(Guitar music) (wind whooshing) (gentle instrumental music) - [Joe] For over a decade now, I've been trying to understand an ancient journey.

Like most histories, this one is not a straight line.

It's a circuitous, complex, convoluted, and often secret journey.

- Why did my family keep so many secrets over generations?

- Being outwardly Catholic and inwardly Jewish was not a tenable dynamic.

- If they were secret Jews, they had on pain of death to remain secret.

- [Joe] It's the journey of people seeking refuge in the face of persecution.

Their routes take us around the globe.

Over mountains and across deserts.

They span oceans and they span centuries.

As you join me on this journey, we'll meet storytellers.

- [Doreen] Oh, my gosh.

- [Joe] Whose ancestors take us back to ancient times.

- A Jewish custom, why would my grandmother be doing a Jewish custom?

- [Joe] They challenge the history we've been taught.

- This is something that actually influenced the shaping of the entire New World.

And not the kind of history that you read in any regular curriculum.

- [Joe] And they challenge the assumptions we've made about identities.

- Someone walking on the street would never identify me as a Jew.

(gentle piano music) (waves crashing) - Your identity could be a choice, but then it's also your history isn't a choice.

- [Joe] Their journeys and secrets began over 500 years ago.

They were sparked by ancient accusations.

(gentle ethnic music) - [Winston] He sent a cow to be killed in the butcher shop of the Jews.

- [David] On Passover, he used to send her matzah.

- [Man] They did not eat pork meat or hare.

- [Woman] He was a heretic.

(fire crackling) - [Man] He was burned at the stake.

(somber music) - [Joe] The Spanish Inquisition.

The first time I ever heard about it was in 1958.

I was just 13.

Our rabbi, William Braude, a respected civil rights leader and scholar, was interviewing Spaniards whose families had been pressured to convert to Catholicism during those terrible times.

But not a person would talk to him.

"No, no, no," they insisted.

(speaking in foreign language) Everyone is Catholic.

We've always been Catholic.

So Braude's sermon told how the shadow of the Inquisition, the terror, the guilt, and the shame that the Inquisition evoked still loomed large 500 years after the Inquisition had begun.

As a 13-year-old, I was struck that something that happened so long ago could continue to instill fear.

But now more than 50 years later, that shadow of fear is fading.

- My name is Jose Emmanuel Barreiro.

As a Spaniard, religion played a huge part in my growing up.

(speaking in foreign language) My parents are loving, caring people.

We said grace at many of our meals.

I taught catechism.

I was a eucharistic minister.

(mother praying in foreign language) There was this rigorous way that you attended mass and you were very, very involved in the Church.

So it was everything.

The first feeling around Judaism and being Spanish and what that meant to me was the guilt and the shame of the Inquisition.

It means something to me.

I'm not sure why it calls to me, but it does.

(gentle ethnic music) - [Joe] During the late Middle Ages, Spain, which the Jews called by its Hebrew name, Sepharad, was uniting its kingdoms under the banner of Catholicism.

Judaism was seen as a threat to the Catholic soul, and Jews a threat to the concept of pure blood.

By 1492, the Inquisition was in full force.

In march of that year, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand declared their new realm an exclusively Catholic kingdom and issued the Edict of Expulsion.

Jews had to convert to Catholicism or leave.

To save their lives, many Jews, some willingly and others forcibly, were baptized, changed their names, and became known as New Christians or conversos, meaning converts.

The New Christians led public lives as devout Catholics often maintaining their Jewish identity in secret.

But when they were suspected of Judaizing, the crime of slipping back into Jewish practices, they were called marranos, meaning swine, and they faced the courts and the fires of the Spanish Inquisition.

- Inquisition was interested in heresy.

The goal of the inquisitors was to get you to confess to the crime that they thought you committed.

And to do that they would interrogate you over long periods of time, they would submit people to torture.

And generally speaking, people did whatever they could to get out.

- So for the Jews who converted to Catholicism but remained Jewish, there had to be a great sense of fear that they were gonna be discovered.

- Many of them have remained silent.

We don't know because they were secret Jews.

If they were secret Jews, they had on pain of death to remain secret.

- Today, there are more and more people, Spanish people, interested in finding out about what may be their Jewish heritage, which you are an example of, that wouldn't have done so 50 years ago.

- The relaxed sort of attitudes in Spain about Catholicism have made the ability to have an interest in Judaism that perhaps didn't exist.

- [Woman] The relationship between the Jewish and Catholic communities has made great progress since the Second Vatican Council when they recognized the great spiritual tradition they shared.

(chorus music) - Vatican II, John XXIII had made it very, very clear we could no longer blame the Jewish people, the Jewish people did not kill Christ.

I think before Vatican II, the fear was if we allow people to have these discussion about our history, who we are, do we risk losing these people to Judaism?

And so I think all of that, it was almost sort of like the Church saying, "It's okay, go ahead."

(bright music) - [Joe] In El Paso, Texas, I met Rabbi Stephen Leon.

25 years ago, a visit from a young Catholic man from Juarez, Mexico changed the rabbi's life.

- He told me that he was Catholic and he had always gone to church, as did all of his family, especially his grandmother.

On Friday evening she would invite him into a dark room in the house, light two candles, say a prayer in a language he didn't understand, and that happened every Friday night.

So, I looked at him and I said, "Well, you know sir, "this is a Jewish custom."

And he said, "Jewish custom?

"Why would my grandmother be doing a Jewish custom?"

Anusim is the Hebrew term for someone who traces that ancestry back to when they were forced to give up their Judaism during the Inquisition.

But I never, ever met anyone with that background.

It just dawned on me that that's what it could be, and it just opened up my eyes to saying this is a phenomenon that is real.

(upbeat music) - [Joe] Within 10 days of talking to that young man, several more Mexican-Catholic families asked to meet with Rabbi Leon.

Some were interested in Judaism.

But all were interested in family histories, long-held secret.

Now all over the world, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or something else, people are discovering that their lives are interwoven by their DNA, their rituals, and their family secrets.

- My father admitted he had known that he was Jewish since he was six.

He was sworn to secrecy to keep the family safe.

- There's a lot of communities that don't even know this is going on.

And then there's new people that are waking up and saying, "Wait, I have these roots."

(rooster crowing) - [Doreen] So, how are your classes going?

- [Claire] Good.

- So, I was raised Catholic.

- Doing my logo.

- [Doreen] My father's from Costa Rica.

(bright piano music) Catholic schoolgirl, beanie, plaid skirt, rosary.

Family of six kids.

When are your tests?

- [Claire] On Friday.

- And it was only until I was an adult and a reporter that over time, people would notice my byline, Doreen Carvajal.

Interviewing a rabbi, said, "Do you know the origins of your name?"

It's an old Sephardic, Jewish name.

And this completely did not fit with my identity.

It became a quest for me to gather information from family members, some of whom were just reluctant to address it.

For example, I had a dear aunt, and she said, Oh, Doreen, I don't know about it."

It was the times, we never talked about that.

So, I wrote to a cousin in Costa Rica, in San Jose, and just basically said, "Are we Jews?"

She wrote back and she said, "Well, as is typical in the Carvajal family, "Yes, we're Sefarditas but it's always complicated."

Why did my family keep so many secrets?

What was it that made them so guarded and so reserved?

Why were they still scared?

Even in the 21st century?

Hey, Claire, come here.

I wanna show you something.

It became a quest for me to kind of crack the code.

This is the family that we traced all the way back to Segovia.

This is your great grandmother.

This is her book of clippings and all the dates.

Everybody in the family.

And I'm following her line to Spain.

(upbeat guitar music) (woman singing in foreign language) I was finally able to trace my family to Segovia to understand how successive generations kept guarding the secret of who they were, and the reason was clear.

They were persecuted for being silent Jews through successive generations.

- [Joe] And Doreen isn't the only one uncovering ancient family secrets.

In New York City, I met Brazilian-born artist, Carlos Demedeiros.

- [Joe] It's a great space.

- It is.

- Beautiful shop.

- [Joe] Carlos was studying to become a priest, but was surprised when an older priest made anti-Jewish remarks.

- And I said, "Father, why you said those things "about the Jewish people?"

And there was this awkward silence and everybody look at me because I made a question.

And everybody look at him and he didn't answer the question.

He said, "Who are you?"

- Questioning the priest did not endear him to the seminary.

Why do you think that was?

- It's almost like the big elephant in the room.

But that is anti-Semitic all over the place.

This was one of the first pieces that I did, I was really in a lot of doubt.

And the hook becomes the question mark.

It was the piece of my struggle on really fading away from Christianity for good.

This I did when I was discovering things.

- What were you discovering?

- The fact that I was raised as a Christian but then my mom was Jewish.

- A few years ago, Carlos heard from a cousin who discovered that their very Catholic family was descended from converted Jews who had fled Portugal for Brazil during the 1500s.

And they were direct descendants of one of the most notorious victims of the Portuguese Inquisition.

Her name was Branca Dias and she has become a legend in Brazil.

Who is Branca Dias?

- [Carlos] She's my 14th grandmother.

And in secrecy she was practicing Jewish rituals and she eventually was discovered and denounced, denounced by her own mother and sister.

- [Joe] Even after two years in the Inquisition torture chambers, Branca never revealed her true religion.

- And she was able to escape to Brazil.

- [Joe] In Brazil, the Inquisition pursued the family for generations.

(soft ethnic music) - To be able to survive so much persecution, I believe that is something very special.

The duality of being Jewish, of being a Christian, is a very personal choice.

If it was for me to choose now, I choose the things they stole from me.

- As Carlos begins the search for his ancestors, we join Doreen in Segovia to dig deeper into how her family's identity was shaped by the Inquisition.

This is David Gitlitz.

- Oh, it's so great to meet you.

- So pleased to meet you.

- [Joe] Professor David Gitlitz, an expert on the Inquisition, and on Doreen's family in particular, agreed to join us.

- [Doreen] So happy to see you.

- [David] You come from a fascinating family.

- [Joe] As we sat in the shadow of the cathedral, David began with Doreen's 16th great grandfather, Diego Arias Davila.

- He was converted as a child as a five or six year old.

But he grew up in a family that still continued to practice Jewish customs.

There was no Inquisition back in those days.

The family had to go to church, they had to hear the sermons, they had to live an outwardly Christian life.

But they were Jewish at home.

And he grew up in that, his childhood was spent in that kind of a dual world.

As a young man, he was a spice salesman.

It was the beginning of the spice trade in Spain in the early 15th century.

And he was handsome and he had a beautiful singing voice, and he would ride into the town plaza.

And he would start to sing and he would draw a crowd.

And once he'd draw a crowd, then he'd open his saddlebags and begin to display his wares and then sell his stuff.

He came to the attention of some highly-placed people.

One of them introduced him to the young prince Henry.

They became very good friends.

And very shortly, Diego got to be the chief financial officer of the Kingdom of Castile.

(bright music) - [Joe] With his friend prince Henry, now king, Diego ran the bachelor king's household.

- [Doreen] So can you imagine that Diego used to walk this way to the palace?

- This was the cathedral, walk around on his way to work.

- So the family was right in the shadow of the palace.

- Oh, yeah, he lived up the street, and he came down.

He was one of the major financial guys for the king, so he worked here.

He had an office, he had a staff, kept the records here.

When they talked about finances, this is where they would have talked about it.

- [Joe] Doreen's great grandfather, Diego, collected the taxes for the kingdom.

He owned markets and real estate.

A man to be envied for his wealth and power.

And Diego had his own castle.

Ironically today it's the tax bureau.

- [Doreen] It was an incredible rush to go into the tower of my ancestors.

Walk in their house, feel where they lived.

Make a spiritual connection, in a way, to the generations from the past.

Finally end up in the last level on these Joeow stone steps.

It was this rush because I was walking in his footsteps.

You walk out the window and you see these glorious views of the parapets and you feel like the master of the universe.

- This place was a statement.

I can picture it, Diego Arias is coming up here and just kind of looking out and saying, "Boy, this is my town.

"I run this town."

I'm sure it raised the ire of every neighbor and everybody in town who had to pay taxes to the Arias family, or who owed them money on loans, or who had to buy in the markets that they controlled.

Combined with the fact that he was from the hated others, that is the Converso class, which pretty much everybody knew.

Diego Arias Davila got to be one of the richest men of his time.

But he continued to pray in Hebrew.

He also went to church.

They were people who clearly lived with a foot in both worlds.

(soft guitar music) - [Joe] The history of Doreen's family in Spain could go back more than 2,000 years when Jewish traders settled on the Iberian Peninsula.

Jews brought not only their goods to trade, but also a new concept, a belief in one God.

- So Jewish tradition says that Jews arrive in Spain as they say as early perhaps as the sixth century BCE, at the time of the destruction of the first temple of Jerusalem.

Until the conversion of Spain to Christianity, the Jews were proselytizing.

And this was true throughout the Mediterranean world.

We know about 1/10 of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish.

(upbeat ethnic music) - [Joe] With the rise and expansion of Christianity, life became harsher for the Jews.

Then, in 711, the world changed for Jews and Christians alike.

(men shouting) (horses galloping) Muslim armies from North Africa swept across the Straits of Gibraltar overwhelming the Christian kingdoms.

They quickly conquered almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, and Islam became the dominant culture for hundreds of years.

But the Christian armies pushed back against the Muslims.

And when the power dynamic shifted, the Jews, always a minority, had to consider to which side they should throw their support.

Yet, there were periods of relative harmony among the Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Some called it Convivencia, a period of living together.

- The three cultures blended in a way that created this Spanish character.

They influenced each other in how they thought and how they wrote and how they sung and what they ate, and how they dressed.

There were tensions.

So, it wasn't all love and kisses.

But on the whole it was pretty good.

(soft ethnic music) - [Joe] In the mid 1300s, a period when Jewish life was flourishing, this was the main synagogue.

And this is probably where Doreen's Jewish ancestors worshiped.

It's enormous.

- [David] It had to have been one of the largest communities in Castile.

- [Joe] So, the women would be upstairs?

- Women are upstairs.

They would be behind these arches in seats up there.

Men downstairs.

And like most of the synagogues, it's decorated in ways that are essentially Islamic in character, the horseshoe arches, the lattice work, all that stuff is Islamic.

Jews decorate like their neighbors decorate.

- The capitals are beautiful.

- Yeah.

- The arches are beautiful.

It obviously had a rather prosperous Jewish community in the middle of the 1300s.

- Yep.

- And they obviously dealt well with their neighbors to some degree if they were able to have this kind of a life.

And then it started to fall apart.

- It started to fall apart with the 1391 riots in Seville that were drummed up by some Dominican preachers there.

And that was the first wave of forced conversions.

(dramatic ethnic music) - [Joe] In 1391, preaching monks railed so violently against the Jews, that massacres of thousands began in Seville, and spread all the way to Barcelona.

For the next 100 years, waves of persecutions left Spanish Jews fearing for their lives.

- The Christian Church was still blaming the Jews for having crucified Jesus and that created a real tension always.

The Jews could be the scapegoats, the evil Jews, the money-grubbing Jews, they're the ones who crucified Jesus.

They're not to be trusted, and so forth.

- [Joe] The massacres by the anti-Jewish mobs began a wave of conversion.

Within a century, half the Jews of Spain would become Catholics.

- People were very concerned about following the right law if they would think of it.

The law of Christ or the law of Moses, and if you followed the right law, you would be saved.

And if you're wrong, the consequences are dire.

- So, your family would have been converting around the time that this was all starting to change.

- [David] Couple of years after this.

- So, probably when they were still young they would have attended services in this synagogue.

- Very likely, very likely.

They and their kids were baptized a couple of years after this.

(bright orchestral music) - [Joe] In Diego's time, Jews didn't have to convert, but for those who did, the Church demanded a total break from their former lives.

The New Christians were forbidden from following Jewish dietary laws.

And unnatural as it sounds, you had to give up all contact with your Jewish family and friends.

So, no matter how sincere your conversion, going to a sister's Passover Seder could be punishable by death.

But despite the dangers, there were ways to navigate a dual identity.

The Arias Davila family was a case in point.

- Diego Arias moved his Jewish sister in next door.

And it was a little socially-awkward for them to hang out together, so he built a little secret door between their two gardens and they could go back and forth and hang out together.

So, here you have a family risen from nothing, in the seat of power, one generation with a foot in both worlds.

The second generation pretty much turning its back on the Jewish world and integrating completely.

It was a very, very common pattern.

(dramatic ethnic music) (crowd chattering) All through the 1400s, as more and more people converted, the complexity of the Converso community became more and more problematic for everybody.

- [Joe] What made the Jews different from their non-Jewish neighbors?

- Well, in terms of education, clearly, it was that Jewish males were almost universally literate.

They had to learn to read, to write, be able to discuss Torah by the time they reached adolescence, around 13.

So in a population where almost everybody was illiterate except for the clergy, the Jews represented a different kind of educated group.

- So because the Jews had to read to be Jewish, to be bar-mitzvahed, they-- - The way that people studied Torah had an impact on the way people thought.

And that meant that people developed analytical skills and they developed rhetorical skills that served them very well in administrative kinds of tasks.

(upbeat ethnic music) - [Joe] But the advantage that literacy gave conversos engendered jealousy, and led neighbors and competitors to question their religious sincerity.

- And so the problem began in Spanish society, that hadn't been there before and that is, who is this individual that's converted?

From the point of view of the Church, he's a Christian.

She's a Christian, baptism is indelible.

If you then observe the Sabbath, and then observe Passover, and then observe the rituals of Judaism, that's Judaising.

Judaising is punishable by death.

- There was nobody in the Christian world who would have said that there was something wrong with punishing people for theological error.

It was taken for granted that that was a crime.

(dramatic music) - The fact that you couldn't tell who was a converso, who was secretly still a Jew, began to take on a new life of its own with people beginning to call for a commission or committee of inquiry, inquisicio, that would inquire into the actions and beliefs of the individual converts.

- And that was the Inquisition.

- [Joe] The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478 and it lasted for 330 years.

It was headed by the grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.

Confessor to the new queen, Isabella.

While all Inquisitions throughout Catholic Europe attacked heresy, the Spanish Inquisition focused on backsliding converts whose Jewish ties might corrupt true believers.

But soon it became a tool for the jealous and the ambitious.

- [Jane] There were great incentives to informing on people because the informers shared in the property of the accused.

- [Joe] So there was an incredible atmosphere of fear?

- The atmosphere of fear of informing quickly spread in Spain.

(soft guitar music) - [Doreen] You can understand how people lived in that time who were conversos and who were living dual identities.

Anyone could look out a window and spy on what you're doing.

They had to be discreet.

People were watching if they were involved with their Jewish family.

You really understand the tensions that existed at that time with people always being under the watch.

Later it all comes home when the leather maker, the laundress, the woodcarver, start testifying to the Inquisition about the behavior in this case of my ancestors.

- [Joe] While the Jews hoped converting would save their lives, some were convinced that Catholicism was the true religion.

So, a lot of people became Christian?

- For very sincere reasons.

And many of them became church people.

- [Joe] But few of those conversos rose to the heights of Diego Arias Davila's son, Juan.

(upbeat ethnic music) (people chattering) Beneath Segovia's aqueduct built in Roman times, we chanced upon a celebration of Bishop Juan Arias Davila, Doreen's great uncle, 16 generations removed.

In the 1400s, Juan's life exemplified an era of sweeping changes.

(soft chorus music) - Juan was appointed bishop of Segovia when he was only 20 years old.

Amazing.

- [Joe] Diego's extraordinary influence with the Crown catapulted his son Juan to the very top of the clergy.

- The bishop presides almost as if he were a monarch-- - So, this was his court?

- Over a throne.

This is his court.

And he sits in this raised thing.

He's got that little crown over his head that suggest that in this world he is the royalty.

- So, this was when he was at the zenith of his power.

- You bet.

He turned his back completely on Judaizing and on the Jewish connections.

And he became one of the striking liberal renaissance bishops of Spain.

He's the guy who imported the printing press, created the first books.

He saw that this would be revolutionary and wanted to seize the moment.

(soft music) - [Joe] Bishop Juan's reforming attitudes and his desire to educate the clergy caught Torquemada's attention.

And he didn't like it.

Juan's piety was beyond reproach, so Torquemada smeared him by bringing charges against his parents, Diego and Elvira, even though they'd been dead for years.

Torquemada's Inquisition found 200 people to bear witness against them.

To see their actual words, we were granted access to the national archives in Madrid.

Deep inside, accusations against Doreen's family, have lain for centuries, handwritten and bound in leather.

Archivist, Elena Jimenez, unearthed the ancient documents for us.

- This is the documents of your family.

- You give me chills.

- So, this is the testimony against Diego Arias Davila who's the accountant of King Enrique IV and against Elvira Gonzalez, his wife.

Father, parents of Don Juan de Arias Davila, the bishop.

- It's amazing how old this is.

It's such a physical connection to finally see the documents.

So, let's meet the family.

- Got it, let's set it up.

- [Joe] Diego Arias Davila and his wife, Elvira Gonzalez, had not been careful.

Washing before the Sabbath, not cooking during the Sabbath, eating kosher food, were all signs that they were continuing their Jewish practices, or Judaizing, while presenting themselves as public Catholics.

And people took notice.

- This testimony was taken on the 23rd of January of 1486.

So, this is the testimony given in 1486, okay?

- [Joe] Amazing.

- So, a few years after the Inquisition started and six years before the expulsion of the Jews.

This witness is saying that Diego Arias, the father of the bishop of Segovia, that he had a (speaking in foreign language), beautiful voice, because he had seen him one day in his house in Segovia standing like a rabbi and singing a psalm that the Jews used to sing.

"His voice seemed like the voice of an angel."

And he said, "Wow, what a voice this guy has got."

What a sad voice, what emotion in this guy's voice.

(speaking in foreign language) This witness said that he had heard Antonia Vasquez, his wife, say that many times she had seen coming to the house of Diego Arias, who is now dead, a Jew who is named Vilas and that he used to bring adafina.

- Oh, that's Sabbath stew.

- Yeah, adafina.

Cooked adafina.

He brought it from the Jewish quarter to the Arias house on Saturdays and on other days.

And that he drew aside with the said Jew to eat it in the upstairs room.

So, they did takeout on Saturday and it was part of their regular routine.

But it shows a habit of continuing to respect the Jewish custom of the ritual purity for the Sabbath.

- [Joe] Even though they were Christians?

- Even though they were Christians.

- [Joe] And that made them heretics.

- And that made them, in the view of some, heretics, yeah.

- Eating a hard-boiled egg from Sabbath stew, you're a heretic.

- You're in trouble.

What's really amazing is that these testimonies are to get Juan, the bishop.

It's testimonies against dead people.

- If they were to bring the case to conclusion, what they might do is dig up the bones, burn them ritually in an auto-da-fe and confiscate the property because it was the property of heretics.

So, all that could have happened.

When eventually, he packed up and moved to the Vatican for his own protection, they won.

This never was formally tried.

This was just the gathering witness testimony stage of the case.

And they gathered a lot.

Fortunately, for us.

- It's amazing when you finally find something that you've been looking for for so long and to see it on a table, aging spots, beautiful handwriting, and it sums up in one sentence what this is all about.

A Jew who converted.

(somber music) - Beautiful place.

- Yeah, it's fantastic.

- [Joe] Back in Segovia, Doreen and I have one more lead to chase.

Overlooking the ancient Roman aqueduct, magnificent palaces flank the entry gates to the city.

Here stands the palace of the Inquisition, where inquisitors stayed during their visitations.

Directly across the street stands another palace and it holds a surprise for Doreen.

(Doreen speaking in foreign language) The family of the Marquesa of la Zoya has lived in this palace for centuries.

The Marquesa leads us through her gardens overlooking the city.

(birds chirping) At the end of the garden, a family chapel lies hidden below ground.

(soft guitar music) - [Doreen] Oh, my gosh.

- [Joe] It's a funerary statue of Diego Arias Davila from the 1400s.

- This is incredible.

Face to face with my great grandfather 16 times removed.

This is Isabel who I descend from.

Isabel was still alive when the Inquisition was interviewing witnesses.

The offices of the Inquisition are just footsteps from where we stand now, so it's really ironic that they're here in this little private preserve.

Their final resting place, obviously, is still a mix of symbols.

There's an altar over there and the Virgin Mary wailing over her Son.

So, in death there are still these Christian icons and no mention of their Jewish past that they tried to preserved in secret.

Because of this visit, I feel like I know people from more than 500 years ago because I know how they ate, I know how they prayed, I know their sadness over living a dual identity, being a conversos but still wanting to be a Jew.

I never thought this day would come.

(lively guitar music) - [Joe] Converted families like Doreen's worked hard to hide their Jewish past.

They took new names for their new identities, many forced themselves to eat pork products, the meat forbidden by Jewish law.

All to prove that they were faithfully confirmed in their new identity and hopefully safe.

To some degree it worked.

Carmen Gomez-Gomez, a PhD candidate in Toledo, says that the history of the Jews of Spain was denied when she was growing up.

- We didn't mention it.

- [Joe] You didn't mention that?

- We mentioned it, we know that they killed Jesus Christ and they were living in the times of Jesus Christ.

That's it, even, for example, in my town, we have a neighborhood that is called now the neighborhood of the Jews.

And I remember they asked my mom, "We have Jews?"

"No, we never had Jews."

But we have a neighborhood.

"No, no, but that's only the name."

It wasn't like that, I researched.

It was a synagogue until the '60s when they destroyed it.

- [Joe] So the history of the Jews was ignored where you grew up?

- Exactly.

And I remember in my last year in high school, my history book, a big portrait of Isabel, blah, blah, blah, blah, she conquered America and she expelled the Jews, point.

- [Joe] And she expelled the Jews?

- Point.

(bell tolling) - [Joe] The Cathedral of Toledo houses vast archives of church and municipal records dating back for centuries.

Carmen's thesis work follows the social networks of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims as shown in the tax records.

This is the archive office for the cathedral?

- [Carmen] Yes.

- Is this all there is or is there more?

- Of course, there is.

Almost all the basements of the clause are full of documents since the beginning of the 13th century until now.

- These are tax records?

- Yes, tax and properties records.

(speaking in foreign language) - So perfect.

And this is all from the 1400s?

- This is from the 15th century.

I follow a tax, and this tax was over the meat, the Jewish meat, the kosher meat.

And follow the story of the tax for over the years, we can know that one family, hard to tell, was expulsed.

- They were expelled because they, you can see what happened because in 1492 they were gone.

- Exactly.

- Oh, I see, I see.

So following the tax records is like a little window into history?

- Exactly.

- [Joe] What is it about this stuff that excites you so much?

- It's the history.

I will show you.

It's a document from the 14th century.

Now you're holding something that has 600 years.

Touch it, smell it.

It's history.

That's exciting.

(soft guitar music) - History is everywhere in Spain, and for me, people like Carmen, Doreen, and David have collapsed the centuries, allowing me to feel like I actually know the people of 500 years ago, and understand the terrors that they faced.

(whistle blowing) So, an Inquisition prison will be very much like this?

- I think so, although many of the ones I've seen have smaller cells.

The Inquisition like that put people in individual cells.

Then they sit until the first interrogation.

- What would happen to a family when somebody was taken?

- [David] They seized all your cash and all of your property.

- Just like that?

- [David] Yeah, oh, yeah, instantly.

- [Joe] Without a trial, without anything?

- No, no, no.

If you didn't have enough cash to pay your expenses, they would then inventory your property and they would sell them at auction.

That money was used to pay your expenses.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

(bell rings) One day, without any announcement, they're gonna come down here and open the door, and take you upstairs and start the first interrogation.

What is your name?

Where were you born?

Who are your relatives?

Are you descended from Jews or moors?

Are you a baptized Christian?

And eventually they would come to the key question, do you know why you were arrested?

Open-ended question, tell us all the things you might be guilty of.

There would be a torture room, every prison had one.

It wouldn't be far from here, often close enough so that some of the louder noises coming from it could be an additional stimulus to the people still held.

(somber music) The three major tortures that were used by the Inquisition, and pretty much in this order.

The Potro, which in english is The Rack.

They would strap a person to a table.

- Like this?

- Like this.

And then they would put a thick rope around, say, this arm, then put a stick or something through and then twist it.

The pain was excruciating.

The second one, if the Potro was not enough, was the Garrucha.

They would tie your hands behind your back like this and then, yeah, right.

They suspend you like that, bounce you until it dislocated your shoulders.

If that didn't work, then they did a Toca, which is water boarding.

They would pry open your mouth with this kind of funnel device and then put a thin, gauzy cloth over your mouth.

And then pour a jar of water down the funnel.

It would force the gauze into your esophagus.

You get the sensation of drowning, and then they would yank it out and say, "Okay, now are you ready to tell the truth?"

You have to picture this in an interrogation room with two inquisitors, at least one scribe who's writing down absolutely everything.

- [Joe] The accused would wear their shame on robes called San Benitos.

- They would be hung in the person's parish church with their name, with the sins, and for generations, and they would be a badge of shame for the family.

- So the horrors of the Inquisition, this had an effect on people for generations.

- The shaming was very, very, very important.

And, in fact, if you want to defame somebody in Spanish, the idiom for that is to (speaking in foreign language), to hang a San Benito on them.

(speaking in foreign language) Suggests that you've been accused of something unjustly but done in such a public way that it defames you and ruins your reputation.

(somber music) - [Joe] In the first decades of the Inquisition, most of the accused were found guilty.

Their fate was decided at a huge public spectacle called the auto-da-fe, which literally means an act of faith.

- [David] At the day of the auto-da-fe, they would come for you, clean you up, dress you in the San Benito.

Every prisoner was escorted by a couple of friars and they're talking to you all the time.

"Now is the time to come clean.

"If you have anything further to say, "this would be a good time to say it.

"Remember that this is not about your earthly body, "it's about your eternal soul."

(crowd chattering) - Here they put all the seats for the people and also the people watched the auto-da-fe by their windows.

For them it was like a show.

- [Joe] A big spectacle.

It was the entertainment of the day.

- Yes.

- Yes.

- When the penitents came down there, the inquisitors wanted them to project a sense of fear to the people.

(menacing music) And then one by one, they would be called up and learn their fate.

In some cases a sense of relief, in some cases they could be breaking down into tears or in screams when they learn what was gonna happen to them.

It was stage managed for maximum effect for the crowd.

Most people decided at that last minute to make a show of conversion just to be spared being burned alive.

- [Joe] Garroted.

- [David] They were garroted instead, yeah.

It's what in Spanish is called an (speaking in foreign language), which is a combination of a design to frighten you and also to warn you of what will happen to you if you misbehave.

(somber music) (flag flapping) - [Joe] The Inquisition and the auto-da-fe were meticulously administered by the Church.

And those found guilty of heresy were handed over to the civil authorities for the ultimate punishment.

So after the auto-da-fe, they were taken out from the walls of the city.

- [David] To the burning ground.

- The throng would follow the penitents to the execution.

It became a spectacle.

- And it was a spectacle that had, as far as the Church was concerned, a very instructive kind of way.

(fire crackling) For people who do not dedicate themselves exclusively to the teachings of the Catholic Church, hell fires await them, and here is a foretaste.

(menacing music) - [Joe] That idea of repression, what does it do to a people?

- The lack of trust that comes from the sense that everybody is spying on you and everybody's gonna turn you in creates a kind of paranoia and almost a schizophrenia in some ways that is very damaging to the psyche.

- You didn't have to murder too many people in a horrible way to have an effect on all of society.

- No, not at all.

And the goal was conformity and absorption and assimilation and conversion.

(fire crackling) (lively music) (horses galloping) - [Joe] With the Inquisition firmly established at the end of the 1400s, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand conquered the last Muslim kingdom, Granada.

Now Isabella could get to work on fulfilling her dream, an exclusively Catholic realm.

Although she let the Muslims remain for a few years, she started immediately to expel the Jews.

- [David] When the king and queen declared the expulsion, senior members of the Jewish community tried very, very hard to get the king and queen to reverse the decision.

- [Joe] They thought it was a ploy?

- Yeah, they thought it was a ploy.

They said what they're doing is, they're gonna force us to cough up a humongous bribe.

They raised a lot of money, they attempted to essentially to buy permission to remain.

- To stay.

- And there is a story, maybe apocryphal, that says that Torquemada strode into the room and thumped the table and said to Ferdinand and Isabella, "Judas sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver "and you are selling Spain for," whatever the amount of money was.

And that that put an end to any discussion of reversing the edict.

(lively ethnic music) - [Joe] And so, on July 31st, 1492, the edict of expulsion went into effect.

All Jews must leave the newly united Spanish kingdoms.

- [David] The expulsion was a time of sorting, in that those for whom the Jewish identity was absolute number one and trumped anything else in their lives would leave.

And those who, for whatever reason, felt that they might stick it out, the way to do that was to convert and say, "Well, you know, there's always tomorrow."

(soft piano music) In the next hour of Children of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition threw people to the winds To all four corners of the earth The expelled jews, and many of the conversos spread Across the world, looking for safety and opportunity.

Algeria, a lot of them went to Egypt Some of them went to Eastern Europe They went worldwide, essentially.

You'll meet their descendants from diverse ethnic cultural and geographic backgrounds.

He said "I can recognize you anywhere.." You're one of us.

L'chaim, Long Life I believe there's a yearning in the hearts of all of those who have the Anusim background Discover the secrets of identity, which have long remained hidden under the shadow of the Inquisition.

We're returning back, and reclaiming our identity and reclaiming our souls.

Check your local listings for part 2 of Children of the Inquisition (guitar music)