A historical contextualization of Sephardi apostates and self-styled missionaries of the seventeenth century

Abstract

The article historicizes the behavior of a handful of penurious travelers of Jewish origin who were tried by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in the seventeenth-century. Their crime was having themselves repeatedly baptized. In some cases, they also presented themselves to local conversos (the baptized descendants of Iberian Jews) and religious authorities as expert Jewish indoctrinators. Mostly unpublished and hitherto under-explored inquisitorial documents reveal that essentially the actions of these transients were not exotic. Rather, they replicated and, on occasion, parodied cultural models found among contemporary diasporic Sephardim, both ideals and modes of social and religious conduct.