PMC:2668061 / 5912-7346 JSONTXT

{"target":"https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PMC/sourceid/2668061","sourcedb":"PMC","sourceid":"2668061","source_url":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/2668061","text":"The people encountered by the Islamic invaders in the eighth century were not a religiously and culturally uniform group; they included among the Catholic Christian majority a substantial minority of Jewish people. They and their descendants are known as Sephardic Jews, from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain. The Jewish presence was very long-established, with some evidence that it predated the Christian era; many Jews, however, are thought to have arrived during the Roman period, either voluntarily or as slaves brought from the Middle East after the defeat of Judea in 70 CE.24 The later arrival of others was due to their displacement by the Islamic invasion of their homelands in the Near East. Under the final years of Visigothic rule, the Jews suffered the first of a long series of persecutions, including forced religious conversion. It has been estimated that during the convivencia, their population size in Spain was around 100,000.25 In the late 14th century, a wave of pogroms affected the main Jewish quarters in Iberian cities, particularly Barcelona and Girona. One estimate26 gives a Spanish Jewish population of 400,000 by the time of the expulsions of the late fifteenth century, during which some 160,000 Spanish Jews were expelled, largely settling around the Mediterranean, while the remainder underwent conversion to Christianity, living as so-called conversos (in Spain) or cristãos novos (in Portugal).","tracks":[]}