Renée Levine Melammed. Heretics or Daughters of Israel: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vi, 256 pp.

Abstract

The forced conversions of perhaps a third of the Jews of Spain in 1391 presented significant dilemmas for the Spanish Crown, the Spanish Church, and the conversos themselves. While the Church insisted that baptism, even by force, was irrevocable, instructing and assimilating so many converts was a major challenge. Conversos, too, were in a quandary: Some chose to relocate and revert to Judaism openly; others accepted their altered situation and not a few pursued new possibilities in Church and public roles; many married their children into Old Christian families. There were New Christians, however, who relinquished neither birthplace nor heritage, choosing to observe Judaism surreptitiously. By the last decades of the fifteenth century, when an increasingly anxious Church encouraged a reluctant Crown to establish an Inquisition directed at conversos engaging in Jewish practices, women had become a particular target. As Renee Levine Melammed observes in her detailed and well-argued analyses of Inquisition proceedings against women accused of judaizing, “The Inquisitors realized the unusual importance of the home in crypto-Judaism and understood that women willingly became the carriers of the tradition they viewed as inimical” (p. 15). Melammed's delineations of the interactions between these women and their adversaries in the inquisitorial courts demonstrates the determination of some conversa women to subvert the teachings of the Church and risk prison or death to provide for the Jewish continuity of their families.