The impact of blood purity laws in early modern Spain is the subject of innumerable studies, some more overstated than others, but has often been distorted by ideological prejudice and above all by shoddy scholarship. The work under review is fortunately a product of very good scholarship which examines the conflicts that took place in the first generations of the Society of Jesus over receiving candidates of Jewish origin. Maryks looks, in intense detail, at all the personalities involved in the debate between Jesuits, and examines several original texts that set out their conflicting opinions. Where necessary, he cites original texts in full, so that the thinking of the writers can be grasped. The controversy was truly international in scope, for though it primarily involved Jesuits of Spanish origin it also extended to Italians and Portuguese who were deeply involved in the politics of the Society. This is a solid, scholarly volume that offers new material and new viewpoints on a theme that continues to excite interest. However, precisely because it is erudite at times it seems to miss seeing the wood for the trees. By looking too closely at written polemics, and by separating all players into two crude ideological categories (‘pro-converso’ and ‘anti-converso’) that suffer from an elementary failure to inform us exactly what the description ‘converso’ means, it often misses broader perspectives and social realities. For example, describing Loyola as ‘Spanish’ (p. 39) instead of what he was, ‘Basque’, can confuse our understanding of Loyola's attitude towards antisemitism in a society, Spain, that was not his own. Likewise, presenting the famous Navarrese archbishop of Toledo, Carranza, as a converso from Seville (p. 104), is a somewhat exotic error that should have been caught before publication. Nor does it inspire confidence that the author accepts the bizarre recent findings of a scholar of genetics (p. 215) who suggests that at the time of the expulsions of 1492 there were 400,000 Jews in Spain. This is a good book, which reveals how the Jesuits, an international order, easily fell out among themselves over the vexed issue of too much influence being exercised by specific national or cultural interests. But the cautious reader must step back a bit from the textual polemics if he wishes to get a clearer perspective of some fundamental issues that are not broached here.