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This article explores the representation of the Antisemitic libel that Jews ritually murder Christian children in illustrated books and comics for children that were published in twentieth-century Spain. Focusing on the stories of Dominguito de Val and the Holy Child of La Guardia, it examines why both these two medieval ‘boy martyrs’ whom the Jews were accused of murdering became the subjects of literature for children in the twentieth century as well as the messages that these works wanted to inculcate in their young readers and what they reveal about the survival of this Antisemitic legend in Spanish society and culture. The stories of Dominguito and the Holy Child of La Guardia were frequently recast in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fit into the more common Blood Libel narrative in which the Jews were accused of consuming Christian blood. Moreover, the Jews themselves were adapted to represent not only quintessential ‘others’ as opponents of Christianity but also opponents of ‘Hispanicity’ (Hispanidad) during the years of the Franco dictatorship.

In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that some New Christians reached upward social mobility through commerce, by calculated market strategies, since social mobility through ecclesiastical orders was unlikely in a society constrained by the purity of blood statutes. The objective is also to understand how the social ascension of a merchant minority took place in a society of the Ancien Régime, delineated by systems of stratification. From the analysis of their commercial activities (credit market operations, guarantees of vessel and dízimos’ (tithing) contracts), we show some of the possibilities available to New Christians regarding the accumulation of capital and the transformation of their wealth into mechanisms of social mobility. Finally, research indicates that some New Christians had managed to insert themselves into high hierarchical positions within the credit and naval markets. It comprises the period between 1710, marked by Rio de Janeiro’s population increase, and 1750.

One month after the triumph in Lepanto, Bicudo proposes Pius V, as the first option, to enter the Dardanelles until Constantinople with the Holy League’s vessels, taking advantage of the surprise factor and the destruction of the enemy fleet. As second option, on the one hand, to occupy the islands of Lesbos and Tenedos in order to put an end to the Turkish trade thanks to the control of the Dardanelles, and, on the other, to seize Alexandria and Aleppo, relying on the desire of the Christian minorities and the Arabs of Egypt and Syria to shake off the Ottoman yoke. Pius V wanted Bicudo to take a papal brief to the shah of Persia encouraging him to attack the Great Sultan defeated in Lepanto, but Bicudo convinced him that it was preferable to entrust this mission to an ambassador of the king of Portugal. It was ultimately owing to Bicudo, therefore, that the embassy of Miguel Dabreu de Lima to the shah Tahmasp took place in 1572. Together with the message of King Don Sebastian this embassy also carried those of Pius V and Philip II. In the document addressed to Don Juan of Austria, Bicudo advised him to notify the Iranian monarch the great victory by means of a letter from him, another from the Portuguese ambassador in Rome, and a papal brief from Gregory XIII, making him aware that he had been already informed by a previous embassy not only of this victory, but also of the desire of the kings of Spain and Portugal to befriend him. But he did not know whether or not that embassy had reached its destination.