At the Jewish Table with Hélène Jawhara Piñer

We just want to start by talking about who Spanish Jews are really, and in particular Converso Jews or Crypto-Jews, because they're gonna be sort of like a big character in this story.

And can you just t- like, assume we don't know anything about Jews in Spain, or maybe we don't know that there have ever even been Jews in Spain.

What are sort of the important things that we have to know about Jews in Spain?

Mm-hmm.

Well, uh, it's really, it's really interesting.

I think you're right.

The, the, this is the starting point.

If the starting point, if you want to talk about the Jews of Spain, and the Converso Jews, and the Sephardi, really, we really want to know what is the right definition for this.

So, you know, the Jews of Spain are the Jews who has been living in Spain since the very first time.

The first people who were thinking in only one God were the Jews, when they settled in Spain in the s- first, second century.

So, they were so the Jews of Spain, and as Spain is, uh, the Hebrew word for Spain is Sefarad.

So then, since 1492, if we wanted to refer to the Jews of Spain, so we used the term Sephardi or Sephardim to refer to the Jews of Spain since 1492 onwards, but not only for the Jews of Spain, but also the Jews of Spain and the diaspora.

And because of the context and the history, when the Jews of Spain had to hide their practices because mainly under the Inquisition period that started in the 15th century, so they became Converso Jews, or Crypto-Jewish person.

So, that means that they had to hide their practices and their Jewishness because they could not practice Judaism openly, so they said they converted to Christianism, but officially, but not officially, they were still, you know, Jews.

Can you say more about just, like, what the Inquisition was and why they had to do that really quickly before they move, like, before we move on to some other stuff?

Yeah.

Well, the Inquisition is the, the, the legal holy office that totally changed the life, the lives of the Jews.

The, so it's, it's a tribunal, it's a court, in fact.

It's a legal court created in 1478 by the Catholics monarchs, and the goal of the Inquisition court was to identify the Jewish families, or mainly the Converso families.

So, the Inquisition was against the Conversos, so the Jews who pretended to be real great Christians, but they were not.

So, we, I feel like there's times when we think about the Inquisition as a singular event and not as a process, um, that took place over many years, if you can kinda expand on that, too.

Yes, you're right.

I think people, when it's, when they say, "Well, this happened under the Inquisition," or something like, they, they really think that it's just, like, it's just one thing, but it's totally different.

So, it's crazy because the Inquisition is this legal court that was created, so in 1478, but only started to sentence the Converso Jews in 1481.

But this lasted for so long time because the end, the officially, the end of the Inquisition is the beginning of the 19th century.