If you want minutes of dozens, if not hundreds of trials in Spain and Mexico, where individuals were tried for their lives on the charge of "practicing Judaism," I'd be more than happy to refer you to specific document collections (and I mean this offer seriously). I'm not sure how anyone with any knowledge of the period can in good conscience pretend that Jews were not coerced into converting.
"If you want minutes of dozens, if not hundreds of trials in Spain and Mexico, where individuals were tried for their lives on the charge of "practicing Judaism,"
Those were people who had publicly converted to Catholicism, and were on trial for secretly practicing Judaism, not people who had refused to convert.
"I'm not sure how anyone with any knowledge of the period can in good conscience pretend that Jews were not coerced into converting."
It can be said that offering the choice between leaving the country and converting was coercion; however, the choice of leaving the country was open, and it is therefore inaccurate to refer to the conversions as "forced."
The Inquisition destroyed or turned upside down hundreds of thousands of lives by torture, execution, expulsion, confiscation of property, hersy trials, etc. It happened to Protestants as well as Jews. People who minimize the Inquisition have no more credibility than those who minimize the Holocaust.
"dsc" uses as his authoritative source documents found on www.catholic.net as a credible unbiased source? LOL!