François Soyer. Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 315 pp.

Abstract

Among the many myths spurred by the Covid-19 emergency is the false claim that Jews caused this pandemic to secretly dominate the world.1 Soyer's book confirms how often conspiracy theories entail a perception of Jews—whether openly professing or “hidden,” through religious conversion or assimilation—as quintessential conspirators. In this vitriolic leaflet, Quevedo explicitly invoked “the correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople” to denounce Portuguese conversos as a dangerous fifth column in Iberia, although he expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of that epistolary exchange, as if anticipating sympathetic future readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.5 In chapter 2 (54–92) and in the epilogue (275–81), Soyer painstakingly probes the origins of these forged letters, which were initially used by Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martinez Siliceo (1477–1547) to support anticonverso exclusionary laws of “purity of blood.” [...]without attempting to show an organic continuity, Soyer demonstrates that the (alleged) epistolary exchange between deceitful Iberian conversos and open Jews living in the Ottoman Empire was recycled through subsequent antisemitic reverberations. 8 It is worth mentioning that for Soyer, Iberian anticonverso conspiracy myths were not exclusively a top-down phenomenon: “The existence of a ‘Jewish plot’ to destroy the Church and Christian community was seemingly accepted as an incontrovertible fact by members of all social ranks” (137). [...]among the many fascinating examples sprinkled throughout the book, the author refers to an anonymous eighteenth-century painting of an alleged flagellation of a crucifix by Portuguese