Conclusion

Abstract

The seventeenth century came to a close with one of the most brutal examples of anti-converso violence ever perpetrated by Neapolitan ecclesiastical authorities. In 1687, a Spaniard receiving last rites in the hospital of San Giacomo admitted to the priests attending him that he was born into the law of Israel and wanted to die in it as well. Shocked by the revelation and fearing for the sick man’s soul, the priests placed his hand on an open flame in an attempt to terrify him into conversion. The converso resisted, and “with great constancy suffered martyrdom and died half-burned in his perverse law.”¹ This shocking and brutal act was nevertheless a bit past its time; the local courts of the Inquisition had largely ceased to investigate cases of apostasy to Judaism by this date, and the last major investigations of the Spanish Inquisition were on the horizon. Crypto-Judaism, though it continued to exist in practice as an object of polemics by ecclesiastical and political figures, was on its way out, gradually decriminalized by the very courts that had pursued it for centuries.