Cristãs-novas e criptojudaísmo na Bahia setecentista (Dissertação de Mestrado/UFF, 2018)

By taking as a guiding thread of history the New Christian women of Bahia in the eighteenth century, the present dissertation aims to examine the social compositions and relational networks that shaped the existence of these characters, as well as to reflect on the Sephardic family between <i>Bahia de Todos os Santos</i> and the European diaspora. The legal, social and religious category to which these women belonged was a demarcator of the “blood purity” in the dimensions of the Iberian world. It is thus discussed the central theme of the blood purity statute, whose jurisdiction has split the population into groups of New Christians and Old Christians. The definition of identities under the inquisitorial persecution is explained with examples drawn from eighteenth-century Bahia society. The trajectories of these women and their families are investigated from their arrivals to Bahia, and the prosopographic profiles in the new land are then outlined: was there a pattern in their habitations, in the mechanical arts and in marital arrangements? What about the socioeconomic character of each of them? In religious matters, what did they do and what did they unveiled in Bahia? The research thus points to the determinant female attribution in the religious maintenance, the specificities of Bahian Crypto-Judaism, two hundred years after compulsory conversion, and the outcomes of a community dragged by the Judges of Faith powers. Fourteen women were sent to the Estaos prisons in Lisbon to answer for the crimes of Judaism. What was, so, the meaning of the inquisitorial sentence? This dissertation responds to such inquiries through research on handwritten series from the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Lisbon (trials, the Prosecutor's Notebooks, bundles, loose papers), collating manuscripts with other documentary funds.