Marranos on the Moradas

Two groups were persecuted over four hundred years in what is now the southwestern United States, each dissimulating and disguising who they truly were. Both now declare their true identities, yet raise hostility. The Penitentes are a lay Catholic brotherhood that practiced bloody rites of self-flagellation and crucifixion, but claim this is a misrepresentation and that they are a community and charitable organization. Marranos, an ambiguous and complicated population of Sephardic descendants, claim to be anousim. Both peoples have a complex, shared history. This book disentangles the web, redefines the terms, and creates new contexts in which these groups are viewed with respect and sympathy without idealizing or slandering them. It uses rabbinics, literary analyses, psychohistory, and cultural anthropology to consolidate a history of mentalities.

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.