Religious Converso Phenomenon

Dear Colleagues,

Late-medieval mass conversions of Jews to Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula created an enduring ethno-religious phenomenon usually known as the Marrano, New Christian or Converso phenomenon. During the early-modern period, Conversos' presence was expanded to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies and dependencies in the New World, in Southern Italy, and across Portuguese Africa and Asia, and it was correlated with the emergence of a specific diaspora made up by those who "returned" to open Judaism in different parts of Western Europe, Dutch Brazil, the Caribbean and British America. Whereas modern scholarship initially focussed on real and purported expressions of clandestine Judaism among Iberian Christians of Jewish origin, with the eventual acknowledgement that many of them were also fervent and even notorious Catholics, after the 1970s, the Converso phenomenon was increasinly studied with regard to teleological concerns (i.e., Conversos as forerunners of modernity) or through the lens of contemporary cultural studies (e.g., by emphasizing the hybrid character of the Conversos). While those approaches contributed to de-essentializing past perceptions of the Conversos, they subsumed their variegated religious beliefs and practices to questions related to the process of secularization and identity politics.

Taking in consideration these historiographical perspectives and shifts, this Special Issue of Religions will re-assess the need to study per se the variegated and protean forms of Converso religiosities from theological, spiritual, ritual and phenomenological standpoints. Issues such as forms of crypto-Judaism, the question of the existence of Converso Catholic mysticisms, Iberian Judeo-Christian messianisms, Converso female religiosities, popular "Marrano" traditions, religious doubt and skepticism among the Conversos, and phenomena of Convero acculturation and religious syncretism, as well as the study of eventual Iberian Catholic influences on early-modern Western-Sephardi Judaism and real or purported descendants of Conversos in the 20th and 21th centuries, will be the main foci of this Special Issue.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Claude B. Stuczynski
Guest Editor

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