A History of the Marranos, by Cecil Roth

 

 

                          The Secret Jews

                                                    History of the Marranos.
                                                   Translation: Juan Novella.
                                                Introduction: Herman P. Salomón.

`Between 1932, when the first edition of Cecil Roth's A History of the Marranos was published, and 1858, when the third edition was about to appear, no new scholarship on the subject has emerged. Cecil Roth, however, was intimately acquainted with the "very important research on the early days of crypto-Judaism in Spain, on the origins of the Inquisition, and on various aspects of the Marrano Diaspora" he had mentioned in his brief introduction to the third edition. Cecil Roth realized that he had adopted an overly idealistic view of the entire epic. While in his 1932 Preface, he referred to "the unique devotion that was able to transmit ancestral ideals untainted, from generation to generation, despite the Inquisition and its horrors...", in his 1958 Preface he wrote: "The years have diminished, though hopefully not entirely erased, the profound romanticism of the author of a quarter of a century ago..."

In private communications with the author of these lines, Cecil Rotb lamented that he had not placed sufficient emphasis on the possibility that the problem of the New Christians was a problem of caste rather than religion, in that people who were content to live as conformist Catholics, often as pious Catholics, were forced to confess to the charge of “Judaizing” and “believing in the Law of Moses,” and to denounce their relatives and friends as guilty of the same crimes, in order to escape alive from the inquisitorial labyrinth. (Extracted from the Prologue).