Growing up as a young Jewish girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I attended a small private Jewish elementary school. I was in the “big class” consisting of sixteen students. Early in my academic career, and every March since then, I have read and listened to readings from the biblical Book of Esther during the festival of Purim. Purim is a Jewish holiday where mostly kids dress up in costumes, exchange gifts, and give to charity. The holiday commemorates how Esther hid her Jewish identity to become queen, only to reveal it at the perfect moment to save her people from genocide. What a mensch! I loved Queen Esther: her glam, her grit, her mystery. I never thought of Queen Esther as a crypto-Jew, but that is exactly what she was (and the first one at that): a person who concealed her Jewish identity to survive in a hostile environment. This narrative resonated deeply with me, connecting my own identity to a long history of Jewish survival through concealment and adaptation. It is a narrative that would play out in my world years later. The story of Esther is an ancient tale but also a template for understanding the experiences of crypto-Jews throughout history, particularly in Spain and New Spain (present-day New Mexico) during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. What follows is an examination of the lives of conversas, or women crypto-Jews, especially those related to the exploration of the New World.
Crypto-Jews, or conversos, were Jews who publicly converted to Christianity under coercion but secretly maintained Jewish practices. According to Renée Levine Melammed’s Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile, these individuals navigated a precarious existence between two worlds, constantly under threat from the Spanish Inquisition. The experiences of conversas, in particular, have been largely erased from historical narratives, their stories buried beneath the weight of patriarchal record-keeping and the violence of forced conversion.
This erasure became personal when I re-encountered the story of Luis de Torres while reading Ilan Stavans’ graphic novel El Iluminado. Luis de Torres was a name I had seen before in Columbus’s diary; he served as one of Columbus’s translators on the 1492 voyage to the Americas, one of the first Europeans of Jewish descent to set foot in the New World. Yet, like so many historical figures, Torres exists in the archive primarily as a solitary male actor. The women in his life — his wife, his mother, his daughters, his sisters — are absent from the historical record, their lives and experiences deemed unworthy of documentation. Reading El Iluminado, I felt a profound connection to the crypto-Jewish community through my background as a New Mexican Jew. The scarcity of our historical presence mirrors the experience of Jews wandering in the desert, searching for belonging and recognition. But it is the women in their lives whose stories have been most thoroughly erased from historical narratives. This essay seeks to recover, or at least imagine, the lives of these women by focusing on Luis de Torres and the woman I believe to have been his wife: Catalina Sánchez.
Luis de Torres was a converso, a Jew who had converted to Christianity and served as Columbus’s interpreter on the 1492 voyage due to his knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic. Columbus’s ship log from the voyage is the primary source that mentions Torres by name, identifying him as part of the first landing party sent to communicate with Indigenous peoples in Hispaniola. Columbus thought the New World would be made up of Hebrew speakers; mirroring today’s conflation of America with the Holy Land. This makes Torres one of the first Europeans of Jewish descent to set foot in the Americas, a historically significant figure whose legacy is often overlooked. However, like most chronicles of exploration, Columbus’s journal is entirely silent on the women in Torres’ family that were left behind in Spain, if any. This absence is not incidental but structural: women were rarely considered worthy of mention in official expedition records unless they traveled aboard or were subjects of scandal. For my research, this source establishes the historical baseline of Torres’s documented life while simultaneously illustrating the archival silence surrounding the conversa women connected to him. Torres’s role as a translator positioned him as a cultural intermediary, someone who moved between languages, religions, and worlds — old and new. Yet this same mobility has rendered his family life nearly invisible. Where did he come from? Who were his kin? What became of the women in his family after he departed for the New World? These questions drove me to search for a paper trail, hoping to find evidence of the women whose lives intersected with his.
My search yielded a rare discovery of a woman recorded in an historical document: a 1508 royal payment to “Catalina Sánchez, widow of Luis de Torres,” compensating her for her late husband’s service on the 1492 voyage. It is also shown that Torres died in La Navidad: “Luis judío converso; murió en la’Navidad.” La Navidad was a settlement on the island of Hispaniola. Many of Columbus’ men were left there when Columbus returned to Spain in 1493 These references to Torres appear in Alice Bache Gould’s Nueva Lista Documentada de Los Tripulantes de Colón, a meticulous work of archival research that provides one of the only direct documentary traces of a woman connected to Luis de Torres. This single payment record is extraordinary in its rarity. Most women connected to Columbus’s crew members remain entirely undocumented. Gould’s work reveals that Catalina Sánchez survived her husband by at least sixteen years and was recognized by the Spanish Crown as his legitimate heir, suggesting she successfully navigated the legal and social systems of early sixteenth-century Spain despite her likely conversa status. However, beyond this payment record, Catalina vanishes from the archive.
The discovery of Catalina’s name raised more questions than it answered. Who was she before she married Luis de Torres? Did she practice Judaism in secret? Did she have children, and if so, what became of them? Did she remarry after Torres’s death, or did she remain a widow? Did she face scrutiny from the Inquisition, as so many conversas did? The archive offers no clear answers, but it provides a rare anchor point for investigating conversas’ experiences during this period. Archival research is fraught with complications, and one of the most significant challenges I encountered was the prevalence of the name “Catalina Sánchez” in early modern Spain. In Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau’s “Strategies of the Accused,” a chapter in In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain, I found a case study of a widow named Catalina Sánchez who faced Inquisitorial interrogation and mentioned a son named Jacob, a distinctly Jewish name that suggests crypto-Jewish practice. One could assume that she raised Jewish children.
While it remains uncertain whether this Catalina Sánchez is the same woman identified by Gould as Torres’s widow, the possibility is tantalizing. If they are the same person, this would provide suggestive evidence about Torres’s family and their maintenance of Jewish traditions. Even if they are not the same woman, Starr-LeBeau’s case study illuminates the strategies that conversa widows like Torres’s widow Catalina might have employed when navigating the Inquisition’s gendered system of interrogation and punishment. Starr-LeBeau examines how accused conversos, including women, responded strategically to Inquisitorial interrogations: some denied all charges, some confessed selectively to minor infractions to avoid torture, and some invoked their roles as pious Christian mothers to deflect suspicion. These strategies reveal the agency that conversa women exercised within systems designed to strip them of power, and they suggest the kinds of choices that Catalina Sánchez, whichever Catalina she was, may have faced.
A further complication emerged from Nancy E. van Deusen’s book chapter “All the World in a Village: Carmona,” from her book Global Indios, which reveals that one woman named Catalina Sánchez from Carmona, initially believed to be connected to Luis de Torres, was actually an Indigenous woman who had been brought to Spain from the Americas. This discovery exemplifies how women were treated as commodities during this time period, being traded or shipped like canned goods, and shows the complexity of archival identification and the dangers of collapsing distinct identities such as “conversa,” “Christian,” and “Indigenous” into a single narrative. Van Deusen’s work demonstrates that in early modern Spain and its colonies, identities were fluid, contested, and often erroneously recorded in official documents. This fluidity could have been strategic as well. It is in potentially disadvantaged group members’ interest to have plausible deniability about being an ‘other.’ Van Duesen’s work helped me address the challenge of distinguishing between different women who shared common names, and it highlights the importance of not erasing Indigenous women’s experiences in the rush to recover conversa women’s stories. Both conversa and Indigenous women faced racialized violence, forced conversion, and erasure from dominant historical narratives.
Recovering the stories of conversa women like Catalina Sánchez requires reading into the archive’s silences and seeking evidence in alternative records such as Inquisition trials, dowry contracts, and testamentary documents. The absence of women from official expedition records is not accidental; it reflects a patriarchal system in which women’s lives were deemed less valuable and less worthy of documentation than men’s. If direct evidence of Catalina Sánchez and other conversa women connected to Luis de Torres proves elusive, which is highly likely, this absence itself becomes meaningful. The silence in the archives tells its own story about whose lives were deemed worth recording and whose were not. In such cases, we can examine what their lives could have been like based on available scholarship about conversas during this period: their religious practices, social constraints, family dynamics, and the dangers they faced.
Conversas occupied a precarious social position. They were subject to intense scrutiny from the Inquisition, which sought to root out secret Jewish practices. They faced restrictions on their religious rituals and their marriages. Yet they also found ways to resist, to preserve traditions, and to pass on their identities to their children, often in secret and at great personal risk. Based on the historical treatment of conversas documented by scholars like Melammed and Starr-LeBeau, and in Queen Esther’s story, we can infer what Catalina Sánchez’s life might have been like. As the widow of a converso who had sailed to the New World, she would have been under suspicion. The Inquisition targeted conversa women with particular intensity, viewing them as the primary transmitters of Jewish tradition within families. Women were responsible for maintaining kosher dietary practices, observing the Sabbath, and teaching children prayers and rituals. This is a departure from the mainstay Jewish traditions where men were leaders and heralded the Jewish traditions forward.
If Catalina maintained any Jewish practices, she would have done so in secret, always aware that a neighbor’s suspicion alone could lead to arrest, interrogation, and torture. The Inquisition’s system of punishment was particularly brutal for women: accused conversas were often stripped, humiliated, and subjected to sexual violence under the guise of interrogation. Those found guilty faced public shaming through the auto-da-fé (act of faith): the ritual for condemned heretics that could include burning. Yet conversa women also demonstrated remarkable resilience and agency. They developed coded languages to discuss Jewish practices, maintained networks of mutual support, and found ways to preserve traditions across generations. If Catalina had daughters, she would have been the one most likely to pass on the family’s Jewish heritage, teaching them in whispers and through example how to navigate the dangerous boundary between public Christianity and private Judaism.
Historical scholarship consistently demonstrates that conversa women were the primary custodians of crypto-Jewish practice. Men like Luis de Torres, who occupied public roles and engaged in commerce or exploration, were more visible and thus more vulnerable to scrutiny if they displayed Jewish behaviors. Women, confined to the domestic sphere, had more opportunities to maintain religious practices in private. This meant that wives and mothers were instructing their kin in the delicate art of dissimulation: how to appear as devout Christians in public while preserving Jewish identity in private. It meant teaching them which foods to avoid, how to observe the Sabbath without attracting attention, and which prayers to recite in secret. It meant preparing them for the possibility of interrogation and teaching them what to say, and what never to say, if they were arrested.
The story of the Carvajal family, depicted in Stavans’ El Iluminado, provides a parallel case. Luis Carvajal came to see himself as El Iluminado, a messianic figure who would lead crypto-Jews to salvation. Yet it was his older sister, Isabel de Carvajal, who maintained the family’s Jewish practices and ensured their transmission to the next generation. Women like Isabel, Queen Esther, and, I believe, Catalina, were the unsung heroines of crypto-Jewish survival. The tale of Catalina Sánchez is ultimately a story about absence and presence, about what is recorded and what is erased, about whose lives are deemed worthy of historical memory. We know almost nothing about her: a name, a payment record, and the fact that she survived her husband by at least sixteen years. Yet this scant evidence opens a window into the lives of thousands of conversa women who navigated similar circumstances, who faced similar dangers, and who demonstrated similar resilience.
Catalina’s story connects to my own experience, learning about crypto-Jewish communities in New Mexico and how they maintained their traditions in secret for centuries after the Inquisition. I happened to be cast in the role of Queen Esther for my school’s Purim play. To think back on this now, it amazes me how connected I was, and still am, to the roots of crypto-Judaism, both physically and spiritually. Queen Esther, the first crypto-Jew, who concealed her identity to survive and ultimately saved her people. It connects to the broader experiences of women in the early 1500s, who were subject to patriarchal control, religious persecution, and systemic erasure from historical narratives. It connects to the Holocaust. It connects to today’s politically strife-ridden climate. The lack of direct evidence about Catalina Sánchez and the other women in Luis de Torres’s life is not a failure of historical research; it is the product of a deliberate system that devalued women’s lives and experiences. The silence in the archives tells its own story about whose lives were deemed worth recording and whose were not. Yet by reading into silences, by examining what conversa women’s lives could have been like based on available scholarship, and by insisting on the importance of their stories, we can begin to recover what has been lost.
Catalina Sánchez may have vanished from the historical record after 1508, but her legacy persists. She survived. She navigated the legal and social systems of her time. She may have passed on traditions to her children. She is part of a long lineage of Jewish women who found ways to preserve identity and community in the face of persecution. Her story, though fragmentary, matters. It reminds us that behind every famous historical figure, every explorer, every translator, every “first,” there are women whose labor, whose love, and whose courage made those achievements possible. These women deserve to be remembered, even when the archive tries to forget them.
As a young Jewish woman living centuries after Catalina, I claim her story as part of my own inheritance. The crypto-Jewish women of Spain and New Spain, the women who lit Sabbath candles in secret and whispered prayers in Hebrew when no one was listening, are my ancestors in spirit if not in blood. Their resilience, their creativity, and their determination to survive inspire me. Their erasure from history is an injustice I seek to remedy, one fragment of evidence at a time. I think Queen Esther would be proud.
