I am a Catholic, but not a practicing Catholic. I basically quit believing the church when I read about the Inquisition. I must have been about 13 or 14 years old. I asked myself how a religion of “Peace and Love” can do such horrible things. When I first took a DNA test, I was surprised to find that I had about 20% Jewish DNA. As I did my research on ancestors, it seems that Jewish people fled the Inquisition to the New World. Once they got here, they got away from the central part of the government as far away as they could. They did so as they knew what could happen to them at any time.
One of the things I do is find or try to find my ancestors; I have been doing it for 15 years now. Today I discovered that one of my great-grandparents was burned at the stake.
My 15th great-grandmother (Francisca de Carvajal de Matas), who was burned at the stake.
Francisca Nuñez de Carabajal (Portuguese: Francisca Nunes de Carvalhal) (ca. 1540, Portugal – December 8, 1596, Mexico City) was a Marrana (Crypto-Jew) in New Spain executed by burning at the stake by the Mexican Inquisition for judaizing in 1596.
Arrival in Mexico
In 1579, King Philip II of Spain appointed Don Luis de Carabajal y de la Cueva, a Portuguese Jew, as the governor of Nuevo León.[1]
He brought with him to Mexico his brother-in-law, Don Francisco Rodríguez de Matos, and his sister, Doña Francisca Nuñez de Carabajal, with eight of their nine children: Doña Isabel (the oldest, 25 years of age, widow of Gabriel de Herrera), Doña Catalina, Doña Mariana, Doña Leonor, Don Baltasar, Don Luis, Miguel and Anica (the last two being very young). Another son, Gaspar, a pious young man, perhaps a monk, in the convent of Santo Domingo, Mexico, had arrived a short time before. Doña Catalina and Doña Leonor married respectively Antonio Diaz de Caceres (see Caceres family) and Jorge de Almeida—two Spanish merchants residing in Mexico City and interested in the Taxco mines. The entire family then removed to the capital, where, in the year 1590, while in the midst of prosperity, and seemingly leading Christian lives, they were seized by the Inquisition.
The eldest, Doña Isabel, was tortured until she implicated the whole of the Carabajal family.[2] The whole family was forced to confess and abjure at a public Auto-da-fé, celebrated on Saturday, February 24, 1590. Francisca was the only one tortured, taking five rounds on the string rack.[2]
Luis de Carabajal the younger, with his mother and four sisters, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and his brother, Baltasar, who had fled upon the first warning of danger, was, along with his deceased father Francisco Rodriguez de Matos, burnt in effigy. In January, 1595, Doña Francisca and her children were accused of a relapse into Judaism and convicted.
On 8 December 1596, the entire family of Luis de Carabajal was burned at the stake, including Francisca.[1][3
El Libro Rojo
Died before the sentence of the Inquisition was passed, or tried after death
Her body was disinterred and burned Dec 8, 1595, for the crime of Judaizing.