Documentary history of Luis de Carvajal the younger and his family in Spain, their migration to Mexico, their life there, their persecution and deaths at the hands of the Inquisition.

In 1579 Philip II awarded a large territory in New Spain to a Portuguese man named Luis de Carvajal. That territory included a significant portion of present day Mexico, as well as portions of Texas and New Mexico. This remarkable man discovered, conquered, and settled most of that territory. He also brought a large group of settlers from Spain and Portugal whose impact on its cultural development was very significant. Many of those settlers were of Jewish descent and some of them were tried by the Inquisition for practicing the faith of their ancestors. This book is a biography of Carvajal and is based on documents that were written during his life or soon after his death. The narrative follows him from birth to death and describes the actions he took to give rise to Nuevo Reino de Le n. These included explorations and discoveries; battles with free Indians; pacifications of Indian uprisings; and legal fights with Crown officials who were determined to eliminate him and to end his government. In the end his enemies defeated him with the help of the Inquisition, but the political entity he gave rise to did not die with him. Samuel Temkin is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. He received a PhD in Engineering from Brown University and has been a visiting professor in Chile, Germany, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Spain. Professor Temkin is the author of "Elements of Acoustics and Suspension Acoustics: An Introduction to the Physics of Suspensions" as well as numerous research articles on Acoustics and Fluid Dynamics, and of many research articles, on the topic of this book. Dr. Temkin was born in Mexico City and was raised in Monterrey, Mexico, the capital city of what once was Nuevo Reino de Le n.

Recounts events surrounding the recovery, in 2017, of a sixteenth-century biographical manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a crypto-Jew executed by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico.

Traces the history of Luis de Carvajal the Younger and his family in Spain, their migration to the New World, their religious practices, and their adventures in New Spain until one by one they were put to flight or indicted by the Inquisition. Luis himself was burned at the stake in 1596 at the age of thirty. He left behind not only his legacy as an exemplary secret Jew but also valuable literary documents--his memoirs, his last will and testament, and his letters to his mother and sisters in the inquisitorial prison.

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews. In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier. 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 richly 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. While the American government offered more religious freedom than had the Spanish colonial rulers, cultural assimilation into Anglo-American society weakened many elements of the crypto-Jewish tradition. Hordes concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community in the late twentieth century. He examines the publicity surrounding the rediscovery of the crypto-Jewish community and explores the challenges inherent in a study that attempts to reconstruct the history of a people who tried to leave no documentary record.

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.