The expe­ri­ences of the forcibly con­vert­ed Iber­ian Jews in the Mid­dle Ages and ear­ly mod­ern times have been the sub­ject of numer­ous works. Yir­miyahu Yov­el, a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the New School for Social Research and chair of the Jerusalem Spin­oza Insti­tute, sug­gests that his inten­tion is to sum­ma­rize pre­vi­ous research. This he does thor­ough­ly in the book, in his notes, and in an ample ​‘works cit­ed’ sec­tion. He fol­lows Jews and Mar­ra­nos from their ancient his­to­ry in Sepharad through vio­lent peri­ods of con­ver­sion, assim­i­la­tion, and per­se­cu­tion at the hands of the Inqui­si­tion into a world­wide dis­per­sion. Along the way, Yov­el explores relat­ed realms of phi­los­o­phy, psy­chol­o­gy, soci­ol­o­gy, pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, and lit­er­a­ture, as well as reli­gion and history. 

In his account, Yov­el explains the ground­break­ing eval­u­a­tion of non-Jew­ish his­to­ri­an Ameri­co Cas­tro, who claimed the Mar­ra­nos as an inte­gral part of Iber­ian cul­ture. Yov­el notes the oppos­ing views among Jew­ish his­to­ri­ans regard­ing the Jew­ish loy­al­ty of the con­verts. Yitzhak Baer praised their stead­fast­ness; Ben­zion Netanyahu saw them as turn­coats and ene­mies. Yov­el stress­es the com­plex­i­ty of Mar­ra­no exis­tence and the results of unique expe­ri­ence and toys with the the­o­ry of this group as ​“poten­tial Jews.” The author describes the prac­tices of Mar­ra­nos who sought to retain their Judaism. They were with­out teach­ers and books and iso­lat­ed from liv­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties after the expul­sions. As a result, var­i­ous qua­si-Judaisms and qua­si-Chris­t­ian forms developed. 

The author cred­its the Mar­ra­nos — and the Jews before them — with sup­ply­ing ener­gy and inno­va­tion to a feu­dal, mori­bund Iberia, which val­ued hon­or and pres­tige more than indi­vid­ual achieve­ment. He stress­es lit­er­ary con­tri­bu­tions prob­a­bly inspired by Mar­ranism, espe­cial­ly the picaresque nov­el and poet­ry. This thick vol­ume includes excerpts and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism. Don Quixote is con­sid­ered at length by the author as a Mar­ra­no product. 

This work con­cen­trates close­ly on a cer­tain seg­ment of Mar­ra­no soci­ety. These indi­vid­u­als, torn between the demands of Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, between church and syn­a­gogue, even­tu­al­ly reject­ed all revealed reli­gions and adopt­ed a sec­u­lar approach. Mul­ti­di­men­sion­al in their inter­ests, the Mar­ra­nos have been called the first mod­erns by many oth­ers besides Yov­el. Spin­oza and his cir­cle in Ams­ter­dam were just such indi­vid­u­als. On a pos­i­tive note, Yov­el believes that the Mar­ra­nos were the mod­els for Jew­ish eman­ci­pa­tion. How­ev­er, he defines the mod­ern anti-Semi­tism which they encoun­tered as the type that cul­mi­nat­ed in the Holo­caust and con­tin­ues to threat­en Jews today.

Impres­sive and detailed, The Oth­er With­in will nev­er­the­less leave many ques­tions unan­swered for new gen­er­a­tions intrigued by its sub­ject. Some may be annoyed by the inter­change­able use of the terms Mar­ra­nos, New Chris­tians, and Con­ver­sos and by the use of BCE and AD. Appen­dix, index, notes.