This Engrossing Study of Contemporary Crypto-Iews -- descendants of European Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition -- traces the group's history of clandestinely conducting their faith and their present-day efforts to reclaim their past. Janet Liebman Jacobs masterfully combines historical and social-scientific theory to fashion a brilliant analysis of hidden ancestry and the transformation of religious and ethnic identity.

No other scholar has explored the plight of crypto-Jews from a social-psychological point of view. Persecuted for centuries in Spain and in its colonies, crypto-Jews practiced their religion in secret and through often modified Jewish rituals, synthesizing Judaism and Catholicism in ways that have been handed down through generations. Jacobs investigates how contemporary crypto-Jews have uncovered their true ancestry and today live with the discovery of their families' Sephardic history, examining how those who chose conversion in response to this discovery have developed their spirituality and Jewish worldview.

The result is a captivating account of a group's struggle to piece together a more complete -- and therefore accurate -- personal and religious history. Jacobs's fifty in-depth interviews with crypto-Jewish descendants raise momentous questions about secrecy, gender, power, and tradition.