Iberian New Christians and Their Descendants

Iberian New Christians and Their Descendants PDF Author: Jack Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527536211
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This ground-breaking volume explores the relatively new academic field of Bnei Anousim studies (also referred to as descendants of New Christians, Conversos, or Marranos), whose Jewish ancestors in Iberia were forcibly converted to Catholicism from 1391 through to the fifteenth century. Chronologically, this book focuses on the eighteenth century, a later period of Inquisition activity marked by the Portuguese Inquisition’s relentless attacks against the Jewish “heresy” and the resultant mass exodus of New Christians from Portugal to Brazil. Several chapters concern the contemporary phenomenon of descendants of these New Christians seeking their Jewish roots. However, among a population that has retained almost no memory of their origins, how authentic are their Jewish roots? After the passage of hundreds of years, how much of what they perceive as “Jewish” is truly a lost Sefardi heritage? This volume addresses these questions from the perspectives of history, demography, genealogy, anthropology, and genetics.

Iberian New Christians and Their Descendants

Iberian New Christians and Their Descendants PDF Author: Jack Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527536211
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book

Book Description
This ground-breaking volume explores the relatively new academic field of Bnei Anousim studies (also referred to as descendants of New Christians, Conversos, or Marranos), whose Jewish ancestors in Iberia were forcibly converted to Catholicism from 1391 through to the fifteenth century. Chronologically, this book focuses on the eighteenth century, a later period of Inquisition activity marked by the Portuguese Inquisition’s relentless attacks against the Jewish “heresy” and the resultant mass exodus of New Christians from Portugal to Brazil. Several chapters concern the contemporary phenomenon of descendants of these New Christians seeking their Jewish roots. However, among a population that has retained almost no memory of their origins, how authentic are their Jewish roots? After the passage of hundreds of years, how much of what they perceive as “Jewish” is truly a lost Sefardi heritage? This volume addresses these questions from the perspectives of history, demography, genealogy, anthropology, and genetics.

Kingdoms of Faith

Kingdoms of Faith PDF Author: Brian A. Catlos
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A magisterial, myth-dispelling history of Islamic Spain spanning the millennium between the founding of Islam in the seventh century and the final expulsion of Spain's Muslims in the seventeenth In Kingdoms of Faith, award-winning historian Brian A. Catlos rewrites the history of Islamic Spain from the ground up, evoking the cultural splendor of al-Andalus, while offering an authoritative new interpretation of the forces that shaped it. Prior accounts have portrayed Islamic Spain as a paradise of enlightened tolerance or the site where civilizations clashed. Catlos taps a wide array of primary sources to paint a more complex portrait, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews together built a sophisticated civilization that transformed the Western world, even as they waged relentless war against each other and their coreligionists. Religion was often the language of conflict, but seldom its cause -- a lesson we would do well to learn in our own time.

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World PDF Author: Francois Soyer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004395601
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred, François Soyer offers the first detailed historical analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies between 1450 and 1750.

Encyclopedia of American Jewish History [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of American Jewish History [2 volumes] PDF Author: Stephen H. Norwood
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851096434
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 881

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Book Description
Written by the most prominent scholars in American Jewish history, this encyclopedia illuminates the varied experiences of America's Jews and their impact on American society and culture over three and a half centuries. American Jews have profoundly shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. Yet American history texts have largely ignored the Jewish experience. The Encyclopedia of American Jewish History corrects that omission. In essays and short entries written by 125 of the world's leading scholars of American Jewish history and culture, this encyclopedia explores both religious and secular aspects of American Jewish life. It examines the European background and immigration of American Jews and their impact on the professions and academic disciplines, mass culture and the arts, literature and theater, and labor and radical movements. It explores Zionism, antisemitism, responses to the Holocaust, the branches of Judaism, and Jews' relations with other groups, including Christians, Muslims, and African Americans. The encyclopedia covers the Jewish press and education, Jewish organizations, and Jews' participation in America's wars. In two comprehensive volumes, Encyclopedia of American Jewish History makes 350 years of American Jewish experience accessible to scholars, all levels of students, and the reading public.

The Converso's Return

The Converso's Return PDF Author: Dalia Kandiyoti
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.

The Sephardic Atlantic

The Sephardic Atlantic PDF Author: Sina Rauschenbach
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319991965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus’ attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah’s eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.

Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797

Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797 PDF Author: Benjamin Ravid
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000945499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The Jewish community of early modern Venice was perhaps the leading Jewish community of its time. It emerged as a response to the desire of the Venetian government to make credit readily available and, toward the end of the 16th century, it greatly expanded as Venice, faced with a serious decline in its international maritime trade, adopted a policy of attracting Iberian New Christian merchants. Yet Jews were still treated as the Other and subjected to restrictions and discriminatory measures, including confinement to a segregated enclosed quarter; the 'ghetto'. Despite this, the interplay between economically motivated raison d'état and traditional religious hostility resulted in a delicate balance which enabled the Jewish community of Venice to assume a real leadership role in the world of the Iberian Jewish Diaspora. Based extensively on previously unconsulted documents, these articles deal with central issues in the experience of the Jews of Venice, and so of Diaspora Jewish history in general: the Jewish quarter, maritime trade and urban moneylending, the Jewish distinguishing head-covering, relations with church and state, the forced baptism of Jewish minors, the converso problem, and anti-Judaism.

A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome

A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome PDF Author: Matthew Coneys Wainwright
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443495
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
An examination of groups and individuals in Rome who were not Roman Catholic, or not born so. It demonstrates how other religions had a lasting impact on early modern Catholic institutions in Rome.

Race and Blood in the Iberian World

Race and Blood in the Iberian World PDF Author: María Elena Martínez
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 364390259X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Racism Analysis is a research series by LIT Verlag that explores racial discrimination in all its varying historical, ideological, and cultural patterns. It examines the invention of race, as well as the dimensions of modern racism, and it inquires into racism avant la lettre. Race and Blood in the Iberian World is the third volume in the Race Analysis series. This collection offers an historical approach to the topics of race and blood in the Spanish Atlantic world, with extended comparative glances toward other Iberian imperial contexts (Portuguese India) and periods (the modern). The contributions include: a proposition to analyze processes of racialization in plural before the modern period * the question of whether it is analytically appropriate to apply the concept of race to early modern Spanish and Spanish American contexts * the intricate dynamics of race and blood in Iberian discourses of otherness * an analysis of the discourse of limpieza de sangre in relation to Spain's Muslims and moriscos in New Granada * the meanings of the Spanish notions of race and its relationships with gender in colonial Mexico * the meaning of casta, raza, and limpieza de sangre in Goa * the place of Gypsies, indigenous people, and blacks within discourses of citizenship and nativeness * a discussion about how to transform colonial subjects into citizens * an exploration of the works of two scientists of the inter-war period whose research in different ways contributed to what is called blood science. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series B: Yearbooks - Vol. 3)

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon PDF Author: Richard Zimler
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1590208064
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
International Bestseller: “A moody, tightly constructed historical thriller . . . a good mystery story and an effective evocation of a faraway time and place.” —The New York Times After Jews living in sixteenth-century Portugal are dragged to the baptismal font and forced to convert to Christianity, many of these New Christians persevere in their Jewish prayers and rituals in secret and at great risk; the hidden, arcane practices of the kabbalists, a mystical sect of Jews, continue as well. One such secret Jew is Berekiah Zarco, an intelligent young manuscript illuminator. Inflamed by love and revenge, he searches, in the crucible of the raging pogrom, for the killer of his beloved uncle Abraham, a renowned kabbalist, discovered murdered in a hidden synagogue along with a young girl in dishabille. Risking his life in streets seething with mayhem, Berekiah tracks down answers among Christians, New Christians, Jews, and the fellow kabbalists of his uncle, whose secret language and codes by turns light and obscure the way to the truth he seeks. A marvelous story, a challenging mystery, and a telling tale of the evils of intolerance, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon both compels and entertains. “The story moves quickly . . . a literary and historical treat.” —Library Journal ''Remarkable . . . The fever pitch of intensity Zimler maintains is at times overwhelming but never less than appropriate to the Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape he describes. Simultaneously, though, he is able to capture, within the bedlam, quiet moments of tenderness and love.” —Booklist (starred review)