Jospeh Abraham Levi in Chapter Eleven, "The Transformation of the Soul," discusses Sephardic
crypto-Jew Gracia Naci instrumental in the revival of Iberian Jewish practices in Antwerp and a financial power in her own right after her husband's death, which was unusual in the sixteenth century.
(Indeed, this is the period when the term 'anti-Semitism' was coined.) Among a number of connections Davison makes between Dracula and fin-de-siecle British culture (including rumours that Jack the Ripper was Jewish), one of the more interesting is her claim that aspects of the Count originate in contemporary representations of Benjamin Disraeli as the imperialist
Crypto-Jew who threatens British national identity from within.
(4) A
crypto-Jew from a prominent family in Benavente, Spain, that resettled in Nueva Espana, as Mexico was known in colonial times, Carvajal was arrested in 1589 by the Inquisition under the suspicion of being a Judaizer, i.e., a proselytizer.
Put away the proof, the map, the philosopher's biography, even if some especially fleshy details are bound to stick--Baruch, the Spanish
crypto-Jew, exile, the orderly propositions and axioms.
books--from the poetry of the
crypto-Jew Joao Pinto Delgado, to the
So her reading of Mailer contrasts the novel's two explicitly Jewish characters, Goldstein and Roth, and the Mailer stand-in Hearn, who Garrett reads as a
crypto-Jew. Where earlier scholarship tended to overlook the book's Jewish specificity, Garrett reads the Jewishness of the characters as the key to understanding Mailer's critique of American institutions.