L
eonor Barzana was a native
of Toledo in central Spain,
a city that once held a vi-
brant Jewish community.
Her ancestors were Jewish, but she
was living as a Christian. Her father,
a money changer, was burned at the
stake, accused of secretly practicing
the Jewish faith. Her paternal uncle
was convicted of the same offense
but ordered to wear a penitentiary
tunic. She lived in the same medi-
eval town of her ancestors and was
often referred to as the “daughter of
the burned man.”
As she grew older, Barzana at-
tracted the attention of Toledo’s
network of spies and Inquisition
informers: A neighbor testified that
she had heard Barzana say several
times that the inquisitors who had
killed her father were “scoundrels
and traitors.”When she became an adult,
Barzana was known as abeata,un-
married Christian women who often
took vows of chastity and poverty
but did not belong to a specific order.
Her dedication to the Christian faith
should have protected her, but her
spirituality became conflated with
supernatural powers.
She developed, it was said, a rep-
utation for being able to tell people’s
fortunes with a talent for predict-
ing the future of newborns. When
a pregnant neighbor went into la-
bor, Barzana is said to have come to
the door with a lit candle. She had
a prophetic vision in which she saw
the sky open, lightning flash, and a
bird brush past her nose. When the
baby boy was born, Barzana insisted
that he should be called Gabriel and
predicted that he would be a wise,
religious man.1530
Leonor Barzana
Daughter of the Burned Man
64 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019five victims
of the
inquisition
All these episodes came to light
at Barzana’s first trial in 1530. She
was accused of boasting of her Jew-
ishness and engaging in magical
practices—charges she said were
fabricated by malicious neighbors.
She received 100 lashes and was re-
leased. Six years later she was arrest-
ed again when new rumors surfaced.
Witnesses said she had “created”
souls by consulting a magical book,
“following which, a sound of crying
could be heard.” Again, she denied
the charges and received a lashing,
but then she was imprisoned.
Barzana may have been a vision-
ary or she may have been a victim of
malicious informers. She would not
so easily have fallen under suspicion
if she had come from a Christian
family. The hatred of Jewishness ex-
tended into later generations, and its
stigma proved difficult to escape.A STANDARD
OF THE SPANISH
INQUISITION IN A
1692 ENGRAVING
PRISMA/ALBUM