Conversos : De Salomón Leví, rabino, a Pablo de Santa María, obispo. Una historia sobre nuestros orígenes

Solomon Levi exchanged his kippah for a tonsure and became known as Paul of Saint Mary. Besides being a prelate in his native Burgos, he would eventually become a powerful figure at the Castilian court and an advisor to Benedict XIII during the Avignon Papacy. His is just one of the many stories of the so-called conversos, but by following in his footsteps through the places he and thousands of others frequented, David Jiménez-Blanco has remarkably reconstructed the landscape of Jewish presence in old Sepharad in search of the origins of many Spaniards. He is accompanied on this journey by his good friend Samuel Bengio, a son of the diaspora. Moving away from conventional historiography, a Christian and a 21st-century Jew produce a fascinating study that becomes a profound reflection on their collective identity. Who were Ferrán Martínez, Vicente Ferrer, and Jerónimo de Santa Fe? Do the pogroms and the cultural integration of Jewish converts not find their echoes in the political rise of the Spanish Empire? How does this fusion illuminate the mysticism of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross or the literature of the Golden Age? What do the latest DNA analyses reveal about a Jewish heritage? This work is an eloquent account of the individual searching for their roots amidst the mists of an uncomfortable and ever-complex past.