Absurdly specific folklore about Jewish medical murder was published as verified fact.

Evidence

Diego de Simancas went further, however, and recounted the story of an unnamed judeoconverso burnt at the stake by the Inquisition ‘many years ago’. Simancas told his readers that the murderous judeoconverso doctor would return home ‘after murdering many Christians’ and be greeted by his children with the following phrase: ‘Welcome, avenger’. To this greeting, he would reply ‘Come to [greet] the avenger’, as if he were stating ‘Welcome, here is the avenger’. Without providing any specific information or references to support this claim, Simancas claimed that the Inquisition had unmasked six hundred cases of murder committed by judeoconverso doctors. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 393

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Welcome, avenger’ family-greeting ritual is a ready-made narrative device — a fabricated, grotesquely theatrical detail deployed to humanize a false accusation, worth an essay on how conspiracy folklore scales from rumor to official record.
• DEEPTHINKING: The leap from ‘six hundred unverified murders’ presented with zero sourcing to official credibility shows how spectacular precision substitutes for evidence in moral panic — a mechanism worth sitting with.