About 4,000 Jews were living in Barcelona during the 13th century and many worked as doctors, scientists, scholars, merchants, or money lenders for the Catalonian aristocracy and crown. Medieval Barcelona was approximately 15% Jewish, with most living in this Jewish quarter. Beginning in the 14th century, Jews all over the Iberian peninsula became targets of religious and political persecution. In the mid-1300s, the Jews were accused of precipitating the disaster of the Black Plague and in 1391, popular large-scale pogroms left thousands of Jews either dead or coerced into Christianity and ‘cleansed’ Barcelona of its Jewish population. This was a full century before 1492 when Spain’s Jews and Muslims were all given the ‘choice’ of conversion, exile or death.