Talk:Juan de Torquemada (cardinal)

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This article needs to be split. There is another Juan de Torquemada, who was one of the first Franciscan priests to arrive in Mexico after the conquest. He wrote an important treatise Monarquia Indiana on Nahua history, culture and customs. -feripe

"Meticulous"

It is not for Wikipedia to say whether the study by Domínguez Casas was "meticulous". In any event, matters of this kind are inherently doubtful. Since crypto-Jews would naturally do all they could to protect themselves from persecution by concealing records, the concept that you can find a man's true ancestry just by examining historical records is perhaps a little naïve. Ttocserp 09:30, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

You may be right about "meticulous" and I thank you for not taking it out directly. Though I think, having read Dominguez Casas study, that it's hard not to say it is indeed extremely meticulous. However this not so fundamental that the adjective cannot be suppressed. On the other hand, the way you cast doubts about Casas's conclusion is not a solid approach for discarding his conclusions. In fact since he has researched all primary sources pertaining to Juan de Torquemada ancestors without being able to find a single converso should be enough to discard the single isolated and quite vague affirmation by Del Pulgar (the one and only source ever used by historians to assess converso origins to Juan de Torquemada). Moreover, and I shall incorporate this in the main article, some pretty solid historians (Norman Roth for example) noted that Del Pulgar is pretty approximative (and even wrong) in many of his statements. Del Pulgar's affirmation about JdT comes without checkable specifics. Roth is doubtful about his statement about JdT. Dominguez Casas's reasearch can be checked in all its aspects. The fact that concealment of converso origins did happen cannot be invoked to discard Dominguez Casas's work. With such an approach every single "old christian" may have had converso origins since the absence of traces can always be attributed to some sort of concealment. That does not seem reasonable to me. Ernest (talk) 17:46, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

I do have an advice to ask: Salomons write about "Hernando del Pulgar’s statement that Juan de Torquemada’s abuelos were converts from the Jewish faith" but in fact that's not what Del Pulgar wrote. He did not write that Juan de Torquemada’s abuelos were converts but that they were of "Jewish lineage converted to our holy Catholic faith" ("Sus abuelos fueron de linaje de los judíos convertidos a nuestra sancta fe católica" -- I have the sources) which of course means his abuelos were not themselves Jewish converts (that takes those putative converso origins even further in time) but had themselves parents (or even grand parents...) who converted. This seems important (as Salomons's quotation is not exact), but does it have to be in the main text? I think it could be stated in a footnote. What do you think? Ernest (talk) 18:13, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

It's an encyclopedia article. It's function is not to tell us Juan de Torquemada's ancestry -- "it's a wise child who knows his own father" -- but to summarise the main historiography on that personage. The significant thing historically speaking is not whether Torquemada had Jewish ancestry, but whether his contemporaries thought he did. What does Dominguez Casas say as to that?Ttocserp 21:45, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Well you did not adress my questions and points. So an erroneous quote has been left in the body of the article since 2022. Though it's easy to check. Though even Salomons' source, Roth does provide the correct quote (Salomons' sloppiness is thus provided to the world without correction): [del Pulgar writes] "his ancestors [ ] were of the line of Jews converted to our holy catholic faith" (Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2002, p. 225: the very page Salomons quotes). So accuracy is not a thing on Wikipedia? Does anybody care? As for what Juan de Torquemada's contemporaries thought, nobody can know what they thought. What we know, is that not one of Juan de Torquemada's contemporaries would write he had converse origins. Del Pulgar published his work 20 years after Juan de Torquemada's death, and, as Dominguez Casas explains, it was not long before many authors refuted del Pulgar on the subject. So neither the affirmation that JdT had Jewish ancestry is true nor the affirmation that his contemporaries thought so. But it seems important to some to state the opposite in the WP page of JdT, with erroneous quotes. Ernest (talk) 18:46, 15 February 2026 (UTC)