The Great Conspiracy in New Spain

Abstract

In the introduction to his The Jews in the Canary Islands, Lucien Wolf wrote almost a half-century ago that “The work of the… branches of the Holy Office in America has only been made known to us piecemeal… For social data relating to the great body of Marranos the records have not hitherto been studied.” These records of the trial proceedings, called procesos, still constitute a fairly virgin field of social, religious and economic Latin American history in general and specifically for the history of Jews and Judaism.A few have written articles about Mexican Jews in colonial times after a cursory study of a few documents and several acclaimed texts. It is, therefore, not surprising that the results are superficial and often suffused with errors. The foregoing may be illustrated by statements in an article published in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Among the numerous errors that appeared therein are “among 2,281 trials of the Mexican Holy Office, 351 concerned crypto-Jews…” and that “By the end of the seventeenth century, the whole crypto-Jewish community had been destroyed.”