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In recent years, the history of Crypto-Judaism in the southwestern United States and the question of the continued influence in the region of Sephardic Jewish heritage have increasingly come to the fore, both in historical scholarship and in the wider press. In his study To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (Columbia UP, 2005), Stanley Hordes traced the presence of puzzling Judaic practices among Hispano communities of New Mexico and the Southwest back to the converso community of Spanish Jews who arrived in the Americas in the wake of their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. Other scholars, including Judith Neulander, have taken another approach, arguing that these practices were instead introduced by Adventist missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are thus part of a constructed identity with no genealogical ties to Jewish roots ("Crypto-Jews of the Southwest: An Imagined Community," Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 18 [1996]: 19–58). It is to this debate that Frances Levine's book, Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth-Century New Mexican Drama, seeks to speak. In her study, Levine traces the story of Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche and her husband, Bernardo López de Mendizábal, who served as governor of New Mexico from 1659 to 1660, and who were both imprisoned and tried by the Spanish Inquisition for the crime of Judaizing. Levine argues that the accusations against them, as attested by the documentary evidence she analyzes, provide proof of the existence of Jewish ancestry and practices among seventeenth-century Iberian settlers in northern New Mexico. In doing so, she addresses the growing field of interest in the formation of heterodox religious and ethnic identities in the early modern Hispanic world, as well as a wider audience interested in various facets of the history of the Inquisition.
Levine's study begins by carefully setting out this critical context and presenting her readers with an overview of the history of New Mexico, with a particular focus on Jewish and converso influence, before honing in on the material circumstances and political conflicts that shaped life in mid-sixteenth-century Santa Fe and which, Levine argues, lie at the heart of the case brought against Doña Teresa. In particular, she emphasizes the discord between religious...