Creating Conversos

Reviews / Votes

"Roger Louis Martinez-Davila's book, Creating Conversos, addresses subjects that might have seemed well-worn-the Carvajal and Santa-Maria families, and even the question of converso genealogy generally-and brings them together in original, creative, and compelling ways. Martinez-Davila uses impressive archival work to demonstrate complex linkages among a small cluster of Old and New Christian families across the expanse of the Spanish empire. In the process he helps us rethink the creative strategies that conversos employed to integrate themselves into Spanish Christian society." -Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, co-editor of Judging Faith, Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World

"Roger Martinez-Davila shows how since the end of the fourteenth century conversos have proved to be resilient, ingenious, and resourceful people that could adapt with astonishing intelligence and ease to difficult social, religious, and political situations, regardless of where they found themselves. The study, which posits the existence of cooperation and collaboration between conversos and Old Christians, will doubtless be of great interest to academics working in Hispanic studies, early modern European and American history, religious studies, anthropology, ethnography, and political science." -E. Michael Gerli, Commonweal Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia

"Roger Louis Martinez-Davila skillfully unravels the complex story of Jews who converted to Catholicism in Spain during the 14th-16th centuries, migrated to colonial Mexico and Bolivia during the conquest of the Americas, and assumed prominent church and government positions. . . . 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."-HaLadpid

"Creating Conversos represents an important contribution to medieval Spanish social and religious history. Its discussion of two extended and interrelated families, the Old Christian noble family of the Carvajals and the New Christian converso family of the ha-Levi/Santa Marias, breaks new ground in the exploration of the highly contested topic of the identity of the conversos in Spain in late medieval and early modern times. Through an exhaustive use of archival material, genealogical research, and, to a lesser degree, artistic representation, Martinez explores a topic that, by its very nature, defies easy explanation." -Jane Gerber, professor emeritas, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

"By tracing the family tie and intermarriages of the Jewish rabbinic ha-Levi lineage of Burgos, Spain (which became the converso Santa Maria clan) with the Old Christian Carvajal line of Plasencia, Spain, Martinez-Davila demonstrates the family's changing identity, and how the monolithic notion 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 the inhabited." -Communique

"Martinez-Davila's work is perhaps the most comprehensive and insightful study of an important converso family to date." -David Gitlitz, author of Secrecy and Deceit: the Religion of the Crypto-Jews