”My Mother Often Told Me”: Dutch Sephardi Postmemory and the 1635 Yom Kippur Raid of the Madrid Inquisition

This lecture will study the case of a Sephardi oral tradition that transmitted the memory of Inquisitorial persecution over more than a century. In a manuscript passage that Abraham Gómez Silveyra wrote in 1736 at age eighty-five, this Amsterdam Jewish poet and polemicist evokes the most incisive moment in his family history: his ancestors, Portuguese immigrants in Madrid, were celebrating in secret the eve of Yom Kippur when armed guards raided the house and arrested the congregants on orders of the Holy Office. Five family members were subsequently tried, tortured, and penanced, among them Gómez Silveyra`s mother Ana Ximenes, being then a girl of thirteen years. Based on trial records from the Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca and on Gómez Silveyra`s clandestine writing, this lecture will reconstruct the crypto-Jewish circle that was arrested in Madrid on September 21, 1635, and the imprint of this traumatic experience in the theological thought of Ana`s son, whose reflections on history and providence already belong to the intellectual world of the Dutch Early Enlightenment.