We have seen in the preceding chapter that the Jews were expelled forever from Spain and Portugal at the time when these two nations, with considerable assistance from professing and converted Jews, discovered the New World and took possession of it. Nothing could therefore have been farther from the thoughts and the hopes of the Jews of those dark days than the idea that America was to be, in a far-away future, the first Christian country to grant its Jewish inhabitants full citizenship and absolute equality before the law. For nearly a century and a half no professing Jew dared to tread upon American soil, and even the secret Jews or Marranos were as much in danger in the newly-planted colonies as in the mother countries under whose rule they remained for a long time.
The first Jewish immigrants in the New World were children who were torn away from the arms of their parents at the time of the expulsions, and even they were persecuted as soon as they grew up. The Marranos who sought a refuge in America in these early days were soon followed by the same agencies of persecution which made life a burden to them in their old home. We meet in America for more than a century after its discovery almost the same conditions as in Spain and Portugal after the Jews were exiled. Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends――says Dr. Kayserling――the history of the Jews in America begins. The Inquisition is the last chapter in the record of the confessors of Judaism on the Pyrenean peninsula and its first chapter in the western hemisphere. The Nuevos Christianos concealed their faith, or were able to conceal it, as little in the New World as in the mother country. With astonishing tenacity, nay, with admirable obstinacy, they clung to the religion of their fathers; it was not a rare occurrence that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the martyred Jews sanctified the Sabbath in a most conscientious manner, by refraining from work as far as possible and by wearing their best clothing. They also celebrated the Jewish Festivals, observed the Day of Atonement by fasting, and married according to the Jewish customs. They clung to their faith and suffered for it even as late as the eighteenth century, which means that the Jewish religion was handed down secretly and preserved in the seventh and eighth generation after the exile. Many went to the stake or died in the prisons of the Inquisition in the New World; many others were transported in groups to Spain and Portugal and gave up their lives as martyrs in Seville, Toledo, Evora or Lisbon. Their religious heroism will be apparent in all its magnitude when the immense documentary material which is heaped up in the archives of Spain and Portugal, and other places on this side of the ocean, will have been sifted and worked up. (“Publications,” II, p. 73.)