Jewish-Christian Brotherhood
Unlike other places in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, in the Kingdom of Galicia there were no popular anti-Semitic riots during the Middle Ages. The closest event was the assault on the synagogue of Ourense in 1442, which was “destroyed” by the noble faction of the Cadórnigas, who took with them “the trees” (scrolls of the Torah) and later stole 50 old maravedís. Both the Town Council and the Church of Ourense condemned the attack on the Jews’ “house of prayer.” The harshest reaction came from the bishop’s representative, who excommunicated Pedro Díaz de Cadórniga and his men, treating the anti-Jewish offense as if it were a sacrilege committed in a Christian church.
Ethnologic Museum
The origin
It is characteristic of pre-Irmandiña Galicia this feeling of grievance from all the victims against the misbehaving knights and their fortresses, scapegoats for social tensions that in other places are directed against the Jews.
The friendship between Christians and Jews is once again shown in 1457, during the wedding of noblemen from Ourense, where it was agreed, with Jews and officials present, to reconcile two Jewish women who had fought, and were released by the City Council from their chains so they could appear before the judges of the alhama. Since the Partidas of Alfonso X, it had been “forbidden” for Jews and Christians to hold banquets together, but the Kingdom of Galicia went against the grain, and on April 25, 1467, at the beginning of the great revolt against the misbehaving nobles, a canon of the Cathedral of Ourense relates how “those of the Holy Irmandade had launched a proclamation that laymen and clergy, Jews and Moors, should tear down the castle of Ramiro.”
The traditional and secular tolerance between Jews and Christians in medieval Galicia, since the 10th century, thus becomes, at the end of the Middle Ages, a Jewish-Christian friendship, a joint defense of social grievances (to the point that in 1368 they offer to pay for fortresses for the protecting knights, [Mendo González, 1044], provoking the revolt of the Holy Irmandade in 1467-1469, at the historical moment of the greatest discrepancy between the situation of the Jews in Galicia and the rest of the Kingdom of Castile: during those years there were massacres of Jews and conversos in Toledo (1467), Sepúlveda (1468), and Tolosa (1469); meanwhile, in Galicia, the Holy Irmandade gathered peasants and canons, Jews and Moors, to tear down fortresses).
