New Christian friendships and spaces of sociability in the early modern Spanish city

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay suggests that reading Spanish Inquisition records against the grain allows us to write a cultural and social history of New Christians not solely from the lens of heresy and “judaizing”, but from a lens that reconstructs their amical and spatial experiences. In particular, it examines the social relationships between New Christians as they took shape in various public spaces in Madrid as well as in other Spanish cities during the seventeenth century. During this period, the Inquisition focused mostly on New Christians of Portuguese origin, who as immigrants often sought after friendship. This study makes the argument that the historiographical tendency to consider New Christians primarily as “crypto-Jews” overshadows the various ways in which this group used public urban space for social interactions similarly to Old Christians, as well as for exchanging essential information about the Jewish faith and its commandments. Additionally, this study suggests that we should avoid the binary division of space as either public or private, since public spaces were also used for clandestine activities, and since the New Christian household was often a far more dangerous place to practice the Jewish tradition, due to the ongoing presence of servants, family members and friends. Nevertheless, New Christians celebrated friendship to a great extent, as it played an essential role in their religious identity and experience.