@Book{1780100353,
editor="Bielik-Robson, Agata",
title="Marrano way: between betrayal and innovation",
series="Perspectives on Jewish texts and contexts 19",
year="2022",
publisher="De Gruyter",
address="Berlin",
keywords="HISTORY / Jewish",
abstract="The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and -- precisely as such -- prefigures the advent of the typically modern ``free-oscillating'' subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ``undercover.'' The book rather applies the ``Marrano metaphor'' to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication -- without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a ``hidden tradition.'' The book poses and then attempts to prove the ``Marrano hypothesis,'' according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, ``out of the sources of the hidden Judaism'': modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a ``Marrano modernity,'' which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces",
note="edited by Agata Bielik-Robson",
isbn="9783110768275",
doi="10.1515/9783110768275",
url="https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9783110768275",
url="https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9783110768275/original",
url="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768275",
language="English"
}