Christians and Jews inhabited a shared space with permeable religious boundaries. Despite the differences between the two communities, Jewish artists produced works for Christians and Christian masters executed pieces for Jews. Transfers and exchanges were often encouraged by the patrons themselves. In a display of acculturation, the Jewish elite commissioned illuminated manuscripts—notably haggadot—similar in format and type to Christian codices. For their part, some Christian painters and patrons drew on their intimate knowledge of Jewish customs and rituals to devise portraits of various kinds: from positive depictions of traditional environments and practices to scenes designed from a clearly polemical perspective. The images show that for Christians no religious adversary was more familiar—and therefore more difficult to ignore—than the Jews.

According to the Christian concept of Salvation History, the so-called Old and New Testaments are inextricably linked. That is why prominent Jewish kings and prophets were common subjects of Christian iconography, where they were represented as prefigurations of the New Law. In contrast to this positive view, from the 13th century onwards Christian theologians developed a distinctly belligerent attitude of negatively stressing the Jews’ inability to accept Jesus’ divine nature. Images, like texts, echoed this controversy through the explicit metaphor of the Jews’ blindness, a theme that was widely disseminated and reproduced in all kinds of works and media. Although many authorities continued to argue that it was possible for the Jews to convert to Christianity, the visual recreation of this blindness paved the way for constructing their alterity. Through their denial of the Messiah, the Jews began to become the Other.

A varied anti-Jewish iconography began to develop in the late 13th century in a context of systemic violence against the Jews. It ranges from portraits based on caricatures and distinguishing signs (clothing and round badges) to scenes portraying the Jews as enemies of the Christian faith. As in the rest of Western Europe, besides expressing intolerance and prejudice, these degrading images often stemmed from strategies for asserting the Christian identity. We need only look at the scenes showing acts of desecration of cult images and the host, or at the Passion cycles. From a Christian viewpoint, many of these representations were regarded as an effective means of ratifying beliefs that had sparked heated controversy within the Church—for example, the cult of images and of the Eucharist— or of spreading Christocentric devotions. The distorted image of the Jews as desecrators and deicides was a reflection returned by the Christian mirror—an expression of the beliefs, fears and anxieties of the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church.

Following the pogroms that devastated many of the Jewish quarters on the Iberian Peninsula in 1391, large numbers of Jews were forced to embrace Christianity. Far from putting an end to the tensions, the mass conversions fuelled unease that Christianity was now under threat from Judaism from within. Accusations of Judaising caused fears and anxieties to be redirected towards New Christians—that is, conversos and their descendants. In this situation, unique in Europe, images were an active and powerful means of expressing a wide range of desires and concerns. On the one hand, Christians in favour of evangelisation used them to stress the need for all those who remained faithful to the Law of Moses to convert. On the other hand, the growing climate of mistrust prompted many conversos to commission religious images to allay suspicions of Judaising. In both cases, images were at the centre of the controversy.