If you are new to this toppic then this is the right book for you. You'll get the historical dates of the Spanish Inquisition and some more informations about the life of Jews in this time, including all problems Jews had to deal with. If you get interested in the Conversos you should read Benzion Netanyahu's books that are dealing with more background informations.

Although too much time is devoted to chiding the ignorant -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike -- with regards to the great Medieval everythingist Maimonides, this book is quite worth the read. If one brackets the amount of bitter, hostile polemics against other scholars of the Middle Ages -- who are never as smart as Roth -- and wades through the countless notes explaining how bad every single person's translation of this and that text has been, one can learn a great deal from this scholarly introduction. The book is neatly divided into essays and texts, just as promised. The essays are both didactic and informative, and the texts give little tastes of the thought of this great man, who is, as Roth so enthusiastically notes, so important for so many reasons. This is a good introduction with good bibliographies, worth the effort, even despite the polemics.