A church bishop urged state action on forged Jewish plot letters

Evidence

The origins of these two letters, which were analysed and convincingly demonstrated to be forgeries by the French historian Isidore Loeb in the nineteenth century, is obscure. Manuscript copies of them were certainly circulating from the 1550s onwards. In the 1580s, these two letters and the claim that judeoconversos were seeking to use their medical knowledge to kill Christian patients were mentioned by Andrés de Noronha, a Portuguese bishop who, after occupying the bishopric of Portalegre in Portugal, was appointed by Philip II to the See of Plasencia in Spain. Seemingly convinced of their genuineness and claiming that the letters had been brought to his attention in the 1560s by an inquisitor from the inquisitorial tribunal of Llerena in Spain, Bishop Andrés de Noronha urged the Habsburg sovereign to pay attention to the letters and take immediate action to prevent judeoconversos from becoming medical practitioners. Given their importance as ‘evidence’ of a ‘Jewish plot’ threatening Spain and Portugal and linking the judeoconversos of the Iberian Peninsula with Jewish communities outside of it, it is hardly surprising that the letters came to feature prominently in the myth of Jewish medical murder. They rapidly found their way into antisemitic propaganda and polemics, of which they became a recurring and integral part. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 386