Martin Cohen’s exciting study is a collective biography of the Carvajal family, crypto-Jews in sixteenth-century New Spain, and their web of connections in the converso underground. How tenuous a web this was is amply documented in Cohen’s minute description from Inquisition records of the small band of “misguided tailors and shoemakers” (more accurately, small entrepreneurs) who composed the converso community. In drawing a picture of the social bonds joining conversos, Cohen is particularly insistent on the relationship between Inquisition pressure, the need for secrecy, and group cohesion. Security considerations were so overweening that they practically mandated endogamous marriages among a relatively small group of conversos; on occasion they would refuse to marry Old Christians for fear of the Inquisition. The result was to foster greater cohesiveness by keeping the circle relatively closed and stable.
If the group’s social cohesion was tenuous at best, its cultural boundaries were even less secure. Cohen demonstrates throughout the book the pervasiveness of the Catholic environment in shaping the impoverished religious doctrine of crypto-Judaism, subjective in form, and in content a “precipitate created by isolation and persecution” (p. 94) scarcely related to normative Judaism. The adjustment that the conversos made to Spanish colonial society reflected both acculturation (leading to such syncretistic practices as kneeling for prayer, conducting religious services in Latin, and belief in resurrection) and reactive adaptation (exaggerated reverence for “St. Esther” as a counterpoint to the Virgin).
Cohen’s narrative is extremely dramatic, a palliative to pedantic monographs, written in a style made possible by the literal way in which the Inquisition recorded testimony, which permits the recreation of whole conversations. The entire context of converso life lends itself to drama: constant pressure from the Inquisition; the consequent need for secrecy, even among members of the same family; indeed, the splitting of family groups along the lines of religious conviction. The martyrdom of the Carvajals makes a mockery of the clichés of frontier evangelical Catholicism: the crypto-Jews, by rejecting the dominant religious cant, went to the stake resolutely, in unwitting emulation of primitive Christian values.
Immaculately researched, provided with rich and useful critical notes, powerfully written, The Martyr is a major contribution to converso studies and to colonial social history in general.
