Between Testaments, Marrano

This work, the first of a trilogy depicting the lives of conversos and Jews in Christian Spain in the second half of the 15th century, revolves around the life of Fernn Hernandes, whose ancestors converted to Catholicism during the massacres of 1391. Fernn falls deeply in love with a young Jewish girl, ignoring a law that forbids marriage to a Jew, for which he could be burned at the stake.

CASTILE, 1449: Within the cities of Iberia, the bitter years that culminated in the massacre of Jews who would not convert to Catholicism produced a class of conversos who did convert but, as Fernando del Pulgar, a converso and chronicler of Queen Isabel wrote, ."they were not keeping either one law (Mosaic) or the other (Christian)." Between Testaments, Marrano, the first of a trilogy of novels depicting the lives of conversos and Jews in Christian Spain in the second half of the fifteenth century, revolves around the life of a young converso, Fernn Hernandes, whose ancestors converted to Catholicism during the massacres of 1391. Enmeshed in a struggle to establish social and religious parity with Old Christians, Fernn, cursed as a marrano (swine) by the townspeople, falls deeply in love with a young Jewish girl, ignoring a law that forbids marriage to a Jew, for which he could be burned at the stake. Based on events during a rebellion in Toledo led by Pero Sarmiento, a second-class noble, the novel intertwines historical fact and fiction into a suspenseful tale of love and peril in an era of religious oppression.