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Costa Mattos, Vicente da. trans. Diego Gavilán Vela. Discurso contra los Judios.
Madrid: Por la Viuda de Melchor Alegre, 1680.
Quarto, engraved arms to title, bound in contemporary limp parchment, worming to inner margins, brand to bottom page edges, last two index leaves badly damaged from mildew with losses, 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 in.
The present work is a vernacular Castilian translation of Costa Matos's diatribe, Breve Discurso contra a Heretica Perfidia do Judaismo, originally written in Portuguese. In it, the author advocates for the expulsion of all Jews from Portugal, casting groundless, wild, and sweeping invectives rooted deeply in antisemitism. Working from an elaborate conspiracy theory that Jews in Portugal were pretending to be Catholic. Next, systematically infiltrate the medical profession, murder "real" Catholics, and use the profession to cover up the killings. Costa Mattos proposed that Portuguese Jews could thereby blot out Christianity and with it the monarchies of Portugal and Spain. (cf. Francois Soyer's Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Conspiracy Theory of Medical Murder in Early Modern Spain and Portugal, https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/28901)
