Livre d'Or

One of the things I found fascinating in writing my Pirate Rabbi stories was that the courts of Phillip II and III (and perhaps others, that was the era I was focusing on) established by royal decree some small number of judios de permiso, Jewish merchants and bankers and diplomats who were allowed to live openly as Jews in Spain during the Inquisition because their economic and political contributions were deemed essential to national security, essentially. But it was an incredibly tenuous existence- you had permission to live and to some degree to practice Judaism, but that permission could be and was revoked at a moment's notice, and you assuredly couldn't publicly associate with any New Christians for fear of subjecting them to suspicion.

I can't really imagine the toll of living the sort of dual life many Jews did under the Inquisition... the dual life of an American Jew in 2016 is fraught enough.