Teacher or Student?: Juan Pacheco de Leon’s Encounter with the Crypto-Jews of Mexico City

• In Event: Approaching Converso and Western Sephardic History

Abstract

This paper revisits the dynamic between Jewish travelers and crypto-Jews and challenges the hierarchical model into which scholars often place these encounters. Typically, the Jewish traveler is cast as the indispensable teacher whose transmissions are pivotal for the survival of Jewish practice among conversos throughout the centuries following the Inquisition. I will complicate this narrative by closely examining the Inquisitorial dossier against one such traveler, Juan Pacheco de Leon, a Livornese Jew who came to Mexico City in 1639 and lived there among the local crypto-Jews before being arrested by the Inquisition in 1642. Juan was fairly learned in normative Jewish practice, and he often discussed this with his newfound crypto-Jewish acquaintances. Yet, a careful examination of the testimonies provided by these acquaintances against Juan shows that this new information had only a limited effect on their actual practices. This state of affairs suggests that during the 1630’s the crypto-Jewish community in Mexico City was, for the most part, religiously self-reliant and it was confident in the legitimacy of its own brand of Judaism. In fact, as he insisted to the Inquisitors, Juan himself had much to learn in order to become a full participant in the local version of Judaism, which was quite distinct from his own religious norms. At one point, Juan even credits his encounter with these crypto-Jews with inspiring him to return to keeping Jewish law, a practice that he had abandoned once he set out on his journey to the New World. I will therefore argue that the hierarchical framework into which scholars have placed these encounters should be replaced with a more dialectical view, where encounters between travelling Jews and crypto-Jews shaped the religious experiences of both parties. I will further argue that the alleged pivotal role played by Jewish travelers in the survival of crypto-Judaism needs to be scaled back to a significant degree, at least with regards to the crypto-Jews of Mexico City in the mid-seventeenth century. In turn, the existence of local traditions and other internal factors should be examined more closely when trying to account for the survival of crypto-Judaism.

author

• Mayer Juni, Yeshiva University