Fragments d’archéologie de l’Occident missionnaire (I). Le pouvoir de convertir et l’invention de la race

The shift from a “theological anti-Judaism” to a “racial anti-Semitism,” precipitated by the proliferating limpieza de sangre statutes in the Iberian kingdoms from the end of the fifteenth century, constitutes a topos in historiographical and philosophical debates on the emergence of modern racism. This paper offers a critical revision by reexamining the thesis once advanced by Yosef Yerushalmi, and often taken up after him, which identifies in the mácula—a biologized, hereditary taint transmitted through generations—the form in which the missionary project of universal conversion to the Christian faith internalizes its limit, its internal contradiction, and its failure. In this first part, we confront this strong thesis with a simple problem: late medieval thought already possessed several conceptions of heredity, none of which were mobilized by the proponents of the “blood purity” statutes. We defend the thesis that the reason lies in the interlocking of these early conceptions of hereditary causality within the structures of medieval kinship, which prescribed a way of counting time and generations, making intergenerational transmissions calculable, and problematizing (especially through policies of forced conversion) a multi-generational time of acculturative transformation of converts into faithful subjects.