Mexico was a colony of Spain from 1521 to 1821 and was then known as New Spain. The colony encompassed all of modern Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, and the southwestern portion of the present United States. Within this territory, Jewish people who had immigrated from Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the Middle East carried on their tradition virtually surreptitiously for almost three centuries. From 1521 on the Jews inhabited the area without interruption but--except for a few decades--the did so illegally. They had material gains and high posts in their command and stood to lose all, including their lives, if discovered to be adherents of the law of Moses. The Mexican Jew of today is not the descendant of the Jews of colonial times; Mexican Jewish history after 1821 involves new people and new communities. The branches of the Spanish Inquisition that reached into New Spain from 1521 to 1851 left a vast legacy of documents that are priceless to the historian. The trial records reveal in meticulous detail the search for heretics and their punishment in dramatic autos-da-fé but. more significantly, unfold the panorama of their lives. Professor Liebman has researched and translated many of the Inquisition documents, and through these and other sources, has defined, described, and analyzed the personalities, lives and customs of representative Hispanic Jews. Two outstanding families, those of Luis de Carvajal and Thomas Treviño de Sobremonte, are treated in full in separate chapters. Other chapters trace the colonists from their departure from Spain through their centuries of faith and flame in the New World. -- Jacket.

Mexico was a colony of Spain from 1521 to 1821 and was then known as New Spain. The colony encompassed all of modern Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, and the southwestern portion of the present United States. Within this territory, Jewish people who had immigrated from Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the Middle East carried on their tradition virtually surreptitiously for almost three centuries. From 1521 on the Jews inhabited the area without interruption but--except for a few decades--the did so illegally. They had material gains and high posts in their command and stood to lose all, including their lives, if discovered to be adherents of the law of Moses. The Mexican Jew of today is not the descendant of the Jews of colonial times; Mexican Jewish history after 1821 involves new people and new communities. The branches of the Spanish Inquisition that reached into New Spain from 1521 to 1851 left a vast legacy of documents that are priceless to the historian. The trial records reveal in meticulous detail the search for heretics and their punishment in dramatic autos-da-fé but. more significantly, unfold the panorama of their lives. Professor Liebman has researched and translated many of the Inquisition documents, and through these and other sources, has defined, described, and analyzed the personalities, lives and customs of representative Hispanic Jews. Two outstanding families, those of Luis de Carvajal and Thomas Treviño de Sobremonte, are treated in full in separate chapters. Other chapters trace the colonists from their departure from Spain through their centuries of faith and flame in the New World. -- Jacket.

The history of the Jews of Spain is a remarkable story that begins in the remote past and continues today. For more than a thousand years, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community noted for its richness and virtuosity. Summarily expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their tragedy of expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another. Indeed, in defiance of all logic and expectation, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain became an occasion for renewed creativity. Nor have five hundred years of wandering extinguished the identity of the Sephardic Jews, or diminished the proud memory of the dazzling civilization, which they created on Spanish soil. This book is intended to serve as an introduction and scholarly guide to that history.

Volume II: In the second volume of his classic exploration of the Spanish-Jewish community, Baer covers such major historical events as the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. This work examines the effect of church policy on the Jewish population in the 15th century, and the points at which Jewish culture as a whole was altered by Spain's actions.

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.

"Examines the influential role of visual images in reinforcing the efforts of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms to renegotiate the role of their Jewish minority following the territorial expansions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries"--Provided by publisher.

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