“El de los Catalanes”: The First Campaign against the New Christians, 1569–1582

Abstract

In October of 1569, Paolo Tasso, the vicar of the archiepiscopal court of Naples, and a group of assistants entered the home of Lavinia Petralbes and made a thorough search. He had just heard a denunciation by one of Lavinia’s servants who accused her of an array of traditional practices associated with marranism: she would fast during unusual times of the year, and during Lent she would secretly consume pane azzimo, matzoh, and then attempt to erase the evidence by cleaning up the crumbs. But there was also something more unusual: the servant described how Lavinia would frequently read in private from a book covered in black leather that she kept locked in a safe when she wasn’t reading it. Tasso and his men found the book in question together with two others, a vernacular officiolo della Madonna and a copy of the letters of Pietro Aretino. The text was identified several months later by Giovanni de Pisis, a convert from Judaism, as “a copy of the cycle of prayers used by the Spanish Jews in all of their holy days” that had been translated directly from Hebrew into Spanish.¹ Despite the attempts of Lavinia and her daughter to destroy the remaining books in their possession after the vicar had departed, the damage had been done. With these few but incriminating clues in hand, Tasso began an investigation into the household.²