Because Jews, who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal, were prohibited from joining the voyages to the New World, the first Jews to come to the Americas were converts or descendents of converts who either practiced Judaism clandestinely or not at all. The double, contradictory nature of the Jewish presence in Latin America has roots in the earliest Jewish communities in colonial Latin America, which were, in reality, not Jewish at all but marrano or New Christian. While I will not use quotation marks around the terms ‘Semitic,’ ‘Jewishness,’ ‘Jews,’ ‘Arabness,’ ‘Arabs,’ or ‘Orient’ in this essay, these terms should be understood as necessarily constructed, whether by Jews and Arabs themselves, or by those who seek to represent them in literature or by other means.
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