Sephardim and Conversos

Ribadavia grew around the Avia and the wine-producing valleys of the Ribeiro. Its medieval Jewish residents appear in the history of trade, taxation and service to the town’s lords. Wine linked the surrounding vineyards to the market town; the later expansion of its export trade is explored in the history of the Ribeiro.

The surviving evidence places a Jewish community in Ribadavia by the late fourteenth century. An earlier settlement in the twelfth or thirteenth century is a historical reconstruction, rather than a securely dated foundation. The streets remembered as the judería run between the Plaza Mayor, the Praza da Madalena and the Porta Nova de Abaixo. The synagogue’s proposed location near the Madalena remains an identification from historical research.

In 1386, the Duke of Lancaster’s forces besieged Ribadavia. Froissart’s chronicle describes the capture of the town and the plundering of Jewish homes. This is an important witness to the medieval community, but his figure of 1,500 Jews should not be treated as a reliable population count. The siege belongs to the shared history of the town’s Jewish and Christian inhabitants.

Jewish conversions to Christianity predated 1391, but that year marked a major turning point. Pogroms — violent attacks on Jewish communities — began in Seville and spread through parts of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Many Jews were killed; others were forcibly baptised or accepted baptism to escape the violence. This produced a large converso population long before the expulsion of 1492.

A converso was a Jewish convert to Christianity; the label also came to include descendants of converts. By 1492, families descended from the conversions of 1391 had lived as Christians for several generations. Their beliefs and experiences varied. The expulsion decree brought another wave of conversion and exile to a society that already contained both Jews and conversos.

Galicia lay away from the principal centres of the violence, and Jewish refugees from Castile found shelter there. Jewish communities continued alongside an emerging converso presence. García Álvarez, documented under his Christian name in A Coruña in 1411, makes this earlier history visible in the Galician records.

A municipal document dated 4 July 1411 names García Álvarez, formerly called Don Samuel Deus Ajuda — also written Dios Ayuda. The record concerns the collection of port tithes in A Coruña and explicitly connects his Jewish and Christian names.

Historian María Gloria de Antonio Rubio identifies García Álvarez as the earliest documented converso in Galicia. This gives the 1411 record particular importance: it names an Álvarez converso eighty-one years before the expulsion of 1492. The document confirms that he had already converted; the date of his baptism remains unknown.

The Cancionero de Baena gives his Christian name more fully as Garçi Álvarez de León and identifies him as a Jew from Astorga who converted to Christianity. Read alongside the municipal document, it connects the names Álvarez and de León with the earliest surviving record of a converso in Galicia identified in Antonio Rubio’s study.

His conversion may have been connected to the coercion of 1391 or its aftermath. The surviving sources do not establish whether it was forced, so that connection remains a historical possibility.

Researchers place Abraham de León’s move from Ourense to Ribadavia between 1438 and 1444, an inference from the surviving records. Documented as a resident in 1453, he worked as a tax collector and as Diego Pérez Sarmiento’s mayordomo, managing the economic affairs of the lordly household.

His career gives the de León name a concrete place in Ribadavia’s medieval Jewish community. The town’s wine trade and its Jewish quarter form the setting for this history; explore that setting on the Ribadavia page.

Created in A Coruña in 1476 for Isaac, son of Solomon of Braga, the Kennicott Bible was copied by Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim. Now preserved at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, it is a surviving work of Galician Jewish scholarship and art. The library’s digital edition lets us read the manuscript itself.

Its illuminated pages and Sephardic script preserve a different side of this history: learning, patronage and artistic work. The manuscript contains the Hebrew Bible and material from David Kimhi’s grammatical treatise Sefer Mikhlol. Created sixteen years before the expulsion decree, it gives the Galician Jewish world a surviving voice beyond the later Inquisition records.

Converso communities had existed for generations when the Spanish Inquisition was authorised in 1478. In 1492, the expulsion decree required Jews to leave the crowns of Castile and Aragon unless they accepted baptism. Some left Ribadavia; others remained as New Christians. Portugal followed a different chronology: the decree of 1496 led to forced baptisms in 1497. These events help explain the Portuguese converso families later recorded in Galicia.

A converso was a convert to Christianity, or a descendant of converts; the term does not tell us what a particular person believed. Judaizante was an accusation of practising Judaism as a baptised Christian. The Ribadavia cases contain testimony about continuing Jewish observance in some households, alongside families whose religious lives took other paths.

Ribadavia’s wine economy also drew Portuguese converso families into the Ribeiro during the sixteenth century. The border connected merchants, relatives and religious knowledge. These newcomers joined established local families, and some became prominent in civic life: Felipe Álvarez served as procurador general, while Juan López Hurtado was a town councillor.

Galicia was initially under the inquisitorial jurisdiction of Valladolid. A permanent tribunal settled in Santiago in the 1570s, bringing inquisitorial authority closer to Galicia’s converso families. Ribadavia’s major prosecution came decades later. Within the households described in its records, parents and grandparents taught the younger generation Sabbath observance, fasting, prayers and the preparation of meat.

In 1606, Jerónimo Bautista de Mena, himself from Ribadavia’s converso community, denounced about two hundred people to the Santiago tribunal. His list included relatives. He had connections with Jewish communities abroad, yet became the informer remembered as the malsín. An inheritance dispute appears in accounts of his motives; it should not be presented as the sole established explanation. He was found dead during the proceedings.

Arrests, interrogations and confiscations followed. At the auto de fe, a public ceremony announcing sentences, in Santiago’s Praza da Quintana on 11 May 1608, defendants from Ribadavia appeared in penitential garments. Further sentences were announced in 1609 and 1610. The penalties included loss of property, imprisonment, the obligation to wear the sambenito, and sentences of delivery to the secular authority for execution.

The records describe Sabbath rest and clean clothing, fasting, draining blood from meat, and prayers without the Gloria Patri. They also record torture and denunciations within families. These testimonies preserve details of religious life, but were produced by a persecuting institution under interrogation and sometimes coercion.

The proceedings reached councillors, merchants, artisans and their families. Xerónimo de Morais, a sixty-year-old councillor, had already confessed to Jewish observance; the record says torture produced no further confession. It says the same of Fernando Gómez, a merchant from Vila Flor. Their cases distinguish an earlier statement from what interrogators tried to obtain under torture.

Juan López Hurtado, councillor and scribe, received two years’ imprisonment. In explaining this sentence, the inquisitors considered his young children, two of them blind, and the perpetual imprisonment imposed on his wife, Beatriz Méndez. Her sentence was a separate judgment, not a punishment substituted for his.

The women’s cases also preserve different outcomes. Leonor Gómez, aged 68 and the widow of Marcos López, made no confession under torture and received four years’ imprisonment. Xinebra Vázquez, 72, had previously confessed but added nothing under torture. María Vázquez, 60 and described as disabled, made no confession; her sentence included one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 50,000 maravedís.

In 1610 the prosecution reached people already dead: Ana Méndez, Blanca Vázquez, Marcos López and Mena himself were condemned in effigy. The proceedings attacked memory and reputation as well as the living community. Later investigations into the inquisitors’ conduct exposed abuses in torture and the handling of confiscated property.

At the auto de fe of 22 February 1609, Catalina de León, born in Ourense and aged 32, appeared with her daughters Isabel Rodríguez, 15, and Felipa Rodríguez, 17. The proceedings describe the transmission of Jewish observance within the family. Catalina was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.

The proceedings describe Isabel learning Jewish observance from her mother, Catalina de León, and her grandmother, Isabel Rodríguez. The sentences differed within this household: Catalina received perpetual imprisonment; Isabel was assigned six months of religious instruction followed by six months’ imprisonment, and Felipa one year’s imprisonment. These details show both transmission between generations and the separate treatment of each woman.

Catalina’s husband was Fernando Álvarez, called “o vello.” This is a separate recorded household: he should not be confused with Fernando Álvarez de Morais, el mozo, whose own parentage is disputed.

Felipe Álvarez, born around 1549 in Tamaguelos, Verín, was an apothecary, merchant and procurador general of Ribadavia. Inquisition testimony records his observance of the Law of Moses and the involvement of members of his family in the proceedings.

Felipe’s testimony describes twenty-three years of observance of the Law of Moses. He spoke of Sabbath rest, clean clothing, fasting, preparing meat according to Jewish practice, and prayers including the Shema and Amidah. The case records him teaching religious practice to his sons. These details show how belief was maintained inside a family whose public identity was Christian.

Fernando Méndez, aged 23, testified that his father had taught him Jewish observance nine years earlier. He described preparing meat according to that practice and hoping to leave for Turkey with Simón Pereira to live openly as a Jew. His case records the name David; Pereira’s records name Isaac. These statements reveal the choices the young men imagined beyond Galicia.

Gaspar Álvarez, aged 20, studied law at Salamanca. The proceedings describe his participation in the family’s religious life and his changing statements during imprisonment. Read as testimony produced in a trial, his case shows both the transmission of belief and the pressure placed on the younger generation.

Felipe and his son Antonio Méndez received sentences of relaxation in person — delivery to the secular authority for execution. A sentence alone does not establish that an execution took place. Felipe survived: Carlos Barros describes an agreement with the Holy Office in 1612 involving 11,000 reais. Imprisonment, confiscation and the struggle to recover property remained part of the family’s history.

Confiscation connected religious prosecution to the family’s livelihood. Vineyards and urban property became the subject of later claims, alongside money brought into the household through marriage. The litigation distinguishes Felipe’s estate from the dowries belonging to Isabel Méndez and Justa Rodríguez. Following those separate claims helps us reconstruct both ownership and family relationships.

The tomb of Felipe and Justa Rodríguez in the church of Santo Domingo gives this story a physical presence in Ribadavia. Estévez’s 2017 study connects the burial inscription with the Inquisition documents and measures the stone at 1.90 × 0.64 metres. Burial in a Christian church was compatible with reconciliation after an inquisitorial sentence; it does not erase the religious history recorded in the proceedings.

Ribadavia’s converso history continued after the trials. Families faced imprisonment, damaged reputations, confiscated estates and the practical task of supporting children and pursuing dowries. Some remained in the town or its surrounding parishes; others sought refuge beyond the border. The court papers show survival through negotiation and kinship as well as persecution.

Contacts reached Jewish communities in Italy and France. Estévez records Ribadavia links with Venice and families who escaped to Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The testimony about Simón Pereira’s time in Pisa, and Fernando Méndez’s wish to live openly as a Jew in Turkey, belongs to this wider history of movement and religious freedom.

The Coronel connection also survives in the family’s own documents: Enrique Coronel and Ana Rodríguez, Bárbara Enríquez’s sister, cared for Mariana Enríquez and Jerónimo de Morais in Ferreiros. Their mother’s dowry became the subject of a later lawsuit. This documented household is a firmer starting point for family research than linking distant families solely through a shared surname.

His family’s later lawsuits preserve relationships, maternal dowries and claims to confiscated property. The tree below brings those records together with the Torre do Tombo cases for Justa and her parents, keeping documented relationships and unresolved questions visible.

The subsequent litigation, preserved in AHN, INQUISICIÓN,2029,Exp.9, concerns the recovery of confiscated property and the separate maternal dowries. Pedro Álvarez de Dueñas, son of Felipe and Justa, negotiated a composición of 150 ducats for the family vineyards. The reviewed powers of attorney show Pedro acting for his half-brother Gaspar; they do not establish the earlier claim that Pedro was a minor in 1624. Francisco Méndez pursued the claims arising from his mother Isabel Méndez’s dowry.

A separate civil lawsuit, AHN, INQUISICIÓN,4552,Exp.8 (1640–1649), concerns Mariana Enríquez and Jerónimo de Morais, children of Fernando Álvarez de Morais and Bárbara Enríquez. After their parents’ deaths, they lived in Ferreiros with Enrique Coronel and Ana Rodríguez, Bárbara’s sister. Their curator Diego de Pardiñas pursued their mother’s 2,000-ducat dowry. Estévez Pérez makes them Felipe Álvarez’s grandchildren through Fernando, but the 1604 dowry deed in the same lawsuit calls Fernando the son of Alonso de Morais, so that link is disputed.