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.

Volume Three of The False Messiah Trilogy.?Although The Marrano was the last of the "False Messiah Trilogy" to be published, its action is mostly contemporaneous with Oak Street Beach, the volume immediately following The Pooles of Pismo Bay (both issued in 1990). The three novels together refract facets of Rose's preoccupation with the loss of ideals in American life, as represented through Matthew Lenart, Gordon Abul, and Reuben Poole. The story begins in Minneapolis ("There is much madness in Minneapolis," the narrator declares), where young Matthew Lenart, who tells the story, grew up as the wealthy son of a newspaper tycoon, and within sight of the estate of Shem Abul, Gordon's father, a wealthy Sephardic Jewish merchant. The Lenarts move on the highest rungs of Minneapolis society, and the Abuls contrive a similar station, but after Gordon steals Matthew's wife, appearances start to disintegrate, revealing a clandestine agenda. Two brutal murders set Lenart off in search of Gordie, whom he finds on Chicago's Oak Street Beach oscillating between a smart set of society hangers-on of polymorphous sexuality, and the tenderloin district riffraff. A mad mix of people and almost surreal events collide with subterranean Israeli espionage.

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MacDonald develops a theory of anti-Semitism based on an evolutionary interpretation of social identity theory. Historical examples of anti-Semitism are analyzed as scientifically comprehensible gentile responses to a distinctive, segregated group. Anti-Semitism has historically been exacerbated by resource competition between Jews and gentiles. Jews have engaged in a wide range of strategies to try to combat it. These strategies include: crypsis, political activity, writing religious and intellectual apologia directed at both ingroup and outgroup members, and engaging in self-deception regarding both the nature of Judaism and gentile responses to Judaism.