| Sumario: | In this article I study a Sephardi oral tradition that transmitted the memory of Inquisitorial persecution over the course of more than a century. In 1736, the Amsterdam Jewish polemicist Abraham Gómez Silveyra looked back at the most incisive moment in his family history: his ancestors, Portuguese immigrants in Madrid, were secretly celebrating the eve of Yom Kippur when armed guards raided their house on orders of the Holy Office. Five family members were subsequently tried, including Gómez Silveyra's mother, Ana Ximenes, who was then 13 years old. Based on trial records from the Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, I describe the Crypto-Jewish circle that was arrested in Madrid on September 21, 1635, and the imprint of this traumatic experience in the theological thought of Ana's son, whose clandestine writings on history and providence already belong to the intellectual world of the early Enlightenment.
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