Facsimile of Alborayque, with pickaxe scars

In 1993, a mason doing demolition work at a house in the small town of Barcarrota, Spain, near the Portuguese border, put his pickaxe through a wall and into a hidden trove of 16th-century texts. The cache included a Spanish picaresque novel, Italian pornography, and a palm-reading manual. It also contained a previously unknown edition of Alborayque, a long-popular polemic against Spain’s conversos, the Jews who converted to Christianity under duress during the Middle Ages.

On the advice of one of Spain’s leading medievalists, a government-owned press commissioned Dwayne Carpenter, a professor of Hispanic studies and codirector of the Jewish studies program at Boston College, to prepare a treatise on Alborayque, an annotation framed in historical, social, and religious context to accompany a facsimile edition of the pamphlet discovered at Barcarrota. The two-volume set was published last year.

According to Carpenter, Jews likely arrived on the Iberian peninsula with the Romans in the first century a.d., and for 14 centuries their descendants lived lives separate from Christians and, after the year 711, from the region’s Muslim newcomers. In 1391, however, following anti-Jewish riots that spread throughout Spain, many Jews accepted Christian baptism for fear of violence and became known as conversos. Forced conversions continued through the 15th century, particularly following the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition by papal bull in 1478. In 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain, leaving an estimated 300,000 conversos behind.

For anti-Jewish Spanish Christians, says Carpenter, “the solution of conversion had worked a little too well.” Jews who had converted were “absorbed into the Christian community, and whereas in the past they could easily be separated from the rest of the community—because they were Jews—now . . . you had conversos entering the clergy, assuming municipal offices, doing business that they were [previously] prohibited from engaging in.” A new pathway for discrimination seemed needed, “and this,” says Carpenter, “is where the notion of purity of blood comes in. We move from traditional theological anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism.”

Alborayque is an early expression of racial anti-Semitism. The first known version of the book dates from around 1465, and Carpenter dates the printed edition found in Barcarrota to around 1525.

The text makes the comparison of conversos to Alborayque (in English, Al-Buraq), the chimerical steed that Mohammed rode into the Seventh Heaven. In Islamic tradition, Al-Buraq is a beautiful all-white winged hybrid, half-mule and half-donkey. In Alborayque, its tail is made a serpent; it has the mouth of a wolf, the foot and eyes of a human, the body of an ox, 20 such corruptions in all. (The Barcarrota edition was illustrated by two woodcuts, both punctured by the mason’s pickaxe.) Each corruption prompts an analogy with conversos. They are depicted as purveyors of hypocrisy, murder, deicide, sodomy, and religious and racial impurity. The slurs, in Castilian, are supported with biblical verses ranging from the Hebrew Scripture (Genesis 49:10, for example) to Revelation (2:9), printed in Latin. Despite the Islamic motif, Muslim converts to Christianity are not attacked.

Ten distinct editions of Alborayque are known to exist. Carpenter has been studying the text since 1990, when only three versions were known. The Barcarrota edition is unique for its appendix, a collection of 16 curses that conversos were said to utter against Christians, written in both Castilian and transliterated Hebrew.

Carpenter’s treatise, published in Spanish by the Editora Regional de Extremadura, is the result of four years’ labor. The 26-page facsimile it accompanies is accurate down to the scars inflicted by the mason’s axe. The original Barcarrota pamphlet is housed now in the town where it was found, in a library built on the site of what was previously a mosque.

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