Article: Becoming Jewish in early modern France: documents on Jewish community-building in seventeenth-century Bayonne and Peyrehorade.

The history of Sephardi Jews in southwestern France began with the establishment in the mid-sixteenth century of small enclaves of Iberian refugees in the regions of Les Landes and the Pyrenees-Atlantiques. The settlers, most of whom immigrated to France in the 1600s and traced their familial origins to or through Portugal, were so-called conversos or New Christians. (1) Historians' treatments of these immigrants have typically paid much attention to the legal foundations of the "Portuguese" (2) colonies, focusing in particular on the fact that the French crown granted the expatriates lettres-patentes in 1550, and renewed them periodically until 1776. (3) These legal ...

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