New Christian

Common card · No. 367111

New Christian (Latin: Novus Christianus; Spanish: Cristiano Nuevo; Portuguese: Cristão-Novo; Catalan: Cristià Nou; Ladino: Kristiano Muevo; Arabic: المسيحيون الجدد) was a socio-religious designation and legal distinction referring to the population of former Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and their respective colonies in the New World. The term was used from the 15th century onwards primarily to describe the descendants of the Sephardic Jews and Andalusian Muslims that were baptized into the Catholic Church following the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was an anti-Jewish law made by the Catholic Monarchs upon the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. It required both Jews and Muslims to convert to Roman Catholicism or be expelled from Spain and Portugal. Most of the history of the "New Christians" refers to the Jewish converts, who were generally known as Conversos (or in a more...

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