The Legacy of Marranism

Abstract This chapter addresses the alleged enduring of secret Jewish practices and identity among forced converts to Christianity in Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth–sixteenth centuries, and their descendants there and in Latin America. The Inquisition assumed a diachronic persistence of Judaizing, but little historical evidence supports an unbroken chain of transmission into the twenty-first century; the exceptions suggest that crypto-Jewish practices and identity were both highly variable and dependent on social ostracism by the broader society. Major conceptual errors underlie the general argument of diachronicity, including the idea of “indestructible Judaism,” the assumption of consistent endogamy, and a fixation on secret Jewish survivals to the exclusion of all other manifestations of ethno-religious persistence. Approaches such as Atlantic history’s emphasis on the routine exchange of people and ideas among the four continents of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa pose compelling challenges to the nationalist-idealist emphasis of much of the scholarship.