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The conflict raging in the bosom of the Church and setting her own children by the ears, was yet insufficient to divert her maternal care from her "unbelieving" stepchildren. In Spain and Portugal, stakes continued to burn two centuries longer for the benefit of the Marranos, the false Christians. In Germany and Austria, the Jews were kept in the same condition of servitude as before.
He sealed his faith in his prophecy with death at the stake . The Marranos beyond the Pyrenees and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of the sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on the increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of hope.
No, they were not without excuse, those ancestors of his who had been left behind clinging to the Church. Could they have been genuine converts, these Marranos, or New Christians? he asked himself. Well, whatever his great-grandfathers had felt, his father's faith had been ardent enough, of that he could not doubt. He recalled the long years of ritual; childish memories of paternal pieties.
"But my father?" he asked, shutting the door carefully. She shook her head. "His family, though likewise Marranos, were true believers. It was the grief of my life that I dared never tell him. Often since his death, memories from my girlhood have tugged at my heart. But I durst not influence my children's faith it would have meant deadly peril to them.
Acosta, that at the time of which we write the Spanish population numbered about 400, who Arángo, in a memorial addressed to the Cardinal Regent, classifies as Government officials, old conquerors, new hirelings, and "marrános hijos de reconciliados," which, translated, means, "vile brood of pardoned criminals," the latter being, in all probability, the immigrants into whose antecedents the king had recommended his officers in Seville not to inquire.
'Getting grace' they call it in English; but with poor Jews it is always grace after meals. Look at the Crypto-Jews, the Marranos, who for centuries lived a double life, outwardly Christians, but handing down secretly from generation to generation the faith, the traditions, the observances of Judaism."
When it succeeded in freeing itself from the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king, Philip II, it inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of peaceful development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to the persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the harassed Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal, migrated to Holland.
Everywhere the funeral pyres of the Inquisition flared to the skies, the air was rent by the despairing shrieks of martyrs enveloped in flames or racked by tortures, the prisons overflowed with Marranos, all instruments of torture were vigorously plied. At last the hour of redemption struck: in 1492 all Jews were driven from Spain, and a few years later from Portugal.
As in the days of the Spanish inquisition, these private houses of worship would, on the solemn days of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, be stealthily visited by the "marranos" of Moscow, those Jews who had saved themselves from the wholesale expulsions by fictitious conversion to Christianity.
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