Teresa of Avila

Nora Gallagher, reviewing Cathleen Medwick’s “Teresa of Avila,” notes that the author herself has a Jewish background (Dec. 18). She approves enthusiastically of Medwick’s biography, but never mentions that Teresa, born in 1515, was from a Converso family that had survived the catastrophic expulsions of 1492 and after. She doesn’t note that Teresa’s mother died when she was 15, after which she began her strange spiritual development. She doesn’t note that the Vatican, under pressure from the Inquisition, forbade her to go on establishing successful convents, and closed quite a few of them, until the king(s), who had always supported the Jews of Spain, stepped in and protected Teresa.

It is no accident that, canonized very soon after her death, Teresa was not elevated until 1970, when the Vatican once again began to recruit Jewish women for the ranks of sainthood. In short, it seems that Gallagher is, like so many, eager to praise a Jew who became, like so many, a stellar Catholic . . . under threat of banishment or death, to be sure.

JASCHA KESSLER

Santa Monica