exclusion and the remarkable non-
existence of Late Middle Ages pogroms listings 26
. Amador de los Ríos says of the
medieval kingdom of Galicia: "where seldom were Jews victims of the people’s anger
"27
. This is so to the extent that if research on the Jews were exclusively centred on
antisemitic mentality and practice , it could be said that Hebrew Galicia would hardly
exist. Galicia is, therefore, since the people’s anti-Semitism did not went beyond the
threshold of violence during the Middle Ages, the adequate scenario to study the weight
of tolerance on Jew-Christian relations, without this meaning, of course, that the
particular situation of Galicia may be simply extrapolated to the other kingdoms of
Castile and Leon.
Not only Galicia stood aside from the violent antisemitic wave, the carnages of
1391 in Castile and Catalonia did not extend to Leon, Portugal or Navarre28
either. From
25
Benito F. ALONSO, "Los judíos en Orense (siglos XV al XVII)", Boletín de la Comisión de
Monumentos de Orense, II, 1904, pp. 166, 182; Leopoldo MERUENDANO, Los judíos de Ribadavia
(1915), Lugo, 1981, pp. 6-7, 13-15, 24-25; Carlos DEAÑO, "Judíos", Gran Enciclopédea Gallega,
XVIII, 1974, pp. 120-123; José Ramón ONEGA, Los judíos en el Reino de Galicia, Madrid, 1981, pp.
199, 247, 272, 280, 291, 326, 361, 365, 407, 417, 443, 543; Anselmo LOPEZ CARREIRA, "Os xudeus
de Ourense no século XV", Boletín Auriense, XIII, 1983, pp. 164-165, 168.
26
Except for the assault to Orense ‘s synagogue in 1442, an event which will be dealt with below,by
the noble band of the Cadórnigas, and which could hardly be described as an popular antisemitic riot.
27
It only mentions the aggression and looting of Jews in Ribadavia in 1386 by foreign troops under
the command of the Duke of Lancaster, remarking that the hatred agisnt the Hebrew race had taken
root not only among the Spaniards , José AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, Historia de los judíos de
España y Portugal, II, Madrid, 1984, pp. 329-330 n3; III, Madrid, 1984, p. 647.
28
Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, II, Madrid, 1981, pp. 386, 395,
402, 439; David ROMANO, "Los judíos de la corona de Aragón en la Edad Media", España. Al-
Andalus. Sefarad: Síntesis y nuevas perspectivas, p. 156.

13
a typological point of view, in the Late Middle Ages, the movements against lords arise
more intensily on the northern territories of the Crown of Castile, especially in Galicia,
whereas the movements against the Jews are stronger in the South, notably in Andalusia,
where pogroms have their origin in 139129
. These regional differences in the domain of
the kingdoms of Castile and Leon as regards "the level of anti-Semitic manifestations"30
,
are also perceived as regards the level of tolerance towards the Jews.31
. The legislator is
aware of it. For that reason in the Ordenamiento de Alcalá de 1348, when purchases by
Jews are limited so as to prevent an uncontroled increase in their properties, greater
permissiveness is shown north of the Douro, Duero allende, in other words, in the
kingdoms of Galicia, Asturias, Leon and the Basque provinces, than South of that
river , Duero aquende: "In the north of the Douro the limit is set in the amount of thirty
thousand mr. for everyone owning a house there ; and south of the Douro in the
remaining counties up to the amount of twenty thousand each as it has been
established"32
.
The greater the tolerance, the more sincere the conversions (i.e. less forced). It is
a shared belief among fifteenth century narrative sources that northern converts (Old
Castile) were more sincere than southern converts (New Castile and even more so in
Andalusia), more notorious before cristianos viejos . That is the reason why the
29
Julio VALDEON, Los conflictos sociales en el reino de Castilla en los siglos XIV y XV, Madrid,
1975, p. 50.
30
en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media, Madrid, 1985, p. 7.
31
The complemetarity and the imposssibility to separate out the antisemitic and tolerant attitudes
transform this mental and social system with a double tendency is a sort of communicating vessels.
32
Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, I, Madrid, 1861, p. 533.

14
Inquisition concentrated its efforts during Late Middle Ages on the sourthern area33
.
This environment of growing coexistence as we move north has to do with the fewer
number of Medieval Jewish settlements34
, and underscores the representativity of
Galician tolerance.
Given the evidence of the spectacularly of triumphant anti-Semitism in Castile,
its tolerant counterpoint goes unnoticed , despite its temporal continuity .It even comes
back to life in the places most affected by the 1391 carnage -,hence the value of studying
less tense scenarios such as the Galiacian one in throwing light onto the mentioned
tendency.
Of the Medieval Jewries we have fewer documental traces35
than in the case of
Castilian ones 36
,which were also more important and conflictive. We know , however,
more of the Jews in Medieval Galicia than of those in the remaining north of the
peninsule37
, data being more abundant from the fifteenth century onwards38
. In the years
33
Julio CARO BAROJA, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, I, Madrid, 1986, pp.
145, 158.
34
Julio CARO BAROJA, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, I, Madrid, 1986, pp.
45, 50, 58, 60-61; Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, I, Madrid, 1981, pp.
153, 155, 159.
35
The fundamental problem is the loss of medieval archives in Galician urban councils. In cases-
like that of Ourense- where council document have been better kept , data abound.
36
As regards the Crown of Castile fewer documents have been kept than in the case of the Crown
of Aragon, David ROMANO, "Los judíos de la corona de Aragón en la Edad Media", España. Al-
Andalus. Sefarad: Síntesis y nuevas perspectivas. p. 154.
37
Julio CARO BAROJA, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, I, Madrid, 1986, p.
60.
38
During the fifteenth century, there was an increase in the number of Jews in the Crown of Castile,
especially in small villages, Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, II, Madrid,
1981, pp. 504-505; on the other hand , massive conversions in the places where carnages occured in
1391, highlight the religious and political importance of Northern and Northwest Jewish communities

15
previous to the expulsion, between 1474 y 1491, we know from the royal taxes paid
by Jewries ( services and contributions for the war in Granada) in which Galician cities
there were significative Jewish communities ( although the list of places where there is
documental evidence of the presence of Jewish is more comprehensive): Allariz,
Bayona, Betanzos, A Coruña, Monforte, Ourense, Pontedeume, Ribadavia y Ribadeo39
.
The amount of maravedíes contributed place Galician Jews living in those towns40
below the level of the Castilian Jews, which confirms their relatively reduced number
41
. The attitude of the Christian majority towards the Jewish minority, is, anyway, a
subjective issue. In other words, it is a qualitative rather than a quantitavity issue42
. The
Jews numerical inferiority favoured on the one hand, integration and tolerance , as the
hegemonic Christian society felt less threatened , but this should not be reason enough
for anti-Semitism not to act in a exteme way , exaggerating the number of the enemies
of the faith 43
. José María Monsalvo has already pointed out the role of social
.
39
Luis SUAREZ FERNANDEZ, Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los judíos, Valladolid,
1964, pp. 66, 68, 69, 79.
40
In the 1474 list Gallician Jews do not appear as Jewry of but as Jews whose abode is, which
seems to confirm a smaller size, Luis SUAREZ FERNANDEZ, Documentos acerca de la expulsión
de los judíos, p. 79.
41
The amount of 1,500 Jews that according to Froissart lived in Ribadavia by late fourteenth
century is to be sure an exaggeration, LETTENHOVE, Kervyn, edit., Oeuvres de Froissart.
Chroniques, (1386-1389), XII, Bruselas, 1871, p. 86.
42
Not even the biggest Jewish communities in Spain -which no doubt - were much bigger
than those in the rest of Europe were beyond 200-400 families. Hebrew culture flourished even
in the smallest villages , something to be noticed in order to understand the social and religious
life of those days , Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, I, Madrid, 1981, p.
158.
43
In accordance with the 1432 statutes, wherever there were over ten Jewish households there must
be a synagogue, Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, II, Madrid, 1981, p.

16
psychology44
in accounting for the fact that the 1391 carnages did not spread to the
Castilian north despite the size of its Jewries, for instance, to Burgos (120-150 families)
- the second most important Jewry after Toledo45
. An outburst of popular wrath against
Jews does not actually require a great number of opponents, but rather factors working
as catalysts: an adequate mental universe - the invention of the other - materialized in
false accussations , spread by overexcited preachers -and latent social tensions whose
only letout is to agitate a well-known medieval stereotype46
, whose origin and
ramifications take us well back into the distant past.
Tolerance as otherness : Allariz
On May 20th 1289 the local council of Allariz reach a paradigmatic 47
agreement
before the royal Chief Justice of the village "and the priests there ", with Isaac Ismael,
"Senior Jew of the Jews with abode in this village", in order to regulate the peaceful
coexistence of Chistrians and Jews: a true pact of otherness . The first remarkable point
is the mediating role of the royal power48
as well as that of the Church, together with
517.
44
en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media, Madrid, 1985, p. 262.
45
Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, I, Madrid, 1981, pp. 155-156.
46
The universallity of the stereotype unifies the anti-Semitic image in the terrritories of Castile and
beyond into medieval Western, José María MONSALVO ANTON, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto
social. El antisemitismo en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media, Madrid, 1985, p. 114.
47
Document from the archive of the local council of Allariz published by José AMADOR DE LOS
RIOS, Historia de los judíos de España y Portugal (1875), II, Madrid, 1984, pp. 553-554; also
reproduced in Alfredo CID RUMBAO,Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984, pp. 64-65.
48
The village of Allariz had a close relationship witht the royal family in the thirteenth century.

17
the equitable and egalitarian nature of the agreement. The tolerance that is established
is mutual; particular care is put in not making Christian superiority explicit . As regards
religions, an agreement is made to separate Christian and Jewish public celebrations,
thus preventing the ones from attending the celebrations of the others so as to avoid
anyone showing anti-Semitic or anti-Christian opinions.
It is thus established that "During the prayers and celebrations that the said Jews
held on the outskirts of the village at the foot of our Castelo49
, there should be no
Christian, dweller of the aforementioned village, whose intention be to scorn or disrupt
their prayers". Jewish processions took place, significatively enough, outside the city,
thus revealing the original Jewish marginality. A typical form of anti-Semitism was to
cause disruption by resorting to legal accions in their religious ceremonies, with the
apparent collusion of the local council. A renounce to such accion was established by
mutual agreement .
Most surely these anti-Semitic actions had prompted retaliatory measures and /or
vicerversa.
Jews, on the other hand, were obliged to respect Christian processions: "and when
we take our God and His mother, Holy Mary, out in the streets no Jew should attend ,
and Christians will be alert in the streets where we shall take our God unless there is
any mockery, disruption, heinous act or riot as it is often the case". This disrespectful
behaviour was, in fact, habitual among Jews by way of retaliation for the discrimination
they suffered : they made fun of their God ( Jesus Christ) and His mother, Holy Mary.
But it is the Christian wording of ‘ our God ‘ which we would like to stress upon as it
The infants lived there and Queen Violante founded there the Nunnery of Santa Clara, Alfredo CID
RUMBAO, Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984.
49
Between the castle and Arnoia River, therefore, outside the walls of the villiage, there is still a
street parallel to socastelo s treet popularly known as sinagoga, Alfredo CID RUMBAO, Historia de
Allariz, Orense, 1984. p. 266.

18
amounts to recognising the plurality of beliefs, thus moving away from the official
nomopolism and proselitistism and allowing us to glimpse a clear glimmering of
religious relativism, which we have already mentioned and which, in this particular
case, demonstrates the sincerity of the offer of an egalitarian treatment on the part of the
mayoritary religion.
Tolerance and segregation- this time voluntary, accepted- in the urban scene is
the agreed form to articulate the mutual acceptance of the other . Not only in processions
must they be separated, but also in the quarters. "And no Christian shall dwell on the
Jewish quarter", reads the agreement, thus informing us of the pre-existence of a Jewry
in the village50
; the motivation to live together and in a non-discrimitatory way derives
from the very agreement itself : "nor there shall be any riot ". From the other party it is
established: "That the aforesaid Senior Jew nor his people purchase, barter or dwell on
any house outside the Jewry or any other street in the village where Chistians dwell".
It is therefore agreed that Alarican Jews cannot open their shops or live outside the
Jewry. But by way of compensation they are entitled to take their victuals and goods
across the village: "and Jews may use the gates of the village to carry to the Jewry
whatever victuals they consider necessary"51
.
In other words, yes, there is segregation . But Jews are not denied the use of the
walled town when they consider it commercially necessary. Thus they mutally facilitate
their daily and economic life by yielding in both civil and religious issues.
Likewise, it is agreed that the Xudeu Maior, Isaac Ismael, who happens to be an
50
According to local historiograohy, the first news about the Jewry in Allariz is from early
thirteenth century, see Alfredo CID RUMBAO, "Alariz", Gran Enciclopedia Gallega, I, 1974, p. 195;
this could account for the lack of references to Jews in the twelfth century l Fuero de Allariz .
51
Most surely the Jewry was at the NW, between the wall and the river. There were only two
ways of gaining access to it: either skirting the wall or going through the Porta da vila and cross it ;
see attached map on Alfredo CID RUMBAO, Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984.

19
important proprietor of real estate outside the Jewry, both in and outside the town walls,
should leave “ the house in the borough’ as security to Xoan de Amoeiro "for the
damages that his Jews may cause"52
. This compensation for damages points to a respect
for the judicial automony of the Jewry- the Senior Jew pledges his assets as security ,
on the understanting that the necessary legal measures will be taken among themselves
- as a civil basis for accepting the other. Furthermore, the council obtains another
commitment from Isaac Ismael - one to which, we infer , he had been resisting - which
has to do with the tolerance of Jews towards the religion of the Christians ( the latter
yield on the basis of their political power and the former on the basis of their economic
power) "and donate to Sancha Eanez, abbess of the Nunnery of Saint Clare- under
construction- the perpetual ownership on a price agreed by both parties of the orchard
he owns on the outskirts of the village , so that the ladies of the nunnery , founded by
Queen Lady Violante, may extend their orchard and build up their graveyard". And thus
the nuns of the Order of Saint Clare will have their graveyard thanks to the Jews living
in Allariz, not far from the Jewry and beyond the walls of the town. The fact that both
the Jewry and the Nunnery of Saint Clare were outside the town walls demonstrates that
it did no longer function as a diviving line between both communities.
This notarial document is drawn up and endorsed in a joint assembly of “men” of
the council “and Jews” , which gives credit to tolerance as the articulation of the
otherness by the end of the thirteenth century . This agreement which will be honoured
for centuries : Late Middle Ages references after the 1289 agreement do not contradict
it. Rather the contrary seems to be the case.
On May 5th 1366, shortly before the civil war, the champion of the cause of King
Pedro I in Galicia, Fernando de Castro, judge and Royal Representative, who is also in
52
The transcription published by Alfredo Cid Rumbao (Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984, p. 64)
throws light onto this issue of the agreement according to Amador de los Ríos’ version, which, in
general, we are following in our analysis .

20
charge of the Royal Fortress in Allariz, proclaims an amnisty for the neighbours of the
village,intended to pardon all unresolved cases and suspend every judiciary action of
the royal Chief Justice: "that any action of justice that the King took against them, and
whoever of them for whatever reason, for whatever wrongdoing they may have done,
or for whatever they may have failed to do , to everyone both Christians and Jews..., all
of them are pronounced free"53
.This implies the acknowledgement by the lords and the
Crown of the persistence by mid-fourteenth century of two well-differentiated
communities , equally treated as regards civil liability.
Almost two hundred years after the founding agreement , on June 15th 1487, it is
the parish priest of the Christian church of Saint Stephen who provides Jews with an
extension of the graveyard of the field of La Mina, at the foot of the wall, next to the
Jewry, ceding on lease a neighbouring estate to all "the Jews of the Jewry, neighbours
and inhabitants of the village of Allariz... as you have had your burials in the other
estate"54
. The basically religious nature of mutual tolerance of Christians and Jews
underscores the importance of this reference to illustrate the tacit vigency of the
agreement by the end of the thirteenth century. A witness of this very special scenario
is Juan Alfonso Carpintero, an important leader of the Irmandiña Revolt in Allariz, for
which several years before (1467) a common front of Christians,Jews and Moors had
been organised against the lords of the kingdom and their fortresses.
The great stability of the tolerant attitudes among Jews and Christians in Allariz
does not obviously mean that there have not been tensions and confrontation practices,
like the ones which resulted in the 1289 agreement . What is characteristic of Allariz,
53
Publica Benito F. ALONSO, El pontificado gallego, Ourense, 1897, p. 307 (my italics ); también
Alfredo CID RUMBAO, Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984, p. 89.
54
Alfredo CID RUMBAO, Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984, p. 122; the church of Saint Stephen
was precisely , within the walled area, up by the Jewry .

21
however, is its acceptable inter-ethnic relationships , which will lead Mosé Péres, a royal
tax collector, to seek refuge there in 1488 to protect himself from the discrimatory
confinement then imposed in the capital of Ourense .
Tolerance as integration: Ourense
Ourense, by the end of the Middle Ages, appears as a much more agitated urban
society than Allariz. Notarial documents from the local council and the chapter show a
background of revolts and partisan struggle in the fifteenth century which could not but
have an influence in the coexistence with the Jewry, otherwise deeply integrated in the
city. The Jews from Ourense appear in documents as a distinguished but accepted
category. They are treated as “neighbours “ -and as such- protected by the council 55
.
As usual, they work in trades of great economic significance (collectors of royal and
lord taxes, dealers, silversmiths56
); and enjoy, apart from the preceptive religious
freedom 57
, a finantial autonomy which verges on self-government : in 1433, the Jewish
silversmith Salomón files a complaint to the city Mayor because ‘the custom’ had not
been respected according to which when the time came to collect the city taxes , Jews
would choose one of them "Under the oath of their law to collect among them the said
payments", thus obtaining from the council the endorsement of their traditional
55
Anselmo LOPEZ CARREIRA, "Os xudeus de Ourense no século XV", Boletín Auriense, XIII,
1983, pp. 164-165.
56
ídem, p. 172.
57
The synagogue at Rúa Nova was incorporated into the urban scenery and surrounded by houses
inhabited by Christians ; references to it are found in the years 1427, 1441, 1442 y 1474, ídem, pp.
161-162; apart from being a place for praying , it was the place chosen to administer justice on issues
related to the Jewish community (1457 y 1484), Xesús FERRO COUSELO, A vida e a fala dos
devanceiros, II, Vigo, 1967, pp. 232-233.

22
autonomy: "ruled that from now on such payment was not made unless on the presence
of the said Jew so that they shared the mentioned mrs among them."58
.
The council, nothetheless, although it accepted the Jewry, did not accept anti-
Christian attitudes . In 1441, the mayor had Jewish silversmith Mosé Marcos arrested,
"on the grounds that he affirmed that the former had spoken mocking and infamious
words against God and Holy Mary when he said that Holy Mary had delivered thrice",
and the council procurator demands from the council that justice falls on him59
. If
torelance implies that the majority accepts the religion of the minority and marks itself
off from anti-Semitic groups, all the more reason not to accept disrespectful behaviour
on the part of Jews towards the religion of Christians. The irrevence of the Jews, in any
case, reveals that - like in the case of late thirteenth century Allariz- both ethnias saw
themselves on a level, also when it came to wrongdoing. On this basis it was build the
policy of tolerance and integration.
In Ourense, unlike Allariz, it does not seem so urgent to organise coexistence by
separating both communities: mutual tolerance is organised in a much more natural way,
perhaps with not such a clear awareness of otherness. Both Christians and Jews lived
much more mixed, without this implying a renounce by the latter to claim their rights
whenever deemed necessary. Such integration accounts for the fact that in time rifts
tend to happen horizontally.
As to the radicalisation of collective attitudes , consequence and cause of the
increase in social conflictivity around mid-fifteenth century60
, how does it particularly
58
Xesús FERRO COUSELO, op. cit., p. 227.
59
X. FERRO COUSELO, op. cit., pp. 228-229; the council procurator’s suspicion , a figure which
in Ourense stems from a tradition of defense of the commons, is mainly of social nature. No doubt
neighbours feared or might fear that the mayor , turned a blind eye on the issue given the social status
of the blasfemous Jew.
60
Its height is the 1455 insurrection, Carlos BARROS, Mentalidad justiciera de los irmandiños,
siglo XV, Madrid, 1990, pp. 32, 45.

23
affect to the good vecinity among Christians and Jews? First, nobiliar intolerance arises
: the assult of the synagogue in 1442. Secondly, the fraternization within the 1467
popular brotherhood of citizens. Not surprisingly, the previous good relationships
between the Jewish community and the council lead the city to side with the synagogue
and Jews to side with the citizens.
Nobiliar anti-Semitism
The economic potential of Jews - of some Jews rather - made them into a target
of nobiliar plundering; no doubt, an antisemitic environment- not always explicit in the
sources- would potentially favour the aggressors’ impunity.
On this respect, there are two precedents in the province of Ourense. In the
eleventh century, between the lands of Allariz and Celanova and those of the capital,
there had his domains a nobleman, Menendo González. He protected certain “ Hebrew”
traders in rags, who were attacked and robbed by another nobleman, Arias Oduáriz, who
in retaliation is made a prisoner by Menendo. The latter eventually obtains the
restitutition of what had been robbed after a number of legal disputes which last several
years and imply the transfer of the domain of several villages from aggreding Arias to
nobleman Menendo for whom the Jews worked when they were attacked 61
.
In the fourteenth century, when the troops of the Duke of Lancaster take
Ribadavia (1386) chronicler Froissart, an eyewitness of the event, tells the following:
"Ainsi fut la ville de Ribadave gaignée à force, et eurent ceulx qui y entrèrent, grant
butin d'or de d'argent ès maisons des Juifs par espécial"62
. Again , the reference to the
61
The documents, dated in 1044 and 1047, were published by Fidel Fita en Boletín de la Real
Academia de la Historia, tomo XXII, 1893, pp. 171-180.
62
Kervyn de LETTENHOVE, ed., Oeuvres de Froissart. Chroniques, tomo XII (1386-1389),

24
ethnic -religious origin of the victims is linked to wealth as the objective of nobiliar
plundering. In other words, anti-Semitism, like in the preceding case , is with all
assurance the contributory cause of the aggression.
We get thus to the 1442 assault of the Jewish synagogue in Ourense by men on
the service of Lord Pedro Díaz de Cadórniga. Apart from the theft of some money (50
old mrs.), affront stands as the primary objective : the destruction of the synagogue and
the theft of the tress were affronts with a religious significance .Obviously enough, the
council sides with the Jews, honouring the tradition of tolerance , reporting on Lord
Cadórniga on April 15th 1442, who pledges to “punish his men" for the affronts caused
"to the Jews of the said city and the synogogue which was destroyed"63
.
These grievances inflicted on the Jews thus come top in one of those anti-lord
memorials frequently written by Ourense inhabitants in the Late Middle Ages. The fact
that emphasis is made on Jews as victims goes out to demonstrate the century-long
policy of integration as well as the egalitarianism of the anti-lord denouncement64
. This
policy occassionally gives rise to a division of opinions among the most influential
neighbours, in which Jews also participated. The latter hesitated when it came to
confronting the powerful, even when it was something so close to their hearts as the
attack to a synagogue.
On June 26th 1442, before several canons and the men of Pedro Díaz de
Cadórniga, four Jews from Ourense declare before the notary of the cathedral chapter
Brussels, 1981, p. 86.
63
X. FERRO COUSELO, op. cit., pp. 273-274.
64
Similarly in another memorial dating from 1442, Affronts which are made to the city council
by Pedro Dias and his men, the council includes among the victims two cases involving Jews :Item
his squire Alvaro Gandio killed our neighbour Alonso, a Jew , (...) Item Gomes de Paazos
attempted to kill our neighbour Nuño Patiño, a Jew , Benito F. ALONSO, Los judíos en Orense,
Ourense, 1904, p. 17.

25
in order to exonerate the said lord from the theft “in their house of praying” so as to free
him from excomunion, which was the situation in which he found himself for having
destroyed the synagogue, together with some of his men, "despite there being no lawsuit
on the part of the said Jews". In other words, apart from the above mentioned lawsuit
by the city council , there was another of religious nature which resulted in the
excomunion of the guilty party and of Pedro Díaz himself . This was done against the
advice of the faction of the Cadórnigas, to which undoubtly belonged the canons,
relatives, and -in some way- the Jews who appear in this notarial document dated on
June 26th. Despite it, the exonerating Jews declare that "Exception were made of
anyone who had the trees that were taken away from the said house of prayer so that
they were not aquitted until the trees were brought back to them"65
. It was their intention,
therefore, to exonarate the head of the nobiliar group but without going beyond the
mental threshold implied in the seriousness of the religious crime of the misappropiation
of the trees belonging to the Jews, which had not been restituted . The religious
dimension of the affront was above any partisanism. It was something umpardonable in
fifteenth century Ourense, even for the friends of the lord .
When it came to coexisting with the Jews, the Cathedral Church of Ourense goes
much further in 1442 than the Allariz church ,when it cedes lands in 1487 for the Jewish
cementery. It adopts a philo-Jewish attitude precisely on religious matters . It punishes
a religious attack against a synagogue as if it had been directed against a Christian
church . It goes even further than the city council, who exonerates Pedro Díaz on April
15th , whereas the Church excomulgates him through the Bishop’s ecclesiastical judge-
provisor with the likely support of the majority of the chapter. The loss of value of
excomunion as eclesiastic censure since it was applied to any crime affecting
65
Documentos del archivo de la catedral de Orense, I, Ourense, 1923, pp. 424-425.

26
ecclesiastic issues, does not diminish the importance of this defence of the Jews in the
form of a canonical sentence.
The serious civil conflict between the Cadórnigas and the Church of Ourense66
,
provides ecclesiastic support to Jewish victims but it does not throw light onto the
concrete use of excumunion, which entails the exclusion from Christian church, to
punish a crime committed against members of other religion. In fact, it is as if the maxim
that “each is salved in his own law” came into effect.
To summarize, the closer Galicia came to an anti-Semitic mutiny in the Middle
Ages, the attack against the synagogue of Ourense in 1442, has more of a thuggish act
by a lord than any other thing. In this case, it is not perceived as the search for a letout
for popular discontent which makes Jews into scapegoats of Late Middle Ages social
conflictivity. The people represented by the city council are clearly with the Jews , and
will be even more clearly as social tensions grow sharper and we draw nearer to the
1467 revolution.
From tolerance to fraternity
In 1457 a unique event occurs during the wedding of a hidalgo from Orense called
Alvaro Suares: the reconciliation , on behest of their Christian hosts , of two rival,
Jewish families ( two women were in prison for a row). The notarial document
reads:"being there the bride and those honest ladies from the city and fidalgos and
squires, they reconciled them and made all the Jews friends anew with those in prison ,
66
The provisor and the chapter were in litigation with García Díaz de Cadórniga in 1440 and 1441,
as it is made public in Boletín de la Comisión de Monumentos de Orense, VI, pp. 230, 269-270; Ruy
Díaz de Cadórniga is executed in 1450 for affronts to the bishops of Ourense, and Pedro Díaz de
Cadórnigadies dies in 1459 being in gaol - and again excomulgated- in the gaol of the Cathedra
Church , ídem, pp. 162, 231-232, 272.

27
on which they embraced and forgave, on the request of those noblemen and ladies "67
.
The reconciliatory act takes place under the protection of the council : "before Vasco
Gomes, alderman of the said city , where they were kept imprisoned and by way of
compensation a fine of six hundred mrs,which shall be spent on good and honorable
causes"68
. The alderman accepts and legally ratifies the resolution of the newly-weds
and of the rest of Christian noblemen, liberating from the local gaol the two women with
a feud, who, on the following day, appear accompanied by their husbands before a
Jewish tribunal to solve their differences 69
, thus the judicical autonomy of the Jewry
being recovered .
These small Christian noblemen, who mediate between these Jews, make a fair
use of their authority and do not take advantage of the situation to impose the superiority
of the majoritary religion. Jewish integration in the society of Ourense was not
uniforming , as we very well know . It implied a respect for their religion and their
autonomy . As regards civil rights, they treat Jews as if they were Christians without
forcing them to be Christian . It is more than merely accepting the other . It is to
fraternise, thus doing away with the herarchic notion that “a non-Christian is not a true
man. Hence, only a Christian may enjoy all human rights "70
.
The Christian-Jewish wedding went against both the Christian and Jewish law
(although the greater transgression was that corresponding to the existing legal rules,
67
Likewise, it has a certain significance , within the nobiliar framework, the relationship
established in the text between the low nobility condition of the mediators and the pursued aim of
friendliness.
68
X. FERRO COUSELO, op. cit., p. 321.
69
ídem, p. 232.
70
Jacques LE GOFF, La civilización del Occidente medieval, Barcelona, 1969, p. 215.

28
namely the Christian ones ).The Partidas explicitly prohibited joint wedding receptions:
"that no Christian may invite no Jew nor accept any invitation from them for eating or
drinking"71
. The laws of Valladolid from 1412 ban Jews from participating in Christian
celebrations72
. The confessor of Henry IV, Alonso de Espina, prescribes in 1460 in his
Fortalitium Fidei: "may not eat together nor invite each other"73
. Jewish laws and
customs, on the other hand, did not permit that their differences were settled before
Christian judges74
, to say nothing of simple citizens (although they are hidalgos).
Weddings, feasts and popular receptions in the Middle Ages had an egalitarian end .
They implied such a reversal of values that it is easy to understand the disregard for
norms and discriminatory intentions as the ones cited.
Father Mariana justifies in early seventeenth century the establishment of the
Holy Inquistion in "On the great liberty of the past years and because Moors and
Christians were mixed up on every kind of conversation and deal "75
. In Galicia, by mid-
fifteenth century , they were even more mixed : united in weddings and revolts. On April
25th 1467, a canon from Ourense tells, when he was about to take part in the Irmandiño
assault to Castelo Ramiro -rebelious accion which according to his testimony "he was
forced to do"-: "those of theHoly Brotherhood had publicy announced that both lay and
clergics, Jews and Christians, went and brought down castelo Ramiro"76
. The
71
Partidas VII, 24, 8.
72
Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, II, Madrid, 1981, p. 440.
73
José AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, Historia de los judíos de España y Portugal, III, Madrid, 1984,
p. 399.
74
Yitzhak BAER, Historia de los judíos en la España cristiana, I, Madrid, 1981, p. 145.
75
"Historia de España", Obras del padre Juan de Mariana, II, Madrid, 1854, p. 202.
76

29
egalitarian and fair sense of the revolt abstracted ethnic and religious differences as well
as of religious herarchy. We have already mentioned elsewhere the autonomous
character of some popular notions on religion which arise with the Irmandiña mentality
of revolt77
. On the other hand, given the background of the Jewish -Christian
relationships , it should not surprise too much the unity of action in 1467.
Does this mean that with the anti-lord revolt anti-Semitic attitutes disappear ? Ten
days before the oral testimony of the cautious canon, a local brotherhood gives the Farm
of Reza back to the monastery of San Miguel de Bóveda, which had previously been
substracted to the monks by Diego Pérez Sarmiento, Count of Santa Marta, through his
steward and tax collector Abrahán de León, a well-known Jew from Ourense. The
peasants working in the farm de Reza testify against the Sarmiento’s steward in the
above mentioned act of Irmandiña restitution, identifying him as a Jewish thief on
reproducing a sentence, " I deceived Lady Abbess with a fishtail ...!"78
, by which the
mentioned Abrahán de León boasted of having deceitfully gained the property of the
farm of Reza for his Lord Sarmiento. This slight anti-Semitic manifestation comes to
the surface stirred by anti-lord attitudes, which tend to locate Galician Jews on the
popular group. The cited remark is nothing more than a marginal remark during the
Insurrection in the spring of 1467, dominated by the egalitarian urban and rural revolt
of "lay and clerics , Jews and Moors " consequence of many years of integration and
friendly relationships. Those who have been defended as victims by the popular side are
now fairly called upon as rebels against the old common enemy, materialized in Ourense
in the fortress of Castelo Ramiro, which not by chance, in 1446, four years after the
assault of the synagogue was in the hands of the very Pedro Díaz de Cadórniga
77
Carlos BARROS, Mentalidad justiciera de los irmandiños, pp. 143-145.
78

30
himself79
.
To summarise, Late Middle Ages social conflictivity in Galicia does not
transform tolerance into persecution. On the contrary, it grows and metamorphoses into
fraternity. By mid-fifteenth century, otherness turns into identity. In a way, it is as if the
other were me. There is a revesal of values which, despite its temporary nature, proves
very significative. The Galician people of the time, according to the known documents
and facts , rather than seggregating , discriminating against and hostigating Jews in
search of scapegoats as a way of sublimating and letting out tensions , make them into
wedding guests and brothers in their fight against lords in search for justice.
The value of these moments of fraternity between Christians and Jews will be
better understood if we compare them with the carnages which, at the same time, occur
in Castile and Leon. We are speaking about the armed confrontation , in July 1467,
between converts and cristianos viejos in Toledo, and the killings of Jews in 1468 in
Sepúlveda and in 1469 in Tolosa80
. During the fifties and sixties in the fifteenth century,
while in the Kingdom of Galicia the sociopolitical preconditions are shaped for a great
revolt against the Lords in the the fortresses, in Castile and Leon anti-Semitic tensions
are sharpened and the environment is set for the 1492 expulsion decree81
.
The political dependency of Galicia in the newly strengthened Castilian
monarquy will force Galician cities to implement the new and definitive anti-Semitic
policy. The integration of Galicia in the centralised State of the Catholic Monarchs and
79
X. FERRRO COUSELO, op. cit., II, p. 290.
80
José AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, Historia de los judíos de España y Portugal, III, Madrid, 1984,
pp. 147-152, 648; A. MACKAY, "Popular movements and progroms in fifteenth-century Castile",
Past and Present, nº 55, 1972, pp. 34-35.
81
en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media, Madrid, 1985, pp. 297 ss.

31
the House of Austrias, results in the loss of certain medieval freedoms , namely, the
tradition of liberal and friendly relationships between Jews and Christians . Having said
this, it should be stressed that good relations did not imply wiping away anti-Semitic
currents in Medieval Galicia ( which, in modern times ,are going to find a much more
favourable institutional context ). There is no tolerance without an antisemictic
counterpoint. The problem is to know which is hegemonic in each place and time.
The modernity of the anti-Semitic stereotype in Galicia
The formation in the collective mentalities of the anti-Semitic imagery can not be
separated from the spread of a number of false accusations, suspiciously universal. That
the anti-Semitic sterotype remains constant despite the diversity of situations82
, reveals
its induced nature, and the collusion of interested institutions.
Which data illustrate this invention of the other in Galicia ? By the end of the
eighteenth century , Manuel Risco includes a fact taken from the already mentioned
anti-Semitic work by Alonso de Espina Fortalitium Fidei (1460) attributed to the
Bishop of Lugo, García Martínez de Bahamonde (1452-1456). The latter, while
baptizing a Jew, “ told of how he had witnessed a henious act performed by Jews in the
City of Saona in the Republic of Genoa, where they murdered with utmost cruelty a
Christian child, whose blood they ate, mixed with some fruits"83
. This ritual murder of
a Christian child did not occur in Galicia but in Italy. The cult communicators are
prelates and Christian writers: Bishop García Martínez, the clergy Espina, the
Agustinian Risco. From the eighteenth century is also the fabrication that Jews in
82
José María MONSALVO ANTON, op. cit., pp. 114-115.
83
España Sagrada, tomo XLI, Madrid, 1798, p. 138.

32
Monforte whipped "In their infamous Synagogue" the image of Jesus Christ "which is
in the Sacristy and the Cell of the Guardian Fathers". The image miracously shouted
alerting Franscicans, who took it away and reported the event to the Inquisition, who"
apprehended and punished the Jews "84
. This anachronism of placing a synagogue in
Monforte de Lemos at the time of the Inquisition, is avoided in Ribadavia by the
originators of a similar cult tradition ( which later became an oral tratition) : an image
of Christ would be whipped by Jewish converts who would gather on Saturdays at the
house of Coenga, until the Inquisition intervened and prosecuted the desecrators; hence
the popular saying: "Jews from Ribadavia would go to whip the image of Christ to
Coenga"85
. In fact, the Inquisition itself spread these fantastic accusations of sacrilage
against false converts, whose greater crime was to clandestinely maintain the practice
of the religion of their elders.
Despite the universal rituals of murdering children and abusing crucified Christ,
there was, of course, in Old Regime Galicia news about the profanation of consecrated
hosts . Ourense Bishop de la Cueva writes in 1726, that in 1672 there was a theft in the
Church of the Jesuits in Ourense, with the disappearance of the consecrated hosts, the
finger being pointed at the descendants of Jews , whose synagogue -according to Onega-
had been placed in the same place where the Jesuits were now. The great religious acts
in amendment for the desecration provide evidence of the climate of Inquisitorial
mentality of the time86
, which is the opposite to the climate of tolerance found in
medieval Ourence .Little wonder that all references of the anti-Semitic sterotype are
84
Jacobo de CASTRO, Arbol cronológico de la Santa Provincia de Santiago, I, Salamanca, 1722,
p. 215.
85
Leopoldo MERUENDANO, Los judíos de Ribadavia (1915), Lugo, 1981, pp. 17-18.
86
José Ramón ONEGA, Los judíos en el Reino de Galicia, Madrid, 1981, p. 581.

33
modern, of cultivated and ecclesiastic origin and are linked, in one way or another and,
with varying degrees of success and spread, to the inquisitorial mentality implanted by
the institutions of the new State .
Seclusion and expulsion
The décalage in the fifteenth century of Galicia with respect to the rest of the
Crown makes that the tolerance and even the brotherhood there prevailing is -in Castile
and Leon- a value subordinated to trimphant anti-Semitism , especially after the 1391
carnages. Thus, the radical measures adopted by the Catholic Monarchs are going to
clash in the kingdom of Galicia with the absence of a popular anti-Semitic tradition on
which to take root; an anti-Semitism which the Galician Church had not incited either,
busy as it was in surviving the vicissitudes of a fifteenth century in which usurpations,
wars and revolts were rife. Despite it, the old as well as the new institutions were obliged
to comply with the discriminatory rules issued in the Court, which grew harder and
more expeditive, against Jews and converts . Galicia, therefore, will be forced to follow
suit, albeit unenthusiastically and above all slowly.
The Courts of Toledo in 1480 give town councils a period of two years to confine
Jews to isolated, walled quarters to prevent their pernicious influence on Christians and
converts87
. It is an old segregationist endeavour. We saw in Allariz how it was applied
on mutual agreement ; now what is underscored is the racist and coercive nature of the
ruling and the determination of its instigators. In fact, the failure of the seclusion
measures will leave explusion as the only solution. By the following year, the city
council of Madrid goes as far as paying for the wall for the isolation of the new quarter,
87
Luis SUAREZ, Judíos españoles en la Edad Media, Madrid, 1980, pp. 263-264; José AMADOR
DE LOS RIOS, op. cit., III, p. 287; Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, IV, Madrid, 1861-
2, pp. 149-151.

34
on the face of the poverty of the Jewish neighbours88
. In the same year,1481, two
thousand Jews are burnt to death in the territory of Seville by Dominican Inquisitors ,
who thus inaugurate the genocide practice that the Holy Office will attempt to spread in
the Modern Ages across Spain89
.
Let us see what the city council of Ourense does before the renewed anti-Semitic
demands of the State. To begin with, the medieval maxim of "obeying but not
enforcing” is still valid. Thus, in July 3rd 1484, at the synagogue, before the presence
as witnessses of two canons, the city council formally calls upon Jews to “ comply with
the Law of Toledo” ordering that within three days "be moved to where they would be
assigned a place"90
. It is a mere ruse, they did not even bother to assign a placement for
the ghetto. But three years later, on May 22nd 148791
, with new aldermen, they resume
the issue more seriously saying that "Your Royal Highness orders that all Jews be
separated in all their kingdoms", specifying the place where the Jewry would be located
"at the Rúa Nova of the aforesaid city, by the gates of the city", and most strongly
criticising the previous city councils for not having enforced the Law of Toledo: " they
complain and have complained that the aldermen and judges of the past, not having
enforced the said seclusion in virtue of the said law , as of law, they were deserving
punishment". Subsequently, they assign the houses in the Rúa Nova where refractary
Jews must live and be identifiable (tax collectors, traders and silversmiths) no later than
the coming Monday. Tax collector Mosé Péres, one of the "secluded" faces up to this
88
J. AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, op. cit., III, p. 288 n 1.
89
Julio CARO BAROJA, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, I, Madrid, 1986,
pp. 153-154.
90
91
loc. cit., pp. 235-236.

35
proposed break with a century-long tradition of integration and tolerance to claim that
he appealed to the Queen and King arguing that "there were unfairly treated". But with
the change in the council’s mentality and policy, there was no turning back and the new
judges confirm their resolution on January 28th 1488, again calling upon each and every
one of the Jews living outside the Jewry to move under the threat of punishment in
accordance with the 1480 law92
. As Mosé Péres is not present, the warrant is given to a
servant and on November 6th 1488, the rebellious Jew is warned again, along with
Yudá Perés ,at his house out of the Jewry. On the following day, the two well-off Jews
answer to the council with cunning and haughtiness.
They declare that in actual fact they no longer were neighbours of Ourense -"nor
do we desire to be "they add- but of Allariz (Mosé Péres) and of Villafranca de
Valcáçar (Yudá Péres). But as they hold the position of Royal tax collectors of the sales
taxes in the province of Ourense they must stay a few days in the capital, being the
alderman obliged - and thus the defendants becoming prosecutors - " to provide us with
lodgings in the said city ... which be safe to keep there the taxes of your Royal
Highness", protesting the unsuitability of the houses in the Jewry where they intended
to allocate them : "they are unhabited and in a place which is not safe"; the disclaimer
goes on to morally discredit the prosecuting alderman : "the aforesaid warrant was
unduly made", " you threatened us and the Jews who have rented those properties",
"protest any grievance . . . . because you are biased against us”; and ends with the
announcement by the aggraviated Jews that they are going to lodge an appeal before the
Governor of Galicia93
.
92
As they were rebels and did not obey and refused to comply [with the rulings of the city
council ] ,as of law , and for that reason, they had been charged and given the aforesaid sentences,
which were included in the aforementioned law of Toledo , everyone being witness to the fact ,
loc. cit., p. 237; we will see later that the city countil did actually enforce the sentences.
93
ídem, pp. 239-240.

36
The choice of Allariz by Mosé Péres as a place of peaceful life confirms that
there, as we have already noted, tolerance continues to be the rule for coexistence up
until the last moment , depite state demands. Up until the previous year , 1487, the Jews
extended , with the help of the parish priest of Saint Stephen, their cementery of the
field of La Mina, thus demonstrating a certain dynamism in the Jewry of Allariz,
whereas in 1500, thirteen years later, authorities are forced to remove that cementery 94
as the Jewish community of Allariz extinguished for exogenous reasons : the expulsion
decree of 1492.
But let us go back to Ourense, where after a decade of resistence, the spatial,
social and mental separation of the two communities proves a reality. For some Ourense
inhabitants the Irmandiña friendship turns into anti-Semitic hatred. A formerly, almost
unknown anti-Semitic feeling grows at the doors of modernity, which sought popular
roots in Galicia, as it did in Castile and Leon, and which was mainly addressed against
the wealthiest Jews - as it is the case of Mosé y Yudá Péres-, who perhaps for that
reason are less willing to lose their social status as a consequence of socio-religious
segregation95
.
In February 1489, we find that the Jews from Ourense are the protagonist of two
royal documents96
which present segregation as a consolidated fact and point to new
problems. The inhabitants of the Jewry demand from the Catholic Monarchs the
protection the council had provided for a long time as neighbours of the city. The
94
Alfredo CID RUMBAO, Historia de Allariz, Orense, 1984, p. 125.
95
refractary Jews will soon realise that the best avenue to maintain their social position was to
convert to Christianism , although there were no such antecendents throughout the fifteenth century
. Previously, Jews had not needed to change their religion to gain the respect and the steem of dominant
Christian society .
96
1964, pp. 320-322.

37
Catholic Monarchs grant them on February 21st a letter of reassurance " as they claim
to fear and be wary of certain gentlemen and persons who out of hatred and spite show
enmity towards them". Despite the attack against the gentlemen, by then always useful
to gain support at the court , especially in the case of Galicia, we know that it was not
so much the gentlemen as the citizens of the council who were the new enemies of the
Jews of Ourense . This is shown in a second royal letter sent by the Catholic Monarchs
on February 27th to Governor López de Haro, in which he was ordered to support the
Jews in Rúa Nova so that the Council did not changed the location of the ghetto for the
worst and so they could keep the shops where they traded in the square of the city, to
the point of sentencing the aldermen-judges who in 1488 had forced them to pay fines
for the amount of 3.000 mrs. for resisting the change to Rúa Nova. At the same time,
the royals censored Christians who still lived in the Jewry and had refused to leave their
houses to the Jews ... In other words, once the Christian-Jewish sympathy in Ourense
had been broken , there only remained the Royal authority to protect them and when in
the critical year of 1492, the monarchy turns against the Jews, it means the end for them
.
The decree of expulsion of Jews - not the converted into Christianism - from
the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon is dated on March 31th 1492. The deadline for
their departure expired on July 1st 1492. As they were forcibly made to leave their
Sefarad, they could not take "Gold nor silver nor minted coin, nor the other things the
law prohibited, except goods"97
. This prohibition, frequently flouted by wealthy Jews,
leaves us with a document that proves that the decree of expulsion also worked in the
kingdom of Galicia.
In May 13th 1493, the Catholic Monarchs order an investigation after the
97
Alfonso GARCIA GALLO, Manual de historia del derecho español. II. Antología de fuentes
del antiguo derecho, Madrid, 1982, pp. 767-769.

38
denounce by Marcos Alonso, neighbour of A Coruña, against the persons who favoured
and benifited from the flight of another citizen of A Coruña, Jewish silversmith Isaque,
who had smuggled two million and half in "gold and silver coins and pearls and other
valuable things", after making underhand payments to A Coruña tax sales officials for
their collaboration and silence , as well as to the skipper of the vessel, merchant Juan de
San Juan, who took him to the lands of Africa98
. The same document makes apparent
that collusion with the the expelled was widespread in Galicia, and it includes -
following Marcos Alonso’s lost report - the A coruña Royal Judge himself among the
friends of the Jews "together with other vessel skippers who took other Jews from the
said Villafranca and from Ferrol and Ponte d'Eume de Lisbona"99
, which shows A
Coruña harbour up as the usual route for the clandestine exodus of both Galician and
non-Galician Jews after March 1492.
In the same way that the tolerant tradition facilitates the escape of wealthy Jewish
in Galicia without that implying the loss of their assets, the hypothesis that for the same
motives - namely, the weakness of the anti-Semitic movement - most of them remained
in Galicia, converted into Christianism and reintagrated in the civil society of the time,
seems quite plausible100
. The medieval tolerance towards the Jews will be easily
reproduced as modern tolerance towards convert Jews who often continued practicising
and teaching their religion to their children . Little wonder that the greater number of
cases tried by the Inquisition in Galicia between 1565 and 1683 corresponds to
98
1964, pp. 513-514.
99
loc. cit., p. 514.
100
Benito F. ALONSO, "Los judíos en Orense (siglos XV al XVII)", Boletín de la Comisión de
Monumentos de Orense, II, 1904, pp. 23-29.

39
Judaizers101
.
Resistence to the Holy Inquisition
The medieval Inquisition is born in the thirteenth century at the behest of Gregory
IX to fight heresies; it spreads across the whole of Europe,including the Crown of
Aragon. In the rest of the Iberian Peninsule, the Inquisition is rather a modern
phenomenon. Inquisition officials begin to act in a number of cities of Castile from
1478 under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs (bull of Sixtus IV), the new institution
later spreading towards the periphery, not without resistence . As to the kingdom of
Galicia, we can consider the the Holy Inquistion consolidated around 1574102
, almost a
century after of its foundation in Castile. A late indicator of the fact that medieval
tolerant Galicia and a medieval Castile were out of step as regards anti-Semitism , the
latter with a much more marked tencency towards antisemtimism.
The imposition of the inquistion clashed in Galicia with the medieval tradition of
torerance as far as beliefs and ethnias are concerned . We are, therefore, before a conflict
of mentalities and , likewise, a conflict of a foreign jurisdictional power with local
powers: for all these reasons Galician resistance to the Holy Office is global, sustained
and, at first, quite effective. Apart from a sustained and blurred popular resistence103
,
the Inquisition , which came from Castile comes up against a host of problems with
101
Carmelo LISON TOLOSANA, Brujería, estructura social y simbolismo en Galicia, Madrid,
1983, 2º ed., p. 11 n 3.
102
Jaime CONTRERAS, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Galicia (poder, sociedad y cultura),
Madrid, 1982, p. 60.
103
J. CONTRERAS, op. cit., pp. 681-685; C. LISON TOLOSANA, op. cit., pp. 27 ss.

40
councils , royal officials and the Church104
. In fact, the tribunal does not openly tackle
the issue of Judaizers in Galicia until Portuguese inmigrants- already in the seventeenth
century - force it to intervene105
. For the last third of the sixteenth century persecution
is centred on Luterans106
, in such a way that the tolerance of the cristianos viejos in
Galicia towards old-time Jews, now Judaizers and converts, is maintained almost a
century after the decree of expulsion or forced conversion. This retarded and laborious
implantation of the inquistotial mentality - understood as the “pedagogy of fright"107
- in
Galicia, together with a prolonged medieval customs of acceptance of the other, gives
historical credibility to a traditional characteristic of Galician mentality pointed out by
several authors : tolerance.
The Galician peculiarity
When investigating the causes of this particular attitude of the hegemonic society
in Galicia towards the Jewish minority , the quantivative argument comes top. The
number of Galician Jews was small. This is true, although by the fifteenth century the
situation changes in some cities ; on the other hand, the affluency of the best known
Jews compensates for their numberic inferiority when it comes to establishing power
relations between both communities. The studied cases of Allariz and Ourense support
this statement. But the important issue is that the legal weakness of Jewish communities
104
j. CONTRERAS, op. cit., pp. 23 ss, 35-39, 57 ss.
105
J. CONTRERAS, op. cit., p. 467, 591-592, 599-604.
106
J. CONTRERAS, op. cit., pp. 590-591, 609 ss.
107
Angel ALCALA y otros, Inquisición española y mentalidad inquisitorial, Barcelona, 1984, pp.
174-182.

41
favours the tolerance of the Christian majority but it does not, however, account for the
low incidence of anti-Semitism in Galicia: anti-Semitism is to a great extent irrational
and its manifestation is not closely related with a high number of Jews.
Given that the concern for religious homogenisation has its origin in the State
emerging in Castile and Aragon during the transition from the Middle Ages to the
Modern Age, the kingdom of Galicia was in the periphery of this new ultimately
unifying power. This political marginality may undoubtedly have facilitated the survival
of a medieval tradition based on the acceptance of the other . The weakness of the
monarquy and of its administrative and ideological machinery in the kingdom of Galicia
hamper the change from the accepted other to the excluded other, the homologation of
Galicia with the rest. The resistance to change of the collective mentalities favours in
this case the maintainance of medieval tolerance as a norm of behaviour.
Anti-Semitism was a habitual letout for the social tensions in the Late Middle
Ages, although not the one which posed the greatest problems to the established system.
If during the Late Middle Ages , the Jew is not the scapegoat par excellence, it is because
there are other scapegoats which most clearly arouse the revolt , which have a deeper
influence in the popular mind, for instance, the fortresses of the lords. The intensity of
the social confrontation between vassals and lords in fifteenth century Galicia does not,
therefore, require the invention of imaginary enemies.

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