This initial volume of a projected three-volume study tracing the history of the Jews in Chile is a biography of a colonial surgeon. The bachiller Francisco Maldonado de Silva was of partial Jewish ancestry and began to practice Judaism, as he understood it, as a young man. He confided his religious convictions to his sister, who denounced him to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Maldonado de Silva was arrested in Concepción in 1627, taken to Lima, and incarcerated by the Inquisition for 12 years. During his protracted trial and imprisonment, he wrote commentaries on his faith and discussed his beliefs with Catholic theologians assigned to his case. He was one of 11 Judaizers executed in the auto de fe of 1639.
Much of the biographical information on this tragic figure has already appeared in print. Böhm himself, in Nuevos antecedentes para una historia de los judíos en Chile colonial (1963), extracted data on the trial from José Toribio Medina’s Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Chile (2 vols., 1890). The present hook draws heavily on archival materials and fills in some, but not all, of the gaps concerning Maldonado de Silva. There is an informative account of the sequestration of his property that describes how the surgeon’s wife sought to regain possession of the marriage dowry that was legally hers.
Although Böhm devotes too much space within the narrative to facsimile excerpts from manuscripts and contemporary printed works, the lengthy documentary appendix (pp. 219-429) he compiles is a valuable feature. A bibliography, that includes studies of the Jews in both Latin America and Europe as well as works on the Inquisition, serves as a useful guide to sources, but many of the items are not cited in notes to the brief text.
