Books in the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series

Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past.Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.

Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas-and especially to Mexico-in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants traversed new layers of bureaucracy and authority amid shifting political regimes as they crossed and were crossed by borders. Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, these Sephardi migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation.

A study of the emergence of unified dating, calculation of elapsed time to establish an era from the creation of the world, this book is a historical challenge to the prejudice saying that Jews dismissed history after the destruction of the Second Temple and the completion of the Talmud.

In Geography of Hope, French sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum examines the work of the some of the prominent Jewish social scientists of the past two centuries in order to analyze their range of responses to the tensions between the Enlightenment call for universalism and the reality of Jewish particularism.

This is the tale of an accusation of blood libel during a period when France prided itself on its rationality.

In this book, Engel asks why and how Jewish history and the Holocaust came to be viewed as separate areas of academic study.

Literary Passports is the first book to explore Hebrew modernist fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice, violence, and victimage in Hebrew culture over the last century.