None the less, Tortosa was a propaganda defeat for Judaism and to some extent an intellectual one too. For the first time in Spain, the Jews could be seen as forming enclaves of obscurantism and irrational backwardness, amid a superior culture. This, as much as the legal and economic pressure, and the fear generated by the high-pressure conversion drives of the friars, produced a stampede of converts. So to a great extent Ferrer succeeded in his object. Alas, converting Jews did not solve ‘the Jewish problem’. What it did, as the Spanish authorities rapidly discovered, was to present it in a
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