![]() ![]() Since the religious purpose of the Inquisition was to protect the Christian community from heresy and deviant practices, the tribunal had in Gaspar Robles the perfect instrument to fulfill its duties. More often, the Holy Office of the Inquisition would build a case based on information gathered from voluntary denunciations, or sometimes from testimonies provided by individuals already in the hands of the tribunal whom they questioned, at other times under the duress of torture or the threat of it. 1 Rare was the crypto-Jew who made a voluntary self-denunciation before the Inquisition tribunal. In 1641, thirty-two year old member of a Portuguese merchant family Gaspar Robles voluntarily appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisi-tion in Mexico City denouncing himself and his kinsmen as crypto-Jews (individuals who professed to be Christian in public, but practiced Ju-daism in secret). It argues that in cases such as that of Gaspar Robles familial ties proved more a liability than a protection and the final outcome was contingent on a combination of religious and ethnic identity, the process of migration, and individual circumstances. Through close examination, this article explores the role of individual and community identity among conversos in New Spain to explain why the nephew confessed to the tribunal sealing the fate of his immediate family and that of a whole community. However, he protected some in the converso community in sharp contrast with his nephew's voluntary confession. He was tried and tortured, and he eventually confessed to his own crypto-Judaism. In contrast, his uncle Francisco Home was also arrested soon after Gaspar's confession. He incriminated his father, his three uncles, and many other acquaintances who formed part of the converso community in New Spain precipitating the mass prosecutions of many in the converso community. Gaspar Robles voluntarily approached the Inquisition tribunal confessing his own and his family's secret Jewish practices. However, their trajectories were vastly different. This article examines the lives of two Portuguese conversos, Gaspar Robles and Francisco Home, a nephew and his uncle, both tried by the Inquisition tribunal in seventeenth-century colonial Mexico during the decade leading up to the Gran auto de fé of 1649. It gave the marrano group, despite its great religious and socio-economic diversity, the characteristics of certain secret societies where shared solidarities and collective identity are fundamental. But the fear of betrayal or unmasking, stimulated by the Inquisition and exacerbated by the great mobility of the conversos, was also foundational to their identity. Crypto-Jews were mainly those who wanted to be, and were, perceived as such through opposition to an “Other”-sometimes the Jew of the Diaspora (the nação), sometimes the Catholic Old Christian, sometimes the image of themselves that they saw reflected back from those around them. Crypto-Judaism was more related to a social practice than a theological corpus it was based on a culture of mobility (geographical, socio-economic) that constantly reshaped the markers of difference. This essay examines the process of identity construction among those crypto-Jews or marranos, both as individuals and as a group. This influx led to a revival of crypto-Judaism and a resurgence of inquisitorial proceedings against conversos. By the end of the sixteenth century, the economic situation and the Iberian Union (1580–1640) pushed hundreds of Portuguese conversos (New Christians of Jewish descent) to emigrate to Spain.
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