Book Reviews: Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith

While autobiographies were deemed "unreliable" sources by earlier generations, Perelis argues that the early modern notion of autobiography must be separated from the modern, and rather than as a focus on the "I," understood as "confrontations with the self," a series of struggles that allow later historians to read "Carvajal, Cardoso, and Montezinos through the lens of family," thereby exposing the centrality of familial and communal relations that frame the authors' literary and psychological activity (21).Unlike many narratives of crypto-Judaism, Perelis does not exalt a gendered domestic space in the preservation of Iberian Judaism by emphasizing the role of women in preparing kosher food and secretly conducting Jewish domestic rituals.Here too, Perelis analyzes the role of emotion in the spiritual journeys of this early modern author, whose narrative hinges on the relationship between Jews and America's indigenous peoples, and the role of secrecy, blood, and family.