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EPILOGUE THE MARRANOS OF TODAY HAD the present work been written fifty, or even ten, years earlier it would have finished at this point. For, at that time it seemed as though at last, after all its efforts, the Inquisition had completed its task in the eighteenth century, and that crypto-Judaism in the Peninsula had been stamped out. Nothing, or barely nothing, is heard of Judaizers, whether in Spain or in Portugal, from the period of the French Revolution onwards. The tide of emigration, to Amsterdam or to London, had dwindled. A fresh, native-born generation had grown up, ignorant of Spanish and of Portuguese, for whose benefit the vernacular of the country had to be admitted, with lingering regrets, as the official language of the communities of the Marrano Diaspora. Not that the flow had altogether ceased. In the Lisbon auto of 1746, two boatmen had been punished for assisting fugitives to leave the realm. The great Earthquake of 1755 had caused great searchings of heart amongst the New Christians, numbers of whom had in consequence fled. Thus the parents of Abraham Furtado (the politician of the revolutionary era in France, a close friend of the Girondins and a leading figure in the Napoleonic Sanhedrin) had sought refuge in London in consequence of a vow which they had made when their lives seemed to be in danger. Simultaneously, quite a number of persons are said to have emigrated to America, joining the communi355
