| Abstract |
Living in Silverado was the last book written by David Gitlitz (1942–2020); the hardcover appeared in 2019 with the paperback edition in 2022. (Disclosure: I had the privilege of hearing Professor Gitlitz lecture about three of the large and extended families he covered for the book several times, most recently in 2019.)
Living in Silverado uses detailed inquisition and other records to trace as much as can be known of the personal lives, family relationships, observances, thoughts, even food and clothing of sixteenth-century Spanish Portuguese individuals of Jewish heritage in New Spain, many of whom were related to one another. Some of them spoke at length to Inquisitors, providing hundreds of pages of recorded testimony. The book focuses on families involved in mining, with a largely solitary existence. The children were often brought up by non-Jewish wives, and overall the miners and their families had a much more attenuated attitude to Judaism than the vibrant Judaizing community in Mexico City. Professor Gitlitz also examines the well-known Carvajal family, and those who came to Mexico with them and transformed Jewish identity there, at least for a while.
The appendices give a rapid overview of the scope and detail of the study: Appendix 1 lists the name, town of origin, birthdate, date and residence in Mexico, and profession or status of over one hundred sixteenth-century individuals mentioned in this book. The other two appendices include details known about observances of Yom Kippur, Purim and Passover in general, and those who attended a series of observances of these holidays with Manuel de Lucena and Catalina Enriquez, twenty-three events in all.
Gitlitz concluded that the frequency of observance of Jewish customs such as holidays and kosher diet reduced substantially with each generation. During the sixteenth century, there were communal events and holiday observances. The final vignette of the book describes a thinly disguised party for the Jewish festival of Sukkot in September 1603, one of many manifestations of the active social and religious life of the Judaizing community at the Cárcel Perpétua (Permanent Prison) in Mexico City. However, this appears to have been the last event celebrated by the dwindling remnant of a Judaizing community.
As for the mining towns: the old leaders had left or died, and by the early seventeenth century, few if any made a concerted effort to transmit actual Jewish practices to the next generation.
Gitlitz is a superb stylist. Those unfamiliar with Inquisition narratives will find the book reads at times like a novel, with adventure, risk-taking, falsified identities, women and children abandoned or abducted, and more.
Living in Silverado adds greatly to our understanding of this period, allowing for better assessment of the extent, scope and trajectory of Judaizing in sixteenth-century Mexico. But it is much more than that: the families studied provide the opportunity for detailed discussion about their social, economic and cultural realities, about marital, ethnic and intergenerational issues, and about the science, engineering and business aspects of silver mining. |
