The Making of a Messianic Reality in the Iberian Peninsula After the Persecutions of 1391

This article reexamines the evidence for the messianic agitation that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the persecutions of 1391. Historians have generally treated the surviving Hebrew accounts as evidence for a messianic movement centered on a prophet or messianic figure named Moses, who allegedly appeared in Cisneros in Castile in 1392–1393. Modern scholarship has also attributed to Hasdai Crescas an active role in the dissemination of the messianic expectations associated with these reports. A critical reconsideration of the Hebrew sources, together with Joshua Halorki’s testimony, Pablo de Santa María’s omission of the Cisneros episode, and a newly discovered letter concerning the events in Cisneros, preserved in a Cairo Genizah manuscript, suggests a more complex picture. The article distinguishes between the demonstrable atmosphere of heightened messianic expectation among Jews and conversos and the historicity of a discrete messianic movement centered on an identifiable claimant. The newly discovered letter provides further evidence for the circulation of reports concerning Cisneros and for the process by which they became associated with Crescas’s authority. The article argues that Crescas’s role has been overstated and that the surviving narratives are better understood as products of a Mediterranean process in which rumors circulated through letters, acquired authority through attribution, and were progressively interpreted, rationalized, and textualized. The “Messiah of Cisneros” thus emerges not necessarily as a recoverable historical individual, but as a historical product of communication and collective imagination in the profound social and religious crisis that followed 1391.