History
Iberian background
The Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula stretches back to Roman times, and for centuries Sephardic Jews developed an extraordinary culture under Muslim and Christian rule. But medieval anti-Semitism closed one door after another. In 1391, a wave of pogroms devastated the Jewish quarters of Seville, Cordoba, Toledo, and Barcelona -- thousands died, and thousands more converted to Christianity under duress. It was the first great rupture.
The second came a century later. On March 31, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of all Jews who did not accept baptism. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people are estimated to have left Spain in the following months. Many crossed the border into Portugal, where King Manuel I initially welcomed them -- only to decree their forced conversion in 1497, eliminating the last legal option for openly practicing Judaism on the Peninsula.
Those who stayed -- the conversos -- occupied an impossible position. Christian society viewed them with perpetual suspicion. In towns like Baena, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, converso families faced systematic persecution and discrimination, trapped between a faith they had abandoned under coercion and a society that never fully accepted them. Ecclesiastical and civil institutions demanded proof of limpieza de sangre, and the Inquisition watched for any sign that the old customs were still alive.
It was in this climate of surveillance that the idea of crossing the ocean was born. The New World offered distance — thousands of leagues between a converso and the inquisitors who knew his lineage. Many judeoconversos joined the conquest and colonization of the Americas seeking that relative freedom to maintain their ancestral customs.
Converso emigration was not accidental. It was a deliberate survival strategy. Families who embarked for the Indies knew that crossing the Atlantic would not automatically free them from the Inquisition — but it would put them far from the neighbors, parish priests, and informers who knew them in their hometowns. In the New World, a converso could reinvent himself: change names, invent a genealogy, present himself as a cristiano viejo. The anonymity of the continent was their best protection.
The first conversos in the Americas
Conversos arrived in the New World from the very beginning. Hernando Alonso, one of the first documented cases, landed in Cuba with Hernan Cortes in 1520 and participated in the conquest of Tenochtitlan. For nearly a decade he lived like any other colonist, serving as a witness in legal matters from 1529. His presence proves that the converso story in Mexico begins with the conquest itself.
Gonzalo de Salazar arrived in New Spain appointed by King Charles I as factor of the Royal Treasury -- one of the most important positions in colonial government. His case is revealing: had he been born fifty or a hundred years later, during the Counter-Reformation, his Sephardic ancestry would have barred him from any public office. But in the early years of the colony, before the inquisitorial apparatus was fully consolidated, a converso could rise to manage the finances of the viceroyalty.
They were not exceptions. Conquistadors, merchants, physicians, artisans — conversos participated at every level of the colonial enterprise. Many integrated so successfully that their descendants forgot the Jewish origins of the family. Others kept the memory in secret, waiting for a moment when they could live their faith without risk.
The Spanish Crown attempted to prevent converso emigration to the Indies. A series of royal decrees prohibited the boarding of persons of Jewish or Moorish ancestry, and the passenger licensing system — recorded in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville — required proof of limpieza de sangre. But these prohibitions were porous: conversos forged documents, purchased testimonies, and used intermediaries to circumvent the controls. Some embarked under invented identities; others traveled as servants of cristiano viejo families. Port authorities in Seville and Cádiz knew the system leaked, but the demographic and economic pressures of colonization meant they often looked the other way.
The Inquisition reaches New Spain
Distance was not enough. From 1522, episcopal authority was already carrying out inquisitorial functions in New Spain, though irregularly and without a formal tribunal. In 1528, the first public execution involving crypto-Jews took place -- just seven years after the fall of Tenochtitlan. The persecution did not wait for the colony to consolidate.
But it was in 1571 that Philip II formally established the Tribunal of the Santo Oficio in Mexico City, initiating the systematic persecution of judaizantes. The tribunal installed itself in a building that would dominate the center of the viceregal capital for two and a half centuries, until its abolition in 1821. Its jurisdiction encompassed all of New Spain -- from Guatemala to the most remote northern provinces.
Over its 250 years of operation, the Tribunal condemned approximately 1,500 people for observing the Mosaic Laws. In 1594, the first formal autos de fe were held in Mexico City -- public ceremonies of punishment designed both to punish and to terrify. The accused paraded through the streets wearing sambenitos -- penitential garments that marked them as heretics -- before hearing their sentences in the main plaza.
The effect was devastating but not total. Persecution pushed the conversos toward the periphery, toward the northern provinces where the inquisitorial presence was weaker. But it did not eliminate them. Family and commercial networks reconfigured, practices became more discreet, and faith survived — adapted, transformed, but not extinguished.
The comisarios of the Santo Oficio — its local representatives in the provinces — rarely had the resources or the training needed to investigate complex cases of Judaism. In regions like Nuevo León, Zacatecas, or Los Altos de Jalisco, the inquisitorial presence amounted to little more than receiving denunciations and forwarding them to the central tribunal in Mexico City. That administrative distance was the salvation of many converso families who settled on the viceroyalty's periphery, where surveillance was nominal and daily life offered the privacy needed to maintain inherited customs.
The Carvajal family
Few lineages embody the converso tragedy like the Carvajals. In 1579, Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva obtained a royal charter granting him the right to colonize and govern a vast territory encompassing what are now the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila. Carvajal was a converso -- and he knew it. The Nuevo Reino de Leon was not just a colonial enterprise: it was a deliberate attempt to establish a community beyond the reach of the Inquisition.
Under his governance, northeastern New Spain became a land of opportunity. Monterrey and Saltillo were founded within this territory, attracting converso families seeking distance from the Santo Oficio. Carvajal promoted livestock, agriculture, and commerce, creating a regional economy that depended heavily on the converso settlers he had brought.
But the Inquisition reached even there. Dona Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, mother of Luis de Carvajal "the Younger," was arrested along with her sister Isabel. Two of her sons -- Baltasar and Miguel -- escaped Mexico City and fled to Rome, where they continued to practice Judaism openly. They did not escape inquisitorial justice: they were burned in effigy at the auto de fe of 1596.
The governor himself was arrested by the inquisitors and died in prison. His nephew, Luis de Carvajal the Younger, left the most extraordinary Memorias of crypto-Judaism in New Spain before being burned at the stake on December 8, 1596. He was just twenty-eight years old. The auto de fe of 1596 marked the destruction of an entire family -- and became the most remembered episode of inquisitorial persecution in the Americas.
The Gran Complicidad
Between 1642 and 1649, the Inquisition in New Spain unleashed the broadest persecution of judaizantes in the history of the viceroyalty. What the Santo Oficio called the "Gran Complicidad" was in reality the dismantling of a network of merchants, families, and communities bound by ties of religion, commerce, and kinship across the entire territory -- and beyond, with connections extending to Portugal, Brazil, and other colonies.
Simon Vaez Sevilla, a prominent Portuguese merchant, was one of the central figures. Vaez Sevilla was not just a businessman: he oversaw the housing, relocation, marriage, burial, and religious needs of the conversos under his care. He was, in essence, the leader of a clandestine community -- a kind of covert rabbi who organized Jewish life in secret within a society that forbade it under penalty of death.
When the threat became imminent, Vaez Sevilla and others placed their assets in the hands of trusted Portuguese friends -- a maneuver that reveals both the magnitude of their fortunes and the certainty that disaster was approaching. Their networks of kinship and commerce extended through family connections to Portugal, the Canary Islands, and other American colonies.
In 1646, an auto de fe reconciled 41 judaizantes. The culmination came on April 11, 1649, at the largest auto de fe in the history of New Spain. Tomas Trevino de Sobremonte was burned at the stake alongside his wife Maria Gomez and others. The Gran Complicidad tore apart entire families, confiscated fortunes, and marked the end of organized converso life in the viceroyalty. But not the end of hidden faith.
After the storm: 18th and 19th centuries
When the Inquisition waned in the eighteenth century -- weakened by the Bourbon reforms and the spirit of the Enlightenment -- the crypto-Jewish communities did not disappear. They became invisible. Conversos and their descendants had scattered to the most remote regions: northern Mexico, New Mexico, Los Altos de Jalisco. There, far from any surveillance, they led anonymous lives within Christian society.
The formal abolition of the Inquisition in 1821, with Mexican independence, did not produce a public resurgence of Judaism. By then, most families of converso origin had lost explicit awareness of their roots. What remained were customs without explanation -- candles lit on Fridays, aversion to pork, stones on graves, sayings that didn't fit the surrounding Catholic tradition.
Hidden Sephardic identity survived in unexpected ways. Surnames that appear in Inquisition records are still common in northeastern Mexico. Family traditions whispered from one generation to the next preserve echoes of practices five hundred years old. What for centuries was a family secret is finally being documented — through genealogy, colonial archives, and increasingly, DNA analysis.
Mexican independence in 1821 brought the formal abolition of the Inquisition, but not a resurgence of Judaism. The conversos who had survived centuries of persecution were so assimilated that most no longer had explicit awareness of their Jewish origins. What remained was a fragmentary inheritance: domestic customs without explanation, surnames that sounded different, oral traditions about a mysterious past. Only from the twentieth century onward — with the work of historians like Alfonso Toro, Seymour Liebman, and Solange Alberro, and more recently with the tools of genetics — has that inheritance begun to be reconstructed. The history of Sephardic Jews in Mexico did not end with the Inquisition: it is being rediscovered now.