Marranos on the Moradas

Norman Simms is Associate professor at the Department of Humanities/English, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is the author of A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works, 2004; Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, 2004; Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature, 2007

“This lengthy and ambitious study defies easy categorization; it is part detective story, part psychohistory, part Jewish studies, part investigation of secrecy and esoteric currents, and part many other things. Yet its purpose is always clear: to explicate the complex, confused , and confusing inner spiritual life of those whom Simms terms “fuzzy Jews”—the New Christians, Crypto-Jews, and Marranos originally from the Iberian Peninsula but transplanted to Mexico and southwest America…the book is extremely valuable, in that it exhibits very clearly the extreme difficulty of studying the history of mentalities and the need for attention to a multitude of disparate academic fields that generally discourages such academic endeavors. This book is recommended to all interested in Jewish history, Jewish-Christian relations, and religious fraternities and secret societies.”

• Introduction; What Did the Penitentes Really Do?; Marranos, Penitentes & the Baroque Anamorphoses in Action; The Machinery of Secrets & the Machinations of Silence: Conspiracies, Contraptions & Ludibria; Crosscurrents & Undercurrents; Penitentes & the Crazy Things They Do: Or, How to be Jewish & Christian at the Same Time; Festivals of Blood Here & Bloody Trials There: Playing Roles & Rolling Along; Reaching Towards a Conclusion; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.