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  • Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World
  • Jonathan Israel
Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World. By Miriam Bodian. [The Modern Jewish Experience.] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2007. Pp. xx, 279. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-253-34861-6.)

This account of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Iberian world provides a skilful, informative, and extensive (but by no means comprehensive) survey and interpretation of what is by any reckoning a most remarkable phenomenon in the history of the Inquisition, early-modern religiosity, and crypto-Judaism. Moreover, the author is quite right to say this phenomenon—crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Iberian world in early-modern times—has hitherto lacked any broad or up-to-date treatment that accounts for recent methodological approaches in historical studies. She is to be thanked for filling a significant gap in our knowledge. [End Page 358]

From a purely quantitative point of view, crypto-Jewish martyrdom was a much more considerable phenomenon in the 1480s, 1490s, and the early 1500s than later. Most crypto-Jews put to death for “judaizing” in the Iberian world suffered martyrdom in the early period, immediately following the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain to combat Jewish influence among the many former Jews and their descendants converted to Christianity in and after 1391, through intimidation or force. Nevertheless, the author is perfectly justified in chiefly focusing her attention on the much fewer but far better documented cases that occurred between the end of the sixteenth century and the late-seventeenth century in Portugal, Spanish America, and Spain. This is because these martyrdoms are better documented in individual cases—in some cases running to many hundreds of pages of recorded evidence—than the earlier martyrdoms, and also because their precise significance in religious, cultural, and intellectual history can be more clearly and fully established. At a time when the Catholic Church’s authority was coming under increasing strain from the Reformation, secularism, materialist philosophy, and the Enlightenment, the post-1550 cases proved much more disturbing and damaging to the general stance, international reputation, and status of the Church than the earlier cases.

Not all of the most dramatic and widely discussed cases of “Jewish” martyrdom that Bodian analyzes actually involved individuals of Jewish descent or, indeed, religious commitment to anything resembling rabbinic Judaism. One interesting case she discusses is that of the young Portuguese Capuchin friar Diogo d’Asumpcão, who, despite his negligible Jewish ancestry, developed an aggressive, violent critique of the Catholic Church and its teachings, especially what he viewed as its misreading of Scripture. After some two years of imprisonment and intensive interrogation, as well as unprecedented efforts to persuade him of his “errors,” he remained defiant and was burned at the stake in Lisbon in August 1603. Another Portuguese individual, Diogo Lopes Pinhanços, was burned at the stake in Coimbra of 1571; although his relatives assumed he died in the “Law of Moses,” his trial records show that he did not believe in God and was a complete materialist skeptic. In both cases, however, both the Iberian Catholic Church and the crypto-Jewish and Jewish world, rather typically, strove to classify these men as “Jewish” in ethnic as well as religious terms.

Despite the odds against them, the Jewish martyrs did indeed exact a kind of retribution through their defiance and the powerful imagery associated with their deaths. They materially affected the international standing of the Church through their effect on the culture of New Christian communities in the Iberian world and through the circulation of reports of their staged, dramatic martyrdoms in the Protestant world and distant Jewish communities—deaths at the hands of seemingly cruel, relentless, and also allegedly “ignorant” and un-Scriptural ecclesiastical authorities. The greatest damage to conventional assumptions, paradoxically, arose from the central significance of martyrdom itself in the Church’s own teachings. [End Page 359]

Spinoza was among those who pointed this out, c. late 1675, in his answer to Albert Burgh, a young Dutch Protestant who had converted to Catholicism in Italy and then sent a passionate plea to his former friend and mentor in...

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