A converso confraternity in Majorca: La Novella Confraria de Sant Miquel

Abstract

After their forced conversion during the anti-Jewish violence of August 1391, Majorcan conversos could no longer avail themselves of the social structures that provided for their welfare as members of the aljama. Rather than joining existing confraternities, which were the main purveyors of social welfare in Christian society, in 1404, conversos formally established a confraternity of their own. Its statutes, translated here in an Appendix, reveal both Jewish and Christian precedents in provision for the poor, the sick and for burial. These applied not only to members, but to all Majoran conversos. While the suspicions or hostility of Old Christians may have deterred conversos from seeking membership in their institutions, the converso confraternity was essentially a formalization of a community that was already bound together by pre-baptismal networks and relationships and which was addressed as a corporate entity by the Crown and creditors of the former aljama. The very establishment of Sant Miquel, as the converso confraternity was called, coupled with an absence of ritual injunctions among its statutes, supports the hypothesis that the first generations of conversos continued in the same relationships and customs as when they were Jewish. The confraternity offered a space in which these conversos could retain vestiges of their Jewish identity while situating themselves in the ambit of Christian culture, thus setting a new social referent for future generations.