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.

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.

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"

The distinct religious culture of early modern Spain -- characterized by religious unity at a time when fierce civil wars between Catholics and Protestants fractured northern Europe -- is further understood through examining the expulsion of the Jews and suspected Muslims. While these two groups had previously lived peaceably, if sometimes uneasily, with their Christian neighbors throughout much of the medieval era, the expulsions brought a new intensity to Spanish Christian perceptions of both the moriscos (converts from Islam) and the judeoconversos (converts from Judaism). In Parallel Histories, James S. Amelang reconstructs the compelling struggle of converts to coexist with a Christian majority that suspected them of secretly adhering to their ancestral faiths and destroying national religious unity in the process. Discussing first Muslims and then Jews in turn, Amelang explores not only the expulsions themselves but also religious beliefs and practices, social and professional characteristics, the construction of collective and individual identities, cultural creativity, and, finally, the difficulties of maintaining orthodox rites and tenets under conditions of persecution. Despite the oppression these two groups experienced, the descendants of the judeoconversos would ultimately be assimilated into the mainstream, unlike their morisco counterparts, who were exiled in 1609. Amelang masterfully presents a complex narrative that not only gives voice to religious minorities in early modern Spain but also focuses on one of the greatest divergences in the history of European Christianity.

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.

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.