Recounts events surrounding the recovery, in 2017, of a sixteenth-century biographical manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a crypto-Jew executed by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico.

In 1579 Philip II awarded a large territory in New Spain to a Portuguese man named Luis de Carvajal. That territory included a significant portion of present day Mexico, as well as portions of Texas and New Mexico. This remarkable man discovered, conquered, and settled most of that territory. He also brought a large group of settlers from Spain and Portugal whose impact on its cultural development was very significant. Many of those settlers were of Jewish descent and some of them were tried by the Inquisition for practicing the faith of their ancestors. This book is a biography of Carvajal and is based on documents that were written during his life or soon after his death. The narrative follows him from birth to death and describes the actions he took to give rise to Nuevo Reino de Le n. These included explorations and discoveries; battles with free Indians; pacifications of Indian uprisings; and legal fights with Crown officials who were determined to eliminate him and to end his government. In the end his enemies defeated him with the help of the Inquisition, but the political entity he gave rise to did not die with him. Samuel Temkin is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. He received a PhD in Engineering from Brown University and has been a visiting professor in Chile, Germany, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Spain. Professor Temkin is the author of "Elements of Acoustics and Suspension Acoustics: An Introduction to the Physics of Suspensions" as well as numerous research articles on Acoustics and Fluid Dynamics, and of many research articles, on the topic of this book. Dr. Temkin was born in Mexico City and was raised in Monterrey, Mexico, the capital city of what once was Nuevo Reino de Le n.

Documentary history of Luis de Carvajal the younger and his family in Spain, their migration to Mexico, their life there, their persecution and deaths at the hands of the Inquisition.

The historical account of one Jewish family's adventures in the New World. The adventures of Luis de Carvajal form the main narrative thread, which intervenes with other episodes and descriptions of everyday life and coustoms, food and dress, methods of travel, trials of accused heretics, the inquisitor's methods of torture, and insights into the plight of the Inquisition's imprisoned victims.

Identity, family, and community unite three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews, or descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 17th-century Iberia and Spanish America. Ronnie Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. Each text, reflects the unique experiences of the author and illuminates their shared, deeply rooted attachment to Iberian culture, their Atlantic peregrinations, and their hunger for spiritual enlightenment. Through these writings, Perelis focuses on the social history of transatlantic travel, the economies of trade that linked Europe to the Americas, and the physical and spiritual journeys that injected broader religious and cultural concerns into this complex historical moment.

In Creating Conversos, Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila skillfully unravels the complex story of Jews who converted to Catholicism in Spain between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, migrated to colonial Mexico and Bolivia during the conquest of the Americas, and assumed prominent church and government positions. Rather than acting as alienated and marginalized subjects, the conversos were able to craft new identities and strategies not just for survival but for prospering in the most adverse circumstances. Martínez-Dávila provides an extensive, elaborately detailed case study of the Carvajal–Santa María clan from its beginnings in late fourteenth-century Castile. By tracing the family ties and intermarriages of the Jewish rabbinic ha-Levi lineage of Burgos, Spain (which became the converso Santa María clan) with the Old Christian Carvajal line of Plasencia, Spain, Martínez-Dávila demonstrates the family's changing identity, and how the monolithic notions of ethnic and religious disposition were broken down by the group and negotiated anew as they transformed themselves from marginal into mainstream characters at the center of the economies of power in the world they inhabited. They succeeded in rising to the pinnacles of power within the church hierarchy in Spain, even to the point of contesting the succession to the papacy and overseeing the Inquisitorial investigation and execution of extended family members, including Luis de Carvajal "The Younger" and most of his immediate family during the 1590s in Mexico City. Martinez-Dávila offers a rich panorama of the many forces that shaped the emergence of modern Spain, including tax policies, rivalries among the nobility, and ecclesiastical politics. The extensive genealogical research enriches the historical reconstruction, filling in gaps and illuminating contradictions in standard contemporary narratives. His text is strengthened by many family trees that assist the reader as the threads of political and social relationships are carefully disentangled.

A pioneering biography of the Mexican revolutionary Carvajal, a central figure in the development of colonial Texas

Among the cities in Mexico, Monterrey has a mystique all its own marked by the enduring "Jewish question" regarding its founding in 1596. The historian, Vito Alessio Robles, made the statement that "all the citizens of Monterrey are descended from Jews." Includes chapters on early prominent founders and families, Alberto del Canto, Luis de Carvajal, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, Diego de Montemayor, Founder of Monterrey, The Garzas of Lepe and Monterrey, Francisco Báez de Benavides and the Martínez of Marin. This book reviews the evidence.--From distributor information.

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.