A01=Yirmiyahu Yovel
Anathema
Anti-Jewish laws
Anti-Judaism
Antipope
Apologetics
Apostasy
Arianism
Author_Yirmiyahu Yovel
Canonical criticism
Category=JBSR
Category=NHD
Category=QRAX
Catharism
Church Fathers
Conversion to Judaism
Converso
Counter-Reformation
Crypto-Judaism
Damnation
David Reubeni
Deism
Demagogue
Demonology
Diaspora Jew (stereotype)
Disenchantment
Disputation of Tortosa
Elijah
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Excommunication
Ezra
Geonim
God
God Knows (novel)
Haskalah
Heresy
Idolatry
Islam in Spain
Islamic religious police
Jehoshaphat
Jewish lobby
Jews
Jizya
Judaism
Judaizers
Kabbalah
Lazarillo de Tormes
Letter of appointment
Marrano
Morisco
New antisemitism
New Christian
Nonconformist
Old Christian
Orthodox Judaism
People of the Book
Picaresque novel
Pope Alexander VI
Popular sovereignty
Religion
Reprisal
Romanticism
Sacred history
Sadducees
Samaritans
Sanbenito
Scholasticism
Secularism
Secularization
Shlomo
Shylock
Superiority (short story)
Treaty of Tordesillas
Uriel da Costa
Warfare
Zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780691135717
- Weight: 822g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jan 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Marranos were former Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, and their later descendents. Despite economic and some political advancement, these "Conversos" suffered social stigma and were persecuted by the Inquisition. In this unconventional history, Yirmiyahu Yovel tells their fascinating story and reflects on what it means for modern forms of identity. He describes the Marranos as "the Other within"--people who both did and did not belong. Rejected by most Jews as renegades and by most veteran Christians as Jews with impure blood, Marranos had no definite, integral identity, Yovel argues. The "Judaizers"--Marranos who wished to remain secretly Jewish--were not actually Jews, and those Marranos who wished to assimilate were not truly integrated as Hispano-Catholics. Rather, mixing Jewish and Christian symbols and life patterns, Marranos were typically distinguished by a split identity. They also discovered the subjective mind, engaged in social and religious dissent, and demonstrated early signs of secularity and this-worldliness.
In these ways, Yovel says, the Marranos anticipated and possibly helped create many central features of modern Western and Jewish experience. One of Yovel's philosophical conclusions is that split identity--which the Inquisition persecuted and modern nationalism considers illicit--is a genuine and inevitable shape of human existence, one that deserves recognition as a basic human freedom. Drawing on historical studies, Inquisition records, and contemporary poems, novels, treatises, and other writings, this engaging critical history of the Marrano experience is also a profound meditation on dual identities and the birth of modernity.
Yirmiyahu Yovel is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and chairman of the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute. He has written widely on philosophy and history, and his books include "Spinoza and Other Heretics" (Princeton); "Kant and the Philosophy of History" (Princeton); and "Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews".
