The Jews of Malta: Slaves, Peddlers, Healers and Diviners

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The Jewesses of Malta: Slaves and Peddlers, Healers and Diviners
By Carmel Cassar

href=”http://culture-malta.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The-Jews-of-Malta.pdf”>The Jews of Malta

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have probably witnessed some of
the most horrendous episodes of scape-goating in European history! Individuals
who did not conform – particularly ‘witches: ‘heretics: and members of the
Jewish communities scattered all over Europe – were often perceived as the
‘other’. Similarly in the Mediterranean island of Malta, anyone who fitted one
of these typologies exposed oneself to potential abuse.

But there was a striking contrast between witches and heretics on the
one hand and Muslims, and Jews on the other. Witches and heretics were essentially
seen, in the case of Malta, as insiders who broke the code of ethics.

Muslims and Jews were regarded with mistrust by the Maltese authorities and
the Christian community. The Jews, in particular, had a long record of being
faithless and it was customary to portray them as treacherous enemies of the
Christian society. The term perfidia which was used in connection with Jews
by Catholics – a term which was inherited from Church conciliar decrees and
papal bulls since the thirteenth century suggested not only a rejection of the
Christian faith but even a determination to undermine and corrupt it. Even
when a Jew (or Muslim) converted to Christianity he or she continued to carry
the old stigma attached to his, or her, old religion and was thus prone to
accusations of heretical behaviour, and particularly, the practice of magic.

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