Set in Portugal at the turn of the century, Fear Not, Jacob! is both a first-rate suspense thriller and a revealing treatment of a theme rarely dealt with on film: the increase of violence toward Jews during Holy Week in Catholic or Orthodox countries. Lejba is a Jewish innkeeper who fears for his life and that of his pregnant wife; though he is far from Eastern Europe, the pogroms of Lublin, Kiev and other cities are fresh in his memory. As Easter approaches, added circumstances develop: Lejba is threatened with murder by a former hired-hand, who uses the assassination of a young couple as a pretense to stimulate intense racial hatred in the town against the Jews on the grounds of ritual slaughter. As hatred foments in the town, Lejba's reaction reveals “a stunning transformation of a frightened and alienated man into a man of self-determination, a change all the more astonishing in a context of both objective and internalized anti-Semitism. Though directed in the traditional manner of the suspense-thriller genre, Fear Not, Jacob! challenges our own notions of modern Jewish identity and symbolically depicts the ultimate consequences of fear” (Jewish Film Festival).