Converso
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Converso (Spanish and Portuguese for "a convert", from Latin conversus, "converted, turned around") and its feminine form conversa referred to Jews or Muslims or the descendants of Jews or Muslims who had converted, sometimes unwillingly, to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal, particularly during the 1300s and 1400s.
See the main articles:
- Morisco for New Christians of Moorish origin. The term morisco may also refer to Crypto-Muslims, i.e. those who secretly continued to practise Islam.
- Marrano for New Christians of Jewish origin. The term marrano is especially used to refer to Crypto-Jews, i.e. those who secretly continued to practise Judaism.
Jewish conversos were often suspected of preserving their ancestral rites in this way and were especially a target of the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition.
Some argue that they contributed disproportionately to cultural and political life in Spain and included Saint Teresa of Avila and, it was alleged, the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada himself. See also Donmeh.
[edit] Gomez de Guzman (Ayala) family offsprings in America
Today perhaps majority of Spanish and Portuguese population and offsprings of Iberian colonists around the world have Jewish converso ancestors. The same is true for many peoples of non-Iberian origin. Gomez de Guzman who were a leading aristocratic family of Toledo provide a case study. The founder of the family Gome Perez and his wife Horabuena (Ora Buena) were Jewish converso. He became Alcalde Major of Toledo. (See, Norman Roth, "Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain", Madison, WI: The University of Wisconcin Press, 1995, pp. 94-95, 333.) His direct male offsprings married women from "Old Christian" and converso nobility. His grand-grandson Diego de Guzman, Lord of Cassarubious, etc. was an Alcalde Major of Toledo and married Ines de Ayala from another important Jewish converso family who had among her ancestors also high "Old Christian" aristocracy, including offsprings of Spanish and Basque royalty. (She was a sister of a major Castilian statesman and famous poet and historian Pero Lopez de Ayala). Their daughter who took her mother name and known as Sancha de Ayala (1360-1418) accompanied Princess Constance of Castile to England where she married Sir Walter Blount (1350-1403) and had numerous descendants in Britain and America. Among her progeny in England poet Philip Sidney. In America she is a forebear of poets Anne Bradstreet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, play writer Tennessee Williams, actors Humphrey Bogart, Chevy Chase, 17th century colonists Robert Carter, Roger Ludlow, Anne Hutchinson, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Presidents of the USA William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush. See, Wilfrid Bayne, "De Ayala of Castile", The Augustan, vol. 13, 1970, pp.289-91; Milton Rubincam, "A critique of Spanish genealogy: the ancestry of Sancha (de Ayala) Blount" in Lindsay L. Brook, ed., Studies in Genealogy and Family History in Tribute to Charles Evans on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1989; Eve LaPLante, "American Jezebel", San Francisco, 2005; Gary Boyd Roberts, "The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants, etc." Baltimore, 2006. The personal achievements of these individuals are not important but their names are a graphic illustration of the fact that one marriage outside of Iberia could result in such a large number of descendants.
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