Three manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal, "El Mozo," were recovered on Tuesday by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture.
They date from the era of the viceroyalty of New Spain and are related to the charges made against the family of Luis de Carvajal by the Inquisition in the late 16th century. They were part of the National Archives until they were stolen in 1932. Last June, the manuscripts were auctioned by the Swann Auction Galleries in New York and purchased by the collector Leonard Milberg, who returned them to Mexico.
Until March 12, 2017, the documents were part of the exhibit entitled "The First Jewish Americans: Freedom and Culture in the New World." Beginning in April, they will be displayed in the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City.
The Foreign Ministry’s consulate in New York and its Office of the Legal Adviser—which implements the recovery program for cultural property illegally removed from national territory—helped recover the manuscripts. The Culture Ministry was represented in the process by the National Library of Anthropology and History of Mexico.
During the presentation of the manuscripts, the Foreign Ministry said that recovery of these documents is yet another success for inter-institutional coordination, in which it participates with other authorities, to recover cultural property that has been illegally removed from Mexico. The Foreign Ministry also stated that these actions help meet the goals of the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970, to which Mexico has been party since 1972.
For its part, the Culture Ministry’s National Library of Anthropology and History underscored the manuscripts’ incalculable value. They are one of the first documents written by a member of the Jewish community in the Americas, and they tell the story of how the Carvajal family came to New Spain from Portugal, and about their religious beliefs.
The return of these manuscripts reaffirms Mexico’s commitment to recovering the nation’s cultural property and to collaborating with the international community to protect it.
