The Century of Silence

Seville, 1415. A jar of olive oil could hang a family.

In the year following the Disputation of Tortosa, which has driven thousands to the baptismal font, Ishaqstill practices medicine to patients of three faiths. His reputation rests on methods he learned fromArabic texts and Jewish teachers, the same transmission the Translators of Toledo once made possible.

He has not converted. He has not fled. He believes the new suspicion will pass.

When a converso family is accused of secretly practicing Judaism, and the evidence is a jar of olive oilfound in their kitchen during Lent, Isaac is asked to testify. He knows the oil is medicinal. He can prove it.

But to do so, he must open his own books, name his own teachers, and place himself under the samewatchful gaze now fixed on his converted neighbors.

The Physician's Proof is the opening volume of The Century of Silence, a trilogy of fifteenth-centurySpain from historian Ricardo Gómez, author of The Andalusian Covenant. Drawing on Galenic medicine,Sephardic history, and the precise legal shape of early informer culture, the novel asks what it costs tosave one family when saving them means exposing yourself.