New Christians and New World Fears in Seventeenth-Century Peru

Abstract

In 1639 Manuel Bautista Pérez, along with ten others, were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition's Lima office for secretly following Jewish beliefs.The classic study of the Inquisition in the viceroyalty of Peru is José Toribio Medina's Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, 2 vols. (Santiago, 1956). For a summary of the auto-de-fe where Manuel Bautista Pérez was executed, see vol. 2, 45–146. More recent studies of the Inquisition in Peru include Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Pilar Hernández Aparicio, La Inquisición de Lima, (Madrid, 1989); Gabriela Ramos, “La privatización del poder: Inquisición y sociedad colonial en el Perú,” in H. Urbano, ed. Violencia y Poder en los Andes, (Lima, 1991), 75–92; Idem, Gabriella Ramos, “La fortuna del inquisidor: Inquisición y poder en el Perú (1594–1611),” Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina, (1989), n. 4, 89–122. See especially Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Recent Works on the Inquisition and Peruvian Colonial Society, 1570–1820,” Latin American Research Review 31:2 (1996), 43–63, for a current and comprehensive bibliography.Analyses centered on Peru's New Christian population include Boleslao Lewin, El Santo Oficio en América 1950; Alfonso Quiroz, “La expropiación inquisitorial de cristianos nuevos portugueses en Los Reyes, Cartagena y México (1635–1649),” Histórica 10 (1986), 237–303; and Gonzalo de Reparaz, Os Portugueses no Vice-Reinado do Peru: Seculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon, 1976). Lewin describes the Inquisitorial processes against New Christians with a focus on anti-Semitism; Reparaz presents information from various sources about the Portuguese in Peru; Quiroz relates the indictment of New Christians to the Inquisitors' need to acquire funds to support their operation. In prison for over five years, Pérez was under considerable pressure to confess to “Judaising”: had he admitted to being a crypto-Jew and repented, his life would probably have been spared. Yet he refused. As a result of Pérez's “obstinacy,” so the Inquisitors declared, he was condemned to die.