128 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINand while many of the basic difficulties of maintaining unified and
centralised rule in the peninsula remained, unity became a more
fully expressed hope, and possibly more of a practical reality. Mythical
or not, this was a time to which later generations in a divided penin-
sula looked back as to a golden age.Outsiders and the Law
AsPIRATIONS towards unity of the people under the aegis of Visigothic
monarchy and Catholic Church, in a society where every tendency
was centrifugal, inevitably created greater hostility towards those who
would not or could not conform. If the rhetoric of the kings and the
bishops was to have meaning, th~n there was little room for tolera-
tion of those who could not be fully integrated into the new society
they sought. The principal sufferers from this were the Jews.
Jewish communities had probably existed in the peninsula from at
least the first century AD. That St Paul had intended to go to Spain
is itself indicative of the existence of a substantial body of Jews, at
least in some parts, prior even to the destruction of the Temple and
the beginnings of the Diaspora. Evidence concerning the Spanish
Jews during the Roman period is slight, but the unusual degree of
attention devoted to them in the legislation of the Visigothic king-
dom may be a further indication of a relatively sizeable Jewish popu-
lation in the Iberian peninsula, in com parisi on with most other western
Mediterranean regions. Unfortunately, but for the existence of a
handful of inscriptions, some in Hebrew, the Jews of Spain in the
Visigothic period have left little record of themselves outside of the
regulations that their Christian rulers sought to impose upon them.^70
The treatment of the Jews by both the secular power and by the
Church in the Visigothic kingdom is the most reprehensible feature
of its history. From the reign of Reccared onwards a series of laws and
conciliar decrees were enacted inhibiting the rights and liberties of
Jews, even on occasion requiring them to abandon their own religion
and convert to Christianity. Although this legislation was originally
only directed against Jewish practitioners of Judaism, those who, will-
ingly or otherwise, converted to Christianity soon came under the
suspicion of the lawmakers and came to be supervised and restricted
almost as fiercely as their former co-religionists. What began as a
process of law-making aimed at the practitioners of a religion ended
as one directed against a race.