Among the many myths spurred by the Covid-19 emergency is the false claim that Jews caused this pandemic to secretly dominate the world.Footnote ¹ Soyer's book confirms how often conspiracy theories entail a perception of Jews—whether openly professing or “hidden,” through religious conversion or assimilation—as quintessential conspirators. Karl Popper has argued that conspiracy myths have proliferated since the French Revolution mostly because they offer simple nonreligious answers to complex realities in a secularized world. François Soyer's focus on earlier historical stages shows that conspiracy myths are indeed compatible with a belief in Divine Providence and with theodicy. In cases loaded with theological connotations, such as traditional anti-Jewish hatred, conspiracy myths reveal a dualistic perception of the world, understood as the arena of cosmological strife between the followers of light, good, and/or God and the agents of darkness, evil, and/or Satan. No wonder that Norman R. C. Cohn, a pioneering historian of anti-Jewish conspiracy myths in modern times, also studied the imprint of Christian eschatology and apocalyptic thought on medieval and early modern violence, and the origins of Europe's scapegoating obsessions, which led to witch-hunting.Footnote ² Soyer's book thus helps us understand Popper's explanation against the grain: less as an example of Weberian secularization as disenchantment of the world, and rather as a profane appropriation of the religious and the sacred. This implicitly political-theological perspective unifies those scholars who explicitly question the accuracy of the once-consensual periodization of premodern anti-Judaism, understood as theologically grounded, and of modern antisemitism, perceived as equivalent to pseudoscientific and nonreligious racism.

Perhaps Soyer's main contribution to the history of anti-Judaism in the West is precisely its focus. Late medieval and early modern Iberian anticonverso attitudes have already been treated by eminent historians such as Cecil Roth, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and David Nirenberg, who identified astonishing analogies with later forms of racism and antisemitism.Footnote ³ Soyer's contribution to this scholarship is twofold. First, he integrates early modern Iberian conspiracy myths with the better-known “purity of blood” exclusionary laws; second, he convincingly demonstrates that some of those old Iberian stories nurtured later Western myths.

Oddly, the author makes no reference to Francisco de Quevedo's satiric episode The Monopantos’ Island (La isla de los Monopantos), originally aimed against Count-Duke of Olivares's purported proconverso policies, as one of the probable indirect sources of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, via Hermann Goedsche's Biarritz (1868).Footnote ⁴ According to Soyer, Jews and conversos were simply a means, and not the aim, in Quevedo's satirical fiction, which is why there is no single reference to The Monopantos’ Island in later early modern Iberian antisemitic literature (82–83). At the same time, Soyer is fully aware of Quevedo's influence during Olivares's times; he identifies Quevedo's circulation of the belief in a converso and Jewish anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish conspiracy plan in a passage from his earlier pamphlet, Execración de los judíos (1633). In this vitriolic leaflet, Quevedo explicitly invoked “the correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople” to denounce Portuguese conversos as a dangerous fifth column in Iberia, although he expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of that epistolary exchange, as if anticipating sympathetic future readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.Footnote ⁵ In chapter 2 (54–92) and in the epilogue (275–81), Soyer painstakingly probes the origins of these forged letters, which were initially used by Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martínez Silíceo (1477–1547) to support anticonverso exclusionary laws of “purity of blood.” Soyer thus sheds light on the way these letters framed anticonverso conspiracy myths in early modern Iberia, and most surprisingly, on the fact that this spurious correspondence (along with a French variant) was still echoed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century conspiracy narratives in France, German-speaking countries, Russia, and in Franco's Spain, as an addendum to more recent forgeries and stereotypes. Hence, without attempting to show an organic continuity, Soyer demonstrates that the (alleged) epistolary exchange between deceitful Iberian conversos and open Jews living in the Ottoman Empire was recycled through subsequent antisemitic reverberations. As it appears in the book, Iberian anti-Jewish and anticonverso conspiracy tropes enjoyed an astonishing endurance coupled with a protean capacity for adaption.

As previously mentioned, Soyer links anticonverso conspiracy myths to anti-Jewish traditions in general (56–59), and in medieval Spain in particular (138–56; 184–96; 233–35). At the same time, he shows that conversos’ enemies did not perceive them as mere followers of the “perfidious” Jews. Rather, they were depicted as worse than their openly Jewish relatives because they furtively employed Christian identities to damage Old Christian society from within. For this reason, Soyer does not limit his research to textual analysis. He argues that the inquisitorial persecution of real and alleged crypto-Jewish practices, such as religious proselytism among Africans and Amerindians, or host and cross desecrations (93–137); initiatives to prohibit or limit conversos from working as physicians and apothecaries to avoid a systematic killing of their Old Christian patients (chapter 4), or as international traders and entrepreneurs because they “suck[ed] the wealth” of the Iberian kingdoms and favored Spain's and Portugal's foreign enemies (chapters 5 and 6); or simply the need to halt converso-Old Christian miscegenation because the former wished to “pollute” the latter (95, 105–6), were all constructed upon a conspiracy metadiscourse. Similarly to Bruno Feitler in his study on anti-Jewish literature in the early modern Portuguese world,Footnote ⁶ Soyer thus concludes that the negative image of the conversos as inveterate conspirators was a tool with which to build a homogeneous and stagnant Iberian Old Christian and Catholic society (267–75), through what could be called a “binary” (i.e., Schmittean) idea of politics as constituted by an inevitable clash between friend and enemy.

Soyer stresses a synergy between the texts and the historical contexts. For example, the obsessive inquisitorial persecution of the Portuguese conversos in Spanish America in the 1640s was grounded on the broader ideological claim that they took part in a “grand conspiracy” against the Spanish Empire (213–28). Anticonverso conspiracy myths, for Soyer, were a means of propaganda, a “conscious and sustained effort by some members of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities in both kingdoms [i.e., Spain and Portugal], most notably by the Inquisition, to foster a ‘moral panic’ about conversos” (13). This approach enables the author to explain why certain conspiracy motifs became more dominant at certain moments and remained recessive in others. It also helps him distinguish between a majority of unfounded accusations, on the one hand, and the claim that conversos planned to destroy the Spanish monarchy in the seventeenth century, which was “constructed from incontrovertible facts” (228) based on the vast converso-Sephardic international networking, on the other.

Soyer's methodological cross-referencing approach enables him to identify three main literary texts through which much of the anti-Jewish and anticonverso conspiracy myths were channeled: Alonso de Espina's Fortalitium fidei (c. 1458), Vicente da Costa Mattos's Breve discurso contra a heretica perfídia do iudaismo (1622 and 1623) (and, to a lesser extent, his Honras christãs nas afrontas de iesu Christo [1625]), and Francisco de Torrejoncillo's Centinela contra judíos (1674), which according to Soyer, was the greatest popularizer of antisemitism in Iberia.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, three alleged historical episodes seem to play the role of archetypes. One was the abovementioned correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople. The second episode was the case of Meir Alguadex, the Jewish personal physician of King Enrique III, who purportedly poisoned the king in 1406, as the archetypical figure of the Jewish/converso homicidal doctor (150–56). The third and final episode was the fall of the city of Toledo to Muslim invaders in 711 with the help of its Jewish inhabitants, as the template of future accusations of Jewish/converso political treachery (186–96).

Soyer compares conversos with other subaltern groups who suffered from similar stigmas and prejudice, both in the Iberian world (e.g., the Moriscos and African slaves) and beyond (e.g., Catholics in England). Although he never forgets the specificity of the Jewish-converso case (e.g., 175–76), he suggests that these conspiracy fears were related to the early modern phenomenon of confessionalization (48–53). Let us recall the case of Rodrigo Lopes, the Portuguese converso physician of Elizabeth I of England, briefly mentioned by Soyer (209), who was executed in 1594 for spying on behalf of Catholic Spain and aiming to poison the queen. Here we find tangible proof of the circulation and adaptability of the Iberian anticonverso conspiracy myth in early modern confessional Europe; this time, however, it was paradoxically employed as a propagandistic tool of English “Hispanophobia.”Footnote ⁸

It is worth mentioning that for Soyer, Iberian anticonverso conspiracy myths were not exclusively a top-down phenomenon: “The existence of a ‘Jewish plot’ to destroy the Church and Christian community was seemingly accepted as an incontrovertible fact by members of all social ranks” (137). Thus, among the many fascinating examples sprinkled throughout the book, the author refers to an anonymous eighteenth-century painting of an alleged flagellation of a crucifix by Portuguese conversos, known as El Señor del Tambo de Montero. Supposedly occurring in Cuzco (Peru) in the 1630s or the 1640s, this story was preserved by local folklore, and the painting, displayed at the Mercedarian church of Cuzco, became the object of popular veneration (135–36).

I applaud Soyer's engagement with a sensitive historical subject like popular antisemitism, without opting to hide behind academic relativism or political correctness. Soyer loudly denounces any form of Jewish/converso hatred and does not exonerate anyone from responsibility: whether the hegemonic classes or the subaltern groups, culprits or victims of power. Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World leaves no empathetic space for any kind of hatred based on prejudice, generalization, or essentialism. Adopting this holistic manner of mapping antisemitic conspiracy myths in the early modern Iberian world may lead to the risk of misunderstanding these shared and widespread fears as representing a monolithically intolerant and fanatic civilization. Aware of this, Soyer briefly mentions Stuart B. Schwartz's All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, which provides an abundance of popular expressions of religious tolerance towards “despised” groups, such as the conversos, often coupled with criticism vis-à-vis inquisitorial persecution, racial exclusion, and demonization.Footnote ⁹ As it is impossible to quantify levels of tolerance and intolerance in the early modern Iberian world (10), I suggest that Soyer's and Schwartz's books be read jointly. The use of microhistorical methods in the form of short vignettes would further nuance and problematize Soyer's and Schwartz's chiaroscuro portrait of the Iberian world. Just to mention a well-known example, the Portuguese converso physician at the court of King Philip IV in Madrid, Fernando Cardoso (a.k.a. Isaac Cardoso, after his “return” to Judaism in Italy), was befriended by two notorious antisemites: Juan de Quiñones and Lope de Vega. The former published a vitriolic tract in which, among other accusations, he claimed that male conversos inherited from Jews hemorrhoid menstruations; whereas the latter, an acclaimed poet and dramaturge, as well as a familiar of the Holy Office, integrated antisemitic and anticonverso myths in his theatrical work, including conspiracy tropes (193, 206, 253, 269–70). Cardoso fled the Iberian Peninsula to Italy, but not because of Quiñones and de Vega, who certainly knew of his Portuguese converso origins. Despite the fact that he could be easily identified as the “archetypal homicidal doctor” decried by so many anticonverso writers, he visited Quiñones on his sickbed and was the personal physician of Lope de Vega and one of the last people to see him before his death. While Cardoso later mocked Quiñones's unfounded accusations with a mixture of anger and intimate irony, he mourned his patient and literary admirer Lope de Vega with poignant poetry.Footnote ¹⁰

Soyer begins his book with an apology to the reader for the lack of enough contextualization. His aim, he explains, was specifically to chart “the history of an antisemitic idea” (11). In my view, the author fulfilled this task in a solid, convincing, and enrichingly honest way.