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  • Beatings and Blessings:The Unorthodox Crypto-Judaism of Duarte de León Jaramillo and his Family1
  • Matthew Warshawsky (bio)

The meticulous recordkeeping that accompanied the Spanish Inquisition's prosecution and eradication of vestigial Jewish practices amongst converts to Catholicism, or New Christians, preserved firsthand knowledge of rites as well as the identity of those individuals who practiced them. No family was more implicated in these efforts in the Inquisition in Mexico during the 1640s than that of the Portuguese New Christian Duarte de León Jaramillo (sometimes spelled Xaramillo). Duarte de León himself, along with his brother Simón Montero, were garroted and burned as relapsed and/or impenitent heretics after the auto grande de fe (Great Act of Faith) of 1649, a public ceremony of much spectacle at which inquisitors sentenced individuals accused of various heresies. León Jaramillo's wife, Isabel Núñez, was saved from the same conflagration by an unusual last-minute admission of guilt that gained her "reconciled" status, which meant admittance back into Catholicism, accompanied by imprisonment (more likely house arrest), confiscation of goods, exile, and lashings. Their six children, Clara Núñez, Francisco de León, Jorge Duarte, Simón de León, Antonia Núñez, and Ana Núñez, were also subjected to similar punishments in the autos de fe of 1647, 1648, and 1649. One of the most eccentric crypto-Jews of the Inquisition era on either side of the Atlantic, Duarte de León belongs in the same category of famous (or infamous) crypto-Jews of the late 1500s and first half of the 1600s that includes Francisco Maldonado de Silva, Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, Manuel Bautista Pérez, and the Carvajal and Rivera families, among many others.2

As complex a figure as any of these individuals, Duarte de León nevertheless stood out from his better-known brethren due to the intensity of his beliefs and the physicality with which he imposed them, in some cases literally, on family members. During his trial, Duarte de León denied all thirty-two chapters of the Inquisition's charges against him as well as the testimony of forty-five witnesses, even though much of this testimony was corroborated through repetition and gathered from the very people whom he had taught to secretly practice Judaism. Using the trial records of León Jaramillo and several of his children, this essay examines the variance between normative Judaism and the Jewish practices of [End Page 15] baptized Catholics, whose Judaism was learned at increasingly greater distances from an open community of fellow believers; demonstrates how crypto-Jews survived for a limited time under the nose of the Inquisition by balancing their outward Catholicism with a clandestine but recognizable Jewish identity; and compares the reactions of parents and their children to pressures to renounce their secret beliefs. The picture that emerges from such a study depicts Duarte de León as an individual who created a Jewish identity in a vacuum based in large measure on a rejection of Catholic teachings, and who then forced those around him to adopt this identity as well.

Despite the complexity and singularity of his crypto-Judaism and the fact that his trial record and those of his children describe it in great detail, historians of the Inquisition in New Spain have not closely studied the case of Duarte de León Jaramillo. Boleslao Lewin does not include him in his biographical studies of crypto-Jews in colonial Latin America. Seymour Liebman, Arnold Wiznitzer, Jose Toribio Medina, and David M. Gitlitz do refer to him several times, but narrowly, particularly with regard to the more unconventional aspects of his Judaism.3 Filling in this lacuna is important because León Jaramillo, who willingly sacrificed his family's well-being for the sake of his beliefs during his nearly twenty years of Inquisitorial scrutiny and detention, personified the complexities and contradictions of the Iberian crypto-Jew. He had first been apprehended in 1628, but the case was suspended. Arrested again in the 1630s, he was reconciled to Catholicism at the auto of 1635 and ordered to pay a fine of two thousand pesos. His trial...

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