Crypto Judaism And The Spanish Inquisition

Cyrptojudaism and the Spanish Inquisition explores Spanish secret Judaism and the Inquisition, which strove to uproot the "Judaizing heresy" among baptized Jews and their descendants. Even in the 18th-century, Cryptojudaism was still prevalent, but the Inquisition finally triumphed. This book describes the private lives of the cyrpto-Jew, as revealed in their confessions, together with their fate in prison and at the auto defeat at which they abjured their Judaism and were reconciled to the Church or, if not, burnt at the stake.

From the end of the 15th century until the 18th, Spanish Jews carried on Jewish practices in the shadow of the Inquisition. Those caught were forced to recant or be burnt at the stake. Drawing on their confessions and trial documents, this book tells their story.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition (a royal tribunal that addressed issues of heresy and offenses to morality) was established in Peru in 1570 and operated there until 1820. In this book, Ana E. Schaposchnik provides a deeply researched history of the Inquisition’s Lima Tribunal, focusing in particular on the cases of persons put under trial for crypto-Judaism in Lima during the 1600s. Delving deeply into the records of the Lima Tribunal, Schaposchnik brings to light the experiences and perspectives of the prisoners in the cells and torture chambers, as well as the regulations and institutional procedures of the inquisitors. She looks closely at how the lives of the accused—and in some cases the circumstances of their deaths—were shaped by actions of the Inquisition on both sides of the Atlantic. She explores the prisoners’ lives before and after their incarcerations and reveals the variety and character of prisoners’ religiosity, as portrayed in the Inquisition’s own sources. She also uncovers individual and collective strategies of the prisoners and their supporters to stall trials, confuse tribunal members, and attempt to ameliorate or at least delay the most extreme effects of the trial of faith. The Lima Inquisition also includes a detailed analysis of the 1639 Auto General de Fe ceremony of public penance and execution, tracing the agendas of individual inquisitors, the transition that occurred when punishment and surveillance were brought out of hidden dungeons and into public spaces, and the exposure of the condemned and their plight to an avid and awestricken audience. Schaposchnik contends that the Lima Tribunal’s goal, more than volume or frequency in punishing heretics, was to discipline and shape culture in Peru.

"Drawing on individual biographies (including those of colonial officials accused of secretly practicing Judaism), family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a detailed account of the economic, social, and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846."--BOOK JACKET.

Thirty-five years ago, Kamen wrote a study of the Inquisition that received high praise. This present work, based on over 30 years of new research, is not simply a complete revision of the earlier book. Innovative in its presentation, point of view, information, and themes, it will revolutionize further study in the field.

Between 1391 and the end of the 15th century, numerous Spanish Jews converted to Christianity, most of them under duress. Before and after 1492, when the Jews were officially expelled from Spain, a significant number of these conversos maintained clandestine ties to Judaism, despite their outward conformity to Catholicism. Through the lens of the Inquisition's own records, this groundbreaking study focuses on the crypto-Jewish women of Castile, demonstrating their central role in the perpetuation of crypto-Jewish society in the absence of traditional Jewish institutions led by men. Renee Levine Melammed shows how many "conversas" acted with great courage and commitment to perpetuate their religious heritage, seeing themselves as true daughters of Israel. Her fascinating book sheds new light on the roles of women in the transmission of Jewish traditions and cultures.

During the mid-1600s, tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition in Lima and Mexico City prosecuted the "Great Conspiracy" trials in response to the crypto-Jewish practices of conversos, or New Christian converts of Jewish descent, who had immigrated from Spain and Portugal to these centers of colonial power. Based on original archival records and published transcriptions of Inquisition trial testimony, this study examines the complex lives and clandestine practices of five apparent crypto-Jews who were the subject of such trials. In so doing, the book aims to understand why these individuals risked their lives and those of loved ones in the name of a forbidden belief system, and how their chameleon-like identity permitted them to live as Jews and Catholics at once. Taking its title from a description of secret Judaism by one of its subjects, Duarte de Leon Jaramillo, the work shows how, despite a lack of regular access to books or teachers, crypto-Jews forged a recognizable Jewish identity at the very time when the Inquisition most actively prosecuted them for doing so. The stories of these individuals also shed light on the complex relationship between Spain and Portugal during the 1600s and particularly on how this relationship affected New Christians from both countries who traveled to Spain's American territories. Each chapter of The Perils of Living the Good and True Law tells a distinct but complementary story about the response of secret Jews to inquisitorial efforts to coerce them to renounce their identity. Some of the topics these stories explore include the role of economics in religious persecution, the notoriety of personality that transcended the Jewish character of beliefs and practices, and the geographic and spiritual peregrinations of individuals from positions of relative safety to the riskier one of crypto-Judaism. Additionally, while the book demonstrates both the authenticity of crypto-Jewish practices and their variance from normative Judaism, it also dispels the notion that similarities in heritage and belief intrinsically unified all New Christians. Contending instead that, due to various degrees of Catholic sincerity, conversos were not Jewish ipso facto, the work uses the life stories of the five individuals and their families analyzed here to investigate how a proscribed belief system survived, as well as the influence of oppression on this belief system. These accounts suggest that relative economic prestige and imputed racial otherness made conversos feel "in and out," a situation that in many cases caused their relationships with fellow conversos to be as complex and even contradictory as those with Christians free of Jewish lineage. Written using a nuanced approach that neither demonizes the Inquisition nor depicts the tribunal's victims as unblemished heroes, The Perils of Living the Good and True Law describes crypto-Judaism in colonial Hispanic America in terms of the experiences of those who lived it and the institution that tried to eliminate it. The work makes a valuable contribution to Jewish, Hispanic, and trans-Atlantic studies by elucidating the legitimacy of crypto-Judaism in colonial Hispanic America and of Inquisition trial records as an accurate source of information about this syncretistic belief system and its complex, often contradictory practitioners. Matthew D. Warshawsky is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Portland. He co-edited, with James A. Parr, Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Connections (Juan de la Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs, 2013). Series: Estudios judeoespanoles Samuel G. Armistead y Joseph H. Silverman, No. 8"

When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and "grilled" the servants, neighbors, and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz & Davidson have drawn a fascinating, award-winning picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian & Islamic traditions in cooking lamb, beef, fish, eggplant, chickpeas, and greens and use seasonings such as saffron, mace, ginger, and cinnamon. The recipes, and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.

*Includes pictures *Includes excerpts of medieval accounts *Includes a bibliography for further reading The road to the modern age of cultural harmony and acceptance is one of the finest feats of human progress, but having said that, there was once a time when the mere doubt of a religious figure's existence was not only punishable by law, it could very well cost a man his life. This was the crime of heresy. This kind of religious persecution has been around for thousands of years, and Christians were often the victims, but when the Catholic Church began its rapid expansion throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, the tables were turned. In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued a papal bull that would kick off a long-standing tradition of heretic-hunting, and as a result, the Age of the Inquisitions commenced. By the end of the 14th century, the distrust and prejudice against Jewish communities quickly spread to Spain. In 1391, James II of Aragon boarded the bandwagon; backed into a corner by the Roman Catholic Church, he established a law that banned Jews from Spain altogether. Jews were shunned in droves, and the remaining were given an ultimatum to either convert/revert to Catholicism or face immediate death. Yet another wave of gory pogroms ensued across the country, especially in Barcelona. For nearly 400 years, the city of Barcelona had served as the central hub of the European Jewish communities, but in just 3 years, all 23 Jewish synagogues in Barcelona had been forcibly demolished. Nothing but charred remnants and ashes lay in its place. Converso was the term given to any individual of Jewish or Muslim faith who had been converted to Catholicism. While some conversos were coerced into the conversion, others, like ha-Levi, willingly converted. This was a label given not only to the generation of the converted, it was also inherited by their children and descendants as well. Conversos prided themselves on being a new generation of Christians. Although they were of Jewish descent, they embraced the "true" Catholic religion. There were even those who claimed that the conversos had a deeper connection with God and were simply better than the "Old Christians." According to the conversos, as Jews, they were related by blood to Christ. When the Spanish Inquisition was in full swing, the inquisitors' handbooks included tips and guidelines on how to identify a rogue Jewish converso, or as others mocked them, the "crypto-Jews." Inquisitors were on the lookout for individuals who did their cooking and cleaning on Friday nights, which was a Jewish habit. These relapsos frequented local Jewish stores to stock up on kosher meals. The latter individuals were fairly easy to spot, as most Spaniards at the time consumed hearty amounts of pork, a staple prohibited in Jewish and Muslim law. The absence of chimney smoke on Saturday nights was another clue that those inside could be honoring the Sabbath. Nonetheless, the "crypto-Jews" would continue to secretly practice their religion and run the risk of incurring the Inquisition's wrath, all the way up until the notorious expulsion of the Jews in Spain at the end of the 15th century. The Crypto-Jews: The History of the Forcibly Converted Jews Who Secretly Practiced Judaism during the Inquisition examines the origins of the group, the laws that discriminated against them, and the efforts to maintain Jewish identity in Spain. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the crypto-Jews like never before.

The Jewish community of medieval Spain was the largest and most important in the West for more than a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Muslim and Christian neighbors. This stable situation began to change in the 1390s, and through the next century hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Norman Roth argues here with detailed documentation that, contrary to popular myth, the conversos were sincere converts who hated (and were hated by) the remaining Jewish community. Roth examines in depth the reasons for the Inquisition against the conversos, and the eventual expulsion of all Jews from Spain. “With scrupulous scholarship based on a profound knowledge of the Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish sources, Roth sets out to shatter all existing preconceptions about late medieval society in Spain.”—Henry Kamen, Journal of Ecclesiastical History “Scholarly, detailed, researched, and innovative. . . . As the result of Roth’s writing, we shall need to rethink our knowledge and understanding of this period.”—Murray Levine, Jewish Spectator “The fruit of many years of study, investigation, and reflection, guaranteed by the solid intellectual trajectory of its author, an expert in Jewish studies. . . . A contribution that will be particularly valuable for the study of Spanish medievalism.”—Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, Annuario de Estudios Medievales

Comprehensive history of crypto-Jewish beliefs and social customs.

B. Netanyahu revolutionized accepted belief concerning the causes of the Spanish Inquisition in his volume of 1995, The Origins of the Inquisition. Toward the Inquisition is another major contribution to this historiographic revolution. Made up of seven of Netanyahu's essays, published over the last two decades and collected here for the first time, it further illuminates Jewish and Marrano history from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. Forming as they do a unified whole, the essays are provocative and boldly interpretive, yet meticulously documented from a wealth of sources. The essays throw light on such long-obscured phenomena as the rise of the Nazi-like theory of race which harassed the conversos for three full centuries, or the abandonment of Judaism by most conversos decades before the Inquisition was established.

In 1598, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, New Mexico became Spain’s northernmost New World colony. The censures of the Catholic Church reached all the way to Santa Fe, where in the mid-1660s, Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche, the wife of New Mexico governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, came under the Inquisition’s scrutiny. She and her husband were tried in Mexico City for the crime of judaizante, the practice of Jewish rituals. Using the handwritten briefs that Doña Teresa prepared for her defense, as well as depositions by servants, ethnohistorian Frances Levine paints a remarkable portrait of daily life in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition also offers a rare glimpse into the intellectual and emotional life of an educated European woman at a particularly dangerous time in Spanish colonial history. New Mexico’s remoteness attracted crypto-Jews and conversos, Jews who practiced their faith behind a front of Roman Catholicism. But were Doña Teresa and her husband truly conversos? Or were the charges against them simply their enemies’ means of silencing political opposition? Doña Teresa had grown up in Italy and had lived in Colombia as the daughter of the governor of Cartagena. She was far better educated than most of the men in New Mexico. But education and prestige were no protection against persecution. The fine furnishings, fabrics, and tableware that Doña Teresa installed in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe made her an object of suspicion and jealousy, and her ability to read and write in several languages made her the target of outlandish claims. Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition uncovers issues that resonate today: conflicts between religious and secular authority; the weight of evidence versus hearsay in court. Doña Teresa’s voice—set in the context of the history of the Inquisition—is a powerful addition to the memory of that time.

Conversos of the Americas highlights a barbaric and gruesome religious episode, namely the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition, Spanish Civil War, and explores the subtle and hidden identity of the New World Hispanics, most of whom are descendants of Jews who have merged with Native Peoples of the Americas and from Africa. There are few descendants from Mexico ́s conversos except for crypt-Jews who could not flee North to New Mexico. It is written to teach readers about our multi-ethnic world, the horrors of religious intolerance, the newest practices of Islamic hate and murders. Interestingly, this book includes twenty pictures showing in detail the barbaric events and individuals, illustrated by master artists of Spain and beyond.