The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the
borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and -
precisely as such - prefigures the advent of the typically modern free-oscillating
subjectivity. Yet the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos)
who were forced to convert to Christianity but were suspected of retaining their Judaism
undercover. The book rather applies the Marrano metaphor to explore the fruitful area of
mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers writers and artists of the Jewish origin
to enter the realm of universal communication - without at the same time making them
relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a hidden tradition. The book
poses and then attempts to prove the Marrano hypothesis according to which modern subjectivity
derives to paraphrase Cohen out of the sources of the hidden Judaism: modernity begins not
with the Cartesian abstract ego but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne
who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish
thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the
volume offer thus a new view of a Marrano modernity which aims to radically transform our
approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life
as surviving the process of secularization although merely in the form of secret traces.
