Contemporary politics aside, this article by Francois Soyer raises an interesting question for anyone using Inquisition testimony for the Converso history. To what extent is the testimony reliable? Two scholars who were immersed in Inquisition records took radically opposed stands on this; the French scholar Israel Révah argued that the Inquisition never made mistakes (« L'Inquisition ne se trompe jamais »), i.e. that the Inquisition's assumption that torture only confirmed what they already knew to be the case was correct - the Inquisition's prime motive was not intelligence gathering but the recognition of the individual that he or she had sinned and needed to repent. The Portuguese scholar Antonio Jose Saraiva argued the diametrical opposite that the confessions of the Conversos were fabrications of the Inquisitorial process, that people confessed to what they were told to confess to end the ordeal, and therefore the Inquisition created 'Jews' (was a Marrano 'factory' as a critic called it - the title chosen for the English translation of Saraiva's work). It is almost certainly the case that some unrepentant victims died at the stake because they were innocent of judaising and had the strength to refuse a confession of guilt. It is also likely that many falsely confessed to jewish practices to escape with a lesser sentence. As is usually the case the truth is between the two opposites, but when reading Inquisition files we should remember that between the martyrs who suffered and died 'in the law of Moses' and those who suffered and died as honest Catholics, the majority of victims were just ordinary people caught up in a dreadful machine desperate to get back to ordinary life. And not a few of the returnees were not so much religious zealots desperate to return to the faith of their forefathers as people who had decided that they might as well be 'hung for a sheep as a lamb' ...