The Jews in New Spain

The Jews in New Spain
Author: Seymour B. Liebman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1970
Genre: History
ISBN:

Mexico was a colony of Spain from 1521 to 1821 and was then known as New Spain. The colony encompassed all of modern Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, and the southwestern portion of the present United States. Within this territory, Jewish people who had immigrated from Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the Middle East carried on their tradition virtually surreptitiously for almost three centuries. From 1521 on the Jews inhabited the area without interruption but--except for a few decades--the did so illegally. They had material gains and high posts in their command and stood to lose all, including their lives, if discovered to be adherents of the law of Moses. The Mexican Jew of today is not the descendant of the Jews of colonial times; Mexican Jewish history after 1821 involves new people and new communities. The branches of the Spanish Inquisition that reached into New Spain from 1521 to 1851 left a vast legacy of documents that are priceless to the historian. The trial records reveal in meticulous detail the search for heretics and their punishment in dramatic autos-da-fé but. more significantly, unfold the panorama of their lives. Professor Liebman has researched and translated many of the Inquisition documents, and through these and other sources, has defined, described, and analyzed the personalities, lives and customs of representative Hispanic Jews. Two outstanding families, those of Luis de Carvajal and Thomas Treviño de Sobremonte, are treated in full in separate chapters. Other chapters trace the colonists from their departure from Spain through their centuries of faith and flame in the New World. -- Jacket.

A History of the Jews in Christian Spain

A History of the Jews in Christian Spain
Author: Yitzhak Baer
Publisher: Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America
Total Pages: 486
Release: 1961
Genre: History
ISBN:

Volume II: In the second volume of his classic exploration of the Spanish-Jewish community, Baer covers such major historical events as the Spanish Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. This work examines the effect of church policy on the Jewish population in the 15th century, and the points at which Jewish culture as a whole was altered by Spain's actions.

Jews of Spain

Jews of Spain
Author: Jane S. Gerber
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1994-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0029115744

The history of the Jews of Spain is a remarkable story that begins in the remote past and continues today. For more than a thousand years, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community noted for its richness and virtuosity. Summarily expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their tragedy of expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another. Indeed, in defiance of all logic and expectation, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain became an occasion for renewed creativity. Nor have five hundred years of wandering extinguished the identity of the Sephardic Jews, or diminished the proud memory of the dazzling civilization, which they created on Spanish soil. This book is intended to serve as an introduction and scholarly guide to that history.

To the End of the Earth

To the End of the Earth
Author: Stanley M. Hordes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2005-08-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231503180

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews. In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier. Drawing on individual biographies (including those of colonial officials accused of secretly practicing Judaism), family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a richly detailed account of the economic, social and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846. While the American government offered more religious freedom than had the Spanish colonial rulers, cultural assimilation into Anglo-American society weakened many elements of the crypto-Jewish tradition. Hordes concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community in the late twentieth century. He examines the publicity surrounding the rediscovery of the crypto-Jewish community and explores the challenges inherent in a study that attempts to reconstruct the history of a people who tried to leave no documentary record.

Art of Estrangement

Art of Estrangement
Author: Pamela Anne Patton
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271053836

"Examines the influential role of visual images in reinforcing the efforts of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms to renegotiate the role of their Jewish minority following the territorial expansions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries"--Provided by publisher.

Spain and the Jews

Spain and the Jews
Author: Elie Kedourie
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1992
Genre: Jews
ISBN: 9780500251133

Five hundred years ago Jews living in Spain were given a Stark choice: be baptized or leave the country. the expulsion of the Sephardim - the term for Spain's Jews - was a turning point in the history of the Iberian Peninsula and one o the greatest upheavals in jewish hostory since the diaspora. published to mark the quincentenary of the sephardi exodus, here is a complete and objective account of these traumatic events.

The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain

The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
Author: Haim Beinart
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2001-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1909821004

Beinart's detailed magnum opus focuses on the practicalities of the expulsion and its consequences, both for those expelled and those remaining behind. Analysis of hundreds of archival documents enables him to take history out of the realm of abstraction and give it concrete reality, and in so doing he also sheds much light on Jewish life in Spain before the expulsion.

Converts in New Spain

Converts in New Spain
Author: Alicia Gojman Goldberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre:
ISBN:

This book, originally published in the 1980s is one of the pioneering studies of the Jewish population in Mexico. The author, Alicia Gojman not only has a long and outstanding career as a historian; she has also played a significant role in the culture of contemporary Mexican Jews. She has been the promoter of a cultural project that has managed to combine important documentary collections maintained in a vital center dedicated to the study and dissemination of the Judeo-Mexican culture. She has promoted far-reaching editorial projects, in which the memories, images, documents and contributions of generations of Jews in Mexico have been combined.Converts in New Spain, is a study about the Converts and Crypto-Jews who travelled along with conquerors and colonizers to the New World. 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, is the end of the history of Spanish Judaism and the beginning of the history of the convert in the Americas. The history of the converts in the New World starts with its discovery, since they themselves participated in the exploration and colonization in a much grater degree than in commonly acknowledged. As part of the Spanish society, they came to the Americas feeling like other Christian Spaniards, "chosen" by God to find in this New World, a New Jerusalem. Their integration to the colonial society was not easy, when they were asked for their "blood cleanness," or when they were harassed by the Inquisition Tribunal. However, these converts, participated in the economic, political, social and cultural development of New Spain. Originally published in Spanish by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, this is the first English edition.About the author: Alicia Gojman Goldberg was born in Mexico city. She has a PhD degree in History from UNAM, where she is a professor and researcher at the FES Acatlán. She has published over 20 books and 194 articles about Mexican and Jewish history.She is the Honorary Director of the Jewish Research and Documentation Center in Mexico; a member of the Mexican National Research System since 1984. She has received UNAM's Sor Juana in 2005, an Honorary Fellowship from Tel Aviv's university in 2006; the Cultural award from the Mexico-Israel Cultural Institute in 2007. The Anastasio Sarabia Award for Archival work in 2009. During her management as president of the Ashkenazi Community Documentation and Research Center she obtained the award as the best private archive awarded by the National Archive of Mexico and UNESCO's Memory of the World award in 2009.