Brujas y conversas

In 1516, the first Jewish ghetto was created in Venice and, from that moment, the already narrow perimeter of tolerance between the Christian majority society and one of the religious minorities that existed in the territories of the Republic was limited: I’m referring to the Jews. After a few years, a seat of the Tribunal of the Holy Office was installed in the city. Despite these two elements, Venice remained a territory open to contamination; in fact, the Venetian Inquisition enjoyed a certain autonomy with respect to the Roman one and exercised its office in a less strict way if we compared it with the Spanish one. Notwithstanding that, its attention to the different forms of heresy was attentive and constant.

Among the processes that the historian Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini has managed to bring together in his essential work Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro ebrei e giudaizzanti (1548–1734), I consider it interesting to study those that refer to the situation of women in the Jewish context since, frequently, a “natural” relationship is established between gender-conviction and religion-persecution of female victims, guilty of any type of infamy.

The observations that I present here have as a starting point the treatment of certain female attitudes that were the cause of persecutions and convictions. In particular, I intend to comment on two geographically very distant situations, but accompanied by two elements: the suspicion of crypto-Judaism and being a woman. The space-time dimension extends from Spain to the Republic of Venice in the 16th century. The protagonists I will name share one more element: having had to go through the trial of the Court of the Inquisition, in some cases the Spanish one and in others the Venetian one.

The critical view with which this type of documentary material will be addressed will be of a socio-cultural nature and will be delimited to the documentation related to the 16th century and, in particular, to that related to the Sephardic and Conversos’ communities.

The purpose of this essay is not only to provide new data that can open up new research perspectives, but is also to try to return, although a posteriori, the voice to some of the victims of gender violence.