“Some clerics and many laymen,” says Pulgar,[35] “informed the Sovereigns that there were in the Kingdom many Christians of Jewish extraction who were Judaizing[36] again and holding Jewish rites in their houses, and who neither believed the Catholic Faith nor performed the Catholic duties. They implored the Sovereigns, as they were Christian princes, to punish that detestable error, because if left unpunished it might so spread that our Holy Catholic Faith must receive great harm.” * * * * * Exactly to realize the position at the time, and the force behind the arguments employed to induce the Catholic Sovereigns to complete the ordering of the kingdom by the repression of the re-Judaizing, or apostasy, of the New-Christians--as the baptized Jews and their descendants were termed--it is necessary to take at least a brief retrospective survey of the history of the Israelites in Spain. * * * * * At what period the Jews first appeared in the peninsula it is not easy to determine with accuracy. Salazar de Mendoza and other ancient historians, who base their writings upon the work of Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, put forward views upon this subject that are curious rather than important. They assert that the Kingdom of Spain was founded by Tubal, the son of Japhet, who had Europe for his portion when the division was made among the sons of Noah. Hence it was called Tubalia, and later on Sepharad by the Jews, and Hesperida by the Greeks. They hold that the first Jews in the Iberian Peninsula were probably those who came with Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Chaldea, and that he brought with him, in addition to Chaldeans and Persians, ten tribes of Israel, who peopled Toledo,[37] and built there the most beautiful synagogue that had been theirs since the temple of Solomon. This synagogue, Mendoza states, afterwards became the Convent of Santa Maria la Blanca (a statement which the architecture of Santa Maria la Blanca very flatly contradicts). He further informs us that they built another synagogue at Zamora, and that those who worshipped there always prided themselves--his point of view, of course, is narrowly Christian--that to them had been addressed St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. They founded a university at Lucena (near Cordova), and schools where the law was taught, so that the holy Jewish religion spread rapidly, and was observed throughout Spain until the coming of Our Lord into the world. Then, in 37 A.D., the Apostle St. James came to preach the new gospel in Iberia, “so that Spain was the first land after Judea to receive the holy law of grace.” Following the writings of Vargas, he goes so far as to say: “and although to many it has seemed apocryphal that the Toledo Jews wrote to denounce the Passion of Our Lord, the assertion is not without good foundation.”[38]