Nathan Wachtel's Souvenir de la Foi first appeared in French in 2001. The work of one of France's most respected historians – for many years Wachtel taught at the prestigious Collège de France – the book was the final part of a trilogy aimed at uncovering and recovering aspects of the ‘lost’ or forgotten cultures of colonial Latin America. The first two parts of the trilogy, beginning with his now classic study, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570 (Harvester, 1977), endeavoured, by combining historical and anthropological methods, to recover indigenous perceptions of the European conquest together with the ways in which indigenous people remembered – and preserved – religious rites and practices that antedated the arrival of the Spaniards and the Roman Catholic Church.

The lost culture featured in The Faith of Remembrance, a long-awaited translation of Souvenir de la Foi, is that of the marranos – literally, ‘dirty pig Jews’ – a term that originated in fifteenth-century Iberia and which referred to those Jews and their descendants who had converted to Christianity. Scholarly interest in the marranos, or conversos as they were more commonly known in the Spanish world, began in the nineteenth century, but Wachtel was among the first to break with the so-called ‘Jerusalem School’, which considered the marranos as individuals who, despite outward appearances, remained true to their ancestral faith.

Wachtel offers a more nuanced approach to what he calls ‘Marranism’, which he defines in terms of a set of quasi-clandestine religious practices and beliefs that were loosely based in Halakhic Judaism but which experienced important modifications as marranos and their descendants, deprived of rabbinical instruction, migrated to the various parts of Spain's empire in the New World. Driven underground by persistent persecution from the Inquisition, elements of marranism persisted for centuries, sustained in part by high rates of intermarriage among the diasporic community – a subject, unfortunately, that the book does not really address. Other than ‘remembrance’, the determination of converts to preserve certain elements of their ancestral faith, Wachtel's marranism comprised certain rituals – circumcision, ritual fasting, avoidance of pork and other proscribed foods, and celebration of the Sabbath on Saturdays – along with belief in a unitary God as opposed to that of the Trinity, and the idea that the messiah had yet to come. Marranism, however, was also porous, evolving into a kind of ‘theological bricolage’ that blended Judaic with certain Catholic beliefs and enabled marranos to worship ‘Saint Moses’ along with Queen Esther. Finally, marranism incorporated a degree of religious scepticism that Wachtel equates with modernity, an argument that has subsequently been developed and pushed to an extreme by Yovel Yirmiyahu in his much-criticised The Other within the Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Unlike Yirmiyahu's study, however, Wachtel's work rests on a strong empirical base. In essence, The Faith of Remembrance comprises a series of case studies, each derived from the trial transcripts of marranos arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy. In this sense the book consists of a series of micro-histories, many of which involve women who, perhaps more than men, were determined to cling, however imperfectly, to their ancestral faith. These micro-histories are often sketchy and frustratingly incomplete, as many of those arrested understandably professed their adherence to Catholicism while downplaying their Judaising on the grounds of ignorance, lack of understanding, or both, of the ‘Jewishness’ of their rituals and religious beliefs. Others, in contrast, openly declared themselves believers in what the Inquisitors often referred to as ‘the dead faith of Moses’, a position that often led directly to martyrdom. Still others, anxious to escape serious punishment, ratted on their fellow marranos, and in doing so pushed them into an inquisitorial labyrinth from which few managed to escape. Each of these case studies, however, makes for fascinating reading, and Wachtel's deft handling of each offers a fascinating window into the complexities of marrano belief.

Save for the author's interest in connecting marranism with modernity, I have few reservations about this ‘tour de force’ book. There are, however, problems with the translation, which, though serviceable, is far too literal and belies the translator's lack of familiarity with the material featured in the book. Moines, for example, repeatedly become ‘monks’, even though Wachtel is clearly referring to friars; accents are regularly dropped or missing from Spanish names included in the text; the French word viceroyaumes is mistakenly translated as ‘viceregencies’ (p. 171); and Seville's ferme de tabacs, which refers to tax-farming, in this case the right of a private individual to collect taxes on the sale of tobacco, becomes ‘the tobacco farm of the city of Seville’ (p. 172) as if it were, quite literally, a tobacco plantation owned by the city's municipal government. And while there is a helpful, albeit incomplete glossary of Spanish and Portuguese terms, the volume lacks explanatory notes (and maps) that would assist the general reader in identifying the location of towns and places appearing in the text. One other quibble: the book, now over a decade old, is situated in a field that has recently received much in the way of scholarly attention. It is a pity, therefore, that Yosef Kaplan's otherwise informative prologue makes no reference to such complimentary works as David L. Graizbord's Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Daviken Studnicki-Gisbert's A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford University Press, 2007), both of which extend, and in some cases revise, Wachtel's pioneering and still valuable understanding of the hybrid character of marrano belief.