Boston College Front Row

Robert Maryks is on the faculty of the City University of New York's Lehman College Department of History, and is author of The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (2009). In his lecture he discusses his book, whichtells the story of the evolution of the discriminatory concept of purity of blood, its complex nature, its magnitude in the early Society of Jesus and the role Christians of Jewish ancestry played in the order.