OUR STORY BEGINS in the towns and villages of Spain and Portugal during the early modern period, as many families and individuals, some after great deliberation, others in great haste, were deciding to leave their homeland to start a new life elsewhere. Their flight marked for them the end of a long period of discrimination, racism, and persecution.

Officially, by the end of the fifteenth century there were no Jews left in the Iberian peninsula. They had been expelled from Spain, from territories under the Crown of Castile and Aragon in 1492 and from the kingdom of Navarre in 1498, and forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal in 1497.

Since the pogroms of 1391 Spanish Jews had either gone through a conversion to Catholicism (voluntarily or under duress) or opted to continue living as Jews. The latter experienced periods of calm coexistence and toleration but also hatred and antisemitism. The Spanish expulsion decrees a century later confronted the remaining Jews with an even more harrowing choice: to leave their country of birth as Jews or to stay on at the price of conversion to Catholicism. From that date on, any who remained in Spain had chosen the latter alternative, to gain, in theory at least, equality with other citizens, or had been born into families that had converted earlier; they were known as New Christians or judaeoconversos (henceforth referred to here as Conversos).

The Conversos were discriminated against, not only on religious grounds —on suspicion of secretly adhering to the Jewish faith—but also for amixture of political and economic reasons and racist prejudice. In their drive to establish a pure Catholic society, various parts of Spain introduced statutes based on the principle of limpieza de sangre (‘cleanliness of blood’), consigning people with Jewish or Moorish blood and background to an inferior status in Spanish society. These statutes, introduced by the middle of the fifteenth century, institutionalized the distinction between Old and New Christians and tried to prevent the latter from entering various privileged sectors of Spanish society, such as confraternities, guilds, military and religious orders, universities, municipal councils, and governmental positions.