Secrecy and Deceit documents the religious customs of the Iberian Jews who converted to Catholocism, largely under duress, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although many of the converts quickly melded into the Catholic mainstream, thousands of others and their descendents strove to preserve their Jewish culture despite the efforts of the Inquisition to suppress them.

The book details crypto-Jewish culture in Spain, Portugal, and their American colonies, principally Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. In coping with clandestiness, crypto-Jews rapidly evolved their own idiosyncratic religion. Its Jewish core was quickly modified with concepts and practices from the surrounding Catholic culture covered by a veneer of Jewish theology. Despite its increasing divergence from normative Judaism, some Jewish customs survived in celebrations of Life-cycle events, like birth, the onset of puberty, marriage, and death; in weekly and annual calendars of religious observance (especially the Sabbath, Yom Kippur, and Passover); in prayer practices; in oaths; in dietary customs; and in various superstitious practices.

The author uses Inquisition records, chronicles, rabbinical rulings, letters, eyewitness accounts, religious books, and other historical documents to give the most thorough and accurate picture of crypto-Jews ever cataloged. This award-winning book raises fascinating questions about living outside a Jewish community and what happens to religions of approximation.

"Secrecy and Deceit provides rare glimpses into a subject that is increasingly fascinating to many different audiences" --Jane S. Gerber, Director for Sephardic Studies, CUNY Graduate Center

"Historians and students of comparative and popular religion will be drawing on this work for years" -- Haym Soloveitchik, Yeshiva Universty

Recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Sephardic Studies and the Lucy Dawidowitz Prize for History

ISBN 082632813X

Paperback, 692 pp.