CONVERSOS

Did you know that in 1391, the largest collective blood transfusion ever recorded began in Spain, and its legacy endures to this day? To what extent is it true that the Catholic Monarchs expelled the Jews in 1492? What was the social role of those ...New Christians... whom the Inquisition would persecute nearly a century later? How does a respected rabbi come to be appointed bishop and even advisor to kings and popes? Salomón Leví traded his kippah for the tonsure and took the name Pablo de Santa María: in addition to serving as a prelate in his native Burgos, he would go on to become a leading figure at the court of Castile, as well as an advisor to Benedict XIII during the Avignon Papacy. His is just one of many stories featuring the so-called conversos, but by following in his footsteps through the places he and thousands of others walked, David Jiménez-Blanco has uniquely reconstructed the settings of the Jewish presence in old Sepharad in search of the origins of many Spaniards. Accompanying him on the journey is his good friend Samuel Bengio, a son of the diaspora. Moving away from conventional historiography, a 21st-century Christian and a Jew have produced a fascinating study that becomes an insightful reflection on their collective identity. Who were Ferrán Martínez, Vicente Ferrer, and Jerónimo de Santa Fe? Do the pogroms and the cultural integration of Jewish converts not find their echoes in the political rise of the Spanish Empire? How does this fusion shed light on the mysticism of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross or the literature of the Golden Age? What do the latest DNA analyses reveal about a Jewish heritage? This work is an eloquent account of the quest for one...s roots amid the mists of an uncomfortable and ever-comp ex past.