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  • Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World
  • Sara T. Nalle
Miriam Bodian. Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. xvii + 278 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $35. ISBN: 978–0–253–34861–6.

In Dying in the Law of Moses, Miriam Bodian focuses on four celebrated Jewish martyrs from the Iberian world who were burned alive by the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions. The four men, Luis de Carvajal, Diogo dAsumpção, Francisco Maldonado de Silva, and Lope de Vera y Alarcón, came to their Jewish faith via diverse paths. None of the four men had been raised as a crypto-Jew, two did not even have proven Jewish ancestry, and not one of them had set out to [End Page 546] become a martyr before his arrest. Yet somehow each of these four came to choose the most extreme and rare form of resistance to the Catholic Church’s hegemony: death by fire.

The book consists of seven chapters — two to introduce the historical setting and explain Bodian’s choice of “dogmatist” crypto-Jewish martyrs, one for each of the four martyrs selected for study, and a last to explore how the Portuguese-Jewish diaspora in Amsterdam responded to the martyrs’ idealized stories. Sometimes less is more, as in the case of this book. Just four martyrs, but accompanying them there is such a wealth of material, scholarship, and ideas! Bodian’s sources take the reader to colonial Latin America, Portugal, Spain, and Amsterdam and cover a rich mix of religious and social currents. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, the descendants of Sephardic Jews were largely cut off from rabbinic Judaism and struggled in isolation to preserve an imperfectly remembered religion that was handed down from generation to generation. Their faith was heavily influenced by the Christian culture that surrounded them — including fragmentary knowledge of Protestantism. In the case of the four men under study, Bible study as young adults led them to discover a scripture-based version of Judaism that also gave them the tools to question Catholicism’s claims to truth.

Although scholars have written extensively about Carvajal and Vera y Alarcón, Bodian’s goal here is to understand how certain individuals came to choose martyrdom, and then to follow how their examples were received in Northern Europe’s Jewish communities. The best way to gain some understanding about the motivations of Jewish martyrs from Iberian lands, Bodian decided, was to find well-documented cases of “dogmatista” Judaizers. Dogmatista was a term that inquisitors applied to prisoners whom they considered heresiarchs, who engaged in religious disputation with their judges and, in the right circumstances, left behind long and rich trial records that might be used by modern-day scholars to unravel the processes that led certain individuals to choose the stake.

Some Jews of the time were tempted to call every crytpo-Jew who died at the hands of the Inquisition a “martyr,” but strictly speaking, the Iberian conversos were apostates because they had lived as Catholics, and if they recanted in order to avoid being burned alive, they died as Catholics as well. But the inquisitors’ determination that every prisoner confess to his or her errors and be reconciled with the faith meant that some individuals would wind up resisting to the end. Indeed, in the four cases presented for study, one sees exactly how the Inquisition’s tactics, which usually successfully broke down the prisoner’s will, drove these particular men in the opposite direction. They found their faith as a result of months, if not years, of isolation, hardship, and argument with their tormentors. The secret records of the Holy Office reveal that one of them, Diogo dAsumpção, even became delusional and believed he was the Messiah, but to the outside world he became known as one more believer executed for upholding the truth of the Law of Moses. [End Page 547]

Throughout the book, Bodian is sensitive to both the personal circumstances of her subjects and the wider historical milieu. The final chapter, “Echoes in...

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