2025/04/15 by Magda Teter · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical and Linguistic Studies #Medieval and Classical Philosophy #Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies
paper · doi:10.4324/9780367347093-rerw245-1
openalex publication_date 2025/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The period between 1300 and 1700 was a time of dramatic transformations. The period includes the invention of the printing press, the Iberian Reconquista (the reconquering of Iberian lands by Christians from Islamicate rule), the European colonial expansion, and the institutionalization of transatlantic slavery. It is also a period of the development of European ideas about race, many of which were grounded in Christian ideas about and policies concerning Jews. By 1300, anti-Jewish laws and imagery had become embedded in European Christian law and art. By the mid-fifteenth century, statutes of “purity of blood” began to be issued on the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquista increased religious tensions, and mass violence and conversions of Jews in 1391 ensued. By 1492, just as European kingdoms were beginning to expand across the Atlantic, Jews were no longer allowed to live the territories of Western European monarchies – the Iberian Peninsula and its subordinate lands, France, and England. The European colonial expansion in the fifteenth century not only changed global geography and power structures but also led to major population shifts and the development of the Western idea of “race.” The population shift was not only due to the enslavement of Africans, millions of whom were transported across the Atlantic to European colonies in the Americas, but also due to the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, France, and parts of northern Europe. The Western concept of race emerged as a result of the enslavement of Africans and the desire to justify that enslavement; European colonial expansion led to the development of a distinctly racialized European Christian identity. That new distinct identity was contrasted with both non-European and non-Christian populations, resulting in casting Jews as non-European outsiders, even in areas where Jews had lived for many centuries. Aside from colonial expansion, Europe experienced a technological revolution – the invention of the printing press and the rise of mass distribution of information and imagery. The printing technology also helped disseminate anti-Jewish stereotypes and create pejorative imagery of non-Europeans, contributing further to the rise of concepts of race in Western European thought. As ideas about race crystallized in European thought, Jews were gradually de-Europeanized and racialized as non-Europeans – a process that started in the seventeenth century and became palpable during the Enlightenment era.