Hernando Alonso

Origins and early life

Hernando Alonso was born in the county of Niebla, in Andalusia, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, a converso — a Christian of Jewish descent, in the years when the Jews of Spain were being forced to the font or into exile — and a blacksmith by trade; this fiche states plainly that what is known of his Jewish life comes from the record of the Inquisition that killed him, and that he was, by that record, the first Jew known on the North American continent.

Work and career

He crossed to Cuba and came to Mexico in 1520 with the expedition of Narváez, went over to Hernán Cortés, and in the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521 forged the ironwork of the thirteen brigantines that Cortés launched on the lake to cut the Aztec capital off from the shore, the decisive stroke of the conquest; he was, the chroniclers say, among the first Spaniards into the fallen city. Rewarded like the other conquistadors, he became an encomendero and a rancher at Actopan, north of the capital, and one of the suppliers of meat to the new Mexico City, a rich man with a Spanish wife.

In 1528 the Dominican Vicente de Santa María, exercising the powers of the Inquisition in New Spain, had him arrested on the denunciation of neighbors: he had, they said, washed the baptismal chrism from his son's head in wine, in a Jewish rite, and kept his wife from church during her monthly period, as the law of Moses required. On 17 October 1528, at the first auto-da-fé held in the Americas, he was burned at the stake in Mexico City with another converso, Gonzalo de Morales — seven years after he had helped to take the city, and a century before the great persecution of the crypto-Jews of Mexico that would follow.