We are struck by the great discrepancy between the image of conversos and the sometimes sordid reality.
Conversos, of course, were those Jews coerced to renounce Judaism by the Catholic Inquisition in order to avoid being murdered by the Inquisition. Obviously a terrible choice none of us would want to face. Also obviously, a source of unfathomable courage and faith for those who chose to die; and a source of important continuity for those who chose to live, practicing Judaism, such as they could, behind closed doors in blackened basements.
Some of these conversos later escaped the clutches of the Inquisition and returned to Judaism. Turkey is one of the countries that took in these returning, repentant Jews.
But the story is not always so morally admirable. We were reminded of this in a news brief this week that reported the return of a 400-year-old Jewish document to Mexico more than seven decades after it disappeared. The document is the 1595 autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, one of the conversos.
The Mexican Consul General Diego Gomez Pickering may well be right that the document holds “cultural and historical significance” for his country and for the history of the Jewish presence in the Americas. But there is a lot hiding behind these generalities.
It seems that Carvajal was accused of several charges, among them, of course, the charge of concealing that his relatives practiced Judaism in secret. He was tried and found guilty — an eternal stain on the history of the Catholic Church in the Americas. But there was another terrible stain. Carvajal denounced more than 120 other secretly practicing Jews to the Inquisition, according to the New York Historical Society.
We do not know how we would have held up under the literally tortuous circumstances that faced Caravajal, and shudder at even considering the question, but there remains no doubt that, at time, beneath the tragedy of the conversos, lurked a disfigured underside.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
