cover image The Return of Carvajal: A Mystery

The Return of Carvajal: A Mystery

Ilan Stavans. Pennsylvania State Univ., $19.95 (112p) ISBN 978-0-271-08470-1

In this slim coda to a centuries-long literary saga, Stavans (Quixote), an Amherst professor of Latin American and Latino culture, narrates the remarkable odyssey of a 16th-century memoir, generally considered the first written by a Jew in the Americas. Luis de Carvajal the Younger discovered his family’s secret background as conversos—Spanish Jews converted to Catholic Christianity—as a teenager, just before emigrating to the New World around 1580. There, Carvajal took to Judaism with a messianic zeal, leading to his persecution by the Inquisition and finally his grisly death by burning in 1596. Between arrests, Carvajal wrote a memoir for his siblings. Stavans notes that “the inquisitors, like the Nazis centuries later, were known for their punctiliousness” and thus meticulously preserved evidence, including Carvajal’s memoir, of their own depredations. Long held in the National Archives of Mexico, the 180-page, 4×3-inch manuscript vanished in 1932, reappeared at a London auction house in 2015, and was finally returned to Mexico in 2017. Stavans does a fine job introducing the academic intrigue surrounding the stolen document. However, much less light is shed on its mysterious disappearance than the title might lead readers to expect. People interested in Jewish and Latin American history will most enjoy Stavans’s study, which for all its scrupulous research leaves the central mystery tantalizingly unsolved. (Oct.)