A History of the Marrranos

Plot

This is the 20th century classical work on Jewish history in Christian Spain; comprehensive and exhaustive, not for the general reader, but helpful nevertheless. The abundance of pages dedicated to mysticism and other abstract cultural issues pertaining the rabbis in those times make the book a hard read. One can skip them of course, but their presence stays on throughout the book if only in the background. This single aspect of the book makes it more a cultural study than what one should expect of a history of the Jews in general.

But being so loaded (an in two volumes) with information, affecting the daily lives of the regular Jewish folk as well as the courtesans and intellectual luminaries, it is well worth browsing through. The author doesn't make it easy either to follow up the lives of the Jews, being as they were from various kingdoms. He dedicates chapters to Castile, for instance, and then returns chronologically to pick up the story in Aragón, when he could have dealt with issues together simultaneously, at least he should have taken more care to organize the stories. If it is a daunting task to tell of so many lives as are here presented, within various geographical scenarios, and for such a long time period as the Middle Ages, the author cannot be blamed for failing: he never even tries. He just takes a kingdom and deals with it for a time; then picks another and does likewise; then takes a different subject matter, then looks into it at another kingdom (perhaps another time...?). One looses any sense of cohesiveness.

Once said, I doubt there is anything left out of the book without even one mention, if it was worthwhile.