Marrano

Marranos (Spanish pronunciation: [maˈranos], Portuguese pronunciation: [mɐˈʁɐnuʃ]) were Spanish and Portuguese Jews, as well as Navarrese Jews, who converted to Christianity, either voluntarily or by Spanish or Portuguese royal coercion, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but who continued to practice Judaism in secret or were suspected of it. They are also called crypto-Jews, a term increasingly preferred in scholarly works over Marranos. The related term converso was used for the wider population of Jewish converts to Catholicism, whether or not they secretly still practised Jewish rites. Converts from either Judaism or Islam were referred to by the more general term "New Christians". The term marrano came into use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, which prohibited the practice of Judaism in Spain and required all remaining Jews to convert or leave. The vast majority of Jews in Spain had already converted to Catholicism, perhaps under pressure from the Massacre of 1391, and conversos numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Suspected by Old Christians of the secret practice of Judaism, the Spanish Inquisition, established prior to the decree, surveilled New Christians to try to detect whether their conversion to Christianity was sincere. In modern Spanish, marrano means "pig", or, more often, "dirty person". For this reason, although its etymology is contested, present-day use of the term can be considered pejorative and offensive. Some scholars, however, continue to use marrano interchangeably with crypto-Jew, or otherwise converso.