As Spain began to settle the New World in the 16th century, crypto-Jews were among the colonists; the Inquisition followed soon after. Natasha Pizzey describes the fate of Luis de Caravajal the Younger, a member of a large, prosperous, and originally Jewish family that came to New Spain:

[The Carvajals] governed part of northern Mexico and soon made enemies, including a power-hungry viceroy keen to topple them from power. The ambitious viceroy discovered that Luis de Carvajal was a practicing Jew, a crime [then] punishable by death. . . . Older relatives had urged Luis de Carvajal to convert to Catholicism for his own safety, but he staunchly stuck to his faith.

When he was first arrested, the authorities let him off with a warning but kept tabs on him. Far from giving up his religion, Luis de Carvajal became a leader in Mexico’s underground Jewish community. When the inquisitors caught up with him again a few years later, he was sentenced to death. He was just thirty years old.

Before he was executed, he was tortured so badly that he revealed the names of 120 fellow Jews. . . . His captors forced him to listen as those “heretics,” which included his own mother, were tortured in the cell next to him. . . . We know the excruciating details of Luis de Carvajal’s persecution because he managed to keep secret diaries. But these were not any old notebooks. They were painstakingly crafted, miniature manuscripts with almost microscopic handwriting in Latin and Spanish.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.