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32 2 Bernarda Manuel Defending Femininity to the Holy Office o n a November day in 1650, a thirty-four-year-old woman was taken to an Inquisition chamber, where, to avoid torture, she declared her innocence and informed her jailers that she had “the curse of women”—her period.1 When inquisitors were not put off by this invocation of a bodily taboo, Bernarda Manuel (c. 1616–?) avoided torture by confessing to having observed the Law of Moses. She then gave an explicit account of the sins she had committed against the church since first learning about Judaism from a nursemaid at age eight. She admitted to fasting occasionally and to keeping the Sabbath, and she named several other Judaizers. Finally, Manuel affirmed that Catholicism was the true religion and the only route to salvation. Poignant as it is to read this woman’s forced renunciation of her religious beliefs and practices, Manuel’s confession is not unique among cases of conversos.2 Like many suspected Crypto-Jews tried by the Inquisition, in the end she confessed to the heretical activities she had denied during her eleven-month trial. In keeping with strategies meant to deter further accusations , Manuel put the blame on a proselytizing servant who, if she existed at all, probably could not be located by the Inquisition. Although Manuel provided some details about her alleged Judaism, it is impossible to glean an accurate understanding of her religious beliefs from her confession. Acting under pressure and responding to specific accusations, Manuel gave the information necessary to appease her inquisitors. Was Manuel a practicing Jew, or was she simply a Catholic descendant of Jews caught in the Inquisition’s mission to purge the country of all signs of heterodoxy? The signs point toward a converso background, although it is impossible to know whether she ever practiced Judaism. Among scholars of Spanish Jewry, debate persists as to whether Jewish practices and culture Bernarda Manuel 33 continued after the first wave of inquisitorial furor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.3 I believe that Manuel’s story is one of the hundreds that provide insight into what seems to have been a thriving, albeit clandestine, converso culture. Manuel’s parents immigrated to Spain from the Algarve region of southern Portugal around 1630. It is likely that they were conversos who left Portugal either to avoid prosecution by that country’s increasingly vigilant Inquisition or to take advantage of the proconverso reforms of Philip IV and his favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, in the 1620s.4 That her family immigrated to Seville might suggest that they sought a new home among the large converso population in that city. Her father’s profession as a doctor and her husband’s as a cloth merchant might be clues to family background , as conversos comprised a large part of those trades.5 It is worth noting that Manuel’s husband tried to deflect blame onto her during his Judaizing trial by testifying that Manuel, her three sisters, and her brother-in-law tried to convert him to Judaism. Whether the couple and their families did indeed observe Jewish practices cannot be known for certain, but the details surrounding them suggest that at the very least they came from a converso background. Like many descendants of the persecuted Jews, they may well have observed both Catholic and Judaic rituals. Regardless of whether conversos’ confessions reflected the truth of their religious beliefs or merely parroted what the Inquisition wanted to hear, we cannot help but notice the double meaning behind Manuel’s affirmation that Catholicism was the only route to salvation. Indeed, had she refused to make such a confession, Manuel could have been banished, whipped, or even “relaxed ,” a process by which the Inquisition, an arm of the church, avoided killing , instead turning individuals over to the secular arm of the law for public execution. Her admission of guilt and her express desire for reconciliation with the church led to lesser punishments. The Inquisition confiscated all her worldly goods, obligated her to wear a penitential garment (sanbenito), and forced her to abjure heretical activities during the public spectacle of an auto de fe. Finally, they sentenced her to perpetual imprisonment (cárcel perpetua). Bernarda Manuel’s is a story about immigrants and Jews, but her Inquisition trial gives us a glimpse into more than just religious and ethnic intolerance . In a compelling twelve-page autobiographical statement (memorial) written in her own hand, Manuel crafted...

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