Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction. Crypto-Jewish Descent: An Ethnographic Study in Historical Perspective 1. Secrecy, Antisemitism, and the Dangers of Jewishness 2. Women and the Persistence of Culture: Ritual, Custom, and the Recovery of Sephardic Ancestry 3. The Self-in-Relation and the Transformation of Religious Consciousness 4. Syncretism and Faith Blending in Modern Crypto-Judaism 5. Conversion and the Rekindling of the Jewish Soul 6. Jewish Ancestry and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity Conclusion. Ethnic Loss and the Future of Crypto-Jewish Culture

About the Author

Janet Liebman Jacobs is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Divine Disenchantment: Deconverting from New Religions (1989) and Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self (1994), and editor of Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis: Readings in Contemporary Theory (1997).

Reviews

"Janet Jacobs's book is a beautifully-written, compelling account of the experiences of contemporary crypto-Jews who are struggling to locate the meanings of their various identities. I know of no other works that cover this material, and Jacobs does so in a rich finely-nuanced way in which she deals with issue of family, memory, community, and belonging. I love the way she draws on such a wide variety of materials to explore this topic in a wide-ranging and impressive way." - Lynn Davidman, author of Tradition in a Rootless World "Janet Jacobs enters fearlessly into the house of mirrors that is Jewish-Hispanic identity, where nothing is what it appears to be... Her ethnography is about the uses of silence and the excuses of memory." - Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language