New York

“What a paltry fisher town was Livorno before the admission of the Jews; what a loser is Lisbon since they have been lost to it!” These words, uttered in 1714 by the radical pamphleteer John Toland, depict Jews as veritable engines of prosperity. According to Toland, lands from which Jews had been expelled, like Portugal, […]

The film opens in a small village in the Portuguese countryside: “Judeus? Judeus?” The director asks where the Jews live and sure enough, everyone in this village—which seems not to have changed very much since 1497, when Portugal’s Jews were forcibly converted—can identify them. Thus begins Frederic Brenner’s The Last Marranos, a film about the […]