Visigothic Spain: eighty years of forced baptism
The first state in Europe to outlaw Judaism throughout its territory. It ended with a decree enslaving the Jews.
After King Reccared brought the Visigoths from Arianism to Catholicism in 587, the alliance of throne and church turned against the country's one non-Christian community. About 613 Sisebut ordered every Jew in the kingdom to be baptised or leave; many were baptised.
What follows prefigures the Inquisition eight centuries later. The Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 ruled that none may be converted by force, but those already converted must be held to Christianity, since they had "partaken of the sacraments". Children of the baptised were taken and placed in monasteries. Council followed council, each with fresh prohibitions—which shows by itself that the earlier ones were not obeyed.
In 694 King Egica declared at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo that the Jews had conspired with their co-religionists overseas against the kingdom, ordered them all enslaved and their property seized, and their children taken from the age of seven to be raised as Christians.
Sixteen years later the Visigothic kingdom fell to an invasion from the south. Christian chronicles accused the Jews of helping the conquerors; true or not, Arab rule gave them back their faith, their property and, as it turned out, three centuries of flowering.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Canons of the Fourth Council of Toledo, 633 — no forced baptism, but the baptised are to be held; children taken
- Acts of the Seventeenth Council of Toledo, 694 — the enslavement of the kingdom's Jews and the seizure of their children
Basis: documents and evidence.