In 1391, decades before Teresa de Lucena was born in Toledo, Spain, waves of antisemitic riots swept across the Iberian peninsula driving thousands of Jews, including members of her distinguished Jewish family, to convert to Christianity. Those who converted— and their descendants—came to be known as conversos or New Christians, regardless of their true religious beliefs. Thus, Teresa de Lucena was born a conversa, not a Jew, in the tumultuous century that followed.

Teresa was the fifth of six daughters born to parents from prominent converso families: Juan de Lucena, an early printer of books in Hebrew, and Teresa de San Pedro. Her father’s parents were doctor Maestre Martín, a physician and translator, and Leonor Martínez. Her mother’s father, Alvar López, was a landowner and tax farmer. Teresa’s mother’s mother is not named in her Inquisition dossier but, according to multiple witnesses, her grandfather chose a close relative for his second wife: his daughter’s husband’s sister. In this confusing but illustrative example of endogamy, which was a common practice among conversos, Teresa’s aunt on her father’s side was also her step-grandmother on her mother’s side.

Teresa’s early life was marked by dislocation and loss. In response to violent clashes between New Christians and Old Christians in the summer of 1467, Teresa’s parents gathered their small daughters and moved from Toledo to Sevilla. Teresa spent her first years there, surrounded by Jewish and converso relatives, until her mother died when she was about seven. (Before the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, when Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or flee, contact between conversos and Jews was possible, although limited.)

Teresa and her sisters were separated for about a year, living with relatives and family friends until their father reunited them in Toledo, where he operated a print shop.

According to multiple witnesses, Juan de Lucena was the proprietor of a business that printed muchos libros de ebrayco de molde: many books in Hebrew type. Two print shop employees testified that they worked for him for two years in Toledo and Puebla de Montalbán, a small town nearby. A witness from Sevilla testified that Juan de Lucena told him he traveled to Granada, then still under Muslim rule, to sell the books he printed.

In 1478, Teresa and her sisters were living with their father in Toledo when Fernando and Isabel, the Catholic Monarchs, established the Spanish Inquisition. Not long afterward, Juan de Lucena fled to Rome. Four of the sisters remained in Toledo, but Teresa and Leonor, about twelve and thirteen at the time, were sent to live with a relative in Puebla.

In April 1485, about five years after the two girls moved to Puebla, the Spanish Inquisition established its offices in Toledo and issued a call for conversos to come forward to denounce themselves for Judaizing (practicing Judaism in secret). For those who confessed voluntarily within a six-month “period of grace,” they offered lenient punishment and the chance to be “reconciled,” or readmitted into the community of the Church; all were required to denounce others they suspected of Judaizing.

On October 28, 1485, after a cousin and a family friend warned them about “what their sister Beatriz had said” about them, Teresa, then seventeen, and Leonor, eighteen, went to Toledo to face the Inquisitors. Their confessions were nearly identical: their aunt in Sevilla had forced them to learn Jewish prayers and to perform Jewish rituals. After swearing never to observe the Law of Moses again, they were both reconciled without penalty or punishment.

Then the sisters chose different paths. According to Teresa’s trial testimony, Leonor accepted their uncle’s invitation to join him in Portugal but Teresa “refused to go.” She remained in Toledo and later married Juan de Jarada, a merchant. Her dossier does not mention whether they had children, but according to civil records, Juan de Jarada had two sons from a previous marriage. According to Teresa, he died around 1506.

Despite being separated by distance and the threat of Inquisition reprisal, Teresa and Leonor found ways to communicate with each other. This we learn from evidence produced at Teresa’s trial: a copy of a letter Leonor sent her by messenger in 1510 that the Inquisition intercepted and copied before delivering it to her. Leonor began the letter with an apology for not waiting for their “usual trusted messenger.” After reporting that she wasn’t doing well (“Ya no soy quien ser solía.”), she shared news about their relatives and pleaded with Teresa to join her in Lisbon. Leonor’s decision to rely on an untested messenger proved fateful.

There is no record in Teresa’s dossier of her life between 1510 and February 8, 1530, the day she was arrested and charged with heresy. She spent eighteen months in the Inquisition jail in Toledo and was interrogated on five separate days. During her first three appearances, the Inquisitors forced her to expand the limited testimony she had offered as a young girl; she named the Jewish practices and the network of relatives and neighbors with whom she observed them. During her final two appearances, Inquisitors pressed Teresa for details about her communications with Leonor in Portugal.

After her first four days of testimony, a tribunal of Inquisitors approved charges against her that fell into five broad categories: observing Jewish practices; breaking Church rules and holy days; withholding information about others; communicating with a person condemned for heresy; and helping to print books in Hebrew. 

Observing Jewish practices: 

Like many conversos born before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, Teresa had contact with Jewish neighbors and direct knowledge of Jewish practices as a child. She confessed to keeping the Sabbath, eating meat purchased from a Jewish butcher, and entering a synagogue and the Booth erected for residence during the holiday of Sukkot.sukkot of Jewish neighbors, among other practices. She also remembered that her family observed Jewish mourning rituals when her mother died.

The Day of Atonement, which falls on the 10th day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei and is devoted to prayer and fasting.Yom Kippur featured prominently in testimony provided by Teresa and others. Teresa’s oldest sister Beatriz testified at her own trial in 1529 that when they were young, “they all spent the day of the Great Fast together in the same room dressed in their finest clothes. The eldest asked the youngest for forgiveness. At times they played chess and at other times they prayed. That evening, they dined as well as they could.”

Teresa did not remember whether she and her family fasted on Yom Kippur, but she described asking a neighbor for forgiveness “through a hole in the fence between their houses.” The neighbor’s husband, who observed the two, reported the incident to the Inquisitors at his trial.

Holiday held on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar (on the 15th day in Jerusalem) to commemorate the deliverance of the Jewish people in the Persian empire from a plot to eradicate them.Purim and the Fast of Esther came to hold special significance for conversas. They identified with Queen Esther, who like them was a hidden Jew, and looked to her for strength and to fulfill their wishes. Teresa testified:

Did you and your sisters and parents keep the Fast of Queen Esther? I fasted and I think my sisters did, too. 

How did you keep the fast? I skipped meals for two or three days until it was nighttime. My sister Leonor fasted, too, and then we ate together in the evening. 

In whose memory did you do this? I did it in memory of Queen Esther, who saved the people of Israel from the evil deeds of Haman and what King Ahasuerus was planning to do. I also fasted to make my wishes come true. I don’t remember if my parents fasted.

Breaking Church rules and holy days: 

According to several witnesses, Teresa and others in her household did “work on Sundays and holidays that they did during the normal work week… baking, sifting, spinning, and every other kind of work.”

Withholding information about others: 

The rules of the Inquisition obligated Teresa to denounce all those she knew were practicing Judaism in secret. Given that the home became the center of religious observance for conversos, it is not surprising that Teresa described observing Jewish practices with her parents and sisters. She was also interrogated at great length about the practices of members of her extended family and converso network. In 1485, she had offered only the name of an aunt in Sevilla. In 1530, the Inquisitors found that testimony wholly lacking:

She also consciously and maliciously refused to say who taught her and others about the Law of Moses…. She covered up for so many people she sinned with and for so many people she knew to have sinned that it defies logic that she could have forgotten who they were. Especially since at the time she confessed the crimes she committed, the people she committed them with were very close family members and acquaintances.

Communicating with a known heretic:

In the spring of 1531, the Inquisitors devoted Teresa’s fifth and final interrogation to Leonor’s letter from 1510, pressing Teresa to explain the meaning of several hard-to-decipher phrases that she had refused to explain in the previous session:

What did she mean when she wrote “and you don’t know whether it’s day or night but if you were with me, you’d know”? And what does she mean when she says she “understands you well”?

What did you write to Leonor that prompted her to answer “I am always working and if I wanted to, I could work even more”?

Teresa continued to refuse to explain what the phrases meant until, under the threat of torture, she asked to speak to the Inquisitor “so that nobody could hear.” No record exists of what she and the Inquisitor discussed or if she acknowledged that the sisters were communicating in code. 

Helping to print books in Hebrew: 

Teresa did not mention her father’s printing business in 1485. At her trial in 1530, she was asked:

How old were you when your father left? About eleven or twelve.

Why did your father flee? I think it was because he was selling the books he printed in Hebrew.”

The Inquisitors did not pursue the line of questioning to establish whether Teresa actually played a role in the print business. But Teresa’s answer about her age, corroborated by the testimony of other witnesses, establishes that Juan de Lucena was printing books in movable Hebrew type in Toledo and Puebla de Montalbán for at least two years between 1475 and 1480.

In July 1531, when Teresa was still a prisoner in the Inquisition jail, she was ordered to appear in the auto-de-fé in Toledo and pronounced guilty of heresy and apostasy. She was eligible for the severest penalty, death at the stake, but after swearing “never again to commit the errors she confessed to or any other type of heresy,” she was sentenced to perpetual house arrest, ordered to attend mass every Sunday and holy day, and required to wear a sanbenito, a garment that identified her as a convicted heretic, when she appeared in public. All of her material wealth became the property of the Inquisition; it is not clear how she supported herself following her conviction.

At her final undated appearance before the Inquisitors, Teresa swore that she had complied with “everything required in her sentence” and an Inquisition official reported that 56 ducats from her funds had been deposited with the notary. In the spring of 1534, the dossier records that a captive held “in the land of the Moors” had been rescued with “56 ducats paid from Teresa de Lucena’s funds” and had returned to Toledo.

In 1545, Teresa died in Orgaz in the home of her nephew, Gonzalo Díaz. Four years after she died, the Inquisition added the testimony of Teresa’s landlord’s daughter and a servant to her dossier. The women testified that while living in Toledo at the end of her life, Teresa turned to face the wall to pray, refused to eat pork, and honored the Jewish sabbath. The last entry in the dossier is their description of Teresa sitting on the floor, only partially hidden by a floor-length curtain, pretending to do needlework on Saturdays.

This article is based entirely on the author’s translation of Legajo 163 Ex. 13, the dossier of material concerning Teresa de Lucena collected by the Spanish Inquisition between 1481 and 1549. The 66-page file, which the author obtained in photocopy form from the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid in 1988, contains testimony recorded by scribes at Teresa’s court appearances in Toledo, copies of judicial proceedings, and testimony gathered from seventeen people in six cities (Sevilla, Toledo, Puebla de Montalbán, Segovia, Madrid, and Orgaz).

Nine people whose testimony was included were relatives or family friends, five were household employees, and two were print shop employees. Excluding the names of Inquisition officials, 101 people are mentioned in the dossier. A copy of the letter Teresa’s sister Leonor wrote to her in 1510 is also included.

The author did not find the dossier organized in chronological order in 1988. Written in Spanish over many years by many hands, some of the pages appeared rushed, while others bore the unmistakable look of careful calligraphy. The former appear to be the work of court scribes struggling to capture verbatim trial proceedings; the latter are copies of previous testimony.

A close study of Teresa’s dossier yields both an intimate portrait of her life and a broader perspective on early converso history. It offers the names and relationships of Teresa’s extensive social network and evidence that women played a critical role in preserving crypto-Jewish identity. In the pages of the dossier lie examples of how Teresa and her peers challenged Inquisition rules, communicated in secret, and clung to their faith.

Teresa’s case also raises questions whose answers lie beyond the pages of her dossier: about the reliability of Inquisition documents, the veracity of testimony obtained under duress or torture, the ability of male scribes to capture women’s voices, and ultimately, the factors that contributed to the dramatic expansion of converso studies in the twentieth century. 

New research in converso studies continues online thanks to a program to digitize Inquisition records funded by the Spanish government. An electronic version of Teresa’s dossier is now available online at http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/show/4515258.