Jews were pretty much restricted to MAKING STUFF and LEARNING ~ or TRADING.
There are quite elaborate laws regarding how things got "turned over" when a Christian prince conquered a Moslem principality, or vice versa.
Jews were left right where they were ~ so they could be taxed.
Obviously there were folks who managed to "convert", but the greater part of the literature on the matter suggests that Jews couldn't convert if they wanted to until the late 1400s. The Crown issued an edict that told them to convert, and evidence is most Jews converted to Christianity, as did Moslems. There were remarkably few people expelled.
Some analysts of this question have come to the conclusion that about 1/4 of the Spanish population is descended in whole or in part from Jews, with another large chunk being descended from Arabs and North Africans.
The smart guys went to the colonial empire as it developed.
It's worth reading about the Inquisition. Yes, it was bad, but not as bad as it's portrayed. It wouldn't hold a candle to the slightest of atrocities commited by the Nazis several centuries later.
Medieval Spain was considered quite Progressive by just about everybody alive at the time who could read and write and travel.
None of these places were anything you'd wanted to live in ~ compared to today ~ maybe like palaces stuck in the mud surrounded by dusty farmland with impoverished peasants and lots of pigs.
You wrote:
“Obviously there were folks who managed to “convert”, but the greater part of the literature on the matter suggests that Jews couldn’t convert if they wanted to until the late 1400s.”
Jews converted in droves in the 13th and 14th centuries.
“The Crown issued an edict that told them to convert, and evidence is most Jews converted to Christianity, as did Moslems. There were remarkably few people expelled.”
Half converted and half left. See Henry Kamen, Spanish Inquisition (1998) pages 29-31.
“It’s worth reading about the Inquisition. Yes, it was bad, but not as bad as it’s portrayed. It wouldn’t hold a candle to the slightest of atrocities commited by the Nazis several centuries later.”
Might make a good slogan: “The Spanish Inquisition - Hey, they weren’t as bad as the Nazis!”
That's false on many levels. To begin with, there were periodic forced conversions throughout Judeo-Spanish history, but they picked up beginning in the mid-14th Century.
Second, the idea that "remarkably few" Jews were expelled is just false. Most scholars estimate that about 165,000 Jews were expelled in 1492. Less than 50,000 stayed in Spain. And many of those 50,000 fled over the next two centuries -- witness the emergence of Western Sephardic communities in the Netherlands, France, Germany, etc., beginning in the early 17th Century.
fascinating bit of history