Blood Secret (19 page)

I
FIRST BECAME INTERESTED
in doing a novel about the Spanish Inquisition almost sixteen years ago when I read an article in the
New York Times
about the secret Jews of New Mexico and the Southwest. They were called crypto Jews. The ancestors of the secret Jews began coming to America as Conversos after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. It was not long before the Inquisition followed them to Mexico and they were forced to practice their religion covertly. After generations of spiritual subterfuge and repression, these Jews entirely forgot that they were Jews; indeed, they had become practicing Catholics, yet clung almost unwittingly to certain customs such as lighting candles on Friday night, not eating pork, and never mixing meat and dairy products.

In New Mexico these crypto Jews began to
intermarry over generations with other people of Spanish descent and the Indian populations as well. The story in the
New York Times
focused on a few of these people who were beginning to rediscover their heritage.

The Nazi holocaust took the lives of six million Jews within a period of a few years. In comparison, the number of lives, more than three hundred thousand, taken during the Spanish Inquisition was much smaller, but the most astonishing thing to me was the unimaginable stretch of time over which the Inquisition endured. The brutality that began with the burning of the Jewish quarter in Seville in 1391 persisted until 1826, when the last victim of the Inquisition died in Valencia, Spain. That an organized program for deadly persecution spanned nearly five hundred years is astounding. The madness that sustained such an endeavor is staggering to contemplate.

I knew that if I was to tell this story, I would have to tell the whole story—the centuries upon centuries saturated by blood. This story could not be told as a day in the life of the Inquisition, nor could it be the story of simply one family within one generation. The crushing weight of time would have to
be as significant as any character. It took me ten years of thinking to figure out how I could try to encompass this dimension of time within a single book.

I do not think I would have ever attempted this book without the encouragement of my late editor, Meredith Charpentier. Patiently, quietly she waited and waited for me to begin the book. An editor cannot give a writer a voice, but a really great editor can quiet down a writer like myself and help her listen to the authentic voices in her own head. Meredith helped me listen for the voices that make up
Blood Secret
.

She died shortly after I completed the last draft of the book, and it is to her memory that I dedicate
Blood Secret
. She was my navigator through the shoals of this unbelievable history.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, March
2004

Gerber, Jane S.
The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience
. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Marks, M. L.
Jews Among the Indians
. Chicago: Benison Books, 1992.

Netanyahu, Benzion.
The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain
. New York: Random House, 1995.

Rochlin, Harriet and Fred.
Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Roth, Cecil.
The Spanish Inquisition
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1937, 1964, 1996.

Sachar, Howard M.
Farewell España
. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Tobias, Henry J.
A History of the Jews in New Mexico
. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990, 1992.

Cover art © 2004 by Getty Images/The Hulton Archive