Francisco Maldonado da Silva

Origins and early life

Francisco Maldonado da Silva was born in San Miguel de Tucumán, in what is now Argentina, in 1592, the son of Diego Núñez da Silva, a Portuguese surgeon and converso — a Christian of Jewish descent — who was himself tried by the Inquisition of Lima for Judaizing and reconciled in 1605; the boy was raised a Catholic, and it was his father who, when Francisco was eighteen, told him the truth of his origins and gave him the books through which he found the faith of his ancestors.

Work and career

He studied medicine at Lima, practiced in Santiago de Chile, where he became surgeon of the hospital and married a Catholic, and in secret became a Jew: he circumcised himself, kept the Sabbath and the fasts, took the name Eli Nazareo, and tried to bring his own sisters back to Judaism — and one of them denounced him to the Inquisition in 1627. This fiche states his route into this directory as it stands in the records of his trial: born the son of a converso, he declared himself a Jew and lived as one, in a Spanish colony where that was death.

For twelve years in the cells of the Inquisition at Lima he refused to recant, debated the theologians sent to convert him, fasted to the edge of death, wrote treatises in defense of Judaism on scraps of paper with ink made of charcoal and a pen cut from a chicken bone, and passed them through the walls to other prisoners. On 23 January 1639, in the greatest auto-da-fé in the history of Lima, he was burned alive with ten other Judaizers; as the sentence was read, a wind tore the awning above the stage, and he said, the chroniclers report, that the God of Israel was watching. Marcos Aguinis's novel La gesta del marrano made him the emblem of the crypto-Jews of South America.