The Inquisition condemns 'o Judeu', Lisbon's comic playwright, in 1739

On Sunday 18 October 1739, as at every auto-da-fé, the Inquisition's prisoners were led in procession from its palace on the Rossio, Lisbon's great square, to the church of the Dominican convent of São Domingos nearby. Among them was a 34-year-old lawyer whose comedies had been staged in the city since 1733. Inside the church, before clergy, officials and a crowd, his sentence was read aloud.3 sources

The inquisitors described António José da Silva as a heretic and apostate from the Catholic faith, in the sentence's words 'convicted, denying, obstinate and relapsed'. He was 'relaxed in person' to the secular justice, the formula by which the Church handed a prisoner to the Crown's courts to be put to death. In the same ceremony his wife, Leonor Maria de Carvalho, and his mother, Lourença Coutinho, heard lesser sentences and were reconciled with the Church.4 sources

He was not burned alive. The executioner strangled him with a garrotte, and his body was then burned. The Inquisition granted this 'mercy' to condemned prisoners who said they wished to die 'in the law of Christ', and da Silva had sworn throughout his second trial that he was a Catholic.3 sources

The execution itself did not happen inside the church. Once the sentences were read, the prisoners condemned to death were taken to a separate site. According to the historians Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva, executions in Lisbon took place beside the fountain at the Terreiro do Trigo, on the river at the edge of Alfama, and not in the Terreiro do Paço, as famous engravings suggest. A short 2009 article by Cristina Abranches Guerreiro places his auto at the Campo da Lã instead, although it also misdates it to 1738.2 sources

The Portuguese Inquisition, the Tribunal do Santo Ofício, was established by papal bull in 1536, two decades after the crown first asked Rome for one. It had three tribunals in the kingdom, at Lisbon, Évora and Coimbra, and one overseas, in Goa. From 1584 the Lisbon tribunal and the General Council that ran the whole institution sat in the Palácio dos Estaus, a fifteenth-century palace on the Rossio. The torture chamber was on the ground floor, and there were cells on all four floors.3 sources

The public face of the tribunal was the auto-da-fé, the 'act of faith'. It began with a procession from the palace, followed by a sermon and the reading of each sentence. Penitents abjured their errors and were reconciled. Those condemned to death came last, and were handed to the civil authorities because canon law forbade the Church to kill. Sundays were preferred. Until the 1680s the great autos were held in the Terreiro do Paço; after that they moved indoors, usually to São Domingos.1 source

Da Silva lived under King João V, who reigned from 1706 to 1750. The Inquisition did well under him: the king gave it money, and it also drew on royal pensions and confiscated property. The historian Francisco Bethencourt describes the years from 1735 to 1745 as a period of renewed repression against New Christians, at a time when the institution was otherwise in long decline.1 source

António José da Silva was born in Rio de Janeiro on 8 May 1705, the son of João Mendes da Silva, a lawyer and poet, and Lourença Coutinho, daughter of a sugar-mill owner. Both were New Christians. The family was wealthy and well connected; its members included lawyers, doctors, merchants, plantation owners and even priests and friars.3 sources

Denounced to the Inquisition, his parents were arrested and shipped to Lisbon, where they arrived in October 1712; his mother's file records her imprisonment there on 11 October. The literary scholar Kenia Pereira dates the voyage to 1713. The three boys, Baltasar, André and seven-year-old António, sailed in the same fleet with many relatives. In July 1713 both parents were reconciled at an auto-da-fé after confessing to Jewish practices, and their property was confiscated. João Mendes da Silva then set up as a lawyer in Lisbon.5 sources

António studied canon law at the University of Coimbra between 1722 and 1725. In August 1726, aged 21, he was arrested on four denunciations. In his interrogations he admitted that an aunt had taught him to keep the Sabbath and the fast of Yom Kippur, and named other New Christians, including university friends and relatives.3 sources

The inquisitors decided he had not told the whole truth about his mother, and on 23 September 1726 he was tortured. The record calls it the trato corrido. The historian Lúcio de Azevedo says he suffered both the polé, in which the prisoner was hoisted on a rope and dropped in jolts, and the potro, a bed of slats on which the body was bound tight with leather straps.2 sources

A month later, Azevedo writes, his wrist was still so sore and his tendons so stiff that he could not sign his abjuration, and the notary and witnesses signed for him. He was sentenced at the auto-da-fé of 13 October 1726 in São Domingos to perpetual prison and the penitent's habit, and left the cells ten days later. His mother, arrested on the same day as him, was held until 1729 and then sentenced to three years' exile at Castro Marim, in the Algarve.4 sources

After his release da Silva worked as a lawyer alongside his father. In 1735 he married his cousin Leonor Maria de Carvalho, a New Christian from Covilhã who had herself been penanced by the Spanish Inquisition in Valladolid after being caught fleeing towards Bayonne in 1725. Their daughter, Lourença, was born on 25 October 1735.3 sources

In October 1733 a new kind of show opened at the public theatre of the Bairro Alto: the Vida do Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança. By January 1738 seven more had followed. The Biblioteca Nacional describes them as óperas joco-sérias, comic-serious operas, played by bonifrates, puppets, and mixing spoken dialogue with music, verse and dance.3 sources

Most of the plots borrow from Greek myth or from Cervantes. The exception is the Guerras do Alecrim e da Manjerona, a gallant comedy set in the Lisbon of its day, in which rival factions take the side of two herbs, rosemary and marjoram. The music was by António Teixeira, and it fed an operatic craze that gripped João V's court and the wider public.2 sources

The comedies were popular. The Biblioteca Nacional calls him the most representative Portuguese dramatist of the first half of the eighteenth century and says the operas were staged 'with great success'; Lisbon knew them as the óperas do Judeu, the Jew's operas. Scholars read veiled jokes in them at the expense of religious fanaticism and of João V's extravagance. Even so, the plays had been licensed by the censors, and the inquisitors never used them as evidence.4 sources

In late September or early October 1737, after a quarrel in the household, an enslaved domestic servant threatened to denounce the family to the Inquisition for Jewish practices. One account names her as Leonor Gomes and says he had refused her a letter of freedom. Da Silva went to the Estaus palace to explain himself. The Biblioteca Nacional's chronology tells it differently: he was taken with his wife, mother, aunt, brother and sister-in-law while they were taking part in a Yom Kippur ceremony.3 sources

His wife Leonor, 25, was taken the same day. His mother, by then in her fifties, was arrested a week later, for the third time. The enslaved woman was also held in the Inquisition's cells, where she died in 1738.4 sources

This time da Silva confessed nothing. That made him negativo, a prisoner who denied the charges, and because he had abjured in 1726 any new guilt made him a relapso. Both words appear in his sentence. The case against him rested on the reports of the Inquisition's lay officers who watched him in the cells, and on two prisoners placed in his cell as informers, who reported that he kept Jewish practices.2 sources

Leonor was tortured. She and Lourença Coutinho were sentenced at the auto-da-fé of 18 October 1739 to prison at the inquisitors' discretion and spiritual penances. What became of Leonor afterwards is unclear. One account says she took their daughter to the Netherlands. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia says she died on 10 October 1739, before the auto, although her own file records her sentence at it, and the encyclopedia itself notes that some authorities have her outliving her husband.5 sources

In 1744 Francisco Luís Ameno published the eight operas in the first two volumes of the Theatro Comico Portuguez. The title page said only that they had been performed at the public theatre of the Bairro Alto; da Silva's name did not appear. The collection was reprinted several times before 1800.4 sources

The Inquisition outlived him by more than eighty years, but it weakened. The 1755 earthquake destroyed the Estaus palace. Under the Marquis of Pombal, a law of 25 May 1773 abolished the legal distinction between Old and New Christians, and a new set of rules in 1774 banned secret accusations and restricted torture. On 31 March 1821 the liberal Cortes voted unanimously to abolish the tribunal.2 sources

The rebuilt palace on the Rossio burned in 1836. The ruins were cleared, and in 1842 work began on a national theatre promoted by the writer Almeida Garrett. The Teatro Nacional D. Maria II opened on the site in 1846.2 sources

Writers in Brazil and Portugal took up his story. In Rio in 1838 Gonçalves de Magalhães staged António José, ou o Poeta e a Inquisição, a play linked to the beginning of Romanticism in the Brazilian theatre. In Portugal, his life inspired a historical novel by Camilo Castelo Branco.2 sources

The playwright Bernardo Santareno published O Judeu in 1966, at a harsh moment of the Estado Novo dictatorship, and it could not be staged. It premiered on 20 February 1981 at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, after Santareno's death in 1980, in a production with seventy people on stage. The theatre stood on the site of the palace where the play's hero had been imprisoned and tried.1 source

The director Jom Tob Azulay finished a film, O Judeu, in 1995. Da Silva's own work took longer to return. In 1956 the director António Pedro complained that his books were not in the shops and his plays were not on stage; from the late 1960s, and above all after the 1974 revolution, the operas entered the repertoire of independent and national companies, and puppet companies in Lisbon and Porto staged them again.2 sources

His trials are also unusually well documented. Both files, and those of his wife and mother, are in the Torre do Tombo, which ran a project from 2007 to 2009 to digitise the whole archive of the Lisbon Inquisition. The two trials are bound together: the first fills folios 1 to 80, the second folios 81 to 398.3 sources