The gold chain 

The gold chain tied to Zacharias’ leg is held by another priest, charged with taking his body out of the Holy of Holies, if he died during the sacred ritual. The curious detail reveals that Christians’ knowledge of Jewish customs was so considerable that it made the depiction possible of an esoteric tradition inspired on the Zohar, the foundational book of the Kabbalah. The images taken from the Jewish world that we find in Christian art reflect situations of intimacy and exchange between the two communities.

Circumcision: the surgical removal of the foreskin 

The Gothic architecture of the temple, the high priest dressed in episcopal attire and the presence of an altar transform the circumcision of Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem into a Catholic liturgical ceremony. This is how one of the basic Jewish rituals — the surgical removal of the foreskin — is reinterpreted with the aim of stripping them of the original significance and giving them a new Christian reading. The images highlight that, for Christians, no religious adversary was more familiar and, for that reason, more difficult to ignore than the Jews.

The woman in the yellow dress 

The use of segregating and negative visual traits to evoke the blindness of the Jews upon not recognizing the Messiah helped to accentuate their stigmatization. A paradigmatic example is the personification of the synagogue as a blind, decrepit old woman, with the standard torn. The yellow of the banner and the dress is a negative sign: from the 13^th century, this colour was related to lies and betrayal. Hence its association with Judas and, with an obvious desire to slander, with Judaism and the synagogue.

Bleeding hosts

From the 13^th century numerous libels were spread that accused the Jews of profaning the host. Aside from the particular details of each incrimination, they all have one thing in common: the Jews beat a consecrated host that miraculously starts bleeding. Depictions of bleeding hosts were an effective means for spreading such a complex and controversial theological concept as the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host of the Mass. The terrible flip side was the growing stigmatization of the Jewish people.

Caricatures

From the 13^th century many images of the Jews reproduce a stereotype determined by exaggerated facial features, like the nose and the disproportionate eyes or the untidy beard. This iconographical recourse is based on ideas from the ancient world that equated physical diversity with the exotic and the monstrous. The truth is that the somatic distortions are interpreted as an expression of moral inferiority, and produce strange individuals, inferior, dangerous even. In short, the paradigm of the “other” is constructed with them.

Deicides

The histrionic gestures, the segregating attire and the distorted and vociferous faces characterize the Jews who are demanding Christ’s execution. With the accentuation of the Jews’ evil, the aim was to increase the feeling of commiseration and grief of the Christian faithful with regard to the suffering of Christ.

Preaching with the image and the gesture

Saint Vincent Ferrer preaches Christianity with a panel painted with the last judgement of a group in which there are some Jews wearing exotic pointed hats. This group is also the audience of Saint John the Baptist, who is depicted making the gesture of preaching with his fingers. The forced conversions after 1391 ran parallel to an intense policy of evangelization of the groups of Jews that would remain in the peninsula.

Icons to save lives 

The pressure exerted on conversos — Christians descended from Jews — and the increasingly habitual accusations of Judaizing meant that religious images became absolute certificates of Christian identity. This radically traditional icon conceived by Antoniazzo Romano served to express the deep-seated nature of the converso Juan López’s Christian faith, and thus, to keep the suspicions of Judaization that he suffered at bay.

The sexual organs of Christ  

This Orthodox Christ of Piety (chalice, wounds) presents some features that underline its Jewish origin. One is the inscription in Hebrew. Another more surprising one is the evocation of his human condition through an explicit depiction of the sexual organ; we can also see that it is circumcised. Few conversos continued to hold beliefs pertaining to Judaism. Another thing is that in some images a Christian view with Jewish emanations was preserved.

The fox

The effigy of Saint Dominic presents two unusual features in his iconography: the inscription “enquisidor” on the halo and the act of wounding a fox, a metaphor for heretics. With these two details, Berruguete, inspired by Torquemada, transformed the saint into a symbol of the Spanish Inquisition, charged with fighting against alleged false conversos or crypto-Jews.

Sambenitos 

Sambenitos were signs that the Inquisition ordered to be hung perennially in churches with the names, the sentences and the punishments of the conversos condemned to autos-da-fé. This is the origin of the expression “te han colgado un sambenito”. Featuring a wolf’s head with its mouth open, spitting fire — a symbol of heresy — this sambenito belongs to master Juan, a surgeon, burned at the stake in 1490 accused of being a “Judaizing apostate heretic”.

Alboraique (the concealed portrait) 

The image presents a monstrous hybrid with a donkey’s body, a horse’s face, a man’s eyes, a greyhound’s ears, a snake’s tail and a mixture of feet of different beings (man, horse, lion and eagle). From the perspective of the old Christians, bodily hybridity was a metaphor of the Judaizing nature of the converso. We are looking at an icon of converso perfidy and of his impure blood. Written to libel conversos, this anonymous pamphlet was very popular in Castile from the late 15^th century onwards.