Chapter 1

       Introduction

      On August 18, 1661, Cristobal Méndez Silveira, a thirty-eight-year-old merchant, deposed in Madrid before three officers of the Spanish Inquisition. He revealed that he was a Judeoconverso, or “New Christian”—namely a baptized Christian of Jewish ancestry—and a native of Seville who had been fully educated in the Roman Catholic faith. On the eve of his deposition, Méndez had been living and trading in Madrid for nearly a year. During the prior eleven years, however, he had resided in the Netherlands as a member of Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Throughout that time, he had traveled extensively in the western Jewish Diaspora, socializing and worshipping among Jews in such places as Venice, Livorno, Bourdeaux, and Bayonne. He had since returned to Spain, where Judaism had been banned for centuries. In the remainder of his deposition, Méndez provided damning information regarding 105 of his fellow conversos, several of whom were prosecuted as a result of his testimony. By the end of his depositions, Méndez had renounced Judaism and had once again embraced Catholicism.¹

      Méndez was only one of hundreds of Judeoconversos who returned to Iberian territory throughout the 1600s despite the fact that they had flagrantly abandoned Christianity and were therefore in danger of being persecuted by Inquisitorial authorities in Spain and Portugal. This book is an attempt to explain the behavior of these returnees and explore their mentality on historical grounds. To begin that exploration, it is necessary to become acquainted with the cultural and historical situation of early modern Judeoconversos.

      Central Dilemmas of Converso Existence

      Iberian history and Jewish history intersect at various points. One fateful intersection occurs in the Early Modern Period,² when thousands of Judeoconversos³—the Christian descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—negotiated their individual and social identities amid fierce debates concerning the true and proper loyalties of New Christians. Among so-called Old Christians in Spain and Portugal, opinions varied as to the moral, religious, and social character of Judeoconversos, yet suspicions that New Christians were in fact nefarious Judaizers (secret Jews) were extremely widespread. Fear and antipathy toward conversos informed Iberian concepts of social danger from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Expressed in the allied (though not always concordant) ideologies of honor, purity of blood (pureza de sangre), and purity of faith (pureza de fe), a virulent phobia motivated attempts to stigmatize and isolate conversos throughout the very period during which many of the latter struggled to blend into the Ibero-Christian mainstream.

      For many Judeoconversos who escaped to the Sephardi Diaspora, the question of their legitimate place in the world was ostensibly solved once they opted to become absorbed into Jewish milieux. Yet even when they chose to adopt the faith of their ancestors, Sephardim of converso origin developed unique responses to fellow Jews and to normative Judaism that revealed the difficulty of harmonizing a newfound Judaic heritage with an intimate knowledge of and affinity toward Iberian culture. Compounding that difficulty was the lingering question: Were Judeoconversos who stayed in the Iberian Peninsula as practicing Christians, or returned to it as penitent Christians, really Jewish? Clear halakhic dicta notwithstanding, this conundrum was never solved definitively within Sephardi kehillot. For instance, it does not appear that rabbinical authorities in the Sephardi strongholds of the Netherlands, Italy, and Northern Africa applied the talmudic principle “although he sins, he is a Jew” with systematic consistency.⁴ It is also doubtful that any consensus on this question