"In Spain and Portugal there are monasteries and convents full of Jews. Not a few conceal Judaism in their heart and feign Christianity on account of worldly goods. Some of these feel the stings of conscience and escape, if they are able. In this city (Amsterdam) and in several other places, we have monks, Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, who have rejected idolatry. There are bishops in Spain and grave monks, whose parents, brothers, or sisters, dwell here (in Amsterdam) and in other cities in order to be able to profess Judaism."
At the very time when Spinoza became estranged from Judaism, the smoke and flames of the funeral piles of Jewish martyrs rose in several cities of Spain and Portugal, in Cuenca, Granada, Santiago de Compostela, Cordova, and Lisbon.
In the last-named city a distinguished Marrano, Manuel Fernando de Villa-Real, statesman, political writer, and poet, who conducted the consular affairs of the Portuguese court at Paris, returned to Lisbon on business, was seized by the Inquisition, gagged, and led to execution (December 1, 1652). In Cuenca on one day (June 29, 1654) fifty-seven Christian proselytes to Judaism were dragged to the auto-da-fé. Most of them only received corporal chastisement with loss of property, but ten were burned to death. Amongst them was a distinguished man, the court-saddler Balthasar Lopez, from Valladolid, who had amassed a fortune of 100,000 ducats. He had migrated to Bayonne, where a small community of former Marranos was tolerated, and had returned to Spain only to persuade a nephew to come back to Judaism. He was seized by the Inquisition, tortured, and condemned to death by the halter and the stake. On his way to the scaffold, Balthasar Lopez ridiculed the Inquisition and Christianity. He exclaimed to the executioner about to bind him, "I do not believe in your Christ, even if you bind me," and threw the cross which had been forced upon him to the ground. Five months later twelve Marranos were burnt in Granada. Again, some months later (March, 1655), a promising youth of twenty, Marcos da Almeyda Bernal, whose Jewish name was Isaac, died at the stake; and two months afterwards (May 3d) Abraham Nuñes Bernal was burnt at Cordova.