Expulsions created suspect convert populations rather than homogeneous Christian space.

Evidence

Jews and Muslims were both violently expelled from the peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet rather than creating a pure, homogenous Latin Christian space, this expulsion opened up new spaces of ambiguity. ‘The number of converts and their descendants, judeoconversos and moriscos, was so great’, Soyer writes, ‘that they did not assimilate and disappear into the wider Christian population.’ These groups became suspect populations, and as such subject to conspiracy theories, including those centring on malevolent medical doctors. However, one group—the judeoconversos—became the main target of such accusations, while the other—the moriscos—were apparently mostly spared. Soyer explains this by showing the specificity of the Jewish Question in relation to the Moorish Question: Judeophobic conspiracy theories were already inscribed in Christian culture centuries before the expulsions. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 91

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that converted Jews, not converted Muslims, bore the brunt of conspiracy theories about malevolent doctors is a striking, conversation-starter fact.
• XREF: The claim that Jewish conspiracy theories predated the expulsions parallels how blood libel and ritual-murder accusations were established medieval tropes while parallel anti-Moorish tropes were not yet culturally embedded.