... 1971 Though it sometimes daringly surfaced, Judaism was an underground faith throughout colonial Spanish America. How many Jews there were is moot; the use of a racial definition by some Mexican writers to embrace all New Christians as Jews has misled many into positing a wider degree of Judaizing...

... This ambitious work seeks to combine conventional historical methods, critical use of published and unpublished written sources, genealogical research, and oral histories. It is thus, as its author puts it, “the first attempt to provide a comprehensive historical analysis of crypto-Judaism in New Mexico from...

..., and from the Arabic muharram , “forbidden,” for swine meat). Baer sees the Inquisition as a religious and political arm of both Church and State, which use and misuse religious fanaticism to the detriment of Spanish Judaism. We must object to this oversimplified judgment of Spanish history...

... not Jews, but detached from Judaism, or rather, to put it more clearly, Christians; (2) that in seeking to identify the whole Marrano group with a secret Jewish heresy, the Spanish Inquisition was operating with a fiction, and (3) that it was driven to this operation by racial hatred and political...

...-Judaism, subjective in form, and in content a “precipitate created by isolation and persecution” (p. 94) scarcely related to normative Judaism. The adjustment that the conversos made to Spanish colonial society reflected both acculturation (leading to such syncretistic practices as kneeling for prayer...

... Press 1971 Jews survived for almost 2,000 years without a homeland. They maintained their ethnicity while living as minority groups in lands of different cultures. When rejected or rebuffed, the usual tendency of minorities is to acculturate and assimilate. Most adherents of Judaism withstood...

... religious teacher and later, as an advocate. Starting from a determination to maintain scholarly objectivity, he finds himself engaged emotionally with the struggle of these “Jews” to enter fully into Judaism while possessing the barest knowledge of what Judaism might be. He is overwhelmed by their longing...

... is presented the identity crisis and reshaping of Judaism among conversos and marranos in Spanish America. Part 3 focuses on the experience of these enclaves in Portuguese Latin America. Part 4 retains much of the same subject matter in the context of trade in France and Caribbean French America. We next...

... of a projected three-volume study tracing the history of the Jews in Chile is a biography of a colonial surgeon. The bachiller Francisco Maldonado de Silva was of partial Jewish ancestry and began to practice Judaism, as he understood it, as a young man. He confided his religious convictions to his sister, who...

... collection of papers, contains a long historical essay on Judaism, “From Theology to Ideology,” two other papers on Catholicism, and four on Islam. They are given perspective through a perceptive introduction and conclusion by the editor. ...

..., misunderstood Judaism, and accepted uncritically many of the stereotypes on which prejudice historically was based. She argues that anti-Semitic propaganda in Brazil was more widespread than previously known. Vargas took no steps to counter it, because its presence was not disadvantageous politically...

..., Christianity, and the Enlightenment are discussed in terms of their impact on normative Judaism. Finally, the various Sephardic diasporas are examined. (Unfortunately, the Spanish-Portuguese Indies are omitted.) The plentiful illustrations are on point, and mercifully avoid the overworked nineteenth-century...

.... But on the negative side, he believes that identifying Jews with “labor” contributed to the Spanish (Christian) cult of leisure, or hidalguismo . He also points to the fourteenth-century Hispanic origin of the idea that Judaism was a race, a biologically heritable characteristic, and notes that both Jews and Moslems...

... and ineffectiveness in many spheres of operation, the Inquisition is described as having been singularly efficient in stamping out the practice of Judaism in Spanish America. By the end of the seventeenth century, owing to Inquisitorial thoroughness, the Jews had virtually abandoned their faith and had “become...

... civil cases. The Tribunal of the Holy Office, which lived on the confiscated property of its victims, had an obvious vested interest in exaggerating the survival of Judaism; and its Kafkaesque procedures were such as to lead automatically to the conviction of innocents. To understand this, Saraiva...

... syncretic) and Indian myths and traditions. Judaism was also syncretic in Brazil. Edenization of New World nature was accompanied by projection onto an American backcloth of European mythology about monsters and demonization of inhabitants and fauna. Colonial Brazil was viewed as a place of exile...

.... The interrelationship of the three great religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) in the Peninsula is particularly well done. Here literary, artistic and architectural evidence is assembled to examine the differing impact of the great resident minorities upon Castile and Aragon. This social, economic and religious...

.... xxiii , 493 . $17.50 . Copyright 1970 by Duke University Press 1970 Published as Volume XI of a monumental series (though the second to appear), this book aims at presenting the antecedents of medieval Judaism in Christian Europe. Fifteen chapters of various lengths cover the period either...

...” of Juan de Baeza “was the circumcision of Indian children with his fingernails.” Greenleaf is aware that the person accused of cryp to-Judaism was one “who showed great disrespect and contempt for Christianity by word, deed, and example especially in sexual morality. He frequently tried to undermine...

... of the Holy Office as a deviating Catholic. The Inquisition also used other terms to indicate Judaism. “Hebreo” was used and is to be distinguished from hebreo-cristiano . The inference, and in many cases the fact, was that the victim had never been inducted into Catholicism. Margarita Morera and Micaela...