Luis de Carvajal el Mozo

Origins and early life

Luis de Carvajal, called el Mozo, the Younger, was born about 1566 at Benavente in Spain into a family of Spanish-Portuguese conversos, and came to New Spain as a boy with his uncle, the governor Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, who has his own fiche here.

Work and career

At about seventeen he learned from his father the family's secret: they were Jews, descendants of Jews forcibly baptized, and had kept the faith in hiding. He returned to Judaism deliberately and completely, circumcised himself, took the name Joseph Lumbroso, the Enlightened, and taught his mother and sisters what he pieced together of the Law from the Vulgate, from memory and from a few books, since no Hebrew text and no rabbi existed in the Mexico of the Inquisition.

Denounced in 1589, he was arrested with his family, reconciled to the Church and sentenced to penance; he continued teaching in secret and writing. In prison he wrote, in a hand small enough to hide, a spiritual autobiography, letters and prayers — the first known writings by a Jew in the Americas, preserved in the National Archives of Mexico, stolen in 1932 and recovered only in 2016. Arrested a second time in 1595, he was tortured in 1596 until he named some 120 other crypto-Jews, a collapse this fiche records as plainly as his courage; he then reaffirmed his faith.

On 8 December 1596, in the great auto-da-fé of Mexico City, he was garrotted and burned together with his mother Francisca and three of his sisters. He was thirty. What he wrote survives, and the record of his trial, thousands of pages long, is the fullest documentary portrait of a crypto-Jewish life in the New World.