Literacy and Education among Judeo-conversa Women in Castile, Portugal, and Amsterdam, 1560–1700

In recent years, scholars of early modern Spain have been unearthing the traces left by women’s passage into a world of literacy and literary production formerly open almost exclusively to men. Early modern women wrote letters, kept diaries and account books, engaged with high culture, and sometimes wrote their own works of literature or religious devotion.¹ During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant portion of conversas, as Jewish converts to Christianity from Spain and Portugal were known, overcame traditional obstacles to become literate, perhaps collectively enjoying a higher level of education than most of their Old Christian female contemporaries in the Iberian peninsula.²

This article will explore the world of literate conversas in several ways. First, to confirm that their literacy levels were unusually high for the period, the article reviews and critiques the available scholarship on literacy rates in Spain and Portugal during the early modern period. Second, the education and reading preferences of conversas and Luso-conversas (Portuguese immigrants to Castile of Jewish heritage) will be discussed. Finally, as many conversos resettled abroad in the seventeenth century, the article raises the question of what might have happened to the Iberian conversas’ educational levels after they settled in the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, where converso refugees from Portugal and Spain created their own version of Rabbinic Judaism, a system which traditionally was hostile to women’s education and participation in the public sphere. First, however, it is useful to remind ourselves of who the conversos were and were not.

After the 1492 edict of expulsion, an unknown number of the Spanish Jews converted to Christianity and remained in Spain;³ these new converts, known as New Christians or conversos, joined the large group of Spanish Jews who had previously converted to Christianity after the 1391 pogroms. In 1497, virtually the entire Jewish community of Portugal was forcibly converted to Christianity.⁴ Despite the efforts of some Spanish and Portuguese conversos to preserve in secret their Jewish identity, the establishment of a highly vigilant and lethal Inquisition coupled with the banning of books in Hebrew effectively extinguished any knowledge of normative Judaism on the Iberian peninsula.⁵ Among a small minority of Crypto-Jews, key prayers, customs, and rituals were preserved, often by women, but with time these practices intermixed with Catholic beliefs, as the minority lived outwardly as religiously conforming Spaniards or Portuguese and participated in the majority culture, a phenomenon known as marranism. Later in the sixteenth century, when France and the Dutch Republic welcomed the relocation of Portuguese converso merchants to their territories, some who still identified with Judaism emigrated and began to recover their Jewish identity. The Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, as they came to call themselves, had lived for one hundred years as Catholics in virtual ignorance of all but the most essential Jewish customs, and in isolation from developments in Ashkenazi communities.⁶ Many had difficulty adapting to Rabbinic Judaism, which they found to be quite different from the faith that they had nurtured in secret. Indeed, despite the wish of some to preserve or recover their Jewish identity, overall, the conversos who remained in Iberia were no longer Jews but Portuguese or Castilian subjects, well integrated into the majority culture.

It is necessary to review this background to underscore how different conversa women were from Jewish women who lived in the Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean or Ashkenazi communities in Europe. A conversa woman’s life experience meant immersion in contemporary Iberian culture, and might have included marriage into an Old Christian family or even entry into a religious order. For those who tried to practice Judaism illegally, it also meant lack of access to a living Jewish culture, written or oral. Because of the Inquisition’s control over the book trade in Spain and Portugal, even if a conversa woman acquired an education in the vernacular (Hebrew being impossible and Latin extremely rare), she did not have access to the Jewish devotional works that were being translated into Spanish and Portuguese in...