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Forced conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Coercion and faith in premodern Iberia and beyond. By Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan. (Numen Book Series, 164.) Pp. xiv + 418. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2020. €143. 978 90 04 41681 9 ; 0169 8834
Over the last decades, studies in converso history have reached a new peak, inquiring into new research problems and opening new paths towards entanglements between Jewish, Christian and Muslim, converso and Morisco history, on the Iberian Peninsula, in the Sephardic diaspora(s) and beyond. A series of illuminating contributions has emerged from the Madrid based ERC-Project CORPI (‘Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond’), among them this volume.
Based on a conference in Madrid in 2016, the volume is dedicated to topics and theories in the history of forced conversions in medieval and early modern Iberia. As stated in the introduction, forced conversions were and are part of at least two of the three monotheist religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And yet they have always been contested from within their own religion. In addition, understandings and justifications of forced conversions have always been part of distinct historical and cultural settings so much so that basic concepts (such as ‘will’ or ‘compulsion’) need to be historicised and new questions to be formulated to replace traditional ones about the ‘truth of conversion’ or the ‘true identity’ of the convert (p. 15). Given the importance of interrelated questions and the urgency of discussions about the ‘violent potential of radical universalisms’ (p. 24), the editors correctly emphasise...