On the other hand, the synagogue was defined as a legal house of worship.
Christians were prohibited from desecrating synagogues. No new synagogues
could be constructed without royal permission, but existing ones could be
renovated. Jews could not be subjected to compulsory labor on Saturday,
except for those who had been convicted of a crime. Finally, forced conversion
of Jews to Christianity was prohibited, though Jews who had converted were
allowed to inherit from their Jewish parents.
The upshot is that this code was a mixed bag for Jews. Judaism was
defined as legal, but rabbinic tradition implicitly opened to attack. Jews
could not be compelled to work on the Sabbath, but Jewish economic life
was restricted by the injunctions against employing Christians. More
importantly, the very appearance of the code marked a step back for Jews in
Christian Spain. For their counterparts elsewhere in Christian Europe, the
privileges of a charter like this would have meant an improved situation.
For Jews in Christian Spain, who had hitherto lived with few restrictions,
much like Jews in the Islamic world, a Christian-style charter was an indi-
cation of decline.
Fortunately for Jews in the thirteenth century, there was a time lag of a
century between the time this code was legislated and the time it was actually
implemented and enforced. When the kings of Castille began enforcing it in
the mid-fourteenth century, a period of decline ensued. Yet the implementa-
tion of Las Siete Partidasduring the 1360s significantly did not drastically
undermine the condition of Jewish life in Christian Spain. As late as 1390,
Jewish life in Christian Spain bore much of the character it had done a cen-
tury and half earlier.
The position would change dramatically with the outbreak of anti-Jewish
riots in Spain in 1391. These riots destroyed dozens of Jewish communities
in Aragon, and eventually spread elsewhere as well. Most of these Jewish
communities recovered only partially, and many never recovered. In retro-
spect, these riots can be seen as the beginning of the end of Jewish life in
Christian Spain.
In the aftermath of the riots, a wave of Jewish conversion to Christianity
followed. The scale of this wave of conversions was largely unprecedented,
leading historians to speculate as to the cause. Some, notably Yitzhak Baer,
presumed that most of those who converted were from the ranks of Jewish
courtiers. Thus, they attributed these conversion to the denuded Jewish iden-
tity and commitment of the Spanish Jewish elite, and contrasted the
conversion of “assimilated” Spanish Jews with the martyrdom chosen by sim-
ple, pious Ashkenazic Jews during the First Crusade.
More recently, this conceptualization has been shown to be highly prob-
lematic and simplistic, leading other historians to adduce alternate
explanations for the wave of conversions. A particularly compelling explana-
tion situates these conversions in the context of the major victories by
The Jews of medieval Christendom 99