Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam »

Miriam Bodian is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She has taught at Yeshiva University and the University of Michigan and has been a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford.

"An engaging introduction to the tortuous plight faced by exiled conversos in Amsterdam and their methods of response. Choicet; In this skillful and well-argued book Miriam Bodian explores the communal history of the Portuguese Jews... who settled in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century." — Sixteenth Century Journa

Drawing on family and communal records, diaries, memoirs, and literary works, among other sources, Miriam Bodian tells the moving story of how Portuguese "new Christian" immigrants in 17th-century Amsterdam fashioned a close and cohesive community that recreated a Jewish religious identity while retaining its Iberian heritage.

Booknews

Investigates both concrete and intangible aspects of the formation of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam, which grew out of the stream of conversos (descendants of baptized Jews) emigrating from the Iberian peninsula in the 16th and 17th centuries. Portraying converso identity as a changing cultural construction that evolved over many generations, the author looks at the ways in which conversos of Northwestern Europe defined themselves vis-a-vis other groups and developed a distinct conception of . Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.