EL ESPEJO

 

 

En la estancia lujosamente amueblada reinaba una calma absoluta.

Además de la araña encendida y de los candelabros pegados a la pared y portadores de numerosas bombillas, las lámparas brillaban bajo sus pantallas un rojo suave.

Sentado cerca del fuego que ardía en el hogar, Jordono fumaba cigarrillo tras cigarrillo. El gran cenicero de plata estaba lleno de colillas, y una nube aromática de humo de tabaco flotaba lentamente bajo el techo color crema.

El teléfono sonó, pero Jordon permaneció inmóvil. Únicamente sus ojos de jade se volvieron, llenos de inquietud, hacia el ruidoso aparato.

Tras algunas señales obstinadas -Jordon contó maquinalmente once-, el timbre enmudeció y el hombre empezó a respirar más profundamente, como si el restablecido silencio le aligerara el corazón.

De las ventanas colgaban espesos cortinajes de terciopelo que no dejaban filtrar el menor rayo de la abundante claridad exterior y que, sin duda, ahogaban al mismo tiempo el rumor de la calle.

Suponiendo, desde luego, que pudiera elevarse algún ruido de aquel callejón desierto, ya que Jordon vivía en un lugar muy apartado de Stokes-Newington, en el cual sólo se erguían algunas casas recién construidas y que en su mayor parte continuaban esperando a unos hipotéticos inquilinos.

Su propia morada era nueva, también. Sólo estaban amuebladas las habitaciones en las cuales vivía; el resto del inmueble se hallaba completamente desprovisto de todo mobiliario.

La pequeña placa de cobre fijada a la puerta llevaba un nombre muy corriente: Ph. Jones. Y nadie, en Stoke-Newington o en Londres, podía adivinar que bajo aquel patronímico vulgar se ocultaba el famoso Jordon.

Jerry -como le llamaban sus amigos- había sido una verdadera celebridad en las mayores ciudades de los Estados Unidos. Al frente de una importante pandilla de gangsters, había implantado allí un auténtico régimen de terror.

Robo, asalto a mano armada, chantaje, rapto, incendio voluntario, asesinato… No había un crimen que él no hubiera saboreado.

Merecía cien veces la silla eléctrica. Sin embargo, el brazo vengador de la justicia no se había tendido nunca hacia él, hasta tal punto era temido su poder. Jerry estaba, sobre todo, muy bien protegido.

Luego había desaparecido bruscamente de aquel mundo equívoco. No habían vuelto a encontrarle en ninguna parte de América. Le creyeron muerto, víctima de algún ajuste de cuentas.

En realidad, se había expatriado a Europa y vivía ahora como un pacífico burgués en un rincón perdido de la capital inglesa.

Podía estar tranquilo. Ninguno de sus antiguos amigos o cómplices hubiera podido identificarle. Gracias a una intervención quirúrgica dolorosa, pero perfectamente lograda, los rasgos de su rostro habían sido completamente transformados.

Sin embargo, no había encontrado la paz que esperaba; sentía gravitar sobre él una amenaza misteriosa y alarmante.

¿De dónde podía venir el peligro?

Lo ignoraba, pero no obstante lo percibía claramente y eso le bastaba.

Había hecho instalar el teléfono, pero dado que nadie le conocía en el país no le llamaban nunca. Pero aquella tarde había sonado tres veces seguidas.

-Me han localizado -gruñó, cuando por tercera vez enmudeció el timbre.

La angustia que experimentaba hacía surgir a su alrededor toda clase de imágenes turbadoras y fantasmagóricas: enormes manos empuñando puñales o revólveres, sillas eléctricas, gigantescos patíbulos y siniestras guillotinas.

¿No eran unos pasos los que resonaban en la casa desierta? ¿No crujía la escalera? ¿Y qué mano invisible manipulaba, en aquel momento, en la cerradura de la puerta principal?

No, no era más que el viento insidioso que rozaba las paredes, en el exterior. La escalera gemía porque era nueva y todavía estaba húmeda. En cuanto a la puerta, no podía dejar de quejarse bajo los brutales bofetones de la corriente de aire que hacía estremecer a la vivienda recién construida.

Volvió de nuevo a fumar cigarrillo tras cigarrillo y vació la botella de whisky.

Súbitamente, una sombra ligera cruzó la estancia. Jordon se echó a temblar.

Pero no había motivo. Se trataba simplemente de una bombilla que, al fundirse, había hecho nacer en la pared una pequeña mancha oscura.

-¡Tonterías! -murmuró-. ¡Ni más ni menos!

De todos modos, no pudo evitar el deslizar la mano debajo del almohadón de seda de su sillón para comprobar si la pistola cargada continuaba allí.

-¿Por qué me he retirado a este maldito lugar? -se preguntó amargamente-. La soledad no sirve para nada. Sería preferible que me perdiera entre la multitud. En los cines, los teatros, los dancing y los clubs nocturnos no se corre el peligro de encontrar unos fantasmas. Mientras que aquí… Es preciso que abandone este funesto refugio.

Por cuarta vez, el teléfono empezó a llamar. El timbre resonaba con obstinación. Ahora, nada parecía poder pararlo.

Como empujado por una fuerza misteriosa, Jordon puso la mano sobre el aparato, descolgó y tendió el oído.

La línea estaba sin duda descompuesta, ya que sólo oyó una serie de crujidos frenéticos. Finalmente percibió una voz desconocida.

Aunque en el otro extremo del hilo alguien hablaba con una gran volubilidad, sólo pudo captar dos o tres palabras que se repetían con frecuencia:

-El espejo…

Luego, la comunicación se interrumpió bruscamente.

-¿El espejo? ¿Qué pasa con el espejo? -gruñó Jordan.

En la casa sólo había un espejo, una pieza magnífica que había comprado en el momento de instalarse en aquella nueva vivienda.

Estaba sólidamente fijado a un marco espléndido, y el cristal, ligeramente verdoso, debía ser de origen veneciano.

Jordano volvió los ojos hacia su adquisición.

Era un espejo soberbio, desde luego, en el cual se reflejaba la luz a la perfección, sin que una sola sombra viniera a mancharla.

Pero, ¿por qué se sentía súbitamente atraído hacia él?

Temblando con una ansiedad que no hubiera podido explicarse, abandonó su asiento y se acercó al espejo, el cual le devolvió inmediatamente su imagen.

Se inclinó, horrorizado: en la glauca profundidad del cristal acababa de aparecer una figura sombría y amenazadora.

Unos ojos de fuego brillaban en sus órbitas y rictus de ferocidad desfiguraban sus facciones.

Jordon profirió un grito y quiso dar un salto hacia atrás, pero sus miembros se negaron a obedecer a su voluntad. Permaneció allí, petrificado, mirándose fijamente en el espejo, donde su imagen se hacía cada vez más espantosa.

Los ojos se apagaron, la nariz se borró. No quedaba más que una boca abierta, de dientes blancos y puntiagudos. Un horror indescriptible se apoderó de Jordon, que reconoció el rostro de la Muerte.

-¡Socorro! -gritó.

La abominable cabeza hizo un gesto salvaje que no tardó en trocarse en una risa homérica, aunque inaudible.

-¡No, no quiero! -aulló Jordon-. ¡No quiero! ¡La justicia no ha conseguido atraparme nunca, y tú tampoco lo conseguirás! ¡Noooo!

Desesperado, se precipitó contra el espejo con los puños cerrados.

El espejo voló en mil pedazos. Estupefacto, con los brazos levantados, Jordon contempló con aire de incredulidad la obra de arte que acababa de destruir.

Esbozó una estúpida sonrisa, mientras contemplaba la sangre que salía a borbotones de las venas abiertas de sus muñecas desgarradas.

Unos instantes después se desplomó sobre la alfombra, muerto…

-Era una pieza rara -se lamentaba el anticuario Boles-, lo que en otros tiempos se llamaba un espejo mágico, uno de esos curiosos objetos de origen puramente veneciano, un cristal maravilloso que, intensamente iluminado, deforma el rostro de un modo extraño… Le he llamado tres veces por teléfono para decirle que no era un espejo ordinario, ya que fue mi empleado quien se lo vendió y entregó.

Pero no he recibido respuesta a mis llamadas. La cuarta vez descolgó el receptor, pero por lo visto la línea estaba descompuesta, porque resultaba casi imposible entenderse.

 

FIN

 

Relato traducido del Ingles al Castellano

por Paya Frank

Theodor Herzl´s Jewish State

 

 

Theodor Herzl's Jewish State : Utopia, Politics, and Prophecy

Published in 1896, The Jewish State ( Der Judenstaat ) is much more than a political treatise: it is the founding manifesto of modern Zionism and a work that encapsulates the dreams of a people dispersed for centuries. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist of Jewish origin, wrote this text in response to the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe, convinced that the solution was not assimilation, but the creation of a sovereign state for the Jewish people.

Herzl doesn't appeal to emotion or biblical nostalgia: his approach is rational, legal, and pragmatic. He proposes the founding of a Jewish state as a modern enterprise, with economic, legal, and diplomatic structures. The text is presented as an action plan, with details on migration, financing, the organization of a "Jewish Society" and a "Jewish Company" that would manage resources and colonization.

But beyond its technical nature, The Jewish State vibrates with a visionary energy. Herzl writes with the conviction that he is sowing an idea that will germinate in future generations. His phrase, "If you want it, it will not be a dream," became the motto of the Zionist movement, and his vision, though utopian at the time, materialized decades later with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

📚 Why read it today ?

• Because it is a window into 19th-century political thought, where the ideas of nation, self-determination, and modernity are intertwined.

• Because it allows us to understand the origin of one of the most complex geopolitical conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.

• Because it's a work that, although brief, raises profound questions about identity, belonging, and the right to a home.

Herzl was neither a theologian nor a historian, but an intellectual who knew how to translate the pain of his time into a concrete proposal. His style is clear, direct, unadorned, yet charged with urgency. For readers interested in history, politics, or the literature of ideas, The Jewish State is essential reading.

 Historical context: Europe, antisemitism and the birth of political Zionism

At the end of the 19th century, Europe was undergoing a profound transformation. The Industrial Revolution had reconfigured cities, social classes, and political systems. Nationalism was consolidating its dominant force, and modern nation-states were beginning to define their cultural and ethnic boundaries. In this climate of emerging identities, European Jews, despite having achieved certain levels of integration and legal emancipation, continued to be subject to discrimination, exclusion, and violence.

Antisemitism was not new, but it took on modern forms: pseudoscientific, political, and media-based. In France, the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), in which a Jewish official was falsely accused of treason, unleashed a wave of hatred that shook public opinion. Herzl, who covered the trial as a journalist, was deeply shocked. Although he initially believed in assimilation as a path to integration, this episode convinced him that Jews needed their own state to guarantee their safety and dignity.

At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was beginning to lose influence over Palestine, and European interest in the region was growing. Herzl saw Palestine as a viable option for Jewish settlement, although he also considered Argentina as an alternative. His proposal appealed not to religion or messianism, but to political logic: if European peoples could have sovereign states, why not the Jewish people?

The Jewish State was published in 1896, at a time when Zionism had not yet emerged as an organized movement. A year later, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897), where the foundations were laid for the political project that would culminate in the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

This context makes the work a key historical document: not only does it anticipate a geopolitical shift of enormous magnitude, but it also reflects the ideological, social, and cultural tensions of a Europe torn between modernity and prejudice.

📖 Literary and political perspective: between manifesto and metaphor

🏛️ From a political perspective: a manifesto of self-determination

The Jewish State is inscribed in the tradition of great founding texts: it is neither a novel nor a speculative essay, but a political manifesto with a transformative vocation. Herzl articulates his proposal with Cartesian clarity, appealing to logic, economics, and international law. His tone is sober, almost technical, yet charged with moral urgency. The author does not seek to convince with emotional rhetoric, but with rational arguments that respond to the European context of exclusion and violence.

Politically, the work represents a radical shift: it proposes that the Jewish people cease to be an object of tolerance or persecution and become a political subject with the power to make decisions. Herzl anticipates contemporary debates about national identity, migration, sovereignty, and collective rights. His vision, although controversial at the time, became the linchpin of a movement that transformed the landscape of the 20th century.

✍️ From a literary perspective: clarity, vision, and symbolism

Although not a literary work in the strictest sense, The Jewish State possesses a narrative force that brings it close to the utopian genre. Herzl constructs a vision of the future, a "possible place" that does not yet exist, but that can be achieved through determined action. This dimension connects it to works such as Thomas More's Utopia or Plato's Republic , where political thought is expressed as imagined architecture.

His style is direct, unadorned, but not devoid of symbolism. The idea of ​​the "national home" functions as a metaphor for belonging, refuge, and dignity. Herzl writes like someone drawing a map: each chapter delineates functions, structures, and paths. And yet, there are moments where his prose soars, as in his famous phrase: "If you want it, it will not be a dream ," which encapsulates the power of collective will.

For the literary reader, the work offers a different experience: it doesn't seek to move, but to mobilize. But in that mobilization lies a poetics of desire, a narrative of return, an epic without individual heroes, where the protagonist is an entire people.

 Conclusion : a text that projects territory and soul

The Jewish State is not only the seed of a nation; it is also the portrait of a collective consciousness seeking to take root. Herzl, with his journalistic eye and political architect's pen, offers us a work that transcends paper: it is a map, a manifesto, and a mirror. His proposal, although written with the precision of a logistical plan, vibrates with the intensity of a shared vision, as if each line traced not only geographical borders but also emotional contours of belonging.

From your perspective as a literary and photographic curator, this book can be read as a latent image: a negative that reveals a people's desire to rebel, to imprint itself on history with its own light. Just as a photograph captures the instant and transforms it into memory, The Jewish State captures a moment of urgency and transforms it into a legacy.

Reading it today is like returning to a crossroads where words become action, and where political literature merges with the poetics of destiny. Herzl doesn't write to entertain, but to summon. And in that summoning, each reader becomes a witness to an idea that, like any powerful image, continues to resonate long after it has been revealed.

Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State (1896) is not just a political plan: it is the founding dream of modern Zionism. In the midst of anti-Semitic Europe, Herzl proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people, with a rational vision and utopian force. "If you want it, it will not be a dream." A brief, clear, and prophetic text that changed history.

STORMS {Story}

 

 

 

My mother dreamed things before they happened, and in her dreams, she found things. I was at the kitchen table cutting a cardboard box to make doors and windows the morning she came downstairs and said she knew where Rua was. She was in a hurry.

-Go!

-Hurry up.

It was one of those frosty mornings in mid-January, when the air is so cold it feels new. As we stepped outside, the wind forced the air I was breathing back into my lungs. I followed her down the path into the woods. A woodcock flew over the trees. Something told me not to speak. My mother knew where I was going. We crossed a ditch and came out into a beet field I didn't recognize. She stopped and pointed in the direction of a heath.

"It's there," he said.

We parted the heather and there was Rua, our Red Setter, his neck caught in a trap. He looked dead, but I couldn't look away. My mother loosened the trap and spoke to him. There was blood on the wire. We carried him home and gave him milk, but he couldn't swallow. Under his coat, his bones were visible, and he slept for three days. On the fourth day, he got up and followed my mother around the house like a shadow. When I asked her if I, too, would find things in my dreams, she told me she hoped that would never happen. I didn't ask her why. Even as a toddler, I'd known for a while that "why" were two words my mother hated.

The dairy farm was a cold, dark room that my parents had filled with things they barely used, from the time before I was born. The yellow paint bulged on the walls, and the damp tiles glistened on the floor. The ties hung stiff from the beams, their bits dusty. The churn was still there, and the smell of sour milk lingered; the wood, smoothed but riddled with woodworm, the paddles long since lost. I don't remember glass in those windows, only rusty bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing through the trees.

Someone pushed the old incubator into the dairy, and a chick escaped; a rusty metal thing that used to shine like a spoon. We placed newly hatched chicks in it, scooping them up in our hands like yellow petals and releasing them into that warmth, down-covered balls with legs always moving, taking in that warmth as our own. Warmth keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow balls fall, overcome by the cold, their legs like orange arrows pointing down. My father's hand discarded them like weeds. My mother scooped them up carefully, inspecting those little yellow bodies for any signs of life, and when she found none, she would say, "My poor chick," and smile at me as she slid them down the chute.

The milk strainers were there too, the old cheesecloth hanging in dingy bunches on a frayed thread. And the jars of wild currant jam that smelled like sherry, reduced in glass with a mossy rim. My mother always made more jam than we could eat. We used to make apple jelly: we'd cut those sour fruits into quarters and boil them to a pulp, cores, seeds, and all; we'd pour the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase tied to each leg of an upturned stool. It dripped, dripped, dripped all night into the preserving jar.

I went to the dairy when I was told to; for a jar of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a stubborn mare. The handle was too high. I had to stand on a creosote can to reach it, and the metal I stood on was as thin as a sheet. When I went there of my own volition, it was to look in the chest, a large rusty box, a boy's pirate's suitcase. It was so old that if I had emptied it and held it up to the light, it would have been like looking through a sieve. Inside the chest, there was nothing I liked: old books, stuck together by moisture and without illustrations, darkened maps, and a few prayer books.

"All this belonged to your father's family," my mother told me, using a voice that he was not supposed to hear.

The chest was as long as I was and half as high, with a tight lid and no handles. I would have opened it and looked at those things, fingered the books with their broken spines and missing covers. It was the past; the past was there. I felt that if I could understand its contents, my life would have more meaning. But that never happened. I would have grown weary of looking at those things, slammed the lid shut, made the metal creak.

The next dream changed everything. My mother dreamed of her mother, dead. Her moans woke me in the middle of the night. Someone was banging loudly on the kitchen table. I sneaked downstairs and stood there, staring into the darkness. My mother was curled up on the floor. My father, who never said anything affectionate, spoke to her tenderly, coaxing her with brandy, calling her name.

-Mary, Mayree, ah, Maayree!

The two of them, who never touched, whose fingers dropped the sauceboat before the other could grab it, were touching. I crawled back up and listened as those endearments turned into something else.

In the morning, the telegram arrived. The postman took off his cap and told my mother he was sorry for her troubles. My mother rolled the telegram between her fingers like cigarette paper. My father made the arrangements. Strangers came to the house. A neighbor hit me on the hand when I turned on the radio. My grandmother, the woman with the purple rash and blue veined breasts, which we washed like paint, came back stiff from the nursing home, in a frilled drawer, and we put her in the cold living room. I got up in the middle of the night and went down to check on her when no one was there. A gust of wind caused wax to fall from the lit candle onto the sideboard. I knew little about her, except that she wasn't afraid of angry geese or worried about contracting tuberculosis. She could cure every kind of poultry disease. My mother had grown up surrounded by ducks, chickens, and turkeys. I touched my grandmother's hand. The cold scared me.

"What are you doing?" my mother asked me.

All this time she had been sitting there in the dark.

"Nothing," I told him.

Neighbors came to join us after the funeral, and cars piled up on the road. I sat on strangers' laps. They passed me around like a bag of tobacco, and I downed three large bottles of 7UP.

My aunt stood guarding the ham. "Who's going to want another slice?" she asked, holding the deadly knife.

My mother sat staring into the fire and never said a word. Not even when Rua jumped on the couch and started licking herself.

Months passed. My mother began cleaning the barn, even though we had sold the cows years before. She went with the brush and bucket, scrubbed the mangers, the passageway, and even polished the hubcap we used to serve the frothy milk to the cats. And then she came back and talked to the statues until lunch. She imagined storms, locked herself under the stairs when she heard wind, put cotton in her ears when thunder came, hid under the table with Rua.

Once, my father and I, while baling rye, watched her in the field, calling the cows.

-Chuck! Chuck! Hersey! Chuck! Hersey!

She stood there banging on the zinc bucket to make the imaginary cows come and eat. My father brought her into the house. And that's when my mother started living upstairs.

So, by the time summer came, I was the one carrying the big kettle for the haymowers, the spout plugged with a page from the Farmer's Journal. The men sucked on straws and looked at me, rudely telling my father that I would soon be of age.

She came for me in the middle of the night, dressed in a red nightgown I'd never seen her use before. She pulled me out of bed, we went down the darkened steps, and out onto the mown meadow, past the haystacks, our bare feet sticking to the seeds. And we continued up through the stubble fields, her hand screwed into mine, the back of her nightgown flapping in the wind. And then we reached the top and lay on our backs, watching the stars, she with her bronze hair and her crazy words, not entirely meaningless, but sensing what we couldn't understand. Like the dog who is the first to hear the car on the road.

She pointed to what she called the saucepan, an arrangement of the stars, and told me how she got there. It was an animal tale that took place in the time of Our Lord, in Africa. There was a drought. The ground had turned to dust, and even the riverbeds were dry. Animals roamed Africa looking for something to drink. The sheep lost their wool and the snakes their skins, but a young bear found a saucepan full of water and gave it to everyone to tide them over until the rain came. All the animals drank their fill, but the saucepan never ran dry. It had a curved handle, and when the rain came, the stars took on its shape, and that's what happened. And then I, too, could see it in the sky.

We stayed there until dawn, the smell of hay drifting in on the wind. She told me about my father, about how he'd beaten her for fifteen years because she wasn't like other women. She taught me the difference between loving someone and liking someone. She told me she disliked me just as much as he did because I had the same cruel eyes.

I didn't understand, but that's when I started going to the dairy without being told to. It was a quiet place. There was nothing, just the blowing wind and the gurgling of the water tank above. The hole in the ceiling, between the beams, allowed us to see the dollhouse, the place where my cousins ​​used to take their dolls to bang their heads against the sloping roof.

It was a stormy day the day the truck came to take her away. My father said she was hurting, but it wasn't anything you could see. I asked him if he meant she was bleeding inside.

"Something like that," he said.

I thought of the image of the sacred heart on the stove, the red heart exposed, illuminated by the red lamp that never went out.

The men are coming to the house to look for her. She's under the table. I can't see. I run to the dairy, open the chest, and look inside. I take out a prayer book and turn the pages. They're worn and soft like my mother's arm. I open one of the darkened, torn maps, and until I find a place I recognize, I can't tell which is land and which is sea. There's an insect's wing stuck to Norway. I hear them in the next room. I open another book and look for illustrations, but there are none. I crawl into the chest and squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what had become my mother's voice grows to a moan. Something falls. I push on the tin lid, let the metal fall on top of me with a squeal of rust, tense. Everything goes black. It's as if I no longer exist. It's not me sitting on damp books, inside a big, black tin. The smell is old and musty, like the smell of a bread basket or the smell of the back of a cupboard when there are cake crumbs left. A smell that's a century old. I remember rats once gnawing at the incubator grille. They got to where the chickens were, and we found pieces of down with legs everywhere, the fleshy parts completely eaten away. We found other chickens, terrified, exhausted, and hiding among cans of paint or rolls of wire, still unable to escape. We picked them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, their screams faint and frantic.

Now I run the house. The last person who said they were old enough got burned. My mother always said there was nothing worse than a burn. And she was right. It just so happens that I don't take any crap from anyone. They leave their rubber boots outside, and my father leaves the dirty dishes on the drainer. I haven't heard him say the potatoes aren't cooked through. I know how to use a serving spoon to pound. He knows that too. Rua walks around the house looking for her. I think of him as my mother's shadow, wandering around the house.

I visit her on Sundays, but she doesn't know where she is or who I am.

"It's me, Mom," I tell her.

"I could never stand the smell of fish," she says. "Him and his herring."

-Don't you recognize me? I'm Elena.

"Helen of Troy! Get on your horse!" he says.

She's good at cards, she cheats others and takes the pocket money they're given each week, and the head nurse has to go to her closet to steal it when my mother is in the bathroom. She doesn't notice. Money never held any interest for my mother.

I keep going back to the psychiatric ward. I like the smell of disinfectant in the hallways, the nurses' rubber-soled shoes, the fights over the Sunday papers. I like the fact that what they say doesn't make sense. What does that say about me? My mother always said that madness runs in a family, and I have it on both sides. I live in a house with the man my mother married. I have a dog that almost died, but doesn't care about being alive. When I look in the mirror, my eyes are cruel.

I guess I have my own reasons for coming here. Maybe I need some of what my mother has. Just a little. I keep a small amount for my own protection. It's like a vaccine. People don't understand, but you have to face the worst possible scenario to be capable of everything.

 

END

 

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).