August 5, 1391 – Massacre of Jews in Barcelona

Jews began arriving in Barcelona, Spain after 70 CE in an attempt to flee Roman repression in Palestine. Jews settled, first through custom, then by compulsion, in an area known as El Call. This area, which came to account for some 15 percent of the city’s population in the 13th century, was the center of intellectual life and provided the city with its doctors, lawyers, financiers, and translators.

However, the Catholic Church was becoming more hostile to the Jews, having developed the doctrine that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.

The situation worsened in the 14th century, when Europe experienced a series of cataclysms that savaged the economy. Barcelona was hit by a run of famines beginning in 1333 and in 1348, the Black Plague struck. Possibly a fifth of the city’s population — then less than 40,000 — died, including a large number of the ruling elite. The Jews were blamed for the illness as well as the economic disruption.

By 1391, there was rising discontent with the economy, the municipal government and taxation. The situation was inflamed by Ferrand Martinez, a Spanish cleric and archdeacon of Écija (part of Seville), who was most noted for being an antisemitic agitator.

In public sermons, Martinez called on all good Christians to destroy the 23 synagogues of the Jewish community of Seville, to lock up the Jews in a ghetto, to have no dealings with them, and to use every means to force them into accepting Christianity. He preached that it was no crime for Christians to murder and pillage the “unbelievers.”

On August 5, 1391 anti-Jewish riots broke out in El Call in Barcelona, led by a group of Castilians who had participated in previous massacres of Jews in Seville and Valencia, and who came to Barcelona by boat intending to attack the Jews there. During the riots in Barcelona at least 400 people were killed (many more were killed in Seville), while others were forcibly converted, Jewish homes were looted, and then the Jewish Quarter was burned down.

The abandoned synagogues were demolished, with their stones used to build the royal palace and a new government office building.

Narrow street of the El Call area in Barcelona

In 1480 the Spanish Inquisition was created by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile with the aim of maintaining Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and rooting out ‘false’ converts from Islam and Judaism. The converts became known respectively as moriscos and conversos, or, in the insulting term of the time, marranos (pigs).

In March 1492 came the edict of the Catholic Kings to expel all Jews from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Jews were given four months to convert or go into exile.

Almost 500 years later, on December 16, 1968, Spain declared that the ban on Jews was null and void.

Nevertheless, according to the Gatestone Institute of International Policy Council (a non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank), Spain consistently ranks as one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe, with a steady rise of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish persons and property in the country. A 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project found 46% of the Spanish rating Jews unfavorably. Spain was the only country in Europe where negative views of Jews outweighed positive views. A 2015 survey found that almost half of the Spanish feel “Jews have too much power and “too much control over global affairs.” A more recent round-up of anti-Semitic incidents in Spain is here In February, 2020, for example, a carnival float in the Spanish town of Campo de Criptana featured uniforms of Nazis, concentration camp inmates and crematoria trains. . . .