The Other Secret Jews   Most readers interested in Jewish
history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and
Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In recent decades,
historians have come to see their story not just as a tragic or
heroic onean affair of Jews forced to give up their faith, or
contriving to remain faithful in secretbut as an important
episode in the evolution of the modern world. Yirmiyahu Yovel
argued last year in The Other Within: The Marranos that these
“New Christians” were the first large group in European history
to be effectively post-religiousfree to define the world and its
meaning for themselves, instead of accepting the definitions of
rabbinic Judaism or medieval Catholicism. That Spinoza and
Montaigne, those skeptical modern minds, were both descendants
of conversos, and that New Christians played a major role in the
economy of the New World, is seen as evidence that these Jewish
converts helped to invent the secular wor