front cover of Arguments Against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam by Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza's Rabbi
Arguments Against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam by Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza's Rabbi
Gregory Kaplan
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This is the first book to offer a translation into English-as well as a critical study-of a Spanish treatise written around 1650 by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, whose most renowned congregant was Baruch Spinoza. Aimed at encouraging the practice of halachic Judaism among the Amsterdam-based descendants of conversos, Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity, the book stages a dialogue between two conversos that ultimately leads to a vision of a Jewish homeland-an outcome that Morteira thought was only possible through his program for rejudaisation.
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Blood and Boundaries
The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America
Stuart B. Schwartz
Brandeis University Press, 2020

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

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Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
Norman Roth
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

The Jewish community of medieval Spain was the largest and most important in the West for more than a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Muslim and Christian neighbors. This stable situation began to change in the 1390s, and through the next century hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Norman Roth argues here with detailed documentation that, contrary to popular myth, the conversos were sincere converts who hated (and were hated by) the remaining Jewish community. Roth examines in depth the reasons for the Inquisition against the conversos, and the eventual expulsion of all Jews from Spain.

“With scrupulous scholarship based on a profound knowledge of the Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish sources, Roth sets out to shatter all existing preconceptions about late medieval society in Spain.”—Henry Kamen, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

“Scholarly, detailed, researched, and innovative. . . . As the result of Roth’s writing, we shall need to rethink our knowledge and understanding of this period.”—Murray Levine, Jewish Spectator

“The fruit of many years of study, investigation, and reflection, guaranteed by the solid intellectual trajectory of its author, an expert in Jewish studies. . . . A contribution that will be particularly valuable for the study of Spanish medievalism.”—Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, Annuario de Estudios Medievales

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front cover of The Faith of Fallen Jews
The Faith of Fallen Jews
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History
Edited by David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye
Brandeis University Press, 2013
From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi’s enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.
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The Inquisitor's Tongue
A Novel
Alan Singer
University of Alabama Press, 2012

Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities.
 
The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity. 
 
In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity.
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front cover of A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo
A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo
Assimilating a Minority
Linda Martz
University of Michigan Press, 2003
A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo addresses the fortunes of Jewish families who converted to Catholicism in fifteenth-century Spain. From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, their careers, successes, and misfortunes are traced as they confront institutional and societal prejudices in the form of the Spanish Inquisition and pure blood statutes.
Linda M. Martz focuses on families that were immersed in the worlds of business and finance. They formed the backbone of the trade industry and, during the economic expansion of the sixteenth century, enjoyed a high degree of affluence. The seventeenth century, however, brought harder times. How these families rose to positions of commercial eminence and then adapted to this economic downturn is one of the questions addressed in this insightful book.
A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo relies heavily on archival evidence--notarial, parish, and city records--that offers new insights into the families' histories. Business endeavors, marriage alliances, involvement in local politics, and the pursuit of improved social status are all subjected to Martz's keen analysis.
These families appear to have been well integrated into their contemporary society; aside from their business and financial activities, many were members of the city's governing council. But how well did they integrate with the lower classes? Assimilating minorities in the majority culture is a task that confronts most modern societies, so the experience of Spain and this particular minority may serve as an example of how earlier societies viewed and confronted this challenge.
This book will appeal to historians of medieval and Renaissance Spain and those interested in the Inquisition's effect on Renaissance Spain. It will also prove to be indispensable for those interested in the history of the Jewish race, as well as for those pursuing the question of marginalization.
Linda M. Martz is an independent historian as well as a freelance editor and writer.
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Suddenly Jewish
Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots
Barbara Kessel
Brandeis University Press, 2007
One woman learned on the eve of her Roman Catholic wedding. One man as he was studying for the priesthood. Madeleine Albright famously learned from the Washington Post when she was named Secretary of State. "What is it like to find out you are not who you thought you were?" asks Barbara Kessel in this compelling volume, based on interviews with over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews only to learn at some point in their lives that they are of Jewish descent. With humor, candor, and deep emotion, Kessel's subjects discuss the emotional upheaval of refashioning their self-image and, for many, coming to terms with deliberate deception on the part of parents and family. Responses to the discovery of a Jewish heritage ranged from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace. For many, Kessel reports, the discovery of Jewish roots confirmed long-held suspicions or even, more mysteriously, conformed to a long-felt attraction toward Judaism. For some crypto-Jews in the southwest United States (descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition), the only clues to their heritage are certain practices and traditions handed down through the generations, whose significance may be long since lost. In Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, many Jews who were adopted as infants to save them from the Holocaust are now learning of their heritage through the deathbed confessions of their adoptive parents. The varied responses of these disparate people to a similar experience, presented in their own words, offer compelling insights into the nature of self-knowledge. Whether they had always suspected or were taken by surprise, Kessel's respondents report that confirmation of their Jewish heritage affected their sense of self and of their place in the world in profound ways. Fascinating, poignant, and often very funny, Suddenly Jewish speaks to crucial issues of identity, selfhood, and spiritual community.
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