Marrano

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Marranos is a term for Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity, either voluntarily or by Spanish or Portuguese royal coercion, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but who continued to practice Judaism in secrecy or were suspected of it. They are also called crypto-Jews, the term increasingly preferred in scholarly works over Marranos.

The term specifically refers to the charge 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 either Judaism or Islam were referred to by the broader term of "New Christians".

The term marrano came into later use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, which prohibited the practice of Judaism in Spain and required all remaining Jews to convert or leave. The Spanish Inquisition was established prior to the decree, surveilled New Christians to detect whether their conversion to Christianity was sincere. The vast majority of Jews in Spain had converted to Catholicism, perhaps under pressure from the Massacre of 1391, and conversos numbered hundreds of thousands. They were monitored by the Spanish Inquisition and subject to suspicions by Old Christians of the secret practice of Judaism, whether or not that was the case.

In modern use, marrano can be considered offensive and pejorative, although some scholars continue to use the term interchangeably with converso or crypto-Jew. In modern Spanish, marrano means "pig", or, more often, "dirty person". Because of these possible meanings for the term Marrano might also be offensive to some descendants of Spanish Jews.^[1]