Marranos

Marranos is a term used for those Jews living in Iberia who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity yet continued to practice Judaism in secret. The term specifically refers to the accusation of Crypto-Judaism, whereas the term Converso was used for the wider population of Jewish converts to Catholicism whether or not they secretly still practised Jewish rites. Converts from both Judaism or Islam were referred to by the even broader term "New Christians".

The term marrano came into later use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, which outlawed the practice of Judaism in Spain and required all remaining Jews to convert or leave. By then, the large majority of Jews in Spain had converted to Catholicism and Conversos numbered hundreds of thousands. They remained under the watchful eye of the Spanish Inquisition subject to suspicions of secret practice of Judaism by formal Catholics, also known as "Marranism".

The origin of the term marrano as applied to Crypto-Jews is debatable, since there are two meanings and thus two etymologies for the word. One derives from Arabic مُحَرّمٌ muḥarram; meaning "forbidden, anathematized". Marrano in this context means "swine" or "pig", from the ritual prohibition against eating pork, practiced by both Jews and Muslims. However, as applied to crypto-Jews, the term Marrano may also derive from the Spanish verb "marrar" (of Germanic rather than Arabic origin) meaning "to deviate" or "to err", in the sense that they deviated from their newly adopted faith by secretly continuing to practice Judaism.

Under state pressure in the late 14th and early 15th century, over half of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula converted to Christianity, thus avoiding the Decree of Expulsion which affected Spain's remaining openly Jewish population in 1492. The numbers who converted and the effects of various migrations in and out of the area have been the subject of historical debate. A phylogeographic study in 2008 of 1,150 volunteer Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups appeared to support the idea that the number of forced conversions has been significantly underestimated, as 20% of the tested Iberian population had haplogroups consistent with Sephardi ancestry. This percentage was suggested as representing the proportion of Sephardi in the population at the time of mass conversions in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, the authors concede that other historical population movements from the Near East such as Syrians and Phoenicians may also account for these results.

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